Our first assignment was a short introductory post (the class is asynchronous and online) which was to include a brief prayer, be it of thanksgiving or something more future-facing. I chose the latter, and tried to address one of my biggest difficulties with writing. As always, I wonder if I’m even conceptualizing the problem correctly, but I have to start somewhere.

I’ve left out the blatantly identifiable stuff, but it’s not the point anyway.

As I begin this semester, I’m making a prayer for patience. Not with myself just in general, but with what I think up. An idea is often something I have to outrun, like a fuse. If I let it get past me, it’s not that I’ll forget it. It’s that it’ll stop mattering. Communicating thus becomes this tug-of-war between getting things out coherently but still quickly enough that I’m not sick of the thought before I’m done. Growing up, I found writing papers interminable, as it involved forcing myself to sit down and type out something that was already formed in my head. It’s like if you’ve written something out only for the computer (or your dog?) to eat it, so you have to re-do it. That feeling of tedium at treading ground you’ve already discovered is how it can often feel for me to try to convey an idea that’s fully developed. If you happen to notice during a Zoom session that I talk fast, this is certainly part of why. It’s no small part of why my “process” for academic writing has been sitting down the night before something’s due and just blasting through whatever first thought pops into my head. Outlining, revising, and all of that never entered into it. Teachers in school (and even college) let me get away with this, but I’m hoping y’all won’t.

So it is that I hope that I can get to know these things that come to me a little better, sit with them a little longer. I’m doing these parts of myself a disservice by not giving them more space to grow, by judging them far too quickly. And it’s not a matter of being afraid of what I’ll find or anything like that, it’s just so hard to sit with something that’s no longer being discovered. It’s in the past now, and while there’s nothing to say I’ll never think of it again, there are so many new things just over the next hill!

Such a prayer is, at least in this case, something thrown out there without my even beginning to know how it’s to be done. It’s also an admission (or at least a complaint) of powerlessness. Simply willing ourselves to feel differently does not lead anywhere good. Similarly, I don’t want to overstate the control I have over what ideas come to me or when. At the same time, I tend to see patience as an overly passive thing. Or better said, it feels that way, even if intellectually I know that it doesn’t have to be. Either way, it’s difficult to just throw my wish into the ether and hope for the best. I’ve long believed that we have to meet God halfway (or as close as we’re able, at least), but as with so many things, this may turn out to be a case of drawing lines in the wrong place. In other words, it could be true in some respects, not true in this (limited) one, but still be true in the way that matters.

I was about to say that “all I can do is what I can do,” but that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? In this case, maybe it’s about not doing something. Amen.

#prayers

I often worry about being, ironically enough, undiplomatic. I’m a lawyer by training, and part of the culture of lawyers is that we argue and criticize the other person’s arguments, then go have a drink together afterwards. Arguing and poking holes in someone else’s arguments are basically the job, so it doesn’t generally get taken personally by those involved. We’re all just trying to do our duty (that of zealously representing our clients) at the end of the day.

This can clash, and clash hard, in settings involving other people. This is true even in ostensibly legal settings when non-lawyers are involved. The two worst jobs I’ve ever had in my life were both “legal” jobs where I was supervised by non-lawyers. It was maddening for a host of reasons, and it conflicted heavily with what I’m supposed to do as a lawyer, which is provide an opinion and judgment, and be willing to disagree with people and/or say they’re wrong. A good supervisor understands this...the people I worked for were not good.

So it is that I remain gun-shy when asked about an opinion on something from a non-lawyer. We’re not really supposed to be diplomatic where that can inhibit clarity or make things seem like less of a problem than they are. I don’t go out of my way to insult people, but for some, disputing something they’ve said is the same thing.

In the present instance, adhering to this was hard.

The links were all stories from something called The Lindy Newsletter (hosted on a SubStack-alike), and written by someone called Paul Skallas. I didn’t know anything about the author going in, and for the most part still don’t. What I found out is that, unfortunately, he sucks at presenting arguments.

It’s strange because he has some good ideas, and there are underlying points to what he writes that are seriously worth thinking about and discussing. The problem is that these tend to get buried among a lot of nonsense, and he consistently relies on either blanket pronouncements, evidence that doesn’t actually prove his point (or worse, undercuts it), or weasel worlds. It’s doubly strange because he doesn’t seem to have an overt political goal; every time I thought he was going straight to Chudsville, he stopped well before getting there.

