Mobs Are Like Weapons Pointed at All of Us

November 30, 2021 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

For years now, I’ve been drawn to the mind of Robert D. Kaplan. It’s not that I’ve always agreed with him, but his insights have rarely failed to pull me in.

Maybe it’s for all the reasons that I wrote last week’s post, A Deeper Sense of Place is an Anchor in Turbulent Times. For much of his lengthy career, Kaplan has written about geography’s influence on politics and national power. He believes that where a people are located,” the place they “call home”—it’s proximity to powerful nations, it’s access to river systems, the extent of its undeveloped frontier, its natural resources (or lack of them), whether they’re protected by mountain ranges or oceans—has “a determining effect” on how these people view themselves and the world around them.

The importance of place was my way into Kaplan’s writing because, in my gut, I always felt he was right.

Three years ago, I wrote about a book by Kaplan called Earning the Rockies: How Geography Shapes America’s Role in the World (2017). It was another illuminating read. This was a time when the executives helming America’s tech companies were still using their prominence and financial clout to lecture the rest of us about “what progress should look like” from their ideological points of view. In that post, I wondered how their rugged individualism, honed on technology’s frontier, jived with Americans skepticism about ideologies and their commandments, another take-away from the “frontier mentality” that Kaplan ascribed to most Americans.

Frontiers [like America’s] test ideologies like nothing else. There is no time for the theoretical. That, ultimately, is why America has not been friendly to communism, fascism, or other, more benign forms of utopianism. Idealized concepts have rarely taken firm root in America and so intellectuals have had to look to Europe for inspiration. People here are too busy making money—an extension, of course, of the frontier ethos, with its emphasis on practical initiative…[A]long this icy, unforgiving frontier, the Enlightenment encountered reality and was ground down to an applied wisdom of ‘commonsense’ and ‘self evidence.’ In Europe an ideal could be beautiful or liberating all on its own, in frontier America it first had to show measurable results.

In the tumultuous years that have followed, my question has been answered in part by a populist, Know-Nothing revulsion aimed at “thought-leaders,” big-shots and experts of all kinds who think they know better.

So perhaps it’s not a coincidence that this same three years has brought Kaplan to the short essay that appeared in the Wall Street Journal this week. It’s called “The Tyranny of the 21st Century Crowd” and it came with the following elaboration: “Mobs that form from the bottom up may prove even harder to defeat than totalitarian regimes.” (Here’s a link that makes his essay available beyond the usual paywall.)

What does any of this have to do with our work next week, the work that all of us should be doing, or the over-all quality of our lives at this place and time? As it turns out, quite a lot.

I had dinner this past week with a small business owner whose office is indirectly buffeted on a regular basis by mob-related mentalities. One of his longtime employees—someone who happens to have an advanced degree—is from a family of anti-vaxers, refuses to send her child to a school that requires vaccinations, and is pushing hard for an accommodation to move her work (from live to remote) to another state where she thinks the schools will be more lenient. A second longtime employee is a member of two oppressed groups (based on age and on race). This employee apparently doesn’t feel like working any more, but also holds the implicit (if meritless) threat of a discrimination action if he is either disciplined or fired. Of course, getting an 8-hour workday out of either of these “disgruntled employees” has turned into a daily minefield.

I couldn’t help but sympathize.

Who needs the expense and aggravation of being dragged by either of these people into a courtroom because they believe (and therefore can claim, without evidence) that their employer is treating them unfairly by refusing to give them what they want?

How can my friend (indeed how can anyone) run a business today when employees can assert the abridgement to some freedom- or identity-based right when all he is demanding is that they come into the office and do the work that they’re being paid to do?

I got a close-to-the-ground view of the mobs that loomed behind my friend’s two employees over dinner this week. But beyond examples like these, Kaplan foresees today’s mob-based threats causing wider, deeper and even more troubling consequences for a way of living and working that we assume is far more resilient than it actually is.

_{Pavlov’s dog parade is by a favorite artist, the late cartoonist and social commentator Saul Steinberg. (If it looks familiar, I also featured it in my post, We’re All Acting Like Dogs Today, on the refusal by regulators (and the public behind them) to confront the user manipulation and mob tendencies that are an inherent feature of dominant tech platforms like Google.Twitter and Facebook.)}

While Kaplan implicitly acknowledges the American peoples’ general hostility to foreign ideologies like communism and fascism, along with its “heartland’s” hostility to the progressive ideologies of the East and West Coasts, he certainly recognizes the populist impulses that bubble beneath all of these debates.

For Kaplan, the Peoples’ arguments over their deeply held political beliefs usually represent “a profound abasement of reason.” In other words, populists of all stripes generally feel the rightness of their views instead of reasoning themselves into the convictions that they hold. Under these circumstances, it’s difficult if not impossible to foresee how America willl be able to maintain its democratic way of life when every quadrant of our politics is being actively overtaken by its own version of a mob. (While Kaplan doesn’t delve into these divisions, George Packer recently described “the four political belief systems” that are operating in the U.S. today in “How America Fractured Into Four Parts,” an article of his that I discussed here in June.)

What Kaplan does do is quote liberally from a book about mobs that I’d never heard of: Crowds and Power by Elias Canetti.

The crowd, Canetti says, emerges from the need of the lonely individual to conform with others. Because he can’t exert dominance on his own, he exerts it through a crowd that speaks with one voice. The crowd’s urge is always to grow, consuming all hierarchies, even as it feels persecuted and demands retribution. The crowd sees itself as entirely pure, having attained the highest virtue.
Thus, one aim of the crowd is to hunt down the insufficiently virtuous. The tyranny of the crowd has many aspects, but Canetti says its most blatant form is that of the ‘questioner,’ and the accuser. ‘When used as an intrusion of power,” the accusing crowd ‘is like a knife cutting into the flesh of the victim. The questioner knows what there is to find, but he wants actually to touch it and bring it to light.’
The tyranny and violence of the mob reaches its crescendo when it exercises the monopoly that it believes it has on virtue. ‘If you don’t agree with us,’ Canetti says of them, ‘you are not only wrong but morally wanting, and as such should not only be denounced, but destroyed.’ Then he deploys notions about nations and their exercise of power to provide historical perspective as well as a glimpse into the future of America’s power. Where once America’s (and the West’s) power resided in its political, educational and media institutions and in the civic cohesion they produced, today that foundation is increasingly undermined not by counter-institutions (that seek social change for the better) but by mob power (whose primary interest is in weakening, when not actively seeking to destroy, the institutions that once bound us together).
Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were defeated by U.S. military and industrial power. Civilizations rest not only on intellectual and cultural foundations but also on coarser aspects of strength and power. The historic West, which is ultimately about the freedom of the individual to rise above the crowd, survived the 20th century thanks to American hard power, itself maintained by a system of individual excellence in the arts and sciences, in turn nurtured by an independent and diverse media. But that media is now becoming immersed in the crowd, where it demands virtue in its purest ideological form, so that much of the media too often plays the role of Canetti’s accuser.
The lust for purity combined with the tyranny of social-media technology in the hands of the young—who have little sense of the past and of tradition—threatens to create an era of the most fearsome mobs in history. The upshot of such crowd coercion is widespread self-censorship: the cornerstone of all forms of totalitarianism….
This ultimately leads toward a controlled society driven by the bland, the trivial and the mundane, wearing the lobotomized face of CNN weekday afternoon television. Outright evil can surely be dealt with, but a self-righteous conformity is harder to resist. Left unchecked, this is how the West slowly dies.

