Josh Wimmer

I thought of calling this post, “You’re Exhausted Because You Don’t Have Enough to Do” – which, yeah, I know: a trolling, clickbaity headline if there ever was one. But bear with me: I have a point. And it’s not accusatory.

Let’s begin with a few things we all know – for instance, that everyone is exhausted. We know this because people keep telling us so. So. Tired. The universal declaration.

As Anna Katharina Schaffner shows in her 2016 book Exhaustion: A History, people have always been exhausted, though they have explained that experience in a wide variety of ways. And the different explanations often arise from legitimately different causes. For instance, there are very good reasons to believe that a common exhaustion of our time and place – of the social environment of, say, people who read the news online – arises largely from the ways that alway-on connectivity allows us no boundaries: emails from work can arrive at any time, and while we might try to tell ourselves that they can wait until the next time we are officially on the clock, in practice we often find it less stressful to get it off (a) and (b) our plate by answering immediately. Which results in a ping on our co-worker’s phone, which may promot her to think that she needs to get it off her mind and off her plate … and so the cycle continues.

It continues in another way also: seeking refuge from the stress, we turn to social media or streaming videos – that is, to the very same devices that have made us anxious in the first place. Devices that can still ping us … and so the cycle continues. An endless sequence of stimulus and response, as we are gradually transformed into mere servers.

Thus also – we’re still talking about things we know – the proliferation of articles and books and YouTube videos and podcasts on the inestimable blessing of disconnection. Silence, or at least quiet; Off rather than On. And there’s no doubt that for those who are able to manage it, such disconnection is a Good Thing. But maybe not the best thing.

The problem with the imperative to disconnect is that it operates still within the world of stimulus and response. Its only real point is to remove the stimulus in hopes that after a while we’ll stop twitching. And maybe that’s how it works, for some of us anyway. But eventually we have to turn our phones back on, and … well, once more, the cycle resumes. The cycle of being frayed by a certain set of stimuli and responding to the fraying by taking refuge in a different set of stimuli. But this does not relieve our exhaustion or restore our good health because constant stimulation is exhausting in itself – even when the stimulation comes from things we like, or think we like.

What’s necessary, I think, is breaking the circuit that keeps the cycle going. And the key to how to do that may be found, I think, in a single claim made by Ivan Illich in his 1973 book Tools for Conviviality. Here it is: “institutions are functional when they promote a delicate balance between what people can do for themselves and what tools at the service of anonymous institutions can do for them.” Let’s unpack this:

• Our “anonymous institutions” – especially the international and transnational media companies – are always telling us what they can do for us: “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” (Google, back in the day); “Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together” (Meta);
• But what they do for us always comes packaged in the stimulus/response model;
• And constant immersion in the stimulus/respons environment exhausts us;
• So the “delicate balance” Illich speaks of has not been achieved – we are constantly being pressured to forget what we can do for ourselves;
• Therefore our institutions are not functional, and neither are we.

This is what my title means: We’re exhausted because we don’t have enough to do. Instead of meaningful action, we have only responses to stimuli.

The first step in making ourselves and our institutions more functional is simply this: To try doing for ourselves what the anonymous media companies are always telling us they can do for us.

Think, then, of a social ill you want to see remedied; now, with that ill fixed firmly in your mind, imagine that there are no social media – no internet even. What do you do? Throw up your hands in despair? That wouldn’t be necessary. You write letters; you see if a local organization devoted to that cause needs volunteers; you attend city council or school board meetings; you change your own behavior in whatever ways might make a small difference. You have more time to do these things because you are no longer trapped in the stimulus/response cycle that is the only thing our media institutions have to offer us. You may well discover that while in one sense you’re doing more – you’re taking action rather than responding digitally to digital stimuli – you’re not as tired. In many circumstances – not all, to be sure, but many, especially in our part of the world – the world of atoms is less wearisome to us than the world of bits.

