Notes from this Semester of Human Becoming

debs/ May 9, 2018

Before it happened, I simultaneously (a) fantasized about and (b) dreaded finding out what kind of adult I would become. (a) I fantasized because, observing the adult world had been a marathon of “I would never do/care/like that when I become and adult!” and now I FINALLY get to make my own choices and be the adult I have always told myself I would become. (b) I dreaded it because, having amassed a list of mantras, faux-pas, instructions on how (not) to be an adult (dedicated to adult debbie, courtesy of childhood debbie), I imposed on myself the herculean burden of becoming the adult that my childhood self would have looked up to.

Dread also came in another flavour.  On one hand, I needed to reconcile with the inner-child; on the other hand, what if one day I finally understand or (God forbid) even agree with all the banal things that statistically-average middle-class adults advised me to care about? What if my adult self regrets disregarding their advice? I presently claim to be an adult on the basis that the State says so, but can I really be considered an adult if I regret neither slouching, nor leaving my hair wet before going to sleep, nor quitting piano yet??? Am I really an adult if I still undervalue stability, still don’t care to negotiate my worth, still don’t want to own a home, still think I’d never want kids, and still don’t think getting braces was worth the effort? Nevertheless, the calculus remains: it’s statistically likely that I will become a statistically-average adult; therefore heeding the advice of statistically-average adults is the most statistically likely method to prevent regret. It’s kind of ridiculous how so much of my life thus far has been lived on the basis of avoiding regret.

And what happens when you were lived your childhood trying to making choices you wouldn’t regret as an adult … and then one day you start buying bus tickets that say ADULT on them and likewise start making decisions that have ADULT written all over them? Well 4 years ago, when I finished my undergrad, this happened:

Within 3 years, I’ve come to accept that the “room” that the elephant is in is the world, reality, and adulthood. Dreadful, because the space that once constituted my comfort zone–the space between the elephant’s ivory tusks–were now as hostile as the world itself. Fantastical, because having no comfort zone enabled me to realize that the career binary of “Industry” or “Academia” is but a failure of the imagination.

Half a year ago, when I had a second chance since legal adulthood to choose how to make a living and ….  Dun dun dun …

… I went back to school!

This time, as a “professional” note-taker [1]

I work for a ~social enterprise~ of sorts that offers note-taking support for university students who are further physically or cognitively disadvantaged in an education system that is, frankly, a stumbling block even to most “well-adjusted” people.  Meanwhile, I think my neuroses render me physically and cognitively advantaged to thrive as a post-secondary lecture note-taker. To be a note-taker I must not participate in the class discussions [2], I may not initiate conversation with the student I suspect I am taking notes for. I simply observe and record. Which is perfect because this is pretty much my natural disposition anyway.  It’s such a relief to know that I can help people on this individual sort of level while still being my authentic self (read: the anti-social prick that I am)… And I’m grateful that I’m living in a time/place that values accessibility enough to pay me to take notes for people [3].

Now that the note-taking semester is over, I get a chance to reflect on this past season of note-taking. Conveniently, Wait but Why recently wrote a post about career-finding containing the the diagram below which the rest of this post will roughly follow:

In the first part, Reflections on the changing world, I try to make sense of the courses I took notes for this semester. In the second part, Reflections on the changing debbie, the learning that pertains to me. This entire post is a note-to-self of sorts.

[1] Among various other odd jobs.
[2] Back in undergrad, I once wrote an email to a prof explaining how I was conflicted about taking/dropping his seminar-based course after learning that a large graded component was based on participation/discussion. He ended up granting me special privileges to stay in his class without participating.
[3] The student doesn’t pay for the service–the universities need to make their courses accessible!

