“Move Slow and Fix Things” - thank you, we should make flags and bumper stickers. I enjoyed this rich and nuanced essay, lots to slow down and think about.
I know it well. One day I need to write a piece on how humans/cultures/mobs/societies unthinkingly adopt slogans and narratives. Why didn't anyone, or any 10 million, hold up a hand and say: "Really? Is that what we say to our 6-year olds running around in the antique store? NO you may NOT!"
Haha, I love that! Yes, I spent the past new 10 years in Silicon Valley and I think you are right, there is a startling lack of that voice of reason. I think culturally the Valley encourages the suspension of that kind of reason, almost like in frat culture or hyper-masculine competition: "I triple dog dare you to go with this crazy idea!"
This culture DOES produce things like mottos, slogans and values that sound, to the world outside of that very small and odd bubble, like utter delusion.
Hi. I am only halfway through reading this, a most eloquent and yes, exquisite essay. (Thank you!) I love this: "Loneliness, then, may not be a lack of intimacy: it may in fact be a lack of embeddedness. We may, in fact, be utterly “seen and known” by our friends and family. But more than that, we want to be required, to be held taut in a web of interchange that is aware — by necessity — of our talents and our resources. We want to be held close, but for that closeness to be selfish on the other’s part. We want our closeness to be mutually beneficial, not merely a favor or an expression of generous love."
I recently quit my 100% remote job because, among several reasons, I felt such a painful lack of connection with the people of that company and of being amongst others' energy. But I love how you describe it, as "embeddedness." In my case, I did NOT feel seen and known. I felt very unseen, and unknown...to these people I was working with and who I was supposedly to get some high-pressure work done with. AND it so happens, the desk job with its requisite hours to log was preventing me from getting out in nature, which is the true church of my soul. For many long years, anyone who truly knows me will say, when I am down, "She just needs to get out in nature."
Your essay on this topic is precise and wonderful.
Heather, thank you for your warm response to the essay! Yes. I have been thinking a lot about remote work basically since COVID began -- the way in which it seemed to "freeze" my work relationships. Those I was close to, I have remained closed to, but the new folks -- there is only so much one can bond through the screen.
There can even be embeddedness, but can there be mutuality without physicality? I'm not sure.
May you spend many long hours in the true church of your soul!
Thank you so much! It's not from a theorist, far as I'm aware; it's just my way of naming the part of the mind that traffics mostly in language -- a part that was much strengthened in me by a college education that both grew and shrank me in equal measure ;)
I’m currently writing a book review and this phrasing works perfectly for a concept I’ve been dancing around. Would it be appropriate to cite you as “writer Michelle Jia”?
Gorgeous essay, Michelle. I love the twist at the end. You were right, I was expecting a "nature is utopia" ending. Instead you explored the consequences of embeddedness in nature with a clear realism that was stunning.
It makes me think: The embeddedness in nature we desire is embeddedness within a system that is constantly dying and rebirthing itself, its individual actors competing and eating each other just as much as they support and rely on each other. Returning to nature isn't returning to a utopic state of innocence, but to a reality in which awareness of the imminence of death is ever-present, along with the awareness that the only thing standing between us and death is our us-ness.
Thus, as you pointed out, we desire to be necessary to each other's survival. But that kind of necessity is hard to come by in today's society. It's hard to come by because, at least in first-world countries, at least in non-marginalized communities, it's easy to survive. Our survival is outsourced to the invisible arms of the industrial machine and to the relatively affordable technology that now powers our society.
Maybe it's for this reason that positive psychology has created a distinction between surviving and thriving. In the modern, first-world context, it's not enough to survive. Real happiness is something else, something you have to pursue—something that seems more elusive the more you reach for it. But maybe this is not how things always have been, or always have to be. I can only imagine, but I imagine that when survival is a communal act, surviving *is* thriving: the ultimate validation of our existence in a world that needs us to exist.
How much of poor mental health, and of loneliness especially, comes from feeling inessential as a result of the impersonal ease of survival?
On a personal note, your essay makes me think differently about my own struggles with chronic illness and the loneliness I've felt in my illness. For a long time, I thought my internal resistance to calling or texting my closest friends was due to fear of not being understood. Silly, because they are super-understanders. Now I think it's because all they could offer was understanding. Back in college, when we were all going through similar things, understanding each other was a way of understanding ourselves better. When we talked, we workshopped our shared struggles. We were necessary to each other. But what is the point of being understood when the act of understanding you doesn't benefit the other person? That kind of understanding feels detached and lifeless, like the extra junk that accumulates in drawers.
In the past few months, I've felt most connected when I've worked together with other team members in my lab toward shared research goals. Being known and seen as a whole person is not a huge part of that dynamic. But I feel necessary. I'm always happier on the days when I've collaborated with others.
