After mentioning my planned media fast yesterday, I have to note two things:
I, too, endorse FT’s daily Big Read!
Middle age has been on people’s mind lately. As I’ll hit 40 in a couple of weeks I am well within the demographic, but haven’t given the matter much thought. Oliver Burkman’s newsletter from today nicely encapsulates my view on the matter, which doesn’t lend itself to crises of the midlife sort once you have it, though obtaining it may possible constitute a crisis.
He writes about “clenching”: trying to preserve meaningful moments in formaldehyde, or wasting your life away on optimizing it for those meaningful moments while they fly by you. In contrast, you can acknowledge the moments for what they are — ephemeral:
Sure, you can have a hundred tea ceremonies. You can ever have them all with the same people. But you can only have that ceremony, that cup of tea, once. Then the moment evaporates forever.
On the days I let myself move through life in this unclenched way, things tend to feel much more naturally enjoyable. Not because I’m trying to make myself appreciate them, or self-consciously “feel grateful” for them – but simply because I’ve (temporarily) suspended the other agenda that was getting in the way.
This way of looking at life does not come naturally to everyone. Certainly not to me; as a 12-year-old reading Around the World in 80 Days, I thought Phileas Fogg’s optimal ways of doing everything were the bees knees. Then I started workin in health care and I saw that:
And I started thinking about life the way Burkman described, more or less. Which I did around the time we had our firstborn, a bit over a decade ago — too early for that event to qualify as a midlife crisis, but maybe I was ahead of the curve. But if you are going to have a crisis of your own, I suggest it being of the sort that turns your life away from clenching.
Tim Harford on the UK’s crumbling health care system:
In the case of St Mary’s Hospital in London, these weak foundations are all too literal. The Financial Times recently reported that the hospital had rotting floor joists, frequent flooding, a hole in one lavatory floor that led to a car park, a ward closed due to a collapsed ceiling, and sewage backing up out of the drains and into the outpatient department. Yet St Mary’s is no longer regarded as an urgent priority for investment, because five other hospitals appear to be in more imminent danger of falling down.
15-some years ago, when I was contemplating what to do after graduating from medical school, the UK was on the list of places for potential residency. It quickly got crossed off because it was hostile to foreign doctors — especially compared to the US — but good for me that it was!
So, it’s done. I am at my low point of X usage. I’ve muted all but a handful of accounts (re-inventing lists in the process), and realized that I can do once-per-week wellness checks at most and not miss out on anything of importance. Now I only need to stop checking the Washington Post home page, and my media fast may begin.
Not too much this month, for understandable reasons:
📺 The Great British Baking Show has punched up its competitors’ affability this year, to the detriment of skill. It was the right tradeoff!
Side note: I have a hard time squaring Britain’s supposed decline with this show. If only other countries could decay so gracefully.
I am editing the 176th (!?) episode of Priključenija, a weekly podcast in Serbian that will be finishing up its 4th year in a few months, and I heard myself say in Serbian what I thought I had at some point written in English, but I’m searching the archive now and nope, never did.
What I meant to write, at some point, was this: for the most part, people — myself included — don’t use social networks to be informed; we go there to be entertained. We might tell ourselves that it is also a good way to get information about the world, the same way 30 years ago teens and adolescents would tell clueless surveyors that MTV was the main way they got their news. But let’s not kid ourselves: the reason we keep coming back is not for the authenticity, veracity, or timeliness of the news we get, but because of the entertainment value. [Note: The link is to Derek Kedziora’s blog, which I found through RSS club, which is mostly about things completely outside of my area of interest, but a few of the feeds there have really hit the spot and I now remember that I should update the blogroll. ] And we do like our entertainment!
The best way to “be informed” has for centuries now been, and continues to be, reading a book. There are, of course, many books with negative information value, but the medium at least allows for books that inform rather than entertain to be made. The second-best way to get information [Note: As opposed to “the news”, which is also mostly entertainment ] is YouTube, which is, if you squint, an extension of what we did before Gutenberg — oral tradition, learning by watching, etc. It is also another double-edged sword — there is so much more computer and human-generated dreck on YouTube than there are valuable videos — but a sword at least has two edges. Social networks aren’t swords, they are spikes, [Note: Intuition tells me that this is because of the minimal “package size” allowed in each medium, how interconnected they are, and how 99.5% ice cream mixed with 0.5% feces is still inedible… but I digress. ] with a single point of concentrated “infotainment” headed straight to your limbic system.
So I must have thought this obvious if I haven’t written about it explicitly, but apparently not. Back in the 2000s and early 2010s there may have been some question of the social network’s value in providing information. More than a decade later, we have our answer: it is zero at best, negative at worst, for any social network of sufficient size, and if you think that you are using one to “be informed” you are either fooling yourself or you are an idiot (and I know idiots don’t read this, so I feel comfortable writing it).
To be clear, there are other worthy goals of being on a social network. Socializing, for one! This is not a call to abandon anything, but a quick reality check and something to which I can point my non-idiot friends when the need arises.
Seeing the news about a woman, two mirrors, and an iPhone photo, the first word that comes to mind — rightly or wrongly — is fabulist. When an attention-seeking person wants to engage a scandal-seeking public, of course that they will target Apple. I am old enough to remember people making a show out of the whole thing. (↬Matt Birchler)
It gives me no pleasure to delete a feed that I have been following off and on for more than a decade now, but the logorrhea combined with intentional scandal-seeking behavior has become too much. Screen after awful screen of gotchas and callouts in a single post. Whatever for?
In nicer news: I took the train (Acela) from DC to Philadelphia this week, and you know what? It wasn’t half bad! It was, in fact, surprisingly good, from the boarding experience to the service (both rides had the happiest conductors I’ve seen anywhere). Now if only the DC-Boston line didn’t take twice as long and cost twice as much as flying.