The Deshittification Philosophy

I think I have a pretty good grasp on the ‘what’ of this, as well as the ‘why’ of it. Those have been the subjects of previous monthly reports. But I think to go along with the deshittification scale there’s value to be had here in interrogating the process itself. How can the philosophy of all this be distilled into something a little more communicable than thousands of words of self-important and navel-gazing analysis?

So this month’s report is on the four pillars of this philosophy. The guiding star, the compass point. Can it still be a compass point if there’s four of them? Wouldn’t that just guarantee you’d get lost? Shut up, you’re overthinking it.

Some opening commentary though. Deshittification is not necessarily an ongoing audit I’m doing every day. It’s not a ritual. It’s not a mantra. It’s also though not one-and-done. I need to keep circling around my end goal, because it’s easy to get lost in the microadjustments and lose sight of the destination. There’s an old story of trainee pilots in World War 1 who would enter cloud cover, and because they didn’t know enough to trust their instruments, would keep adjusting and adjusting and adjusting their position until they emerged completely upside down. They’d trust their unreliable vestibular system over the evidence of their gauges and dials. You gotta trust your guts but you should never lose sight of the fact that you can end up facing the wrong direction by forgetting your other calibrations.

I think if someone is genuinely committed to deshittification, it’s important to think of it as at least a year-long project. It doesn’t need to be done all at once. In fact, as per the nose wrinkle mechanism, it’s not possible to do it all at once. If you wanted to give this a go, then maybe you begin with a weekly self-interrogation, moving to monthly, ending up annually. Most importantly, I think this has to be a needs based reflection – you invoke it when you feel unsettled. If you’re happy with your life the way it is, then you don’t need to change anything. If however you’re going through life thinking ‘the vibe’s off’, then maybe sit down with a notepad and work through the questions below.

Also though… are you happy with the way your life is, or have you just not thought about it in a while? An un-examined life is not worth living, as Socrates once said. If the idea of earnestly asking yourself that question makes you uneasy, then let me tell you buddy – ‘the vibe’s off’. Avoidance is its own flavour of dissatisfaction.

The easiest frame of application here is modern technology, but I think this also applies to social obligations, work pressures, and life goals. We spend so much of our lives being told what we should want – money, fame, glory. If you really dig down into yourself though you’ll land on where enough is enough for you. What does that next promotion get you, and what does it cost you? Where is the maximum area under the curve of what you enjoy doing versus what you need to do? Can you afford your life and your future? If not, is that a problem with your lifestyle or your income?

Income > Outgoings, right? Or maybe Accomplishment > Ambition. Social status > the dread of insignificance. If those resolve to true, life is good. Yeah?

The modern economy tells us that the problem is always on the left side of the equation – that’s the where you’re most controllable by The System. Realistically though, it’s often on the right side – the rest of the world. Sure, you can work hard and get that payrise – or maybe you don’t actually need a new phone quite so often? Skipping an optional £1200 purchase is like getting an extra £100 a month in your pocket for the year without actually negatively impacting on your life at all. Your current phone is fine. Your life isn’t going to be better with five more megapixels in a camera or with 5% better stabilisation. The difference between ‘no camera’ and ‘a shitty camera’ is huge. The difference between ‘a shitty camera’ and ‘a good camera’ is significant. The difference between ‘a good camera’ and ‘a better camera’ is negligible unless a meaningful portion of your life revolves around photography. The modern economy needs you to believe that final step – from good to better – is worth the disproportionate money you’ll spend on it. It’s almost certainly not.

I used to labour under the assumption that a better guitar would make me a better player. And yeah, a decent guitar does sound measurably better than something you’d pick up for a fiver in a charity shop. But a better guitar won’t fix the fact that I simply don’t invest enough of my life into attaining (or retaining) basic competence [1]. That life change doesn’t come from spending money, it comes from meaningfully investing time.

Society tells us that we must always be striving. That the next achievement, the next promotion, the next payrise is the one that will satisfy us. That’s a trap you only realise you’ve stepped into when it’s too late. I’ve made it pretty clear in a lot of places that I’m not bothered about getting the final ‘Professor’ title, which baffles a lot of my colleagues. ‘It’s more money’, they say. ‘It’s the ultimate goal’. they say. ‘It’s when you can start to relax’, is what they say.

And there’s a degree of truth to all of that, but you need to weigh it off against the cost of attainment. Currently I’m structurally barred from being professor because I haven’t taken the baby’s first teaching courses the university mandates. And my refusal to do them is taken as either me being wilfully stubborn (99% of people) or charmingly quixotic (1%, all of them me). But I do think these courses are insulting. It’s the idea that someone with 25 years teaching experience has to do a first year teaching course because of some bureaucrat with a hardon for pointless credentialism. Process counts more than common sense at Chalmers. Study after study after study shows that teaching credentials have no real effect on teaching quality. You know how you get more satisfied students? Give them higher grades. Is the goal having happier students? Probably not.