The self-censorship that this kind of tyranny causes and the masks it forces us to wear are more isolating than any restrictions that were imposed during the pandemic. Reasonable people withdraw from free exchange for fear of having their livelihoods and reputations challenged by self-righteous mobs. Effectively “lobotimizing ourselves,” we mask up to avoid being “destroyed.”

_{One of the Saul Steinberg and Inge Morath images from The Mask Series (1959-1963).}

Reading Kaplan’s essay reminded me of a book that I hadn’t read since college, The Revolt of the Masses by Orega y Gasset, a Spanish essayist.

Sounding like an Old Testament prophet 85 years ago, Ortega wrote about the undermining of “liberalism” by mobs of communist and right-wing agitators. He feared the “tyranny of [any] majority” and the “collective mediocrity” of the “masses” (and the so-called “mass-men” that populated them). Ortega believed they threatened both individuality and freedom of thought with annihilation. Much like Kaplan, he wrote:

The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different, that is excellent, individual, qualified, and select. Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated. And it is clear that this ‘everybody’ is not ‘everybody.’ ‘Everybody’ was normally the complex unity of the mass and the divergent, specialized elite groups. Nowadays, ‘everybody’ is the mass alone.

Twenty years later, in Homage to Catalonia (George Orwell’s sobering account of his own time fighting for the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War), the eventual author of 1984 and Animal Farm reached the same conclusion as Ortega about the mobs of the left and the right that were squeezing the life blood our of their homeland. It was an experience that eviserated the romanticism that an idealistic young man had once felt for his own republican principles.

Even with their differences, Orwell, Ortega and Kaplan would probably agree that it was the power of America and the West—the only champions of “liberal” values left standing—that liberated at least some of the civilized world from the mobs that were overtaking it before World War II. As we sit here today, it’s hardly misplaced to wonder: Who, if anyone, will do so again?

In the course of his essay, Robert Kaplan doesn’t mention the mob that attempted to interrupt the Electoral College vote in Washington last January; not a woke mob enforcing its virtue from prominent positions in the nation’s media and universities, but a MAGA mob that was encouraged by a president who’d just been defeated at the polls.

The “insurrection” was another side of the same coin.

In a post from a month before the Capitol assault, I wrote about “the big lie” that was told to the German people following their defeat in World War I. “You didn’t actually lose,” conspiracists told them. “Our terrible surrender was the result of a plot by leftists, Jews, bankers and others who stood to gain from it.” That it was a lie hardly mattered, because it fed so seamlessly into the resentment, anger and economic hardship that many German soldiers, their families and communities were already feeling. It was these “regular people” who fed the mobs that led to national socialism and, only twenty years later, a second world war.

I think the wrong question to take from these historical similarities is whether Donald Trump is another Adolf Hitler. Instead, as I wrote a year ago:

Are there genuine parallels between Germany in the 1920s and 30’s and the U.S in the 2020’s and 30’s?
Were there political leaders (both then and now) who were willing to tell “a big, almost preposterous lie” if it could stoke existing grievances and rally their supporters so they could gain additional power?
Did the German people permit their leaders to send fellow Germans who were supposedly to blame for their tribulations to concentration camps?
How could so many free people, who had enjoyed democracy and the right to determine their futures, been overtaken by such a lie?
Surely, they knew then (as we know now) what was happening around them, as reporters today are called ‘enemies of the state’ and election officials are targeted for assassination.
Did they pretend (and are we pretending now) not to see the breakdowns in the fabric of our society that continue and only seem to get worse?
To paraphrase [the poet, W.H.] Auden: “Did the best among us on both sides really lack conviction, while only the worst / were full of passionate intensity”?

In a new HBO documentary about last January’s revolt of the masses, called “Four Hours at the Capitol” (link to the film’s trailer), a police officer who was interviewed recalled a piece of advice that he had gotten during his military training as he thought back to where he found himself that day:

Individuals aren’t usually a problem. But when they get together and create a mob, then, the mob is the weapon.

Too few in America and in the West today are actively trying to disarm these weapons, which are being stoked every day by social media, by too many in the legacy media, and by the demagogues who give voice to every flavor of them.

Will we need the purifying force of another world war—another battle to the death for the best and against the worst in our civilization—in order to break the hold that mob rule increasingly exerts over our politics, our freedom of speech, and our ability to be anything more than mass-men or -women in one frenzied crowd or another?

Maybe Kaplan and his intellectual forebears give us an alternative vision to hold onto: a view of America and the West that once again has the fortitude to stand up against every kind of mob in the world–not because of our theoretical beliefs about democracy and our Enlightenment traditions, but because we cherish our freedom and individuality for their practical benefits and refuse to give them up because weapons keep being pointed in our direction.

This post was adapted from my October 17, 2021 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning and occasionally I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

Having a Plan Turns Bystanders into Helpers

October 28, 2021 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

“If those around him had known how to intervene to stop him, it would never have gotten to this point,” someone might have said about New York Governor Andrew Cuomo recently.

I wasn’t expecting to write about bystander interventions today, but was jarred (as many were) by the longstanding accommodation of Cuomo’s harassment. His temper, directed at everyone in his orbit, was a common secret. Like Churchill once said about Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, Cuomo was apparently another “bull who brings his own china shop with him.” But in addition to the tolerance that those around him had for his temper tantrums, Cuomo’s groping and touching were also common knowledge. Many around him knew he was grabby with women, but none of them intervened to stop him (or protect him from himself), so apparently it became “the way that things were for years” if you were in the Governor of New York’s orbit.

The longstanding tolerance for Cuomo’s conduct reminds me of Harvey Weinstein’s decades-long run of predatory behavior in Hollywood. Like Cuomo, those in Weinstein’s sphere of influence were afraid of crossing him because they relied on the power of his support and feared the wrath that might jeopardize it. Too many came to feel that accepting Weinstein’s abuse was the price of admission. And because (like Cuomo) the power disparities between Weinstein and almost everyone else were so profound, “the way he acted” became an open secret, widely known and effectively normalized, while he continued to groom his prey and damage more lives.

