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| BECOMING, BEING AND LIQUIDITY |
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| This is an archived blog post from 2021 regarding my thoughts on the obsession our society has with becoming and how it relates to me personally. This is not a fully cohesive concept, as I wrote this in one sitting while journaling |
| 2021-06-08 - finished |
As a society, we have become so obsessed with Becoming that it takes away our ability to live in Being. What is Becoming? What is Being? I’ll try to connect these questions to a few topics and view them at a high level. I have a feeling that my definitions would not suffice if a strict philosopher were to view them written on paper, but I’m going to go with my senses. I can speak to becoming as something I feel is innate inside of us. For me, it has become something of an obsession. So it seems with our modern culture. This is what takes up most of my brainpower during the day. It’s an obsession with the future and trying to see all possible vectors towards some distant point in time. While I cannot control exactly where I end up, my default mode seems to use most of my effort to do just that.
I can pinpoint the exact moment when I became existentially aware. It was not the normal question of “I wonder what I will be doing in 10 years?”. This was clear, wide, and with high resolution. The fog had lifted. I was sitting at work, looking at emails early in the morning. There was this rush of an intense feeling of what am I doing. That was one of the first times in my life that I’ve been hit by that type of realization, the existential kind. Not long before that, I had been fired from a job after almost 4 years with no warning. My attempt to explain it now is helping me realize that up to that moment of clarity, I had not thought about the future and my place in it.
Most of my daily personal efforts over the past 4 years have been in service to the future. What am I doing now that will give me the greatest outcome in the future? Even more, my focus has been on enhancing my abilities to eventually give that back to society to make a positive impact. I think anyone who is existentially conscious wants to make an effort to give what they can offer. My concern is our societal obsession with Becoming. How are we able to focus on that without becoming self-serving narcissists? I have struggled with this, and I don’t have the answer to that question. The differences in each individual could provide a kaleidoscope of answers of how one would handle an obsession with personal optimization, enhancement, and knowledge gaining.
Initially, when thinking about this problem, I would say that my end goal is altruistic, but so far, I’ve had a strict focus on improving myself. There have been many times that the people around me have been neglected because of my focus on becoming something. I don’t even know what that something is or where it’s located. I do know that it’s somewhere in my future. That knowledge is fuel for my effort to become what I set out to do. All of this effort rests on the assumption that I will accomplish what I set out to do. That all of my efforts now will sum up and output the answer that I’ve prepared for. This may be wishful thinking.
For most of my life, I’ve had a sense that I was supposed to do something or be part of something bigger than myself. I’ve always felt this pull towards something visceral. I need to be there, not here. Wherever “there” is, I have not found it. What I have found shows that no matter where I am at personally, my view is always shifting away from here and now.
BEING
Society seems to always be showing us to not accept our current selves, but to become the person it wants us to be. By following a set of guidelines that it has laid out for us, we can become who we truly want to be. Why stay the same when you can be better? Always in a state of becoming. How do we usher in times of just Being? How do we sense when it’s time to flow back to the other and vice versa? It seems that a person can’t stagnate in one realm for too long, or other parts of themselves will be neglected.
Our attempt to weave in and out of Being and Becoming ought to be a conscious effort in the quest to gain wisdom. Individually, I struggle with the constant need to always feel a forward motion. A progression. This feeling is encouraged by everything around us. Attention to the things that surround us, accumulation forced in by societal pressure, pulls my being out of focus. This could also be said for the amount of content engineered to grab our attention. It’s a strong force in our daily lives.
Spending moments in Being, in my opinion, is a different animal. From personal experience, there is a way that you have to feel into this mode of life. Unlike Becoming, it requires you to slow down, to scan the interiors of your body, and to be accepting of the now. Concepts like career and progress don’t seem to be adding up. There is a sense of a lack of longevity in a lot of my personal projects. I’ll attribute some of that to personality, but I see a connection in how it pertains to endemic uncertainty and how we (as modern humans) don’t have the time to “solidify”. Zygmunt Bauman, whose research recently caught my attention, explored this topic. I’m interested in current availability and how the lack of it is causing us to be out of sync with our Being-Doing-Becoming cycle (this tripartite cycle is fully explained by Daniel Schmactenberger as he specifically lays this out in a recent Stoa call ). At first glance, it would seem that the lack of personal responsibility could be the highest contributor to the instability of long-term plan implementation. Even more than implementation, follow-through could be seen as nonexistent. A person could also argue that seeing a plan through to its end is not the issue; the problem lies in perspective-shifting, which can cause long-term plans to dissolve. There has been a fragmentation of decision-making that can be directly tied to the lack of available (mental) space for deep processing. This type of processing, from what I’ve experienced, is necessary for making well thought out plans and pulling the signal from the noise. More importantly, it’s necessary to create that space for yourself to pull out the important signals, not just any signal. Without the mental space for this, it seems that we end up in a feedback loop of unchecked self-assurance without ever parsing out the facts. The ever-constant connections make sensemaking increasingly difficult.
CURRENT AVAILABILITY AND LACK OF SELF-RELIANCE
Modern life has taken the amount of mental availability that we have and has chopped it up into micro spaces of thought. These micro spaces are owned by the things we own. Specifically, the devices that connect us to the internet. In terms of current availability, our inclination (or even obsession) to always be connected pulls our attention away from long-term work. I would even add the type of work that requires more than an hour of focus in this category, but would also add it to flow state type of activities. Living in and out of these spaces, which are small in the amount of time, requires the type of agency that can hold many things at once. This is like a plate-balancing act, except for the mind. By jumping from one thing to another in everyday life, it becomes a habit. We get used to the anxiety of having to manage several things at once. This becomes the norm. I can connect this with what Zygmunt is explaining on his topic of liquid modernity. His idea states:
“Liquid modernity created a new and unprecedented setting for individual life pursuits, confronting individuals with a series of challenges never before encountered. Social forms and institutions no longer have enough time to solidify and cannot serve as frames of reference for human actions and long-term life plans, so individuals have to find other ways to organize their lives.”
