Crackpots #60: Lessons (Patreon)

Hi everyone,

Yung Chomsky here. I hope you all had a joyous holiday season. As you probably could guess, TrueAnon podcast will return very soon. But in the meantime, I'm here with some thoughts. I had a sort of technical essay about photography in mind, but the calendar being where it is, I decided to put that one off and write something a bit more reflective this month. This isn't gonna be about geopolitics, so if that's your bag you're gonna have to sit tight for a little longer. Instead I thought I'd meditate a little on the lessons I've learned — or am in the process of learning — from the past year.

Because learning a lesson is never quite as straightforward as we'd like, is it? We might wish that it were more like applying a software update: that we could encounter some idea or wisdom on a page, or hear it from a friend, or arrive at it through the force of pure reason, and after examining it , decide that it is sound and would improve our quality of life, and so decide to figuratively click "install" and immediately start reaping the benefits. But of course it rarely works like that. Sometimes we think we've learned something, or we tell ourselves we're changing our ways, yet still we continue to go about things the same way we've always had despite professing to know better. New ways of being take time to metabolize. So I don't know if it's really fitting to say that these are things I've learned in the past year, but they're updates I'm trying to digest.

Stand in the place where you liveNow face northThink about direction, wonder why you haven't before

— REM, "Stand"

So much of modernity is about making location and distance irrelevant. The miracle of the internet is that we can communicate instantaneously with people anywhere in the world. For all its flaws, the internet does still deliver on this basic promise, and it is in many cases a beautiful thing. Much of what I've done for fun, not to mention the ways I've made a living, for the past 15 years or so could not have existed without that technological foundation. But these distance-obliterating technologies can also have the side effect of making us less connected to the people and things that are in our physical proximity. We constantly find ways to cocoon ourselves as we move through the world. We plug our ears with noise-canceling devices, we stare at our screens when we walk, we take cars instead of transit, we take driverless cars instead of taxis. We do all of these things in order to remove ourselves from the confines of our actual surroundings, to become locationless.

In the last year I've started trying to do the opposite. I want to be in the place where I am. I want to be aware of and engaged with and curious about the geography and the architecture and the people around me. I don't go out with earbuds in anymore. I've started making eye contact and smiling at people I pass on the sidewalk. I say "hello" or "good morning" or "that's a great jacket" or "I like your hat." One nice thing about the holiday season is you can say "Merry Christmas" or "Happy New Year" to every stranger you see, and it doesn't matter who you are or who they are, they understand what you mean and they'll almost always smile and say it back.

It's not always reciprocated. I was walking around the other morning and sort of writing this in my head, as I usually do, and I passed two separate guys on the street and said hello to each of them as I tried to meet their eyes, and they both totally avoided my gaze and ignored me. Sometimes people look at me like I've got two heads. That doesn't feel good, but it's also not that bad. It's like microdosing rejection, which maybe strengthens the emotional immune system. And then as I was thinking about that, someone else walked past and said "I like your scarf" to me. I said "Thanks, yours too!" because she was also wearing a scarf. She said "thanks!" Neither of us stopped walking, I don't remember what she looked like, but we both smiled, and I felt good about it. It gave me a little extra spring in my step and more than made up for the two guys that ignored me.

I don't do this with any intention beyond the moment, although it's led me to some unexpected places and interactions. It's more about keeping the mind sharp and ready and open for whatever might arise, whether that's an opportunity to help someone, or to ask someone for help, or to make a new friend, or merely to appreciate the strangeness or beauty of some unexpected event. You're not going to be equipped for any of those situations if your mind is always elsewhere, and that kind of presence in the face of constant distraction requires regular maintenance.

I didn't used to do any these things. I always had earbuds in because I like listening to music and podcasts and didn't want anyone to bother me. I'd look at my phone as I walked around like I was waiting for some kind of important news, even though I wasn't really. I was the kind of person who bemoaned small talk. I don't want my time to be wasted, I want to get where I'm going. I think an important realization I've come to is that smiling at a stranger, saying good morning, or paying them a small compliment isn't necessarily something I do for their benefit, but for my own. Small talk isn't about conveying information, but about reminding ourselves in a small way that we're not truly alone, even when we feel lonely. Things are happening all the time, strange things, beautiful things, and you can see them if you pay attention. There's a great big game happening all the time, and we're all playing it whether we like it or not. It's not always easy — other people do a lot of things that annoy the hell out of me, and I wish I could block those out or escape them. But on balance I think it's worth putting up with that stuff in order to stay focused on the game.

Where I still struggle with this is when I'm alone at home. That's when I often want to distract myself with all the bullshit that lives in my phone. I recognize that this is because I'm trying to avoid dealing with some unpleasant thoughts or feeling I might be having, or to put off doing the challenging or unpleasant task that's ahead of me. With nobody watching and nobody to watch, it's very easy to slip back into that place where I blast myself with white noise that drowns out everything rough or unpleasant or annoying that's rattling around in my brain. But I haven't given up yet.

"They don't think it be like it is, but it do."

— MLB Player Oscar Gamble

Sometimes I think the greatest lesson there is to learn in life is acceptance. To see things as they are, to understand our limitations, to allow ourselves to be carried on the current of the universe rather than fight against it. I don't know if it's truly possible to understand this until the very end, at which point there's no other option. You've probably heard the Serenity Prayer:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

I had to look it up just now to know that it was formulated by theologian Reinhold Niebuhr nearly a century ago. It's accumulated the patina of cliche, which means it's challenging to appreciate the truth of it. I think that as we get older we gradually gain more understanding of the meaning behind cliches like that. "I love you" is a cliche. Its meaning doesn't really lie on the surface of the words. How can we understand the weight those words carry except by accumulating experience, and eventually hearing them or using them in the context that allows us to come into contact with something timeless and heavy and pure?

I think the last part of the prayer — the wisdom to distinguish what we can change from what we can't — is probably the really difficult part. When you're a socialist, a communist, whatever you want to call yourself, you're at odds with the way things are. You want things to be different, and you feel compelled to help change them. That's a good impulse, but it's not an unalloyed good. There are things we can't change, and trying to change those can cause harm. If we knew which things we could change and which we couldn't, life would be pretty simple. I think I know better than I used to, but it's still like seeing through a glass darkly.

I know that I don't want the innocent to suffer or the guilty to go unpunished. I don't want my loved ones to age and die. I don't want people I care about to make bad choices. But those things are going to happen regardless of what I want. I know they will, even though I live my life like I think maybe they won't, or like I can somehow prevent them. But I think I'm getting a little better at accepting the reality. When I was younger, I tended to think that if I just said the right words I could get people to see things my way, and maybe they'd make different choices. I think there are times when that can happen, but they're very rare. I think the internet is set up to make it seem much less rare than it is, because going online and arguing with people is good for business. But I think a lot of people arguing or just generally being aggressive or obnoxious online mostly just want to feel seen and heard, and I've managed to find other ways to get that feeling, so I don't argue online much anymore.

I've never been much of a new year's resolution guy — I like to think that change is a constantly ongoing process and shouldn't be saved for infrequent milestones. But it can be nice to check in on how things are going. So that's where I'm at lately. Until next time,

YC