Because so many in the entertainment business “knew about Harvey,” those who were “in on the joke” regularly got to have an uncomfortable laugh when somebody (usually a comedian) had the gumption to drag the stinking truth onstage.

As reported by one outlet after his first accusers got press coverage, the finger pointing had been ongoing in mainstream comedy for years. For example, Weinstein’s behavior was a punchline in the TV show “30 Rock,” where the character played by Jane Krakowski says in one episode: “I turned down intercourse with Harvey Weinstein on no less than three occasions out of five.” And while announcing actress nominees for an Oscar in 2013, comedian and comedy writer Seth MacFarlane joked in front of Weinstein himself, the rest of those in the “live” audience, and the 40 million people viewing on TV: “Congratulations, you five ladies no longer have to pretend to be attracted to Harvey Weinstein.” As time goes on, we’ll probably hear about the jokes that staffers and favor-seekers in Albany were telling one another about Cuomo too, instead of doing anything more than laugh among themselves about it or cringing in a corner as he headed their way.

Part of what was so compelling here was the high visibility of Weinstein’s and Cuomo’s misconduct. After all, they were acting out their dark fantasies in Hollywood and the Empire State, with their wall-to-wall press coverage, enterprising scoop-hunters, and hangers-on with blackmailing agendas. Yet for both of them, it took years and a long trail of victims before collective action started to puncture their skeevy underbellies.

Clearly, some basic checks and balances were missing in the workshops that Weinstein and Cuomo once dominated.

Clearly, far too few at their stratified elevations knew how to inoculate their workplaces from the diseases that undermined them, along with every individual who worked with these two and tacitly permitted their misconduct.

Clearly, Weinstein/Cuomo/comedians Bill Cosby and Louis CK/artist Chuck Close/ former House Speaker Dennis Hastert/former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick/former Olympic gymnastics’ doctor Larry Nassar/all those victimizers in the American military who continue to act with impunity towards their subordinates: each of them was or is enabled by others in their reigns of terror, and it was more than their closest victims that lost something of value by not having healthier places to work before “what almost everybody seemed to know already” finally became unacceptable.

In the wake of the report about Governor Cuomo by New York’s attorney general in early August, there was a brief interview with an employment law professor named Marcia McCormick about redesigning employee training and reporting systems to fight sexual harassment in the workplace. What caught my attention was the interview’s focus on “activating bystanders” who already knew about the harassment so they could join in the fight against it.

This angle in the discussion could be traced back to a 2016 report by the EEOC (or Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) which insisted that victims were not the only ones who needed to know the rules about workplace harassment and discrimination; every employee needs to be empowered to challenge both perpetrators and their fellow employees to drive predatory conduct out of the workplace. Said Professor McCormick:

[B]ystander training in particular is very effective, to allow co-workers [of the person being harassed or discriminated against] to intervene in ways that are not [as] risky to them…[W]hen people complain about discrimination against themselves…they are perceived to be whiners. Their complaints are sometimes not taken seriously…[but] when a person advocates on behalf of another, that usually doesn’t happen…[R]eporting by a bystander doesn’t trigger the same kind of psychological backlash and potential for retaliation that the person who experiences it might.

Moreover, when all employees are trained to recognize, intervene and demonstrate their solidarity with targets of illegal behavior, they are better able to disrupt new overtures before they happen and help victims to report and gain more backing from fellow workers afterwards.

A 2018 article in Harvard Business Review acknowledges that empowering an entire workforce like this is a lengthy and difficult task (far more so than having “a canned training session” and an employer’s checking “the legal liability box” afterwards) but when executed properly, empowerment training almost immediately begins to deter likely perpetrators, from the boss’s office on down. This is how one expert described the root problem that needs confronting to the article’s author:

Jane Stapleton, co-director of the Prevention Innovations Research Center at the University of New Hampshire and an expert in bystander interventions, told me about an all-too-familiar scenario: Say there’s a lecherous guy in the office — someone who makes off-color jokes, watches porn at his cubicle, or hits on younger workers. Everyone knows who he is. But no one says anything. Co-workers may laugh uncomfortably at his jokes, or ignore them. Maybe they’ll warn a new employee to stay away from him. Maybe not. ‘Everybody’s watching, and nobody’s doing anything about it. So the message the perpetrator gets is, My behavior is normal and natural,’ Stapleton said. ‘No one’s telling him, I don’t think you should do that.’ Instead, they’re telling the new intern, ‘Don’t go into the copy room with him.’ It’s all about risk aversion — which we know through decades of research on rape prevention, does not stop perpetrators from perpetrating.

Once again, when the bystanders aren’t empowered to act, harassing and discriminatory behavior is “normalized” in the same way that rape or child abuse is normalized when the family where it’s happening pretends that it’s not.

Enabling bystanders, the author writes, “is leveraging the people in the environment to set the tone for what’s acceptable and what’s not acceptable behavior.”

_{A still from the 1985 movie, Witness}

Because I’m sometimes unable to act on my best (or even better) impulses when confronted with something that seems wrong, I spent a lot of ink in early book drafts considering how any of us might do a better job of it.

From behavioral studies that delved into the mechanics of helpful intervention, it seems that the cure for bystander inertia comes in two doses: already having a better plan in mind before the unacceptable happens and seizing the occasions to act on your plan when it does.

The deeper I dug, the more I appreciated how visualizing the path we want to take before being called up to act almost always improves our responses. It’s the difference between being ready when the time comes versus having to make up what you’ll do (or far more commonly, refrain from doing) on the spot. But this requires preparation. You have to want to act in a certain way—like treating others in the same compassionate way that you hope they’d treat you in similar circumstances—so you’ll make the effort to devise a plan that you’ll already have it in your pocket when the need arises.

If it’s really as simple as that, why weren’t more people in Weinstein’s or Cuomo’s or other predatory orbits—and why aren’t more onlookers of “bad stuff” generally—able to follow their better angels and intervene to stop (or at least help in stopping) the damage that they’re witnessing?

In my case, I’ve usually been delusional enough to imagine that “I’ll be as brave as my best hopes” when I’m called upon by circumstance to right some wrong, or stand up for somebody who needs my help. Unfortunately, whenever I’m surprised by the need to intervene in a bad situation, I usually find it easier to fret about my skill set, whether I want to get involved or have enough time, or if someone else is in a better position than I am to step in and make a difference. In other words, my hoped-for better self usually never shows up and I end up making lame excuses to explain to whomever’s listening why I failed to do much of anything at all.

In research I did at the time, I learned that it doesn’t have to be this way, that even considering my thoughts and feelings more deeply in advance of witnessing, say, sexual harassment at work or one stranger being tormented by another, would likely have enabled far better responses on my part.