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Reflections on the changing world

“As for Pyramids, there is nothing to wonder in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby” — Henry David Thoreau

My biggest work perk is immediately obvious… according to Wait but Why‘s diagram, I’m getting “experience” and “education” at the same time! This was the haul of courses I took this semester:

• World Ideas: Antiquity
• World Ideas: Early Modern
• History of the Jewish People
• American History since 1601
• Rise of the Documentary Film (from 1891 to 1942)
• Political Science (Canada in it’s comparative perspective)
• Canadian Criminal Justice System
• Psychology
• Astronomy
• Calculus
• Linear Algebra
• Introduction to Engineering
• Statistics for Planners (Civil Engineering)
• Work Measurement Analysis and Design (Industrial Engineering)

Obviously simply taking notes in undergraduate-level courses (without writing the essays, doing the research, or writing the exams, at that) makes me no expert at anything.  So instead of talking about the courses at length, I’ll try to focus on the cross-talk that arises from holding the ideas from these courses in my mind-space simultaneously. 

I found that Jacques Ellul’s thoughts from Perspectives on Our Age gave me a substantial basis on which the fragments of the courses could crystallize, so I’ll gloss over it presently.  As summarized in the table below, Ellul claims that there have been three successive milieus in human existence: the natural, the societal, and the technological (Perspectives on Our Age, 60-66). Humans simultaneously live/d off and are/were challenged by the dominant aspect of the milieu they are/were in. The succeeding milieu becomes the new means of living and but also adds its own challenges. The succeeding milieu is never completely immune from the challenges (or benefits) of the preceding immune, but renders both the benefits and challenges of the preceding milieu less glorified and catastrophic respectively.

Milieu	Period	Means of Living	Challenges	Who holds power
Natural (60)	Pre-Historical	Sustenance (hunting, gathering)	Poisons, wild animals, barrenness, shortages	Physical strength
Society (61)	Antiquity	Protection from/domination of nature, Social organization/structure, bureaucracy, administration	Distribution of wealth and information, cohesion, war	Money, “The person owning capital privately” (45)
Technology (63)	Present Day	Mediation of society relations, Further domination of nature/alienation from challenges thereof,	No self-regulation	Technological knowledge, “the person who activates his or her capital within … technological operations” (45)

In relation to my courses, World Ideas: Antiquity (and World Ideas: Early Modern) focused on what Ellul would consider the milieu of society. In this course, we followed the process of human civilization and the archaeology thereof) from the Agricultural Revolution (10,000 BCE) through various ancient civilizations with the overarching question: “what constitutes a civilization?”. As the Agricultural Revolution helped us overcome the challenges of Ellul’s natural milieu (poisons, shortages, etc.), what dominated our way of life also shifted from nature to the society (as Ellul puts it) or the civilization (as the course puts it). Civilization refers to complex social organization including (but not limited to) religion, administration, urbanization, trade, etc.

Within the context of civilization, History of the Jewish People traced the migration and adaptation of one minority group from Antiquity until the Present Day (milieu of society –> milieu of technology).  We saw how Jews, like any minority, were at the mercy of war and peace and general “mood” of the civilization that hosted them. We saw how the Jewish identity diverged at every external change within the milieu of the society as they got to choose whether to adapt to the new ways (secularization/integration) and/or continue with old ways (religiosity/separation). As a group of people with a multiplicity of micro-identities who could not conform into the neat categories demanded by the societal milieu, Jews were scapegoated for the problems of civilization under the pretense of being “uncivilized”.

Meanwhile Rise of the Documentary Film follows the development of the technology of film up until the Second World War.  We saw how film developed from a technology to the creative treatment of non-fiction that we understand as documentary today. How its evolution was also closely tied to the conditions of a societal milieu… but later how television (an extension of film) affected American History [1] as we transitioned into a technological milieu.

Both Political Science and the Criminal Justice System pertain to the societal milieu, but we see that they are frequently struggling to adapt to and regulate the challenges arising from a technological milieu. Time and time again, the Criminal Justice System lecturer suspected that many problems (ie. over-representation of the mentally ill in prisons) should have been addressed in other institutions are being downloaded to the Criminal Justice System. And of course Ellul had already saw that “the law is totally losing its validity and significance. It is becoming a technical device for administration and organization.  Law no longer as the objective of bringing justice. Today it is [a technology] in the hands of administrators” (51). The Political Science course introduced different monetary policies used around the world … but how does that change when capital itself will become secondary “capital activated within the ensembles of technological operations” (45)?