So, paradoxically but truly, the way out of our current exhaustion is not to do less but do other – or rather, genuinely to do rather than merely to react. And then when you do return to the media world, you’ll do so as someone who has helped to re-establish that “delicate balance” Illich speaks of. You’ll have taken a step towards healing yourself, and taken a step towards healing our institutions. What do you have to lose except your Pavlovian chains?

In my new essay on anarchism, I describe myself as “a person with an exceptionally low anthropology” — and if you want to know what I mean by that, here’s more from David Zahl. 

This post, weekend open thread – April 17-18, 2021 , was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.

This comment section is open for any non-work-related discussion you’d like to have with other readers, by popular demand.

Here are the rules for the weekend posts.

Book recommendation of the week: Good Company, by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney. The discovery of a wedding ring that was long believed lost reveals secrets that unsettle a marriage and a friendship.

* I make a commission if you use that Amazon link.

Elizabeth Warren touched off yet another news cycle on Medicare-for-all last week when she released a detailed financing plan for how she would pay for the program. The basic idea is to soak the rich with a variety of special taxes, cut health care costs by squeezing providers, and then make up the difference by capturing slightly less than what employers currently spend on employer-based insurance. Thus she claimed that her plan would not raise taxes on anyone but the rich.

There are a lot of worthy elements to Warren's plan. But its badly-designed tax on employers, and the political calculations implied by that decision, reveal how very broken the Medicare-for-all discussion is in this country.

One underlying problem here is it is stupid governance to expect every single program to come with its own special pay-for. Every year, Congress authorizes a big slate of spending, the government collects a bunch of tax revenue, and then makes up the difference with borrowing. If we are to discuss tax revenue, it should be in the context of the entire budget, whether other programs (ahem) might be trimmed, how much it might cost to borrow money, and so on.

"But how will you pay for it?" is not ever a good-faith question about responsible budgeting. It is only asked about new social programs — virtually nobody ever asks how we are going to pay for a casual $80 billion increase in the military budget, and Republicans easily bat away questions about gigantic tax cuts for the rich with utterly preposterous assertions that they will pay for themselves. The Bush tax cuts did not, and neither did Trump's.

The point of this question, whether the journalists who ask it over and over and over realize it or not, is to make it harder to pass social programs that benefit the non-rich by holding them to a double standard that requires a lot of unpopular talk about taxation. (And it is more than a little maddening that Democrats are constantly hazed by Jake Tapper about arcane tax details while Republicans get away with the policy equivalent of vomiting a stomach full of library paste onto the kindergarten teacher's dress.)

Indeed, as my colleague Jeff Spross points out, there is strong evidence that the economy is still far below potential maximum strength, and thus we could probably finance quite a lot of a universal Medicare program just through borrowing, at least at first.

Nevertheless, because Medicare-for-all would be such an enormous program, it is not totally out of line to imagine some financing options. Here Warren's team pretty clearly bent her plan for political reasons. The rich-focused taxes are fine, of course, but the employer ones are not. One of the many horrendous aspects of the health care status quo is how each employer has to pay for their own workforce individually, but people's health care needs do not just coincide with their level of pay. That means lower-paid workers have to dedicate more of their compensation to insurance to get decent coverage, or they just go without.

Warren would levy a new employer-side tax on workers that is 2 percent smaller than current spending on health care, which would entrench that unjust funding structure. It would effectively be a head tax, as Matt Bruenig argues, a policy charging employers a similar dollar amount for each employee — especially given that Warren would gradually transition these payments into a standard Employer Medicare Contribution calculated as the "average health care cost-per-employee nationally."

This would be a monstrous tax on low-paid employees. The contribution would be in the ballpark of $9,500 per employee over the next decade — or a nearly 63 percent tax on someone working at full time at minimum wage. Conversely, it would be much easier on high earners, as $9,500 isn't much for someone making $150,000. Even a flat payroll tax — that is, a percentage charge on all wages — would be much, much more fair on both sides. A payroll tax plus an income tax (as suggested by Bernie Sanders) would be more progressive still, because the first 12-24,000 dollars in income are exempted from income taxes.

