Slowness, Intellect, and Limitations

It’s remarkable how much time we (I) seem to spend thinking about time. I make various attempts, consciously or not, to slow it down, speed it up, or pause it completely. It’s all some craving for control. For one example, I’ve likely spent twenty minutes attempting to start writing these past few sentences. But for the sake of my pride, I’m telling myself it’s only been two. In other moments, like when treating myself to some form of sugar at the end of the day, which I consume at a speed that can only be measured in millisecond, I attempt to make time stretch, imagining myself savoring every bite — as if I’m back in a meditation class I once took where Jack Kornfield asked us to focus on a single raisin. And then there are those moments where I want the world to stop, so I can take stock, and then package it all up for endless returning to: an expression on my daughter Nina’s face when all of a sudden she became a toddler; a random song by an artist I didn’t even know the name of which caused the hair on my arms to stand; a bite of a particular soup I had in Rome; a Sunday morning at the park with friends and friends’ babies all playing together, where life felt like a scene out of a movie that I’d normally consider unrealistic if it all wasn’t so very real.

Slowness

At the end of my parental leave last September, there were a few weeks where we started childcare before I had to go back to work. Given my susceptibility to being an anxious overachiever, I recall a sense of pressure over how to best spend this, what felt like sacred, free time. So, rather on the nose, I turned to a book about time: Jenny Odell’s Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock. I loved Odell’s first hit book (How to Do Nothing) and was particularly drawn to the ways in which her writing altered what I payed attention to in the world. There was a sense of being awoken from a trance — noticing moss on rocks, buds on trees, and to the detriment of my friends, a newly discovered obsession with a plant identifier app that caused me to be an unbearable walking partner.

I admire the ambition of Odell’s second book, which I heavily dog-eared and underlined. But I found it a bit too heady, too abstract. Maybe I was too dense, struggling to connect the insights, but I came across similar feedback in other reviews. It all felt more like a mosaic of loose ideas rather than a work of cohesive wisdom. And most critically, I couldn’t really understand the pragmatic implications — for a book with this title, you’d expect some guidance. Critiques of systemic issues are compelling, but without any practical advice you’re left with an idealism that feels rather detached from reality.

This is where I can sometimes struggle with a certain genre of writers, thinkers, and activist that I’d label as a purveyors of “slowness”. It’s not that I don’t think these perspectives are important or necessary — we very much need a subversive revolt against workaholism, toxic productivity, and on the more extreme end, exploitative work practices. But when “slowing down” is positioned as some definitive cure for the suffering of our times, it can come across as naive, and I fear there’s even a risk of it being co-opted as a justification for apathy.

Society ticks on because people apply themselves, attempt to solve hard problems, and care for each other. Progress, however that may be defined, seemingly requires bold and ambitious action, and this can sometimes feel in conflict with calls to “slow down”.

But I recognize I’m likely being too binary in my thinking here. This particular tension — hard work vs. rest, striving vs. acceptance — is one I think about probably a little too much. What’s coming to mind now is the Buddhist philosophy of the Middle Way, which can be a balm for the black and white thinking I can accidentally stumble into. This perspective is delightfully summarized by Jack Kornfield below:

We learn to embrace tension, paradox, change. Instead of seeking resolution, waiting for the chord at the end of a song, we let ourselves open and relax in the middle. In the middle we discover that the world is workable.

Intellect

We admire intelligence. It’d be dumb not to, no? But I’m skeptical about the ways we put human intellect on a pedestal, especially in this vast universe of which we are only one, smart, but deeply flawed, form of life. And I’ve been noticing this sort of heightened worshipping of intellect, particularly in the circles of Silicon Valley. There are certain thinkers that are idolized, some more credibly than others. Tyler Cowen appears to be one of the credible ones (who I previously referenced as an author of an initial progress studies article). I’m only lightly familiar with his work (by which I mean, I’ve listened to a podcast or two) and therefore can’t comment on my feelings regarding his politics or world view — I’m sure there are things I’d disagree with, especially given his association with certain tech elites. But he’s an interesting figure nonetheless and The Economist just ran a long profile: Tyler Cowen, the man who wants to know everything. It’s a captivating deep dive into his unique talents and esoteric breadth of knowledge (at least the half I’ve actually read). One of the more interesting aspects of the piece is well summarized by the subhead: He is Silicon Valley’s favourite economist. Does his lust for knowledge have a place in the age of AI?

