If there’s one word that encapsulates the prevailing mood right now, it’s “uncertainty”. Not that life was ever certain (only its end), but it’s much harder to grasp even fleeting moments of stability. As William Gibson expressed it in his novel Pattern Recognition, “For us … things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents’ have insufficient ’now’ to stand on.” We aren’t living in “times of unprecedented change,” as people are fond of claiming. What’s unprecedented is the pace of that change. When I worked in the world of software engineering, whatever I learned in the morning was often obsolete by tea time. It feels as though that dizziness has engulfed everything. No doubt this is because tech companies are largely driving that pace of change. What we need, I think, are ways of expanding that sense of “now”.
Mindfulness, like resilience, has been co-opted and commodified. There’s a “right way” to do mindfulness, usually through a data-hungry and panoptic app. Instead of allowing us to be more mindful, this tech-led approach becomes a regime that we serve. Perform your five-minute meditation, then return to the mindless consumption that fuels the economy. The challenge is that we need to create our own regime, which, naturally, is a lot harder than following someone else’s - especially when it’s marketed as being about us. In The World Beyond Your Head, Matthew Crawford explains:
To attend to anything in a sustained way requires actively excluding all the other things that grab at our attention. It requires, if not ruthlessness toward oneself, a capacity for self-regulation.
Self-regulation is nigh-impossible, given the number of people whose livelihood depends on us being in a permanent state of distraction. I wonder whether the answer is to distract ourselves from the distractions. This requires intentionality. In The Point of Distraction, Will Eaves describes how he found “unusual solutions to apparently insoluble personal and artistic problems by halting one activity (writing) entirely and taking up another (music), before returning to the first problem”. Although composing piano pieces didn’t directly help him finish his novel during lockdown, it did hone his creativity. Also, he got a non-fiction book out of it. That outcome would’ve been less likely had he spent 2020 getting into fights on Twitter. The focus demanded by writing - either fiction or music - help us lose a sense of time. They can expand “now” by blurring its edges. We don’t have to be creating “great art,” either. Eaves refers to the “biome of culture,” where creators are all feeding off each others ideas. A sketchy blog post or experimental poem might inspire a more substantial work in either its own creator or in another mind.
Art takes time, both to learn the craft and to produce meaning. In the 21st century, the emphasis is on consumption, not creation. Pursuing a creative life, we’re told, is pointless and irresponsible. In Embracing Uncertainty, Margaret Heffernan warns of the behaviourists’ “Skinnerian daydream” in which “people blindly obey impersonal, inhumane decisions made by nobody”. All we do “is turn up and follow incentives”:
“Since everything that matters is measurable, sooner or later scientists will have all the data they need to understand every aspect of human behaviour, and they can use it to design incentives that guarantee we respond correctly. The reward: consistency and certainty.”
Do we crave algorithmic certainty? Real life is messy and unpredictable. As Heffernan argues, artists are better than most at living with uncertainty. Determined to express their vision, they’re willing to endure hardship and play a long game. Unlike most of us, their work isn’t valued according to how long it took them. They’re not trying to work out what’s going to happen, they’re expressing what it means to be human “now”:
Experts in forecasting now argue that the window for accurate predictions ranges somewhere between 400 days, if you’re fantastically rigorous and practised, but just 150 days if you’re not. … The one thing we can be sure of is that we will need to be very good at change, improvising and adapting to new and unforeseen circumstances. It is in these circumstances that artists have much to teach us about living with uncertainty.
Having been a supremely goal-directed person for most of my life, I’m trying to think more like an artist. As I didn’t start playing until I was 50, there’s no way anyone’s going to hire me to play the piano (although they might pay me to shut up). That relieves a lot of the pressure - there’s no way I can turn this into a job. And having previously tried to make a living from writing and publishing, I know that’s only ever likely to be a passion project. I want to resist the pressure to turn those activities into a “side hustle”. Instead, I’m going to explore ideas in writing, based on what I’m interested in. Maybe one of those ideas emerges as a book, but that’s not the goal. Above all, I’m protecting time for reading, writing, and music - time that’s not measured or gamified. I’m also enjoying participating in writers’ groups where people show up almost every day at the same time practice their art. I love this public commitment to the importance of writing. It’s almost like an act of worship.
Writers’ groups also feel like an act of rebellion. We’re creating instead of consuming. And what we create is unlikely to contribute to anyone’s bottom line. The reward is what Matthew Crawford describes as “the experience of seeing a direct effect of your actions in the world, and knowing that these actions are genuinely your own”. Those actions might not lead to a published book, but they might play a tiny part in someone else’s success or just help us feel human. This daily practice and focusing on what I can control hasn’t made life any more certain for me. But for a couple of hours a day, I get a stronger sense of “now” on which to stand. Perhaps that’s all we can do.