The Futility Workout
About two weeks ago, the earth, during some arbitrary interval of its lonely, local axial spinning, each revolution ticking off roughly an increment of 1/365th of its annual sight-seeing tour through the solar system, fell off the edge of the calendar we arbitrarily referred to as 2021, and ready to begin another repetition, rose again on the edge of the calendar called 2022.
If the other planets weren’t doing it too, the earth might look strange observed in its frenzied spinning, as it it soars through space by the tractor pull of inertia and gravity, spun along by a force much bigger then itself and against which it is (thankfully) powerless to resist.
That is also roughly a good analog for how much of twenty-twenty one felt on earth, especially coming down the stretch. And if a good population of the country wasn’t doing it too, I might feel strange doing it myself. The unceasing treadmill into the future felt as though the incline was getting steeper, the pace faster, and that perhaps a gigantic woodchipper had been placed behind it. The contents of each day felt like they were slipping into the undifferentiated annihilation of sameness, virtually stale and expiring before they could even be lived. While a resistance to that pull, a desire to jump off the treadmill felt like they were always on my mind, it also felt like there was no time to actually step off, no time to plan the actual resistance. All this anxiety and spinning in place being a gigantic exercise in futility. Paradoxically, attempts to step off the treadmill feel just as futile.
The good news / bad news is that I know I am not alone. Adult human beings are recommended to get a minimum of 150 minutes of “moderate intensity” exercise per week. I know plenty of people who far exceed the recommended minimum. Many overachievers are diligently exercising side by side, yet isolated, in their own personal futility gym on a 24/7 schedule, not allowing a moment of rest.
Despite all the bad news about our sedentary lifestyles, overconsumption of sugars, excess drinking, and drug overdoses, you might think we’re actually a pretty healthy country with all this exercise in futility going on. I’ve never followed any of the fad routines of the past (crossfit, P90x, etc, etc), but despite not seeing the futility workout advertised much, it absolutely is sweeping the nation. It even seems to be immune to the “news years resolution drop off” effect.
Exercise On The Go
You actually don’t need to join any special futility gym equipment to do these exercises. Many of us have found it quite easy to do them in the comfort of home, or while at work. Very especially while at work. And especially at home, for that matter. No instruction on form is required, as the effects are largely mental. The byproduct of the futility workout is not sweat, but anxiety, which becomes baked into life as something we all experience, and drives our very economy. The workout produces some serious motivational network effects, in that the more one any person works themselves out (and up), likelier it is that everybody around them will feel the results. The futility becomes atmospheric, and the stuff is contagious. Like ringworm.
You don’t even really have to do anything to get ample exercise of this kind but to simply live. We are all fitness fanatics in that modern life has seemingly evolved (descended) into an untenable high wire act of trying to do 10,000 things at once, and all rigged for failure from the onset by virtue of featuring high standards for excellence, while featuring the purely practical constraint of needing to be done with limited resources, which dictates that, only some fraction of them can be “completed” at half- or quarter-assed levels of satisfaction, at best. This is doubly true when we know other people will see the end product.
Slowly Add Resistance
The phenomenon I’ve described above is a very popular workout in which the athlete attempts to fit 50 hours worth of life into a 24-hour bucket. Aside from chronically underestimating how long it takes to do anything, there are other ways to add character-building futility to increase the difficulty. For any task, just conveniently forget that the seeming easiness of the task at the conceptual level is always inversely proportional to the annoyance in reality of actually doing it. Everything is annoying. Nothing is straightforward. You can’t even stop doing something without it taking 15 minutes. Mel Brooks nailed it almost 40 years ago.
Proper planning could mitigate some of these difficulties, set our expectations a little lower, but if you’re a) living in the modern world, you are lured into letting your guard down by the illusion of infinite convenience at your fingertips, and b) if you’re good about doing your exercises, you know that taking time to plan is both out of the question and impossible when you’re already so anxious about the fact that it’s somehow already 6:00pm and you haven’t even started dinner. Rush rush rush.
The following are just a few banal examples, straight from your life, of things that should be easy:
A text is received. I’ll respond to it quickly with a voice dictation. How seemingly elementary. Siri, how is it that you interpret everything like I’m talking to you through a mouthful of cauliflower rice. Fuck! I hate technology!
