Joseph and the Robe of Many Colours

‘Now Israel loved Joseph more than any other of his sons, because he was the son of his old age. And he made him a robe of many colours’

Genesis 37:3- ESV

 

Jonathan Pageau’s definition of love has stood out the most for me and it makes a great deal of sense in and beyond feelings. ‘Love becomes the manner in which both unity and multiplicity can coexist together. You know, because love does not abolish difference. It celebrates difference, but it also celebrates unity. It celebrates how difference can come together and be really one at the same time.’ Joseph’s robe of many colours was not only an illustration of Jacob’s love for Joseph, but it was also an expression of symbolic love in sartorial form, beyond the personal. The robe is a display of how ‘unity and multiplicity can coexist together’. The multiplicity lies in the many colours and the splendid robe in its entirety is the unity. In Jordan B. Peterson’s Biblical Series, Episode XV: Joseph and the Coat of Many Colours, he limns an insightful picture on what Joseph’s robe means for us today. ‘For something to be many coloured’, says Peterson, ‘it means it spans the entire gamut of possibilities.’ For Peterson, the many colours allude to the variegated skills or qualities Joseph had which we should also have, to be able to deal with the malevolence that is in the world and which we will have to contend with over the course of our lives. Brad Lomenick, in his blog post on the 8 key leadership qualities of Joseph, describes Joseph as principled, humble, disciplined, faithful, graceful, competent, wise, and strategic. These are skills and traits that led him to success despite the malevolence that darkened his path. And there was plenty of malevolence going around: sibling envy, attempted fratricide, domicide, slavery, wrongful imprisonment, perjury, broken promises etc… and yet he was not destroyed. This is what Peterson was pointing to; embodying a ‘differentiated mode of being that enables you to be competent and at home in the widest possible places… you can be put in more places and function properly, which is one of the indications there’s more to you’. Peterson exhorts: ‘Make yourself so damn different and dynamic that you are more than a match [for the malevolence]’.

 

‘People are like houses divided amongst themselves. They are working at cross-paths.’ Peterson here is describing a multiplicity that lacks a unity which is a being that is fractionated and not differentiated. This is a person for which malevolence is not external but an ever present internecine internal force in opposition to the person becoming ‘fully fledged’. Being fractionated limits you while being differentiated expands you in the world. This ties with what Byung-Chul Han writes in his book What is Power? ‘Power allows the ego to be with him- or herself, in the other. It creates a continuity of the self…Power is a phenomenon of continuum. It provides the holder with a vast space of self’. It is the differentiation that realises power in different circumstances and in turn becomes even more powerful… like Joseph. Rollo Tomassi in The Rational Male writes, ‘the definition of power is not financial success, status, or influence over others, but the degree to which we have control over our own lives’. Having control over our lives lies in our ability to deal with chaos and uncertainty and impose our own will on our lives despite the malevolence. It is the ability to move from our own ‘mental point of origin’ to use another Rollo Tomassi phrase. But before we can even sharpen our mental point of origins so that the decisions we make with regards to our lives are the right ones, we must be highly in tune to who we are.

 

A short vignette. About thirteen years ago, a friend of mine lent me his copy of Clem Sunter and Chantell Illbury’s The mind of a fox. It’s still on my bookshelf but he hasn’t returned my 30 Seconds to Mars This is War album, so we are even-steven. The book became my armour against a very judgemental world that insisted on specialization, on deciding your entire future when your brain hadn’t even finished developing yet. I knew as I read the opening quote. ‘The fox knows many things- the hedgehog one big one’ (Archilochus) that I was indubitably a fox and that I was not alone. At the time I was dating a hardcore hedgehog and we had endless yet fun debates on the matter. The book Mastery by Robert Greene was on his bookshelf and that was his weapon of choice which he wielded against my The mind of a fox. I think this played a role in why I had avoided Mastery for the longest time but if you’ve read any of my other blogs; you would know that it has become a firm favourite. Thanks Mr Hedgehog, whichever burrow you are in, for introducing me to Robert Greene. Mr. Hedgehog knew exactly what he wanted to do, sharp clarity, steely determination, laser-like focus and an analytical brain that burrowed down all the way to first principles. Being a fox looked like a snafu in comparison. I was all over the place and I could hear the ‘Get it together Girl!’ reverberating across the expanse. I have long embraced that I have varied interests; unsatiated curiosity; and a general Eckhart Tolle ‘let life unfold’ disposition. I have ‘followed my bliss’ (Joseph Campbell) and have tried to work in alignment to the things I really like doing; naturally inclined to and move in directions to which I was drawn. So here we are. It’s like how Santiago Ramón y Cajal, ‘To him who observes them from afar, it appears as though they are scattering and dissipating their energies while in reality they are channelling and strengthening them.’ The reason why I have come to love books like Mastery is because of what Angela Duckworth says we shouldn’t do.  ‘Don’t confuse the healthy development of a work ethic with the premature commitment to a singular passion.’

 

Back to Rollo Tomassi’s mental point of origin. The world is geared towards efficiency, which is why most of the words used to describe the technology or processes we use end in an -er or -st. This efficiency goes hand in hand with early specialization. It starts in the first grade ‘when I grow up, I want to be…’ and then there’s school, university, career, marriage, children then retire. Efficient. It’s not really a system that encourages meanderings. And even if there is a little voice beckoning us elsewhere; we are so encumbered with responsibility that we are absolutely terrified of any uncertainty. Having our own mental point of origin allows us to explore and discover who we are because we will be on the lookout for what David Epstein refers to in Range as ‘match quality’. ‘Match quality is a term economists use to describe the degree of fit between the work someone does and who they are- their abilities and proclivities’ and Peter Drucker of Little Bets adds ‘success in the knowledge economy comes to those who know themselves- their strengths, their values, and how they best perform’, but ‘we learn who we are in practice, not in theory’ (Epstein). Maximizing match quality seems to be more efficient in the long run because then people will always have an array of skills to bring to the table like Joseph. Epstein quotes Herminia Ibarra (an organizational behaviour professor) on maximizing match quality. ‘Ibarra concluded that we maximize match quality throughout life by sampling activities, social groups, contexts, jobs, careers, and then reflecting and adjusting our personal narratives. And repeat’. And that is now we learn who we are. Epstein touches on the ‘end-of-history illusion’ which is a psychological illusion experienced by individuals of all ages where people believe that they have already experienced significant personal growth and changes in tastes up to the present moment but will not substantially grow or mature in the future. So, we mistakenly think that who we are today is who we’ll always be, so we make these huge specialization decisions based on an incorrect assumption. Epstein writes, ‘The precise person you are now is fleeting, just like all the other people you’ve been… that feels like the most unexpected result, but it is also the most well documented… The only certainty is change, both on average as a generation ages, and within each individual’. We rely on this change, though, to become differentiated people. Therein lies the opportunity to tap into parts of us which have been otherwise dormant. Carl Jung calls this movement towards reaching full potential, the ‘circumambulation’. We move around a centre (home in on ourselves in a sense) and this circumambulation manifests itself by making us interested in things. When we follow this interest and tap into it and harness whatever skills or competencies or traits that come about because of that interest, we become differentiated, the centre holds. This centre that holds makes way for expansion which in turn increases our power. This unity can be expressed as a centre with lines homing in from different angles or it can be reconfigured as straight lines coming together to a single point like the tip of a spear. It’s important to bear in mind though; only the presence of a multiplicity produces a unity. Without multiplicity, we cease being spears; we are just sticks.

