that was the year that was

Navel-gazey reflective end-of-year stuff; feel free to skip!

The Practice

A(nother) year in notebooks… the thicker one is a kind of catch-all/commonplace book, and the two thin ones topmost are specifically work-focussed, but the rest are morning pages only, the dedicated medium of the Practice, of which this has been the fifth full year.

The Practice (still) means a lot to me, but this year I’ve noticed a sort of drifting within it. To some extent, this is baked into the original conception: Ms Cameron argues that there’s no wrong way to do the morning pages (other than not doing them), that sometimes we just have to “rest on the page”, and that writing the pages is not capital-W Writing. Nonetheless, a lot more of this year’s pages have felt like resting-on-the-page than usual, and while on one level I see this as more of a diagnostic than a failure—a drifty set of pages in the morning often correlates with a drifty and unfocussed day to follow—experimentation suggests that the pages can (at least sometimes) be nudged toward more interesting and substantial writing, and that there’s a potentially duplex causality involved: like, if drifty pages seem to presage a drifty day to follow, then less drifty pages may actually result in a less drifty day. So in the year ahead, I think I will play around with leaving myself prompts for the next morning’s pages, and see what sort of effect that has, if any.

Writing in/for academia

My motivation for tweaking the Practice is due, at least in part, to feeling that I haven’t written much of worth this year. That feeling is not false, but it is perhaps deceptive, and rooted in a malaise that is less to do with quantity than with quality: I wrote a lot of stuff this year, but a lot of it was job applications and grant pitches which, as already discussed, largely fell into the void without leaving so much as a ripple. (It is perhaps telling to note that the grant I actually got was the one that took the least amount of thought and effort to write… though it also bears noting that it was for the lowest stakes.) As an estimate, I would say that I’ve spent a clear 1/3 of 2022—yes, four months—either working on applications or being so burned out and stressed by applications that I was effectively unable to work on anything else.

This is unsustainable and unhealthy, and over the last few months I’ve come to think that it may be futile—or at least that the odds of success are so low that the law of diminishing returns is very much in effect. For all sorts of reasons (systemic and circumstantial and personal) I’m very unlikely to land a faculty gig in Swedish academia; for the same reasons, plus some extra statistical stuff, getting a grant is also unlikely, and gets ever less likely the longer I spend trying to land one. This is not me being hard on myself, to be clear; I think I’m good at what I do, and that feeling is endorsed both by some sectoral metrics (I’m better cited than some full professors) and the testimony of sectoral peers. The older I get, the clearer it becomes that one of the biggest factors in success is persistence—but persistence is not merely (or even mostly) a matter of “grit”. If I spent another five years hustling around for every bit-part teaching gig and tide-me-over grant that came up, I’d probably have a fifty-fifty chance of getting a permanent position, maybe better. But I don’t have the luxury of time and patchy precarity, partly because I came to academia late (most folk at my career stage are at least a decade younger than me), and partly because I have to stay employed if I want to keep my residency and upgrade to citizenship here in Sweden—which, I have come to realise, is more concrete and important to me than the abstract goal of “becoming a proper academic”.

There’s also a simpler and more emotionally direct argument, which goes something like: “I’m spending four months a year begging for the permission and resources to do a compromised version of the work I want to do, which is four months in which I could just have been doing the work itself”. I want to write, and I want to write things that might be read; academia is one way to achieve the space and income that allows for the former, but at the cost of the latter, and with a bunch of formal constraints on the writing itself which are increasingly in direct opposition to what I actually want to say and how I want to say it (which, in turn, are increasingly inseparable; style is rhetoric, and the tacit asceticism of academic writing hobbles it more often than not).

Plus, to be real: over the last year I’ve met up with a handful of people who I’ve known since my earliest days in academia, when we were all part of the rather nebulous Weird Futures scene, and many of them have a book or books or similarly substantive projects out there in the world. Sure, I’ve done stuff, worked on some great projects—but they’re largely illegible outside of academia, even though there’s no real reason they should be. (Perhaps if I was a better self-promoter, they would be more legible than they are, but, well, there’s only so many hours in the day, which loops us back to the less emotional argument.)

