Utility is a pernicious myth. The idea that something might be better based on an objective function that can be applied over and over and to more than one person. Nonsense. Sometimes a fight has the most utility. Sometimes a cup of coffee. Sometimes being late in order to care for someone you love. Paying attention is an effective way to figure out what might be the thing to do or not do or think or not think, but data gathering and research seem antithetical to doing this well (at least for humans, with our bodies that seem resistant to patterns). I won’t make a punching bag of economists for this whole piece because I don’t think they started it. Managed systems probably started even before feudal property managers were trying to optimize yields and keep the peasants from stealing their precious kindling and harvesting their precious deer (and that was around before the original Mr. Smith (Adam, of pin factory economies of scale fame). I know it’s a problematically high use of parentheses when I can’t remember if I need to use one or two right parentheses to close out a thought.
Here we are, sitting in the early day sun in April in the Garden State. Well, you might not be there, but you could be, because I didn’t put the plot into year-context. Maybe I did before, and maybe that will be on the book jacket (if this book wins the Masters and gets one of those – it will have to be green). But I’m remembering that the date of writing is not relevant to the ISBN people: it’s all about the date of original and most recent publication. How did book writing become oriented around the people who print books, rather than the people who write them? Maybe it’s akin to the human groups who would give the first choice of meat to the people who made the arrows (and the hunt’s success assignment) rather than to the people who actually made the kill.
I really like metaphors. And similes. And all analogies of every kind. They’re all terrible at describing whatever they’re trying to map themselves against. But they’re all unbelievably useful. Eisenhauer and plans, essentially. I particularly like historical references as analogies that try to stand on their own without explaining themselves much. Like when I talk about formerly innovative now-curmudgeons as strolling around the Princeton campus talking about how God doesn’t play dice (quantum physics begs to differ, Albert). Sometimes it’s easier to be smart when all you’re doing is reviewing patent applications and no one knows who you are and all the universities have told you that you’re no good. Which brings me back to the impressions that exist about utility.
It’s often better for me to be worse off. Worse off today means even better off tomorrow; there’s an entire cliché ecosystem that needs to be re-made. And then never printed in more than one copy of one pamphlet because they need to be re-made for every person every day. Statements that imply knowledge over time are absurd. Can an infinity be divided by an absurdity and provide a useful number? Don’t ask a statistician or an economist, because they’ll give you an answer with way too much conviction to be trustworthy.
The sun was in my eyes, so I turned ninety degrees. Now the sun is in the corner of my right eye, to give you an idea of the plot. The coffee is delicious this morning. I biked to a coffee roaster a few miles away and picked up a Costa Rican light-ish roast. It’s scrumptious. A full-on breakfast replacement, taken without milk. I also brought back ice cream on this bike ride and the backpack on the front rack with a zip-up cooler and an ice pack kept the ice cream in tip-top shape.
It would have been a higher efficiency move to drive to get ice cream and coffee (and deli-sliced Swiss cheese) but my personal utility on a cool, not-too rainy day was maximized by biking to do all of this. Utility is a concept that has limited utility when it’s thought of in this way, because it’s definition is too squishy to have any value. It reminds me of something I read on a website about Stoic something or other yesterday, about how there aren’t any words for it but there’s still something to show up and do. That’s vague enough that it either has a ton of utility for you or none at all. And that sentence right before this one doesn’t have any utility because it could be in between or something completely different.
Measurement. It’s not even valuation that’s we’re obsessed with. How many deer were staring at me when I walked under the power lines through the meadow yesterday at sunset? Herds of them, and who could tell when one is so distracted by the grasses and the pastels. How many words did you write? Why would you count?? Why??? So many question marks, you’ll probably count them and tell me I used too many or just the right amount or too few. But what if I was letting my fingers express my feelings and letting my feelings flow through “punctuation” (we all know by now that I do that, and then break the fourth wall with self-referential navel-gazing [aka, narcissism]). I used scare-brackets there to make my point about self-orientation. Be very afraid.
What gets measured gets punished. What gets measured gets observed and then transformed from a wave into particles. And then reminded of its childhood insufficiency and its fear of the dark and then the light goes out. I blame economists, but again, they’re just a product of their environments (eat your hearts out all you Marxist, structuralist people). Yet rage against the machine, frustration, sadness, and unacceptable tragedy still seem like legitimate, context-defying contexts. Sort of like the end to all Youtube comment conflicts.
But here we are. Sitting outside. Listening to the birds. And I say we, because you’re here with me. Even if you’re not here. That’s the beauty of writing and the subsequent reading of the writing. It’s a sharing of the experience. It can also be a writer taking the reader’s head and dunking it in the water they are drowning in, so that the reader can feel what a lung-full of this particularly type of water feels like. It’s up to you (and me). And really it’s not up to either of us.
Back to the plot. I’m on the East Coast, but not on the water. I’m going to sell my car and about to go on a road trip in my car. My bicycle feels like home and it’s here with me. The deer are my friends and so are people. Are these things happening in sequence? Absolutely, in the order above. It’s a recipe.
