Who Has the Time to Read Anymore?

Issue Three: The Understory

As we are now a few issues into The Understory, I wanted to write something a bit more personal. I also want to challenge you as a reader and part of my community in a different way. 

I’ve been wondering how well any piece of writing can compete for your attention. How long does it take you to open a periodical or an issue of The Understory once it hits your inbox? Do you read an article in one sitting, or in fragments, perhaps not finishing it at all? Do you go in search of primary sources after reading an article citing an author or book? My concern is that sustained acts of reading are no longer compatible with our ideas about a profitable, productive, or self-improving use of time.

We have focused attention while listening in-person that is often quite different from our discipline when outside of a social context (and no I am not talking about social media). Let’s imagine we were sitting across the table from one another. We would likely engage in a deep and lengthy conversation about some of the many topics of shared interest between us. Neither of us would look at our watches or phones nor would we request each other to summarize the main argument in advance or skip ahead in the conversation. It would take a few hours for everything to unfold. We’d bump elbows and go home fulfilled. Through that conversation we would have expanded each other’s thinking, and perhaps have introduced each other to new concepts and questions.

Now let’s contrast that to the way you read. I am guessing you have multiple online media sources that you check daily, perhaps even multiple times a day. You scroll through the headlines, rarely open an article, and even more rarely read an entire article from start to finish. At work you get hundreds of emails per day on top of all the chat communications through Slack or Teams. In between times get consumed by social media applications—four minutes here, one minute there, scroll, like, congratulate, close. At the end of the day you retire to the bedroom and notice the books piled on the nightstand. They beckon to be opened, but you usually find yourself too tired to do so. At New Year’s someone asks how many books you read this year. The answer is always in the single digits, and frequently under five. You make a resolution to read more next year.

Over the past few years, there have been myriad books articulating the bleak view of our time-starved plight and how we might escape it. While I liked Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (2019), I’ve been captivated by Jia Tolentino’s language and reflections in The New Yorker and her book, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion (2019), on the rigours and challenges of days spent within the system of late capitalism:

“The chopped salad is engineered…to free one’s hand and eyes from the task of consuming nutrients, so that precious attention can be directed toward a small screen, where it is more urgently needed, so it can consume data: work email or Amazon’s nearly infinite catalog or Facebook’s actually infinite News Feed, where, as one shops for diapers or engages with the native advertising sprinkled between the not-hoaxes and baby photos, one is being productive by generating revenue for a large internet company, which is obviously good for the economy, or at least it is certainly better than spending lunch reading a book from the library, because who is making money from that?”

In Issue Two I talked about how the words we often use to describe our state of mind (overworked, frazzled, fragmented, distracted, overwhelmed, stretched thin) tally the personal tolls resulting from a culture of unlimited growth and of proliferating products, services, and entertainments competing for our attention. Tolentino, Odell and others describe both the inescapability of our deluged situation, as well as visions of a lost equilibrium we should aspire to regain. They suggest that the situation we are in is not entirely our fault. At the same time, it is upon each of us to resist the endless barrage of external solicitations and the internal temptation to always be optimizing ourselves. 

It is imperative that we invest in learning, feeling, thinking, and contemplation. The impoverishment of those activities as a result of our hurried, constant growth culture is leading to not only a climate crisis, but also a crisis of leadership and intelligence. I hope by the end of this issue I will have re-energized your pursuit to overcome the challenges of a 24/7 life both for your personal well-being, and for that of our living planet.

The Attention Economy 

In his book 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (2013), Jonathan Crary builds a nuanced understanding of the attention economy that envelops our every waking moment with nonstop production and consumption controlled by corporate priorities. The surfaces around us create a kind of continuous interface of illuminated screens demanding interest and responses. We spend our days endlessly managing mutating devices and platforms, which are continuously being replaced with new versions that expand the previous landscape of choices and services: 

“Submission to these arrangements is near irresistible because of the portent of social and economic failure—the fear of falling behind, of being deemed outdated. The rhythms of technological consumption are inseparable from the requirement of continual self-administration. Every new product or service presents itself as essential for the bureaucratic organization of one’s life, and there is an ever-growing number of routines and needs that constitute this life that no one has actually chosen.” 

If you feel continuously behind or “out-of-the-loop” on a new technology, Crary’s writing is a reminder that you didn’t actually explicitly choose this non-human life, nor must you continue trying to master the new product offerings. But it takes a kind of resilience to our sleepless machines and social pressures to ignore the reminders bleeping from our devices or the hushed encouragements of our friendly voice assistants. The screened world has encroached on our analog world so much that we often are challenged to escape its deleterious effects anywhere. Crary talks about the impoverishment of contemplative, social, and analog experiences through the process of their documentation: 

“Real-life activities that do not have an online correlate begin to atrophy, or cease to be relevant. There is an insurmountable asymmetry that degrades any local event or exchange. Because of the infinity of content accessible 24/7, there will always be something online more informative, surprising, funny, diverting, impressive than anything in one’s immediate actual circumstances.”

Online will always be like that dialogue in a movie script that was so perfectly crafted, we feel like inferior humans for not saying it just like that when the situation presents itself in our own lives. If we hold ourselves to the standards of the best version that can be extracted from our 24/7 archives, we will forever be disappointed in ourselves and everyday situations. Much like my comparison of the social dinner together versus the solitary online activities above, we must not succumb to the incursions into our “real-life activities.” We need to remind ourselves and each other that the spaces of fulfillment and human enrichment lie outside the applications, platforms, and systems that seek nothing more than to capture and control our time and experiences.

