I'm always interested in time use. One point that struck me is that when you mentioned delivery apps, I initially thought of grocery delivery ordered directly from supermarkets, not fast food. I don't know whether that's just me or a difference between Australia and the US. Notably, it's a reversion to the past, when milk, bread and (going back further) vegetables were routinedly delivered at home.
Regular grocery deliveries strike me as much more justified than getting prepared food delivered for most meals. At least there's some thought and planning involved! And grocery shopping doesn't have the same social aspect as eating out (at the actual restaurant, with other people there).
"Maybe one reason we can’t seem to sustain a liveable society is that we are trying to do so with people who don’t have any idea what it would mean to live." This really resonated with me.
Post-pandemic, I've seen much of the thick social fabric that sustained our collective life evaporate, and not much has replaced it outside of doomscrolling on phones and watching absolutely unfathomable amounts of TV. (I don't watch any TV, and I am appalled when my coworkers casually mention how much of it they consume each day.)
One thing I think about daily is the role of culture in American life. I was raised by music teachers, and perhaps my most fundamental, and most democratic core value is that every single person is capable of making or actively participating in culture. Culture is a thing that you do, not just a thing you passively and inattentively consume as one would a bag of Doritos. And while it does require learning and mastery, this is something that is actually within the reach of everyone. Yet, for a variety of reasons, I look around at my peers and their children and I see an absolute absence of self-made culture, replaced by mass-produced corporate trash. Everything is just consumed as so many empty calories.
(In Marxist terms, I think of the moments of production - production, distribution, exchange, and consumption - and think that production is the highest determining value, not consumption.)
When I think about what it would mean to live, I think that the sound of freedom is the song you sing yourself, and the sound of our collective life is the songs we sing together.
Please forgive my digression, I know that the above is not directly relevant to your post, but when I think about your students who struggle to achieve very basic social interaction, this is where my mind goes.
The bit about Aristotle and habit made me think of another, more recent text, William James's Talks to Teachers. In one of the middle chapters he focuses on habit and makes similar sounding claims. Might interest you if you haven't seen it. It's on gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/16287/16287-h/16287-h.htm
> I find such stories satisfying because my intuition is that almost all claims to maximize “wellness,” and certainly all attempts at de-ageing, are bullshit scams
I also feel relieved whenever I see wellness, or healthmaxxing, or whatever the right label is now exposed as pseudoscience. People should really hate Bryan Johnson more for all the money and attention he’s sucked up to, at the end of the day…show people what the cosmetic benefits of dutasteride look like, while still having high blood sugar and being negatively impacted by Covid-19?
My pet theory is that one big contributor to the exhausting wellness optimization tendency has been people chasing the high of having discovered that cigarette smoke is linked to every medical condition imaginable, from the life-threatening (heart disease) to the cosmetic (wrinkles). So now they’re looking for some similar other big evil that can be exorcised in the same way—sugar, salt, fat, sitting, plastics, eating tomatoes…but none of them come close, and some aren’t even bad! So there’s just a lot of useless self-flagellation.
One of my favorite lines from Thoreau's Walden is, incidentally, the sentence immediately prior to the much more famous, "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." The line before it is funnier, and demonstrates his knack for snarky wordplay: "As if you could kill time without injuring eternity." Most of Walden is a meditation on time, how constrained and precious it is, and how thoughtlessly Thoreau's contemporaries sacrificed huge passages of it to choices made under a delusion of necessity.
I have often, as a thought experiment, imagined what Thoreau might say of our time today. I've no doubt he would be disgusted. But much of Walden still rings as clear today as it did in the 1850s. Consider how fresh this excerpt still reads one hundred seventy years later:
> To make a railroad round the world available to all mankind
> is equivalent to grading the whole surface of the planet.
> Men have an indistinct notion that if they keep up this
> activity of joint stocks and spades long enough all will at
> length ride somewhere, in next to no time, and for nothing;
> but though a crowd rushes to the depot, and the
> conductor shouts "All aboard!" when the smoke is blown
> away and the vapor condensed, it will be perceived that a
> few are riding, but the rest are run over — and it will be
> called, and will be, "A melancholy accident."
It's not for nothing that many economists liken the A.I. industry to the development of rail systems in the 19th century. Thoreau's critique aptly describes what subsequent technologies have done, even what the Internet has done and continues to do. Will it not also describe what artificial intelligence will do? Even in the most optimistic daydreams of the techbros building it, their grand future is a world where A.I. and robotics replace all human activity, but for what? When software replaces everything else in the name of convenience—not just food preparation, but child rearing, love making, grief counseling, artistic expression—what will be left?
