Calibrating life

When things turn to shit, we tell ourselves life could be worse.

I've lost my job, but I've got my health. I've lost my leg, but I've got my life. They lost their life, but they lived it well.

It helps a lot of the time. In If This is a Man, Primo Levi wrote this of his time in Auschwitz:

Strange, how in some way one always has the impression of being fortunate, how some chance happening, perhaps infinitesimal, stops us crossing the threshold of despair and allows us to live. It is raining, but it is not windy [...]

It's a good way of stopping yourself from smothering on the stench.

But what about when life gives you roses? If something good happened and a friend told you it could've been better, you'd slap them.

Unfortunately, life is always telling us it could be better, via advertising, and social media, and media of any kind, and generally having eyes and ears...

Plus, the reason you'd slap the friend is because they'd be right, and they'd have killed your buzz.

That blog post you wrote? It was good! It wasn't a novel...

When are our friends - and, more importantly, our own minds - right to tell us things could be better?

Philip Larkin is best known for his poetry, but he was also a critic. In Further Requirements, he said this about criticism:

It is no use remonstrating with a reviewer for speaking of the latest Poetry Book Club choice in terms that leave no adjectives for, say, Hardy, Tennyson, and Pope. If he tries to keep the same critical standard for the lot he will find himself unable to say, not only anything favourable, but anything at all about the month's poetry, simply because critical perspective means that if the classics are in focus then ephemera are not even visible, and vice versa.

Is the same true of life?

I think it is for things that aren't personal achievements. This morning's sunrise might not be as spectacular as that one in 1998 with Barbara on Machu Pichu, but it still looks pretty damn epic, so shut the fuck up about Peru.

This Friday night in Dalston might not be as thrilling as a first night at Glastonbury, but I've still got chills up my spine...

It's tricky when things get personal, though.

When I write what I think is a good blog post, should I remind myself that it wasn't a novel? It would kill my buzz, but maybe all those small buzzes from all those small blog posts give me just enough satisfaction to stop me from ever writing that novel, and maybe the buzz from the novel would be a whole other world of buzz I'll never experience because I blog?

When I write a good article at work, should I remind myself that I haven't exposed any corruption or impeached any presidents? Would I be more likely to topple presidents if I was that hard on myself? And if I did eventually take one down, would I be able to feel happy about it, or would I have lost the ability to feel anything positive?

Likewise every achievement that provides small satisfactions or burns off small frustrations. If I didn't have Tinder, would I eventually get frustrated enough to approach people I like in bars, and if I did would I take more of them home? If I didn't run and do weights, would I go to Syria to fight Isis, and if I did would I consider my life more worthwhile when it ended 3 months later than if I'd lived 60 more years in suburbia?

There's danger in letting off steam as well as in bottling it up, I suspect.

In general, I think we have to re-calibrate our expectations every once in a while to make sure the ephemera remain visible. I don't think there's any danger in this: I'm pretty sure nobody has ever blown their mind like a set of overloaded speakers through an unexpected pleasure surge. There is no Stendhal syndrome of the streets.

But for maximising your own potential, I don't know. We can't all be Thomas Hardy, but nor would Hardy have been if he hadn't tried.

Quotes#4: Philip Larkin and Nas

Philip Larkin, in his poem Dockery and Son:

Life is first boredom, then fear, 

Whether we use it or not, it goes,

And leaves what something hidden from us chose...

Nas in New York State of Mind:

It drops deep, as it does in my breath/

I never sleep, 'cause sleep is the cousin of death/

Beyond the walls of intelligence, life is defined/

I think of crime, when I'm in a New York State of Mind

The 50 greatest things in life

In The Photographer's Playbook, a book of exercises for photography students, Dennis Keeley suggests listing "your fifty greatest things in life, in order" since "if you cannot identify, qualify, contrast, or uncover the hidden parts of greatness, it is more difficult to prioritise your own processes and procedures in making work".

I'm reading the book for general interest and life inspiration, rather than to improve my (infrequent) photography, but a) I'm fond of lists b) I thought listing the greatest things in life might help me prioritise how I spend mine and c) I can't find any reference to this exercise online and I think that's a shame because I think it would be interesting to see how different people's lists compare (imagine how cool it would be to read the lists of people you admire) and how people's lists change over time.

