I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Sunday Planning, I plan for the week ahead.
I’m wary of saying anything about what I’m going to do in the coming week since it seems I rarely actually do what I say I’m going to do.
One thing I’m thinking of doing this week, though, is quitting Twitter and Reddit. I waste far too much time consuming mostly meaningless bits of content on those sites. That activity keeps me at a surface level of interaction with the world. I’m also moving away from Facebook and Instagram, which I’ve mainly used because I needed to in support of art groups I’m in. I’ve resigned from one position and finishing up a commitment for a second, so soon I could deactivate those accounts as well. I may keep the Instagram account and post paintings as I finish them, as part of a standard process I follow when I complete a painting. Then it can become a catalog of what I’m doing (though I can easily do that here on this website instead I suppose).
In Episode #201 – Resistance, Love and the importance of Failure. (Zizek, Han), Philosophize This! podcaster Stephen West shares philosopher Byung-Chul Han’s perspective on consuming this kind of content, or doing other activities at a surface level (he uses painting as an example!):
Consumer society is all about turning life into an endless stream of surface-level interactions that are easy to consume. This is why TikTok is such a sensation. As Byung-Chul Han might put it, it’s the video form of what happens when you eliminate constructive negativity: zero patience required, zero discomfort, zero effort, zero boredom.
The moment you’re painting and begin to feel bored—or face the effort it takes to engage at a deeper level—your phone is right there, waiting for you. Or the video games. Or some other hobby that lets you stay at the surface.
Consumer society wants to keep people at this level, because there is always something to sell them when they are there.
I like to think I’m not a slave to consumer society because I don’t go shopping very much if at all and I don’t buy a lot of things other than groceries and painting supplies. But I do spend way too much time each day consuming quick hits from Reddit and Twitter. The dopamine hits it gives me make me feel like I’m productive and engaged with life when I’m doing it. But I’m not.1
I would like to continue studying philosophy (or re-studying it, since I majored in it in college) as part of an effort to engage in life not as a consumer or as an achievement subject but as a way to deeply and meaningfully engage with life. Han recommends the vita contemplativa as a way of overcoming the demands of the achievement society to achieve more, improve yourself, and be more productive.
Han stands with Nietzsche in seeing the vita contemplativa as an antidote to the constant stimuli of modern life:
Reacting immediately, yielding to every impulse, already amounts to illness and a symptom of exhaustion. Here [in Twilight of the Idols] Nietzsche is simply speaking of the need to revitalize the vita contemplativa. The vita contemplativa is not a matter of passive affirmation and being open to whatever happens. Instead, it offers resistance to crowding, intrusive stimuli. Instead of surrendering the gaze to external impulses, it steers them in sovereign fashion.
This idea of personal sovereignty keeps coming up, as I work on my memoir project Things Men Gave Me. I wrote about it in the story An Introduction to a Queen, in which I realized that my boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend had the right idea in establishing her sovereign lifestyle. Acting with sovereignty is different from being the master and slave in one that Han says you become in an achievement society, when no longer are you compelled by outside institutions and strictures to live a certain way; instead, you follow the rules you’ve absorbed into yourself. Those rules say: You can do anything! You shall do better, be better, be all you can be! Acting with sovereignty means stepping out of achievement society and choosing a path beyond the surface-level offerings of capitalist consumerism.
For me, blogging here everyday is one way I escape the superficiality of modern life to do something deeper, more relaxed, and without any idea it’s going to get me anywhere.
I’m really loving Stephen West’s Philosophize This! podcast. It could provide just the antidote I need to surface-level content on Twitter and Reddit. I’m considering starting at the beginning. He began the podcast in 2015 with an episode on pre-Socratic philosophy. He’s been doing the podcast for ten years! I love that. I can see in his work how valuable it is to deeply engage with a project, and to give it time, taking small steps forward on a regular basis. I’m doing that with my 1000-day project, allowing myself plenty of time to figure out what I want to do and then lay the foundation for doing it. I’m doing that with Things Men Gave Me, writing short story-essays and pairing them with paintings, without a specific schedule for ever finishing.
So though I started this post by saying I’m wary of making any statements about what I’m going to do next week, I will propose another idea for something I might do. I will start from the beginning episode and start working my way through them.
Meanwhile, I’m going to finish my latest story-painting pairing, which is a flashback to high school. The story (essay?) includes some coverage of Han’s The Agony of Eros and also discusses Bella’s giving herself over to love with a vampire in the Twilight series. I think it’s really fun. The painting is cool too though it needs some more work before I consider it captures the concept I’m trying to express.
I’m also considering subscribing to some periodical to get access to deeper content than what I’ve been consuming through Twitter and Reddit; perhaps The Economist or The New Yorker? I’ve subscribed to both in the past, and I like The New Yorker a bit better. That reminds me that I used to do their crossword pretty regularly online—there’s another activity for me to use to replace the time I used to spend on Twitter and Reddit.
On Wednesday, Ray and I are taking a fall color drive to get out of town and immerse ourselves in mountain beauty. According to the Colorado State Forest Service forecast, we may be a little early for peak color. But I bet it will be gorgeous.
In West’s episode 201 that I quoted from above, he discusses love as a way to transcend “surface-level consumption and static identity”:
When you fall in love with someone, it doesn’t really matter what your life was like before you met this person. It doesn’t matter how much of a groove you were in or how habituated your routines had become. Meeting someone who makes you want to entangle your life with theirs fundamentally shakes everything up and forces you to reconstruct your world in consideration of this other person.
In a world that otherwise incentivizes surface-level consumption and static identity, love compels you to rediscover yourself in a new light. In this way, love becomes a kind of activity that mirrors the role philosophy plays in unsettling our common-sense understanding of the world. The other person takes on the role of a dialectical opposition.
I am finding that my relationship with Ray, now three months in, is shaking up my sense of self and the way I live. I feel lucky that happened for me, though I wasn’t very seriously looking when I joined some online dating apps in June. I know most people at midlife don’t want their lives unsettled, they don’t want their sense of self to be called into question. This wasn’t something I knew I wanted or needed, but I’m glad of it. I’ll think of this as the vita amativa, the life of loving, as important and deep as the vita contemplativa.
- Also being exposed to the Charlie Kirk assassination discourse was really unpleasant. ↩︎