Also, I feel embedded in the greater ecosystem of planet Earth when I watch PBS Eons, a Youtube channel I discovered recently. Worth checking out: https://www.youtube.com/c/eons
One of my favourite consequences of this writing project is getting to act as a prompt for my brilliant friends, and I'm WOWed by this mini-essay in the comment section :') Thank you for your thoughtfulness!
I love your note that in Nature, individual actors eat and are eaten. It reminds me of one of my favourite tunes by Adrienne Lenker, Ingydar. In it, she sings:
"Fragilely, gradually and surrounding
The horse lies naked in the shed
Evergreen anodyne decompounding
Flies draw sugar from his head...
Everything eats and is eaten
Time is fed"
And this: "Our survival is outsourced to the invisible arms of the industrial machine and to the relatively affordable technology that now powers our society." Yes! I agree. Never has it been easier to survive WITHOUT being useful to your fellow human beings -- and sometimes downright violent!
Hmmm yes... and I think to add to the discussion of positive psychology, we often see these things in an implicit Maslow-esque "hierarchy of needs," wherein we secure survival first, THEN we have the "privilege" to pursue thriving. But what if these two concepts are more complexly related? What if the pursuit of survival can in some ways hinder our thriving? What if they are sometimes opposed?
YES: "How much of poor mental health, and of loneliness especially, comes from feeling inessential as a result of the impersonal ease of survival?"
I appreciate so much your reflection on the difference between calling friends -- and getting their understanding, but not existing in mutual give and take -- and working in your lab towards shared goals. I sometimes wonder if our cultural assumption about which is more important -- understanding or embeddedness -- is just completely off. I think of my parents, who are certainly not emotionally perfect beings, but who have lived their lives more or less maximizing embeddedness over understanding, as is a pretty Chinese thing to do. When I compare them to someone who has maximized understanding but NOT embeddedness, it's the latter that I feel exudes more "quiet desperation." Yes, my parents could do with more of the Western sense of "Hey, I love you, I see you, this part of you matters," BUT they are doing way better I think than they would be if they were fundamentally lacking this mutuality, this social usefulness, that I think is the engine of their lives.
Thank you for suggesting Eons! I'm subscribing now x) x) x)
Love you dear friend. It's a gift to share our attention and thoughts this way -- you are a busy academic and family member and person so I feel really grateful we get to connect over this. Thank you for reading and hope you are having a beautiful day!
My birch Bettie, my indoor plants (among them Rubby, a rubber tree that I've been moving around the country with me for 23 years, Hibulicious, Spidey and Tom) and an as-yet unnamed century-old walnut tree around the corner that would require 3 of me with arms interlinked to reach around its massive trunk, all thank you for understanding our divined bond and writing it out so gorgeously.
Your essays shape my mind so much, Michelle. Thank you!
I've been workshopping a series of articles on creativity & corporate culture with Vishesh Gupta, & beneath his brilliant systems thinking is a very related idea: that wanting a good/safe outcome leads to stifled creativity -- if we want creative culture we need a culture that embraces the fulness & messiness of life.
Mechanized modern culture strives for control, safety, domination. It often sells us relationships or products as the end of loneliness. And I think you & the commenter named Eleanor are right (no idea who she is, but she sounds super hot), there's even a bit of Mechanized culture in our utopic view of embracing nature: the idea that nature lets us be fully happy & stable.
The reality, you point out, is richer & also more terrible. It's an embededness, a connection, one bigger than us & outside our control.
Yes!!! I appreciate the connections with Vishesh's article -- he let me read a draft last week and I do think the connections are there. One thing I appreciate about his work is the way in which he emphasizes how scale leads to outcomes that no individual would rationally want. Nicky Case does the same in a lot of their work, too: points at the ways in which large systems, obeying simple sets of rules, produce outcomes that confound the very actors who create them.
I think there's likely something similar going on here: there is not one mastermind saying, "comfort! Comfort is better than embeddedness!" There are a bunch of tiny decisions, and markets, and cultures, each saying, "Well in the blazing heat I'd PREFER to have A/C," and this preference -- which is so difficult to think through in its implications for the whole, as Kant might want us to do -- is what creates a dystopia at a larger scale.
This was exquisite – and motivating, not only to continue to try to, well, fix things, but to write about it. Easy subscribe. Thank you for this.
“Move Slow and Fix Things” - thank you, we should make flags and bumper stickers. I enjoyed this rich and nuanced essay, lots to slow down and think about.
Thank you so much.
