On moral obligations, how the gears fit together, and feeling the loss of all that we cannot read
Dear Eva,
I am tardy on my letter this week! The slacking continues. This week I have no lack of ideas brewing, just having trouble getting back into enough of a rhythm with my schedule to find the right time and mental state to sit down and put the proverbial pen to paper. (I put the literal pen to paper jotting down ideas for the letter yesterday. I’ve settled on a preferred workflow for letter-writing where I write down snippets in my notebook and then write the letter from start to finish on the computer. Once I know generally what I’m going to write, I get impatient trying to hand-write. And if I just sit down and hand-write without knowing what I will write, it feels more scattered and rambling than I like. I have decided my initial mode of thinking is not remotely linear or sequential. I have to do my mental sorting in a later stage.)
This week I printed out all 13 of our pairs of letters. How fun to see the stack! I started poring over them, armed with a highlighter and piece of paper to jot down themes and recurring threads. I am relishing it, and I plan to do my review and curation slowly and systematically. It is already fascinating to see how some of the points we make in weeks one and two pop back up in different ways over time. I love the idea of the layers of learning from this project. I learn when I write. I learn when I read your letter each week. I learn when I think about what you wrote and it feeds into my next letter. I learn when I read your reply to my last letter. Repeat. And then, now that I am reading them afresh after 13 weeks, I am finding new insights, opening new doors in my brain. I wonder if the learning cycle could just continue infinitely if we kept writing and re-reading these letters until the end of our days!
Now, enough about process and down to the meat. I have been continuing to mull the “progress principle” and whether and how it intersects with the desire many of us have to contribute to something that has larger value in the world. In my brain, I have an image of two brightly colored toy gears (hey, these are the gears I am most familiar with). One gear turns when you are making steady progress toward a defined goal of some sort. The other gear turns when you are somehow making a contribution toward something that somehow makes the world a better place. The lucky few in this world have gears that interlock such that their own micro progress in work contributes toward progress on a macro level. Teachers, scientists, artists come to mind. Most of us have, at best, gears that do not touch. Our progress at work results in personal fulfillment of some kind, some emotional reward for making a valuable contribution toward a set of commonly-held goals. But that progress has no bearing on the world at large. And then, of course, there are gears that interlock but in the wrong direction. Personal progress at work contributes to something that has a negative effect on the world at large.
I don’t think it is at all surprising that so many good people can fall into that last category. We have talked before about how, whether we like it or not, we are most affected by the things that closely touch our lives. My dog dying is a bigger deal to me personally than a war on another continent, no matter how well I intellectually understand the relative importance to the world. It follows, then, that a job that I find personally rewarding could overshadow the negative effect that the employer has on the wider world. This is especially true given that we are all just micro flecks of dust, each filled with very little capacity to personally make much of a contribution to progress or destruction at scale. That individual futility can easily excuse individual moral indifference. And when you factor in the fact that the individual income often supports loved ones, it is so easy to see how the moral calculus leads to the wrong result on an individual level.
All of this raises more questions than answers for me. What happens when our moral obligations to our families are in tension with our moral obligations to the wider world? And even when progress at work has a neutral effect on the world at large, where does the sort of micro change we have talked about before fit into the equation? The tiny effect of a good relationship with a coworker, even a generous exchange with a single customer. These things matter, too. But can they sometimes help excuse the larger injustice?
There is so much left to learn and ponder, but I’ll leave it for next week, when I will surely have all the answers! :)
Yours,
Sarah
Dear Sarah,
Happy new year! Here we are, in January, and last week is also last year, ages ago, far away in the distance. My own letter from last week left me feeling like I’d been digging myself into a hole of some kind, and that I then ran away from the hole and it sat there taking on water, worms squiggling out from where I’d just broken up the earth a bit. Which is to say, some ideas in progress. I’m giving myself a little bit of leeway this week not to peek right back into that hole but maybe to poke around in a different bit of dirt somewhere else in the landscape of our conversations.
If sometimes I sound like I’m trying to figure out what’s going on in other people’s heads, I’m also trying to figure out what’s going on in my head, trying to put some rules and shapes in place so that things make sense. But they don’t really make all that much sense, and there aren’t really rules except the ones we fabricate together, so — can we set some new rules? When the old shapes don’t fit, can we build some new ones?
Over the holidays I deleted a volume of unread personal email, newsletters and the like, thousands of messages, after the most cursory of reviews of the senders and subject lines of all that email. Email! It seems so boring to talk about email. But my personal email is like this vast archive of the last near-20 years, this landmass that simultaneously takes up none of my physical life-space, and plenty of digital space (though still only a relatively tiny fragment of digital space). (I refuse to pay for more email storage so I periodically have to find ways to dump ballast, heaving overboard giant sacks of content I didn’t know were hiding under the floorboards, heavy nuggets of dense material taking up space.) So I just found a huge bundle of unread email from the last year, then another year, and then another, and deleted it, and then I emptied the trash. Then I felt nervous for a couple of hours, like I’d pulverized the foundation of my own home, and I was now balancing on a thin shell on top of a wide open empty space. What if I’d inadvertently deleted something important? How would I even know if I did? How would I even judge what was important? I probably did delete some important things, but I wouldn’t know where to start identifying them, as they are gone, and nonspecific.
Still, I felt some minor loss, a twinge, the fact that I could delete thousands of emails unread, never to be seen again. There are so many actual texts in this world I’ll never read — so many books, so many magazines, so many articles. And that wealth of texts doesn’t even scratch the surface of all the good things I won’t see or do — films, songs, podcasts, streets I’ll never walk down, countries I may never see. You can’t do it all, can’t take it all in. There simply is not time for it all. And there is some relief in saying out loud (or at least writing down) that I can’t do it all! It’s humanly impossible. Who would we be if we could take it all in? I heard from M. about something he’d seen years ago, a friend owned a laserdisc (!) with a mass of images on it, a university’s document of its image archive from a full year. And he had seen it, one of those situations where you watch the flash of image after image, context-less and gathered together in this simple time-based collection. Like a movie in which some hero or antihero is trained, educated, by images and scenarios and bits of film flying by at light speed, filling and stretching the brain to its full capacity, imagery drawn in by the eyes just absorbing it all. What if you could take in text at that rate, absorb and know without all the time it takes to read? These human bodies, they’re very advanced, but they can only move so fast, and last so long. This on the heels of my resolution to recommit to reading, something I seem to have let fall by the wayside even though last year I created a shiny aspirational document full of good titles at my fingertips, “Reading List 2018.” Time to give it another go!
I felt soothed coming off the holiday this week, and I’m trying to preserve that certain peace of mind that comes from letting the mind wander only where it wants to go, instead of where we lead it every day. We are fragmented and segmented, working all the time except when we’re finally on holiday and we’re relaxing, dammit, or we’re retired and hoping to enjoy all the things we wanted to enjoy along the way, except we saved them all for the last minute and we’re not as young as we used to be, and our time grows ever shorter, if we’re lucky enough to make it so far. To echo your letter from last week — how can we spread the good moments throughout the year, why try to chunk all the joy into these few days that are supposed to mean so much, and then — back to the regular stuff, and see you in a year? This year I’m looking for some new rules, new ways of organizing my time, new ways of enjoying every day, week, month, year, before the holidays come roaring around again.
Until next week!
Your friend,
Eva