Hey there,
Y’know that story about the wolves? It works, it demonstrates an important point, and yet it is incomplete in a number of important ways.
Here is the first: they’re wolves. You don’t feed wolves, and wolves work in packs. The wolves fight each other only because you are the territory. They are parts of you, but their motivation is shared: to take as much of you as possible. They are not your friends. They will hunt from your supplies, invade your territory, and if left unimpeded will kill you.
The story is often invoked to provide some measure of guidance for some unanswered question: the hero faces a crisis of faith and must address a moral quandary. Useful, but not as it might otherwise be to recognize that the wolves within you which the wise mentor shines a light on are only the most prominent of many.
Here is the second reason the wolf parable is incomplete: it offers a palliative simplicity useless in the day-to-day.
For all intents and purposes, there might be hundreds or thousands of warring (packs of) wolves, contesting every unimpeded patch of space within your mind. Think of it like this:
(The real thing continues outside these bounds for some time, and is much less linear, with folds of overlapping planes; consider manifold overlapping, self-referential, twisted Maslow’s hierarchies and task orientations, and you’re getting closer, most likely.)
Third: having engaged the combination of
Wolves are hostile, fighting within you to claim dominion over your cognition (and therefore your actions,) and
There are innumerable wolves controlling you, and you can’t even detect most; it’s occasionally clarifying but ultimately reductive to focus on only two at a time,
We find the actual utility of the wolf idea: the world is attempting to consume you whole, and you must fight your way out.
There are two ways to do this: first, it is possible to tame wolves, and certainly it has been done before. This takes time, however. The second option is easier to start with, and works in the short term: to carve away some space over which your wolves cannot fight.
The above is background for the one underlying wolf duel I would like to describe for you in more explicit detail: the conflict over time. The two wolves leading their armies into battle are Work and Leisure, perhaps, with the forces of Maintenance and Necessity well-entrenched but aiming for expansion around the sidelines.
Allow me to quote a few passages which describe the shape of the wolf named Work (and I do recommend reading each post in full:)
Michael Ashcroft summarizes Total Work, “a term coined by philosopher Joseph Pieper:”
“Doing work is worthy. Not doing work is shameful, unless done in the service of work. Total Work says it's absolutely fine to nap, meditate, exercise, eat well, and sleep, because those things will make you more productive for work.”
“…at that moment I also saw the brilliant deviousness of Total Work: there is nothing anyone can do to get out without getting trapped by the first criterion: when work is the centre around which all of human life turns.
To decide to take an hour off from work is to assert that life is defined by work.”
Shreeda Segan explains the effects of the beast:
“…productivity is a fuck. The folk concept of productivity has done untold damage to people’s psyches, including yours. It has made people fearful of work, rather than invigorated to wake up and seize the day. It has created an unattainable archetype for a successful person…”
Work will consume you, if you let it; it is one of those ideas that is Out to Get You:
“Facebook wants your entire life. Users not consciously limiting engagement lose hours a day… Political causes want every spare minute and dollar. They want to choose your friends, words and thoughts… Television eats people’s lives. So do video games. So do drugs and alcohol.”
The motivating complices and structures of work will, if allowed, take everything. That is its purpose. Make no mistake, this is an incredibly useful engine; it runs on the resources it is afforded, and it is pretty damn efficient, considering those inputs. As we now understand, capitalism outperforms communism; it harnesses work, morphing it into its most pure form, as opposed to regarding it as a necessary evil to be minimized. Work is beneficial for society precisely because of that relentless nature.
And yet.
Imagine you’re a mage, powerful and valiant, attempting to liberate your town from your enemies. They cannot be allowed to persist, for they are torrential, rapacious demons; even their spectres must be banished to ensure your safety, and so you work the most powerful magicks you possess. You summon a dragon, a tremendous creature, a leviathan, all wings and scales and fiery breath, and the occupying forces are torn to shreds. It’s a rout.
Just when the celebrations start, the dragon realizes it has worked up a decent appetite, and it eats the populace of your town before flying off to rampage across the countryside.
Then, of course, the second the dragon leaves, the invaders work their way back and resume their ravaging ways.
[Imagine a political cartoon here, a really heavy-handed one: the Work Dragon has left and the Leisure Enemy rides in again, maybe saying “did you miss me?” or something else obviously, uncharitably villainous. The caption reads “when the cat’s away, the mice will play,” and there’s a smug air of superiority about the whole affair, complete with a New Yorker Monocle in the corner of the page.]