One study I found had some of the study participants attend a lecture on the ethics around rescue and the bystander effect (where they’d presumably imagined their own responses to various situations) and other study participants who missed that lecture, before all of them encountered a stranger who’d actually fallen and couldn’t get up outside the lecture hall. While the scenario was staged by the study’s authors, its findings were not: 43% of those who’d just attended the lecture ended up coming to the victim’s aid, while only 25% of bystanders in the study who’d missed the lecture stopped to offer their help. It’s a resonant statistical difference between those who already knew something about overcoming bystander reluctance and those who never may have thought about it at all. (Notwithstanding these findings, I still recall being surprised and disappointed by the fact that only 43% of the lecture goers actually stopped to apply what they’d just supposedly learned!)

Another study revealed that even taking a relatively minor step “in the right direction” (beyond just learning more about it and imaging how you might act beforehand) makes an additional difference in determining how you’ll act or fail to act going forward. This tendency was demonstrated by an experiment in which some teenagers pledged to remain virgins until marriage while others in the study were never given the option to make such a pledge. Given teenage hormones, It doesn’t seem like much of a commitment, but this study found that those who took the pledge had sex much less often than the non-pledgers. Indeed, even the non-pledgers who said in advance that they supported abstinence before marriage ended up having sex far more frequently than their pledge-taking peers. In other words, even as small an act as making a verbal commitment tended to reinforce attitudes and lead to behavior that was consistent with one’s helpful intentions going forward.

To test this behavioral guidance system—and to pay-it-forward on behalf of all who had came to my assistance over the years when my car has broken down on a busy road—I did some of my own committing in advance. The next time I saw a car broken down in traffic, its driver in distress and I could pull over safely to help, I promised do so. I rehearsed the likely scene in my mind, and a couple of months later the opportunity presented itself.

A woman outside of her car was being confronted by an angry truck driver during rush hour on North Broad Street in Philadelphia after an apparent collision. I could and did pull over and offered her my assistance which, after some initial surprise (who is this white guy in a suit offering to help me?), she ended up being visibly grateful for.

Without an action plan, I would likely have found a dozen excuses for not stopping. Once I acted, I knew even better what I’d do the next time, the likely range of emotions I’d feel while intervening, and the best part, how I’d feel afterwards—which was genuinely enabled. On the other hand, without a plan of action beforehand, my hopes alone about being a helper would likely have left me at the bystanding sidelines.

When we want to, it’s not so hard to empower ourselves towards helpful action.

It’s not so hard to train ourselves to help confront the Weinsteins and Cuomos who can end up dominating our worklives by finding ways to move in a constructive way beyond the “common secrets” and “inside jokes” about the boss or “that guy over there” or the touchy-feely holiday party.

It’s learning about the bystander inertia that naturally holds us back by plotting our ways to helping when the need arises.

Maybe when more of us make this commitment, there will be enough people in every workplace who are ready, willing and able to intervene on behalf of victims who will almost never be vindicated when standing alone.

This post was adapted from my August 8, 2021 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning and occasionally I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

What’s In a Face?

October 6, 2021 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

I come from people who loved to search faces.

As a kid, my folks would visit a honky-tonk strip in a place called Savin Rock early on a Saturday night and, of course, they’d take me along. They’d park in a good spot on the main drag, open the windows and gaze out at the passing stream. Or we’d set out on foot, find a roost near the cotton candy stand or similar attraction, and go to work from there.

We had more than a little interest in what our passers-by were wearing (or in their gay abandon, not-wearing), how they were enjoying themselves (besotted in pairs and threesomes), but the main thing was their faces. They seemed to be masks as well as portals: about their workweeks, their illnesses or desires, about the boats their grandparents had come over on, the churches they’d attend tomorrow, or the suburbs they were aiming for. It was as if you looked hard enough, you might see it all there.

We were spectators who’d come for the faces.

The muttered comments from dad or mom were rich to a kid. I suppose that some were judgments of a sort. Marking distance while they gazed, maybe saying “We’re better than this. Look at how far we’ve come.” But I don’t remember the superiority in it. They genuinely seemed to want to make sense of it all, of this colorful slice of the world on parade and how they fit into it. We didn’t go so much to laugh or to pity but for the enjoyment of locating ourselves in the hot mess of it all as it seemed to teem by.

It’s a proximate experience that I’ve really missed during the past year and a half.

The crowds I’ve seen from afar while walking or driving have often seemed irresponsible or even dangerous. It’s literal masks I’m looking for now, or how few are wearing them. Since they’re outside like I am I know how foolish this is, but the crowds still draw me in less and make me more wary. They’re other people instead of the same people, less a pageant that I’m a part of too. I miss what seems like an old chronicle (although it’s only a short time ago) about who they are, where they’re going and seem to have been, or what I’m doing here in the middle of them.

Those triangles of eyes, noses and mouths that pull in our attention even as newborns are apparently embedded as essential markers of danger or promise in the most basic instincts of our brains. Is she friend or foe, is he caregiver, stranger or something different than either of those things, but still “of interest”?

When Wally looks up to read me, it’s not at my hands or how I’m sitting. What he’s after is a dog’s kind of facial recognition.

We look for that, and need that, too.

+ + +

With deadly germs around, it seems safer today to search a stranger’s face through the eyes of an artist, whether it’s a painter, a sculptor or a photographer.

Aside from pictures of family and one increasingly infamous ancestor, the only portrait I have at home is of The Queen. Although clearly a violation of protocol, I mean it no disrespect by keeping it over a commode so I always have it to look at when I’m standing in front of it. A sign of the times, it never looks back while I search those lines and folds of powdered skin for clues about her gravity, about who she really is. Because it’s a good portrait and perhaps because she’s sat for them so often, she’s known how “to do the portrait-thing” forever so it’s full of information that she wants us to have and little that she doesn’t. Even if This Queen doesn’t live forever, she’ll still be sharing her majesty with me in this theater of perceptions she was so clearly “in on” creating.

_{“Lightness of Being,” by Chris Levine (2004)}

When I go to a museum these days—at least when I did before the lockdowns—I’d go to see one or two things that I missed having a conversation with or simply wanted to learn more from. The regular aim was targeting my attention instead of bringing it “to all of European Art since 1850” or to everything that the curators had decided to hang up on a wall from the Orient or ancient times.

It turns out that being more selective about my attention has also carried over into what I’ve been doing in museums after I’ve covered my destination pieces and places.

For example, when I flew out to see Emily in LA a few years back and we went to The Getty for the first time, I knew “what I had to see” but quickly discovered that those who had staged the galleries I was seeking had played their own games with the objects of my affection. So, while I searched the face of Rembrandt’s “Old Man in Military Costume” for clues, I eventually noticed that I wasn’t the only occupant in the gallery who was doing so. A marble bust in the same room (Bernini’s “Pope Paul V”) was searching the Old Man’s face too—its sight lines arranged “just right” by the staff—so that the rest of my visit involved noticing the interplay between “must see” works and how there always seemed to be other Star Gazers who’d been strategically arranged to see them too.

