Think Small
I am not small, physically speaking, at six feet tall and pushing 240 pounds. Some of this is hours, over years, in the gym; some is beer, pizza, and fried chicken. I’m drawn to “world-building” science fiction, and hefty, groundbreaking ideas from many sources. I love listening to symphonic classical music and composing six-minute-plus symphonic metal epics. I love forests thick with tall trees, big hills with panoramic overlooks, the Great Lakes, drum kits with two bass drums, Imperial IPAs, printed works of nonfiction that could prop open a door (but the contents of which are too valuable to put to such use).
Maybe bigness is a religion, in which growing bigger for its own sake has become sacred, and the accompanying belief that such growth will…eventually…benefit everyone. Small is the devil of this faith, weak and quaint, pitiable and backward, unwilling to trade the quiet stability of the small for the permanent insecurity of the unending quest for bigness. It is a populist faith, attracting rich and poor, shot through with hope and fear and guilt and stern purpose to rival the world’s traditional religions. If the United States of America (and increasingly, the world) has a shared religion, it is the religion of bigness. Production and consumption—and the attendant necessity of widespread waste, excess, and despoilation—are the articles of this faith, and it has many, many evangelists on both sides of the tiresome partisan schism. I am not even sure if I believe myself when I talk this way, though; maybe I ‘m a crank.
There is a little patch of forested land behind my house where my dog and I like to walk. In the winter when the ground is covered with feet (yes, feet) of snow for months (yes, months) at a time we trudge through the snow to pack it down, creating little trails and paths, slowly and painstakingly, so that we don’t have to give up our walks in that little patch of woods. There are two seasons in the North Woods—cold, and not-cold. This time of year, late March, is the slow unraveling of a six-month (at least) winter cold, when the snow melts (but sometimes still falls), the lakes thaw (slowly), and the long icy dark beats a slow retreat, creating at least a few months of “not-cold” space and time for vitality and sun. I love it here.
I grew up in a large metropolitan area in Texas. There were two seasons there, too—hot, and not-hot. Like the cold season here, the hot season there lasted for at least six months, but when it was not-hot, it could be anything, from approaching-hot (80 degrees plus, even in the middle of winter) to almost cold (20 degrees or lower, which I now consider comfortable but which, with half an inch of ice, would shut that entire city down). It was dirty and crowded and loud and seedy. Garbage on the roadside, thrown out the windows on the freeway, blowing in the wind, stuck in chain link fences, and swaying like occupiers’ flags from barbed wire. It took half an hour to get anywhere, always by car. Only in the suburbs could you walk or bike, but the sprawl was intractable, and the big trucks and SUVs often treated pedestrians and cyclists with little regard. To be fair, there is a lot to like about that part of Texas, too, but the place I live now, and the place I grew up, could not be more different.
I was a social media junkie since the MySpace days and had several accounts across multiple platforms that I checked religiously. Last November, I vowed to give up social medial for at least 30 days; after almost 120 days, I’m not sure I’ll ever go back. This is not to say all my interactions on social media were bad, but enough, perhaps most, were shallow and unproductive, and a few were downright nasty. I also deleted all the games and “entertainment apps” from my phone and life—including, more recently, the news app (sorry not sorry). I still have YouTube and I still use streaming services to watch TV and listen to music. And, of course, there’s the website to which this blog is attached. I don’t see myself giving these up—but never thought I’d be here, either.
I study and teach statistics (among other things), the art of separating signal, something that’s probably meaningful and relevant, from noise, something that is random and not significant, if not outright distracting. A little noise is to be expected, as math always models the world within a margin of error, and statistics quantifies ignorance more so than knowledge; a lot of noise means there’s something wrong with the model. C.S. Lewis described Hell as the kingdom of noise (I first encountered this phrase in The Screwtape Letters and have referred to it elsewhere). I’m certainly not saying this is Hell—that’s completely unfair given how many good things there are in the world as it is, bigness and all—but I am noticing changes as I separate myself from the excessive noise. Maybe the noise was my fault, and I’m too anxious, too easily distracted, too prone to respond to outrage or fear or see the negative side of things. Maybe the algorithms and interactions were an accurate reflection of me, and I owe the media giants and the religion of bigness a heartfelt apology.