I got into this business because I enjoyed writing and being read, and because I thought I had things worth saying. All those things still apply, and I know I’m a far better writer than I was a decade ago. But here I am spending four months in twelve with my cap in my hand, trying to frame my work in terms and concepts of which my work is fundamentally critical, in the hope of being given the space to do it, but also in the knowledge that even if I get to do it, it’s unlikely to achieve much beyond the enrichment of the academic publishing industry.

I could have written a fucking book this year in the time I pissed away asking for permission to do things that are pretty similar to writing a book. I’m wasting my time, and I’m wasting other peoples’ time. And I don’t think I can un-realise that realisation—though some days I find myself still trying pretty hard to do so.

Well, selah: 2023 is academic exodus year, I think. I’m gonna roll the dice on a couple more grants, because the effort involved in doing so will be minimal—I will rewrite the failed FORMAS bid from this year, as it didn’t score that badly, and there’s another one where the first-stage application is pretty short—but they’re gonna be my last attempts. If I’m gonna spend energy on pitching, then I’m gonna pitch what I actually want to do… which means essays and stories and books for publication outside the academic system. I’m also gonna throw everything I have at the Tomelilla gig, because it is (at least potentially) exactly what I’ve spent the last five years saying needs to be done with regard to futuring for (and with) the public good. I’ve also spent a lot of time carping about how the lay world doesn’t care about theory, but in truth academia doesn’t care for it much either, outside the much smaller circle of theorists. If I think there’s any value in theory—and I really do; I wouldn’t waste as much time and thought on something I didn’t believe in, I’m too damned lazy for that—then I have to find a way to make it relevant and useful in the real world.

In other words, it’s time to put up or shut up. I’ve had a good run—hell, even a lucky run—in academia, but it’s done.

Social media

I’m not even going to frame this section in the obvious way, because honestly I’m as tired now of Birdsite Discourse In Places that Are Not The Birdsite as I had become of the Birdsite itself. Nor will I indulge the temptation to claim that my own frustration with social media as a broad category is indicative of some greater societal shift… though I will admit that I really hope it is, because the whole thing has become such a tawdry shitshow, a monstrous waste of time and energy, in both senses of that latter term. (I saw the best minds of my generation &c &c.)

I signed up for Mastodon back in 2018, back when I still felt that I wanted a replacement or alternative to extant social media; there were many fewer instances back then, and I can’t remember exactly why I ended up on social.tchncs.de over any of the others, but the account sat moribund until the Muskening a few months ago, when it started getting follow requests from old friends. I’ve now migrated to assemblag.es, which is basically a tech-crit/STS neighbourhood—you can find me here, if that’s a thing you want to do—but even though the local instance vibe is much more to my taste, that Birdsitey sense of hyperbole, hysteria and relentless ongoing moral panics of every political hue can be heard in the wider “fediverse” (ugh), like the rumble of multiple squabbling protest marches throwing paving stones at one another just down the road.

It’s admittedly much easier to “curate your experience” (UGH) on the ‘don, but I find myself wondering whether I can be bothered; the innocence of early-doors social media cannot be recaptured my technological means, because it was an inherently social phenomenon, and you can’t wind the clock back on that shit. Furthermore, I was a different person with a different life back then: a life which, for better or for worse, seemed to have more spare hours in the day for scrolling through other people’s momentary thoughts and opinions and experiences and sharing my own, in a world which—absurd as it would have seemed had you claimed it at the time—felt a lot more innocent than this one.

Maybe I’m dooming myself to friendlessness and isolation in a world where social media is “just how people interact now”; honestly, I’m not so sure, and I think this recent SMBC captures my thinking on this issue quite well. But if that is the case, I think I’m ready to accept it. We’ll see how it goes, I suppose… but my motivation to make the best out of what increasingly feels like a glorious failed experiment running way past the point of useful results has dwindled to almost nothing. I think I’d rather spend half an hour a day writing letters by email to people; it reduces the field of correspondents considerably, but I enjoy the interactions so much more. If you feel the same, then paul [AT] paulgrahamraven [DOT] com is my address, drop me a line.

(I also want to blog more, but at this point in history saying you want and intend to blog more is the greatest blog cliche still in regular production among people who still have blogs, so let’s see how that goes. We can’t step into that river again, either…. though it might yet become one that is just as good in some different way.)

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Eh, that’ll do. 2022 reading round-up post tomorrow, I suppose.

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