_{Because of the distance, my camera couldn’t capture Bernini’s “Pope Paul V” (1621) gazing over at Rembrandt’s “An Old Man in Military Costume” (1630-31), and certainly not when I was eye to eye with the Old Man himself, but here are the two of them as they looked that day.}

The aim for Rembrandt and Bernini and maybe for their time was to capture the essence of their subjects by using all their artifice and painterly tricks to find the truth in their sitter’s faces. These days, of course, truth is a far more slippery agenda, approached, if at all, with irony and trepidation—more mask (in the pursuit of) than a sign promising what’s true over its portal.

Among many other things, “this way that we see things today” is what made John Vincler’s short essay this week (the latest of his “Brush Strokes” columns for The Paris Review) so illuminating.

Vincler was writing about the contemporary portrait painter Michael Borremans and his pilgrimage to see his first Borremans’ portrait “live” in one of New York City’s art galleries. The visit last December was a birthday present from his wife, his “out” after being cooped up for months during the pandemic. He’d wanted to go and search the painted face in “Study for a Bird” for what mere reproductions of it might have been less able to tell him.

_{Michael Borremans, “Study for a Bird” (2020)}

To look at this image of it, “Study for a Bird” is slightly unsettling, somehow ajar. What’s going on under her chin or at the back of her neck? What is she wearing, why is she wearing it, and how does this headpiece direct our attention around the hollows and elevations of her face? Surely these are some of the questions that lead Vincler to say:

[t]he people in [Borremans’s] portraits often seem as if they are playing a role in some mysterious production, adding a layered tension to an existential question they ask of both themselves and the viewer: What am I doing here?

The same, I think, could be said about earlier portraits of his, like “Columbine” (note the slip in her left eye) and “The Hood” (the smudge at her mouth, along with that vaguely animate thing that’s perched on her shoulder). How do we pass through these “cues,” these intentional masks or diversions, on our way to The Truth about these subjects? What does the visual pathway that Borremans lays down for us tell us about reality today and the roles we’re playing in it?

It’s like he doesn’t want us to know anything for sure, or as an art critic wrote about another of Borremans’s portraits:

‘The painting somehow manages simultaneously to speak clearly and to stutter.’

_{Michael Borremans, “Columbine” (2008) and “The Hood” (2007)}

It’s often interesting how artists talk about their work, and that’s certainly true about Borremans, who lives and works today in Ghent, a Belgian city that’s been associated with great artists for centuries. Here he is, explaining “how he first came to work in this structurally abstruse way,” in a 2015 interview and commentary.

It’s really a philosophical question about what truth can be. And truth is just as much in the lie as in something straightforward or honest. All of this came very organically for me from the way I perceived the world since I was a child: that there’s a variety of interpretations of something called ‘truth’. And I was always cautious about it. As an adolescent, that’s where my fascination for cinema came in. They build decors; they fake everything to make it seem real. And if they do it with that,’ he continues, warming to his mistrust, ‘they do it with everything. To have it is to use it. Landing on the moon, wars – you never know. So therefore in my work I want to give information in a way that’s clearly incorrect, not fitting, out of place. I think that’s more honest.’

This variability of truths seems well-suited for today, when we can’t even agree on whether the virus that’s roaming this land like a reaper is real, or that it’s actually killing us.

+ + +

Looking into the faces of Borremans’s subjects—staged as they are—isn’t the same as watching a parade of faces in a place like Savin Rock, or even the expressions of the confinement-rejecting walkers who stream past my front porch all day, every day. But there are similarities in the exchange. We look into these faces and they look back, telling us something about where we are–“doesn’t anyone else see this too?”–and how those fleeting recognitions make us feel less like strangers, if not quite companions of one another on this strange trip we’re all on?

In Vincler’s essay, after viewing Borremans’s portrait and starting to write about it, he tells us (with obvious nostalgia) how he remembers the similar joys of searching the commuters’ faces on a subway that he’d taken regularly to work not so long ago.

Taking the subway means daily having at least one person’s face across the aisle and many faces in your line of sight. You can’t help but study the concentrated face of a reader, the elsewhereness of a daydreamer, the sadness here, the exhaustion there, the twitchy concentration of a game player, the open face of the tourist, and even the practiced but not quite impervious shell of the city dweller, lightly armored in sunglasses or headphones. In staring at the face in Borremans’s portrait. . . I was . . . reminded of the experience of moving through a city, the mix of intimacy and alienation that comes from incessant, packed proximity with strangers. It was okay to stare there in the gallery, to contemplate the dignity and complexity of this subject, with the strange costume, the visage part mask and part portal, suggesting something as awesome and truly unknowable as an individual person. Isn’t this a paradox, to be made to remember the faces of strangers?

And how great it would be to stare into and search our ways through them again, just like we used to, face to face.

In the meantime, Michael Borremans’s portraits provide us with some suggestions about what we might see when we can finally do so again, whenever that is. Ambivalence, containment, resignation, foreboding and, at times, even some humor in the face of it all. (His picture up top is called “Man Wearing a Bonnet” after all, from 2005.)

There’s something true, if not exactly truthful, about each one of them. And even that sense of recognition feels good.

This post was adapted from my August 1, 2021 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning and occasionally I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

Why We Gravitate Towards the Work We Do

August 17, 2021 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

I’ve always wondered: how did somebody I meet end up doing the job (or jobs) that they’re doing? After many of these exchanges, the most telling answers always seem to involve early preferences that they’d chosen to act upon.

It’s what you preferred to do when you were bored, where you turned “to make something” when inspired, or the ways you reacted when you’re put in an uncomfortable spot. These decisions reveal almost instinctual affinities, the pull of your strongest magnets. Almost always, they’re more intuitive than rational and you end up trusting them enough to turn them into springboards.

Recent evidence has helped to confirm this hypothesis.

Some family members and friends of Bo Burnham repeatedly made fun of him as a kid. They were amused that he acted “kind of gay” and, by way of response, he proclaimed some of his work-defining preferences not by starting a diversity workshop on his front porch (signaling his flowering desire for a career in HR) or by researching “conversion camps” he might attend (sensing the power of immersive experiences to improve himself and the gravitational pull of maybe working for an investment bank or a major law firm one day). No, Burnham didn’t respond by doing either of these things.

Instead, he reacted to the hurt or alarm he felt by leaning into his family member’s and friends’ conformist attitudes and spoofing them (along with his role in triggering their intolerance) in videos he made in his childhood bedroom, posting them on YouTube, and writing the first chapter of what was to become his viral success story.