And now we’re talking about cooking. I am nearly unable to follow a recipe. I talk about this all the time, so if I’m repeating myself, pay close attention and look for logical inconsistencies. I have a hard time looking at a list of ingredients with amounts in units that are all over the place (why, why, why can’t there just be one unit? could it be because eggs cannot be measured easily in milliliters? I think they could be.) And then the recipe is in prose sometimes or another list. And there are all sorts of actions that seem to need to take place out of sequence. It’s far easier to keep a process in my head exclusively; I can keep four pots going on the burners while also using the oven, as long as nothing is written down. But as soon as there is a cook time, a thing that has to happen before another thing, or an ingredient that has to be a specific type of ingredient, I collapse in a big pile of mushy potatoes that are undercooked and lumpy. It’s probably why when people ask me about genres, I mumble something about memoir and philosophy. And when people tell me what to do or give me a number rating at work, I either cry or initiate psychological warfare against them. Maybe one day I’ll learn how to do the stress-position yoga that is a number list and expectations clarity world. But that day is not today and it’s probably not this year. And if I can still have money come into a bank account that I control from time to time, even the economists shouldn’t care if I figure it out.
It’s 8:34am Eastern Standard Time. What might it look like if everyone in the world used the same time zone? Our stories about what 8:35am is supposed to mean would decay and become wild (in the same way deer run through Manhattan in every opening or middle scene of every post-apocalyptic urban movie). Unless you live in the place where 8:35am is still 8:35am (it got a minute later, that’s why we’re not talking about 8:34am anymore; should give you an idea of how long some sentences take for me to write, and if you do more numerator and denominator stuff you can probably figure out how long it has taken me to write this chapter and maybe even this book – it’s 8:36am now as an additional hint). Or, alternatively, we could stop using time completely. Instead of a calendar, we could just be places and other people could join us when they know where we are. Replace time with location. And the location could be in a Zoom room. That was, the tyrannical panopticon of the calendar would be overthrown. Nietzsche said go beyond good and evil, I say go beyond time. Or backwards from it. If I’m feeling like hanging out with people who are writing, I’d like to be able to search for and enter a place where people are doing such a thing. And I’d love to be able to do such a thing either in the physical place I am or on the Internet. Sometimes it’s nice to write in pen next to other people who are breathing the same air, at least when that’s safe to do (that veiled reference should give you a better idea of what year this is, if you’re still stuck in a world of wanting to know the number time all the time – people always ask the wrong question when they go into a time machine that hasn’t been tested much).
If time went away and was replaced with location, I wouldn’t have to do anything in any specific order. And time wouldn’t be running out, I would just be running (or walking or biking) to the next place. There would still be a plot, not to fear. But it would be less clear what amount of sunshine and moonlight might have been cast over a given cause before the next effect in the plot recipe sequence. This way, where you are is less related to how long you’ve been wherever, and more related to the wherever and the whoever. And the next philosopher to break a paradigm will say, “we must go beyond location!”. And then we will be among people and living things, and that will be what we pay attention to (and probably measure, because economists are everywhere). And then we will say, or some controversial philosopher will say, “we must go beyond life!”. And we will pay attention to the rocks and the sun and the particles of the air, and be among the atoms and molecules of the body, and recognize the narrative significance of algorithms and the constituent, non-living components of the human brain rather than the Descartes-nonsense that are minds today. And what might we go beyond after that? Perhaps we will go beyond going beyond, and either go backwards or nowhere. But don’t count on that anytime soon, the progress narrative is strong with this civilization. Everything must be getting better, getting better all the time.
I’m susceptible to better-ism (and I keep a calendar). I biked out to get better coffee, ground it in a grinder, and now I’m drinking it in the sun with a “better” setup that allows me to use a Bluetooth keyboard and look a little more straight on to the screen that’s displaying the words I type. And I turned that ninety degrees away from the sun. And I try to remember whether it’s better to write out the number word or use the digits. And then sometimes intentionally do it worse. Which has more utility???? Is four too many question marks? Is 4?
Would I like to be better? What does that mean? I think I’d like to be. And I think I already am. And perhaps I can use “and” to start sentences a little less often (those are regular quotes, not scare quotes, because I’m not sure if it would be better). Mostly, here I am. Here you are. The birds are singing, especially if you’re reading this in a post-cataclysmic version of Manhattan. In which case it probably has a real, physical spine and you probably don’t have a way to tell time anymore. Congratulations, you’ve gone beyond time. But without the Internet, it’s a little harder to go beyond location. Those deer are in a place and you need to either make the arrows or shoot them in order to eat. I wonder whether your culture celebrates the arrow-maker or the hunter more highly. Perhaps you can write something that I can read, and when you ask me what year it is after you travel back in time, I’ll ask you for your book that hopefully you brought with you. And you’ll know to bring it, because you will have read this. Thank you, from the past.
I think having the sun at my back is a little like having the wind in the sails (and the wind is going the direction you want the ship to go). I’m able to write with the non-living radiation flowing into the back of my head, flowing into the non-living components of my neurons, and electrifying this whole supposedly living body. I appreciate the sun. And my non-living cell-components. Go beyond life and learn to respect the rocks. You’re standing on them.
Roman Ryan 