A colleague has a question on something at work. No problemo, a simple straightforward email should clear this up. <Takes ten minutes to write a thoughtful email> Response: “I think it would be helpful if we schedule a quick call to discuss. I’ll put some time on your calendar.” Fucking idiot! I hate working with this moron!
Want some jalapenos in your lunch? Very easy. Hmm. <proceed to slice jalapeno; Jalapeno seeds all over the counter and the floor as soon as the knife is applied> Fuck! I hate… physics!
Password requirements. Session timeouts. Corporate compliance training. Covid background anxiety / which pocket is my mask in. What time was I supposed to pick up the kids. This recipe says there’s a 5 minute prep but then the ingredients list includes cooked rice.
But fortunately it’s really easy to be sane and healthy, you just have to make sure you:
Get eight hours of quality sleep every night.
Drink less than two glasses of alcohol per day.
Make sure you get a minimum of 150 minutes of aerobic exercise each week.
Get in your 10,000 daily steps.
Eat the recommended 30 - 38 grams of fiber per day.
Associate with people and don’t isolate, or you increase your risk of alzheimers and depression.
Eat at least 2,200 calories per day to maintain your current weight.
Absolutely drink 8 glasses of water every day.
You should make sure you ejaculate at least 21 times a month otherwise you increase your risk of prostate cancer.
Limit your exposure to blue light & overhead lights at night. You should get natural light exposure early in the morning.
Practice gratitude and write in your journal.
You should meditate for 15 minutes each day to keep your mind resilient against stress.
Stumbling through the day in a haze of anxiety and frustration, it somehow feels over before it begins, that the dawn we awoke to, with its clear plan for the day lying in tatters by the time we notice our phone reminding ua it’s time to go to bed, and find ourselves wondering (for the nth day in a row) where does the time go, and coming up empty-handed when we search our threadbare pockets for some kind of receipt that this day even existed. There is simply no time to feel anything other than worn out. But we still go to bed thinking, “ok, I’ll get a good night’s sleep and get to all the stuff I need to do tomorrow, plus everything I didn’t get to today.” Now that’s dedication. And some people think crossfit is a cult!
Modern life is essentially the Groundhog Day-like condition of being perpetually surprised that the task that “should take five minutes” ends up taking twenty, even though it is the same task that we underestimated yesterday and freaked out over accordingly. Our overestimation of our ability remains strangely difficult to calibrate, despite the effects being predictable and constant. It is like me betting you $1,000 that the sun has zero chance, no way, will never, ever rise tomorrow.
The Sea We Swim Tread Water In
The cumulative effect of this ratcheting anxiety builds up and bleeds into everything. It ensures that each new day is begun with a certain baseline level of frustration; an exposed raw nerve which the first annoying work email, a slow internet connection, or the grocery store being out of whole milk kefir seems to lacerate with the sting of thousand knives. (One is reminded of Bukowski’s Shoelace.)
This growing baseline anxiety is a key feature of the futility workout, as it enables us to maintain the same routine without becoming too conditioned to it. And do note that the futility gymnasium of life is not just simple body weight exercises - our equipment is the very infrastructure that is supposed to make life convenient - the internet, our phones, roadways, and, most alarmingly, other people - coworkers, bosses, neighbors, grocery store shoppers, motorists - assume a default role of obstacles.
Even more pathologically, the more stressed we are, the more even pleasant interruptions to the day sound like intrusions. The very things that should replenish us, bring us joy, and make us feel together become levers for guilt and isolation. They become things to be deferred or denied because we feel we don’t have the time for them. A text from a good friend. A voice in our head says, “I’m too busy to deal with this right now”. In invitation to go for a walk or a coffee. "Go. Away.” Having to pick up the kids - 15 minutes to spend with family - but the brain is somewhere else, “I really need to be finishing this email / report when I get back… if I can just get it out this evening I WON’T HAVE TO THINK ABOUT IT. ALL NIGHT.”
The phone rings. It’s a family member. Somebody I should look forward to talking to. Why is my default reaction: What could you possibly want? Didn’t I talk to you last week, and you know, same old same old, nothing is new here, just wanted to say “hi”. I can imagine you saying “hi”. I can imagine you saying nothing is new here. There! I just had a 10-minute phone call in 5 seconds! How’s that for efficiency! No need for the actual thing! Maybe instead of reporting how you have nothing to report, go do something so that you do have something to report. I’d much rather have sixty minutes of meaningful substance instead of 10 minutes of fluff. Is this actually the calculus? Is this how our operating systems are actually being reprogrammed to think?