So, in possibly the most on-the-spectrum thing I've ever done, here's my list of the 50 greatest things in life, in order of sheer pleasure-giving power (as opposed to, say, the eradication of small pox, which, although indeed great, has never sent a shiver up my spine):

1. Sex
2. [Redacted pending legalisation]
3. Love 
4. Sunlight (felt) 
5. The anticipation of / start of a night out 
6. Women (appearance of) 
7. Good writing 
8. Synth 
9. Colour 
10. Uncrowded swimming 
11. Sunlight (seen) 
12. Water (sight of) 
13. Other natural vistas 
14. Beer 
15. Electric guitar 
16. Drumming 
17. Blues guitar 
18. Wine 
19. The look of Michael Mann's films
20. Lamb kebabs  
21. Rum 
22. Clusters of skyscrapers 
23. Bass 
24. Barbecue 
25. Sitting in a field 
26. Shelves of books 
27. Racks of magazines
28. An unexplored city 
29. Getting into bed tired 
30. Playing football 
31. Crisp mornings 
32. Quiet 
33. Good coffee 
34. Identifying with a tragi-comic fictional character's chagrin at the shitness of things 
35. Neon 
36. Running 
37. Flowers 
38. Buffalo sauce
39. Good tea 
40. Hunter S Thompson 
41. The concepts of JG Ballard 
42. The hard-boiled noir style
43. Whiskey
44. A cold glass of water on a hot day
45. Hokusai woodcuts 
46. Burnished metal 
47. Staircases 
48. Glass
49. Wood
50. Heft

I basically came up with this list in an afternoon, so it might change over the next few days and / or a longer period.

Worth

Are any human actions inherently worthwhile, rather than being worthwhile because of their impact on some other person or animal?

Maybe knowledge creation.

But can knowledge stand alone?

The universe is full of information that stands alone; knowledge is the conversion of information into a useful form.

If someone counted the number of grains of sand in the Sahara, they could choose to express their knowledge of that information by, say, writing one sentence for every grain. But that wouldn't be very useful: someone else would have to count all of those sentences to gain that knowledge. It would be more useful to write merely an order of magnitude. Every attempt to express knowledge of something also increases the amount of information in the world; the key to being useful is to minimise that increase as much as possible.

Which actually has nothing to do with the reason I started writing, so I'm failing my own usefulness test here - sorry.

I started writing because I'm wondering: how many things are worthwhile if they go unperceived by someone else?

Exercising is worthwhile if it makes you healthier and happier, even if it has no effect on anybody else.

But can a life be worthwhile if its effects are entirely self-contained? I think not.

So if you want your life to be worthwhile, does that mean your main pursuits should be outward-looking?

In The Photographer's Playbook, Ed Kashi advises aspiring photographers to "be passionate" about their subjects. He's photographed Northern Irish Protestants, Kurds and Syrian refugees. Worthwhile activities, no doubt.

But what were the Protestants, Kurds and Syrians doing while he was photographing them? They probably weren't photographing him back. They probably weren't photographing each other.

But maybe the happiest among them were making each other food. Telling each other stories or listening to them. Helping and healing.

So, does worth demand the existence of pain? And if so, is there enough pain to go around? And if not, what does that mean?

Today, the average person has to spend most of their life working. In the future that may not be the case - it maybe wasn't the case in the past, when we were tribal, for example - but today it is.

Are there enough jobs that directly salve pain for everyone to have one? No. So should we therefore create more pains?

Consumer capitalism creates pain in order to salve it for profit - ideally temporarily and repeatedly. This is bad if its overall impact is negative, for example because of impact on the environment, or if the pain grows through repeated invocation. But is that always the case? And does the involvement of profit necessarily negate good feeling?

We could instead slice these jobs more thinly among ourselves, but then would they be too thin to satisfy?

Or we could forget about manufacturing pain and instead try harder to slice genuine pain more thinly, through more effective redistribution.

But then what would we do with ourselves? What did tribal man do with himself?

Again, as Yuval Noah Harari asks in Sapiens: what do we want to want?