It's also a bit of a stretch to claim that Warren's plan does not raise taxes on the middle class. Even if employers are paying the taxes directly, they still take the money out of their labor spending bucket, and thus the taxes are ultimately paid by the workers. Now, we might say that existing employer insurance payments are basically taxes anyway, in which case it's arguably fair to say Warren would not increase taxes relative to the current reality, but at the end of the day workers are still going to be making some huge new payments to the government, and her insistence that we "don’t need to raise taxes on the middle class by one penny" is a little too cute.

Then there is the fact that Warren would exempt most independent contractors, and employers with less than 50 workers from these contributions, which presents a big incentive for big companies to either break themselves up into hundreds of little 50-person units or to make all their employees independent contractors in order to avoid the tax.

Anyway, I am virtually certain Warren's policy team knows all this, and would not actually structure a plan this way if she was writing a bill. So why this goofy tax? Well, it allows her to dodge some of the landmines in the mainstream policy discourse, which generally holds that taxes are bad by definition, especially on anyone other than the rich. It also gives her a plan she can use to roll up and whack Pete Buttigieg on the nose with when he cynically pretends as though having a completed tax plan before the next Congress has even been elected is the most important thing a presidential candidate can do.

I appreciate that Warren is sticking to her guns on Medicare-for-all. But Bernie Sanders' approach to financing is more productive and more honest. Instead of dancing around the issue, he puts it straight — saying essentially that we're going to have a great new benefit, all cost-sharing is going away, and you will have to chip in some new taxes, but almost everyone will come out ahead. It sounds less squirrelly — and does the important ideological work of advancing the idea that taxes are the way sensible countries pay for a decent society, not some kind of theft. What's more, it makes his tax proposals better on the policy merits.

Straightforward, breezy confidence is the way to defeat bonehead assumptions and bad-faith questions. The only way around duplicitous tax-baiters and their media enablers is through.

Want more essential commentary and analysis like this delivered straight to your inbox? Sign up for The Week's "Today's best articles" newsletter here.

I did not choose to significantly reduce my engagement with the online world, and specifically to delete all of my social media. I did so out of painful necessity, in the wake of my own terrible behavior, and within a sweeping set of changes to all facets of my life. I am not in a position to evangelize – it’s hypocritical to do so if you only found religion to stay ahead of the cops – and I’m not interested in doing so. Anyway, it’s hard for me to say what changes in my life stem from my online habits as opposed to going back on meds, seeing a social worker, getting back into therapy, doing a year of AA, going to a support group, or suddenly living a reclusive life. I’m not trying to convince you to do anything.

I do want to simply share my experience about going from being pathologically online to being, not offline, but less online, consciously online, deliberately online. Or if you can forgive me for being cute, halfline.

I got rid of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. These were services that I utilized, as I say, pathologically – that is, to excess despite clear negative effects on my life and constant decisions to cut back or quit. Checking them was a literal constant for me, as it is for many people. I argued about politics; I kept abreast of the news; I stayed connected to friends; I told and read dumb jokes; I fought, and I fought, and I fought, and I fought; and I looked at pictures of attractive women. Those things wallpapered my days and were suddenly gone. I also stopped blogging, and in a bigger sense, opinion making, after having done so faithfully for almost exactly a decade. I stopped freelance writing, which was a major source of my sense of self and a minor source of income. (It will disappoint some to learn that I still get asked.) If I’m being honest, I long ago stopped writing out of the joy of getting published and started writing out of something like spite. So all of those things are gone.