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In The 33 Strategies of War, Robert Greene quotes Ian Knight (The Anatomy of the Zulu Army) and it sent chills down my spine: ‘Legend has it that Shaka altered the nature of fighting in the region for ever, by inventing a heavy, broad- bladed spear designed to withstand the stresses of close- quarter combat. Perhaps he did: certainly, both Zulu sources and the accounts of white travellers and officials in the nineteenth century credit him with this achievement… His military innovation s made an impact on Zulu folklore, if nothing else, for Shaka certainly developed fighting techniques to an unprecedented degree, and there is a wealth of stories concerning his prowess as a warrior; he may, indeed, have been one of the great military geniuses of his age’. Shaka’s iklwa is what came to mind when I thought about the tip of the spear. It is the spear itself that increased Shaka’s prowess and the piercing nature of the spear enabled him to defeat his malevolence. Interestingly, Shaka’s warriors used to encircle the enemy and home in on them, circumambulation much? In What is Power?, Han writes that the tip of the spear is centred and gathers everything unto itself. And that is how prowess is culminated; the unity that gathers the multiplicity into itself. Dark Horses is a book by Ogi Ogas and Todd Rose that explores those people who became successful in unconventional ways. They write, ‘people often believe that when it comes to earning a living; you must choose between doing what you like and doing what you must. Dark horses teach us that is a false choice. By harnessing their individuality [who they are and their interests] dark horses attained both prowess and joy. By choosing situations that seemed to offer the best fit for the authentic self, dark horses secured the most effective circumstances for developing excellence at their craft, since engaging in fulfilling work maximises your ability to learn, grow and perform. Thus, dark horses provide a new definition of success suited for the Age of Personalization, one that recognizes that individuality truly matters. Personalized success is living a life of fulfilment and excellence’. The synchronicity of the word ‘prowess’ has not been missed. When we are differentiated then we have prowess and its this prowess that will empower us to contend with the overwhelming computing capacity of AI technology and parry with it.

 

Moravec’s paradox is an occurrence in AI technology where the tasks that are simple for human beings are complex for AI, and the tasks that are complex for human beings are simple for AI. Ogas & Rose ‘describe our epoch as the Age of Standardization as opposed to the industrial age because the age is characterized by the standardization of most fixtures of everyday life, including consumer products, jobs and diplomas’. Premature specialization falls right in line with this group. This standardization that opened the gap for AI; anything that can be turned into an algorithm. But, optimistically; it is this standardization that will inspire human beings to move away from a standardized contribution to a more nuanced, dare I say, differentiated one. Epstein, ‘Modern work demands knowledge transfer: the ability to apply knowledge to new situations and different domains. Our most fundamental thought processes have changed to accommodate increasing complexity and the need to derive new patterns rather than rely only on familiar ones’. Information is widely available but requires synthesis and the ability to transfer it across disciplines; that is part of the aforementioned prowess. ‘You have people walking around with all the knowledge of humanity on their phone, but they have no idea how to integrate it. We don’t train people in thinking or reasoning’ (Arturo Casadevall quoted in Range), or as James Flynn puts it, ‘everyone needs habits of mind that allow them to dance across disciplines’. It’s this cognitive flexibility that can put human beings in the driving seat of strategists and multi- domain problem solvers and AI in the passenger seat of focusing on tactics. ‘In narrow enough worlds, humans may not have much to contribute much longer, in more open-ended games I think they certainly will. Not just games, in open-ended real-world problems we’re still crushing the machines’ (Gary Marcus). In my line of work, I recently met two amazing girls who are currently in Grade twelve; one goes to St Anne’s Diocesan School for Girls and the other, Roedean School.  They are both remarkable and are involved in a panoply of extra-curricular activities. From drama to hockey to leadership to musical instruments or taking Spanish as an elective and involvement in The President’s Award. Even when interacting with them, one gets the impression that these are pupils who will fare well in life. Both have entrepreneurial parents so there is also exposure on that front. I think their range has long been inspired by how Ivy Leagues wanted learners with range. As I was researching on why that is the case, turns out that it’s no longer the case. In a blogpost titled, ‘How to get into Ivy League Schools: The Definitive Guide’ Shemmassian Academic Consulting writes, ‘In the past, being a ‘well-rounded’college applicant was considered the best admissions strategy. However, in today’s competitive admissions climate, well rounded applicants don’t stand out- there’s nothing about them that’s unique, special or different. The far more effective approach we recommend to our students is to become a specialist in their chosen extracurricular field- to go all in on a specific interest and be extraordinary in that small areas’. These are the reasons listed supporting this strategy:

·         ‘Specialists possess an ‘it factor’ in admissions conversations they get referred to as the ‘tech entrepreneur or the published self-help author’ or the ‘non-profit founder’

·         Specialists elevate their college community through their developed passions, achievements, and unique experiences. A group of students who are each exceptional in different areas make the student body well- rounded as a whole, and to a higher degree than a group of moderately we- rounded students would

·         Specialists have higher levels of self-awareness than students who merely dipped their toes into several different activities. They know who they are, have clear career direction and will take greater advantage of the available Ivy League resources.’

 

Fresh from reading Range and Dark Horse, I, naturally, had questions.

·         Wouldn’t an ‘it-factor’ come from being as differentiated as possible, that your ‘power’ spreads across domains, you are a lateral thinker, you are a better problem-solver overall?

·         Epstein writes, ‘both training and professional incentives are aligning to accelerate specialization, creating intellectual archipelagos’. Are higher education institutions immune from becoming intellectual archipelagos? A group of moderately well-rounded students could better create an actual college community because there would be more potential nodes of creating connections based on similar interests. A group of students who are each exceptional in different areas make the student body look great on paper, like archipelagos on a map but in terms of benefitting the actual student body? Not too sure

·         I made a case earlier in this essay that the people who know who they are, in fact, are the ones who explore and discover who they are. For the majority of people, we had a vague understanding of who we are in high school and so the discovery was still in nascent form. Universities are known to be specialization tanks, and for them to extend their reach of specialization even earlier into the lives of prospective students seems unwise. Epstein writes, ‘Mostly, though, students get what economist Bryan Caplan called narrow vocational training for jobs few of them will ever have. Three-quarters of American college graduates go on to a career unrelated to their major- a trend that includes math and science majors- after having become competent only with the tools of a single discipline’. Now even the years prior to university, that could have been used for exploration and ‘sampling’ as Epstein puts it are now dedicated to specialization. Our education systems are designed around specialization, with a few exceptions such as Roedean and St Annes’s whose cultures engender sampling. It sure does come at a steep price. The fee tags attached to those schools are… WOW! What makes it worthwhile is not the fact you’ll achieve A’s at the school (‘Valedictorians or in our context dux scholars don’t become millionaires’- Eric Barker) but the richness of contexts available to learners. What usually happens in standard classrooms is standardization, the truly exciting stuff is happening outside the classrooms. Extra- curricular environments offered by these schools is invaluable. Ultimately, we thrive in environments that are in alignment with who we are. As Eric Barker puts it, ‘Following the rules doesn’t create success, it just eliminates extremes- both good and bad. While this is usually good and all but eliminates downside risk, it also frequently eliminates earth shaking accomplishments. It’s like putting a governor on your engine that stops the car from going over fifty-five; you’re far less likely to get into a lethal crash, but you won’t be setting and land speed records either’. Conventional classrooms are about following rules and conforming; everything outside the classroom is where we get to tap into creativity; to explore; to discover who we are. As Sir Ken Robinson says ‘we are educating people out of their creativity’. 

