When to give up
Never mind about that reading list thing
I was on the podcast Free Forum with Terrence McNally this week! Terrence’s tagline is, “Let’s Tell Stories of World that Just Might Work.” I couldn’t agree more! Click below to listen, and you can always find all my media appearances on my website.
I recently wrote about trying to bring more intention to my online reading, hoping to finally get around to some of the dozens of tabs I’ve had open or saved for months. And I have, in fact, read and enjoyed several of them since then, as well as more new arrivals than usual. One of the new ones was a newsletter from our anti-productivity and pro-mortality fave Oliver Burkeman, which makes a compelling case for giving up my reading list entirely:
If you’re stuck in a rut, and you feel like you’ve stopped making progress on things that matter, it could be that you need more immediacy in your life.
To explain what I mean, I suppose I’ll have to tell you about the other day when I deleted, or threw in the recycling, about 300 articles I’d saved to read later; roughly 70 web pages I’d bookmarked; a three-inch-high stack of supposedly vitally important printouts; plus more task lists and old project plans than I care to think about.
All gone – and at time of writing, I haven’t regretted it for a moment, because it worked.
I know the relief of abandoning reading lists/mass deleting inboxes/disposing of physical and psychic clutter. But I’ve always seen it as a reset to start a new list of things I will actually read this time, I swear. It works for a few days. The problem with letting things wait around, Burkeman says, isn’t that I get distracted or lazy. It’s that the things actually become less interesting, removed from how they initially sparked against my own curiosity:
The most obvious problem here, of course, is that you far less frequently get around to actually reading or watching – and thus letting yourself be changed by – the ideas you encounter. But the other problem is that it generates a huge backlog to slog through – so that even if you do get around to reading or watching, you’re no longer responding from the place of aliveness and excitement that first drew you in, but from a duller sense of obligation to clear the backlog, extract the important bits, and move on to something else.
I read Burkeman’s newsletter from exactly that “place of aliveness and excitement”; I opened it immediately and gulped it down right away. And I do feel changed by it, at least a little. Once again, the answer might not be holding ever tighter, but letting go more quickly.
(You can subscribe to Burkeman’s newsletter, The Imperfectionist, here!)
My writing
Now that archaeologists have freed themselves from the assumption that unequal, hierarchical societies are the pinnacle of human cultural achievement, they’re exploring much more interesting questions about how, why, and where inequality arises in the first place—and how, why, and where it doesn’t. I wrote for Science about a new paper that looks at one place where people resisted developing enduring inequalities for 5,000 years, despite having many of the ingredients that led to them elsewhere: Europe’s Carpathian Basin (basically Hungary and pieces of the surrounding countries). Click the button to read it!
Scheduling note
The Lizzie Wade Weekly will be on summer break for the rest of August. I’ll have some reruns for you in the meantime, and I’ll see you with new content in September!