I also found myself naturally less connected in terms of following the news cycle. Social media, after all, is a feed, of news and opinions among other things. Early on, when I was most involved with the essential work of early recovery, I read nothing that I could not hold in my hands. It was a blessing in a period that was both incredible difficult and filled with blessings. Over time I came back to reading stuff – #content, Takes – in fits and starts, and never close to the level as before. There wasn’t, and isn’t, much rhyme or reason to what I read and when. I catch on to many stories late, but some I am perfectly up-to-date about. Whole controversies pass me by only for me to learn about them from some oblique reference from a friend. I learned about the Harvey Weinstein thing months after the fact, only because I caught a glimpse of the front page of the New York Post and was curious. Sometimes I still get into Wikipedia rabbit holes. I can’t remember the last time I read a hot take about politics or saw the front page of the New York Times, but I check ESPN.com religiously. I still check RSS, but I never followed anything remotely mainstream on RSS anyway, and as the category of interesting and independent thinker has essentially gone extinct online, my RSS reader has grown barren.

Occasionally I codify my media consumption into a set of rules. For example, for more than a year and a half now I have not read a story with the word “Trump” in the headline. I simply realized one day that I could not remember having learned one genuine thing from such pieces, one insight that made me a smarter or sharper person, and so I stopped. I do not feel at all the poorer for it, or for dramatically reducing my consumption of online opinion making in general.

I am not a monk. Going fully offline was not an option. After all, email is a form of internet communication, and I need email, for work most of all. I also couldn’t maintain my current job without access to my online calendar, to Blackboard, and to (shudder) CUNYFirst. Nor would I willingly give up the ability to communicate with friends and family via email, or to coordinate my files with Dropbox. I stream movies on Amazon. I also occasionally play video games, which at least require downloading and often online connectivity. I watch some YouTube, even after a major reduction and imposition of rules, as I realized that watching YouTube was becoming just another habitual behavior. Similarly I found myself obsessively checking MLB and NBA box scores until I realized it was just another way to constantly open up my phone. I still have to keep an eye out for the subtle ways I might cheat without knowing it.

So what has it meant for me, to leave constant connectivity, endless social conditioning, and perpetual knowingness behind? Perhaps the most important thing to say to anyone is this: nothing happens overnight, and what does happen is not dramatic, at least at first. I sometimes read about people going offline for three months or six and I sense that they are disappointed that wisdom does not suddenly appear. Probably the most obvious difference for the first year was that my phone suddenly had an abundance of battery life. I think it takes longer than a year for changes to emerge, and even then you must be prepared for the changes to be gentle and quiet. If you’re going into it with an expectation of some quick fix then don’t bother.

But changes do come, and they are real. The most obvious is just the need to fix. The constant sense of having to check something, to go seeking that little hit of dopamine and getting it. Again, I suspect that the transition for me was less obvious because it was drowned in the personality-destabilizing experience of onboarding meds. But the feelings were still very present and sometimes intense, the reflexive grab for the phone. I think this manifests for most people as an inability to maintain attention on anything for even brief snatches of time. And that did change, for me. Bit by bit, the vague panic that something somewhere was happening that I wasn’t noticing subsided. I didn’t imagine unread urgent emails and I didn’t assume that I was ignoring some vital social cue. I stopped feeling like I had to do something else at the same time I was watching a show. That stuff did come and it has raised my quality of life. But it comes slowly.

It also takes work. I’ve always been a big reader, but my exile prompted me to really think about it, and I admitted to myself that where I was once a reflexive and habitual reader, I had become in the past decade a deliberate one, someone who penciled reading into his planner. Perhaps this was grad school, most of all, but I’m also sure that the ceaseless fight against a flickering attention played a large part. You can’t read voraciously when you’re fighting another part of your brain for control of your attention. (I truly fear for the world’s 11 year olds, that they may never experience what it’s like to be incapable of putting a book down.) So I set about trying to make reading a more organic, spontaneous part of my day, paradoxically by initially scheduling more brief moments to read. In time I didn’t have to schedule anymore, and when I did read I felt pulled away less often. It took a lot of ignoring. In time the temptation to read while doing something else returned, although it’ll never be like it was before I first read a blog.

