Breadcrumbs: Stop Making Sense

Not an essay. Just a trail of conceptual crumbs to indicate a forest path which perhaps leads somewhere.

The other day, I wrote this little thing on Notes:

So many people working in pursuit of clarity, digging for new lenses or polishing off the old ones to see if we shouldn't have discarded them. We're positively obsessed with clarity. But in a world where clarity is fleeting and even unobtainable, where those who purportedly gain clarity seem to lose it, and those who make the greatest strides in collective clarity might still often suffer and die miserable… perhaps a better goal is: thriving in the absence of clarity.

That notion of dying miserable and confused, even when you might be what others deem a top contributor to the project of humanity (what some might call the pursuit of collective clarity), is something that has long bothered me—An anxiety that flares up regularly like a rash, particularly badly the first time I read Benjamin Labatut’s book “When We Cease to Understand the World”, and every time I think about it now.

In her opening to a New Yorker review of that book, Ruth Franklin says,

I’m weirdly obsessed with “When We Cease to Understand the World”. It’s a stunningly beautiful work of semi-fiction about the pursuit of clarity through madness, clarity on account of madness, clarity predicated upon and producing madness. It is about the pitfalls of discovery, about damning pursuits, being damned and even monstrous and somehow then celebrated as prophets of progress. It’s about being pursued by one’s own pursuits; about that affliction we call genius.

“He had also gone through a bad divorce, become estranged from his only daughter and been diagnosed with skin cancer, but he insisted that all of that, however painful, was secondary to the sudden realization that it was mathematics—not nuclear weapons, computers, biological warfare or our climate Armageddon—which was changing our world to the point where, in a couple of decades at most, we would simply not be able to grasp what being human really meant.”

-Benjamin Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World

I am haunted by the notion that one can be simultaneously brilliant and confused and miserable. That thriving and what we call clarity are in conflict. I have at times categorized my own project in life as the pursuit of clarity and the capacity to help others find clarity, and I often wonder now just how worthwhile a goal that actually is. Especially as I struggle with the sense that clarity isn’t increasing as I age. The subjective sense of clarity might have peaked for me a long time ago; now I find myself noticing often how my faculties fail to show up in times when I attempt to conjure them. I forget too much. I have a powerful fear not of death, but of the inevitable and prolonged diminishment which precedes it.

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A friend let me know she liked my post on Notes about thriving in the absence of clarity. She seemed to wonder if it was in response to something else. I was glad she brought that up, because it is in response to something else. It is a response to another thing I wrote that day on LinkedIn which goes like this:

I avoid posting to LinkedIn when I'm feeling overwhelmed or nihilistic, when I'm struggling with depression or lack clarity. Because... why would I say anything at all here if I don't have something coherent to say? Obviously this is a space intended for those with clear heads and clear paths to share with... one another? No that can't be right. That would be silly... Why would the clear-headed need advice on seeking clarity from one-another? It must be... for people who are crushing it to share with other people who are crushing it... or to bombard desperate job hunters with tips and tricks on how to crush it. It's for crushing-it-based businesses to make money off of people who are desperate to finally start crushing it...

I mean in the end it's mostly not for us netizens, right? It's really for the people who make money off of us somehow. This niche is shaped and modulated by those shadowy figures who want us to see and say particular types of things... we might thrive despite their machinations...

I refrain from posting to LinkedIn when I'm feeling overwhelmed, underwater, nihilistic, or depressed, because there is doxa at play here. Doxa: the unspoken rules of a cultural field. They constrain my behaviors, and my clarity on them indicates just how successful I will be within that field. Having a few thousand followers might indicate that my instincts around the rules of the game here are... ok I guess. At times. But then I go through periods where I don't post anything. I refrain from sharing my lived experience when that experience deviates from the doxa of the platform. I withdraw from the field because part of me recognizes that what I'm prone to share in the moment would violate doxa here. People who show up to this space without some kind of positive clarity... are they punished? Will I have cultural capital withdrawn? Perhaps I will be paradoxically rewarded for deviating from the tiresome trends of relentless positivity. There must be many who fall into that unreflecting and unreflected niche I'm describing…

Doxa is a useful concept to understand if you want to crush it in your business endeavors.

I'm just kidding. I don't care if you crush it. I'm more interested in us thriving than crushing it. Nobody should have to crush anything in order to thrive. Alas...

I've been withdrawn lately because I lost the thread a bit. Because I've been struggling, like I do sometimes, to find clear, positive things to say. I am finding that I have more to say in other venues, like in private discord spaces with friends, or on Substack, where I get to decide the unspoken rules of my particular space. Follow me there if you're a fan of a verbose sort of lack-of-clarity.

I am thinking of starting to employ the community features there for the people who follow my Substack. My preferred communities are the ones that meet me as I am, where I am. I wonder how many people are here only because they lack spaces with better protocols...

You may see how I ended up at the topic of thriving in the absence of clarity.

I do not care if you or we crush it. I care if we thrive. Nobody’s thriving should be predicated on crushing anything.

