Thinking Takes Time
Smart refrigerators, feral horses, autocompleted destinies, heist-movie gunfights and millions versus billions of years.
Thinking takes time. This seems obvious. But it’s like a buoy in a hard tide. To stay where it is requires a lot of resistance.
A thought may be immaterial and even transcendent, but thinking is a physical act, an electro-chemical process. Even when it happens very fast, thinking doesn’t happen all at once.
The other day I was reading a book by Franco “Bifo” Berardi, and he made this point. I was feeling exhausted when I read it, and it struck me. It was something very basic that I’d forgotten.
New confusions
Thinking itself seems to have changed in my lifetime. The way thinking used to work is that something would happen and then a person would think about it. Those thoughts would form a foreground, which would then refocus and reformulate the background idea of one’s world.
Simple enough, but the order has been disrupted by the pushy, prosthetic brain in our pockets. It claims to have done all the knowing and thinking already. All the thoughts in this device are linked according to a system decided on before we showed up. The links follow fast upon one another in a distributed network. In this way, reading the internet is sex without orgasm - how do you know when you’re done?
While the internet offers a lot, one’s personal motive and inquisitive urgency get lost. The cart of information outpaces the horse of thinking. The horse goes feral or takes a nap.
Saxophones and St. Paul
Thinking takes time. This should be obvious. But in the moment, nothing is obvious. Only afterwards can we make the connection. And lasting connections take time to intuit, identify and test.
There was a century between the invention of the saxophone and Charlie Parker doing what he did with it, three decades between the first electric guitar and Jimi Hendrix. Try to imagine the long, empty hours Charles Darwin had during his five years on the HMS Beagle with nothing to do but think.
St. Paul was knocked off his horse, blinded, given with a vision of all times by the Son of G-d and given a new first name. He still needed three years in the Arabian Peninsula to think things over before starting his apostolic career.
Nothing was obvious at the time. That’s a constant, probably the constant. We see through a glass darkly.
Wonder at Lechmere
When I was a kid, people seemed to find it borderline miraculous that anyone thought of anything at all. I used to walk the aisles at Lechmere in the Greendale Mall, marveling at the CD players, microwave ovens and mini trampolines, asking myself what will they think of next?
Today, when I see a refrigerator with a touch screen, I think please, enough, just give it a rest, already. But that’s me. I wrote a novel that took place partly in a neighborhood that jammed the wi-fi and cell signals, with its residents opting for VHS tapes, jukeboxes and pay phones.
I know people who are more in line with the broader world, and their attitude toward the march of technological progress is different, but they seem no happier for it. Over the years, their gee-whiz response has hardened into an ongoing resentment that it’s taken so long to invent the newest features and devices. And they seem frustrated at all that hasn’t been invented yet.
Autocomplete
I also notice that people have resignation about new technology. The technological advances of the future seem like a foregone conclusion. Don’t argue, it’s as good as already here.
And why not? All the information is supposedly in one place, available to nearly everyone. And given on the sheer number of number-crunchers and well-networked would-be entrepreneurs, this should be the moment when we crack open all the mysteries, overturn all the past errors, and invent the future dreamt of by the ecstatic visionaries of all previous ages.
But no. One big reason? Thinking takes time.
That seemingly optimistic narrative actually curtails the imagination. One corollary of it is that people expect to be having the best idea right now. Usually, we’re not. Historically, we’re not often having our best idea. The expectation that we’re having our best idea right now is a tangible pressure. It leads people to overly exalt the crummy ideas we do have, like Airbnb-but-for-pants.
What time it is
What time is it? is a big, cosmic question that influences how we perform even small tasks.
Answering that question is one of the most important things a new church or a new viewpoint can do, noted N.T. Wright, an Anglican Bishop who writes a lot about the early Christian church. The early church was very adamant that we were at the end of time, and as such, people should be as holy as they could manage. That was 2,000 years ago.
We still try to make sense of what time it is. We look at other stars in the galaxy to get a sense of when and how ours might expire. We make models of history and models of the weather. People say the phrase Late Capitalism, but offer no clear indication of when capitalism’s bedtime might be.
Without a sense of where we are in cosmic cycles, other sensibilities creep in to what time it is for us as individuals, as a nation and as a species. In America, these sensibilities leak through from our jobs. The question of what time it is translates to: Is it time to brainstorm ideas? Is it time to define our customer base? Time to raise money? Time to engage in research and development? To go to market? To expand to new markets? To cash in? To cash out?
One of my favorite jokes
is about what time it is. During an astronomy lecture, a professor tells the class “… and in ten billion years, our sun will expand to a gas giant, engulfing the planet Earth, melting, incinerating and eradicating every last trace of human life.”
A student, who hasn’t been paying close attention, suddenly jumps up and says “What?! Professor, what did you say?”
The professor replies, “I said that in ten billion years, our sun will expand…”
“Oh,” interrupts the student, suddenly relieved. “Billion. I thought you said million.”
Being wrong
For most purposes, we never know what time it is. I knew a guy who died a few months ago, a former coworker I’d get drinks with now and then. When I found out, I looked him up, and came across his Facebook page. Two weeks before he died he was sharing his Wordle score. He didn’t know. None of us do.
Any of us could die tomorrow. The world could end. We can guess that time is short and the end is near. People do it all the time. There’s always new doomsday cults and Ponzi schemes. We can guess it’ll go on forever. There are always people inheriting hefty 401(k) and IRA accounts from parents and loved ones who didn’t get to enjoy the entire retirement they’d saved for.
You will be wrong about what time it is. But you can choose the fashion of your mistake.
Too late
The only time I've ever been personally very clear on is Too Late. That one has an unforgettable flavor. Too late to say something to a dead friend. Too late to apologize to someone I’ve wounded. It's the only time with no guesswork in it.
What time is it?
I have some idea of how people have tried to suss out the signs and figure out where we sit on some centuries-long wave. When I was in school, I read Gibbon and Spengler and Vico about how civilizations come and go.
Lately, I’ve checked in on Peter Turchin, who says the whole house of cards is about to tumble because we’ve overproduced educated people, making it harder for people like Turchin to be appreciated for their true stature. That seems to have caught on in certain circles, for reasons you might guess. I have my own ideas about this (see “A Saddle on a Cat,” in January).
In my busy middle-age I tend to think of the question of what time it is in more practical, personal terms.
I approach the question a little like a conversation during a lull in a heist film shoot-out: Am I bleeding? How many of the gang are can still shoot a gun? How much can I carry? Where are the exits? Is the place surrounded? How many bullets left? How many hostages? Where’s the getaway car? What promises must I keep, no matter what?
I just hope I have time to think it through.
Selected bibliography
A cool, short book by Franco '“Bifo” Berardi
Berardi’s Substack
A book by N.T. Wright about St. Paul