It was surprising just how tired I found reading all this. I knew that poorly-formed arguments annoy the hell out of me, but it was weird just how much they bothered me in this case, especially since he’s not trying to get people to vote Republican or whatever (as far as I can tell, anyway).

This will make more sense with specifics. The first article I read was called “Are We Becoming Too Domesticated?” So we’re confronted first with a clear example of Betteridge’s law, even if I didn’t know that until later. The title alone gave me pause, as my experience has been that whenever people start talking about ideas in this vein, i.e. that we’ve somehow lost things from prior eras, it can get ugly real fast. That’s not really where it goes, thankfully, even if it’s because it never really goes anywhere.

He never clearly defines “domesticated,” but seems to be saying “risk-adverse.” The argument is basically that we’re becoming less willing to take risks than before, and that lives with lots of twists and turns have “vanished from modern Western life.” His examples for this are (1) the life of Col. Sanders (of KFC fame) and (2) two novels: Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck and Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos. This is as far as it goes, though: he just says things were different (as recently as 50 years ago, apparently), full stop. The only specific evidence he gives of actual changes in this regard is that teenagers are engaging in less risk-taking behavior, namely things like drug use, reckless driving, unprotected sex, etc. (really). Beyond that, he says that, for example, people are buying more cars painted black, white, or gray, “because it’s safe.” He provides a graph (without any indication of the source) showing this trend, but never even attempts to show that this is because “it’s safe” (whatever that means). So to recap, all we have is his statement that this is a trend, and we know it’s a trend because teenagers are doing fewer harmful things.

This leads into the second issue, which is that he never even gives us a reason to care. He says at one point that “successful upper middle class professional people tend to be dull” and that the modern form of our society/economy/workforce (all of them at various times) encourages this. This is one of those instances where there’s actually an interesting idea here: we’re still trying to understand what the Industrial Revolution has done to us, much less the more recent shift towards more white-collar work. Skallas never goes anywhere with it, though. Instead, we’re supposed to believe that life being “dull” is both bad and inevitable based on this supposed trend. He does at one point gesture vaguely towards “creativity” being lessened, but never connects this to anything.

This is not the extent of the problems, but it gives a good idea of what’s going on. There’re a couple just bizarre arguments too, namely that because people of the same “educational class” tend to “mate,” we’re already engaged in “embryo selection” for traits such as docility. It’s certainly a take, and starts to get into weird techbro pro-natalist stuff.

. . .

I don’t know the author well enough to impugn any kind of motive, chalk it up to a case of Dunning-Kruger, or anything like that. But I do see how easy a trap it is to fall into. It takes a lot more work and time to be precise and to really provide background for what you’re saying, and in the context of a blog post or newsletter especially, you have to draw the line somewhere to avoid it turning into a full-on book. This author seriously misses that mark, though. More than being directed at the author specifically, I’m frustrated that something this trite and lazy is taken seriously.

This is part of a broader frustration, I think, and this relates to one of the good ideas that Skellas accidentally ran over in passing. Complacency is dangerous in the political context, and maintaining vigilance over time is exceedingly difficult. This is worth its own post, so I won’t go into detail here. Instead, there’s a related problem brought to mind: why don’t we demand more?

I keep coming back to this when thinking about politics and public policy. Everyone hates politicians, but why don’t we require more of them? There is a chicken-and-the-egg problem, of course, because there’s the issue of getting better people to actually seek office. Regardless, I don’t understand why so many people think they don’t deserve better.

Something that I expect will be a common refrain for the foreseeable future is a feeling I have of being adrift, without much in the way of goals or really any ability to navigate my life as it currently stands. My life is comfortable, yes, but also feels stagnant. I can’t shake a feeling that I still haven’t lived up to my potential (the only thing scarier is the thought that maybe I have).

The contradiction I’m discussing is, in short, this. I’m someone with a near-schizoid level of social independence. I don’t generally seek out interaction with others, and am fine going for long periods without much if any of it. It’s not that I dislike social situations or anything; I’m certainly introverted, but far from shy or uncomfortable around others. But for whatever reason, I’m just not generally spurred or led to seek out other people. I’m not a sociopath or anything, and I certainly feel lonely sometimes, it just seems that my threshold for solitude is much higher than average, and I do run out of energy quickly in social situations.

Despite this, my strongest skills and one of the strongest of my innate qualities are very other-people focused.