I characterized this space as a “verbose sort of lack of clarity”.

I would assume that part of what inspires this notion of thriving is me being infected by Robin Wall Kimmerer’s declaration that “all flourishing is mutual”—the world as a gift economy, positive sum and mutualistic rather than extractive and exploitative.

This feels like the antidotal notion to crushing-it-based thriving which permeates the clarity-ravenous culture essentialized on LinkedIn.

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We are positively obsessed with clarity. This makes sense—the world feels precarious when we’re in the fog. In the absence of proof-of-absence, we resort to simply imagining threats. We will even flee from a place of absolute uncertainty to one of certain (though incorrect) doom, because the latter feels somehow more secure than the former. Better the devil you know, I guess…

Given a choice between two sensemakers—one who highlights how impenetrable the darkness and roiling fog is and another who draws for us a clear outline of a wolf in the shadows, the latter might seem to possess clarity that the former does not. Even when the wolf fails to materialize, we might be tempted to think they at least demonstrated the capacity for detecting information in the noise—a capacity which the first sensemaker demonstrably lacked.

Clarity about lack of clarity is quite specifically excluded.

There is a clear evolutionary advantage to a threat-detection system generating more false positives than false negatives. A false positive might mean you sometimes run from a scary tree. A false negative might mean failing to flee from an actual threat. But there’s a cost to our hypervigilance as well—our compulsion to identify a threat, any threat, whether it exists or not, dooms us to live in a world rife with possible threats. And we don’t think clearly when we feel endangered. We treat one-another worse when we feel unsafe. We see less of the real world when our focus is threat-attenuated. We constrain ourselves and one-another—a useful adaptation in times of crisis but one that perhaps precludes what Kimmerer refers to as flourishing.

Dynamics change in conditions of precarity or scarcity at the scale of both individuals and societies—In “The Dawn of Everything”, Wengrow and Graeber describe ancient civilizations growing more hierarchical in seasons of scarcity and more egalitarian in seasons of abundance. Mere survival and mutual flourishing as wholly distinct modes of being…

In the process of writing that LinkedIn post about the doxa of LinkedIn, I was reflecting on the idea that a place or platform wherein only those possessing a perceived sense of clarity contribute is maladaptive. I recently saw someone joke about how everyone on LinkedIn is a consultant/business-coach and everyone on Substack is a writing coach. I thought about all the retired military colleagues I’ve seen transition from the military into the business of helping people transition out of the military. There’s a particular type of very motivated person who is compelled to take their most recent experience of lacking clarity and turns it into a personal survival niche—and LinkedIn appears to be a primary place where we create and maintain those niches. It’s perfectly logical. Being the market for a particular offering seems to validate product market fit. Being a target user yourself feels like you’re doing the highest-fidelity user research. Side note: My study and practice in the field of design has taught me this might be misleading. We are taught to not put too much faith in user statements about what they want, or what they would use, or how they would behave given different circumstances. People are famously bad at predicting such things.

In that post, I was also reflecting on just how attenuated I was in my own expression as a result of this bias for positive clarity among the LinkedIn community, which I described through the lens of Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of doxa. I thought about just how much less attenuated I am in more communal discord spaces and well-moderated online communities, where relationships are mutualistic rather than extractive. Where the primary interest is not in extracting value from one-another but in pursuing collective thriving. Where the primary protocols are relational rather than transactive. All flourishing is mutual…

I wondered out loud in that post just how many people had never been in a space where all expression came from a place of love and support and encouragement, even when it contained critique. As I wrote that post, which alluded to my ever-returning anxiety and depression, I worried that what I might get in response would be mostly expressions of concern. The kind that come across as “get well soon”, which one then suspects really means “I hope you snap out of this and feel up to extracting and being extracted again.”

Brings to mind a song lyric from the rapper Noname:

People say they love you, but they really love potential
Not the person that's in front of them, the person you'll grow into

Loving someone’s potential like like the antithesis to that quote from Adrienne Maree Brown I won’t ever stop sharing:

“Do you already know that your existence--who and how you are--is in and of itself a contribution to the people and place around you? Not after or because you do some particular thing, but simply the miracle of your life. And that the people around you, and the place(s), have contributions as well? Do you understand that your quality of life and your survival are tied to how authentic and generous the connections are between you and the people and place you live with and in? Are you actively practicing generosity and vulnerability in order to make the connections between you and others clear, open, available, durable?

Generosity here means giving of what you have without strings or expectations attached. Vulnerability means showing your needs.”

Brown’s ontology here also feels like a gift economy of sorts, relying on protocols of generosity and vulnerability—two things decidedly un-potentiated in conditions of scarcity and precarity.

And then I started writing this piece because it occurred to me that the pursuit of clarity might be at odds with the pursuit of thriving. I thought back to the desperation and despair of pursuit highlighted in Labatut’s “When We Cease to Understand the World” and then in the process of trying to unpack all of this in an essay, I encountered that Ruth Franklin quote about the book:

I see now we’re retracing our steps.

