Bread Thoughts

It’s Thanksgiving, and I’m idling around my house waiting for bread dough to rise and the oven to preheat. So far this year I’ve published a blog post every month. But it strikes me that it’s November 27th and I’ve yet to put anything out for the month. It so happens to work out, because the smells involved in baking bread are oddly stimulating to the mind, and I’m in a mood to introspect. Unlike most of my posts, I’m writing, editing, and publishing this all on the same day, and it’s probably gonna show.

I (along with many others, I’m sure) find Thanksgiving to be a rather ironic holiday. Because nothing screams thankfulness like buying more stuff, Thanksgiving is juxtaposed with Black Friday, the busiest shopping day of the year in the United States. Nowadays, in the internet age, we’ve doubled down on the consumerism by immediately following it up with Cyber Monday. Call me crazy, but I’m beginning to get the impression that (societally speaking) we like getting new stuff at least twice as much as appreciating what we already have. If you wanna feel really good about the world, definitely give the “Violence” section of the Black Friday Wikipedia page a skim. The fact we’ll trample each-other in Walmart because of a discount on Xboxes is troubling, to say the least.

In the face of such facts, it’s very tempting to write off the world as a lost cause. Aren’t we all just savage animals pretending to be civilized? The AI bubble will crash the economy, the world’s governments will all become right-wing autocracies, and global warming is going to destroy the planet, right? Why bother? One way to cope with this onslaught, which I can personally attest to, is to enter into a cycle of indignation and rumination. This procedure is especially powerful when performed as a group, where you can all feed into each other’s sense of outrage and (perhaps) moral superiority. Don’t get me wrong, there are things worth being angry about. There are even things that you should be angry about. But what happens when someone is constantly angry and embittered and does nothing about it? That kind of situation is a problem. I know because I’ve been there. I’d call myself a “recovering cynic”. Who knows, maybe I’ll be a cynic again in a few years? So far my life has been a constant stream of “Wow I was an IDIOT a few years ago, good thing I’m starting to get things figured out!” only to later conclude I was not, in fact, figuring things out. So, it’s pretty difficult to tell when I’m having a genuine personal insight or if it’s just because I’m in my 20s and far dumber than I realize.

Whatever the case, what I have concluded is that contempt is very rarely appropriate, and that toothless indignation is, at best, an unhealthy coping mechanism. Sure, maybe it feels good in the moment to swap shocking news articles or say a bunch of mean shit about someone. But all else being equal, being bitter about something just makes me more miserable, so if I’m not going to take action then I should probably let it go. Sure, feel your feelings and process those emotions, that’s fine. But these rumination-type behaviors can’t possibly be good for me, and they can’t possibly be helping me become the kind of person I want to be.

There’s a lot out there to make you feel bad: politics, AI, the economy, pick your poison! It’s already bad enough that the “traditional” news cycle is so fast, where every few days (if that!) there is a new crisis to occupy your mind. It gets even worse when you throw short-form content into the mix. I’ve probably watched tens of thousands of short-form videos between Instagram and YouTube, and I could recall maybe 10 of them if I really tried. Yet, these videos have a very real affect on my emotional state and attention span. It’s simultaneously mind-numbing and manipulative. I find myself sucked into a stream of light and sound, and by the end of it all I did was titanically waste my time. It’s tragic to look back on time spent scrolling and realize that not only do I not remember anything I just saw, but that it wasn’t even restful. At least sleep is rejuvenating.

What both of these things have in common is that, at least for me, they “shut off” my brain. Not literally of course, but they both have a sort of addictive quality. Short-form content shuts your brain down in a more obvious way, but I’ve found even negativity can put me on autopilot. It’s so easy to just vent, and vent, and vent, and vent, and never do anything about an issue other than vent. I’m not saying to be stoic about everything, nor am I saying we shouldn’t get frustrated or angry sometimes. I am saying that the emotions should either have a purpose, or be allowed to run their course. When faced with something upsetting, it’s a lot easier to throw up a generic negative response as a wall rather than truly face and internalize it. Complaining about how bad something is makes it feel like you’re doing something about it, but you’re not. You’re just digging a rut that gets deeper and deeper, which only makes you more negative, which in turn makes it even easier to be bitter. The mindless scrolling, the constant feed of negative news, and upchucking negativity at people and events, are all purposeless activities. It’s living adrift without any intentionality, while lashing out instead of taking responsibility for affecting change or accepting unfortunate circumstances. None of this is meant to be dismissive of people’s emotions or reactions to things. Rather, it’s the pattern of returning to these feelings over and over again without doing anything, that I take issue with, because of personal experience.

We get to choose how we show up in the world. In the words of Annie Dillard: "How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” In just the same way, the world is the aggregate of every individual’s actions. There are a lot of things deeply wrong in the world, but things can change, if people are willing to act. I’ve got a lot to be thankful for, and this Thanksgiving I find done with simply having warm and fuzzy thoughts for a day. Living with intentionality seems a lot more honoring of my life than wishful thinking. It’s all much too short to be distracted all the time.