All professional men are handicapped by not being allowed to ignore things which are useless
I’m sitting writing this in our ‘spare lounge’ and, despite it being very early, it’s light outside and the back garden is looking lovely. Other than my still-to-be-diagnosed heart condition, everything that is weighing me down at this point in time has been invited into my life by me. Whether it’s trivial news, other people’s opinions, or information about the parlous state of the world, I have chosen to read, watch, or listen to it.
There are objectively terrible things happening in the world at the moment. There are always objectively terrible things happening in the world at every moment. That’s not to be a nihilist about the situation; it’s just a reflection based on studying history for a few decades. I absolutely think that we should do something about the terrible situations, but how much time I choose to spend my time thinking about them is a decision I need to weigh up against my need for some semblance of mental health.
I think it would be hard to argue against the opinion that, in the west at least, we have engineered a bureaucratic world. It’s one in which technocrats have wrested control from those who more intuitively ‘feel’ how the world should be. To my mind, one of the reasons it’s so easy to replace certain roles and functions in organisations is because they had been so stripped of humanity in the first place: mere cogs in machines, there to perform a function.
Thankfully, there are a few merciful flashes of human kindness and ingenuity to reassure me that we’re not in a dystopian simulator. Perhaps it’s part of getting older, but I’ve start to value a smile, that few seconds of extra time spent, and other small indicators to show that the other person cares.
My world is a small one these days. Very rarely let out for good behaviour, I orbit my home office, the gym, and an occasional coffee shop. On bad weeks, most of my interactions are intentional and transactional; headphones block out voices and noises I don’t want to here, and I can quit meetings I don’t want to be part of with a couple of clicks.
One thing I’m thankful for is my family. I’ve seen a few examples recently of middle-aged guys, sometimes for reasons I kind-of understand, and sometimes for reasons I don’t, seek solace in some quite dark places. Whether that’s out-and-out belief in conspiracy theories, or taking slightly more nuanced, but definitely paranoid, view of the world, I feel like they don’t have someone who cares for them.
Care, like ‘community,’ is an over-used word which can become a dead metaphor if we’re not care-ful. In a solipsistic time, where any number of AI-powered technologies will tell you that the inane idea you typed into its chat interface is galaxy-brain stuff, sometimes ‘care’ can be reminding people that they’re human. And, of course, fallible. It’s the equivalent of the skull being painted into the portrait of the powerful person, the whisper in the ear at the Roman feast reminding those riding high that, yes, some day they will die.
I think it was Aristotle who said that you cannot say whether somebody’s life is ‘happy’ until after they die. I’ve always taken that to mean that you need to see the whole arc of their life, and to discover, post-mortem, whether their life could be deemed ‘happy’. I think, for Aristotle, happiness is part of the eudaimonic project of both balance and understanding the world as it ‘really’ is.
Goodness knows I’ve had some low times in my life. Times when I’ve been almost desperately unhappy. I’m not quite in that situation right now, but if I were plotting a chart of happiness over time, let’s just say the line wouldn’t be popping its head over the zero line of the x axis.
Part of this is to do with my physical, and therefore mental, health. But, to come back to something I mentioned before, part of it is due to what I let into my life. I tell myself that I enjoy listening to politics podcasts, because as a ‘citizen of the world’ I should know what’s going on. But what’s going on is almost always pretty bad. I tell myself that I should keep ‘up to date’ with what’s happening in terms of technological development. But there’s only so much dystopian stuff about AI destroying the world that I can take.
So, after mentioning that I’m taking a week off Thought Shrapnel, and given that I’m taking off our teenagers’ half-term as a holiday, I think I’ll just retreat from the online world as much as possible for a bit. Perhaps I’ll see if I can expand my offline world and break out of my usual orbit to do something a bit different. Wish me luck.
Quotation-as-title by Goethe. Image of Nicholas Alcocke, surgeon to King Edward VI (via Wikimedia Commons)