It’s a reversal of Facebook’s infamous motto, “most fast and break things.” ;)
I know it well. One day I need to write a piece on how humans/cultures/mobs/societies unthinkingly adopt slogans and narratives. Why didn't anyone, or any 10 million, hold up a hand and say: "Really? Is that what we say to our 6-year olds running around in the antique store? NO you may NOT!"
Thanks again for adding your voice of reason.
Haha, I love that! Yes, I spent the past new 10 years in Silicon Valley and I think you are right, there is a startling lack of that voice of reason. I think culturally the Valley encourages the suspension of that kind of reason, almost like in frat culture or hyper-masculine competition: "I triple dog dare you to go with this crazy idea!"
This culture DOES produce things like mottos, slogans and values that sound, to the world outside of that very small and odd bubble, like utter delusion.
Love the idea of this side project 💥
Hi. I am only halfway through reading this, a most eloquent and yes, exquisite essay. (Thank you!) I love this: "Loneliness, then, may not be a lack of intimacy: it may in fact be a lack of embeddedness. We may, in fact, be utterly “seen and known” by our friends and family. But more than that, we want to be required, to be held taut in a web of interchange that is aware — by necessity — of our talents and our resources. We want to be held close, but for that closeness to be selfish on the other’s part. We want our closeness to be mutually beneficial, not merely a favor or an expression of generous love."
I recently quit my 100% remote job because, among several reasons, I felt such a painful lack of connection with the people of that company and of being amongst others' energy. But I love how you describe it, as "embeddedness." In my case, I did NOT feel seen and known. I felt very unseen, and unknown...to these people I was working with and who I was supposedly to get some high-pressure work done with. AND it so happens, the desk job with its requisite hours to log was preventing me from getting out in nature, which is the true church of my soul. For many long years, anyone who truly knows me will say, when I am down, "She just needs to get out in nature."
Your essay on this topic is precise and wonderful.
Heather, thank you for your warm response to the essay! Yes. I have been thinking a lot about remote work basically since COVID began -- the way in which it seemed to "freeze" my work relationships. Those I was close to, I have remained closed to, but the new folks -- there is only so much one can bond through the screen.
There can even be embeddedness, but can there be mutuality without physicality? I'm not sure.
May you spend many long hours in the true church of your soul!
God this was beautiful. Thank you!
This was lovely. I was struck by your phrase “the lexical mind.” Is that from a theorist, or is that just your own brilliant phrasing?
Thank you so much! It's not from a theorist, far as I'm aware; it's just my way of naming the part of the mind that traffics mostly in language -- a part that was much strengthened in me by a college education that both grew and shrank me in equal measure ;)
I’m currently writing a book review and this phrasing works perfectly for a concept I’ve been dancing around. Would it be appropriate to cite you as “writer Michelle Jia”?
Happily! :) please feel free to send the review when you are done!! I’m curious!
Gorgeous essay, Michelle. I love the twist at the end. You were right, I was expecting a "nature is utopia" ending. Instead you explored the consequences of embeddedness in nature with a clear realism that was stunning.
It makes me think: The embeddedness in nature we desire is embeddedness within a system that is constantly dying and rebirthing itself, its individual actors competing and eating each other just as much as they support and rely on each other. Returning to nature isn't returning to a utopic state of innocence, but to a reality in which awareness of the imminence of death is ever-present, along with the awareness that the only thing standing between us and death is our us-ness.
Thus, as you pointed out, we desire to be necessary to each other's survival. But that kind of necessity is hard to come by in today's society. It's hard to come by because, at least in first-world countries, at least in non-marginalized communities, it's easy to survive. Our survival is outsourced to the invisible arms of the industrial machine and to the relatively affordable technology that now powers our society.
Maybe it's for this reason that positive psychology has created a distinction between surviving and thriving. In the modern, first-world context, it's not enough to survive. Real happiness is something else, something you have to pursue—something that seems more elusive the more you reach for it. But maybe this is not how things always have been, or always have to be. I can only imagine, but I imagine that when survival is a communal act, surviving *is* thriving: the ultimate validation of our existence in a world that needs us to exist.
How much of poor mental health, and of loneliness especially, comes from feeling inessential as a result of the impersonal ease of survival?
On a personal note, your essay makes me think differently about my own struggles with chronic illness and the loneliness I've felt in my illness. For a long time, I thought my internal resistance to calling or texting my closest friends was due to fear of not being understood. Silly, because they are super-understanders. Now I think it's because all they could offer was understanding. Back in college, when we were all going through similar things, understanding each other was a way of understanding ourselves better. When we talked, we workshopped our shared struggles. We were necessary to each other. But what is the point of being understood when the act of understanding you doesn't benefit the other person? That kind of understanding feels detached and lifeless, like the extra junk that accumulates in drawers.
