#4: Book summaries, conversations for closeness, kids can't be kids, and Just Bad things
Opening up the writing graveyard
Hi!
I didn’t publish any new articles in April so, inspired by Haley Nahman, this newsletter will instead include a few of the innumerable unfinished pieces which haunt me.
The ideas in this writing are all completely speculative and not yet fully developed which makes them uncomfortable to share. But thinking in public is good if you’re stuck! So here are 5 rough drafts — or rather, a hopefully coherent extract from each.
Five drafts I started and haven’t finished (yet)
1) Communication debt
In any kind of relationship, there's a level of communication necessary to maintain things. If you become too ignorant of what's going on in each other's lives, it becomes harder to connect or feel like you have common ground. Having seen the same problem in multiple relationships, I’ve finally come up with the right term: communication debt.
It's easy to build up communication debt when you first meet someone. You're too focused on the joy of getting to know them. You don't yet have a good sense of how best to communicate. You don't want them to see you in a negative light. You're uncomfortable being vulnerable. It's also easy to build up communication debt when one or both of you have a lot going on. Or when you're spending time together, but it's always involving immersion in an activity or other people are always present.
The deeper the relationship, the more you need unstructured conversation, where you bring up random details of your lives or things you're enjoying or stuff you're worried about. It’s vital for the exchange of information. But also by paying attention you signal care and affection. And it’s a bit like social grooming.
2) Book summaries are underrated
If you love reading, it’s fashionable to hate on book summaries. I’ve done it in the past. The general view of book summaries seems to be that they’re something you read instead of the book to save time and effort. People who use them to replace reading act as if they give you the benefits of reading without the work.
But the view of summaries as something to be read instead of a full-length book is simplistic and ignores the many ways in which they can be valuable. It also ignores the potential summaries have both for readers and writers.
Because reading a book isn’t a binary thing you’ve done or you haven’t. It’s more of a spectrum encompassing many ways to experience the same material depending on goals. Summaries fit at multiple points on that spectrum.
3) Bad taste in people is really just bad signalling
The way people treat us and the kind of people we attract are easy to attribute to our own selection criteria. But the information we signal (in the economic sense) is arguably more important.
Sometimes that’s because we don’t know we’re signalling something or because another person interprets signals differently. Sometimes we intend to signal one thing and end up signalling the opposite, perhaps because people view trying to signal that thing as being something you’d only do if you lacked it.
If we assume bad selection criteria, we locate the problem in the other people who only entered our lives because we didn’t notice their wrongness and badness. From this, we take the lesson that we need to improve our selection criteria, at spotting badness and at chasing goodness. But my guess is that the signals we send matter more than the traits we gravitate towards for a few reasons.
4) Very Good things and Very Bad things
It’s really hard to weigh the value of things that are a mixture of extremely good and extremely bad. The more extreme the two poles are, the harder it is to evaluate if something is a net gain or a net loss.
There’s a reason other people do things you consider extremely bad; the extremely good sides feel worthwhile for them, on balance.
Many of the most damaging things in life seem to involve extremes of goodness and badness. They’re hard to walk away from because the good parts make you doubt your prior perception. And pursuing the good parts feels nice right now, while the bad parts can seem off in the distance or unreal.
A major thinking pitfall is trying to label everything on a binary good/bad scale. Rather than an ever-shifting mixture of both. A useful practice is to step back and remember any given moment is not representative of the overall effects.
Some things in life are just bad even if they sometimes or initially feel good. Some things are just good even if parts are aversive or the payoff is delayed or the beginning sucks. As obvious as it might sound, I think we all make assessments based on one moment and frequently don’t notice the bad deal we’re getting. For example, staying up too late to be productive is just bad for me because the harm the next day far outweighs the extra tasks completed. Another example: exercise is just good for me because the benefits should be enough to override my laziness
5) The death of adolescence: what happens when kids can’t be kids?
It doesn’t take much humility to say that I did a lot of eyewateringly dumb stuff as a teenager. Much of which I can attribute to no ability to think beyond right now, the theory of mind more typical of a six-year-old, and an explosive combination of boredom, anger, self-hatred, frustration, and external pressure. Although my prissy grammar school life and innate dorkiness meant it didn’t go further than stupidity, I frequently acted in questionable ways in response to incomprehensible feelings.
Now, in my early twenties, very little of my teenage idiocy haunts me. My mistakes and bad decisions were treated as something to get through, without saying anything about who I would grow into. Since teenagers were invented post WW2, the whole point was that they got to transition into adulthood. More choices and freedom meant mistakes were needed to learn. Traditionally, adolescence has ideally been a cushioned time to allow all the stumbling once people could no longer blindly follow their parents’ path.
But the internet is changing what it means to grow up. On social media, children and teenagers are more often than not held to the same moral and ethical standards as adults. Their mistakes meet condemnation, not education. We’ve already, at least in the Western world, stripped childhood of risk. Children lack opportunities to fail, depriving them of precious lessons. And now social media makes it safest to avoid intellectual experimentation. The possibility of being secretly recorded in some way normalises unrelenting self-consciousness and self-objectification.
+ Assorted stuff I enjoyed in April
In case you need some suggestions for random novelty in your life:
Articles that made me think: Have no excuses and Desperation, Don’t worry son, all your friends are weirdos too (in general, you couldn’t pay me to read blog posts about people’s kids, but somehow this series is actually compelling!), on shame and on not losing my nerve (Ava is my favourite personal blogger right now), Stoned strategy, Perfection is a modern heresy and Patton’s sword, and these two Ask Polly columns.
Learning/interesting things: On the Possibility of Progress (a Nobel Prize talk on overcoming scarcity), Decision Making in a Complex and Uncertain World (a course I took), English Heritage’s delightful Victorian Way videos, and a 99PI episode I never get tired of revisiting.
Music I’ve been listening to: Sarah Davachi, the album Paris 1919, recently released techno music produced for the East German Olympic program, Melodrama, and this album my friend introduced to me as “definitely made by Jesus.”
Films I’ve enjoyed: Possession (1981, horrifying), My Own Private Idaho, Marriage Story (emotionally draining), and the new Rebecca adaptation (which, okay, was mostly a tepid bore, but if you love the book it’s worth it for the sheer camp drama of the last 15-minutes.)
That’s it for April. See you next time. If you have comments or feedback, hit reply to this message or contact me here.
Rosie