Burnham’s early-and-often preference for turning uncomfortable situations into comedy—and then sharing his unexpected point of view as widely as possible—had a kind of apotheosis two weeks ago when his Netflix special called Bo Burnham: Inside (about his discomfort at having to relieve his isolation during the pandemic through the screens of his devices) received 6 Emmy Award nominations only six weeks after it was first released (which on top of everything else has to be some kind of record) however terrific it frequently was.

I didn’t know Burnham before watching his comedy special but almost immediately wanted to know how he first set sail for the strangely hilarious harbor he was sharing with us. Still in his early teens, filming his reactions to other people’s judgments in his bedroom, and then wanting to get his response to as many people as possible—Burnham had been drawn to blaring situational comedy like a moth to a flame before he could probably explain it. And when he was pulled in that direction, he proceeded to act upon “what that little inside voice” was telling him to do. Now that voice had been given what some might call The Ultimate Amplification.

Because at least half of my work today is writing about work, I often ask people I encounter “how they happened to get into…,” and not infrequently, I hear stories about childhood affinities and the aptitudes that helped to further them. Discounting the occasional savvy marketer who has built an “engaging origin story” around his or her subsequent success, there plainly seems to be more than mere coincidence in the “follow-your-early- preferences” Theory of Workplace Fit. In addition to everyone else that I’ve heard from, it surely applies to my career choices, including what family members and random observers told me “I should do when I grow up” once they had a sense of where I was telling them (subliminally of course) that I was headed.

So on Friday morning, after I’d listened to an interview with a neuroscientist who’d wanted to be either a professional dancer or a scientist as a kid—and then heard him say that the same brain circuits which enable the birds he studies to vocalize may also enable both humans and birds to dance—I knew that I’d be writing to you today about his preference-driven origin story.

Was it a coincidence, or something far deeper, that brought him to a career fork between “obviously dissimilar” jobs early on, but found him discovering, at mid-career, that he’s always been interested in (and his preferences had always somehow involved) investigating the mechanics that make both of these jobs possible?

_{Illustration by Maiken Scott for the Bird Song episode of her podcast.}

The interview with Erich Jarvis (who is a professor at Rockefeller University studying the neurobiology of vocal learning) was on a podcast called The Pulse. The tagline for the pod describes it as “an adventure into unexpected corners of the health and science world,” and since I listen fairly often, I can report that in terms of “adventure” and “unexpected” it often delivers, and certainly did this week.

Jarvis concentrates his research on how birds produce song with the broader aim of finding solutions to human speech disorders in the ways that certain song birds, including parrots and hummingbirds, learn how to sing by imitating other birds and the real world sounds that they encounter. As he delves into the brain circuitry that enables these birds to “learn” their speech patterns, he hopes to find ways that can enable similar circuits (or molecular pathways) in the human brain to fire again as intended once they’ve broken down.

As the interview unfolded, I learned that Jarvis grew up in New York City. His mom was a gospel singer and his dad a musician with a deep curiosity about science. Encouraged by their artistic inclinations, he became a dance major at the High School for the Performing Arts in New York City, leading to internships at the Joffrey Ballet and Alvin Alley Dance Company. Notwithstanding his talent as a dancer, Jarvis recalled his deepening fascination with science, which he took from both his father and a high school biology course. On the eve of college, he wondered if he might make more of a difference to others as a scientist than as a dancer. He chose the path of science of course but made a point of mentioning that he still dances as much as he can, including in the studio that he maintained in his apartment during the pandemic-related shutdowns in New York.

Elaborating on his research, Jarvis mentioned a couple of widely-viewed video clips featuring performing birds on line. He told us that one of them, featuring a parakeet named Disco, illustrated how birds can learn to mimic surprisingly complex speech patterns. As with all birds and animals that have learned how to mimic, they do so by storing sounds they have heard in their auditory memories, transferring these sound cards through a motor pathway to their voice boxes (a syrinx in birds, a larynx in humans), hearing themselves vocalize, and then practicing until their memories and their voices are aligned—in a sensory feedback loop. When I got to check it out, I had to admit that Disco’s feedback loop was, indeed, pretty amazing.

But then Jarvis made his own surprising disclosure: “Only species that can learn how to imitate sound can learn how to dance.” Apparently, in Jarvis’s corner of of the scientific community, interest in this possible overlap was only piqued after a cockatoo named Snowball was seen by millions dancing to the Backstreet Boys and revealing, among many other things, how clickbait can have entirely unintended consequences once it finds its own feedback loop.

During the scientific debate that Snowball triggered, Jarvis said that he began to extrapolate from what he had already learned about the neurocircuitry of vocalizing animals and humans.

Are there specialized connections that take sound from the ears and integrate them into the brain circuits that control the muscles of the body, [stimulating not only the vocal cords in animals and birds, but also other responses in their bodies]? If those specialized connections and genes that control those connections are the same ones that gave rise to the spoken language circuit…it would suggest that the mechanism of learning how to dance [actually] came from language. What’s interesting about this is that some cultures don’t distinguish dance from music.

Jarvis’s podcast interview never direcly linked this hypothesis to his own career fork in high school, or to the fact that the same mind-body connections might be integral to both of them. Instead, the coincidence (or congruence) just floated about in the ether for a few seconds before his interview ended.

I tend to think there is something behind most coincidences, in this instance how genes and environmental factors may have embedded the career preferences that Jarvis had in high school far more deeply than he ever could have known for sure.

I think the good work of his life—as prefigured by his early preferences for dance and science—may have always been about the drive to discover how his mind, was telling his body, what it should do.

The image up top is of a 2006 painting by David Hockney called “Wheat Field Beyond the Tunnel,” one of many paintings he’s done of paths in rural England and what lies beyond them.

This post was adapted from my July 25, 2021 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning and occasionally I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

We Don’t Have To Be Productive All the Time

July 19, 2021 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Yesterday, when I sat down to write to you I didn’t really feel like making the effort. Instead, a few relaxing hours with a slow cup of coffee were calling to me. But then my thoughts challenged my feelings.

“Being useful on a Saturday morning means writing to you,” I told myself. Producing Sunday’s newsletter is on the schedule, how I’m adding (as opposed to subtracting) something to the cosmic balance sheet on this particular day.

Then I worried: Is writing this week’s post just one more unnatural way that I contort myself into Being Productive or, because it’s nurturing a community and not merely commodifying one, is what comes naturally to me here fundamentally different from the urgency that drives me at most other times?

I hoped it was the latter, because I can imagine that writing to you is not “more work” (or really “work” at all) but instead its polar opposite: an essential human interaction that’s valuable in its own community-building way, with no purpose beyond initiating a good conversation around a campfire that we’ll gather around remotely after I press “Send” every Sunday morning.

But as I dug into writing the paragraphs below, every coffee-calling part of me knew that I’d probably gone back to work instead.