His idea is not as granular as what I stated above but is a macro view on society not having the time to solidify its mode of Being. From what I can see, this can be shown at any level, from the individual human up to the whole of society. Because our institutional certainty has fragmented, looking upwards is no longer a reliable option in terms of making sense of where we are. An effort must be made by the person to take information gathering seriously and to pay attention to the narrative. By offloading the complexity of managing incoming information to others, we risk getting pulled in directions we want to avoid. At the same time, always crunching information can exhaust our ability to extract important information and lead to poor decision-making. Again, it’s a balancing act, and ultimately, we have to decide how much we can handle at any given time. Completely disconnecting is not the answer. Always on is not the answer, either. Current availability, or the lack of it, plays into this balancing act. The lack of it can tip the scale and inhibit our ability to filter the information we deem important to the subjects we are interested in. Increasingly, institutions have made an effort to take the role of sense maker in our lives, and it’s easy to let them. If we make an effort to sit in Being, it’s possible that we could be more aware of whom we trust.
WHO'S THE DRIVER?
Ultimately, time management comes down to discipline, but that’s not the only facilitator of Being. Awareness, embodiment practices, the shedding of daily distractors, and intention are factors. The liquidity of our modern life teaches us to jump around from topic to topic, event to event, app to app, person to person. If we could zoom out on a graphic of each person’s daily current availability, it would look like a long horizontal timeline of super small vertical segments. Those segments would show that we fill each given time-space with something that has been trying to catch our attention. To some, this would confirm our suspicions that we spend too much of our lives completely distracted. It would possibly show that we are not at the wheel of the vehicle but are in the passenger seat. In this seat, it’s much easier to be complacent. You don’t have to be aware of the things coming your way, and you can avoid looking at them. Essentially, you have no control while sitting in the passenger seat. I would not call this giving up, but I would put it more in line with delegating your availability to someone (or something) else. Without the opportunity to control the vehicle, we live in uncertainty. One could argue the opposite of my position above and state that by being in the passenger’s seat, you would have a better opportunity to take a look at your surroundings. I agree with this. With everything, there is a balancing act. This is where operating in the mode of Being can help us determine which seat is best for us at any given time. For the purpose of this thread, I would say that this is similar (loosely) to code-switching. It could be called seat-switching. By alternating between passenger and driver, we can take some control of ourselves and decide (in some time frame) where we want to be. This can be hard to determine. Most of the time, we could make the wrong decision. Is a decision wrong if we learn from it?
LINGUISTIC TOOLS
There is a term in code-switching literature called diglossia, which is a situation where two different dialects (languages) are used in different situations. Vernacular language is paired (or used alongside) with a highly codified lect. Specific situations call for the use of either one, depending on the setting. In speech, literature, or education, the higher version would be used. In everyday life, the local variety would be used. The interesting connection that I would like to make between diglossia and what I call seat-switching is another term called multilingualism. (NOTE: For the sake of this attempt at a connection, I will not try to explain dichotomies between dialects, but I think the link above is a good topic in linguistics.) Having this ability makes it possible to switch between languages and dialects. Depending on where you are or who you are with would determine what language you need to use.
Figuring out where we are is an important skill to have, but when we get there, it’s imperative to know how to operate in that position. In the vehicle that is you, determining which seat to be in can be difficult. As a driver, taking control and moving in a certain direction is key. As a passenger, you should also know your direction but are not actively in control of where you are traveling. Each of these positions requires specific knowledge, but all lie within the domain of traveling. In the modes of Being/Doing/Becoming, we need the tools to help us figure out where to be, what to do, and how to communicate with others who may be in different positions than we are. Communicating is key. Not just with others but within ourselves as well. We need to understand the context in which we operate and how to change seats. The quality of the connection between those positions is facilitated by our skill in managing them.
Our failure to respond to uncertainty makes it difficult to determine where we should be operating at any given moment. There may be a select few people who are at a point where this does not require a lot of effort, but most of us are not there. It’s important to use certain frameworks to help us make sense of what is happening around us. For the most part, most of our sensemaking requires us to narrow down complex issues into something that we can understand, but one size does not fit all. As Korzybski said, “a map is not the actual territory”. In determining where we are at in ourselves, certain tools help us, but we need to be careful about overuse if we feel one works over the other. To determine where we are at with a clear mind, we have to be antifragile.
LIQUIDITY AND UNCERTAINTY: OPPORTUNITIES
In light of all of this uncertainty and liquid times, we have an opportunity to break from the institutional process and create our own. With all of the negatives of “connectedness” and the culture around social media, we also have the opportunity to mold something that can satisfy the need for wholeness and the necessity of choice. The ability to have an infrastructure that scales can allow us to become live players. As we watch our institutions corrode, it seems difficult to replace something that has a multigenerational existence. They were created for an age that no longer exists. Instead of focusing on a replacement, we should focus on creating new things. Jordan Hall makes a case for moving to local experimentation. “Different approaches for different people in different locations”. The key is avoiding an overly centralized way to do something and performing actions at a more localized level. Communication between organizations is key. There should be an effort within organizations and groups to give people the tools to be more capable within themselves so that they can better support the people around them. Hall has a set of nine principles for big change that are still relevant.
In the tripartite system of Being/Doing/Becoming, no mode is more important than the other. Focusing on one more than the others can cause us to have a skewed sense of where we are in the world. Operating in the mode of Being can allow us to better view the territory in which we live.