Reframe Your Inbox (30 Is the New 20 Edition)

Happy early birthday to my brother Chris. Young Christopher, may your birthday be filled with many grams of non-dairy protein and many hours on YouTube vibing to music videos from the early 2000s. Everyone should do Chris a big 3-0 birthday solid by liking this tweet and giving @c_lowenstein a follow.

Here are four things this week:

FIRST THING

I’ve significantly cut back on my social media usage over the past few years, but I still gravitate toward Twitter for breaking news, election returns, and (as I’ve learned recently) updates about global pandemics. One could make a compelling argument that these are three of the least productive and most anxiety-inducing times to check Twitter, but here we are.

In any event, earlier this week I came across a Twitter thread that began as follows:

Advice from a historian in the Boston area: Start keeping a journal today, ideally a hand written one if that’s within your ability. Write about what you’re seeing in the news, how yr friends are responding, what is closed in yr neighbourhood or city or state or country. Save it.

I’ve been meaning to start journaling for years. I know how clarifying it is to process the world around me through writing. (I wrote about it, naturally, here and in chapter four of Reframe the Day.) But until this week, I never succeeded in making journaling even a minor part of my daily routine, probably for the same reason that many of us intend to do things we know would be good for us but don’t actually do them: I just didn’t.

This Twitter thread inspired me to think more about how I could create a journaling habit that might work for me. If I wanted it to stick, it would need to be digital, easily accessible and update-able, and part of a service or app I already use. I settled on, of all things, WhatsApp.

For a week now I’ve had a WhatsApp group called—wait for it—“Journal.” I’m the only person in this group. There’s no structure to how or when I use it; I just send passing thoughts and reflections and streams of consciousness as they come to me. I send pictures of routine life in lockdown. I send screenshots of news articles that capture what I see the world saying and thinking at that moment. I send photos of nice things, like sunsets that seem incongruously beautiful given the chaos in every corner of the globe. I send notes about little fears, worries, uncertainties, anxieties, realizations, ideas, and other fleeting thoughts that pop into my head, and I send them as they happen to pop into my head.

Here’s one from Monday:

This is SO WEIRD. A roller coaster of emotions - everything’s totally normal, everything is changing forever, then back to normal, and repeat…

One from Tuesday:

QUESTION: When did thinking switch from “when will things get back to normal?” to “what will the new normal look like?”

And one from Friday:

First thought this morning - it’s so QUIET.

That’s basically it. It’s not profound or complicated at all, which is why it seems to have worked so far. There’s no barrier to entry, and hardly any barrier to maintenance. Because WhatsApp is already part of my daily life, maintaining this e-habit requires almost no additional effort or attention. Because I can’t go back and edit the messages after I’ve sent them, I don’t waste any time worrying about style or flow or phrasing or word choice or syntax anything else. Because there’s no format or regularity to these messages, I have no expectations that I need to meet. I just think, process, send, move forward. Think, process, send, move forward.

There are plenty of shortcomings to a system like this, of course. Opening WhatsApp to share a post with my one-person group also opens me up to distractions and reminds me of other messages that need a response. Little digital notes aren’t particularly secure or particularly easy to preserve for posterity. Writing by hand would probably be less distracting and more mentally cleansing. Every time I see the words “from Facebook” at the bottom of the app, my blood pressure goes up. And anything that encourages me to spend more time on my phone—even if it’s just a few extra seconds—moves me further from being in control of my time and attention.

In other words, my solo WhatsApp journal may not be the “best” system—whatever that means—for keeping a pandemic journal. But for something like this, the system you use is always better than the system you don’t. We’re living through remarkable, and remarkably unsettling, times. Even if you never reread a single word you’ve written, anything that helps you do a little processing and bring a little clarity to your world is worth a shot.

SECOND THING

“The one thing that might be said for societal collapse is that—for a while at least—everyone is equal. … Communities that have been devastated by natural or man-made disasters almost never lapse into chaos or disorder; if anything, they become more just, more egalitarian, and more deliberately fair to individuals.”

That’s from Sebastian Junger’s Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, a short book about how human beings are wired to find meaning and purpose through community, and why modern life has made it so difficult for many people to do so. I highlighted those lines a couple of years ago, but they feel especially relevant these days.

A related book I recently added to my to-read list is Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster. In the book, as a 2009 New York Times review put it, Solnit studies “the fleeting, purposeful joy that fills human beings in the face of disasters like hurricanes, earthquakes and terrorist attacks. These are clearly not events to be wished for… yet they bring out the best in us and provide common purpose. Everyday concerns and societal strictures vanish. A strange kind of liberation fills the air. People rise to the occasion. Social alienation seems to vanish.”

THIRD THING

Earlier this week I published the fifth article in my “Radical Rethink” series on Medium: The One-Sided Campaign to Make Government Dysfunctional and Distrusted. Here’s an excerpt:

These arguments — that government is an enemy of innovation, that it’s incapable of working efficiently, that it’s always bureaucratic and bloated and broken — are not facts. They’re stories, just as the scam of false choices is a story. Sometimes these stories are true. Often they’re not. Yet we’re told them so much that eventually we stop questioning them. We internalize them. We start to repeat them ourselves. Before long, it is simply accepted as fact that the government cannot work, when, in reality, it never had a chance.

Government is not broken because it is inherently defective. Government is broken because it has been privatized, demonized, and defunded for four decades in a row. But that’s not the story we hear.

The anti-government campaign that turned these stories into facts is inherently self-fulfilling and inherently one-sided. It’s much easier to obstruct government action than it is to make it succeed. (To some extent, it was designed that way.) That makes it easier to keep the government from functioning effectively. Making it dysfunctional, in turn, makes it unpopular and distrusted.

The more unpopular and the more distrusted government is, the easier it becomes to convince people that government is broken and needs to be defunded and dismantled. That conviction, in turn, create a social and political permission structure for cutting funding, eliminating regulations, and outsourcing the basic functions of government to private entities.

The longer this cycle continues, the more unpopular and under-resourced government becomes. The more it loses the funding and faith of the people, the less it’s able to do its job — such as, say, passing and enforcing laws and regulations that would break up anti-competitive monopolies or prevent environmental pollution or fight fraud in financial markets. The less effectively government functions, the more easily it can be manipulated by those who can afford to manipulate it, or those who prefer to ignore it.

The full piece is on Medium here. Look for the sixth article sometime next week.

FOURTH THING

Isn’t it amazing how quickly phrases like “How’s it going?” or “How are you?” have taken on a dramatically different meaning over the past couple of weeks?

***

What tips and techniques are you using to make a bit of sense out of the craziness swirling around us these days? I’d love to hear a few and share them in next week’s newsletter.

Stay safe, everyone, and thanks for reading.

—Adam