re-setting my mental clock

A couple of months I submitted to my brilliant agent, Christy Fletcher, a proposal for a general-interest book, a book I had been thinking of as a kind of completion of a trilogy that began with The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction and continued with How to Think. The three books together would distill most of what has been central to my teaching over the decades.

And then I wrote back to Christy and asked her to withdraw the proposal.

Why? Because I kept asking myself What is the point? and could not come up with any answers. As an evangelical Anglican Christian and a professor of the humanities, I have spent my adult life in service to the church and the academy, and I don’t know how anyone could look at either of those institutions right now and see them as anything but floundering, incoherent messes, helmed largely by people who seem determined to make every mess worse. I want to grab those leaders by the lapels and shout in their faces, “I’m trying to contain an outbreak here, and you’re driving the monkey to the airport!” What good has anything I’ve written ever done? Why bother writing anything else? What is the point? The monkey’s already at the airport, securely stashed in the airliner’s cargo hold, and the plane is taxiing down the runway.

Now, around the same time that I arrived at this melancholy judgment about my past and future as a writer, I also decided that I needed to make some serious changes to my encounters with social media. I deleted Twitter from my mobile devices, and, just to make sure that I couldn’t access it even from the web more than a time or two a day, scheduled daily blockages via Freedom.

Of course, this did not remove the posting itch, so I moved my social-media posts and photos away from Twitter and Instagram and to micro.blog, the wonderful new creation of Manton Reece where I can post to my heart’s content but can’t retweet, can’t be retweeted, can’t see how many followers I have — it’s amazing: just conversation without posturing or signaling or bots. (You can, and I do, cross-post to Twitter, which means that when I want to point to something cool that I’ve read I can do so to a much, much larger audience than I currently have on my micro.blog account, but, thanks to Freedom, without even being able to see whether people are liking it.)

Please do consider signing up: it’s not free (though there’s a free trial), but there are also no ads, which means that Manton has no agenda except to make the service fun and useful for his users. Also, following the example of my friends Kathleen Fitzpatrick and Dan Cohen, I connected my micro.blog to my own domain, keeping my stuff on my turf.

In related moves, I purged a number of news sites from my RSS feed, deleted Apple News from my devices, and canceled my subscription to the Washington Post (which in any case has been interspersing more and more and more Florida Man-style stories among the actual news and analysis pieces). I have come to rely on the weekly news summaries provided by, for instance, National Review and the Spectator — more leftish magazines should do this kind of thing; also monthlies and quarterlies. It would be interesting to see what the “top news stories” looked like if you could only gather them every three months.

There has been one significant consequence of all these moves, and I find it an interesting one. Curiously, though in a way logically, my escape from Twitter’s endless cycles of intermittent reinforcement and its semi-regular tsunamis has made me significantly calmer about my own future as a writer, in large part because it has re-set my mental clock. I have always told myself that I have time to think about what, if anything, I want to write next, but I haven’t really believed it, and I think that’s been due to my immersion in the time-frame of Twitter and other social media. Now that I’ve climbed out of that medium, I can give not merely notional but real assent to the truth that I have time, plenty of time, to think through what I might want to say.

And who knows, maybe I’ll even come back to that third volume of my Pedagogical Trilogy.