Another Week Ends

1. I’d write a lofty and well-crafted introduction to this week’s column, but doing so would probably mean the rest of it wouldn’t be finished by the afternoon’s deadline. So without further ado, in his weekly newsletter Oliver Burkeman outlines what he believes “captures an awful lot of what holds us back from living saner, happier and more meaningfully productive lives.” What is this arresting impediment to our happiness and productivity? What he calls, “toxic preconditions,” which can probably best be summed up in the colloquial phrase “Put your best foot forward.” In Burkeman’s estimation, this demand for preemptive certainty often prevents us from taking any steps at all. In his characteristic fashion, Burkeman begins his article by discussing the arduous task of writing (ahem), before pivoting to far more consequential aspects of life:

Toxic preconditions lie in wait everywhere. Consider the ubiquitous modern-day search for the ideal morning routine, featuring the “optimal morning sunlight protocol” and so forth. (Step one: Don’t live in northern England during winter.) It starts off innocently enough, with a list of three or four things you might beneficially do each morning, in order to feel happier and get more done. But then it morphs – shockingly easily and quickly, in my experience – into a list of three or four, or seven or eight or nine, things you absolutely must do each morning, if you’re to stand any chance of being happy or productive.

And just like that, you’ve turned a system for living better into an obstacle to living better, because every time something gets in the way of the routine – whether an external interruption or the fact that you simply don’t feel like meditating or journaling this morning – you’ll find yourself feeling at a major disadvantage, and/or mired in self-criticism, with no option but to promise yourself you’ll start afresh tomorrow, and do things perfectly from then on.

I’m no morning person, but I imagine the Type-A perfectionists in the room feel seen in the above. Burkeman doesn’t stop his article with daily routines, but pivots again to other places he sees toxic preconditions at play:

A more wide-reaching form of toxic precondition is what Anne-Laure Le Cunff, in her brilliant just-published book Tiny Experiments, calls “the tyranny of purpose” – the oppressive idea that the activities with which we fill our days must be leading up to something, to some final and finished state of having arrived at our destination in life, if they’re to be worth doing in the first place. […]

Which brings us, I think, to the fundamental toxic precondition lurking behind every other toxic precondition: the strong desire we have for some kind of guarantee – before we embark on a new activity, or even just allow ourselves to relax into life – that it’ll all unfold safely and securely, that we’ll retain the feeling of being in control. That’s what you’re surrendering, in a small way, when you go ahead and write a few hundred words of your novel, with no certainty they’ll be any good. Or when you move forward with the day’s projects despite not having carried out your morning routine to the letter. It’s also what you’re surrendering when you decide to cut yourself a bit more slack in life – because who knows what chaos might unfold if you stopped yelling internally at yourself to work harder or do better, if you stopped watching yourself like a hawk for signs of backsliding? In other words: we don’t erect toxic preconditions simply because we’re irrational, self-defeating idiots. We do it because we want to feel secure, and to avoid the risk of experiencing emotions we’re unsure we’d be able to handle.

This explains why it can be so powerfully liberating – and action-triggering – to understand that the uncertainty and insecurity you imagine you’re avoiding is in fact how things already are for you. As the great Elizabeth Gilbert puts it: “You are afraid of surrender because you don’t want to lose control. But you never had control; all you had was anxiety.” Getting past toxic preconditions is less a matter of being willing to step into the unknown than of realising that you’re already in the unknown.

Ah, yes. The perfectionist death spiral of control and risk aversion. The more firmly we try to grasp on to something, the more it slips between our fingers.

2. Sticking with toxic preconditions for this next one, we turn to Gen Z’s aversion to romance, or better, their aversion to being in an actual relationship (as opposed to a “situationship”). That might sound improbable, most all to Gen Z, whose favorite pastime seems to be winging on about how terrible Hinge’s algorithm is. The numbers, however, say otherwise. A 2021 poll found that 54 percent of participants ages 18 to 34 reported not having a “steady” partner. In 2001, that number was 33 percent. Reasons for the decline abound, ranging from blame of the aforementioned dating apps, to the pandemic, to economic instability. Writing in the Atlantic recently, Faith Hill puts forward another theory: toxic preconditions.

