I’ve been searching out deeper connections lately. Older. Time-tested. Wilder. More expressive. Reaching out to distanced friends and unique individuals. Doing hard, uncomfortable things. Digging way back into my music collection (and listening to the songs all the way through). Trying to remove all the filters (there are a so many filters!)
Seems to me like we live under pressure to optimize every aspect of our life - biohacking and optimizing our way to perfection (and exhaustion), or employing systems to control things for us: infinitely customizing, quantifying, synthesizing, and automating. We take these decisions to be acts of attention, of responsibility. But control does not equal care.
In fact, control can reduce our desire to care, because we never reach the level of engagement and depth necessary for such a feeling. Speeding through an optimized life, our view of the world is distorted, like looking out the window of a bullet train. We see bits and pieces, not the whole - and thus are left to assemble them in our scattered moments of free time, or to let them endlessly circle just beyond grasp in our sleepless brains - never quite resolving into clear thought.
Clear thinking is hard. It asks us to dive to the depths of things, and encounter the scary, unfamiliar things that lie waiting there. But doing hard things, things we don’t love, if done with sincerity and in a way which we’re proud, leaves us with a sense of accomplishment and self-esteem that can’t be found on the easy path.
We mistakenly assume that utilizing systems of automation and optimization is the easy path. Systems fill in for all the choices we no longer have to make, right? But systems can’t feel or desire. They can only average out an experience, engage in mimicry. Simulation vs. stimulation. Or pornography vs eroticism, as Byung Hul Chan describes it in his book Non Things. A desire to get to the quick finish vs linger in a moment.
To focus on something deeply is to experience it fully, truly. And it’s in those depths where the algorithms can’t find us, where our individuality comes out. Where we can engage in the things that makes us uniquely human. We are creators, apprehenders of meaning.
“Deep in our bones lies an intuition that we arrive here carrying a bundle of gifts to offer to the community,” writes Francis Weller in The Wild Edge of Sorrow. When we are denied the opportunity to identify and exercise those gifts, something is lost - to ourselves and to the world.
This loss manifests as a buried form of grieving, or gets bundled up as rage. We mistakenly think that because we are ever-occupied in low-level decision making in so many aspects of our life, that we are doing everything we can to exercise our gifts, and that the world is rejecting us.
But our busy-ness does not lead to depth. Depth requires stillness. Depth requires acceptance that not everything can be controlled. It asks us to answer the question “to what will we you be devoted?”
The hope is: your unique soul.
