1: Getting better at getting better is what RiseWithDrew is all about.
Monday through Thursday, we explore ideas from authors, thought leaders, and exemplary organizations.
On Fridays or over the weekend, we are exploring some of the life lessons captured by author Oliver Burkeman in his wonderful book Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts.
It was a glorious morning in Paris in the 1930s.
Philosopher Raymond Aron was walking in the park with his wife Suzanne and their newborn daughter when he saw his friend Simone Weil, who was crying uncontrollably, Oliver writes.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
She responded through her tears, “There is a strike in Shanghai, and troops fired on the workers!”
Simone “was one of those people who never manage to abstract themselves from the torrent of suffering in which humanity finds itself engulfed,” scholar Alain Supiot explains.
Who is to say, Oliver observes, if Simone “was wrong to feel such distress about a horror unfolding thousands of miles away, to which she had no personal connection.”
Certainly, being concerned about the suffering of others is commendable.
Oliver writes: “But I’m on safer ground asserting that most of us, including me, would be entirely unable to function were we to experience the emotional impact of every killing or act of injustice around the world as if it had befallen a loved one.
“And yet that isn’t too far,” he notes, “from what’s increasingly demanded of us today.”
2: Oliver acknowledges that this claim may seem strange since the current era is “often characterized as unprecedentedly self-centered and heartless.”
Still, because of modern technology, we are now so connected, he observes, that we’re “liable to be asked to care, with maximum intensity, about everything. . .
“Anyone scrolling a social media platform can be instantaneously invited to care about more human suffering than the greatest saints in history would have encountered over the course of their whole lives.”
Not only that, but the revenue model for many social media firms and news organizations is no longer the news itself but our attention.
“We understand that this arrangement boosts the prominence of pointless celebrity feuds, polarizing conspiracy theories, and videos of people humiliating themselves in public,” Oliver explains, “it hardly matters whether or not a story is important, so long as it’s compelling. . .
“Even when some event in the news is legitimately extremely serious, we can be sure it’ll be presented as even worse than that—except in those corners of the internet where there are more clicks to be gained by just as misleadingly denying its existence altogether.”
It was in 2016, after Donald Trump’s first election victory and the Brexit vote, that Oliver “first began to notice a bizarre effect of all this in myself, and more acutely in certain friends and acquaintances. It wasn’t simply that people were addicted to doom-scrolling (although they certainly were).
“It was that they’d started ‘living inside the news.’ The news had become the psychological center of gravity in their lives – more real, somehow, than the world of their home, friends, and careers, to which they dropped in only sporadically before returning to the main event.
“They seemed significantly more personally involved in whether Trump would fire his Secretary of State, or whom he might nominate for the Supreme Court, than in any of the local or personal dramas unfolding in their workplaces or families or neighborhoods. . .
“Living inside the news feels like doing our duty and being a good citizen,” he notes, yet “this behavior in no way makes the world a better place.”
3: So, what are we to do?
We can begin by picking our battles. And not feeling bad about doing so.
“By embracing our limitations in this way,” he writes, we’ll “be in a position to do more to fight the battles we do pick, and also thereby to feel better about ourselves, than the person who tries to care about everything. (Who may be largely focused, in any case, on trying to show that he or she cares about everything.)”
In times gone by, there was a saying about certain horrifying news events: “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.”
“But that’s a relic of a time when people had attention to spare,” Oliver believes, “and when it wasn’t in the vested interests of media outlets to stoke as much outrage as possible.
“In an age of attention scarcity, the greatest act of good citizenship may be learning to withdraw our attention from everything except the battles we’ve chosen to fight.”
A mindset about which William James once said: “The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook.”
More next week!
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Reflection: Where am I letting the constant stream of news and outrage pull my attention away from what truly matters in my life and community?
Action: Identify one area where I can consciously withdraw my attention from the noise and focus my energy on making a difference where it counts.
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