We are subtly retraining ourselves to be annoyed and further stressed out by the things we would prefer to be doing. Perhaps we feel guilty for not being able to engage the things that deserve our attention with an undistracted mind. Looking into the mirror of self to admire our exercise-sculpted physiques and find that the image is not a flattering one to gaze upon.
Rest Day
So 2021 felt like a very futile year. I got a lot of exercise. In fact, I feel fucking jacked. I’ve earned some time off. Though as it draws to a close, I find myself needing a break.
2022 has ushered itself in alongside an urge to isolate. Profoundly. Monastically. To extricate myself fully from the rat race and retreat as deeply into myself as possible, away from everything & everyone, to a place of utter stillness and silence, unbroken save for the chirping of birds and the peaceful ripple of waves.
I should add here that this urge to withdraw is maybe all the more surprising considering I already live in Alaska.
How long of a rest day? What would I do? Six month, minimum. Maybe evaluate whether I want to re-evaluate rejoining life at that point; if not, give it another six months.
Largely the appeal is to slow down. Instead of trying to do ten thousand things I don’t care about poorly, I want to be able to do a handful of important things, exceedingly lovingly & well. Learning to do them well. Loving learning to do them. Doing them and only doing them, not thinking about the next thing I have to do while doing them. For a long time, I could get by with just reading books. Taking photographs of birds. Writing about books & ideas & taking photographs of birds. Doing these things because they bring joy, and for no other reason than that. I’ve never understood boredom - life is so full of things to explore and do, even by myself, that I’ve felt I could live for centuries and never get bored. Just give me some time to focus and I could accomplish… I dunno… something, I guess.
Drilling Down
Of course, isolation is absolutely the 100% wrong response. In principle, it seems life-affirming; isn’t this a pure & noble embracing of the things that give me joy? No, I think if I am being honest, when I drill down and examine the roots of my own reasons, I realize that what I mean by “withdrawal” is actually just escaping responsibility. It is all about avoiding obligation, and wanting to simply do everything on my own terms. A grasping, desperation to hoard the fleeting and increasingly scarce shreds of my time that daily life constantly threatens to scatter to the winds. It is life-denying. It is a stupid wish for an option that doesn’t exist - the ability to become self-sovereign.
Self sovereignty. Everything on my terms. Of course, this is perfectly absurd and untenable for a variety of reasons. For starters, barring enough material wealth to live independently for the rest of my days, it is only a temporary “fix.” And knowing that deep down, we offer this compromise - we’ll voluntarily undergo some period of exile, immerse ourselves into… something, and we’ll emerge as changed, recharged, better & more valuable people. Sharper and brighter in our individuality, which we broadly mistake as some measure of self-worth based on some bullshit notion of scarcity.
To be very clear, there are good and noble reasons to eject oneself out of the rat race. I don’t even think you need good and noble reasons to take a break - a little vacation is not a bad reason by any stretch. I encourage anyone who has reached the end of their rope (for the millionth time) with their job to quit to find something better. The primary point here is that quitting your life is a little harder, and one should be sober and be honest with oneself that, if the plan is to “take a breather” and write, chill, “slow down,” pursue some craft, or whatever, and then emerge as a “new person” capable of waltzing invincibly back into yet some other crappy job doing the same unfulfilling work and on the same treadmill as the one you left, you may be disappointed at how instantly familiar and prone to sinking back into the old routine it is. We are not just thinking of fleeing a particular job, a particular situation; this anxiety is deeply embedded in our society, and the sad truth I think is that it is not easy to find a wormhole out of that doesn’t just lead to something that’s “the same but different.” To expect a systemic change in plot and trajectory from a change in scenery is simply another exercise in futility, to keep playing the same game.
Despite the tone of this piece, I am not depressed. Just a little worn out. I love life, despite its (constant) hiccups, and see that something fundamental must (and eventually will) change before we can all stop spinning this insane charade of running in place in pursuit of this perfection of futility. It is not healthy. It is not sustainable.
More to come on the issues of the corporate work / life treadmill, identity as our prized possession, and *some* of the underlying causes and potential alternatives & strategies for regaining some sanity in the meantime.