Books 03: Paying Attention without Imploding
Fareed Zakaria: Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World
Note: “Books” parts one and two were not labeled this way, but I’m backwards-imposing a structure on these pieces. The first was about The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. The second was about The Future of Capitalism.
Stingy with Attention
I’m stingy with my attention, largely because of my tenuous hold on happiness. I was born the dark-souled son of a depressed mother – you can see it in my baby pictures – and I have struggled with anxiety and depression since birth. I’ve got it under control now, I’m really fine. But I still guard my mental health – thus the stinginess – and my resistance to having my gaze directed.
Which is to say, I am not paying a lot of attention to the war in Ukraine. When it was a looming threat, I registered that and ignored the month-long countdown; when Putin shockingly gave in to his hateful madness, I noted it and felt sad. Feel sad.
But I don’t need the details. I know what the next things are: refugees, death, more violence, horror stories. All wars are essentially the same if you’re not overly tribal slash a bit racist: in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iraq again, Syria, and Sudan and Ethiopia and Yemen – all wars are roughly the same. All I actually need to know after the fact of war is regarding escalation or an ending (if they can be said to ever actually end). Let me know if nuclear weapons are used, or if other countries join in. And that’s it. I only need the big points, and the little points – the trapped students, the dead children, the heroic stances, the mass murder – add nothing to my mind, life, attention. This isn’t not-caring. I do care.
Filtering out Bus Crashes 3000 Miles Away
I learned from my mother that we have a duty to bear witness, and I do. But the details are just garbage sauce. The news industry does not have my interests or health in mind; it sells shock and horror with every bite of actual information. Over the years, I’ve learned to apply a strong mental filter, with the goal of staying in touch but not being completely lost in grief – either spending all of my capacity for empathy or wearing my empathy down. By now it’s been demonstrated pretty clearly that humans don’t know how to care for an entire planet, or for significant amounts of time; our care is limited, in many real ways, to people nearby and things happening now. The news manipulates this by making it seem like these stories are happening to us, which keeps us overwhelmed and scared. I’m trying to compensate for this with my filters.
I make sure I read enough to have an idea what is going on, and I apply a personal filter that morphs and changes as I learn. I have a bucket for things everybody is talking about, with subsections I Don’t Care and I Care.
I Don’t Care gets applied to all celebrity news, fashion, and gossip – full stop. I do not care.
I Care is subdivided into I Want to Know More and I Don’t Want to Know More. The second box is for people trapped in wells and distant vehicular accidents. I also use it, defensively, for missing children, although I try to share bulletins when I can, in case someone else can help. (After following a few of those stories to their devastating ends, I made the sanity-preserving choice to barely register those stories. The takeaway from all of them is this fact: “People hurt children.” The action I can take is to oppose that when I see it– not to stare into the abyss of those sad stories.)
My mother used to get very offended by this. She’d be talking about a bus crash in India, all upset, and I would ask, “How does it help us to know about that? What is that news for?” And she would say I was being heartless. I am not heartless. I just don’t want to wear the thing out.
I also Care but Don’t Want to Know about bullshitters – liars, game-players, attention hounds, and grifters. I rigorously ignore assholes who demand my attention by being outrageous (this is a recently learned and employed lesson that emerged, of course, during *45’s reign). I see the headlines about Marjory Taylor Green, but I know how I will feel after reading her latest dumb-mean-girl/village-idiot antics: I will feel used and diminished. She’s still out there – so is *45, apparently – and that is all I need to know. Tell me when *45 gets punished (as if), or dies (guaranteed). Tell me nothing about MTG – I do not care.
How I Care
With the I Care and Want to Know More boxes, I apply my “Trusted People” filter: I look for journalists who respect their vocation, primarily. I look for thinkers who share my values (people over money, say) and who can live by those values as they explore the world. I trust those people pretty seriously, but not blindly, and when they lose the thread, I let them go (Vox magazine and Russell Brand, please figure your shit out!).