Ellul’s technological milieu is not merely about technology, but rather the concern for rationality and efficiency (39) and “preoccupation with the one best way of doing things” (ix) that are symptomatic of the technological mentality. This obviously refers to the Engineering courses I took … especially Work Measurement Analysis and Design and all the pedantic considerations it takes to optimize an assembly line. Indeed the technological milieu, of which the Industrial Revolution is a symptom of, is dehumanizing … valuing organization of humans (streamlining life from birth to death like a factory farm) over human dignity and agency. But more interestingly, I find this obsession with rationality/methodology is forced on disciples that it may actually be a hindrance to … like Psychology. In those courses, the lecturers simply could not convince me that forcing the scientific method on a topic like Psychology is the most meaningful way to go about it. (At risk of offending people, I’ll take the rest of my snobbery to the footnotes [2].)

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I’d like to conclude with this meandering thought. The World Ideas: Antiquity course was, in part, trying to get students to deconstruct Western assumptions of civilizations. However, students not only resisted this, but imposed the modern/Western values of our civilization (aka rationality and efficiency in the technological milieu) on these Ancient Civilizations (in the milieu of society). I heard patronizing language from students like, “The Ancient ____s used religion to control their subordinates”. As if ancient persons in power were definitely conspiring against the ancient laymen who were assumed to be primitive and uneducated. As if the persons in power must have seen themselves outside of the worldview that privileged them.

Actually, it might be The Meaning of the City, Ellul criticized the phenomenon of the city/civilization for taking on an entity of its own. In the milieu of the society, civilization and humans have a symbiotic relationship. Humans (both those in power and lay people) needed the civilization for protection from nature. Civilization needed humans to exist and used humans for its own expansion and perpetuation. Meanwhile, in the technological milieu, it seems like technological intentions have taken on an entity of it’s own: “What had occasioned the technological phenomenon [rationality and efficiency] now became a demand of technology for conditioning its own development” (42). The technological phenomenon develops when we “prefer to let the drawbacks and danger [of technology] develop (on the pretext that they are not fully demonstrated) and to create new technologies to ‘repair’ the problems. … There is no self-regulation of any kind in the technological system” (65).

Perhaps one day, the rationality and efficiency we are indoctrinated with at present will be seen so primitive that future humans will not believe that those in power genuinely bought into it.  “Obviously, those tech-giants fabricated rationality and efficiency to control the masses”, they would say.

[1] As an aside, in contrast to Jewish History which had more overarching themes about human nature spanning both space and time, I found that American History is centered on big names and prominent figures. I find that I am far more interested in the former … and I suspect studying history in the way that we did in that course has better predictive power for the future.
[2] <snob alert> The human brain is objectively cool, but Psychology courses (at least the ones I took) are overrated. It tried too hard to be a hard science and, in doing so, adopted all the boring parts of the hard sciences without drawing conclusions that are related to some generalization universal phenomenon like, you know, how Physics does. Perhaps, as someone who began her studies interested in the hard sciences and currently nurturing a curiosity for the humanities, I have less patience for the soft sciences which are kind of neither-nor.</snob alert>

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Reflections on the changing debbie

“All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, till they take root in our personal experience” — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Some of my reflections pertaining to my evaluation of whether to continue note-taking can be summarized in the Why By Why’s diagram combined with this overrated Ikigai Venn diagram.

On first thought, if work is about getting paid enough to do what you love, then I’ve freakin’ made it, right? Why, then do I feel the need to justify myself after I tell people what I do?

• Let say I happened to love working in Silicon Valley and I claim to get paid doing what I love, would I not need to justify myself thus?
• Let’s try something less polarizing. What if I work at Pixar and I claim to get paid doing what I love. Even if it’s not related to my education, I would not get any flack for it. (In fact I’d be praised for being a prodigy.)
• Let’s try something that pays less (perhaps pays negatively) and is less stable. What if that job I love is being a serial entrepreneur  … even that seems slightly less sketchy.