We’ll get back to my conundrum later, after considering why it matters to think as well feel our ways through a version of my same, basic question:

Even when we don’t want to be working, why does it feel like we always are?

The Problem

It’s amazing, really, how much we’ve bought into the myth of continued “productivity” and “usefulness” today. Indeed, our language tells us about the depths of our belief, since the opposites of these two words (when applied to people) are almost always negative. If they’re not “productive” and “useful,” they must be “lazy” and “useless.”

None of us want to be a parasite (which is another trope). Instead, we want to contribute to that overall balance sheet, and so an entire system has been created to support, measure and reward our productivity and continued usefulness, not for it’s own sake but to sustain the system itself. You could call it 21^st Century capitalism or simply a giant hamster wheel that provides all the rationales we’ll ever need to keep on going—never getting off of it until all our energies are spent and we’ve been reduced to uselessness in it’s final form, which, of course, is death.

In the ultimate fantasy about Hamsterdom, maybe our continuous push to be useful (and never concede to retirement) can even delay the inevitable. Not worked to-death exactly, just denying its bitter aftertaste.

She was productive to the very end, god bless her. What a good life she had. That’s how I want to go too! Never a burden to anybody, she worked until the very end.

To some extent, we’ve all bought into this fantasy, but what about the price we’ve been paying to maintain it? Because oftentimes, work can be “life” (as in “life-force”) threatening.

Undoubtedly, it’s why the work we’re always doing feels exhausting. It is exhausting, sucked-dry to the marrow exhausting, because we’re condiioned to work and be productive and never be a burden to anybody, except, of course, to ourselves.

In this, we’re both the enablers of and the fuel for Hamsterdom’s productive fires, and, from its system perspective, the best part is that we’ve come to believe that working this much is actually good for us too! Busy hands are happy hands. Generous hands. Building character.

Well, it’s the ultimate hoodwink.

Indeed, this colonization of our vital energies is so complete that it’s almost imperceptible to us on most days, but we can still get glimpses of what we’ve lost when we consider our so-called “time off.”

Even our play or leisure time today is increasingly turned into a productivity challenge or been repurposed somehow as a marketable product.

How many photos can I take at a Second-Line parade in New Orleans or while I’m visiting Jerusalem? (Last week’s post.) How many experiences—photographic or otherwise—can I consume on my vacation before I’m “full” and feel I’ve made “the most of my time away?” How many pictures can I post about it? How can I improve my fitness or knowledge or adaptability today, help my kids get into better schools, show my neighbors an even more beautiful garden, whatever it is, because I’ve only got this little block of “free” time before I’m supposedly “back to work”?

Or approached somewhat differently:

If we’re smarter than hamsters, why aren’t we working ‘only enough’ to enable us to get off that treadmill for meaningful chunks of time so we can enjoy the convivial life that we’ve otherwise been missing?

Part of why I’m asking these questions today comes from reading a series of thought-provoking essays by Tedd Siegel, a prolific writer who’d been wondering the same thing and found himself in conversation with a range of others who’d been wondering about it too. (This will take you to his starting block essay, in a rich and continuing series of them.) Siegel begins with an observation:

[T]he deal we’re being offered (work yourself to death for the next thirty years while you build your human capital) requires each of [us] to take out a mortgage on the self that [we] know can never be paid off. The deferral of most personal goals to an imagined future, in exchange for laboring continually for the goals of their employers, lies exposed as a rotten deal….We’ve played by a set of rules that was too optimistic, too individualistic, and too lacking in urgency for change.

Siegel writes to agitate for that change, and he identifies several root causes for the state of our near-ceaseless work today. One results from the shift (particularly in developed countries) from a manufacturing to a service and finally to today’s digital economy. (With my asides to Siegel’s observations) this caused:

a qualitative change in our relationship to our jobs. Our jobs are more intimate to us [today], more reliant on our interpersonal aptitudes and emotional intelligence. [We are not just cogs-in-a-wheel making widgets anymore. For this new hamster wheel, we have to go to school first, know how to trouble-shoot, etc.] Neoliberal capitalism [as he calls it], has us constantly concerned with its problems [meaning that we take our work home with us], integrating them into our life problems in order to get things done.

(Once upon a time, a fellow lawyer was onto something when she asked me whether I was billing the time I spent thinking about my cases in the shower.)

As he got going, Siegel eventually introduced me to Jenny Odell, who’s a professor at Stanford, and her 2017 book How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy.  Two words became important to him and to me in her book title. The first is “Nothing.” Odell doesn’t necessarily mean that we should be doing nothing at all, just nothing that Hamsterdom wants us to be doing (which includes relaxing and zoning out). The second word is “Resisting.”

Throughout her book, Odell argues that all of us should create an autonomous zone of resistance to Hamsterdom’s relentless demands—a protected and even defiant place where we hold onto aspects of our lives that cannot (and never should be) optimized. It’s making a deliberate conscious choice, every day and maybe several times as day, to carve out a space for living in a way that cannot be appropriated or assimilated by the market’s logic and turned into a deliverable—because we simply won’t allow it.  (For example, in the era of Google and Facebook, that includes taking back our attention from companies that are selling it to others by turning off their apps on our phones and laptops.) Then, and most importantly, the autonomous zone we’ve recovered will allow us, at long last, to enjoy a version of “a satisfying, collective life” that’s entirely apart from work.

For Odell, the act of resisting-in-place “is to make oneself into a shape that cannot be easily appropriated by a capitalist value system.” It begins with a very specific way of “doing nothing” that involves learning (or more accurately, re-learning) how “to redirect and enlarge our attention.”

And how will we spend all of this liberated attention?  Once again, Odell’s answer is something that humans have always known instinctively how to do, at least (it seems) until quite recently. It involves nothing more complicated than rejoining the conviviality of a collective life with other people.

The Way We Were

Like Siegel and Odell, James Suzman has been troubled for some time by the impacts of modern work on our lives and wondered, from his perspective as an anthropologist, whether humans are hard-wired “to work this way” or whether it was cultural imperatives (culminating in Hamsterdom) over-riding our essential natures. His research took him to hunter/gatherer communities where he could observe human behavior before “all of this civilization came along,” and it resulted in a series of books, most recently, Work: A Deep History from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots (2021).

Suzman discovered several things in the course of his research, among them that we are not, as humans, naturally inclined to allow work to take over our lives.

In fact, all the way back to our hunter/gatherer forebears, humans viewed their time and proceeded to organize it in ways that maximized the convivial zone of collective life while safeguarding its refuge (by, for example, ensuring that community members never felt devalued by someone else’s status or driven to distraction by internal competition). Indeed, hunter/gather groups like the Ju/’hoansi, some of whom still live in southern Africa, went to great pains to ensure that they only worked the amount that was absolutely necessary to support the time they spent together. Concluded Suzman:

Half of the value of understanding hunter-gatherer society is to recognise that lots of these things [about working] that we think we are hostage to are actually not a part of our nature.