This is a decent frame too, I think; we are forced into such poor equilibria as a matter of reckoning with the extreme, for Leisure is just as bad as Work. Remember how television and Facebook and video games will steal your life and laugh at their triumph? The recognition of that deep, dark evil, coupled with understandable if inappropriate resistance against Work is what gives rise to procrastination’s worst forms.
Leisure carries half the blame, if not more, for the sensation of internal bleeding in the pit of the stomach, the “dear God I should be working but I cannot do it, neither can I rest,” and the tossing and turning and fitful lack of dreams.
I think, often, of Malcolm Ocean’s description of the conundrum as Rock-Paper-Scissors:
Go to bed. This is what my near-mode brain really wanted to do. Exceeeepppt, I had to…
Work on the paper. This is what my far-mode brain knew I had to do before I could sleep. But it was uncomfortable work, so instead I was more inclined to…
Go on Facebook. This was preferred by my near-mode brain over option 2, although not over option 1 (given just those two choices, both modes would have been aligned on wanting sleep more).
“So there I found myself, in a situation where neither part of me was getting what I wanted. My body would much rather have been sleeping than facebooking, but my mind would much rather have been working than facebooking. Yet there I was.”
This is the default state, the worst possible outcome. It is being unwilling to pay Scylla and still trying to skirt past Charybdis’ slow, inexorable destruction. Past the event horizon, on the edge of the gravity well, knowing it’s all bad now and convinced there’s no escaping. It reminds me of Simpson’s paradox, except the victim is aware of the deception in the back of their mind.
Let us more fully describe what Leisure is, as we have gotten the shape of Work and their battles’ scorched-earth half-resolutions: Leisure is anything that serves no purpose, an unintentional, default state which the Rock-Paper-Scissors exists as an attempted escape from. It is Not RPS, and it is Not Work, but it is also Not Good.
Leisure, as wolf, is a seeming salve from the wounds of Work, a welcome reprieve that reveals itself to have created no value, to have redressed no grievance, to have created nothing of value and accomplished no goal.
The key here —the defining factor which wraps up these attributes, is this: Leisure, as wolf, just as Work’s wolf, takes more than it gives.
We learn to manage this duality and to find balance within it over time, hopefully. I believe the conscious recognition of the equivalence to be a valuable first step in that process. Once we have identified the combatants, then, but before we are able to convince them to fight for us or in the times they are unruly, we can at least push them back a little. We can reduce the size of their battleground, and all that takes is a little chalk and conviction.
Supposedly.
I think of myself, sometimes, as a parliament of people, each with their own little quirks. Some of them have nicknames, even epithets, like the titles of Friends episodes. Orion-124, The One Who Drinks Coffee, has a few votes. Orion-51, The One Who Thinks in Words, has a number, but not a dominating number; Orion-78, The One Who Reads in Words, has more, because how else would I read? It’s a loose, very rough sort of mental model: reassuring in some ways, helpful in others.
I delude myself mildly, most likely, with the idea that I reason based on, well, reason— but this is how that charming image of The One Who Monologues To Himself filibustering from the cheap seats works; there’s an internal logic to it. I am so often caught in their crossfire that I sometimes forget they might as well be upright wolves in suits and ties. Bluster, debate, and pontification tend to obfuscate these rather important issues.
I wrote a sixth book chapter yesterday. I try to run the simulator of other people so that I can make them real. In this manner I can find myself contemplating the reality of these common characteristics from a more oblique perspective than usual: are other people governed by polities or packs? Does that impact how they spend their time? Can they be rewired, aligned toward a common good?
Should they be?
Should I be?
Links
I would be remiss not to link Conflict Vs. Mistake, a Slate Star Codex (RIP) post exploring this type of question as it applies to broader civics.
A soft cross-section slice of a short-lived phase of humanity —a photograph— tracked down through months of letters and research: one memorable issue of Marcin Wichary’s newsletter (Shift Happens, a regular dispatch of keyboard anecdotes and images.)
Ben Einstein takes apart and annotates a Juicero Press, explaining the hardware reasons why it commanded such a ridiculous cost (custom parts and complexity, mostly.)
Michelangelo’s Agony in the Sistine is a sliver of the pain and difficulty which it took to produce that chapel’s great ceiling. It also informs part of this well-researched, informative speculation for Why Michelangelo Disliked Leonardo da Vinci.
That’s all for today, I think.
Best wishes,