The book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has been sitting on my desk, uncracked, for weeks. I keep waiting for the right time to open it and to drop into a flow state while reading about ‘the psychology of optimal experience.’ It’s less that I’m seeking this paradoxical nirvana of narrowed attention for myself, and more that with a book coming out next year called Stream: A Watershed Manifesto, which plumbs streams both hydrological and psychological for its metaphors, I figured I should learn more about flow from the ‘experts.’ But flipping randomly through, man is it boring. I’m not sure reading 300 densely packed pages of clinical case studies about how fun work can be if you just find the right kind of work is the best use of my time.
It also feels very dated. Originally published in 1990 when the exhortation to work happier was in vogue, now it’s a foregone conclusion that no one is happy ‘at work.’ Everyone is dreading the next email finding them. Everyone works longer hours for less money. I’m not sure exactly how, but this feels connected to the excessive reporting on the Strait of Hormuz during a war in which thousands of civilians across a dozen nations are being killed. If you look at mainstream news outlets like the NYT, NPR, WaPo etc., the main concern is how to keep the lights on, the oil flowing, and the economy growing. How do we keep working while war groans on in the background? Release oil reserves, teargas people in the streets to force them back into their climate-controlled offices, while the US bombs oil tankers from the Caribbean to the Red Sea releasing vast black clouds of CO2 and other noxious gases into the atmosphere, accelerating uncontrolled climate change.
At this point, it feels trite to sound the alarm on climate change. It’s-a changing. There’s not much we can do about it aside from adapt and try to prevent the suffering of as many people as possible. I think most powerbrokers know this, and sometimes I think this latest war is nothing but an excuse to throw as much money into the garbage as possible so as to avoid paying the reparations demanded by the Global South for the ecological devastation wrought by Europe and the US for centuries, past and future. (Although I'm not averse to throwing as many monkey wrenches into the working of global capital and the war machine to slow down the devastation.)
But back to work. As a writer, I’m tired of people talking about writing despite the unfolding atrocities all around us. The phrases ‘the world is on fire’ or ‘gestures broadly’ infuriate me. If you truly believe this is the case, then why do you continue to write/work/behave in a business as usual manner? I don’t want to close my eyes and my ears to suffering in order to write/edit/publish. I want my work to reflect the suffering in the world, to provide evidence that not everyone stayed in their lane with blinders on and plodded quietly along. The extent to which literature can provide evidence of this is debatable, but it’s a debate I’d like to have, rather than meekly continue submitting the next grant application. I don’t write to counter despair; I write to change the world.