I'm always interested in time use. One point that struck me is that when you mentioned delivery apps, I initially thought of grocery delivery ordered directly from supermarkets, not fast food. I don't know whether that's just me or a difference between Australia and the US. Notably, it's a reversion to the past, when milk, bread and (going back further) vegetables were routinedly delivered at home.
Regular grocery deliveries strike me as much more justified than getting prepared food delivered for most meals. At least there's some thought and planning involved! And grocery shopping doesn't have the same social aspect as eating out (at the actual restaurant, with other people there).
Also, more interaction with the delivery person than with checkout operator let alone self-check
"Maybe one reason we can’t seem to sustain a liveable society is that we are trying to do so with people who don’t have any idea what it would mean to live." This really resonated with me.
Post-pandemic, I've seen much of the thick social fabric that sustained our collective life evaporate, and not much has replaced it outside of doomscrolling on phones and watching absolutely unfathomable amounts of TV. (I don't watch any TV, and I am appalled when my coworkers casually mention how much of it they consume each day.)
One thing I think about daily is the role of culture in American life. I was raised by music teachers, and perhaps my most fundamental, and most democratic core value is that every single person is capable of making or actively participating in culture. Culture is a thing that you do, not just a thing you passively and inattentively consume as one would a bag of Doritos. And while it does require learning and mastery, this is something that is actually within the reach of everyone. Yet, for a variety of reasons, I look around at my peers and their children and I see an absolute absence of self-made culture, replaced by mass-produced corporate trash. Everything is just consumed as so many empty calories.
(In Marxist terms, I think of the moments of production - production, distribution, exchange, and consumption - and think that production is the highest determining value, not consumption.)
When I think about what it would mean to live, I think that the sound of freedom is the song you sing yourself, and the sound of our collective life is the songs we sing together.
Please forgive my digression, I know that the above is not directly relevant to your post, but when I think about your students who struggle to achieve very basic social interaction, this is where my mind goes.
The bit about Aristotle and habit made me think of another, more recent text, William James's Talks to Teachers. In one of the middle chapters he focuses on habit and makes similar sounding claims. Might interest you if you haven't seen it. It's on gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/16287/16287-h/16287-h.htm
I'm familiar with similar ideas from his shorter course on psychology, which we taught for many years at Shimer College.
> I find such stories satisfying because my intuition is that almost all claims to maximize “wellness,” and certainly all attempts at de-ageing, are bullshit scams
I also feel relieved whenever I see wellness, or healthmaxxing, or whatever the right label is now exposed as pseudoscience. People should really hate Bryan Johnson more for all the money and attention he’s sucked up to, at the end of the day…show people what the cosmetic benefits of dutasteride look like, while still having high blood sugar and being negatively impacted by Covid-19?
My pet theory is that one big contributor to the exhausting wellness optimization tendency has been people chasing the high of having discovered that cigarette smoke is linked to every medical condition imaginable, from the life-threatening (heart disease) to the cosmetic (wrinkles). So now they’re looking for some similar other big evil that can be exorcised in the same way—sugar, salt, fat, sitting, plastics, eating tomatoes…but none of them come close, and some aren’t even bad! So there’s just a lot of useless self-flagellation.
And honestly, was it really surprising that cigarettes were bad for you?!
One of my favorite lines from Thoreau's Walden is, incidentally, the sentence immediately prior to the much more famous, "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." The line before it is funnier, and demonstrates his knack for snarky wordplay: "As if you could kill time without injuring eternity." Most of Walden is a meditation on time, how constrained and precious it is, and how thoughtlessly Thoreau's contemporaries sacrificed huge passages of it to choices made under a delusion of necessity.
I have often, as a thought experiment, imagined what Thoreau might say of our time today. I've no doubt he would be disgusted. But much of Walden still rings as clear today as it did in the 1850s. Consider how fresh this excerpt still reads one hundred seventy years later:
> To make a railroad round the world available to all mankind
> is equivalent to grading the whole surface of the planet.
> Men have an indistinct notion that if they keep up this
> activity of joint stocks and spades long enough all will at
> length ride somewhere, in next to no time, and for nothing;
> but though a crowd rushes to the depot, and the
> conductor shouts "All aboard!" when the smoke is blown
> away and the vapor condensed, it will be perceived that a
> few are riding, but the rest are run over — and it will be
> called, and will be, "A melancholy accident."
It's not for nothing that many economists liken the A.I. industry to the development of rail systems in the 19th century. Thoreau's critique aptly describes what subsequent technologies have done, even what the Internet has done and continues to do. Will it not also describe what artificial intelligence will do? Even in the most optimistic daydreams of the techbros building it, their grand future is a world where A.I. and robotics replace all human activity, but for what? When software replaces everything else in the name of convenience—not just food preparation, but child rearing, love making, grief counseling, artistic expression—what will be left?