In the past few months, I've felt most connected when I've worked together with other team members in my lab toward shared research goals. Being known and seen as a whole person is not a huge part of that dynamic. But I feel necessary. I'm always happier on the days when I've collaborated with others.
Also, I feel embedded in the greater ecosystem of planet Earth when I watch PBS Eons, a Youtube channel I discovered recently. Worth checking out: https://www.youtube.com/c/eons
Dear Eleanor,
One of my favourite consequences of this writing project is getting to act as a prompt for my brilliant friends, and I'm WOWed by this mini-essay in the comment section :') Thank you for your thoughtfulness!
I love your note that in Nature, individual actors eat and are eaten. It reminds me of one of my favourite tunes by Adrienne Lenker, Ingydar. In it, she sings:
"Fragilely, gradually and surrounding
The horse lies naked in the shed
Evergreen anodyne decompounding
Flies draw sugar from his head...
Everything eats and is eaten
Time is fed"
And this: "Our survival is outsourced to the invisible arms of the industrial machine and to the relatively affordable technology that now powers our society." Yes! I agree. Never has it been easier to survive WITHOUT being useful to your fellow human beings -- and sometimes downright violent!
Hmmm yes... and I think to add to the discussion of positive psychology, we often see these things in an implicit Maslow-esque "hierarchy of needs," wherein we secure survival first, THEN we have the "privilege" to pursue thriving. But what if these two concepts are more complexly related? What if the pursuit of survival can in some ways hinder our thriving? What if they are sometimes opposed?
YES: "How much of poor mental health, and of loneliness especially, comes from feeling inessential as a result of the impersonal ease of survival?"
I appreciate so much your reflection on the difference between calling friends -- and getting their understanding, but not existing in mutual give and take -- and working in your lab towards shared goals. I sometimes wonder if our cultural assumption about which is more important -- understanding or embeddedness -- is just completely off. I think of my parents, who are certainly not emotionally perfect beings, but who have lived their lives more or less maximizing embeddedness over understanding, as is a pretty Chinese thing to do. When I compare them to someone who has maximized understanding but NOT embeddedness, it's the latter that I feel exudes more "quiet desperation." Yes, my parents could do with more of the Western sense of "Hey, I love you, I see you, this part of you matters," BUT they are doing way better I think than they would be if they were fundamentally lacking this mutuality, this social usefulness, that I think is the engine of their lives.
Thank you for suggesting Eons! I'm subscribing now x) x) x)
Love you dear friend. It's a gift to share our attention and thoughts this way -- you are a busy academic and family member and person so I feel really grateful we get to connect over this. Thank you for reading and hope you are having a beautiful day!
M.
Brilliant.
I'd also add that the industrial machine also tends to both obscure & destroy cultures that are deeply embedded in each other & nature. :(
My birch Bettie, my indoor plants (among them Rubby, a rubber tree that I've been moving around the country with me for 23 years, Hibulicious, Spidey and Tom) and an as-yet unnamed century-old walnut tree around the corner that would require 3 of me with arms interlinked to reach around its massive trunk, all thank you for understanding our divined bond and writing it out so gorgeously.
I thank them back! Their work is so invisible in our culture, isn't it?
Yes, but more and more are seeing it thanks to contributions like yours.
Your essays shape my mind so much, Michelle. Thank you!
I've been workshopping a series of articles on creativity & corporate culture with Vishesh Gupta, & beneath his brilliant systems thinking is a very related idea: that wanting a good/safe outcome leads to stifled creativity -- if we want creative culture we need a culture that embraces the fulness & messiness of life.
Mechanized modern culture strives for control, safety, domination. It often sells us relationships or products as the end of loneliness. And I think you & the commenter named Eleanor are right (no idea who she is, but she sounds super hot), there's even a bit of Mechanized culture in our utopic view of embracing nature: the idea that nature lets us be fully happy & stable.
The reality, you point out, is richer & also more terrible. It's an embededness, a connection, one bigger than us & outside our control.
I'm going to keep pondering all this... ❤️
Yes!!! I appreciate the connections with Vishesh's article -- he let me read a draft last week and I do think the connections are there. One thing I appreciate about his work is the way in which he emphasizes how scale leads to outcomes that no individual would rationally want. Nicky Case does the same in a lot of their work, too: points at the ways in which large systems, obeying simple sets of rules, produce outcomes that confound the very actors who create them.
I think there's likely something similar going on here: there is not one mastermind saying, "comfort! Comfort is better than embeddedness!" There are a bunch of tiny decisions, and markets, and cultures, each saying, "Well in the blazing heat I'd PREFER to have A/C," and this preference -- which is so difficult to think through in its implications for the whole, as Kant might want us to do -- is what creates a dystopia at a larger scale.