Everything is relative. Without real pain, would our boredom become the pain that we'd salve for each other through clowning? Would the meaning of life be to play the fool for others?

The wealthiest among us already have lives like this. Maybe I already have a life like this: what is my Facebook activity if not clowning for your amusement?

If it works, why am I writing this?

What should we do?

What should we do, eh?

What should we do about our depression, anxiety and loneliness?

Now that a climate change-denying, disability-mocking, sexist, racist liar has been elected the most powerful person on Earth, we should probably spend the next four years fighting political fires. But what about after that?

As I wrote about here, Christopher Lasch thought we should establish systems of education, government and life in general that empower people, since small accomplishments achieved in local communities would involve the fostering of human connections and result in the satisfaction of jobs well done.

Which sounds great.

But it does rely on there being a sufficient number of appropriately difficult challenges for us to solve, forever.

Curing all diseases, alleviating all poverty and ending all wars and oppression are pretty decent goals that we're already trying hard as a species to achieve. Well, we're trying a little bit, anyway. But is it possible for all of us to make meaningful contributions to those tasks? I doubt it.

Preventing harmful climate change is probably the next-most pressing issue, and we can certainly all do our bit there, but can we do much as local communities? Again, I don't see it. Likewise preventing biodiversity loss.

Besides, while we certainly should be trying to repair the damage we've wrought on the planet, merely undoing our previous crimes feels like a waste of human potential. Think of it this way: if all you can say on your deathbed is that you did no harm, will that feel like a life well lived? You may as well have stayed in bed the whole time.

Likewise raising kids to be good people so that they in turn can raise kids to be good people so that they in turn can...

We need something else.

But what?

I don't know yet.

The best ideas I can come up with are a Star Trek-like interplanetary policing role and some kind of galactic artwork of the sort Fry carries out for Leela in an episode of Futurama:

But the first of those looks like a bit of a stretch given that we've proved to be pretty shit at even terrestrial policing, and the second would probably be an even more hideous misuse of our powers than any of the fuckups we've yet managed here on Earth (I'm reminded of a moment in one of the Red Dwarf books when a space crew rearranges the stars into an advert for Pepsi)... Oh, and they're both technologically impossible, too.

So I'm stumped for now. But it seems worth thinking about.

Book review: The Culture of Narcissism, Christopher Lasch, 1979

The Culture of Narcissism posits that when we tumble forth from the bliss-like satisfaction of the womb into the cold hard world, where not all of our needs are satisfied, we develop the capacity for anxiety; and that because the modern advertising industry keeps us in a state of constant desire, and because the bureaucratic nature of modern life makes us feel, and indeed often makes us in fact, helpless to act in many of the ways we wish to, we're not able to achieve or be satisfied with the minor victories that ought to be all we need to live fulfilling lives; and that we've therefore become creatures of anxiety and narcissism (as defined by psychotherapy as opposed to general usage) who vacillate between feelings of implausible entitlement and bewildered, depressed dissatisfaction; and that we therefore need to build a system of education and government that empowers people rather than swaddling and failing them.

Which is all pretty fucking good. Sadly it's mixed up with a fair dollop of Freudian codswallop about Oedipal complexes and castration fantasies and all that guff, but if you can hold your nose through that nonsense there's a great deal to like.

Too much to quote, in fact, although one turn of phrase in particular I thought was magnificent:

"Since the society has no future, it makes sense to live only for the moment [...] to become connoisseurs of our own decadence."

If that's not the perfect description for our modern inclination to do things like down 14 pints, vomit in our own lap and then brag about it to our friends, I'm a mongoose.

It's also highly pertinent to our recent fondness for voting for ludicrous quick fixes to complex problems, as I've written about here.

The modern malady

Whatever you think about democracy, it tells us more about a nation's people - through how they vote - than any other system of government in use today.

So what do the UK's EU referendum and the US presidential election - the two most significant voting opportunities of 2016 - tell us about the British, the Americans and the western / developed world in general?

The Leave campaign won in the UK, leaning heavily on the slogan 'Take Back Control'. The idea that decisions about the UK should be taken in the UK was the number one motivation for Leave voters.

