The Threshold of Being Left Behind
What to do when your life is reading and writing?
Subcriptions remain free, so…
This post could have been recorded so you might listen to it through white earbuds, like an audiobook, but I won’t even do that, sticking to these words that require your eyes and must be read. I type these words on a laptop missing the letter “v,” and it sticks all time, so my writing is often filled with words like vvvvvvery (see the rest of this post; I givvve up!). Fivvve other letters on the keyboard havvvvve been erased by years’ worth of my oily fingertips, and only my “qwerty” memory keeps this engine on its rails. The laptop, still a beautiful rose gold, is ten years old, which is 3,875 in computer + dog years.
I’m 54 and feel like a character in a full-color film transforming into black-and-white, like the end of The Wizard of Oz, but instead of being in a bedroom surrounded by recognizable faces, I’m in a cliche scene where a character hangs from a ledge by their fingers—the old city lies below and salvvvvation awaits abovvvvve. You can’t just hang on—you either let yourself go like Hans Gruber or pull yourself back up onto Mount Rushmore like Cary Grant in North by Northwest.
What do I mean? I havvve spent all my professional life innovvvating. In fact, I’vve been doing this so often and for so long that the word itself, “innovvvvvating,” lies in my life’s windowsill like the husk of a dead insect. I see and understand the changes around me: large language models, artificial intelligence, the explosion of digital and multi-platform expression in our age of content. Data data data and measurement measurement measurement of all things, scientific or not. I hear the calls for nurses, data analysts, STEM-ers, programmers, people who can fill any job whose prefix is “bio,” even if it’s “bio table wiping.”
But what do I want to do? Read. Write. Occasionally fashion a handmade book. That’s it. Simple. I’m not on social media, but what am I missing? Judging by evvvvveryone else’s unhappiness in that “space,” maybe I was lucky to eject early. TikTok remains a mystery. Instagram is coming and going without my added wit. I don’t watch any news; I read it—I start every day by reading work at six or so well-established digital news sites. I havvvvvvve literally not seen a movvvvving image of a President speaking in almost 8 years. If you take the word “influencer,” I am its direct antagonist; I will unintentionally make you not want to buy and wear something.
So I’ll ask: Is it okay, at some point in your life, to simply say, “leave me behind” in a way that is synonymous with “this is who I am, and from here forward I adapt and grow on my own schedule”? Is it okay to be the one person in a multi-mile radius who can talk at length about Wittgenstein or Faulkner or LeGuin, and who really believvves that’s important? Or is that not useful, especially in my profession, which is education. Does knowing Faulkner’s perfect understanding of how history is shaped help me, or any of my students, get a job? If you work in the arts and/or humanities, “job” has cruelly, and wrongly, become antonymic with words like “English,” “History,” “Theater,” or “Painting.” Heck, within 5 seconds of ChatGPT being able to produce a grammatically correct sentence people declared “writing is over.” I received a request today to apply for a job teaching a computer how to write. Students really do change!
Frankly, I find myself scared. I don’t call this site The Declining Academic for nothing. Should I write more poems that don’t change much of anything or anyone? Or should I write algorithms—poems of their own—that seem to offer the promise of purpose?
In today’s world, when we hold on or fight to maintain something, no matter how important, there’s a strong chance of being labeled as “against change.” Of course we should change. Right now, we can name thousands of things we should change (see: healthcare or parking). But we focus much less, profoundly so, on what to maintain (ironic, in the time of, for example, “originalist” judges who use that label to… force change).
What makes this predicament painful is that I’m struggling ovvver simply continuing to do things I lovvvvve and care about, to which I’vvvve dedicated my entire professional life. No one wants to be outdated. But it’s become much more difficult to recognize both the shape of the peg and the hole. Do they evvvven fit? A decade ago I poured my efforts in digital humanities, which felt vvvvital, but when you spend six years in administration even that will pass you by like a train powered by cold fusion.
So I find myself here at the enjoyable Substack, reading and writing quite a bit, as it seems this might be the only social platform that brings all of us, whatever our species, within speaking distance of each other, within a space where there is a chance to be yourself for another day.
Does anyone else feel this way?
Who do you subscribe to (and thus who should I) that provvvides wisdom and insight into not just the world, but how to movvve forward in it?
All thoughts are welcome!
(My new laptop will arrivvvve soon, so the “vvv” problem will be solvvved.)
Another enjoyable-to-read and provocative offering from you, Chuck. Thank you for putting intellectually stimulating and well articulated ideas into the world. We all keep hearing that the pace of change--already the fastest In our species’ short history--is accelerating and doing so at an increasing rate, like the universe. I do not care for social media but feel like I must engage with it for work purposes; I am skeptical of its actual value in relation to the time commitment and others’ ascribed importance to posts. For fun I listen to a handful of podcasts and have a long list of books patiently waiting their turn for my attention. The future: I am excited about the potential for an AI-enabled assistant to help me navigate the world on my terms. Of course there will other more positive impacts in medicine, robotics, manufacturing, transportation, the environment, communications, space, and on and on. And of course there will be downsides and reasons to worry about those downsides that are more probable than others. But in the meantime I will stick to what I enjoy now and remain open-minded for new possibilities.
This is really a remarkable piece that I'm just now getting to, grazing through your archive here. I read it with the uncanny feeling that large swaths of it could have written about myself, including a strong preference for getting my news from newspapers. I read this a couple times, and found myself sort of reassembling words and phrases and applying them into my situation, which also feels rather like hanging from a ledge. One difference: Rather than having spent my working life innovating, I find that the middle-age segment of my writing life now, unfortunately, demands it. By virtue of shifting my journalism work to exclusively arts and culture coverage, I have basically shouted "leave me behind" even as I come to grips with the fact that, given the state of things, I've *already* been left behind. Since I get to focus doing on what I love (reading and writing, along with seeing films and plays, etc.) it makes me wonder what purpose the work serves *as* "work," if that makes any sense. Last night I found myself asking, "Is it okay to spend the evening reading about Lord Byron and wondering if some connection might be made with David Bowie with regard to how artists create a persona of themselves?" And: "Would that be of use to anyone, or have I reached a point in my life where it's enough to just figure it out for myself?" and to not worry about how to crowbar it into "work." Anyway, probably starting to ramble here. Great article, I'm really enjoying your perspective. We are definitely on the same page on a lot of stuff.