If Descartes were a millennial: on avoiding avoidance
As he took refuge from an inclement winter storm in 1637, Descartes was forced to “spend the whole day shut up in a small room heated by a stove”. Rather than complain about the apparent dullness of it, Descartes relished that “[he] could converse with [his] own thoughts at leisure”. It was under such oppressing circumstances that he began to develop his Discourse on Method, a timeless treatise on how to correctly conduct one’s reason and seek truth in the sciences. In it, he outlines four rules for directing the mind in the pursuit of knowledge: 1) accepting nothing as true that is not self-evident, 2) dividing problems into their simplest parts, 3) solving problems by proceeding from simple to complex, and 4) rechecking the reasoning.
The impact of this contribution has been long acknowledged as one of the building blocks of the modern scientific method, so much so that it is taught in most introductory courses to epistemology. There is little need for me, with no formal training in philosophy, to summarize this further; there are plenty of better resources for that. Rather, I would like to focus on the stove. Yes, the stove.
Weirdly enough, the thought of Descartes’ stove (it was not his but you get the point) came to me while heating some bread in my own stove. I have lately forced myself to do one thing at a time, or so I have tried to do in an attempt to train my focus and creativity. I am making an effort to just cook when cooking, just wash when washing, just eat when eating, and so on. I am not doing this because I consider any of these activities to be inherently worthy of my full focus, but rather because I want to accustom my brain to do one thing at a time, hoping that this will translate into better working habits and allow me to process thoughts and emotions without distraction. Too often I catch myself avoiding difficult thoughts and emotions through seemingly productive or soul-feeding content. The ultimate outcome is avoidance; I run away from uncomfortable internal conversations. My goal is, paradoxically, to avoid avoidance.
So yesterday night, while heating some bread and fighting against the urge to play music or listen to a podcast in the meantime, I recalled Descartes and his stove. I thought, what would I have done if “spending a whole day shut up in a small room heated by a stove”? Given I had signal, I would have definitely spent my day on the phone. In the best-case scenario, I would have listened to music or a podcast and read a couple of online articles. More realistically, I would have spent hours on WhatsApp and made a couple of calls.
The point of my concern is not that I could come up with something brilliant were it not because of my pernicious phone use — that is highly unlikely. My concern is that my failure to focus while carrying out mundane tasks might be correlated to my failure to focus while carrying out non-mundane ones. When every walk becomes an opportunity to listen to podcasts and every lunchtime becomes an opportunity to watch anime, I am feeding my brain’s need to seek constant stimuli rather than place its attention on the task at hand.
More importantly, carrying out activities that require little or no cognitive effort constitute what neuroscientists call “passive rest”; these are times during which our brains may work out unresolved ideas or process undigested emotions. These moments, although ever more scarce, are crucial to achieving creative breakthroughs and deep insights. The point, crudely stated, is that dullness can be good. As a generation who grew up with social media, smartphones, and Netflix, we have been conditioned to fear and as a consequence avoid dull episodes, however fleeting they may be. I do not believe this to be a mere, innocent search for entertainment or escape from boredom. Beneath it lies an inability to wrestle with uncomfortable, exciting, or obsessive thoughts.
At a societal level, the amount of unfinished ideas, artistic breakthroughs, and potential innovations that have been stifled by our lack of “passive rest” moments is impossible to gauge. I am sure, however, that Beethoven would have composed fewer symphonies and Shakespeare written fewer plays had so many of their moments been sequestered by the addictive availability of social media and immediate entertainment. Indeed, I am willing to wager that, if born as a French 21st century millennial rather than a French 17th-century aristocrat, Descartes would not have spent that day “in a small room heated by a stove” contemplating the mechanics of knowledge. It is more likely he would have spent the day, or at least a good part of it, responding to comments on Twitter — as most contemporary intellectuals seem to do in their spare time.
How far this hypothetical scenario can be stretched out is hard to tell. Most might agree that I am already pushing it too far. But ask yourself, would you not like to be able to sit in front of that stove for an entire day without your mind desperately clinging to distractions? None of us will conceive something as transforming as did Descartes, or at least I won’t. But hey, you might come up with an idea for a cute little article like this one while heating bread on the stove.
For one, I am sure glad that Descartes did not listen to music on his phone during that cold winter day.
