ON SHARED KNOWLEDGE, COMMUNAL ATTENTION, AND SHARED STORY UNDER A SINGLE FLAG
Wednesday November 27 2019
Dear Sarah,
I am having a bit of quiet time as I think about what I want to say in this week’s letter to you. It’s a holiday week, the latest possible Thanksgiving we can have under the fourth-Thursday structure, and we had a big snowfall last night that pushed our Thanksgiving travel plans from Plan #1 (drive to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan this afternoon) to Plan #2 (drive first thing tomorrow morning, to make it in time for Thanksgiving dinner with M’s family). (Plan #3, which I think we’ve ruled out at this point, is that if the weather is too bad all around we would just stay home and have a quiet, small celebration.)
Hearing about all the travel plans gone awry, I found myself thinking about what it would be like if, instead of traveling all across the country and the world to see family and friends for this day, the biggest travel time of the year, what if we all got together with the people around us — local friends and family, neighbors, colleagues, compatriots. What if we all just stayed put and celebrated with the people here? For years in San Francisco M and I had Friendsgiving celebrations, and family visited on occasion, but we didn’t travel, since we always planned for a longer visit in Michigan over the Christmas-New Year holiday stretch. One year when I was in grad school, we invited two friends from my program whose families were far away to join our celebration, and they brought dishes of the cozy foods of their international homes. I have no problem with people wanting to spend time with their distant families and loved ones on Thanksgiving, of course! But when a sneaky snowstorm sweeps large swaths of the country at the last minute as we all prepare to travel, I can’t help but think it would have been easier if we’d all planned to stay right where we are! In any case, I’ve made my famous (to me) cranberry sauce that I look forward to every year, and we’ll hit the road early tomorrow morning and hope the roads that wend into the Upper Peninsula will be clear-ish by the time we reach them!
When I was working on my letter to you last week I was thinking about the Jia Tolentino and Ezra Klein interview you discussed, which I had heard about from you but had not (and still have not) listened to myself. My letter last week had some additional drafty bits (making my letter even longer!) that I cut out because I was trying to write fully formed ideas about something I hadn’t listened to, which was proving difficult. This week I have the luxury of being able to think about your letter, wherein you were thinking and writing about Jia and Ezra. I am drawn to your note that Jia often thinks about what a waste of civic energy it is for her and others to expend so much effort every day trying to explain / persuade / justify to strangers. This makes me think about how organizations have to do this kind of work — the explaining, the persuading — but they do it in bulk, with multiple people riding under a single flag, and with certain people responsible for telling the story of the thing. Assuming an organization or business is trying to get something done, the only way to move forward is to make sure whoever needs to know is on board, and then the ship starts sailing. What is the ideal size for such a ship, I wonder? Individually, it will simply take forever to do a thing, to do anything, if we are all trying to fully explain ourselves to every other one of ourselves. An infinite global factorial, and with who knows what actually getting accomplished. Is the global “we” trying to accomplish anything? It feels somehow like trying to get the whole world on the same page, but on the same page of what, for what? Maybe the answer is that we should only all be working together toward solutions to the world’s problems, the huge problems with which we are bombarded every day, as you noted. We are people all “together” in digital spaces, and we are all staring together at world-scale problems, and presumably we have energy to spare, and yet — how do we channel that energy in ways that start to solve those problems? Should I be channeling the time I spend on instagram into volunteering at a soup kitchen, or campaigning for local causes? (I probably should.) Social media on the large scale dissolves our time in dribs and drabs. And yet we can’t, of course, operate only at a scale outside of ourselves, focusing only on large-scale external needs, the needs of the world.
I feel like these two topics are connected — they have something to do with how we think about our relationship to the world, to the people around us, how we think we know people, how we want to know people, who we count as our people and who we think of as other people in other places. The world’s big problems seem always to be problems of other people in other places — until the problems find their way to each of our backyards or schools or workplaces or flights toward family for the holidays. I wonder what the world would have been like if we had somehow not had the internet, the web, social media as a part of our lives? It’s truly impossible to picture now, having had these things woven through my life for the last twenty-plus years. Would these ways (or some ways) of communicating globally have somehow been inevitable, as more of us came to exist on the earth and as we created problems that approached the scale of the global? Which chickens or eggs came first?