This intense desire, almost fetishization, of knowledge is not new of course, but it’s particularly interesting in our current context of an impending artificial general intelligence. There are multiple predictions that the we are quickly approaching a moment where we will “lose our monopoly on human-level intelligence”, which of course then raises the question of how this might change our relationship with said intelligence. The smartest thing anyone can likely say at this time, according to Socrates at least, is that we really don’t know how this will all play out.

But maybe this reckoning will force us to expand our understanding of human conscious beyond intellect (pass the joint, I know). I’m a little sheepish about pulling up a quote from Eckhart Tolle at risk of sparking an eye-roll reaction to New Age philosophy. But hey, Kendrick Lamar appears to have found inspiration in Eckhart, so I’ll consider take this as a culturally defensible position.

I’ve been reading, on and off, A New Earth based on a recommendation from my therapist. There’s this particular section where Eckhart is sharing a personal story about certain painful realizations regarding the limitations of intellect, which I’ve paraphrased below.

I was convinced that all the answers to the dilemmas of human existence could be found through the intellect, that is to say, by thinking…. I looked upon the professors as sages who had all the answers… I didn’t yet realize that thinking is only a tiny aspect of the consciousness that we are…

And even Tyler Cowen himself, in a recent podcast with Dwarkesh Patel, touched on these limitations.

“When in Bay Area, the people here are the smartest I’ve ever met on average. Most ambitious dynamic and smartest. But a side result of that is that people here over value intelligence. And their models of the world are built on intelligence mattering much much more than it really does.”

Bumping against limitations

Speaking of limitations, I’m now thinking about that frustrating feeling we often have when bumping up against our own. There are two fantastic descriptions of the liberating, expansive, and even somewhat profound experience that can follow if we decide to stick with a craft long enough to break through these limitations and eventually satisfy, even if just slightly, our own taste. I can’t say I experience this often, but the small moments in which I do are enough to keep me going.

Ira Glass on the “The Taste Gap”

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.

Debra Eisenberg on “making a set of givens yield” (shared from the podcast with Jia Tolentino, referenced below)

I find it endlessly interesting, endlessly funny, the fact that we’re rather arbitrarily divided up into these discrete humans and that your physical self, your physical attributes, your moment of history and the place where you were born determine who you are as much as all that indefinable stuff that’s inside of you. It seems so ridiculous. Why can’t I just buckle on my sword and leap on my horse and go charging through the forests? But the real fun of writing, for me at least, is the experience of making a set of givens yield. There’s an incredibly inflexible set of instruments—our vocabulary, our grammar, the abstract symbols on paper, the limitations of your own powers of expression. You write something down and it’s awkward, trivial, artificial, approximate. But with effort you can get it to become a little flexible, a little transparent. You can get it to open up, and expose something lurking there beyond the clumsy thing you first put down. When you add a comma or add or subtract a word, and the thing reacts and changes, it’s so exciting that you forget how absolutely terrible writing feels a lot of the time.

A closing quote

Two to share from Jia Tollentino, one of my favorite writers, who was part of a wonderful conversation on Talk Easy, one of my favorite podcasts, earlier this year.

On a hopeful outlook that spurs action:

Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.

On how Debra Eisenberg’s writing advice is also relevant for life:

We’re talking about a world where it seems like there is an inflexible set of givens. But I think the act of really living reminds you that you can make those givens yield…. We get tangled in writing and life when we try and answer the question that’s too big. What do we do about all of this in general? Who the fuck knows. But what do you do about the sentence that’s right in front of you right now? You can really do something there, you can really get somewhere with it, and I think there’s something to that.

A parting song

Lugu Lugu Kan-Ibi by David Darling and the Wulu Bunun

This appeared somewhere in my random shuffle on a walk to work and I found it to be moving. Upon a little research I’ve learned it’s an album created between American cello player David Darling in a collaborative experience with the indigenous Bunun people of Taiwan.

And a belated happy International Women’s Day - to my daughter Nina, my wife Caitlin, my mom Debbie, my mother-in-law Lisa, and many many more. Sending love to all the women in this life who deserve far more credit than society gives them.