When I get to the end of all the articles in my RSS Reader, I’m shown a little image of a cartoon robot lying on a sunbed with a drink.
“All done!” the caption says.
The robot is smiling.
Most people don’t use an RSS reader these days. They scroll through the infinite lists of Twitter or Facebook or Reddit. But in each case, the articles we read are supposedly for our own amusement. Reading my RSS feed should be an idle pleasure. And yet when reaching the end, I’m rewarded with the image of someone finally relaxing. Only now I’ve read them all can the real relaxation can begin.
There’s a bit of truth to this. If I don’t open my RSS Reader every day, the list builds up. 20 unread articles. 40 unread articles. 100. Every day more articles are added to my RSS heap. And the only way I can keep ahead is by reading them. It’s content entropy. I’m constantly wading against the tide of articles to see that elusive smiling robot. (I may be adding to this problem by sending you this email. I hope its infrequency is at least a partial relief).
I wrote about something similar nearly two years ago. In Fortnite, the ever-growing list of tasks becomes more work. 9-5 I look at tickets on Jira. 6-8 I look at tickets in Fortnite. But it’s not just Fortnite. I’ve been gifted subscriptions to magazines which became the gift of more to-do list items to get through. The gift that keeps on giving you work to do throughout the year.
An article by Armando Iannucci in the Telegraph sticks in my head. “The Sopranos has been described by some as the finest television series ever made,” he writes, “but, for various reasons, I never quite got round to watching it.” He decides simply to give up.
The sooner we set limits to the amount of stuff we’re prepared to be entertained by, the happier we will all be. I’ve suddenly sensed how much pressure we are under to view and hear everything. The constant thrum from the arts pages and review sections of the weekend papers, the non-stop shrill from monthly magazines and cultural round-ups on television and radio, insist that we simply have to see that film and order those CDs and set the video for the next 19 episodes of this unmissable drama.
And yet, as those unread supplements pile up, as the VHS tapes filled with recordings of old but as-yet unwatched episodes of The Nazis: A Warning From History and Spaced form a mountain on the floor, what we are left with is an ever-expanding sense of failure to catch up with all the sensory experiences that have been made available to us.
He wrote this in 2004.
I realize I have been feeling this on and off for nearly two decades. My Kindle has so many unread books on it, I’ve organized them by category to make the backlog look smaller. I’m so behind with TV programmes I’ve run out of space to store them. I’ve given up on my New Yorker subscription and have barely touched the Atlantic.
Bring out the tiniest violins, for it seems such a trivial problem: just spend your time doing the thing you like most. But therein lies the conundrum. With so many things to watch, how do we know which will be the best? So I end up paralyzed and watch old episodes of NCIS. I’ve pondered on Medium whether evolution has trained us to cope with scarcity but left us unprepared for the world of plenty in which we in the West now live. I have never lived through a famine. But I turn on screentime controls to stop me going on Twitter too much.
Perhaps this is why Wordle took the world by storm. There was one a day. You didn’t end up with a backlog of wordles to finish off. You got one, and that was it.
The other day, I finally cleared the unread messages in the business collaboration tool, Slack.
“That’s you sorted.” It said, “Put your feet up.”
There was a picture of a comfy sofa.
I may have dealt with the messages in Slack, but that doesn’t mean I can put my feet up. I have actual work to do. In a different way, Slack is as ludicrous as my RSS reader, or the inbox that says “No more mail! Have a cuppa” or any of the numerous empty dataset views in apps across my phone. Each app acts as if it contains the totality of my aims for the day, rather than just its own generated list of busy work for me.
I know this is just one email in an overflowing garbage fire of emails, so just three links for you to scroll past below and then you can put your feet up and have a cuppa.
Elsewhere
1.
Substack may be the belle of the newsletter ball, but there are delightful newsletters on Mailchimp, including The Notices by Nick Parker. Most issues are a list of links, but sometimes he writes a short essay. I particularly liked his ode to origami (although like all the best articles, it’s about something wider. In this case: knowledge and learning)
When I first started, I thought that I would feel like I could 'do' origami when I knew how to fold, say, a dozen or so things. It turns out that my memory is poor, and I frequently forget a step or two as I'm making something. And while this still infuriates me, it feels much less significant than I imagined it would. To be able to pause at any point and say, yes, I can see how rabbit is coming together nicely; that fold was a good fold; this fold is not such a good fold. A kind of knowing-in-the-middle-of-things, that's where the 'being able to do something' is.
Not related to origami, but there’s something about the way he numbers his points. Perhaps it’s because it feels like you’re progressing through something in small, digestible chunks, with each paragraph as a unit of thought. Either way, I have borrowed that to number the links in this email. You are one down. Two to go.
2.
Rebecca Stott on A Point of View on Radio 4 (and BBC Sounds). Stott recently retired as a fellow of Creative Writing at UEA. Here she talks about her reflections on what teaching has become over the last two decades:
A fellow professor told me it had to have been ten years since she last encouraged a talented PhD student to apply for academic jobs. “Now I tell them to run,” she said, “get out while you can.”
But I didn’t tell the PhD student to run or about the surveys. Or that my nerves are frayed. Or my eyesight is shot or that it was years since I last talked to a colleague in the corridor about anything intellectual. I didn’t tell her that these days we talk instead about the admin we’re doing or admissions strategies or the endless audits called “research excellent frameworks”. I didn’t tell her that I hated having to use the ugly jargon that the audit culture forces us to use. Phrases like “performance indicators”. I don’t want to call my books outputs or deliverables anymore. And I don’t want to think of my students as customers.
None of this is any surprise, but there is something grimly depressing about the sapping of our intellectual and creative industries. I can’t help wondering if her career has turned into a process of lists to work through: inboxes, assessments, audits, surveys, forms. Sometimes it feels like the whole world is experiencing something similar as we relentless churn and burn through our lists. What is climate change if not nature experiencing quite literal burnout?
3.
“That’s where I get my shoes,” I say, as I walk past Mr Shoes in town. It’s a long-running joke with my friends that I love shops called Mr {item-being-sold}. There’s something simultaneously naive and lazy about them. It’s as if someone decided to start a shop, couldn’t think of a name, and just named it after the first thing they saw.
I once had a vague idea to try and visit as many as I could find and write about them, but Nick Asbury has beaten me to it. Mr Blog is a fun (old-fashioned) blog about shops called Mr Something, filled with delightful observations and thoughts:
Mr Bit is the glorious sunset that brings it to a close.
Of course, the inevitable question arises: Is Mr Bit better than Herr Kutz?
No, he isn’t.
But only because Herr Kutz has a shopfront, whereas Mr Bit only has a van, albeit a very nice one.
Still, the very fact that it comes down to such fine considerations shows we are in special territory.
I can imagine a humourless brand consultant warning that ‘Mr Bit’ highlights a potential negative, implying that Mr Bit’s service falls short of the highest professional standards. Couldn't we call him Mr TotalClean instead?
No, we couldn’t. I'm sorry I even imagined you now as you're annoying me!
Mr Bit is touched with genius and I urge anyone who lives within a reasonable distance of Worrall to call upon his services.
That is all for this week. Until next time.
Simon