Live Like a Duck. Maybe.

The four Fs.

I happened upon the above meme yesterday, and it made me smile… and then made me think.

Don’t get me wrong. I love my tech. I am extremely grateful for advances in medicine and hygiene and coffee shops. I’m quite happy in my house with power and water and Internet — and most definitely do not want to live in a cave, as that kind of accommodation generally comes lamentably under-provisioned with niceties like bookcases and refrigerators and cats.

But while progress is great and all, isn’t it strikingly true that the things with most value and resonance, the moments and environments that get us through life, the events we’ll remember with fondness in later years, floating comfortingly across our fading minds on our death beds, are the things we could have had a hundred and fifty years ago — or two thousand, or more?

Friends, food, conversation, community, walking amidst trees, looking at lakes or swimming in them, laughter or hug from a child who feels safe and loved. We’re not so different to ducks, or at least not as much as we’re encouraged to imagine.

An instructive quote:

“In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”

— Herbert A. Simon

‘Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World’ in Martin Greenberger (ed.) “Computers, Communications, and the Public Interest” (1971)

I do not need to know what some distant acquaintance had for lunch. I should not make myself anxious striving for the regard of people I will never meet, and for whom my labor’s fruits are of only passing interest. Incessant information about the activities of celebrities or billionaires or the economy serves me not at all — except by keeping me sedated under a warm blanket of the inexplicable or unimportant.

We live in a world where constant, technologized and monetized demands upon our attention leave us so depleted of that facility that it comes as a shock to realize that all this far more real stuff is still present, behind the blizzard of the modern.

The lakes are still there for us, too.

Yes, this observation may seem obvious to the point of platitudinous, but it’s worth reminding ourselves — especially now — that we can live both inside time and outside it. Of course we benefit from advances in science and culture — but we are also constrained by them, and distracted by them, and sometimes waylaid. We’re like plants that have been painted gold. Sure, it’s perhaps prettier (to some) but we didn’t actually need the gold. We were functioning before that coat of the fake — and this carapace of artifice, of convenience and “progress”, may in fact prevent us from emotionally or spiritually or creatively photosynthesizing in a way that keeps us sane.

Almost everything we do is historically and culturally determined. We can make choices about which of those fashions we choose to live by. As creatures we don’t have to wear clothes, but nobody needs (or wants) the sight of me wandering around naked, so I’ll stick with that norm — just as I’ll continue buying my food from other people, rather than bringing it into being myself, as I’d be a terrible farmer.

But so many of those other activities and concerns and ways of life, those norms that are presented to us as inevitable? Mere choices, and ones that we don’t have to make. We can choose instead to focus back on the real. On the three Fs.

Friendship, Food, and Fun — the latter broadly defined to include not only positive interactions with other humans, but also with animal friends, the environment in general, both natural and artificial, and with creating things, or even just sitting back and staring affably into the distance.

To be clear, I am not socially conservative, far from it. I’m certainly not claiming things were better the way they were. For much of history, for the majority of people, they were shit, and the most vocal proponents of the old ways conveniently forget such trivia as slavery, rampant poverty and infant morality. I greatly enjoy many of the things that progress has brought us, from iPhones to electric guitars to being able to being able to jump in a car and go buy some beer and a ripe avocado.

But after allowing for the importance of being able to stay warm and fed, at heart we’re far more like ducks than we sometimes realize. The things we as humans want and need are timeless — and in conversation with many people recently I’ve heard them turning away from the chaos and back to those values: to community, to nurturing activities, to the small things in life we know are the most nourishing.

There’s a problem with this, however.

Another timely quote:

“We all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call; no way out, just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down with us trapped, locked in it.”

― Tennessee Williams, The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore

For just one happening-right-now example, the President is moving the military into American cities. DC first, Chicago next, likely San Francisco and many other cities after that (prioritizing the Democrat-led ones, of course). Literally as I’m writing this, it’s been confirmed that the Guard are now carrying lethal arms.

Under the guise and pretense of fighting crime and immigration and “the homeless problem” — a problem that actually lies within society, not the individuals themselves — we are watching a horrible, ignorant man setting the table for pitting the military against its own citizens.

For the time being, it’s “just” the National Guard. But — as a friend pointed out to me last night — what happens if one of these weekend warriors gets up in the face of a now-homeless guy who actually served in Afghanistan or Iraq, and the guy decides he’s not there for this bullshit — and shots get fired and someone’s dad (who likely didn’t want to get deployed there in the first place) winds up dead on the street? This (or someone throwing a sandwich in vague protest at a cowardly masked ICE goon) will be leapt upon as legitimation for sending the real military in.

In America.

This is where we are. This is happening, and not just here. Europe too is suffering the rise of overtly and proudly right-wing movements in everywhere from Germany to France and even Portugal, while in the UK young men are being briskly radicalized into convenient racial hatred by low men suave with opportunist greed. Choosing to turn aside from the news and from current events in order to live in some kind of intellectual Arts & Crafts universe in which we focus on the timeless essentials of life sadly also serves the people who want to dominate us and to destroy the planet for their own ends, those sleek monsters supported by the kind of perpetually angry morons who can lose their minds over Cracker Barrel changing their logo, on the ludicrous grounds that the redesign is “woke”.

There’s the three Fs, but also a fourth. “Fuckers”.

And one fucker in particular, a clear and present international danger to everything we hold dear, a man who lives in a world without boundaries, a feral and ahistorical force for wanton and selfish destruction. To ignore the fourth F and let the world’s fuckers run rampant is to put ourselves in the position of people in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s — who also believed it couldn’t happen there, or if did, it wouldn’t be too bad, and it certainly wouldn’t impact us. Yes, this comparison has been made often enough that I’m sure some of you are rolling your eyes. But it’s true, isn’t it.

Can we live like content little ducks on private ponds while the fuckers are rounding up all the other creatures and pointing guns at them, their fingers itchy on triggers?

I don’t know what the answer to this dilemma is.

Do you?

Late 1920s Berlin