Trump won in the US, making similar use of the phrase 'Make America Great Again'. The man himself said that a Trump victory would be "Brexit plus plus plus".

What do both of these campaigns have in common? They leverage a feeling or fear of a loss of control.

Why would British or American people feel they've lost control?

Britain has relinquished an empire and its position as the world's primary manufacturing, military and political power, but most of that happened before most of today's voters were even born.

America, the replacement imperialist, is seeing rising competition from a resurgent China, but it remains the world's dominant superpower and is likely to stay such for decades.

Economic growth in the UK at the time of the referendum was the highest in the G7 group of the world's leading economies, while the US weathered the storm of the 2008 global financial crisis better than probably any other leading economy.

So what's the problem?

Many point to growing inequality, with the income of the top 1% of earners rising to hundreds of times that of the average earner.

But Americans have decided the best solution for what ails them is to elect a politically inexperienced billionaire with a history of off-shoring jobs from his own companies, while Brits have voted for a course of action that will probably make individuals and the country less well off and leave British companies having to abide by EU rules while no longer having a say in what those rules should be.

Both outcomes demonstrate the victory of easy promises of greater control over reasoned argument. How could this happen?

In the run-up to the UK referendum, the British politician Michael Gove was broadly castigated for having said that "the people of this country have had enough of experts". Even though he actually said "the people of this country have had enough of experts [from] organisations [with] acronyms saying that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong", the widely reported and broadly castigated sentiment was correct: people in the UK decided to ignore the advice of economists, business leaders and statesmen and vote for the easy answers.

Likewise, Americans decided to vote not for "the most experienced presidential candidate in history" but for someone who has never held political office.

In his 1979 book The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations, Christopher Lasch quotes Ludwig von Mises as follows:

"Bureaucratic collectivism [...] undermines the "cool rationality and objectivity of capitalist relations" and renders the "plain citizen" dependent on the "professional propagandist of bureaucratisation", who confuses the citizen with his "empty catchwords" and esoteric obfuscation."

In other words, modern bureaucratic society (and what commoner objection is there against the EU than that it's overly bureaucratic?) and its 'experts' have made people dependent and confused.

Lasch goes on:

"Our growing dependence on technologies no one seems to understand or control has given rise to feelings of powerlessness and victimization."

So we're not only dependent and confused, we're also afraid and angry.

And it's not only that we're materially worse off and more dependent:

"Our society tends either to devalue small comforts or else to expect too much of them. Our standards of "creative, meaningful work" are too exalted to survive disappointment. [...] At the same time that our society makes it more and more difficult to find satisfaction in love and work, it surrounds the individual with manufactured fantasies of total gratification. [...] We demand too much of life, too little of ourselves."

Lasch is referring to promises of the absence of physical pain, lavish lifestyles, celebrity and adulation, but it's easy to see parallels with grandiose promises of 'making America great again' and 'taking back control' - or with that so telling phrase of Boris Johnson's: "I'm pro having my cake and pro eating it."

Lasch himself concludes:

"A reassertion of "common sense", according to Mises, will "prevent man from falling prey" to the "illusory fantasies" of professional bureaucrats. But common sense is not enough. In order to break the existing pattern of dependence and put an end to the erosion of competence, citizens will have to take the solution to their problems into their own hands. They will have to create their own "communities of competence."

Lasch was writing in 1979, when free market liberalisation and globalisation were only just being ramped up by Reagan and Thatcher. The problems he wrote about are much bigger today.

But at the same time that globalisation has split developed nations into the haves and have lesses, it's also lifted hundreds of millions of people in developing nations out of genuine poverty, while placing ever greater pressures on the environment.

And it's shown millions of people in Eastern Europe, Mexico, North Africa and the Middle East the kind of lives that people in the west are so desperate to protect, having lucked into them via the lottery of birth.

So while the solution Lasch advocates of greater personal and civic autonomy might well be the right one, we're also going to have to pay even greater heed to another of his points:

"The best hope of emotional maturity, then [...] lies in acceptance of our limits. The world does not exist merely to satisfy our own desires; it is a world in which we can find pleasure and meaning, once we recognise that others too have a right to these goods."