Sarah, where am I going with this letter? I am going to wish you a very happy Thanksgiving holiday with your loved ones, and I am going to raise a glass to you from a distance! Welcome to the official holiday season, stay cozy, and please eat and drink all the things!
Until soon,
Your friend,
Eva
November 29, 2019
Dear Eva,
I am sitting in our soft oversized armchair in the living room next to our newly cut and decorated Christmas tree, which shimmers with little white lights and mostly homemade ornaments on the lowest hanging limbs where little arms could reach to place them. There is a “Christmas peaceful piano” Spotify playlist piping from the speaker on the fireplace mantle. In other words, it doesn’t get much cozier than this for letter-writing. Yet I am again having a sensation of not having enough space in my brain to fully enter writing mode. This happened last night as well, when I sat down with my laptop and a nice Bell’s Two Hearted Ale ready to write to you. I quickly called it a night, and we turned to Netflix instead. I am recalling this happened sometimes during the holidays last year as well, and perhaps also on our family vacation. I am sensing a trend! Hours full of festivities and action—joyful, packed hours—they make it hard for me to tap into the quieter, more reflective part of my conscience that needs to come alive for me to really feel engaged in writing. But it is Friday late afternoon, just hours before we head to another family party for the evening, and week 61 of our letter-writing project shall not be the first week I miss our weekly deadline! So here I write.
I have pondered your questions from last week’s letter every day since I read them—What is the goal of taking in, of the consumption of information? Is it important that we all take in volumes of information? Like you, I have been fascinated by our new endeavor of attempting to track the media we consume. As with so many things in life, gaining awareness of our own behavior can be stunning on its own. I had no idea how much I was consuming. I wrote in our notes that I realized I am like an animal, just running around with my mouth open, swallowing whatever happens to fall in, unchewed. That realization came quickly, and the project began shaping my behavior pretty quickly after that. I am definitely reading less, and reading what I do read better / slower. But I still have a long way to go before I could ever claim to be fully chewing everything I consume.
I share your skepticism about the value of observing the impeachment hearings. I have almost entirely avoided the footage, choosing instead to read or listen to a handful of summaries each week about the latest developments and analysis. It seems to me I am rarely better off when I closely follow the daily drama of U.S. politics—either I become a heartless, gawking passerby of the train wreck, or I hop aboard an emotional rollercoaster that isn’t particularly healthy either. I should note: just because I know what is healthy does not mean I always opt for that diet! I have lost plenty of hours in a Twitter haze, but I typically hate myself afterward. I no longer have a Twitter account, which helps very much. But it still happens.
Your larger question last week about how much shared knowledge is really necessary intrigues me. Surely there is some baseline level of information that is best known and understood by all of us; this is, after all, an assumption upon which we have built modern civilization. We have a shared understanding of [literal] rules of the road, of how to exchange goods and services, of why it is important to exercise your right to vote. I think about some of the very practical (and in my mind, lovely) topics that Jonah has learned in his first 2.5 years of elementary school—things like the difference between tattling and being a good citizen and friend, or learning about the elements of a community. (I have no idea if these things are part of the common core.) Doing our best to create an orderly society depends upon shared knowledge. But as you point out, we cannot share all the knowledge. And social media and 24/7 news cycle can make it feel like we should, or could. Popular culture is another interesting layer to this. What is the real value to watching the same TV shows and reading the same books as our neighbors and coworkers? Growing up, I was often aghast because my parents were completely disinterested in the movies and music that it felt like the rest of the world consumed. As an adult, I wonder if maybe they were onto something. They knew what they liked; what did it matter if they were left out of an occasional shared joke or conversation at a party because they didn’t get the reference made? If we think about it with the framing you used last week, they were just stubbornly refusing to let society take control of their field of attention, at least in that realm.
All in all, I think your rebellion sounds like quite a worthwhile endeavor. In many ways, it is just a natural extension of your broader departure from the structure of full-time employment. You now decide how to spend your days, and therefore, where to place your gaze or bend your ear. I generally despise the word mindful these days because I think it has been ruined by women in yoga pants, but mindful living feels like the right phrase here. Being intentional about where to spend energy, where to turn attention, how to spend money, with whom to break bread and share laughs. From where I sit, life on the bank of the rushing river looks pretty darn pleasant.
Your friend,
Sarah