     I remember how at the end of high school; the big buzz word was ‘innovation’. We were expected to magically start innovating, and my response was a bewildered ‘How sway?’ At which point of my educational journey was innovation cultivated; it felt like a blindside. It was a skill the world was expecting me to have without having taught me methods or approaches that build the innovation muscle. Peter Sims says experimental innovation is the approach that will lead to breakthroughs and success; and where else to experimentally innovate than outside the classroom in those twelve precious years of formal education. ‘For most of us, adopting this experimental approach requires a significant change in mindset. One reason for this is the way most of us have been taught. Great emphasis gets placed in our education system on teaching facts, such as historical information or scientific tables, then testing us in order to measure how much we’ve retained about that body of knowledge. Memorization and learning to follow established procedures are the key methods for success. Even when we are taught problem solving such as solving math problems, the focus is generally either on using established methods or logical inference or deduction, both highly procedural in the way they require us to think. There is much less emphasis on developing our creative thinking abilities, our abilities to let our minds run imaginatively and to discover things on our own. We are given very little opportunity, for example, to perform our own, original experiments, and there is also little or no margin for failure or mistakes. We are graded primarily on getting answers right.’ So, the early specialization required for university admissions, extra-curricular time should not be usurped to serve ‘premature optimization’ as Paul Graham describes it. Range has also inspired me to view educational reform in a very different light. In South Africa, where inequality is rife and rampant, the area code we are born into usually dictates the type of education we get. And I have been myopically focused on reforming, the disadvantaged classroom that learners have a fighting chance in the work market. But that is just ensuring that learners have only one skill (good enough grades to pursue their desired career at the time). As I’ve mentioned earlier in the blog, having one skill makes a person a stick, not a spear. We will not have any prowess. Alternatively, we would have to blow up our perspective and focus on all the time outside the classroom to engross learners in different environments, cultivate skills; and assist learners in discovering who they are or at the very least what they like or are interested in.

 

Some people would describe David ‘stay hard’ Goggins as someone on the extreme side of the continuum of human achievement, and Jessie Itzler lived with him for a month. Respect! If you don’t know who Goggins is, google him and just prepare to be yelled at by a shirtless man for not living out your full potential. Goggins has accused everyone who has called him crazy as lazy and weak because they want to use him as an excuse. According to him, anyone and everyone can do what he does and accomplish what he has accomplished. I’m not as convinced. When Eric Barker introduced the Gautam Mukunda idea of ‘intensifiers’ in his book, Goggins immediately came to mind. Barker, ‘Intensifiers are qualities that on average, are negative but in certain contexts produce sweeping benefits that devastate the competition’. David Goggins is not the ‘sunny disposition’ and ‘rainbows and butterflies’ type. I can imagine him saying, rather yelling, to a five year old on his birthday ‘WHAT YOU EATING CAKE FOR? DID YOU COMPLETE YOUR MORNING RUN?’ Goggins is pretty intense and that is his intensifier. Tapping into that has really differentiated him from the bulk of society, and it has given him power and he is now able to access more people and places(expansion) as a result. I know I said Goggins is shirtless, but he is actually wearing an invisible coat of many colours. Just as how grit is context specific, success is context specific as well, and it is the range of our exposure that increases the likelihood we land up in the right context. Barker writes, ‘[success] is less about being perfect than knowing what you’re best at and being properly aligned with your context… sometimes an ugly duckling can be a swan if it finds the right pond. The thing that sets you apart, the habits you may have tried to banish, the things you were taunted for in school, may ultimately, grant you an unbeatable advantage.’

 Oh, before I forget. Tiger Woods was an early specializer. And I also want to rope in another Tiger into this: Amy Chua, the Tiger Mom. Without getting into too much detail about kind and wicked learning environments; or that the ‘availability heuristic’ regarding Tiger Woods leads us astray; drawing conclusions that do not hold under scrutiny. Its best to use Tiger Woods words to cut straight to the point: ‘To this day, my dad has never asked me to go play golf. I ask him.’ Epstein reminds that ‘it’s the child’s desire to play that matters, not the parent’s desire to have the child play.’ This was Amy Chua’s error. One day, after years of being forced to play the violin, Amy’s daughter quit the violin. And that was that. It’s not about imposing yourself on children but rather about creating environments where children are allowed to follow interests, to play, to discover and to develop range

A Digital Footprint is not a History

 

'But what if we are at the crossroads, as the blues singers moan, longing for something else, neither diversion nor distraction, escape nor mere entertainment'

Phil Cousineau

 

‘To people the world over, pilgrimage is a spiritual exercise, an act of devotion to find a source of healing, or even perform a penance. Always, it is a journey of risk and renewal. For a journey without challenge has no meaning; one without purpose has no soul’ (Phil Cousineau, The Art of Pilgrimage).

This is how I approach my mother’s photo albums. Neatly tucked away at the back of my cupboard, where I have to recruit the assistance of a chair, to be able to reach them. There are two of them, one burgundy and the other mahogany and they are considerably heavy as I move them from the top shelf onto my bed. I am at a crossroad, my soul weary, my bones heavy and I’ve come to these albums for answers, for direction and for healing. To go through my mom’s albums is to go on pilgrimage, is to move from a Here to a There while remaining in the confines of my room. Right before I open the first one I sigh, physiologically, and prepare myself for the challenges that the sojourn always raises within me; the evocation of ‘emotion and commotion‘ as Cousineau puts it.  These albums are sacred to me, and they pull back the curtain slightly on the life the woman who gave birth to me lived. She is beyond the veil now and yet she still speaks to me through her history. She beckons, encourages, clarifies, and guides. ‘The point of a pilgrimage’, writes Cousineau, ‘is to improve yourself by enduring and overcoming difficulties’… and I need improving, in ways only my mother can understand.

As I crack open the first album, its sheaves are stuck together. I separate them and can feel the intensity of the moment build. I’ve visited these albums before, but there is still a hesitation behind my actions, a knowing that whatever is revealed must be obeyed; that is the imperative. This is how it works with arcana; I speak to my mother through photographs, implore and wrestle with her. Carl Sagan, a resounding voice, ‘we make our world significant by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers’. So, I ask courageous questions and I am met with deep answers.  Each photo is a part of a larger narrative, it’s a story unfolding, revealing its essence at the deepest level. People casually and whimsically describe this as walking down memory lane. Although there is nothing whimsy about it, it is a lane that needs to be walked, to be traversed. ’Pilgrimage means following in the footsteps of somebody or something we honour to pay homage. It revitalizes our lives, reinvigorates our very souls’ (Costineau). Following these footsteps and unlocking the clarity of my own path cannot be rushed. These photo albums hold duration within them. Their assembly was a protracted affair, it was undertaken with great care and consideration and that is what each picture, in turn, requires of me. Byung Chul-Han in The Scent of Time writes, ‘The path which separates the place of departure from the place of arrival is also an interval. Like place itself, it is semantically rich. The path of a pilgrimage, for instance, is not an empty space between two places that is to be traversed as quickly as possible. Rather, it constitutes the very goal to be reached. Being- on- one’s way here is altogether meaningful. The walking means doing penance, healing, or gratefulness… it is a prayer. The pilgrim’s path is not merely a thoroughfare, but a transition to a There. In temporal terms, the pilgrim is on the way to the future, which is expected to bring salvation.’

