I have changed the title in this third part to avoid confusing what I am talking about with self-control. Although "self-regulation" appeals in that it challenges the anthem of individualism directly, there is no quantity of self-control that could replicate dare I say "organic" environmental mechanisms. (Parsing the dilemma confronting, e.g., a frog in a lab as an "increased cost of self-regulation" would suggest that the project is one of degree, as though replicating the vicissitudes of pondwater temperature, seasonal signals, smells of safe hiding places in the muck, etc. could be achieved with greater quantitative input, when, obviously, it would be foolish to attempt this.) I am trying to draw the thread of "regulation" which used to be an interface of social environments and individuals but is now the province of (largely disoriented) individuals trying to regulate themselves. As such, "costs of disentanglement" seems to provide the conversation more appropriate illumination.
The dark horse hit "The Banshees of Inisherin" appeals because it fully confesses the cost of disentanglement. One of a pair of friends dismembers his fiddle hand in a masochistic assault on a decades-long--and suddenly unwanted--friendship. The other, while even-keeled on the surface, careens from insoluble depression to an obsession with recovering his lost relationship. Notably, the folk of Inisherin back the fiddler in his attempt to realize his self-concept and increasingly alienate the friend he left behind. Society's props, from pets to domiciles, flake away one by one, revealing at the core of a compulsion toward relationship--or lack thereof. So framing, the film reveals a social fabric we take for granted. The post-modern anthems of our time--disruption, atheism, economics, individual health, etc.--dictate that radical independence is the route to self-actualization. Yet, here, the abnegation of a single friendship burns through property, liberty, and happiness as though they were bric-a-brac.
A recent New York Times Op-ed concurs. "Listening to patients, it feels to me like we’ve reached a real pitch of delirium regarding generalized advice, prescriptions, moral codes for behavior and images of some supposedly achievable balance," a psychologist opines. He laments that islands of experience and philosophical traditions have been thrown headlong into the overheated melting pot of digital communication. "Now the internet has given us access to all of it, all at once, and none of it in its real, embodied, sensually lived and shared forms. It’s not making people feel any more optimistic. All the ways we now seek to manage ourselves deaden the little freedom we have, the possibility of exploring our wildest and worst fantasies in order to reconcile with them, and with it, take advantage of the minor pleasures we might achieve in life."
A more prosaic perspective is cleaning up. Housekeeping is not so much a means of hygiene as it is one of familiarization with the identity we store in our environment. (I know this because when my wife used to hire a cleaner, I would joke that we paid her to design a scavenger hunt.) Each replacement of an out-of-place item reminds us of its category and storage location. E.g, Placing socks in the sock drawer not only removes a parataxis of wool from our sight but telescopes a locus and a function. The pencils I store near the desk, the coffee pods near the coffee machine, and the toys in the toy box. I could otherwise trip over the toys or wind up searching for the other things when I need them, but equally if not more important is the conviction that I have cabined a category of thing where it "belongs."
Some part of my concern overlaps with post-modernist critique. I suppose the distinguishing element is that I am appropriating cognitive science to the problems of disentanglement. The mind forms tethers in the physical and indeed social dimensions of lived experience. But, so far as I have been able to ascertain, everyone pretends that doing away with these anchors is tantamount to progress. It has no cost at all, or at least no cost that we can name.
A loss of spatial recall when reading digital as opposed to physical books may be the most atomistic instance of this cost. When I read a physical book, I find that I am able to turn to a passage that is on the tip of my toungue because I remember where on the page the passage was located. My mind touched its location and stored feeling there without digitizing every pixel. By contrast, I have no such ability with digital books. Ctrl +F is a friend when available, but somehow the location information of those few sentences is missing. How much more significant is the loss when an entire human is displaced, as with a migrant, or an entire workday, as with most of our jobs. Modular furniture.
It should be obvious that there is a degree to which I have abstracted a personal problem in writing about this issue.
It is true that working from home is hard for me. Some people thrive working in their abode. I on the other hand need the subconscious cues and physical deprivations of an office to be productive. It is a painful lesson I learn over and over when I maintain--against any empirical finding--that I will be able to accomplish my goals without leaving home. Invariably, hours later, I have eaten several breakfasts or lunches and done nothing or close to it. I suppose, therefore, that this experience is the substrate of the phenomenon I am writing about here.
But there is more. This summer, based on nothing but her ordinary behavior, I finally ascribed autism to my mother. Why did it take so long? Not a small part of her character involves masking unusual behavior. For instance, as a child, my mother would angrily chide me that, "[she is] NOT crazy," without any specific prompting. Autism has visited an explanation that elucidates at a single blow decades of wrenching embarrassments and tawdry resentments. Neither am I naive enough to think that I fully dodged this mental impairment in growing up. I have an ADD diagnosis to boot, whose relevance I wrestle with about as often as I test my ability to work from home. I think that both issues encompass costs of disentanglement that may be peculiar to my experience. And so there is some question whether I am actually describing something to anyone besides myself.
