The Obliteration of Thinking

It's July and I'm thinking a lot about...thinking. Or the lack thereof.

‘Google says it’s a forest’. Source: Paul Schafer on Unsplash.

I unironically love self-help books — or ‘development’ books, as I prefer to call them, since it makes me feel better about myself. (See, they’re working already.) Many books in the genre are gimmicky, exploitative trash. Some of them are genuinely useful and big value-adds.

Right now, I’m listening to the audiobook of Deep Work. I checked my records, and it turns out the last time I read it was also in July, five years ago. There’s something about the summer that gets me thinking about long-term plans. This time, it’s me taking a little bit of time to figure out how I’m going to write the book I’ve been meaning to publish for, well, about five years now.

Listening to Deep Work, with its distinction between deep, focused work and fleeting, shallow work, made me realize just how ephemeral so much of what we do has become — and how much of it we’re doing. I’m mostly talking about white collar work here, with its endless meetings and e-mails and texts and pings and faffing about. There’s thought going on during all of this, but so much of it is fleeting and, at scale, so much of it obliterates thought.

When you’re emailing and planning logistics and coordinating God knows what, you’re doing what so many of us must do, but you’re also not doing deeper thinking about other things: plans for your life, your goals, the state of the country, the future of the planet, etc., etc., etc.

It’s not just logistical and communications work that obliterates thought. I write a lot. Some weeks, I write four or five pieces for various outlets, including this one. That is a lot of writing. I’m able to do it because I’m trained to do this at scale and on-time, and I’ve been at it for more years that I’d like to remember.

I write fast, I have frameworks in my head that I can draw on to produce coherent pieces in a short time, I know who to call as a source to talk about whatever I need to talk about, I read a tonne and remember most of it, and I have fantastic editors. That’s how I can freelance, get to scale, and make a living. That’s good stuff and I’m lucky and grateful and satisfied with all of that. But the pace comes at a cost.

The pace of contemporary life, particularly the capitalist marketplace, obliterates thought because it asks and expects us to do more in an ever-narrowing window of time while consistently distracted by technological products designed to hoover up as much of our attention spans as possible. These exigencies mean we have less time and energy to slow down to think, question, and consider, alone or with others. And for those whose job isn’t to think about politics in the world, by the end of the day there’s nothing left in the tank.

Tech isn’t solely to blame for this problem, but it bears a lot of responsibility. Even when we’re out with our friends or colleagues for a pub or coffee shop chat, or at home with a partner, or anywhere else, we’re tethered to the tech-world slot machines by way of our smartphones. At home or the office, laptops and desktops connect us in the same way, offering boundless, customized comfort and distraction at the click of a buttom. We’re endlessly networked and endlessly distracted.

In my book — the one I’ve actually published — I argued that making good political decisions requires material resources and capacities. Doing this also requires the resource of time. In many ways, time, or its lack, is a critical barrier to making better political decisions. By extension, the same applies to focus, which is related to time.

When you try to write a tonne you end up unable to do deep thinking, the sort of work that produces less ephemeral, more considered output. You’re still thinking. You may even be thinking well in some instances. But at some point, you’re on autopilot, and you’re not thinking as much as you’re just reacting to stimuli and, in the process, relying on an instinctual responses and biases based on thin understandings of the matter at hand. I think this approach produces inferior work. But in my business, at least, the alternative is not hitting the scale you need to hit if you want to pay the bills.

The upshot here is that a critical mass of us, even in professions where you’re paid to be thinking about politics and the world, aren’t really thinking all that much. As Truman Capote more or less said, ‘That’s not writing; that’s typing.’ For our purposes, I’d say ‘That’s not writing; that’s reacting’.

Practically speaking, I don’t know what the way out of this conundrum is. It’s easy to say it’s shortening the work week and paying workers more money, both of which, surprise, surprise, are things I support! But that support is not gonna free up my Fridays any time soon.

I’m lucky enough that I can carve out moments, from time to time, during which I can approximate deep work. This summer, I’m going to take a week off to think and plan. I’m working to arrange my (flexible) schedule to time block a few deep work hours every day where I can work on my book project: reading deeply, scrawling notes, writing freely, staring out the window, going on walks and letting my mind wander, or whatever it takes. But most people can’t do that.

On balance, I think we’re in big trouble. I don’t think the pace of life and technology will slow any time soon. I think the market will continue to steal our attention and diminish our attention spans. I think we’ll keep getting worked to the bone and beyond. That’s not to say we shouldn’t fight for better, which we should. But the current trajectory suggests that struggle is a long-term, tough one. And the more we’re pulled into this paradigm, the harder it is to exit it as we get caught in the daily grind. Indeed, I was lucky to have the time today to think on this a bit, which at once supports my point and gives me some hope that someday I might be proven wrong.