I can’t help but contrast this rich, intense way of keeping record with todays’ electronic albums which are emaciated and weak in comparison. Modern day photos are way too easily retrievable. They can all be accessed at a swipe. There is no preparation needed either to access the pictures and they are always within arm’s reach. The voluminous number of the photos compromise any significance they may possess. The photos comprise mostly of faces without contexts; without a semblance of connection; just sameness with different backgrounds. The photos are merely a matryoshka doll reflecting ourselves back to us at the surface level as the screens through which we view the photos do. Empty and emptying in their proliferation. Han writes, ‘Electronic memories and other technological possibilities for recurrence destroy the temporal interval which is responsible for forgetting. They make what is past instantaneously retrievable and available.’ Part of being human is the ability to forget- that is the healing grace of time. There are things that we are the better for having forgotten. Yet electronic memories do not permit us to forget, and we face death by a thousand cuts constantly reliving painful and unhelpful events. Because of digital media’s ahistoricity, we have no past to speak of, everything can be conjured into the presence as fast as our thumbs allow. This is itself an unkindness. There are no spaces of introspection and growth when everything you’ve ever done is immediate. Society judges you harshly on the things you said or did at 15 and at 50 alike. There is no space for redemption. Redemption is narrative and our digital spaces lump everything together. All specificity is lost, and this is why we age, and we do not grow older. There is no distance between events and the contemplative and introspective aspects of those events. As Han writes, ‘An event is not a theme to which consciousness could relate, but a trauma which cannot be captured by consciousness, which is entirely outside its control or annuls it.’ These events become doubly traumatic because these digital spaces are intolerant of second chances. Therefore, we indiscriminately carry these things with us.

Our brains have evolved in such a way that our memories themselves aren’t concrete; they are porous and continuously reconstruct themselves. I can’t help but think this is for our ultimate good. Our brains are protecting us from things we would otherwise be unable to handle were we required to take them in directly. Our brains allow us to put things in the past; even the sting of difficult things has been devenomized. Our brains filter and dilute events into things we can swallow to ensure we can still carry on living. Our feet are buckling under the weight of our present-past. And because the digital footprint does not discern, neither does it make any concessions; our memories are cold, hard-as-stones facts. The digital space does not hold back any blows, everything is there and anyone with an internet connection can access it and a savvy-coder can hack into our clouds. Forgetting brings a lot of healing and it can also bring freedom and unburdening. The digital space is quite the nuisance at reminding, it picks scabs and it unrelentingly burdens. This process is additive, we are forced to take in and contain more and more memories without the ability of letting anything go. This compulsive remembering flagellates and offers no penance. We are abelian sandpiles and some of us won’t survive the avalanche to re-form again.  

 

My mother’s photo albums are a site, an in-heritage site for her daughters. They are movable locations where pieces of her social, political, cultural, and spiritual history have been preserved. They hold heritage value and lingering power. Electronic memories, however, are sights. ‘Sights are places one passes by. They do not permit any lingering or staying’ (Han).  You see them and move from one photo to the next as though driving fast by them. It’s the feeling evoked when listening to Daniel Caesar sing Streetcar, ‘Seems like streetlights, glowing, happen to be. Just like moments passing in front of me.’ You are persistently swiping or scrolling from one picture to another that it’s a blur. Even though, they themselves are in the photos, they seem to be having an out-of- body experience and are disconnected from the people in the photos because they can’t reconcile the evidence of photos and the lack of experience the photos allude to. The Baudrillard inspired ‘frenetic stillness’ comes to mind: the rush of historical events only provides scant cover for (and ultimately, in effect, produces) a standstill. People are moving rapidly from one event to the next, but it all signifies nothing, existentially they are standing still. People’s ‘histories’ can now be reduced to a single digital footprint. The footprint is quantitatively large but it’s a single lonely footprint unaccompanied by its pair counterpart, with no sense of direction and purpose. Electronic memories don’t take strolls, they don’t take walks, they are simply standing still. ‘Solvitur ambulando’ as the Latin phrase goes, but if we are standing still, it means our lives remain unresolved, and unsaved. Our entire lives a big fat question mark?

Electronic memories do not arrest a gaze because they are mundane; they have no narrative power. Nothing distinguishes them from one another. Electronic memories are ‘atomized time’. ‘Due to the lack of narrative tension, atomized time cannot hold our attention for long. Atomized time is a discontinuous time. There is nothing to bind events together and thus found a connection, a duration. The senses are therefore confronted with the unexpected and sudden, which, in turn produces a diffuse feeling of anxiety’ (Han).

There is a common saying in our times that ‘if it’s not on the gram, then it didn’t happen’. The irony of that is the fact that if it’s on the gram, that means it was gleaned of life through that process. A chunk of experience was sacrificed at the altar of the Instagram gods. Nowadays, when you have to stop what you are doing to take a picture, then you are not doing what you are meant to be doing anymore. The difference between the photos in my mom’s albums and Instagram is that taking a photo of an event back then was a part of the experience, it added to the experience and the picture was singular. Taking a photo for the gram interrupts the experience and diminishes it and the more this instagramming take place, the more the pictures lose their uniqueness. Kabir, the poet, puts it better when he writes, ‘If you have not experienced something for yourself, then it is not for real.’ And since taking pictures for Instagram robs the moment of its experience, and the posing and curating robs the moment of its realness. It would make more sense to draw the conclusion that if it’s on Instagram then it didn’t actually happen. Han writes, ‘A fulfilled life cannot be explained on a quantitative basis. It does not result from a plenitude of possibilities, just as recounting or listing of events does not necessarily amount to a narration or account. Rather, the latter require a special synthesis to which they owe their meaning.’ Today, we have more photos than we know what do with and because the ‘medium is the message’; following Marshall McLuhan’s thinking, human beings have become servomechanism of phones. The compulsive photo-taking serves the medium although it disguises itself behind serving the people taking the pictures. The proliferation of pictures without any sort of synthesis drains life of its meaning. ‘It is not the total number of events, but experience of duration which makes life more fulfilling. Where one event follows close on the heels of another, nothing enduring comes about. Fulfilment and meaning cannot be explained on quantitative grounds. A life that is lived quickly, without anything lasting long and without anything slow, a life that is characterized by quick, short-term, and short-lived experiences is itself a short life, no matter how high the ‘rate of experience’ may be’ (Han).

‘…he who contemplates does not absorb the object into himself. The long, contemplative gaze trains itself in the preservation of a distance to the things, without, though losing their nearness. Its spatial formula is that of a distanced nearness.’ My mother’s photo albums are a space of contemplation. Each photo absorbs me, pulls me in and there is a losing and subsequent finding of self through the album. I, however, do not absorb the album into myself. Sacred things retain their separateness. Cell phones have become extensions of selves, the contiguity between device and person dissolved. When people cannot spend time away from their devices, it isn’t about missing important communication, its more about the fact that we’ve absorbed the devices into ourselves. The device is a material containment of parts of ourselves like horcruxes and we are as territorial of them as Voldemort was of his horcruxes. We can therefore not truly contemplate them and consequently cannot see the thing properly and since we've  assimilated the device into ourselves, even the way we see ourselves is obscured. To be able to see something, there has to be a distance between us and the object. The galleries on our smartphones, although quantitatively significant, do not offer much of substance to us; if any. And if there was something to be grasped; we would have no way of seeing it. As Cousineau puts it, ‘I don’t believe that the problem is in the sites as it is in the sighting, the way we see… we look more and more but see less and less’.