For some reason I find the return encouraging. Treading the same ground again and again makes it more visible for us the next time we’re passing through.

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2 years ago I wrote an essay titled “Sometimes It’s Not Time to Make Sense”. As commenters at the time pointed out, it should have been called “Stop Making Sense". Talking Heads are the best, so that’s what I’m calling this one.

David Byrne of Talking Heads once described their song “Once in a Lifetime” as being about the unconscious. He said, "We’re largely unconscious. We operate half-awake or on autopilot and end up, whatever, with a house and family and job and everything else, and we haven't really stopped to ask ourselves, 'How did I get here?'"

It might be my favorite song of theirs:

And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself, "Well, how did I get here?"…

And you may ask yourself, "How do I work this?"
And you may ask yourself, "Where is that large automobile?"
And you may tell yourself, "This is not my beautiful house"
And you may tell yourself, "This is not my beautiful wife"

Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
Into the blue again, after the money's gone
Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground

In another interview discussing the song, Byrne said “Maybe I’m fascinated with the middle class because it seems so different from my life, so distant from what I do. I can’t imagine living like that.”

Part of what I was responding to in that piece about making sense was the sense that a posture of resolution-seeking and problem-solving might prevent us from creating the kinds of systems which promote access to our own inner complexity. Does the clarity sought by business coaches on LinkedIn simply enable us to somnambulate more efficiently and effectively into the cul-de-sac of meaning decried by Byrne in his song? The kind of middle-class existence that he can’t imagine living but which so many of us blindly pursue, not just once but for entire lifetimes?

Does it attenuate our attention by placing us within an ontology where uncertainty and ambiguity births threats within us to our own capacity to dwell, to notice, to attend, to connect, to thrive mutually?

Same as it ever was, same as it ever was…

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The first time I tried to explore this topic, it started with inspiration from Brigid Russell on (then) Twitter:

This message struck me, particularly as someone who is in the habit of trying to make sense of messy information—Through my writing, sharing my experiences and observations, trying to derive clear lessons or rules from it, and then through my work as a facilitator and workshop-designer, where the goal is to get others to generate and swim in the messy soup of experiences and perceptions, to see what useful abstractions might be derived from them... to “tidy stuff up”. This message struck me as important. Perhaps explained in part by what I explored above about the pursuit of clarity itself being the basis for a kind of lost-ness.

There are times when the rush to interpretations and patterns is not helpful. It might make us feel more comfortable, since we like to live in clean and tidy intellectual spaces where there are more answers than questions, since we like to consider ourselves "action-oriented" and hate to simply dwell on what's happening (particularly at the scale of mere individuals); but what would be most helpful... I suppose it depends on how you frame “help”.

I think often of this image from a tweet by

John Cutler

in which he described three approaches to sense-making:

A - Exposing the mess

B - Clustering but leaving a path back to the mess (the preferred but most difficult approach)

C - Hiding the mess

When I initially encountered this image, I thought about how many people see the world only through abstractions, living purely in that third space where the mess appears to vanish. The mess is hidden, and where it appears, we are constantly “tidying up” with the power of chosen abstractions. These abstractions often feel useful to us (helpful) because they are coherent with our own lived experience—or (perhaps more likely) we simply interpret our lived experience through the lens of the abstractions we've dogmatically attached ourselves to, resulting in a sense of coherence.

This makes life feel less messy than it actually is. It feels safer, when we equate mystery with threat.

The mess and mystery is reality though. The abstractions are simply useful fictions… helpful when they align to our purposes:

"All the fundamental laws of physics tell us what will happen when there is no environment, not when there is one. Their universality doesn’t derive from the fact that they apply in every environment but from the fact they don’t apply in any!”

-Russell Ackoff

The clusters provide useful patterns in experience that can be exploited or employed in the design of “solutions”, but the majority of experience falls outside of those clusters rather than within them. They are simply points of overlap in otherwise turbulent information.

…every individual is an exception to the rule. Therefore, one can never give a description of a type, no matter how complete, which applies to more than one individual despite the fact that thousands might, in a certain sense, be strikingly described thereby.

-Carl Jung

Cutler's image brought to mind how we apply rigid frameworks to just about everything, seemingly incapable of interacting with the mess at all, needing to immediately jump into the steps, the dogmas and abstractions of our particular approach, discipline, worldview, or favorite theory... and how often this results in conflict—the attempted or inadvertent silencing of others' lived experience.

The interruption of natural complexity through the violent installation of more ordered abstractions (or technologies).

Thriving that is by no means mutual—A zero-sum sort of non-thriving. A transactional, extractive, competitive vying for position within a world made up not of complex, both/and ambiguities but of simple abstractions, where one displaces another. Where my gain in clarity necessitates your loss.

Therefore a type of clarity that is inherently destructive. A destructive ontology.

This is decidedly not flourishing, if we are to adopt the vitalizing ontology offered by Kimmerer.