The tendency to consider universal what is in fact personal is universal; however, communication is the only test.
The dark horse hit "The Banshees of Inisherin" appeals because it fully confesses the cost of disentanglement. One of a pair of friends dismembers his fiddle hand in a masochistic assault on a decades-long--and suddenly unwanted--friendship. The other, while even-keeled on the surface, careens from insoluble depression to an obsession with recovering his lost relationship. Notably, the folk of Inisherin back the fiddler in his attempt to realize his self-concept and increasingly alienate the friend he left behind. Society's props, from pets to domiciles, flake away one by one, revealing at the core of a compulsion toward relationship--or lack thereof. So framing, the film reveals a social fabric we take for granted. The post-modern anthems of our time--disruption, atheism, economics, individual health, etc.--dictate that radical independence is the route to self-actualization. Yet, here, the abnegation of a single friendship burns through property, liberty, and happiness as though they were bric-a-brac.
A recent New York Times Op-ed concurs. "Listening to patients, it feels to me like we’ve reached a real pitch of delirium regarding generalized advice, prescriptions, moral codes for behavior and images of some supposedly achievable balance," a psychologist opines. He laments that islands of experience and philosophical traditions have been thrown headlong into the overheated melting pot of digital communication. "Now the internet has given us access to all of it, all at once, and none of it in its real, embodied, sensually lived and shared forms. It’s not making people feel any more optimistic. All the ways we now seek to manage ourselves deaden the little freedom we have, the possibility of exploring our wildest and worst fantasies in order to reconcile with them, and with it, take advantage of the minor pleasures we might achieve in life."
A more prosaic perspective is cleaning up. Housekeeping is not so much a means of hygiene as it is one of familiarization with the identity we store in our environment. (I know this because when my wife used to hire a cleaner, I would joke that we paid her to design a scavenger hunt.) Each replacement of an out-of-place item reminds us of its category and storage location. E.g, Placing socks in the sock drawer not only removes a parataxis of wool from our sight but telescopes a locus and a function. The pencils I store near the desk, the coffee pods near the coffee machine, and the toys in the toy box. I could otherwise trip over the toys or wind up searching for the other things when I need them, but equally if not more important is the conviction that I have cabined a category of thing where it "belongs."
Some part of my concern overlaps with post-modernist critique. I suppose the distinguishing element is that I am appropriating cognitive science to the problems of disentanglement. The mind forms tethers in the physical and indeed social dimensions of lived experience. But, so far as I have been able to ascertain, everyone pretends that doing away with these anchors is tantamount to progress. It has no cost at all, or at least no cost that we can name.
A loss of spatial recall when reading digital as opposed to physical books may be the most atomistic instance of this cost. When I read a physical book, I find that I am able to turn to a passage that is on the tip of my toungue because I remember where on the page the passage was located. My mind touched its location and stored feeling there without digitizing every pixel. By contrast, I have no such ability with digital books. Ctrl +F is a friend when available, but somehow the location information of those few sentences is missing. How much more significant is the loss when an entire human is displaced, as with a migrant, or an entire workday, as with most of our jobs. Modular furniture.
It should be obvious that there is a degree to which I have abstracted a personal problem in writing about this issue.
It is true that working from home is hard for me. Some people thrive working in their abode. I on the other hand need the subconscious cues and physical deprivations of an office to be productive. It is a painful lesson I learn over and over when I maintain--against any empirical finding--that I will be able to accomplish my goals without leaving home. Invariably, hours later, I have eaten several breakfasts or lunches and done nothing or close to it. I suppose, therefore, that this experience is the substrate of the phenomenon I am writing about here.
But there is more. This summer, based on nothing but her ordinary behavior, I finally ascribed autism to my mother. Why did it take so long? Not a small part of her character involves masking unusual behavior. For instance, as a child, my mother would angrily chide me that, "[she is] NOT crazy," without any specific prompting. Autism has visited an explanation that elucidates at a single blow decades of wrenching embarrassments and tawdry resentments. Neither am I naive enough to think that I fully dodged this mental impairment in growing up. I have an ADD diagnosis to boot, whose relevance I wrestle with about as often as I test my ability to work from home. I think that both issues encompass costs of disentanglement that may be peculiar to my experience. And so there is some question whether I am actually describing something to anyone besides myself.
The tendency to consider universal what is in fact personal is universal; however, communication is the only test.