The Art of Living
The Convivial Society: Vol. 5, No. 4
Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology and culture. There are countless paths into these expansive subjects, and countless paths running through their interrelationship. To think and write about technology and culture is just to think and write about how to be human in the world today, and the mode of my writing shifts a fair amount accordingly. Last time a rather long essay in a more academic vein; this time around a brief reflection, which I hope you’ll find usefully suggestive to your own thinking and practice. Cheers!
A thought for your consideration on a Friday afternoon:
The art of living, like any other art, is the art of learning to work creatively within the constraints of the medium.
I would not claim to be an artist, of life or of any other medium. But this thought came to mind recently as I washed dishes and mulled over some of Wendell Berry’s work, which I’d just been reading.
I’m drawn to the idea of an art of living much more so than to the compulsive search for life hacks, regimens of self-improvement, or self-optimization schemes. These too often feel like a doubling down on the insistence that we can always do more if only we apply the right technique. They also suggest that the path to happiness involves the discovery of a set of methods which I might readily apply to my work, my relationships, my health, etc. independently of any virtues I might need to cultivate or vices I ought to correct. They draw my attention to what more I might do and what more I might have rather than who I might become.
An art, on the other hand, presupposes limits and invites the artist to work with and within those limits.1 These limits, inherent to the medium itself, can be disregarded, but then you would not have art. The limits of the medium are precisely what call forth the creative effort. They are what create the conditions that make art possible.
Thinking in terms of an art of living also invites me to consider how I might need to change in order to practice it well. It suggests not a set of methods which demand nothing of me, but a set of practices or skills which I must cultivate and whose cultivation changes me in the process. These skills enable me not only to produce something, but also to see the possibilities latent within the medium and to imaginatively draw these out—not to make a demand, but to perceive and respond to an invitation.
By way of contrast, the ideal of limitlessness consumption serves the modern economy quite well, but it does not serve the person well at all.2 This ideal imparts to us all a spirit of scarcity that darkens our experience: not enough time, not enough attention, not enough capacity to care. But upon what does this spirit feed? It feeds, in part, on the temptation to live as if there were no limits to what I am able to do: the tasks I can accomplish, the things I can care about, the information I can consume, etc.
We are formed by the structures of modern society to be insatiable consumers of an increasing range of commodified things and experiences and services. There is no art in this, because the tacit assumption that we must buy into along the way is that there is no limit to what we can consume.
But if the constraints of a medium of art appear self-evident—the canvas is only so large, the instrument plays only a certain range of notes—what are the limits of the medium on which the art of life plays. Indeed, what exactly is the medium in view?
This post is meant to be suggestive rather than prescriptive, so I hesitate to answer that question in definitive fashion (as if I could). Rather, I’ll simply tell you how I thought about the matter.
Perhaps because I had Berry on my mind and had recently written about his distinction between those who wish to live as creatures and those who wish to live as machines, I thought of our embodied condition as the medium of the art of living. The stuff of life is our bones and flesh. We may be more than bone and flesh, but we are not less.
The constraints of the medium, then, are the constraints of our embodiment, or at least that is my proposition to you. And these are, in part, the constraints of place and time. I can only be here now, and I can be here now only for so long, which means there are only so many things to which I can meaningfully attend at length and at depth. I may choose to accept this reality and respond creatively to it, or I can resist it and seek to transcend it and embrace every tool that promises to help me do so.
However, to pursue the art of life is, again in part, to learn to perceive the possibilities latent in the here and now rather than to submit to the temptation of digitally-abetted telepresence or to defer our “real” living to another more propitious time that never quite arrives.
To practice the art of living is to learn to see not what we wish were before us but what is, in fact, there, but also what it can be. What can this encounter with the stranger be? What can be made of this moment I am given? It is, fundamentally, a matter of learning to draw out the fullness latent in our encounters with the world, rather than perpetually skimming the surface of our experience. But to practice this art we must first accept and even celebrate the limits of our embodiment, the right and proper medium of our living. In doing so, we might be surprised by what can be made out of the stuff of life.
The Convivial Society is free to read for all, but welcomes the support of those who value the writing and have the means to support it.
Here as always when I talk of limits, I want to be clear that I am not talking about limits unjustly imposed by others. However, by making this clarification I do not mean to suggest that the only limits worth embracing are those I have freely chosen.
In The Uncontrollability of the World, which I highly recommend, sociologist Hartmut Rosa writes perceptively about the drive for more: “To argue that modernity is driven by an increasing demand—higher, faster, farther—is to misunderstand its structural reality. This game of escalation is perpetuated not by a lust for more, but by the fear of having less and less. It is never enough not because we are insatiable, but because we are, always and everywhere, moving down the escalator. Whenever and wherever we stop to take a break, we lose ground against a highly dynamic environment, with which we are always in competition.”
I think we make choices about whether what we're doing is for utility or beauty or both -- when my child speaks to me, I make choices about how I respond: am I saying things that bring joy and disturb the current, things that tickle and delight, things that make a moment matter, or am I just hurrying them to get to the next thing and then the next. So I think in this way our choices can amount to art but they can also be many other things with many other moods: a rush, a slog, a merry-go-round, a circus, a war, and so on.
In our culture / civilisation we are subject to training of several kinds. Leaving aside education and work, the corporate world through advertising has become increasingly effective over recent generations at commanding indirect as well as direct strategies - perhaps the methods are quasi-science? The recent devices reach even more effectively than before because data collection provides 'feedback'. We can expect AI to take these methods for modifying attention and intention to new levels. There are better 'fixes' available. I listened to Nate Hagens 'Frankly' this afternoon recounting the remedial effects of his recent stay among convivial people in India who retain a traditional culture and art forms.