ALCHEMY

A word on Alchemy

Last year, I was given an Apple Watch.

Now I enjoy most things Apple (so elevated), and it’s a generous gift. But given my temperament, it was less helpful than I’d hoped.

The Apple Watch has all sorts of metrics it tracks, and the goal, I assume, is to optimize those metrics—close those circles, PR that mile, finish your Ten Rules for Life audiobook, or whatever. Nothing wrong with any of this. But as someone who, at a baseline, is conscientious to a fault, I found the introduction of all these new, random goals to be inhibiting. “So now I have to worry about getting 30 minutes of exercise and 12 hours of standing, on top of picking up groceries, making breakfast, feeding the dog, working all day…” And so my Apple Watch currently serves as a very expensive and very unnecessary desk clock.

 For me, the new checklist was strangely paralyzing, and oddly reminiscent of an overstocked grocery aisle. Can’t we just keep it to Cheerios and Frosted Flakes and call it a day? American psychologist Barry Schwartz calls this paralysis the “paradox of choice”: the more options you have, the more anxiety, and ultimately the less you attain. Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard observed a similar but arguably broader psychological truth a century or so earlier, noting an analogous relationship in the existential domain: we suffer from a spiritual angst, of which we might be blissfully unaware, that is nevertheless contingent on some starting point of actual freedom. Proximally, the result of such freedom to choose is a spiritual dizziness, a sense of nausea produced by glancing over the edge of the cliff of our own being.

Whoa.

And, unfortunately, it might get worse before it gets better. As our cultural ecosystem continues to strengthen its symbiosis with the great tech giants of our economic moment, it seems that Silicon Valley is increasingly pollinating culture at large not only with its commitment to such abundance of choice but, what’s more, its ethic of optimization. That is, not only is there a heightened anxiety in part due to a plethora of digital choices—to like this post, not that one; to subscribe to this channel, or unfollow this person—but there’s also heightened value ascribed to making the most efficient or productive choice, impossible though that may seem. Put another way, it’s not enough to just pick a daily workout; now you have to pick the best one, the one that you can do while still doing everything else, that you can track, that involves daily goals and ideally an exponential growth curve. It’s no longer sufficient to tend to your material self; now you have to worry about your digital self, in all its unadulterated, creatively-curated glory. 

These two interweaving threads of the freedom to choose and the responsibility to choose well are, of course, much older than the Apple Watch or the valley of silicon from whence it came. Perhaps most anxiety follows a similar recipe, and perhaps there have always been profiteers at hand. But I do wonder if our notions of freedom and responsibility aren’t being warped in response to some deeper hunger for control—a hunger motivated, like most hungers, by an underlying sense of lack. The pandemic, the politics, and the ongoing online fracturing of relationships threatens to leave us more alone, more vulnerable, and more desperate for a sense of order and stability. Unfortunately, I think that many of our attempts to reclaim a sense of control promise to only exacerbate the problem: as we lean into a data-driven world of digital option sets and its accompanying ethos of optimization, our attempts at control seem to be leaving us with more anxiety and somehow even less time to address it effectively.

So, where do we go now? 

Here I’d like to take a cue from Yaw, one of my college friends and former bandmates. Yaw’s epiphany came when we were undergrads together at Princeton, a magical school of witchcraft and wizardry host to a student culture that’s positively brimming with dizzying opportunities and neurotic levels of optimization. It was Yaw who had the idea to bolster the latest mental health campaign by posting flyers all over campus that simply said “do less”. (A true disciple of his cause, Yaw ultimately decided to do less himself, and the posters were never printed.)

Hear me out. Beyond armchair philosophizing, there seems to be some empirical punch to Yaw’s point. Take something mundane but important, like sleep. If you can’t fall asleep, you should just try harder, right? No. We all know that only makes it worse; the more you focus on trying to sleep, the more elusive sleep becomes. But what happens if we take Yaw’s advice and try to instead do less? Stop trying to fall asleep, and voila! You might actually fall asleep. The same truth undergirds that old cliché, “happiness is a butterfly”: if you chase it, it will escape you, but rest for a moment and it might just land on your shoulder. Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl lauded similar instances of “paradoxical intention”, of willing the opposite of your goal, and witnessed its success across a number of domains. The takeaway? When doing more isn’t working, it might be time to do less. Because less, in some cases, really is more.

German sociologist Hartmut Rosa characterizes such paradoxically optimal, non-engineerable results to be examples of what he calls “resonance”, a quasi-spiritual sense of unsought and yet unparalleled congruency between one’s own being and that of the world at large. Like falling asleep each night, so many of life’s most important ventures are more about grace than grit; they come to us unexpected, unearned, and nevertheless incomparable in their meaning. Try as we might, we can never fully engineer them. Remember that electric ripple down your spine when the tired view from your 5th-floor walkup was painted over with a thin blanket of fresh snow? Remember how that chance interaction with the stranger at 7th Street and Broadway left you reeling with conviction, youthful once more? These are the moments of epiphany that spur us on, the memories of which we repackage into pocket-sized philosophies and etch into fragile stone tablets, only to be broken and remade, again and again. Rosa calls it “resonance”, but here I’d like to call it “alchemy”.

What comes to mind when you think of alchemy? Is it a primitive science, a predecessor to modern chemistry? Is it a spiritual quest for eternal youth, the transformation of a pretty stone into an elixir of life? Or is it that hippie-run crystal shop in the beach town that burns incense all summer long? Alchemy is many things, but the strand I’m reaching for is that of transubstantiation: the mysterious transfiguration of one essence, one essential and indivisible identity, into another.

When I reflect on my own transfigured (disfigured?) essence, I’m struck by the apparent absence of design in it all: swirling colors, clashing frequencies, crossed wires. It’s a beautiful amalgamation of poor decisions and pointed surprises. Really, though. It seems like so many of my most prized seashells are the ones I wasn’t really looking for in the first place: my passions, my friends, my marriage. Maybe I’d woken up early to see a pacific sunrise, but I hadn’t counted on the beauty lurking in the tidepools.

These moments of resonance that anchor the story I tell myself, the stories we all tell ourselves, about ourselves—these moments of unsought and unexpected meaning, attained through a lack of searching, a rejection of all optimization and aim—maybe these are the raw ingredients of alchemy. Maybe the path to the deepest treasure looks a lot like wandering.

-J