Image: Found via Google image search, I thought this was hilariously cryptic and Wallace-ian, in contrast to the million motivational quote memes that also turn up. Perfect.
Last year I read a piece by Tim Wu in the New York Times called In Praise of Mediocrity. In it Wu argues that our pursuit of excellence has infiltrated and corrupted the world of leisure. That we cannot just do simple hobbies and activities to relax, purely for their own sake, instead they need to be building towards some socially acceptable and valuable outcome. This is something which I personally struggle with a great deal. In fact it’s something I’m struggling with in thinking about this blog. I spend time writing, because I enjoy it but also because it’s a way to produce a public product. I sort of embrace that it’s pointless, but its still ‘productive’ in some sense. I honestly have no idea what I’m doing here. My hope was that doing this daily some sense of direction would emerge but it hasn’t yet. I’m considering turning on analytics to see what is getting more traffic, but that’s a kind of poisonous activity in and of itself. One thing I’m going to do is move my email newsletter send to Mondays, and start taking Sundays off. Writing on Sundays with the kids in the house is stressful and not fun, and then I feel guilty if I don’t do it. So I think I’m going to start taking a day off a week.
Even my playing of video games, in this case Dota 2, has some element of ‘seriousness’ to it. I have been thinking that maybe I should start a YouTube channel to document what I’m learning as I play and to help teach others. There is a whole community of people doing this on YouTube, many with a lot of traffic, since the game is so hard and complicated. But this is evidence of the same infiltration of work and product-making into what should be a relaxing activity. So I’m resisting that impulse as well. What this reveals is the difficulty which I have in doing something purely for pleasure which I don’t see as ‘virtuous’ in some way. This connects in my mind to the article I posted a few weeks ago about millenial burnout. I think that there’s a process at work which tempts us to draw everything into the sphere of work or other virtuous activity like exercise or ‘being a good parent’ (another cognitive minefield). I’m feeling starved for time and space to think and work deeply on things I want to. But again, there it is, I want time, but not to relax and enjoy life, but instead to work. But for me working deeply on something I care about is in fact relaxing. It’s a confusing situation.
This also connects to a book I read not too long ago, and wrote briefly about, Mastery by George Leonard. The pursuit of mastery is the work of a lifetime, and can take place outside of what we think of as ‘work’. Leonard is an Aikido teacher and practitioner, something which few will be able to do professionally, but many will dedicate significant time to becoming excellent at. This idea of practice, of pursuing excellence, perhaps for it’s own sake, is a kind of virtue and is seen as such. What Wu argues for in his article is for us not to scorn the more dilletante pursuits of someone who just wants to dabble in a wide variety of things, purely for pleasure. In a way it’s a defense of frivolousness, of lightness, perhaps something we might think of as childish. As someone who finds that the older I become the more heavy and serious I become in my thinking and way of life, I feel the need for this. Luckily having children is a way for me to be continuously pulled in this direction, to participate in all kinds of silliness and pointless activities. But I think for all of us, Wu’s appeal is worth considering.
