Zeitkrankheit

The art of dying in accelerated times

OK, let’s try something different here.

I got this blog with the idea of posting essays on technology on a kind of structured rhythm — programming, then data science, then philosophy of technology in general — but I couldn’t keep it.

And then I constantly realize that time is all what the problem is about.

See, I started this blog during some really turbulent times for being an international professor. Not just because of direct issues with US policy, but also because of all the consequences for higher education. Institutional and financial struggle is all around as universities get constantly under question — politically, economically and technologically. There has been a huge drop of admissions in technically-oriented programs, for example, following the idea that AI will be sufficient and that companies are not hiring at all.

And then we wonder what we all should do, “how shall we then live”. Personally, it has been overwhelming, because your experience of belonging seems to be questioned all the time — do I belong here? Will I belong here? Where will I belong? Is there anywhere to belong in this world?

Meanwhile, I have been reading Andrew Root’s The Congregation in a Secular Age, a book that called my attention because it draws from one of my preferred sociologists, Hartmut Rosa, to address problems in the contemporary church. And the diagnosis is really about that: everything is too much accelerated and just we can’t keep up.

See, one of the starkest things I find in Rosa’s theory of social acceleration is how he notices that all our contemporary depression is due to our sense of being overwhelmed, always lacking time and energy to attend to all demands that come to us. That is surely a reality for me, who has been fighting against burnout and depression for a long time, but is also true for bigger collectivities, such as institutions, universities, and churches.

I don’t know if I agree with the way that Andrew Root connects this time-sickness to the pressure that we face today about our identities — I think that identity is just one variable in the big equation that was actually called reflexivity by sociologists like Margaret Archer — but, indeed, we are all living as if we really got to that kurzweilian “singularity point” and we can’t keep up anymore. So we just “throw the towel”. It is simply too much.

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Now, why, and how to be writing a blog in the midst of this pandemic of zeitkrankheit (time-sickness)?

• Universities require us to be innovative and come with a new vision for higher education that will attract new students. I see the point here, but, again, as Andrew Root notices repeatedly in this book, this is just saying what we already hear everywhere: we need to accelerate more, and more, and more, in order to keep up. Seriously, we shouldn’t expect everyone to feel excited about that. Lots of people and institutions (churches, for example) are starting to become cynical about this — and with good reason. Acceleration has no limits: it always demands more and more.

• So, will a blog like this, with lots of essays about life in a technological culture, help anyway? Some things I hear:

  • People don’t have time to read.

  • People won’t read if I’m not intentional about tone and public reach (again, an urge for more reflexivity). I need to be relevant, a “public scholar”. But, then, what kind of relevance? Should I become a YouTube influencer? Should I abandon philosophy and be content with superficiality? (For me, sometimes it really seems that most people who are too much worried about accessible scholarship are just trying to justify their mediocrity). “Oh, your are too much theoretic” — a phrase that I just hear as something like “oh, we don’t have time for you; we need to act fast”.

  • And, you know what, I “kind of” have a public — a friendly community of discussion in Brazil, people who like to ask what has been on my mind and that I’m also interest to know what’s in their minds. Like friends and family. But these are not the communities who we are pressed to engage, right? Because, after all, even if I try to market US higher education to my home country, people won’t be able to come anyway (because of money and because of politics). So is this actually useless?

• Even beyond blog writing, there has been plenty of project ideas, but, as always, no time to pursue them, or even to think about what’s the most important thing to do. I’ve been having really promising insights while engaging with some scholarship on digital labour, platform cooperativism and commons-based peer-production economies, finding in them some good directions to be pursued for technology today. Still, the feeling is that we are always behind; left behind by a train that we should have already got years ago. “What should I know about this?” “How should I put this forward?” “How to get people to see and engage in this”? Everyone seems too overwhelmed to even care. After all, we are also all caught as prey in the attention economy. “Digitally overwhelmed”, as my friend and colleague Craig Mattson constantly puts.

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The craziest thing about time-sickness is that stopping to think about strategies to cope with it is already a part of the problem. What we see as the remedy becomes the sickening agent itself. (We always had experiences like this: personally, for example, as I fight against exhaustion and IBS-C symptoms, getting to start special diets or doing more physical exercise seem to only worsen the situation).

So, sometimes I just think about Jenny Odell’s proposal for a revolutionary move in the accelerated society: do nothing. Yes, nothing.

Actually, I think that Hartmut Rosa has a better elaborated way to put it: go for resonance, which is experiencing the uncontrollable, the unavailable (or, better expressed with the German word Unverfügbar).

As Christian discipline, I think about terms like patience, faith, hope, or what I remember that Francis Schaeffer called “active passivity”, in terms of Mary’s response: “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.”

Or maybe we could think about some kind of “time asceticism”, or “action asceticism”. Which doesn’t mean slowing down for just the sake of slowing down, but slowing down to contemplate better; and especially contemplate that sacred time that doesn’t need to accelerate.

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One of the most important reads I had this year was Ahmed Afzaal’s Teaching at Twilight: The Meaning of Education in the Age of Collapse. His urge for professors to think about what we are actually doing to students while everything is collapsing is dark, but necessary. Are we preparing them for this world of crises, of Zeitkrankheiten? Rosa’s reflections support that; he would say that all our modern crises are here because of acceleration: nature is not supporting our speed anymore (thus ecological crisis); society is not support our speed (thus institutional crisis), and we are not personally supporting our speed (thus psychological-existential crisis). Will we continue with business-as-usual, just presupposing that things will continue accelerating as always?

In this last spring semester I performed the worst teaching of my whole life. I felt lost, overwhelmed, without time or energy, and even questioning my vocation. (Meanwhile, also listening to people saying: “you are panicking too much; you are paranoid; you should look for a doctor; everything is fine, life was always hard like this and you are just doing being a snowflake and doing a scene when complaining”). And, you know, I still feel some of the shame for this bad teaching. But, in other times, a thought comes to my mind: yeah, that was one way of “doing nothing”. And it was good, because even in the midst of lots of problems, lots of other good stuff happened.

So, yes, what I’m usually thinking today when I wake up and go to teach is that a good part of “The Meaning of Education in an Age of Collapse” is teaching people “how to do nothing”. Because, you know, resonance comes in when we do nothing, and we start seeing new things. Like in the sacrament of the Eucharist, where the veil of this temporal reality suddenly raises and we see the only place where we really belong. We learn how to live one day at a time — the Day of the Lord.

So my manifesto is also Wendell Berry’s mad farmer’s manifesto:

So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.

“Work for nothing.” You know how our “Christian higher education” or “Christian scholarship” will innovate and find its place in times like this? By doing nothing. By keeping sacred time untouched. By dying. And then resurrecting.

The ars moriendi (art of dying) to be practiced during all this societal collapse has an exquisite beauty, and is also an easy yoke. So, when a blog like this seems dead, just think that maybe there is someone living, and living abundantly.

Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash