Modular life, meaningful work
Highlights from the cutting room floor, pt. 3
Isamu Noguchi, Ashtray Prototypes, 1945-1948
An alert thinker will often find more that is instructive and delightful in the playful writings of great men than in their serious works.
—Lichtenberg
In January, I was in the mood to read fragments: the leftover scraps authors have in their notebooks, the tangents they’ve cut from their main works. Fragments attract me—the straight-to-the-bone quality of the writing, the way it captures the underlying structure of how someone thinks by giving you hundreds of discrete data points instead of one long line of edited thought.
Fragments and notes are also a way of writing that is well-fitted for the complexity of the worlds we inhabit nowadays. Here is Kapuschinski on why he turned to fragments as a literary form in the 1970s and 80s (my translation):
A problem arises when one confronts the world and realizes how fragmented it is, decimated, self-contradicting, full of movement, full of incredibly charged questions and things. And this one has to describe! It’s not possible to do so epically; too many things pile up under the pen, and such different things, so incredibly mixed up, tangled and unclear things that are constantly changing, as the configurations are constantly transforming. One can only work fragmentarily, with fragments that touch on aspects of the world’s complex reality and try to illustrate it. Nothing can be done in any other way, as far as I see it. Naturally, a genius might suddenly emerge who can master the entirety of this world’s reality, an extraordinary person, but I doubt it.
This put me in the mood to do another collection of fragments (see the previous two here and here).
So, I’ve gathered tangents that I cut from essays in the last few months. The themes of the fragments are: figuring out how to find meaningful work; writing about things that matter to you; dealing with anxiety; and how to use modularity to make life easier to optimize.
At the end, there is a list of stuff I’ve enjoyed recently.
The anxious narrator
October 3, 2024. For the last nine days, I’ve had a pressure across my chest. Nothing has seemed meaningful to me, and my thoughts have been racing trying to figure out why and what to do about it.
Listening to my inner narrator trying to make sense of what is going on has been (almost) amusing. It is amusing because objectively speaking the reason I’m feeling blue is no mystery: in September, I put up 5 exhibitions and published ~20,000 words while homeschooling our kids and helping the carpenters change the roof of our house—my system is predictably out of balance. Underslept, overstressed. But the funny thing is that the voice in my head refuses to acknowledge that what is going on inside me has anything to do with these trivial bodily needs. Instead, it comes up with these outlandish conspiracy theories about why things feel bad, “Oh, what if you are on the wrong path? Perhaps you’ve misunderstood some part of the byzantine EU tax code and they’ll take your house? And . . . what if that scratchy itch on your head is cancer?”
It is like those cases where people with epilepsy get their brain halves surgically disconnected. The researchers whisper a dirty joke in the ear connected to the part of the brain that doesn’t control speech. The subject giggles. Then the researchers ask the other ear why they giggled, and the subject says, “Oh, that cabinet looks so funny!”
The narrator in my head is like that. It is 100 % sure that it is right, even though it is disconnected and ignorant of the parts of the system that are causing the problem. It would make a good political pundit.
The wise and experienced part of me says, “Well, no, actually the body that you and I live in just need to sleep and eat and spend a few days in nature. We’ve seen this before. It feels like an intellectual problem but it is actually just the body that is out of sync.”
And the narrator says, “No, no. Not this time. This time it is because the universe is meaningless!”
When I was younger the narrator used to convince me and I’d get carried away and try to solve my problems; I would have a miserable time. But one of the perks of getting older is that I have enough emotional experience now, so I trust that if I just take care of my bodily needs, the feelings and thoughts will sort themselves out—even if I don’t find that intellectually plausible in the moment. I will let the voice spin its stories for a few days while I sleep and eat and lay down with the 3-year-old on my belly. Slowly the narrator will become sane again.
A reflection about modularity and how I found work that felt meaningful
When there are strong selection pressures for success, evolutionary pressures often select for modularity: