*Book - Chapter 1 - an American Sadness

 

PART I — REORIENTING: SEEING THE WORLD AS ALIVE AND ARRIVING

(From management → encounter)

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Chapter 1 — The Life That Slips Past

Bold question: What if the problem isn’t that life is too full, but that we are rarely present for it?

• Optimization vs aliveness

• Productivity mind vs presence mind

• The cost of living in “getting things done” mode

• “Why do capable, successful people still feel adrift?”

Companions:

• Neil Postman

• Jenny Odell

• Jon Kabat-Zinn

• DFW

DFw From Salon on Infinite Jest

The sadness that the book is about, and that I was going through, was a real American type of sadness. I was white, upper-middle-class, obscenely well-educated, had had way more career success than I could have legitimately hoped for and was sort of adrift. A lot of my friends were the same way. Some of them were deeply into drugs, others were unbelievable workaholics. Some were going to singles bars every night. You could see it played out in 20 different ways, but it’s the same thing.

DFW shows:  What happens when attention is captured.; Your book shows:  What becomes possible when attention is reclaimed.

That quote names the problem your entire book responds to:

• outward success, stimulation everywhere, options, mobility, achievement, and yet… drift, compulsion, anesthesia, quiet despair

 What happens when a person has built a life but not a way of being.    You’re not writing: “Here are wholesome habits.”  You’re writing:  “Here is why so many capable, educated, functioning people feel vaguely lost, restless, and over-stimulated.”

Chapter 1 is about:

• The American sadness of abundance

• Endless stimulation without depth, Achievement without arrival, Choice without orientation, Entertainment as sedation, Busyness as avoidance

This is the pre-attention life.
The life where the world cannot be met because the mind is never still enough.

DFW = witness to the cost. You = offering a different way to live inside the same culture.

** This American Sadness**

DFW captures a particular modern feeling in quotation above.  I'd never heard it as "sadness" before.  Adrift, Lonely.  

The book All Shining Things names it, says that it's a lack of meaning guiding us.  Authors reference Elizabeth Gilbert in Eat Pray Love.  

Jeff Tweedy says in a podcast that we often numb it. Anesthesize it 

The title of "Infinite Jest" comes from a TV show so entertaining that it turns the viewer into a drooling halfwit.  DFW pointing to the increasing presence of ads and entertainment in modern life.  

I’ve always thought of myself as a realist. I can remember fighting with my professors about it in grad school. The world that I live in consists of 250 advertisements a day and any number of unbelievably entertaining options, most of which are subsidized by corporations that want to sell me things. The whole way that the world acts on my nerve endings is bound up with stuff that the guys with leather patches on their elbows would consider pop or trivial or ephemeral.

 Neal Postman here from Amusing Ourselves to Death.

Maybe Postman is about what it's doing to us politically.  

What is our state: entertained, lonely, sad.  Excited about the next episode dropping.  The next playoff game.  My stepson Henry moves from screen to screen, often stating factoid he's just heard on YouTube videos. "Mom! Did you hear that the new Steelers coach is....?"  "Both quarterbacks today had zero interceptions and over 330 yards."

Often enough in my experience, in the department office, I hear "It's just too much."

Nick Cave caught my attention calling it "keeping the devil in its hole" By that I take it that there are some activities that keep the mind okay.  And also that it's a continuing practice.  The devil is always trying to come out of his hole for us.