Slowing the Hurried Life

For those who know me, you will perhaps sense a certain irony in me writing this. I’ve been a long-time advocate and integrator of networked technologies that help groups communicate more efficiently. I’ve built technology companies and helped other companies build new technologies. I have even built a coaching practice over the past five years working with senior leadership at large corporations helping them understand and navigate digital strategy.

Non-coincidentally, over the past decade my time for contemplation and reading difficult things was decreasing, eventually grinding to a near-complete halt while trying to run my own agency. Reading the news meant skimming headlines. I was informed just enough to be aware of the contemporary conversations, yet without the depth of investigation and contemplation to consider their implications. I was drawing down a density of knowledge and understanding that I had built during my two university degrees and in the years before we had kids. Big concepts that were changing the environmental movement such as the circular economy and regeneration were outside of my field of view. Every day felt like a struggle against time. And yes, I too was that person with the stack of books collecting dust on the nightstand and recording single digits on books read each year.

Since I began concepting The Understory, I have been asked why I am writing it. But even more frequently I am being asked how I write it, or more specifically how I find the time to write it. That question is immediately followed by a personal caveat by the questioner saying they can barely manage to find time to have focused reading, let alone the process of spending hours writing. I do not find or make extra time, I simply allocate it differently. I am not in favour of ‘biohacks’ either in nomenclature or practice. The pursuit of optimized productivity through polyphasic sleeping, diets/fasting, cryotherapy chambers, and other novelties hitch one’s wagon to a culture of continuous work and consumption as described by Crary and Tolentino, when efforts should instead be focused on neutralizing its effects on your life. 

My secret will never make a great headline because it is too obvious. I started to devote time to reading and thinking. Beginning last year, I shut down my agency, and no longer took projects that required continuous and yet fractional attention such as social media campaigns. I cast off staying abreast of new technologies and every media headline in favour of reading for quality: long-form articles, podcasts, books. My day begins by reading only one thing for fifteen to thirty minutes, without chasing any peripheral vectors, and before chasing emails or to-do lists. Gradually that time expanded from just mornings to evenings. A personal commitment to slowness in apportioning attention and digesting ideas brought me to writing this publication. I also have a degree of privilege that provides me with a flexible time horizon to focus on concerns beyond sustenance.

A Return to Consciousness

Nearly 50 years ago a team of 17 researchers published a report commissioned by the Club of Rome called The Limits of Growth (1972). The Introduction begins with an acknowledgement that “every person in the world faces a series of pressures and problems that require his attention and action.” The problems people focus on (otherwise known as the ‘finite pool of worry’) were then plotted along a space-time chart.

The research team found that a majority of people as shown in the lower left hand corner were concerned with people in their immediate space such as family and short-term horizons. Only a few people (scattered in the top right quadrants) concerned themselves with problems of large populations over an extended period of time. “In general the larger the space and the longer the time associated with the problem, the smaller the number of people who are actually concerned with the solution,” noted the report’s authors. 

While the authors did not label them as such, we can recognize those few people in the top right quadrants as having the potential for leadership because of both the spaces where they operated and the timescale they were working in. The troubling nature of this graph is what if those people in leadership positions tasked with thinking across larger spaces (businesses, neighbourhoods, nations, world) prefer and end up thinking on short, rather than long time horizons. And they do so because the complexity of thinking on long time horizons is too daunting given the space afforded for such thinking in their own lives. And here lies our present-day leadership conundrum across shareholder focused companies and the tenures of elected officials. We need leaders operating in the top right quadrants, but most are descending to the far left ones.

The former Editor-in-Chief of The Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, recognized that CEOs were increasingly falling into a quadrant of ever-larger spaces of influence with increasingly shorter time horizons in his article for Quartz. “To navigate this age of corporate-social existentialism, any CEO today is being called on to add a new skill-set to their CV: that of the moral philosopher,” says Rusbridger. 

“Traditional moral philosophers had the advantage of time. They could—and can—think long and hard, sometimes for a lifetime, about particularly intractable issues. A modern-day CEO doesn’t have that luxury. When the moment comes, no CEO will have the time to sit down with a learned book and a cold towel on their head to ponder.”

Rusbridger's recommendation is to hire a CMP (Chief Moral Philosopher). My recommendation is to forgo Rusbridger’s recommendation to expand the executive team and to instead build a more learned and contemplative culture amongst the leadership team corporations already have. This investment, rather than creating an executive appendage, doesn’t require reading up on issues of complexity in the moment your organization confronts them. Patagonia illustrated that perfectly (as profiled in Issue Two). However, I do agree with Rusbridger that business leaders are “also accountable for a company’s position on the swathes of social issues that are dividing societies around the world.” But, to me, this means better preparing our leadership to think critically rather than abdicating morals to a single individual on a management team.

Conclusion

Good leaders create the space and time to read, think, seek counsel, and ask astounding questions. At the root of those big questions is a complexity of understanding, as well as a curiosity that needs to be nurtured. The accelerating demands of our 24/7 world create regular incursions into our contemplative experiences that erode our well-being and our ability to challenge ourselves and those around us with thoughts and strategies that extend beyond the near-term. We must resist the impoverishment of critical thought for ourselves, our communities, and the planet. 

While your version of ongoing learning and contemplation doesn’t have to parallel mine, I hope you can create your own version of slowness and commit to it. If you are in a leadership role and are looking for assistance creating that time, please reach out.

Go forth and make a difference in the week ahead. 

Adam