For example, the Ju/’hoansi have a fundamentally different view of scarcity (or “enough”) than we seem to. In the course of his observations, Suzman found that the Ju/’hoansi rarely stored food that they had hunted down or gathered for more than a few days. Trusting that their environment would always provide for them, they worked to meet their immediate needs and then stopped, rather than worrying about shortages and planning ahead. (By way of contrast, we might ask ourselves: Is our modern view of “enough” programmed and encouraged by a perpetual consumption machine urging us on, or do we actually “need” all the stuff that we buy, especially when we might be doing something far more satisfying with our own “hunting and gathering” time?)

The Ju/’hoansi also go to great lengths to regulate their group dynamics to ensure a general harmony when they do what’s most important to them, namely, sharing in one another’s company. That means they don’t want any hunter in their midst to get too big for his britches. Whenever one of the hunters returns with a big kill, they told Suzman: “we always speak of his meat as worthless. This way we cool his heart and make him gentle.” It’s a practice that’s known among researchers as “insulting the hunter’s meat.”

According to Suzman, the Ju/’hoansi also “insisted that the actual owner of the meat, [that is] the individual charged with its distribution, was not the hunter, but the person who owned the arrow that killed the animal.” This helped keep the most talented hunters’ egos in check while, at the same time, allowing arrow owners like “the elderly, the short-sighted, the clubfooted and the lazy [to get] a chance to be the center of attention once in awhile.” Group harmony, not one-upmanship, was important to hunter/gatherers. (We, by contrast, live in countries where someone who is perceived as “the most successful businessman” can be elected president, where nearly everyone can name the richest man in the world [Jeff Bezos], and somebody like Elon Musk has millions of social media followers following his every utterance. Every once in awhile, wouldn’t we be a lot better off “insulting the hunter’s meat”?)

Suzman’s Work book, and his scholarship generally, has provoked a great deal of commentary among professional commenters, including Derek Thompson, who writes regularly for The Atlantic. In a piece from earlier this year, Thompson adds some heft to Suzman’s observations by noting some recent polling data and how the Ju/’hoansi differ from us when it comes to time. (I’d seen this U.S. polling data reported elsewhere, but it had a particular resonance in the context of this conversation.) Notes Thompson:

When a recent Pew Research Center survey asked about the secret to happiness, most Americans, of all ages, ranked ‘a job or career they enjoy’ above marriage, children, or any other committed relationship. Careerism, not community, is the keystone in the arch of life.

This finding is particularly striking since “it doesn’t have to be this way” given our hardwiring as a species. Our preferences today also tend to justify Jenny Odell’s conclusion that our commitment “to working all the time” has been so engrained in us that only “active resistance” will overcome it.

For me, Thompson’s most insightful paragraph related to our relentlessly future-oriented view of time and our unwillingness (despite the prompts of our yoga apps) to live, even for a few short minutes, in the present and leave our worries about the future behind.

[M]odern civilization is a shrine to the future. The shift goes back to the agricultural revolution, which subjected humans to farming cycles that separated planting and harvest by many months, and continued with the rise of finance. But a fixation on the future by now goes far beyond crop cycles and long-term loans. It is at the heart of our concept of education and corporate development, which presumes that young students and workers will gladly spend decades honing skills that they will be well compensated for only years later. The least controversial values in America today—the importance of grit, the hope for progress, the dream of social mobility—assume that the future is always changing and that our inclination is always to wish for better.

Thompson goes some distance towards explaining why we are where-we-are with our work, but he has little to say about what we can do about it beyond being aware that it doesn’t have to be this way. Suzman presents a longer chronicle of human labor in Work: A Deep History, but he “gestures towards” instead of “describing a way off” of the work wheel that’s endlessly depleting us today. For that, we need to return to the roadmap that Jenny Odell hands to us in How To Do Nothing.

A Way Forward

_{Getting back to the commons of a non-working life.}

Odell flat out rejects two of the most obvious reactions to the burnout of working today, namely: “temporary life hacks designed for increasing productivity once [we go] back to work” and “saying goodbye [to the workplace] permanently, and neglecting our responsibility to the world.” To her, there is essential work that’s always waiting to be done but it is equally essential to nurture our “non-working” lives.

As already telegraphed above, Odell’s “third way” involves active resistance to Hamsterdom’s forces so we can decide for ourselves—autonomously or outside the logic of the market—that:

Solitude, observation, and simple conviviality should be recognized not only as ends in and of themselves, but inalienable rights belonging to anyone lucky enough to be alive.

To protect these “inalienable rights,” all of us need to create and protectively manage a zone where we can “resist in place” despite the 24/7 ubiquity of modern capitalism’s siren call.

Like the Ju/’hoansi, Odell asks how much work is “enough work” to maintain this non-working zone, but unlike these hunter/gatherers she recognizes that limiting the amount of work and “resisting in place” will be far easier for some than for others. Economic needs may be so great that some individuals will find her kind of resistance difficult to afford.

To this quandary, Odell finds hope for “a way out” in “collective refusals,” where groups of people join with one another to hold open a space for more resisters to join them, at least to the extent that they can. Odell’s “refusal, boycott, and even sabotage [would be] like a crowd of Thoreau’s [at Walden Pond], refusing [the unnecessary benefits of modern working life] in tandem.” Amongst these “Thoreau’s,” other resisters might be empowered to work at least somewhat less in order to better enjoy the company of friends, families, and nature, as well as their own curiosity, playfulness, contemplation and “un-marketable” creativity.

Tedd Siegel elaborates on the mechanics of Odell’s resistance even further:

[T]here is a kind of tipping point with respect to immiseration that… brings things out into the open. This is because some people’s misery counts for more than others on the terrain of public discourse. Once the middle class and the professional classes join the ranks of the miserable, it starts to become possible [for nearly everyone] to talk about the problem at the level of the system itself.

In other words, it begins by facing our exhaustion, appreciating that everything from sustainability to human attention is being turned into a commodity, and wondering about the essential pleasures we’re missing as a result because our world of work can’t figure out a way to make a buck off of them.

Isn’t enjoying those essential pleasures more important than working all the time? Then surely we should “make room” in our working lives for them by actively starting to “resist in place”–not tomorrow, but today.

Derek Thompson concludes:

Happiness means being just rushed enough [by all the work that’s waiting for me].

After reading Jenny Odell, I might change this to say:

Working enough to be happy means actively resisting work’s relentless undertow, every single day, in every job that I do.

(Would I be lying if I said that writing this newsletter to you is a fruit of that resistance instead of more of the same? Unfortunately, I may still be too enslaved by the demands of Hamsterdom to even be able to tell.)

This post was adapted from my June 6, 2021 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning and occasionally I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

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