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Wednesday::Jun 26, 2024

Meme Wisdom

I

've developed a bad habit recently of completely discounting little quotes from the internet that in any way smack of self-improvement. There are a couple of motivations at play behind this, I think. One is a growing disgust with the "meme" as a format for anything other than jokes -- I've just been coming more and more to the conclusion that anything that tries to make a point or sound profound within a few sentences is necessarily vacuous and misleading. The second motivation has something to do with "spiritual priorities", and this one is a little harder for me to tease apart.

So, sometimes I will come across "good advice" on the internet, in the form of a short quotation. Here's an example, from John Durham Peters, as curated by Austin Kleon:

Write early in the morning, cultivate memory, reread core books, take detailed reading notes, work on several projects at once, maintain a thick archive, rotate crops, take a weekly Sabbath, go to bed at the same time, exercise so hard you can’t think during it, talk to different kinds of people including the very young and very old, take words and their histories seriously (i.e., read dictionaries), step outside of the empire of the English language regularly, look for vocabulary from other fields, love the basic, keep your antennae tuned, and seek out contexts of understanding quickly (i.e., use guides, encyclopedias, and Wikipedia without guilt).

Now, this is "good advice". I can't really fault much, if any of it, and a lot of it could probably bear good fruit in my own life. But my gut reaction to reading it is disgust, and I think this is a flaw in myself, where I can't read something openly and honestly without this background heuristic of judgement. But part of the problem is that I fear "technique-ifying" one's life -- the idea that all that's needed to live well is performing a bunch of little learnable techniques (often in the context of "hacking" your mind) that will make you happy and fulfilled. And this leads into the second part of my rejection of the self-help meme.

There just seems to be a spiritual emptiness at the center of these kinds of advice. That is, they (very often) don't seem directed at the right things, things like knowing and loving God, or coming to a deeper understanding of one's own brokenness, or learning how to be an integral part of genuine communities, or engaging in deep humility. I don't know that this criticism is fair, but it's what springs to mind.

Basically, my intuition about life is that if it is directed well, the amount of pleasure in it doesn't matter very much. And the direction of a life is a very hard thing to fit in a meme. Easier to just distract people.