Let's stub those toes

At some point last year, I found myself in the waiting room of the radiology and ultrasound lab on Sherbourne and Bloor aspirationally named Rosedale Radiology. The centre is in the basement of a midrise building, no natural light and a myriad tiny rooms containing different imaging apparatuses. We were in the middle of another lockdown, the appointments spread throughout the day, so there were few people in the waiting area first thing in the morning. A dad with a 6-year-old came in right after I sat down, which woke me straight up from any onset of self-pitying moods. What is a six-year-old doing in radiology, ffs? The world is awful.

The technician who called me to the exam roomette seemed rather unhappy: unhappy probably to have to get up early in the morning to ultrasound people’s abdomens, unhappy, she let it be known, about the insufficient amount of water I drank before the exam, I imagine very unhappy with the basement office with no natural light, and probably the salary too. While I was getting ready she turned to her phone and typed up a couple of messages. The lettering was probably Arabic, I thought, so she’s an immigrant from the Middle East. Maybe right this moment she’s in touch with her family abroad? The imaging itself took maybe 7 minutes, during which I thought, is this how it happens? Cancer will find you in the underground imaging cubicles greyer than communist-era healthcare, in the company a bored and indifferent technician who would rather be checking her DMs. The persistent stabbing pain on the left side could conceivably be a cancer—the one-in-two statistic is apparently accurate and once heard, hard to forget. Two people I know fairly well had entered the pandemic in 2020 with a cancer diagnosis but practically every healthcare system in the world decided to deprioritize all other illnesses vs covid, which resulted in referrals to cancer screenings plummeting and all but the most urgent surgeries being postponed. That is undoubtedly the unluckiest illness you can get during your society’s obsession with covid, I thought as the technician snapped her images.

Then something happened over the next few days. Convinced that I was about to be handed a terminal diagnosis, it was as if someone had switched a different kind of lighting over my days. The usual unhappiness with my life under endless lockdown, the worry about the loss of income, inability to travel and interact with people, and the persistent feeling of emptiness and lack of meaning suddenly lifted, and I saw every minute of my day as worth living. Life was a miracle. The blistering brightness of being (alliteration accidental) showed itself to me. I was very much in the present. Imagine I survive this, imagine I’m not ill, I thought to myself. I will never take a minute of my life for granted ever again. Imagine the grace of being given all this back! For a while, I couldn’t. When I heard back from the GP in my walk-in clinic who told me that the scans were perfectly boring, I lived in ecstasy for two days.

And within a week, this new awareness was gone. Life returned to what is in effect a semi-conscious vegging.

Many people have written about this, how hard it is to attain and keep this insight. There’s a scene in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot that stayed with me across the decades, in which a key character describes how he was brought before a firing squad only to be pardoned at the last minute. He was facing death, and then suddenly he wasn’t. There and then he decided he would never waste a day of his life again, he would live it to the fullest, he would finally do it justice. And did it happen, someone asked him? Of course not. I forgot all about it within a few days.

Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (2021), which I just finished, brought all this back. It may sound like a self-help book promising to teach you to “master the time” and “optimize productivity” when in effect it’s a book of philo-psychological meditations that criticizes the mastering and optimization mindset as a sort of postponement of life. Why do so many of us believe we are in a kind of ante-chamber of life, while our real life is something that will happen after we reach a particular milestone, change jobs, start earning more, find a life partner, have children, see children leave the coop, move once more, finally own that property, finally fix our relationship with our parents? And why are we so damn busy?

Opening up too many projects and over-committing, then flitting between them to end up overwhelmed and conclude It’s just impossible! is a way to not commit to anything truly, and to avoid becoming aware of failure, imperfection and finitude, Burkeman argues. The ideology of busyness is a super elaborate scaffolding we put over the fact of the 4000 weeks: the number of weeks we get if we live till the age of 80. By projecting ourselves into the next ten or whatever years or months, by following closely our achievement metrics, we feel like we’re mastering time.

Some of the chapters in the book are directly about being aware of being alive, and for that Burkeman recruits the help of various psychologists, Buddhist monks, and, naturally, Heidegger. “Most philosophers and scientists spend their careers pondering the way things are: what sorts of things exist, where they come from, how they relate to each other, and so on. But we’ve forgotten to be amazed that things are in the first place—that “a world is worlding all around us”, as Heidegger puts it. This fact—the fact that there is being, to begin with—is “the brute reality on which all of us ought to be constantly stubbing our toes,” in the splendid phrase of the writer Sarah Bakewell. But instead, it almost always passes us by.”

Burkeman talks of people who’ve left their by-the-clock lives to live on a farm, by the farm’s needs’ timetable, and those who are so focused on being that they are never bored, and manage to find even the everyday chores engrossing. He analyzes the cases of extremely successful people who have realized they hated their lives and that they want an out. Sam Harris of course appears as well, as never being bored by existing is what his meditation app thing is all about I expect (this btw is a fun interview by Jon Kay in which JK, sensibly, tells him he’s dreadfully bored by any and all attempts to meditate and Harris tries to convince him that there is not a single reason why any human should feel bored—especially when sitting still and doing nothing).