The photos in my mom’s album went through a selection process. Not the arbitrary selection of the best picture out of 100 to post on social media, but the actual event itself goes through a selection process. The camera only made cameo appearances at events that were deemed important and significant enough and there was also a meaningful order to the events themselves. Nowadays, the camera is whipped up at the least provocation: meals, gym, coffee runs, getting dressed, buying new things, pets being pets, children being children etc... everything has become an event. The wisdom of Patrick Lencioni prevails, ‘If everything is important, then nothing is’ i.e., if everything is an event then nothing is. This is why digital spaces are unable to captivate us. ‘Events are no longer linked up into stories. The narrative chain, which yields a meaning, operates by making a selection. It strictly regulates the sequence of events.’ (Han). Histories bring things together; they are narrative in structure. My mother ‘was able to collect the events around’ her as Han puts it and allowed her history to emerge and we, her descendants, are anchored and can gain purchase into the world because of it. ‘History as directed time protects time against decay, against its dispersion into a pure sequence of point-like presences.’ These ahistorical spaces that we participate daily in, disperse, dissipate and dissolve us and ultimately render us invisible. ‘The decay of the temporal continuum renders existence radically fragile. The soul is permanently exposed to the danger of death and terror of nothingness, because the event which wrests it from death lacks any duration. The intervals between events are death zones. During these eventless in-between times, the soul falls into lethargy. The joy of being mingles with a fear of death. Exaltation is followed by depression, by an ontological depression even.’ (Han). Our digital footprints are indistinct from the general sludge of the internet space which means the way we regard them is the same as the way we regard everything else in the space and since everything on the internet is scattered and pulling in different directions, it confuses us. And since we are unable to stay on things long enough to struggle through to elucidation, our confusion turns into boredom, we give up and move on to the next stimuli. Hurston Smith wrote in the foreword to The Art of Pilgrimage, ‘But by attending to [obstacles] now- openness, attentiveness, and responsiveness are the essence of pilgrimage- you will be able to surmount them by yielding to them in the way that life always requires that we yield to it. And draw the resilience you will need from those who have preceded you, for pilgrims are a hardy breed.’ Which is why histories are so important. When the story unfolds and we see how those who came before us struggled through the obstacles that made them who they eventually became, we are encouraged. The tools for posterity to become ‘a hardy breed’ themselves are laid bare before them.

Pilgrimages are durable and histories are as well. Internet spaces are spaces characterized by instantaneity; they hold no duration which is also a part of the reason they are ahistorical. Han describes electronic mail as follows: ‘Electronic mail produces instantaneity by destroying the paths as spatial intervals in their entirety… Intervals structure not only perception but also life.’ When I behold my mom’s photo albums and think through the chain of mini-events that took place from the point a picture was taken to it making its way to the album, it is just a process brimming with interval spaces. From waiting for the film to be used up, to dark rooms, and archiving, there are spaces of deliberation, selection, waiting and lingering and these structure life. Its even in the descriptive languages of these processes. Traditionally, photos were developed and now they are printed. When something is printed, there are implications of replication and sameness (sludge). When a picture is developed, there is an anticipation to it; we are awaiting a transformation. Transformations are a long time in the making and are not instantaneous. Even dark rooms remind us of a time when everything wasn’t as glaringly ultra- transparent as they are now. Mystery and spaces of becoming have given room to intransmutable digital footprints.

As I return my mom’s photo albums to the place reserved for them, I feel like I have been a witness to the life of a great crocodile. I am now at a new Here equipped to return to life and live as fiercely as my mother did.

 

‘Traveler, there is no path

Paths are made by [putting our smartphones down and] walking’

 Antonio Machado with annotation

Robala ka kgotso, Kwena ya metsi

The Tyranny of the Measurable

 

‘For it is well that the years should not seem to wear us away and disperse us like a handful of sand; rather they should fulfil us.’

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

 

The final pose at the end of a yoga practice is savasana (corpse pose) where a practitioner assumes a supine position; closes/softens her eyes; relaxes her mind and dissolves all the tension in her body. This pose integrates the benefits of her asana practice. It has a reputation of being ‘the hardest yoga pose’ because people have a difficult time lying still after moving through an asana practice; and overcoming the restlessness of needing to move on to the next thing. Regardless, savasana is still a part of the practice and when a practitioner skips this part of her practice, her practice is incomplete. Interestingly, in the Learn Skills Faster episode, Andrew Huberman of the Huberman Lab podcast describes a neurological process that bears the verisimilitude of savasana. ‘There are also data showing that after any kind of motor movement provided, you’re not bringing a lot more additional new sensory stimuli, there’s a replay of the motor sequence that you performed correctly and there’s an elimination of the motor sequences that you performed incorrectly, and they are run backwards in time.’ This process differs from sleep in that in sleep the correct sequence is performed forwards in time. This process happens necessarily within the same session as the actual motor movement. It is a critical part of the learning process. It is both indispensable and unmeasurable. This is where the restlessness comes in. In a society where ‘time is money’ and productivity is valued above most if not all things; this ‘doing nothing’ can be quickly labelled as sloth. Novice practitioners can easily come up with a list of things they could be doing instead of savasana and they do, to the detriment of all the work they just put in. This brings me to the relationship between the symbolism of ‘coherence’ and ‘completion’.

 

Jonathan Pageau of The Symbolic World in a podcast episode titled ‘The Apple CEO, 666, and The Garden of Eden’ explicates on the relationship between the symbolism of the numbers 6 and 7. The easiest illustration is how they are connected in The Creation Myth. The work of creation was finished on the 6^th day and the 7^th day was the Sabbath, the day of rest. In Biblical symbolism, 6 is the number of coherence (the ‘consistency’ of the work week) and 7 is the number of completion. Essentially there are 6 days which are measurable in terms of productivity and then there is the 7^th day which is not. The cadence of the first 6 days is the same and it changes dramatically on the 7^th day. The 7^th day is a day set apart. Slowly, however, this day’s difference and essence has been lost to society, and the day has been changed into just another day to serve the means of production. In his book, The Disappearance of Rituals, Byung-Chul Han writes ‘God does not rest on the seventh day simply to recover from the work he has done. Rather, rest is his nature. It completes the creation. Thus, when we subordinate rest to work, we ignore the divine… Rest is not merely recovery from work nor is it a preparation for further work. Rather, it transcends work, and it must in no way come into contact with work… If rest becomes a form of recovery from work, as is the case today; it loses its specific ontological value. It no longer represents an independent, higher form of existence and degenerates into a derivative of work.’ When we fail to set aside rest, we become beasts of burden living mundane lives, reduced to servomechanisms of production. ‘Rest is made to serve production and is degraded into leisure and recreational time’(Han).

Han writes, ‘Most importantly, during the Sabbath man rests his tongue from the everyday chit-chat & learns silence and listening. The sabbath demands silence; the mouth must be closed.’ Most of the communication that takes place today is serving the means of production. There is on one hand the endless chatter of social media: posts, lives, boomerangs, comments, DMs, likes etc. which is mostly meaningless and on the other hand, businesses are becoming more and more dependent on WhatsApp for e.g., to achieve their productive ends. This, no doubt, makes it quicker to communicate but it also increases the endlessness of it all. Communication has become more about quantity than quality and we end up saying a lot about nothing or even worse, using our mental bandwidth in attempts to stay on top of unread emails or messages which themselves have an exponential life of their own. This has created a lot of dread; of missing important communication and of missing out on other important things in life. Production spills over and seeps into every crevice of our lives. And any silence from our side (unread and unanswered correspondence) is ill received and we are labelled as rude, and impolite. An app like WhatsApp has increased the accessibility of people beyond belief. For people who have had the same phone number since time immemorial; all the people they would have met over the years, in all those different seasons have access to them today, now, in this season. This hyper-accessibility may serve production, but the psyche takes a pounding. There is also a hyper-surveillance where people’s movements on the app. are tracked and timestamped. There is an expectation and entitlement, socio-normatively, that if people are online they imperatively have to acknowledge and read all the messages that come in.  

