Hi friends,
Greetings from Brooklyn!
I am currently crawling my way through Infinite Jest, the latest book on my list of a year of reading classic literature. It is so cognitively demanding that I have to run my fingers down every line to make sure I don’t fall off the cliff of its 1079 pages. It’s riddled with obscure technical language, cryptic references, and a storyline as straightforward as the dream my five-year-old feels an urge to tell me about at breakfast.
I almost gave up. But then I decided to reach out to fellow readers to vent. Was it just me, or was this brick of a book seemingly written to make the brain sweat on the inside? I received encouraging messages in return from folks struggling just as much. A gentleman wrote “I’m retired. Don’t know how working people, especially if they have kids, could do it.” I love the internet.
Until next time,
Florian
Time Crumbs
My five-year-old came up to me the other day. “Here, dad, you forgot your phone on the couch”. He said it with the concern of a nurse catching a sick patient skipping their medication.
A parent’s routine is Swiss-cheesed with moments of idle time. It’s the slow sucking of a milk bottle, the purgatory of swing-pushing, the growing stretches of time between each spoonful of peas. Micro-moments like these are the sprouting ground for my urge to scroll.
And so while I watch my son slowly segregate the zucchinis from the pasta on his plate, I hop on my entertainment life raft hoping to play time on fast forward. What follows is a chaotically eclectic sequence of 30-second video reels. It includes an accordion potato recipe, an oil tanker plunging into apocalypse-level waves and a surprisingly pleasing time-lapse of a guy turning his weed-infested backyard into a zen garden.
The wisdom I received as a child was that boredom is either a virtue to be embraced or a challenge to be met with a little extra squeeze of the imagination. But where’s the wisdom for how to deal with crumbs of time?
I’ve experimented with a few strategies.
The Caveman. The idea here is to keep your phone switched off when you’re inside the house. I thought that way I’d eliminate the temptation altogether. Unfortunately this approach also eliminates a few other things my phone is actually helpful for. I do appreciate being able to quickly record a video of my three-month-old daughter’s first giggles or look up a recipe for pancakes on a Sunday morning.
The Misanthrope. For something a little less radical, I tried focusing on the usual suspects. I spend 90% of my phone time on 10% of its apps, the scrollable ones of course. I’ve been pretty good at eliminating all of them from my phone. Except for one. I keep deleting it and then installing it back. The story I tell myself is that it’s hard to give it up because that’s where I keep up with my friends' lives. Mmmh.
The Decoy. Behavioral science tells us you can eliminate a habit you’re not happy with by substituting it with a new, more desirable one. Would this work to fend off the Gollum-like urge to unlock my phone? I’ve tried using a notebook as a substitute. Conveniently, it also fits in a pocket so I thought, hey maybe I can trick my brain that way. Less phone, more writing. Win-win. It worked for a week.
The Monk. One of my favorite chapters in Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha is when the main character has a rather unexpected epiphany: deprivation is just a form of glorified escapism. Isn’t my wish to subdue the urge to scroll not a symptom of a similar form of escapism? Am I not choosing the shortcuts of cheap temporary tricks perhaps out of shame or guilt? And what if the wisdom of embracing boredom was still right but only boredom's face has changed? It no longer looks like the paint on the wall of my childhood bedroom; it looks like accordion potatoes, oil tankers, and garden clean-ups on fast forward.
Weekly Wisdom
📚 Strangers as a mirror: I love writers who obsess about the mundane bits of life we barely pay attention to. Annie Ernaux is the absolute queen of the mundane. In “Exteriors”, she describes, in a very matter-of-fact way, short scenes witnessed on her way to work, in a parking lot or at the supermarket. I love how she upends the diary form. In her own words, “It's the strangers we encounter - in the subway, in waiting rooms - who truly awaken our memories and reveal us to ourselves, through the interest, anger, or shame they stir within us as they briefly intersect our lives.”
🐣 The truth about newborns: When I first held my son, it took my brain cells a few long minutes to compute that the alien in my hands was in fact my son. He didn’t look anything like the pretty newborn babies I’d seen in the movies. Well, after reading Urban describing his newborn daughter “an upsetting slimy pancake” and a “miniature 390-pound 84-year-old woman”, I finally feel seen.
🧐 On being a good snob: This piece argues that it’s okay to be a snob in your music, art or literary taste but you need to be a good snob. And what distinguishes good snobs from bad ones is that being a good snob requires effort. It requires that you do the work of exploring why you like what you like. It seems easy but it’s surprisingly hard!
Lateral Thought
“Good books are over your head; they would not be good for you if they were not. And books that are over your head weary you unless you can reach up to them and pull yourself up to their level. It is not the stretching that tires you, but the frustration of stretching unsuccessfully because you lack the skill to stretch effectively.”
Mortimer J. Adler
What a great quote by Annie Ernaux:
"It's the strangers we encounter - in the subway, in waiting rooms - who truly awaken our memories and reveal us to ourselves, through the interest, anger, or shame they stir within us as they briefly intersect our lives.”
I had to order this book after reading your synopsis—thank you.
Omg! I struggle with the same problem. These bits of time when you're waiting for something, or someone, you really don't know how to fill that time. The answer that presents itself in my head is, maybe that time doesn't need to be filled. I should probably allow myself to be bored, but it's hard. Or I should carry a book, but they're big/ cumbersome and then I have books on my phone, but then if I open my phone, I end up looking at something else, and 10 seconds later, I'm scrolling and watching some NYC girl's ASMR GRWM routine. Ugh.