The trivia of days

In going through old papers, I found this—a rare printout from the digital era, a single page that I had written in December of 2011, over ten years ago. Many of the major devices and platforms that we give our time to—iPhone, Facebook, twitter—already existed when I wrote this, but they were still nascent, and it was a different world. Still, while my words here are perhaps a bit dated, they also, I think, have a timelessness worth sharing.

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I forgot to mention.

The trivia of days. We were told that the industrial revolution and modern conveniences would free us from the tyranny of constant work, of details persistent, recurring, and never complete, such that now, we could think. Such, it is said, is an explanation for the explosion of ideas and creativity of the 20th century. A return to the land, by such math, would mean a retreat of intellectual productivity. A return to the land would mean fewer advances.

But doesn’t each new thing glitter, and beckon? We walk in to a room and, almost regardless of our intention, see the myriad objects that murmur: Attend to me. Keep me clean. Update me. Look to my associates and do the same for them. The cords connect us, and we are as the same.

Few objects remain pure, merely what they are. Screen time begets more screen time. And we are beholden to cultural norms, or told that we are: We must buy for people, to indicate love. Buy requires shop. Shop requires time. Time spent there is time not spent elsewhere. It’s the unavoidable zero-sum game. In the marketplace, virtual and not, all is gauzy and meant to appear non-zero-sum. It is a deceit. It whispers, and also shouts: You can have it all, yes you can. Except.

You can have it all except for the main thing, the in-retrospect, now-I-see, this-is-what-it-was-all-for reward: time to think. Time to create. Time—extended time—of your own to imagine and revel and produce something heretofore unknown. Were we not to be freed from constant attention on the trivial? Was that not sold to us as the point?

Instead we have the ascent of the trivial. Before, the mundane was also the fundamental, and therefore not trivial at all.

• Tilling, sowing, harvesting, storing.

• Grinding, kneading, shaping, eating.

• Consulting, gathering, extracting, healing.

• Chopping, carrying, stacking, lighting.

• Shearing, carding, spinning, weaving.

And even when it was not strictly fundamental, still it was purposeful. Out of purpose arises emergent qualities; the mundane can produce beauty and meaning.

• Whittling, fastening, tinkering, building.

• Collecting, drying, grinding, painting.

• Wedging, shaping, firing, glazing.

• Sitting, talking, remembering, projecting.

Or maybe those things are, indeed, just as fundamental. We are artisans and artists, makers of forms both functional and fanciful. And we are storytellers to our core.

Now, the repetitive actions of most of our days are not only mundane, but also trivial, and we have lost our foundation.

We spend our time punching buttons on devices to have them save us work. Physical activity is replaced with action of the what-order-does-the-machine-require-me-to-go-in sort. There is no mechanical input and there can be no deriving of more global physical lessons from attaining mastery of an electronic device.  We have arrived at a nearly complete disconnect from the actual physical space in which we live. Such promises—the labor saved! The heights attained!—are revealed to have been empty to begin with, or long since broken.

And so our days fill with trivial actions, days once filled with repeated actions which were not, as it turns out, trivial. Most of us have freed ourselves from those perceived chains, and found ourselves imprisoned by things far worse.