The young-love recession … might reflect a real shift in how comfortable Americans are, on the whole, with emotional intimacy. Generational researchers have described Gen Z as a cohort particularly concerned with security, averse to risk, and slow to trust—so it makes sense that a lot of teens today might be hesitant to throw themselves into a relationship, or even just to admit they care whether their dalliance will continue next week. In a 2023 Hinge survey of Gen Z daters, 90 percent of participants said they wanted to find love — but 56 percent said that fear of rejection had kept them from pursuing a potential relationship, and 57 percent said they’d refrained from confessing their feelings about someone because they worried it would “be a turn-off.” Those reservations can create a self-fulfilling prophecy, Phillips said, in which young people keep a romantic prospect at arm’s length — and then, when they feel confused or get hurt anyway, they become even more wary of relationships. “Why would I want to go any further in this world,” she said many wonder, “when I had this flirtation that seemed to be very close and very promising and went nowhere?” […]

Hill goes on to probe why there might be such fear surrounding relationships, and the modern gender divide might have a lot to do with it. Women are afraid of men, and men have internalized the judgment that they are not to be trusted. Oof. But Hill also finds there to be a broader disconnect between personal values and the inherent dynamics of romance.

[Journalist and college professor Lisa] Phillips talked to her students about an excerpt of Plato’s Symposium, in which — at the beginning of time — Zeus splits each human in two in order to foil their plan to overthrow the gods. From then on, everyone wanders around yearning for their other half. Falling in love, according to the story, is when you finally find it. Alas: Her students hated the story. They didn’t like the idea of only one other person being meant for each of us, or the suggestion that they’d be incomplete without such a reunion. They told her they wanted to be whole all by themselves — not dependent on a soulmate. They had a point.

And yet, Phillips still felt there was something sad about their reaction. They didn’t seem to understand that “relationships are an interpersonal exchange,” she said: that “they involve both feeling expanded by someone else and then some genuine sacrifices.” You are at least a little dependent on someone in a relationship; that’s what the symbiosis of love requires. It’s scary — but it can be interesting, and beautiful when it’s good, and sometimes formative even when it doesn’t stay good. You might want to find out for yourself.

Any precondition, toxic or otherwise, operates within the realm of law rather than grace. Whether it’s a means of control, a risk aversion, or a belief that love without the mutuality of self-giving loss is even possible. And while it might be good advice to hedge your bets, preserve your autonomy, or put your best foot forward, at least part of the trouble with such an approach is that we overestimate how much we actually know. We think we know both what we want and how life will transpire, but there are too many hidden variables to solve the equation of life with any degree of certainty. But the biggest unseen variable in all this is, of course, God, who doesn’t have any preconditions for his benevolence.

For Ted Lasso fans, this is exciting:

3. One way our judgments are skewed? The rise of zero-sum thinking, or the belief that, as outlined by Damien Cave in the New York Times, “Life is a battle over finite rewards where gains for one mean losses for another.” While many aspects of life are zero-sum — my neighbor might get that coveted parking spot just before me — much of life is not zero sum. Personal happiness, for example, is not contingent on the misery of our neighbor. But Cave notes how zero-sum calculations seems to be everywhere these days:

It’s how we view college admissions, as a cutthroat contest for groups defined by race or privilege. It’s there in our love for “Squid Game.” It’s Silicon Valley’s winner-take-all ethos, and it’s at the core of many popular opinions: that immigrants steal jobs from Americans; that the wealthy get rich at others’ expense; that men lose power and status when women gain.

Much of Cave’s article is devoted to global politics (and the article was presciently published well before this week’s trade wars ignited), but I’d argue there’s more at stake than the movements on a chessboard of international relations (another zero-sum image). While psychologists note that “purely zero-sum situations are exceedingly rare,” viewing life as a rat race diminishes our lives more than it enriches it. Here’s Cave again:

4. Turning to laughs, Reductress‘ “Woman Uncertain Which Personality to Use With New Acquaintances” pokes at our tendency toward self-presentation and control. For a low anthropology in service of self-justification, the Hard Times has “The Art of Forgiving Yourself for Your Mistakes While Holding Other People’s Against Them Forever.” But my favorite this week was the New Yorker’s twist on breaking the third of the Ten Commandments in their “Prayers for Everyday Life“:

At the workplace
Dear God Almighty,
Why hasn’t that idiot Liam been fired?

Oh, Christ,
I was just about to sign out
For the day,
And now somebody sends me this.

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,
Is this guy boring. […]

At the pharmacy
Oh, for God’s sake,
You are not next in line. […]

Oh, my God,
That is Aïda,
The young woman from the taco place.
Please may she not have heard that.

And who’d have thought SNL would endorse traditional prayer book funerals?