Other chapters are about the political economy of time. We have been on abstract clock-time at least since the Industrial Revolution, but this spilled over into leisure time and family life. The time-saving machines (washer, dryer, vacuum cleaner) never actually created much leisure time: they only ushered in a new era of higher cleanliness standards and sped up and multiplied chores. When we exclaim THIS IS BULLSHIT while observing the wifi taking its sweet time reconnecting, we are of course forgetting that only sixty years ago we would have had to go out and take letters to the post office instead of sending that email from home.

Things to consider if we want to allay the situation:

• Don’t aim for time sovereignty. If there is no one and nothing stealing your time, you’ll be time-sovereign but solitary and purposeless. Time-sovereign for what?

•  Stop “keeping your options open”: commit to your profession, partner, it’s crucial to limit your options so you can dedicate yourself to what’s top of the list. Have a closed to-do list and an open to-do list and always start with the closed one. You can add stuff to the open list but accept that you may never get to those.

• Civilization as we know it is only about 6000 years old. Compared to say the Milky Way, we are a minute. Burkeman calls this tack the cosmic insignificance therapy. The universe does not hinge on you doing 10 instead of two major projects, or your supporting 7 instead of three charities. There’s a book titled Universe Doesn’t Give A Flying Fuck About You—that. There’s relief in that. Do what matters to you now. You really have to enter the space and time fully, there’s no other way. What is to be done? Do the next most necessary thing, and then the next, and then the next.

And so on. I recommend the whole book.

II.

Same week, I read a paper which obliquely deals with the topic that Four Thousand Weeks tackles, only in a very different philosophical tradition. Holly Lawford-Smith, who teaches political philosophy at University of Melbourne, earlier this year published ‘Was lockdown life worth living?’ in Monash Bioethics Review. We now know that Australia and NZ had phenomenally hard lockdowns and, until recently, Covid-zero policies. We also know that China is still locking down; and while now this looks odd to us, most of the planet adopted China-style lockdowns the moment covid spread globally, and employed them for two years. There were differences. The UK did have the policemen stopping people in parks asking them why they’re not exercising if they’re out using their government-approved fitness hour, but they were also among the first to abandon covid restrictions and never adopted vaccine passes, rewarding their citizenry for the high vaccination pickup rate and general compliance. Many, many jurisdictions had curfews, the completely unscientific, purely sadistic measures which accomplish nothing. Ontario, for a change, didn’t (I would have probably gotten arrested, resisting a fine for walking about past 9 p.m., had this been the case) but as I complained many times in this space, it swung a wrecking ball into its arts and culture and the main street. Schooling, too, was a disastrous mess for two years. I don’t need to go on, we can recall well enough.

I expect the lockdowns and covid controls in general will remain a big topic for the ethicists and political theorists for the foreseeable. Lawford-Smith weighs the problems, including the health-related ones, caused or exacerbated or abetted by lockdowns—the rise in domestic violence against women and children, the rise in alcoholism and substance abuse, the economic devastation in many professions, people dying alone unvisited in hospitals or care homes, plus what I mentioned at the top, the deprioritizing of the unequivocally terminal illnesses--next to the largely non-terminal but highly inconvenient virus. She also uses the framework of preserving the quality of life vs. the quantity of life, individually and population-wide, akin to the argument that is sometimes heard in conversations about medical assistance in dying.

Lawford-Smith being in the analytical philosophical tradition, there’s bound to be a thought experiment in there somewhere and the teasing out of implications. She uses Derek Parfit’s notion of the Repugnant Conclusion (at what point does the quality of life spread out too thinly across vast population numbers to be unworthy of preservation, where even the utilitarian argument of quantity cannot override the individual low quality). Parfit doesn’t shy away from the tricky task of itemizing what specifically a life worth living contains and what does its opposite (all “muzak and potatoes” instead of actual music and varied food, for example).

How was life under strict lockdown in Melbourne? “It was, just, bearable. You could get by, providing you expected nothing good to happen, everything to take twice as long as it should, and no useful end to be served. Like a body adapting to starvation, you rationed expectation, postponed pleasure, concentrated on the little you could control in your unkempt lethargy, and thought sympathetically of the worst-off, if in an abstract sense”. (Haigh, Gideon. 2021. No gratitude, no pride, no relief: Just quiet seething. The Australian. 22nd October 2021.)

Lawford-Smith doesn’t offer easy answers, but she does say this: “Perhaps rather than asking ‘was lockdown life worth living?’ and answering, like Haigh, ‘just barely’, the better question is, did each of us, as individuals, have reason to choose quantity (of our own lives—reducing the risk to our own mortality and morbidity) over quality of life? If we didn’t—or if most of us didn’t, and wouldn’t have chosen that if given the choice—then that would appear to create a challenge to the fact that lengthy lockdowns were imposed on us. That would be the state paternalistically intervening to impose the value of preservation of quantity of life (and from a specific cause, namely COVID-19, only) having strong priority over both preservation of quantity of life from other causes (here specifically lockdowns), and preservation, or minimization of decrease, in quality of life. To the extent that this policy-making decision was underpinned by an assumption that this is what a fully-informed population would choose, it would then be a bad policy.”

Full paper here.

Till next time!

L.P.