 

George Lakoff & Mark Johnson, in their book Metaphors We Live By write ‘Metaphor is for most people a device of the poetic imagination and the rhetorical flourish- a matter of extraordinary rather than ordinary language. Moreover, metaphor is typically viewed as characteristic of language alone, a matter of words rather than thought of action. For this reason, most people think they can get along perfectly well without metaphor. We have found, on the contrary, that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature. The concepts that govern our thought are not just matters of the intellect. They also govern our everyday functioning down to the most mundane details. Our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people. Our conceptual system thus plays a central role in defining our everyday realities. If we are right in suggesting that our conceptual system is largely metaphorical then the way we think, what we experience, and what we do everyday is very much a matter of metaphor.’ Communication, of the nature discussed above, is promoted and endorsed because it is highly measurable and can therefore be used productively. The content is largely insignificant because it is largely bullshit. Harry Frankfurt in Bullshit writes, ‘One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit’. However, this communication is measurable and measured. It is the bits/s that make this communication valued and the ringing bell that makes tech companies salivate like Pavlovian dogs is data. As Lakoff & Johnson put it; we live by metaphors and they can provide perspective on how we see things and their affordances to us. In general, living in the information age, this movement of information is described as the ‘flow’ of information. When we are on the internet; we are said to be ‘surfing’ the net. We ‘stream’ when we watch or listen to something online. There are data ‘lakes’ where raw data is stored. Our language depicts how we see data in relation to ourselves. This means we metaphorically see and experience data as water, and this itself is a harbinger of things to come. As fun as surfing is, human beings can’t ride waves indefinitely. You have to, eventually, get out the water or risk drowning. With the omnipresence of information and communication, drowning presents itself as a large and looming possibility. Also, is Big Data akin to a Big Wave of the Nazará proportion?  or is it like Meta Data and it represents a Meta Cosmic Reality named The Great Deluge and its mass extinction implications? Things to think about.

I would like to colligate this with another metaphor we live by. The word ‘understand’ etymologically means ‘stand in the midst of’. When we have grasped something than we are standing in it. It’s ok to stand in water up to your knees but what happens if the data is quantitatively large (as is its nature) or moving so quickly, it knocks you off your feet? How and when does understanding take place and become knowledge. Nicholas Carr beffitingly named his book, on our inability to ‘dive deep’ to understand and know ‘The Shallows’. Han writes: ‘processors are faster than a human being precisely because they neither think nor understand, they only calculate… the proponents of dataism would argue that humans invented thinking because they cannot calculate fast enough, and that the age of thinking will prove to be a short historical interlude.’ Homo Sapiens’ big claim to fame is this ‘thinking’. What then to become of the thinking man in the times of calculation and algorithm? If we are still standing then we are likely, sinking.

With our limited understanding and knowledge, one would assume we would have less to say and yet the means of production, press upon us more ardently; insisting that we continue speaking and increasing the speed at which we do this. Less to say. More communication. The proliferation of Bullshit. Frankfurt writes ‘Bullshit is unavoidable when circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about. Thus, the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person’s obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic exceed his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic. This discrepancy is common in public life, where people are frequently impelled- whether by their own propensities of by the demands of others- to speak extensively about matters of which they are to some degree ignorant.’

 

‘Work, work, work, work, work, work’ Our Barbados-born princess sings in her not-so-surprisingly named song, ‘Work’. The hard work Rihanna is singing about is not traditional work but a labour for love, or rather a labour for a connection beyond sex. Dare I say a ‘relationship’. We are at least comforted that Rihanna only repeats ‘work’ 6 times and not 7. On the 7^th day, she can rest from the need to keep that particular ‘relation-ship’ afloat in these tumultuous seas that is modern day dating. Hook-up culture is one of the insidious ways which illustrate how far we’ve embraced the measurable; even in our so called private spaces. How many matches? right swipes? followers? subscribers? Frankly, How much? Interactions between people are fixated on sex. With sex off the table, the table itself ceases to exist. Sex sells now more than ever but now we are willingly pimping ourselves out productively. We have reduced one another into succubae and incubi where the sexual act and its finality is prioritized above all else. We consume each other to the point of disgust, if not physically then virtually. Han writes, ‘the sexual act in today’s porn films seems mechanical. The principle of performance has also taken hold of sex, giving the body, the function of a sexual machine.’ In the spirit of performance and sensationalism, we are continuously stretching the boundaries of sex and sex which is just one dimension of existence permeates all the other dimensions. Coprophilia and Bestiality are becoming commonplace. A few weeks ago, a sex scene from The Wife went viral and it was heralded as a first of its kind in the South African context. Not only was this inevitable, the general trajectory of broadcasting lends to an increase in gratuitous salacious content to garner more views. ‘What the Immanuelle is going on here?’ commented a viewer because there was a time when sex had a time and a place, it was contained, it wasn’t broadcast when children were wide awake. The broadcasting of sex in the first place has been a very slippery slope. And now it’s everywhere. How do we call it sexual liberation when we are clearly enslaved to sexuality and can hardly move in any direction without being bombarded by it? We’ve also violently reduced each other to faces and genitals which we use and discard. And why would a phenomenon such as ‘Ghosting’ surprise us? What justification or explanation would we need to provide to a face and genitals? And besides lengthy explanations would require time that the means of productions do not encourage; it’s simply on to the next one. ’Porn kills off sexuality and eroticism more effectively than moral repression ever could have hoped to… the pathology of today’s society is the excess of positivity. It’s a too much not a too little that is making us sick’(Han).

 

In one of the Thinking Ape episodes, Stardusk speaks about an old duffel bag that was given to him by his father that lasted for more than a decade in good working order. And he laments how things are just not made to last for a long time anymore. Things have no durability. Which is precisely how a society of production would want it to be. Things are made, not mainly for the utility they provide, but to be sold. The sell is the bottom-line and there’d be just enough product substance to entice people to buy. There are times when there is insufficient product substance to warrant a purchase but once the hedonic treadmill has got people running on it like gerbil on spinning wheels; not much convincing is needed to have them spending money needlessly. We’ve fetishized the new and we are constantly upgrading and updating. We, as Han puts it, don’t use things but use them up. Even novelty is lost on us. Novelty is the new against the background of the old. When new is foregrounded against the new, it is not novel; it is just the sameness of the new; the coherence of production. Han, ‘the new quickly deteriorates into routine. It is a commodity that is used up and arouses the need for the new again. The compulsion of production as the compulsion to seek the new, only gets us deeper into the quagmire of routine in order to escape emptiness, we consume ever more new things, new stimuli and experiences. It is precisely the feeling of emptiness which spurs communication of emptiness which spurs communication and consumption.’ Our identities become as fickle as the ever-changing things around us. Nothing grounds us, and there is nothing to stand under (understand) either. Life is an ever-changing morass of insecurity and uncertainty. We are stabilized as every morning we wake up to new ceilings. We are unhomed, perpetually.

 

We’ve also lost the capacity to play and laugh. Play for the sake of play does not serve the means of production. It is merely unmeasurable in economic terms. It is the expenditure of energy that doesn’t translate into money. Han describes how poetry is becoming ever so rate because poetry is linguistic play. Haiku and Limerick are games with specific rules and the value of the game lies in successfully adhering to the rules of the game. On Monday afternoon at 3pm CAT, Chillers the world over gather to laugh while watching McGee, Sol Phenduka, and Ghost Lady play with language. A form of resistance against the tyranny of the measurable. Sure, the number of subscribers is a measurable metric, but that was the form that followed the function. And chillers aren’t mere spectators, they participate in following along and sharing in the laughter when Sol the PUNisher drops a pun. And there is no sophistry, no theatrics, no ‘TV personality’ paraphernalia, simple guys and girl, simply dressed, playing to their heart’s content. And it’s on productivity’s main day, Monday, during the actual workday. What was a Blue Monday?

