"Escaping from the grind" is just another form of grinding

And that's totally okay

This blog is fed by my reading, and writing this blog on a regular schedule means I must also make time to read regularly.

I went through a phase, during graduate school, where I tracked my reading very precisely, using a stopwatch and a spreadsheet, and I found that usually I read for about 10 to 15 hours, if that. My writing time was about the same, 10 to 15 hours. With two or three years of constant effort, I eventually got to the upper end of that bracket (closer to 15 hours), but I could never make it much past that, for both writing and reading.

Time-use studies inevitably reveal that we overestimate the amount of time we spend on the things we wish we were doing, or would prefer credit for doing. That's why I am always skeptical of writers who say they write for four or six or eight hours a day. Or people who say they read for two or four or six hours a day. Because I know they usually aren't being rigorous. I found that if I didn't read or write for a day or two in the week, my average went way down. I also found that I had a lot of days when I read for ten minutes or thirty minutes.

I found it most productive, when it came to getting my numbers up, to have marathon days. This was something I mostly did for writing (which I prioritized more heavily than reading). I'd have days where I wrote for eight hours at a stretch. If I then wrote for an hour or two every other day, it'd average out to more than two hours of writing per day.

On the book front, because I logged every book I read, I found that I had a natural tendency to read shorter books and graphic novels. I tried instituting a point system, where I gave more points for harder books, then gamifying the levels so that if I got a certain amount of points I could have a reward.

It was perhaps indicative of the kind of ambition I had in my twenties. I felt powerfully compelled to work faster and harder. I was losing time that I couldn't make up!

A while back a Twitter thread went viral--a writer was remembering being out at the bars on Friday and asking where another friend of theirs was. Their other friend was writing, of course. And the thread-maker was powerfully inspired--the real writers didn't go out, ever!

In my MFA, people had something of this ethos. We had stories due three times a semester, and whenever someone's week was coming up, they'd be like, "Can't go to the bars, I'm working!" Or in peoples' second year, when our theses came due, people spent months "working on their thesis", which meant they couldn't come out.

I was always a bit perplexed. My policy was to quit working every day at 5 PM, just to give myself a break. Because I knew exactly how much I was working and what I was producing, I knew that the psychological benefits of trying to work into the night didn't outweigh the results.

At the same time, I do think time at the desk is more important than time at the bar. You will naturally accumulate plenty of life experiences to write about--what you won't naturally accumulate is the skill needed to write about them.

I dropped most of my productivity schemes in the years after graduating, and all of the rest of them went by the wayside once I had a baby. Nowadays the only remnant of them is that I rarely work after 5 PM. I don't do any tracking or logging and create no metrics.

This works for me. I think the habit of work is something you build up. Nonetheless I am under no illusions that I spend much more than ten hours a week writing and ten hours a week reading. Nor do I necessarily think that I work an appropriate amount. I'm sure Merve Emre works much harder than me, just as my wife does, and perhaps it's part of the universe's essential fairness that both Merve Emre and my wife are much more successful than me!

The blog is interesting because it keeps me honest on a granular level. If I haven't been reading anything, I simply have nothing to write about. This week is actually an exception, because this week I'm writing two posts on each of my post-writing days, and I put the good stuff (all about poetry, with references to poems by Wordsworth, Mandelstam, and Baudelaire) into my first post. That post went to my publicist, and if they can't use it I'll post it in a week. But you can see clearly that this second post of the day is running on fumes--there's much less there.

Ted Gioia reported hat the average American spends eleven hours a day looking at media and six hours looking at video. I have no idea what "looking at" media entails? I think it just means "time spent at a computer"? I chased this statistic all over the web—it’s been cited since 2016—and it seems to come from some sort of Nielsen report, but I’m not sure which one. I can't make heads or tails of what they're really measuring. Looking at videos is pretty clear, but everything else is vague: does texting count? Does using your computer for work? Am I looking at media right now?

The statistic seems inherently suspect. I don’t think the average American has six hours a day that they could dedicate to watching videos—this probably records a lot of multi-tasking, a lot of TV in the background. I’ve certainly been in households where the TV was just on all the time, every moment of the day.

But I think we understand that Americans spend a lot of time on their computers, a lot of time on tablets and phones, a lot of time watching TV. Probably something on the order of five or six hours a day, all told, even for people who don’t have email jobs.