5. I bought a car this past summer with the craziest feature: it will automatically drive for me while on a highway. I toggle a couple of buttons and the car slows for traffic, then speeds up when clear, and turns when the road bends. It’s kind of a game changer for long road trips. But the biggest surprise I’ve found? No joke, the car is a better driver than I am. It’s not an autonomous, self-driving car, but the elimination of human error highlights one impact of our seemingly inevitable driver-less future — and it might not be entirely positive. Amid a wider discussion of self-driving technology and economics in Wired’s Uncanny Valley podcast, host Michael Calore has some astute observations/reservations for what this frictionless driving future might mean:

The thing that I keep thinking about is the humanity of it all. When you leave your house and you call a car to take you somewhere and a person shows up in the car, you get in that car, you talk to the person, you interact with the person in some way, and maybe it’s not the best interaction or maybe it’s a positive interaction, but either way, their humanity rubs off a little bit on you. Likewise, if you drive a car or like me, if you ride a bike, you’re out there on the road and you’re sharing the road with other human beings, and some of them are in a generous mood, some of them are in a foul mood, some of them just are in a hurry and they’re driving really fast, and those can be pleasant interactions. They can be very unpleasant interactions as long as you don’t get hurt, they’re harmless. But again, you’re interacting with human beings and their humanity is rubbing off on you. So in a world where you’re getting in a car and there’s no human in that car, or in a world where you’re going onto a road where it’s mostly non-human cars on the road, then I feel like you lose a lot of the human interactions that we rely on to keep us human and to keep us normal people who know how to interact with each other. So I feel like it would just sort of increase feelings of isolation and loneliness and lack of community, and a lot of the things that cause a lot of our problems as a society if we don’t have humans in those public spaces.

Talking with finance-types in my neighborhood, they say the real reason why so many companies are interested in self-driving cars has nothing to do with highway safety. It instead has everything to do with freeing up more of people’s time for the attention economy: social media, YouTube, Disney+, etc. If that connection seems far-fetched, consider this gem from Lara Marsh’s recent New York Review article:

In 2014 researchers from the University of Virginia published a set of studies of people’s willingness to sit and think. They asked participants to spend six to fifteen minutes alone in a room without cell phones, laptops, or books. All they had to do was think. Sixty percent reported difficulty, and nearly half found the experience unenjoyable. In a follow-up study, the researchers added a twist: participants were given the chance to experience a negative sensation — a mild electric shock — during the quiet time. Sixty-seven percent of the men and 25 percent of the women in the study decided to take it. “Simply being alone with their own thoughts” was a deeply unappealing prospect for many people, the researchers found; they would “rather do an unpleasant activity than no activity at all.”

6. With so many people turning to their phones to quiet the anxiety that arises from sitting alone with one’s thoughts, it’s no wonder churches and ministries have turned to creating their own apps to offer a healthy dose of God. Surely you’ve seen the Mark Wahlberg and Chris Pratt ads? My second favorite is the Daily Office app (right after the Mockingapp, of course). But is app-ifying your spiritual life a good idea? Writing for the Public Discourse, William Gonch both endorses the habit-shaping technology, while recognizing that God is far better than a controllable routine:

Speaking for myself, I love CWC apps. I have long struggled with personal order and discipline (including ADHD, undiagnosed until only a few years ago), and CWC apps have helped me to build habits and to understand why building them was so hard. Exodus 90’s use of the “why” is particularly fruitful, turning a powerful but potentially self-centered aspect of psychology into a means of loving others. Apps like these can help users to build virtue and grow closer to God. But even with a transformed “why,” there is a tension between the Christian spiritual life and the user-centered framework built into the form of a lifestyle app, because the app offers a vision of happiness as gradually increasing control over one’s life. It is no wonder that this vision is attractive to young people who might spend hours scrolling social media, only to ask, “Why did I do that?” The difficulty arises from those parts of the spiritual life in which the only way forward is to lose control. […]

What these apps cannot prepare us for is the unexpected — the moments when God reaches into our lives to challenge us in ways we could not have imagined. Exodus 90 is inspired by the Book of Exodus, and our understanding of Exodus is shaped by its end: we know that God will lead the Israelites to the promised land. But the Israelites did not know this, and our familiarity with the book can lead us to overlook how deeply invested it is in God’s surprises. Repetition dulls the weirdness of the burning bush, the dread of the river turned to blood, the despair of the Israelites on the shore before God parts the sea to save them. We live our spiritual lives through the mystery that Exodus records, and so much of Christian spiritual life entails responding when God does something wildly unexpected.

Strays:

• My Walmart Evangelism Wasn’t Working
• More Than Sunday: The case for Catholic life beyond Mass
• Nick Cave on forgiveness and some heart-warming stories about Flea, the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ bass player