 

Speaking of blue. There is a rhyme that goes: ‘something olde, something new, something borrowed and something blue, a sixpence in your shoe.’ This is a tradition that the bride incorporated when she married to ward off evil spirits and bring forth a good and happy marriage. Marriages themselves are falling apart quicker than they happened in the first place. There is a plethora of reasons why this is the case, (Rollo Tomassi has a comprehensive list) but my focus will be on one where productivity rears its head once again. In modern marriages, the marriage which has become an event (as opposed to a ceremony) of elaborate expenditure and consumption is disproportionality emphasized more than the everyday rituals of marriage. Even beyond the wedding, material acquisition (productivity) becomes the mainstay of the marriage or the online performance and parade of carefully curated consumption. Most of marriage is daily bread. The actual wedding is meant to be a ritualistic crossing of a threshold where a transformation takes place in the individuals who are about to start a life together. And yet this is not what takes place at weddings, the people in the advent of the marriage are the same as they were before the wedding and that marriage becomes like a house build on sand. Han, ‘The daily bread provides no stimuli. Stimuli quickly pale. Repetition discovers intensity in what provides no stimuli, in the unprepossessing, in the bland. The person who expects something new and exciting all the time, by contrast, overlooks what is already there [or simply loses interest in it].’ Marriages are frail because the objective unifying purpose of a marriage is lost to the subjective states of individuals within the marriage; the bond was flimsy to begin with.

 

In Gabor Maté’s, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, he writes, ‘Boredom rooted in a fundamental discomfort with the self, is one of the least tolerable mental states.’ Tom Bilyeu says what usually gets people is boredom; it’s the taedium vitae that is part and parcel of any goal pursuit; long stretches of burden punctuated by the short excitement of a milestone reached. The measurable would want us to frame boredom in a negative light so we are compelled to seek out new stimuli. A friend of mine Katlego Letlonkane says, ‘there are no boring things; just uninterested people.’ Our relationship to the objects around us is discursive and dismissive and objects are viewed through a lens of disposability. This contemptuous ‘been there, done that’ attitude makes it very difficult to move away from our solipsism to see things as daily bread, to bear witness to them, to experience intensity and not tedium, to form relationships with the everyday things around us and the everyday duties required of us as to experience being homed and subsequently a homing. ‘Men, their ever-changing nature notwithstanding, can retrieve their sameness, that is, their identity, by being related to the same desk and the same chair’(Han).

 

In a preceding paragraph I mentioned how porn as a machine of productivity has reduced people to genitals and faces. The process of legal identification has done the same thing. People are reduced to a face, a unique number and two or so more particulars. IDs, driver’s licences, student cards, employee access cards, passports etc. This is something we have generally accepted and relegated to that particular sphere of life. This process of reduction may be more pernicious than we think. Zoom, Skype and Teams are ways where only the face matters productively. Apple has Facetime because it is time with your face, only. Michael Phillip in his Third Eye Drop podcast once said that we have become heads moving way faster than our bodies and we have left our bodies behind. We live in our heads and because we live in the information age, prepositional knowledge is valued above everything else. Our bodies take up space and they are slower than our brain’s processing speed, embodiment requires time, deliberate action requires time, enacting requires time, rituals require time. But time is money. Intercourse is ignored for unrelenting discourse. As prized as prepositional knowledge is, it falls short in offering us what we need to live fulfilling lives.  Wisdom is rare while depression, alienation, formlessness and meaninglessness are rife. We are burnt out and our bodies have become landfills of pathologies. The hyper-exposure of the day denies the arcane and art, it also denies an agency that is unifying and complete. We are dispersed. We lack the situational awareness to fully participate in life because we are not situated.

 

And on the 7^th day God rested. He participated fully in his creation. He observed it. Observing the sabbath is a ritual. The disappearance of rituals has been a marker of the days where only the measurable matters and is attended to. Like all tyrants, productivity does not have limits. Its avarice requires all our lives.

And on the 7^th day God rested. He recognised his creation. He communed with it. Han writes, ‘But what is recognition? It is surely not merely a question of seeing something for the second time. Nor does it imply a whole series of encounters. Recognition means knowing something as that with which man makes himself at home in the world, to use a Hegelian phrase, is constituted by the fact that every act of recognition of something has already been liberated from our first contingent apprehensions of it, and is then raised into ideality. This is something that we are all familiar with. Recognition always implies that we have come to know something more authentically than we were able to do when caught up in our first encounter with it. Recognition elicits the permanent from the transient.’ 

And on the 7^th day God rested. Productive time became transformative durable time. John Vervaeke, ‘Ritual situates us in imaginal time in order to afford imaginally augmented cognition and perception to discern real patterns; to enter into right relationship with our future selves; to empower our self-correction and our self-regulation and to enact the serious play needed to self-transcend and aspire.’

 

 

Homo Ludens: Man, The Player

 

‘Any thinking person can see at a glance that play is a thing on its own, even if his language possesses no general concept to express it. Play cannot be denied. You can deny, if you like, nearly all abstraction: justice, beauty, truth, goodness, mind, God. You can deny seriousness, but not play’

Johan Huizinga

 

Woman: ‘"Grown men”, why are you still playing video games?’

Man: ‘Same reason you wear makeup. Nice lil’ escape from reality.’

 

Still. So. Funny. Although there is a consensus amongst the female population that video games are a waste of time; and since most men are trying to get the female population to copulate with them; they may begrudgingly give games up or play on the DL. Mark Rober, who came up with the Super Mario Effect offers a different perspective to gaming. Many a millennial is well acquainted with the Italian plumber that is Super Mario and therefore an effect that is named after him is nostalgically well received and simply lands for many of us. The Super Mario Effect occurs when we shift our focus from falling into pits to saving the princess, in this way, we stick to the task and learn more. The effect is centred around reframing failure. When we were learning to play Super Mario, every time we ‘died’; we would try again and do things differently to how we had done them before. That’s it. We didn’t really care how we looked when we failed or anything else besides getting good at the game. This in essence is what life is about; life is a meta- game. We could leverage this effect and apply it to the rest of our lives. It seems ‘grown men’ may just be in a better position skill-wise; to deal with life. People would argue that life is different from gaming in that games are low stakes. This is what makes Rober’s point salient. We decide if something is high stakes or not and when we do that we get to decide where we place our focus; on the princess or the pits; the prospective gains or the losses. Andy Frisella says that people assess risk from the perspective of what they could lose as opposed to what they could gain. ‘You’ve built this life that you are afraid of losing as if it’s extremely valuable. When in reality, the value is way down the road, that you haven’t build yet and you are afraid to trade what you have for what you could have.’

Another factor that impacts how we characterise failure is whether we see life as an infinite game or finite game. James P. Carse in his book Finite and Infinite Games: a Vision of Life as Play and Possibility differentiates between the two. He writes: ‘There are at least two kinds of games. One could be finite, the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.’ Simon Sinek in his book The Infinite Game adds ‘No matter how successful we are in life, when we die none of us will be declared the winner of life. And there is certainly no such thing as winning business. All these things, are journey, not events.’

