Living in Expectation of the Unexpected Gift

Metadata

Author: L. M. Sacasas
Full Title: Living in Expectation of the Unexpected Gift
Category: #articles
URL: https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/living-in-expectation-of-the-unexpected

Highlights

One could argue that the app itself is already, to some degree, designed in that spirit, but it also seems to find in certain users a decided inclination to exploit the app’s affordances in this particular spirit bent on optimization itself as the form of the good life. We might speak not only of the spirit of optimization but also of a desire to rationalize, manage, control, or otherwise achieve a measure of mastery over our experience.
For some people at least, the idea seems to be that when we are freed from these mundane and tedious activities, we will be free to finally tap the real potential of our humanity. It’s as if there were some abstract plane of human existence that no one had yet achieved because we were fettered by our need to be directly engaged with the material world. I suppose that makes this a kind of gnostic fantasy. When we no longer have to tend to the world, we can focus on … what exactly? It seems rarely to occur to us, or rather we are encouraged to forget that much of the joy and satisfaction we might find in this world may stem from our purposeful involvement in the sorts of tasks we are told to see as mundane, trivial, and inconvenient.
- Note: cf. Oliver Burkeman’s point that the challenges we confront are in fact the substance of life.
And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving…. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.
In the Prologue to The Human Condition, with the promise that automation would empty the factories, Hannah Arendt worried that “it is a society of laborers which is about to be liberated from the fetters of labor, and this society does no longer know of those other higher and more meaninfgul activities for the sake of which this freedom would deserve to be won.” “What we are confronted with,” she added, “is the prospect of a society of laborers without labor, that is, without the only activity left to them. Surely, nothing could be worse.”
- Tags: #favorite
While Arendt’s mid-twentieth century fears about automation have not yet played out as she, and many others at the time, feared, her claim that modern society no longer knows of the higher activities for the sake of which freedom deserved to be won is still worth pondering. If we grant that Arendt is on to something, I’d suggest that it is precisely in the absence of such activities or goods that technique takes on its compulsive, colonizing nature. Optimization becomes an end in itself. I may not know where I am going or why, but I can take some comfort in knowing that I can travel faster and more efficiently. Frenetic activity or compulsive distraction substitute for a clear sense of purpose and commitment. Substantive goals may elude me, but I can take refuge in tracking and optimizing an increasing range of activities and bodily functions.
There are so many reasons why any of us might feel exhausted and depleted, but just now I find myself wondering how much of it is the result of aimless labors that serve only the operations of a techno-economic system designed to offer us everything but satisfaction, schooling us only in various forms of envy, addiction, and dependence.