I try and avoid partisanship (good journalists will do this), and seek opinions from all reasonable “sides” of the political spectrum. I listen to these people talking about the political, spiritual, psychological, practical, and technological aspects, and I try to incorporate their ideas into my worldview – the story of how things work, what people do, what goes wrong. From that I can draw useable lessons. This keeps my attention turned on, but not wasted. I’m not being precious (I hope); I am preventing someone else from running my mind (I hope).
Oh, and I NEVER watch TV news. There’s nothing there I need – not the anxiety, not the imprecision, not the inanity. Do yourself a favour and stop watching it. You will find you are not uninformed about anything important. Use the time for anything else.
Wait for the Book
With the big stories I do attend to, I follow sort of fuzzily, sort-of-but-not-quite loosely. I don’t care what people say today about Doug Ford’s failures, or Trudeau’s – I know which way the wind is blowing, and most of the chatter is noise. I zoom in when I’m interested (or embroiled), but I zoom out again when that’s done. And in many cases, I wait – for the good, smart, summative book or documentary, which usually comes about a year after the thing happens.
I like the wider picture. I can make more sense of a wider picture. I can draw more connections to my actual life and the arc of history. After the initial rush of 9/11’s daily news, and once I saw that it was not going to be responded to with any grace or courage, I tuned out and waited for Chomsky to put out a book about it. Having read that, I spread my attention to the sources of it and got into Cold War history, and then the history of empires; all of that fed back into my bucket “What happened on 9/11 and after, and why?” I developed a solid answer.
For the financial crisis, which is a realm in which I am very ignorant and solidly suspicious, I needed The Big Short and Yanis Varoufakis. The daily news cycle during the Great Recession concerned things I just didn’t understand, which made it impossible to follow for me: Fannie what? The who brothers? Subprime what? The broad picture is super-interesting, and helps draw lines between other related stories. The Big Short helped me connect Roger and Me and the Seattle anti-globalization protests to the Occupy movement and even ahead to this pandemic. The more pieces that get filled in, the more interesting the puzzle becomes. When I need to understand the deets, I have friends I consult – mostly my partner Marjan. Am I hobbled by not knowing or understanding in the moment? Not really. The ever-pressing time of NOW on the news is rarely real; you can learn things whenever. Later is fine. Next year is fine.
The Story of the World
The wider picture allows me to form a better sense of the actual story of our world and civilization, and not get lost in the POV of my nation or community or moment. Keeping an eye on the actual big picture means that I don’t get stuck seeing white wars as more important than brown wars; I don’t get hung up on “never forgetting” one genocide while not noticing another. The wider picture is slower and less frenetic; in the wider picture, climate change has been one story for 30 years, not a waxing and waning of attention and belief. It allows me to be on Team Human, to the degree that that is possible.
I have tried being in the weeds – I was a news junkie during much of *45 – and can report that the closer you look, the more there is to look at, and that’s all. And judging from my recent dive into Twitter for the Trucker Nonsense Parade, more is not only not better, it is not useful AT ALL – it just amplifies and multiplies the noise factor.
I like my news diet. It’s taken me years to figure it out, and I think it’s solid. I’m not pretending I’m superior for any of this – I’m a dumb addict like everybody else, and a little bird stuck in the subway can make me feel suicidal for weeks. I’ve struggled to figure this approach out, so I’m sharing what I’ve figured out. If you have tweaks that will help, please share them.
Fareed Zakaria Has Written a Book You Should Read
All of that being said: if you’d like a good, intelligent look at the transformations wrought by COVID, and are tired of the rapidly devolving discourse around it, read Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World by Fareed Zakaria. It looks at the pandemic’s impacts, the lessons we can draw from them, and the changes caused or exacerbated by it.
It was the book I really needed last month, when everyone was chewing their legs off like raccoons in traps. It didn’t make anything better, but it grounded me. I think that’s all one can really ask for when things are shitty. That’s the point of the serenity prayer, right? – “Strength to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; wisdom to know the difference.” Right?
I’m not going to review or describe the book – here are a couple of interviews that’ll give you a look. I really liked the book – it’s clear and informative, a great read.
I’ll keep sharing books here that help me understand our world, and that I think teachers should read.
Thanks for reading. Peace out.
jep