The idea of life being a journey ties wonderfully with the The Hero’s Journey myth (Joseph Campbell) which players tap into through games. Edward Castronova writes in a book called Life is a Game: what game design says about the human condition, ‘People want to be heroes. They crave agency, and the ability to do something that matters. They want meaning.’ Ray Dalio of Principles co-opted The Heroes Journey and formulated a five step process people can apply to get what they want from life: 1. Pursue Audacious Goals 2. Fail 3. Learn Principles 4. Improve and 5. Pursue More Audacious Goals. Whether you are trying to save Princess Peach from Bowser or trying to be an amazing athlete or trying to live an infinite life like Sinek’s grandma, this process is applicable to all facets of life.

As hilarious as the tweets I opened this essay with are, they only scratch at the surface of the role games and makeup play in the lives of human beings. As contemptuous as the woman is towards men who play games, she doesn’t realise that she is playing as well. You only have to watch women dressing up and beating their faces to know that they derive plenty of fun from it and are essentially playing when they engrossed in cosmetics. The man dismisses the makeup play as a form of escapism, but he is only considering the aesthetic, tangible morphological aspects of makeup. Of course, there is another game at play here called the mating game where women use makeup to beguile, lure, out-compete other women to win over the affections of suitable males. The biological seriousness of mate selection is used to cover up the fact that makeup is both ploy and play. All roads lead to Rome. Even when men play video games, they are learning important skills which when applied to other contexts of life propel the species forward evolutionarily. Michael Phillip of The Third Eye Drops podcast says in an episode on Transrational Oracles and Magical Thinking in the 21^st Century with Sarah Zucker, ‘I would posit that play leads to evolution, to curiosity, to exploration, eventually to acts of creation, science and even art. I think they are all derivative of play.’ Play creates reality, it does not escape it, well at least it shouldn’t. While Icarus was instructed to fly neither too high nor too low; play, too, has a golden mean: The Divine Child archetype. If we play to distract, to wile away our time, to numb or escape reality, we miss the golden mean and spend much of our time at the extremes of the continuum of play: being Peter Pan/ Wendy Darling whose play renders them impotent or ineffectual in life or Adulting-Adults who have removed all play from their lived experience. For the most part, makeup is low-hanging fruit when it comes to playing games particularly because there aren’t really any higher-order skills that women tap into during that form of play. Jordan B. Peterson qualifies games worth playing by asking: ‘To what degree do you practice a wide range of subset of skills that would be transferable to other games while you are playing that game? I think you could make the case that if you are playing a very complex video game; that the activities that you are engaging in, which involve leadership, and cooperation, and communication and problem solving are actually a more comprehensive subset of the skills that you would have to develop, to work in the world as a complex place?’ Castronova breaks down game design into two main components: strategies and stances. He describes a stance as ‘a combination of three things: an assumption about what victory in life is, a strategy for winning, and a set of tactics for carrying out that strategy on a day-to-day basis. A stance is an attitude towards existence, when existence is understood as a game.’ I think that there are conducive stances and obstructive stances in life. It is usually obstructive stances that hamper people’s progress in life. A stance can go awry at any of the three junctures listed above: viewing failure as rigid and static losing as opposed to dynamic nuanced learning (antidotally addressed by The Super Mario Effect); having no strategy and/or doing things on a day-to-day basis that do not move you closer to your goal. Strategy is what allows us to exercise our agency effectively. Games do not only develop these skills but they also impress upon us that ‘agency [in the world] is taken, not given’ (Ryan Holiday).

Holiday shares an anecdote about General James Mattis in Courage is Calling. ‘“What keeps you up at night?” General James Mattis was once asked by a television reporter. Before the question was quite finished, he was already answering. “I keep people awake at night.”’ Mattis is a strategist. Alternatively, we can have life happen to us and be in constant reactivity mode like tacticians. Robert Greene in The 33 Strategies of War writes, ‘In war, strategy is the art of commanding the entire military operation. Tactics, on the other hand, is the skill of forming up the army for battle itself and dealing with the immediate needs of the battlefield. Most of us in life are tacticians, not strategists. We become so enmeshed in the conflicts we face that we can think only of how to get what we want in the battle we are currently facing. To think strategically is difficult and unnatural. You may imagine you are being strategic, but in all likelihood, you are merely being tactical. To have the power that only strategy can bring, you must be able to elevate yourself above the battlefield, to focus on your long-term objectives, to craft an entire campaign, to get out of the reactive mode that so many battles in life lock you into. Keeping your overall goals in mind, it becomes much easier to decide when to fight and when to walk away. That makes the tactical decisions of daily life much simpler and more rational. Tactical people are heavy and stuck in the ground; strategists are light on their feet and can see far and wide.’  Strategists keep people awake at night and take the offensive in life and accomplish their overall objectives. ‘Few men of accomplishment, da Vinci noted, got there by things happening to them. No, he said, they are what has happened’ (Ryan Holiday).

‘Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play’ (Heraclitus). In his Ted Talk, Mark Rober illustrates that people succeed because of the way they frame failure. This is crucial because the manner in which we frame failure will predict how much more practice we put in i.e. repetitions. There is a characteristic of video games called ‘Lives’ where a player has a finite number of tries before the games ends with a game over. This has been one of the developments of gaming that have been for me, a game-changer. Andrew Huberman describes two types of motor skills: open and closed skills. Open skills are performed in a dynamic and changing environment, while closed skills take place in a predictable environment. Skill type as well as focused attention determine how readily a new skill will be acquired. Repetitions lead to errors which let us know where we need to focus our attention which increases our plasticity and improves our skill. Lives incorporate all these aspects of skill acquisition. A novice can learn quicker, and an advanced player can take more risks. All this hangs on one thing however: The reps. There’s a word in adulting-adults language, that gets a bad rep; that word is discipline. When we frame failure negatively, discipline means doing hard things that we hate but are good for us. When we frame failure like the Divine Child: we see discipline as doing something we love to do anyway; that may be hard because its good for us. Discipline is ‘the seriousness of a child at play’. G. K. Chesterton in Orthodoxy writes ‘because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, ‘do it again’ and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-ups are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, ‘Do it again’ to the sun, and every evening, ‘Do it again’ to the moon.’ When we play, we unwittingly say to ourselves ‘Do it again’. As we arrive at the console, court, contour etc., we say to ourselves ‘Do it again’ and we infuse play into our work, our lives. In the face of failure, error, pits; we tell ourselves ‘Do it again’. 

Castronova writes, ‘I love games and have been playing and studying them my whole life. It stands to reason that, eventually, I would start seeing life as a genuine game. It has been a way to process and accept the awful things that can happen in a life. A game perspective on life gives the awful things a place: they are part of the experience; they make the experience good in the same way that reality of unfair losses in sporting events makes the whole experiences of sport genuine, legitimate, and emotionally real. A sport without crushing losses is not good. Neither is a life without any possibility of suffering. Human suffering makes this a serious game indeed. Well worth our time, thought, and passion. Well worth playing. Worth playing well. The game of life matters; it also seems to have been incredibly well designed. The more time I spend thinking about life as a game, the more brilliant its design seems to be. The game is rich, deep, beautiful, and elegant; moving and full of pathos; exciting, exploding with possibility, rich with reward, and fraught with danger; full of vast empty timelines punctuated by heart-pounding moments whose memory lasts forever; and also, a dense web of secrets, absolutely impenetrable, yet with hints and clues lying about everywhere. The game is played both alone and with other. No human person has ever won definitely, yet playing is satisfying to everybody. The game of life is real, and it fascinates endlessly.’

Let’s play!