Make Something

doomerism

Doomerism, a sense that everything around us is breaking all the time is enjoying a peak cultural moment. It is easy to get lost in comments, forums, videos, where the discussion quickly goes to what is wrong out there, with others, with the system etc. I am sure we can think of examples, although I am not posting any here now as I have been trying not to collect or dwell on these things in the past few months. But it's out there! And I am sure that the loudness of doomerism online has much more to do with algorithms pushing the most zesty takes rather than the more common opinions out there. But it doesn't take much algorithmic juicing to induce a curiosity-deficit-thinking into the real world, into real conversations. How often are our conversations with our friends, family, co-workers about how bad everything is, works, isn't getting better, etc. We cycle through a rut of comments that can sound like "How have we not fixed this already? How have we not figured this one out yet? Will someone please take care of this for us?".

An obligatory statement about how things do fail us, our institutions fail us, traffic is bad and could be better, the faucet could be fixed, half of the self-checkout kiosks are broken, there isn't enough housing for all, we have not beaten scarcity nor injustice, and we want to do better.

That being said, for all of the boring and tiring conversations we are having, full of urgency, self-righteousness, and frustration, all of the challenges we face have not magically gone away. Instead we strip away our own agency, create anxiety in ourselves and transmit it to others. We leave the opportunity to build stronger connections with each other and with ourselves, and we practice thinking that degrades our ability to solve problems that need solving. This doesn't feel good to us.

Craft, not Consumption

There are many cures to this, that span social and technological, but at risk of being old-fashioned or quaint, I want to consider some personal options we might have. For the sake of this post, the one I want to consider is taking on a craft.

I will use craft broadly to mean, anything that takes time, energy, skill, or knowledge to pull off.

• art
• music
• sports
• coding
• etc.

Basically anything that forces you to do something you are not immediately expert at, importantly, anything where it is very immediately obvious to you and others you are not an expert yet.

My theory about what has been going on with me for the last 15 years, and I dare say most of us who are online, is we are stuck on the first part of the Dunning–Kruger effect We are collectively living on the peak of "Mount Stupid"

With access to so much all at once, access to all of art, all of the problems, all of the content, I think it is easy for me to slide into a pattern of feeling like I know something about a lot of things, when in reality I know a half a dozen headlines that I saw without engaging in the article. Rapid consumption of knowledge is actually in the way of me creating a deeper knowledge of anything specific. I see so many images daily that I have forgotten that they take any effort to make. (insert a panicked caveat due to the ever advancing AI capabilities).

What I have noticed in myself at least is that by constantly interacting with so much craft around me, it's easy to forget that there is real work and effort under all of it! Until of course I pick up a camera for the first time in years and try to take a photo. Without my phone doing the work to stitch hundreds of photos together into a single perfectly exposed, perfectly focused image, I find that taking a good photo is quite challenging! In fact, it takes multiple tries, futzing with settings to get something decent. And that's at the operation of the equipment level, there are layers to the noticing the right composition, waiting for the right moment, and many other subtle but important skills that an expert photographer brings to bear on any image. And even the expert will go through dozens of shots before they find the right one.

All this to say, as soon as I started taking photos again, I grew in my appreciation for any photo I looked at. I started to notice photos more, look at them more closely for secrets they might pass onto me as I incorporated their technique into my own. Working more closely with software tools that don't come with everything configured out of the box has made me appreciate the level at which so much of our computer infrastructure works due to many smart people putting time into it. And when it breaks on me, I feel more aware of how making something work in every use case is a complicated thing!

My work at the Detroit Land Bank forced me to to confront all the layers of law, policy, implementation, software, process, people, management that goes into getting something answered for a resident. There are a variety of ways that government is not enough for people. But it is also true that there is a lot of craft at work in maintaining the status quo much less ameliorating it.

In the last few months, trying on more crafts than I have in the past, I have been surprised by how it has deepened my appreciation for anything I interact with. I assume more that there is some craft at work when I interact or observe something.

Curiosity is a Virtue

By forcing myself to experience an overload of ignorance, I increase my curiosity. How did we get here? What are the solutions that have been tried before? What wisdom is there from our ancestors that can help me understand our current challenges? After being humbled by trying a few crafts, I can start to imagine how much more I really don't understand, and be filled with gratitude for the people who developed their craft contributing to our shared life together. I have found that for me, my sense of agency has increased, my anxiety has gone down, and my curiosity towards what work people are doing to tackle the problems of our age has gone up. Collective small steps towards curiosity and humility it how we solve big problems, I am excited to keep practicing the mindset and get unstuck from Mount Stupid.