Another thing: there is a remarkable freedom in no longer feeling like you need to sell something to someone. That’s what I feel, when it comes to me. I feel like I no longer have to sell anything – not an idea, or an image, or a self. Because that’s what you’re constantly doing on social media, selling some version of yourself, marketing your very personality. (One of my pet beliefs is that many or most adults go through life relitigating high school, trying either to recapture past glory or to get to be one of the popular kids this time around. This impulse explains approximately 100% of Twitter culture.) It’s freeing to allow your personality to just exist, disaster though it may be. Offline I have nothing to advertise.

What is most powerful is what I can’t convey. There is just a kind of voice in my head that’s gone, a level of awareness I’m no longer aware of. Something will knock around in my brain and for a second I’ll go “Ohhhhhh…” and I’ll recall a kind of knowing that knows only itself, an internet ouroboros, a cell of the hive mind. There is a type of meta-understanding of oneself within a constellation of other selves that I’ve lost, and which I won’t try to describe, because I don’t want to think about it too hard and risk it coming back.

Here’s what I know: the mindset I have partially and slowly left behind is the product of choice, and not my choice.

It’s a point that I cannot stress enough, and it’s one that I think should be far more common, prevalent, and pressing than it is today. Silicon Valley is constantly in the process of manipulating your brain chemistry to suit its ends. Deliberately and directly. Tech companies spend untold millions of dollars engineering ways to alter your mind. The way online life changes the way you think is not an accident; it is the result of a very conscious and nefarious decision by powerful corporations to monetize the malleability of our psychological selves. When you feel like you can’t stop checking Facebook every 5 minutes, when you stare at your iPhone despite knowing you’re being rude in doing so, when you lie awake at night on Instagram even though you’ve made up your conscious mind not to do so… these things are happening because engineers have set out to manipulate you. They have control over you. Real control. None of it is an accident, and all of it is done because it is profitable.

That we have gone along with this strikes me as one of the darkest turns in our collective cultural memory. And the change has been, to many people, unambiguously a bad one; so, so many people who are permanently online will tell you matter-of-factly that they derive far more unhappiness from online life than they do happiness. If you don’t believe me, ask around. Go on Twitter. Ask people: does this network, on balance, bring you pleasure? I suspect most will admit that it doesn’t. Certainly if all the gallows humor is to be believed the answer is no. Yet people continue to participate despite this knowledge. Cool kid Twitter has, for a very long time, struck me as an unbearably sad place; all the irony and jokes and memes paper over a desperate and directionless unhappiness. They may farm likes and retweets, and they may address the whole world from a stance of derisive and disaffected superiority. But they’re not happy people.

Some seem to find offline life unthinkable. Every four or five months someone emails me to ask whether they have discovered my “secret Twitter account.” There’s also the “I need it for my job” delusion. Usually when people say that, if you respond “How do you need it for your job, specifically?” the response is a lot of hemming and hawing. The number of people who authentically need to access social media must be very small. I am less interested in this excuse itself than I am in the urge to find an excuse at all. The behaviors that compel us to come up with excuses and rationalizations are the behaviors that hurt us most.

Like I say, I am not an evangelist. People should do as they please. Most everyone will find using social media a healthier pursuit than I did. Most people do not possess my abundant pathologies, and most possess the maturity, restraint, and perspective that I never did. Perhaps most people use social media without issue.

But I think it would be good for everyone if we all communally understood: when we use these technologies, we are giving access to our brain to some very shadowy figures. And too many of us are relying on the pleasant fiction that our conscious mind will overpower the unconscious, the conditioned, the Pavlovian. It is a hallmark of irrational thinking to believe that our rationality prevails. Take it from one who knows of what he speaks: we are not in control of our own minds. And when we sign away the deed to even a sliver of our brains, we risk bringing discord of an insidious and unknowable variety to the recesses of our selves. You do not have to believe that we live in the worst case scenario of what social media could potentially do. You only need to believe that, when you open the door to those amoral and rapaciously ambitious men of Silicon Valley, you never know what will come through, or if you will even notice the day it walks in.

I do miss the Instagram thots though.