But thinking small, this shift in perspective, wasn’t deliberate, really—even ditching social media and the entertainment apps was more a short-term “cleanse” than something lasting, and I didn’t anticipate how much my thought process would change in doing so. Thinking small is just something that happened slowly with the shift from urban to rural; and from global and virtual to local and interpersonal. It’s hard to explain, but maybe thinking small is more about practice and experience, and less about theory and explanation. Every day I think small, I feel more content, less anxious, and less depressed on a day-to-day basis; my attention span has increased and sharpened, and I’m feeling more self-confident. Even though I’m more relaxed and have more time, I also seem to get more done. My interaction with other human beings is much smaller, too: face-to-face conversation and live events with an occasional text message or phone conversation. I talk to a handful of people regularly rather than the thousands I “talked to” on social media. Though the quantity of interaction is small, the quality of those interactions has without doubt improved overall. Do I miss some people? Of course. And I hope to meaningfully connect with them again. Someday. Some of them. Even if these changes I’ve experienced aren’t typical, I’m thinking that heartfelt apology would be premature; increasingly I don’t think the problem was me.
These ideas have been percolating in my mind for years; reading Huxley’s Brave New World and Zamyatin’s We, discussions of the personalism of sociologist Christian Smith in graduate school with one of my mentors, Paul Stock, culminating in a co-authored book chapter; last summer’s reading list which included Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist by controversial writer Paul Kingsnorth. I’m also reading two books right now that I am finding equal parts fascinating, provocative, and frustrating: Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s work Antifragile, and E.F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful. Taleb argues that bigness (and its attendant neurotic efforts to predict, and control, relatively small instances of disorder) fragilizes systems; taking a cue from him, small can in fact be antifragile, not merely surviving, but benefiting from, disorder. Schumacher argues for an “economics as if all people mattered,” a vision that begins with the local, with traditional wisdom and practice, that is authentically conservative (another story for another day), environmentally sustainable, and averse to violence. Taleb, a mathematician with libertarian sentiments who predicted the Great Recession, and Schumacher, an “old school” communitarian economist who found a sympathetic ear in the Carter White House, would probably get in a heated argument if they were placed in a room together (Schumacher is no longer with us, so we cannot test this conjecture) but I see value in both their perspectives even as they each challenge my own. I’m not done with their books, so I don’t want to say too much yet; and I’m not exactly running out of things to do with all my free time mid-Spring semester, so I’m reading them and putting them down in brief stints.
I’ve also delved into recent work on the neuroscience of media and social media, including the possibility of “digital dependency” or addiction to digital media, and, at the risk of confirmation bias (finding smart-sounding stuff that tells me I’m right for thinking and doing what I was already going to think and do anyway), it isn’t pretty. I’m thinking of the cultural studies anthology Are We All Addicts Now? That I recently finished reading (along with a handful of scholarly articles I’ve looked up for later)—unlike the other books I mentioned, which involve time and frustration, I found this one impossible to put down. Don’t even get me started on the privacy and surveillance issues that I used to try to remain willfully ignorant of (there is mention of these in the book, too).
Maybe small does mean weak and quaint; maybe I’m weak and quaint for shutting out the big world, and if I keep this up, I’m going to get left behind by this shiny ever-new religion of bigness. Maybe that isn’t so bad. What’s wrong with weak? Weak can feel in ways strong can’t. Strong is a trap—if you call me strong, or try to make me want to be strong, it makes me wonder what you plan on doing to me next. And what’s wrong with quaint? Quaint can be beautiful. Never thought I’d live in the country. Walking in that little patch of woods at night, I can look up and see the stars (good luck seeing stars amid urban sprawl and light pollution). A starry sky, a spring rain, pine trees, flocks of birds, snow and ice, sun and moon; quaint if anything ever was. Old-fashioned and beautiful. Weak and quaint? Guilty. Guilty. Guilty.
Then again, maybe I’m a crank, sinking into thin-skinned romanticism with age or the complacency of relative privilege; and the evangelists of bigness will soon reach me once more and set me straight. For now, I’m going to think small a little bit more and see where this takes me.
Sources:
Bartlett, Vanessa and Henrietta Bowden-Jones, editors. 2017. Are We All Addicts Now?
Huxley, Aldous. 1932. Brave New World.
Kingsnorth, Paul. 2017. Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist.
Lewis, C.S. The Screwtape Letters.
Schumacher, E.F. 2010. Small is Beautiful: Economics as if All People Mattered.
Smith, Christian. 2010. What is a Person?
Stock, Paul V. and Lukas Szrot. 2020. “Justice.” In the Routledge Handbook of Sustainable and Regenerative Food Systems: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9780429466823-8/justice-paul-stock-lukas-szrot
Taleb, Nicholas Nassim. 2010. Antifragile: Things that Benefit from Disorder.
Zamyatin, Yevgeny. 1924. We.
Image Source: https://www.freeimages.com/download/pine-tree-1388454