On the skill side, I have a gift for language and especially for learning it. Foreign languages click for me in a way that they simply don’t for most people, even if I do often struggle with memorizing vocabulary. I haven’t any idea why this is so, it’s just always been the case—I’ve consistently absorbed languages and in particular how they work rapidly and easily, and am more comfortable speaking other languages (even when I’m not very familiar with them) than most other people I’ve come across. The best I can describe it is that the sentence or phrase I want just gets assembled in my head as I go, and my brain rarely stumbles over things like verb or case endings, or at least can recover/correct before my spoken words catch up.

The other of my strongest skills is that I’m a good teacher. I haven’t really figured out why this is or how it works, but I’ve gotten enough feedback from others that it’s apparently true. As best I can tell, it has something to do with the way I conceptualize more complex things in simpler terms, combined with a general vibe that makes people comfortable being wrong. (Related to this, people do seem to feel comfortable sharing a great deal with me, sometimes to a degree that surprises even them.) This of course varies with the individual “student,” as learning styles can vary. But I do try to, at least, recognize when my approach isn’t working and find something else if I can.

The (other?) innate quality is as, well, a diplomat. I have a natural aversion to conflict, but rather than walking away, in me it manifests as a drive to diffuse. I’ve been told that my physical presence is inherently calming; it was once described to me as reducing the temperature a few degrees (in a positive way) when I walk in a room. My natural inclination is to find consensus and try to deflect people from butting heads.

These are all wonderful things, but as is likely clear, they’re inherently people-oriented. They really only serve to affect my interactions with others, or at least the dynamics of social situations. I’ve been trying for awhile to find things I’m good at, but I think I had written off these more socially-focused aspects of myself because of how inherently incompatible they seemingly are with how I tend to be by default.

For example, it might seem like I’d be a good counselor or therapist. I don’t believe this is true, however. For one, I tend to be much more problem-oriented in my thinking, which isn’t really what a therapist does. More importantly, it would be almost if not entirely impossible for me to maintain the focus on one conversation for a full session, much less a full workday. I’ve had jobs that involved a lot of social interaction (be it retail or legal hearings), and they left me exhausted. As these were all done when I was in my 20s or younger (I’m 41 as of this writing), I seriously question whether they would’ve been sustainable. Trying to brute force my way through mentally demanding tasks (and undiagnosed ADHD made those much more numerous than I would’ve thought) has left me with a sustained case of weariness that even years later I’ve not recovered from.

One thing that has come to mind is some kind of spiritual counseling/guidance/whatever. I don’t know enough about my options there to know if the same pitfalls may apply, to say nothing of how uncomfortable I feel with the idea of being such a spiritual resource. Granted I enjoy thinking about and writing about my own religious life and journey, but holding myself out as some kind of authority is a wholly different thing. To say nothing of actively trying to advise someone on a specific problem they’re having...

Despite all that, I can’t ignore the gentle tugging in that direction, something I’ve felt periodically in the past. Because I get bored with things easily, one of the few heuristics I have for deciding that hey, I may actually want to do this, is seeing if it’s something that I keep coming back to regardless of how much time I do or don’t devote to it. I took a couple graduate-level classes at a seminary a couple of years ago, but hit a very solid wall about two-thirds of the way through the semester such that I just could not get myself to do the work anymore (I ended up withdrawing from both). I never felt like they were too demanding, but some form of burnout is the best explanation I’ve been able to come up with.

I was going to say that I’m “considering” going back and trying again, but if I’m honest that’s not the right word. It implies a more intellectual process, a weighing of pros and cons, than is actually happening. I want to do it, I’ve mostly decided to do it, I just can’t bring myself to actually pull the trigger (so to speak). My plan this time is to be more conservative and only take one class, which is devoted to writing, so I should have a much easier time managing. If nothing else, I find myself writing all the time anyway.

I don’t have a clear idea of what’s holding me back. If I had to guess, it’s that right now I’m in a place where it’s all potential: I can imagine any (or no) results of this decision, and reality so rarely lives up to expectations that I have a hard time convincing myself that actually going through with it is a better alternative. As I said above, I’m also intimidated by the idea of some kind of responsibility for others, which conflicts (we have us a theme) with this feeling I have that too little of what I do really connects to the world beyond myself.

My attraction to something akin to “writing as ministry” is that it’s potentially the best of both worlds. I can get much of the benefit of my skills (and I’m sure some of the other qualities I mentioned would come through) without worrying about social burnout.

How would a second-century hermit have handled the internet, I wonder?