That's sort of inescapable. You might watch less TV than that, or use less social media, but no matter what you're going to spend a lot of time each day looking mindlessly at your phone. There is no escape from our common social condition. I think it's a mistake to view that time as wasted, because there's no evidence that it was ever or could ever be productive time. When I was 12 I didn't have social media or streaming, but I spent umpteen hours playing video games. When I wasn't looking at video games, I noodled around drawing vast maps of fantasy worlds. I was like Wordsworth, who writes a poem about how he would spend hours outside, just staring vacantly at the world passing by.

It's incumbent on us to do and make something, to rescue some of our time. There's lots of chatter online about the importance of escaping grind culture and not worrying about productivity anymore, but if you read all those books they're like "brah, just disconnect, just be there in the peace and stillness and do nothing." Well, yes, if you situate being disconnected as our ur-state, then "doing things" is bad. But actually, being connected and browsing the phone is our natural state, and being disconnected is very actively a form of "doing something." So the books use the terms "escape grind culture", but they're really just advocating another form of work, which they call laziness.

It's like all the people who talk about intuitive eating. The end result of intuitive eating is finding balance with food and not overeating and gaining lots of weight and eating bad stuff anymore. But that's exactly the reason people diet in the first place! Thus intuitive eating becomes just another word for dieting. It might be a better diet, but it's still a diet. Nobody can sincerely advocate not working or not putting out an effort, because you don't need to advocate those things. We all know exactly what it looks like to not make an effort, and it's not very pretty.

I read The Protestant Ethic And The Spirit of Capitalism recently, and what I am saying does sound very Protestant, doesn't it? Max Weber writes that Protestantism advocated self-control and productivity in every aspect of your life, so people could see you were part of the elect.

America is a very Protestant nation. The joke is that America is so Protestant that even the Catholics are Protestant--in America Catholics are trad-cath and hate the Pope and think he's the anti-Christ or they are leftist radicals who ignore the church's teaching on sexuality and social issues. Both are essentially Protestant outlooks, emphasizing a personal connection to God over the wisdom conferred by the apostolic succession.

In America, even our laziness is Protestant, we simply don't know how to advocate laziness in a truly lazy way. But maybe that's because in a country that has a healthy laziness, you don't need to advocate for it! In a country where laziness is a long family mean followed by a nap and a glass of wine on the promenade, people-watching, there's neither grind culture nor "escape from grind culture" culture.

But we live in the country we live in! Americans work. We overexert ourselves. We get sad and then we narcotize ourselves. We measure ourselves by our accomplishments. It may be unhealthy, but that is our essential self, and there's no escaping from it.

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Addenda

My heart goes out to Jewish people across the world. I think people underestimate the trauma of the Holocaust. People murdered at a music concert, murdered in their homes, abducted--that gives major pogrom vibes. And America is the home of half the world's Jewish people (Israel is home to the other half), and I think given the rise in antisemitic violence in America, it's not unreasonable for Jewish people to want Gentiles to unequivocally condemn the killing of Jewish civilians, regardless of whatever generational crimes those civilians might've been part of. The attributing of some generational blood-guilt to Jewish people is an old, old tactic, whether it's killing Christ or the "stab in the back". To say Jewish civilians deserved to die because of something done to Palestinians--it reeks of eliminationist rhetoric. I also think it's applying a kind of logic to Israel that we don't apply to, say, Armenia and Azerbaijan. If two hundred people were murdered at a concert in Baku, we wouldn't say "Well that's what you get for doing the ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-Karabakh."

I’ve been surprised by the level of outright support for Hamas on my Twitter, but, on the other hand, I’ve gotten little hate for my opposing views. I remember a few years ago the author Casey McQuiston removed a totally banal reference to Israel from her book Red, White, and Royal Blue because of backlash by her fans, and I thought, wow, you’re not even allowed to admit in fiction (about the son of the President of the United States, no less!) that Israel exists? It was a little absurd.

Those days are done. You can’t really get canceled anymore. The design of Twitter amplifies the voices of blue checks, who are overwhelmingly conservative, so it’s just not possible for the censorious left to get up enough steam to result in serious consequences for anyone. I think a lot of people are regretting right now their absurd statements in support of Hamas—they simply hadn’t realized the underlying political and social and technological conditions had changed—and I’ve seen more than a few apologies for initial intemperance.

At the same time, I saw that a law student lost their job offer for pro-Hamas remarks, so perhaps in 2023 we’ll simply see the opposite: you can only be canceled from the right and not the left. Let’s see!