But the real reason is that I find it funny to see the institutional machinery fail to make any dent in my resolve because all their threats and blandishments are thoroughly ineffective. The tools of coercion are fundamentally blunted if:

a) You don’t care enough to play the game, and
b) You’re contractually secure enough they can’t fire you without it being more trouble than it’s worth, and
c) You can see their dire threats of consequences are more of a problem for the system than they are for you.

I’m fine with where I am. I don’t have to kowtow, don’t have to play the stupid publications game of trying to get publications I don’t care about into venues that don’t matter so people I don’t know can cite them without reading in papers that don’t matter. Enough is enough. I played the game long enough to find out that it wasn’t really worth it. I know too many professors to have any inherent sense of respect for the title.

So with that little personal example, here are the questions I think you need to ask yourself as part of the deshittification process. Only you can answer those questions, but I think you should have answers even if you don’t necessarily like them.

Enoughness

You probably have more than enough abundance in your life. It’s maybe time to spend some of it to add depth over breadth.

So, I ask myself:

• What do I need versus what do I actually merely want?
  • And how much would me life be improved, and for how long, if I got what I want?
• What is the cost of the things I need and how happy am I spending it?
  • Cost isn’t just money. It’s time, enthusiasm, mental energy.
• Are the things I need in the form I want?
  • And if they’re not, do I need to compromise?
• What do I already have that will perform duties I want?
  • Refuse, reduce, reuse, repurpose, recycle. That’s not just a mantra for environmentalism. It’s for everything.

Proportionality

This is not a all or nothing process. You will not hit 100% deshittification. 100% deshittification is a self-enforced exile from reality. The last 5-10% of it are systemic, not personal.

So, I ask myself:

• Where is compromise ‘deshittified enough’?
  • If I can get 80% to a goal, how much do I need to sacrifice for the last 20%? Is ‘good enough’ good enough?
• Who gets hurt by my intransigence?
  • And to what extent is their hurt their fault, projected onto me?
• Where can I make my peace with shittification, if I must?
  • What are my pragmatic red lines? Where must I break, where can I bend?

Timeliness

Sometimes you need to wait for things to get better. Sometimes things must get worse before they get better. Don’t jump too early, don’t hold out too long.

So I ask myself:

• Do I really need to do it now?
  • What happens if I don’t do it now?
• What is coming down the pipeline that suggests I should do it later?
  • Can I ride something out for a while or do I need to bite down hard on the cyanide capsule right away?
• How long have I been waiting for the future?
  • It’s not healthy to forever hold out for a solution that has no signs of emerging. Hope is not a plan.
  Mindfulness The cost of frictionless access to life is passivity. Meaningfulness is a byproduct of effort. Audit where your time is going, and how happy you are by it. Introduce friction where ‘willpower’ doesn’t suffice. Willpower is an enshittified currency. Like much of the modern economy, it permits you to rent things, but it doesn’t let you buy them outright. So I ask myself:
• What is it that I don’t want to want to do?
  • Life is the sum of the things to which we choose to pay attention. Am I choosing well?
• What obstacles would make me think about what you I reflexively?
  • Can I selectively apply friction to break patterns of unwanted behaviour?
• What exhausts me about my resistance?
  • If willpower is a shittified currency, how can I stop myself being tricked into spending it when it doesn’t have to be?

I don’t know if this will help you at all, but I’ve found it’s a useful checklist to keep in mind when the brain chemicals want something right now.

[1] If you heard me play guitar you’d say ‘Hey, you’re pretty good for a beginner’. Unfortunately I have been playing for about 30 years. Better equipment will not install missing diligence in me [2]. You can actually get what are effectively self-playing guitars now, but isn’t that a perfect example of mistaking the destination for the journey? The friction of attaining mastery is what it’s supposed to be about [3].
[2] However, ever since seeing Mica Tenenbaum and Magdalena Bay performing Ashes to Ashes with the help of a keytar, I’ve been thinking… maybe that’s the instrument that will prove I’ve secretly been musically talented all along.
[3] If I was the kind of person who went to parties, I’d be the kind of person who saw someone arrive with a guitar case and I’d think ‘I hope to Christ they have a Tommy gun in there and not an instrument’. I’d rather be gunned down than listen to some tosser playing the same three indie hits they learned when they were twenty for a crowd that explicitly are not there for his[4] impromptu concert. Someone on Twitter once made a comment along the lines of ‘Come on man, unless you’re Ed Sheeran don’t come to a party and start playing’, to which Ed Sheeran replied ‘Even I don’t do that at parties’. You can do some things just because you personally enjoy doing them, not everything needs an unwilling audience to validate the time you spent.
[4] It’s almost always ‘his’.