Choose your Daemons wisely. (Part Two)

How to exist in the world without succumbing

Catch the prelude [Here].

Doubt is your ultimate safety mechanism. Doubt is involuntary memory. Doubt is the smell of Proust’s Maman’s madeleines. Doubt is disquiet that sometimes doesn’t even have words until we make some up for it. Without doubt you can give yourself too easily to a cause and lose the ability to consider whether the cause is actually worthwhile. Likewise, you can get stuck in a twisted version of a good cause and completely lose yourself in that too. This is what seems to have been what happened in Silicon Valley.

Technology can be used for good. A great deal of good, [my next post will be about the positive uses of AI as a creative] on balance I would say that I am glad to have been born in the age of the internet, for it has imparted a far wider frame of reference and opportunities upon my generation than any cohort of humans has ever experienced before. The problem is that the culture which has produced modern digital technology is built upon a fundamentally toxic premise: ‘Move fast and break things’. An adage which emphasises action above all consideration, speaking without listening and struggling without introspection. To see it laid out plainly, listen to the first couple of minutes of this recent interview with Marc Andreessen, the founder of Andreessen-Horowitz, one of the most successful VC firms in SF:

He says it straight up: “I practice very little introspection... Move forward. Go.” The interviewer points out that it is common among CEOs of all industries, but especially apposite in tech.

This is the guy who funds many of the developments which are challenging our idea of what it even means to be human. And he is completely oblivious! So long as it can become a Unicorn, Mr Andreessen is in on it.

While it is true that to get on with anything you need to silence some of your doubt and perhaps sometimes work with the darker side of your character, to efface doubt completely opens the path to the madness that has come to linger over San Francisco. The madness which says we must go all in on AI at any costs, all in on mass surveillance at any costs, all in on military technology at any costs, we must pursue anything that could become big because it can become big. Not because it is good or bad but because it can be big. We want to be important men, so we must make things that have impact! An aesthetic quality has taken over all reason and subjugated everything to it.

It is not without reason that this is so, because the existence of people like that necessitates that you too need to act quickly and ‘with agility’ for long periods of a time, manage the stress of running a massively over-leveraged start-up, deal with the hyper-competitivity that comes with a somewhat cowboy attitude to intellectual property, &c. Success in that world is not merely dangerous, it is actively maddening.

Indeed, something similar is true of the stunted development that affects most celebrities. That idea that one is frozen at the age one became famous. The inability of these people to develop ethically, the fact that almost few of them are able to maintain life-long relationships and that many of them lose themselves to drugs and other vices. The general unhealthiness and unhappiness that pervades pop culture. The Stink of something daemonic.

It is also true of the number-goes-up mentality in finance; careerism in the professions; the publish-or-perish culture in academia; influencer culture; and in the pathological risk-aversion of traditional media and publishing. Rather than doing what stands upon itself and has worth in itself: everywhere that there is status in the world today, there is an attendant corrosion of the soul, such that the people in charge do not seem to be in-charge but instead seem like the most over-worked slaves to an overbearing master.

The system has compelled these people to forget themselves for so long that even if they were, by some fluke, to develop a capacity for introspection, they would struggle to know what to do with themselves.

Kierkegaard had a good way of describing this condition: “[You] whose nature it is to conquer… are never within yourselves but always outside. When the battle is won…then there is nothing more you know, you do not know how to begin; for only then do you stand at the true beginning.” (Either/Or 1843[1992], p.464).

I envy those who are Buddha-Natured and can endlessly retreat into themselves in search of Moksha; for my soul endlessly pushes me outwards, to do something out in the world. I cannot shrink from the daemonic because the soul commands me to fight! To fight is to engage in labour, and as we established last week, labour is itself daemonic.

It is thus that those of us who have this fire must learn how to tame dragons. To take what is necessary while giving less than our whole souls to Mephistopheles. We literally have no other options.

I assert that the key to this endeavour is to decide while we are still in-touch with ourselves, what shall count as enough.

If you think about it, that is what ties together every musical biopic, every CEO back-story, every dissatisfied corporate weapon, every celebrity breakdown: There is always the absence of ‘enough’. They are not enough; their accomplishments are not enough. They do not know how to begin, to return, to remember themselves because they will not even try until they have conquered everything. But they cannot conquer everything so instead they enter cycles of burnout and self-delusion. And round and round it goes…

Those of us who are compelled to be in the world but who do not wish to sell our souls must learn to identify at each juncture in which we remember ourselves, what shall be enough for us to stop and remember ourselves again. How far must we leap before we can take a moment within ourselves, free from the externalising push to carry on?

The simple answer is to identify, from your greater goals, what is achievable within a week, or two weeks, or at most a month, and state the intention. Much like a weightlifter, it is wise to set these intention. ‘I will complete X before the month is out.’ It is usually best to go for a goal that is genuinely satisfying. Build something, complete something: ideally something that is mostly within your control, inasmuch as your field allows. Break it down into as small a series of tasks as granular as you need (nested to-do lists are a great tool for this—more on that next week...) Once the goals are set they should be followed in the simplest way possible. Let yourself follow the plan, quell some of your doubts, but don’t forget yourself completely.

At the same time, you must make sure that there are frequent instances for reflection along the way, so that you can remember yourself, handle any doubts (by way of journalling or talking or whatever works,) and get the nod from your quietest voice that you are still following the correct path.

It also helps to have a grounding practice, such as yoga or running or even just regular walks (ideally without your phone.) or some other thing where you can retreat inwards and turn it into a kind of meditation. The great thing about meditative motion is that it remains appealing to you especially when you are busy, because it feels aesthetically like you are still grinding, while deferring burnout, while at the same time offering a space where your quietest whisper can breathe along with you. Those moments of enforced quiet, necessary for preserving dwindling sanity, are also the thing that can return you from the insanity of obsession when the time to return arrives. There is a neat alignment of the aesthetic and the ethical that comes with a moving practice: that lulls the daemon in you into a false sense of security.

In both cases, the journalling and the motion practice, you are creating opportunities for involuntary memory, or for crises of despair. You must make your work amenable to doubt, should it no longer be aligned with the orders of the soul.

You should only take on new responsibilities insofar as they do not interfere with your ability to do these things.

Do not let your practices of remembrance be tangential or ‘nice-to-haves’, they must be the hook upon which everything else hangs. You may advance only as fast as you can inculcate patience. If you start letting go of these things, then you will probably be lost until next you burn out: however long that will be.

It is also useful to have people around who can snap you out of it for that reason. The stronger your bonds of community/fellowship, the more likely it is that you will know when you are deviating from the path. People who love you tell you when you’ve taken a wrong turn.

If you can retreat from the world then retreat from it because the world is sick. Either you are not ready to face the world or it is not your destiny. If, however, you feel your soul pushing you back out again to do something, then something you must do. However, the pace of what you do must be determined not by your capacity to achieve but by your capacity to remember, and your goals must be broken down into the shortest, simplest, most well-scoped possible pieces. Only then can you work as hard as a demon and yet live as a fully-cultivated, dignified human being.