So, more specifically, why do I feel like the need to justify myself work that doesn’t conform to neoliberal success narratives? Perhaps, it’s the grip of the technological milieu; it’s only work that is “indispensable for capitalist and industrial development, and also for all technological development” that can be considered “a positive value” (42). The understanding of “positive value” stems from the ironic thought process:

“All people must be integrated in the work process, albeit, of course, with the hope, with the promised, with the Utopian expectation that we will finally no longer have to work! This is part of the dual effect of technology, which makes people work to their maximum, but always with the prospect that technology will totally and radically take over for us and replace us when we can finally do nothing.” (42)

 

Secondly, “We are forever told that we are freer to choose the course of our lives than ever before, but the freedom to choose outside the success narrative is limited.” I went into post-secondary education under the pretense that getting an education is supposed to equip me with skills that make more opportunities available. If I’m now being told that it’s a waste to do anything “less remarkable” [1] than what I was educated for, then education is a restriction. Why does a potential to be “remarkable” restrict me from choosing to be “unremarkable” nevertheless?  Or as Thoreau put it, “The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind, why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others?” I think this “waste” mentality is really just a euphemism for class mobility, or at the very least, class perpetuation.

Finally, the most common expression of disapproval [2] I get is most enticing but also a direction I resist at present.  Some claim that I can achieve my “greatest potential” by doing work that “helps the greatest number of people”. Helping the largest number of persons is a noble, objective interpretation of “what the world needs” (see diagram above), no?  That mentality is a perpetuation and glorification of “efficiency”…not so objective after all. In fact, Ellul continues

“I feel that any action pertaining to the technological milieu must remain on the fringes because this milieu is extraordinarily enveloping and, I might say, extraordinarily seductive.  My work, therefore, is obviously on a small scale; it requires much effort for apparently meager results.  … I am fully convinced that my slow labour, involving small numbers of people is actually a point of departure for an internal change in society.  Confronted with the technological phenomenon and the new milieu we live in … [we need to be people] who can use the technologies and at the same time not be used by, assimilated by, or subordinated to them.”

 

I wish I could be as confident as Ellul was about his place in the technological milieu. But for now, I think I can relate to Thoreau much more:

“With his principles in tact but without a job, Thoreau’s crisis of vocation deepened. … Lacking any clear direction, Thoreau found himself periodically employed in a variety of miscellaneous roles, including labourer, pencil-maker, gardener, general handyman, tutor, occasional lecturer and editor… his options it seemed, where either to make some compromises and pursue a different vocation — that is to do something for which there was much more demand in the market — or else somehow find a way to become much less dependent on the market” — Samuel Alexander, Just Enough is Plenty, p 3

 

Only time will tell whether my experience of being “periodically employed in a variety of miscellaneous roles” constitutes an extended childhood or a legitimate adulthood. But how old do I have to be before the decisions I make become characteristic of my person rather than a passing characteristic of my age? When will I be able to consider my intuitions credible as opposed to reckless?

Regardless, a changing world implies a changing expression of average adulthood.  I am increasingly convinced that the average-adult advice I took so seriously 20 years ago is outdated today. In a world where nothing is guaranteed, employers/things/policies that used to be dependable long-term relationships/investments are no longer, living on the principle of regret-prevention assumes more about the future me and the future world than I can act on.

Ironically, on hindsight, the childhood I lost to preventing regret is most regrettable.  Moving forward, it doesn’t matter whether I am experiencing legitimate adulthood or extended childhood, my decisions ought not be motivated by fear of regret.

[1] where “less remarkable” is used as shorthand to imply “less involved in technological development”
[2] Don’t get me wrong! I have lots of support … I’m just kind of sensitive to the off-handed comments (and sometimes, silence) which I perceive as criticism. I hate that I care what people think, but at the same time I want to understand where these reactions come from.