Hope in the dark
We’re all in different stages of grief about the American election. Today I feel kind of resigned to it, which is incredibly depressing. We have a new Conservative leader in the UK, who is likely to need to get Farage back into the Conservative Party, we are heading down the same road. Hope is particularly important in dark times.
As we learned in Series 39 of Walk the Pod, hope is not a lottery ticket we clutch on the sofa, hoping to get lucky. Hope is an axe we use to break down a door in an emergency. Rebecca Solnit writes in her brilliant book, Hope in the Dark, ‘hope should shove you out the door.’
Being shoved out of the door, might mean re-engaging with the news. I quit consuming news in 2017, the first time around, and what I’ve been trying to avoid hasn’t gone away. It turns out that in order to understand the contours and edges of a problem properly, it is necessary to remain informed about it. Who knew.
But we can get sucked into a doom scrolling spiral of ‘staying informed’ to the point where we are not functioning terribly well. Our mental health is shot to pieces; we don’t want to get out of bed. So news consumption has got to be limited. The 24/7 news cycle exists, but that doesn’t mean we have to be glued to it, and there is an argument to say that the 24/7 news cycle has made the news worse!
Watch the 10 o’ clock news and then go to bed? This might foreground the news in terms of what your brain has to file from the day. Perhaps read the news in the morning, then put it away. But continue to read it. The Situation has got to be monitored.
Ryan Holiday’s stoic philosophy book Stillness is the Key has a chapter called ‘Limit your inputs’. Holiday starts by describing Napoleon’s strategy of only opening his mail three weeks after receiving it. He found that much of it was no longer relevant. Could you leave your emails to marinade for a few days (weeks?!) before opening them?
Ryan goes on to point out though that whilst Napoleon instructed his generals never to wake him for good news, he did want to be informed immediately if something had gone wrong. And that made him what Jim Collins calls a ‘Level 5 leader’. Somebody whom, when something has gone wrong, will look into it in forensic detail in order to understand what can be put in place to avoid it ever happening again.
Holiday quotes Epictetus, who counselled that in order to improve, we must be prepared to ‘appear clueless or stupid in extraneous matters.’ It is ok then to look a bit stupid, and confess that you haven’t read a particular email, if what you were doing instead of ‘staying on top of things’ was something strategically sensible. And many of us have jobs that are threatened by being overwhelmed with the urgent but unimportant. It is essential to carve out time for the non urgent but important.
The stoics are kinda smart. I started reading them a few years ago and whilst a terrifically gloomy bunch, there is hope woven through absolutely all of their asceticism and their gloom. I highly recommend Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations as a place to start.
Have a good week, dear friends, and I look forward to finding out the results of the Series 52 topic poll this afternoon. Your 52nd Series of Walk the Pod starts on Monday 18 November.
The news SUCKS. One of my sons has withdrawn almost entirely from news coverage. Being a fan of the fantasy genre, he brings different perspectives. He calls most news stories 'cursed knowledge', quoting the American writer HP Lovecraft's 'The Call of Cthulu', written in 1926:
'The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.'
He's not ignorant of events, he just refuses to subject himself to a stream of reminders of bad news happening in the world that he - and we? - struggle to understand, let alone do anything about. There's an argument to be had here about political activism, sure. But Trump, Ukraine and, yes, Israel/Gaza are all very far from our influence as individuals. Thousands have marched to signal their disgust at what's happening, and to put pressure on our own government, but few believe the UK's stance on these issues will move any needles. And that's painful.
It's hard to know what to devote our attention to, these days, such is the weight of stuff we'd do well to avoid. I've just written this on another thread, debating the phrase 'living your best life':
'...until social media, if we wondered what other people's lives & relationships were like, we had to use our imagination & our common sense ... Now, though, we get to 'curate' ourselves, we get to edit and transmit what amounts to a minor tv series called 'Me', or 'Us' ... the cumulative effect of all these mini-series is huge, and debilitating ... my common sense tells me it's self-harm for most of us.'
Weirdly, both remote international events and close, personal matters seem to be 'cursed knowledge'. Is there any knowledge that ISN'T cursed these days? How did this happen?
I think the clue is that, via social media, we are replacing direct experience with, essentially, the same 'televisual', heavily edited storytelling that the news uses to inform us about wars, earthquakes & famines. Charity donations aside, there's little any of us can DO about corruption at COP29 - and even less about the fact that, look, the Joneses are on their second foreign holiday this year, how the hell are they affording THAT?
Gotta keep it as real as possible, I guess.