TPO#16: Flowers in Ash
This is Issue 16 of The Purposeful Object, a newsletter about modernity and the good life by Navneet Alang. This issue is a little different. Rather than my usual links et al, it is only some year-end reflections in a personal essay of sorts. TPO will return — likely in a slightly modified form — in 2021.
If you might forgive the obvious pun, the latter half of this year has not felt terribly purposeful. While there have been distinctly happy moments, like flowers in the ash of a forest fire, in many ways 2020 has been a strange slog, at once slow and lumbering yet also a numb, mad dash to just have this annus horriblus end. All told, it has left me feeling raw and ragged, drained, and looking forward to a chance for a reset. I imagine many of you feel similarly.
And yet, this is nonetheless a newsletter about the good life. And I’ve been thinking what TPO might be or become as we move into 2021. Under that nebulous umbrella topic, I’ve been trying to reflect upon what it is that makes life rewarding or fulfilling and how, in the face of the many alienating and bewildering facets of late capitalism, one might make life... well, better.
The pandemic has had some lessons for that difficult yet somehow airy question, and I can’t decide if this is surprising or not. As I’ve talked about in earlier issues, being cut off from so much and so many has revealed to me at least that there is something to be said for pulling back: for making considered, deliberate choices about where, why, and for whom to expend energy. That may be in small, comparatively easy things like simply reducing the amount of stuff one has or buys, Marie Kondo style. Or, it may involve more serious decisions to see and engage with fewer people — that, to invoke our currently struggling John Mulaney, being away from people has helped some realize there are too many connections where you don’t see someone for six to eight months and it doesn’t matter at all.
In that sense, COVID-19 has been strangely clarifying. Yes, clearly, it has revealed the deep inequities in our society and our many broken socio-political institutions. But with routine and normalcy upended, the pandemic has also been a chance for us as individuals to reconsider how we organize the day-to-day of our lives and how, in the face of a glimpse of alterity, it might be time to change.
There have been encouraging responses: mutual aid and community fridges and friends making the time to make sure others don’t fall by the wayside. There have been fire pit gatherings, parks drinks, socially distanced walks. Even Zoom parties had a certain charm for a time. But for me personally, the pandemic has unfortunately highlighted the reason I started and continue this newsletter: a persistent inability to build the kind of sustained everyday practice that forms the ground of a fulfilling life.
It’s why, perhaps, despite the fact that this year saw what I suppose were my “greatest” professional successes — one of those discourse-defining articles; a columnist gig at a major newspaper; or the chance to legitimately be called “professor” — I didn’t really capitalize on any of it. Book agents littered my inbox, editors from big-name magazines with New York in the title asked for pitches; but it has all, for now anyway, amounted to very little.
I should be clear — for all this negativity, I can’t pretend this year has actually been bad for me. In the one area of my life that has hung like a cloud over my head for years — my perpetual singleness and the sort of spiritual deprivation that can bring when it isn’t of one’s choosing — things are suddenly looking a lot brighter (hi Bali!). To have someone warm, thoughtful, and fun to turn to and with whom to share things is a profound change in my life, all the more so because I had started to believe it would never arrive.
I suppose there is a lesson in that — specifically, the almost silly-sounding tautology I have begun to recite to myself, “nothing changes unless you change something.” In a positive sense, that meant opening myself to possibility, giving myself over to emotion rather than thought, and trusting the kindness and affection of another person. On the downside, it meant understanding that “success” (such as it is) doesn’t simply breed success on its own. You have to push yourself to some next level, take risks... oh you know the cliches. I’ve done ok at forgiving myself during a difficult time, but I still wish I had done more with the good fortune that came my way this year.
I have not yet, you will be shocked to learn, figured out what makes a good life. I’m going to keep muddling along, though, both in life and this newsletter. Here, there’ll be reflections on routine and ritual, spirit and materiality, technology and the pastoral. There will be links to the wide, wondrous world of the technomodern. And there’ll inevitably be some reviews of some ridiculous thing I bought off Instagram. And there may well be something new. I’ll see you next year.
That's it for this issue folks. As ever, I so appreciate you reading this newsletter. And for those of you who support me materially, I am especially grateful. Happy new year, friends.