In his 1848 work Principles of Political Economy, John Stuart Mill observed:

It is not good for a man to be kept perforce at all times in the presence of his species. A world from which solitude is extirpated is a very poor ideal. Solitude, in the sense of being often alone, is essential to any depth of meditation or of character: and solitude in the presence of natural beauty and grandeur, is the cradle of thoughts and aspirations which are not only good for the individual, but which society could ill do without.

That notion — of solitude “as essential to any depth of meditation or of character” — sounds weirdly, disturbingly, antique today. We can’t very well turn off our cell phones or keep our e-mails unanswered, can we? And what if we know nothing of the news of the day?

Still, the idea of solitude as an essential, humanizing trait is one that’s been honored, and reiterated, for centuries by the best and most influential minds of Civilization. It’s an idea come down to us through the humanities — art, history, literature, philosophy, religion — those disciplines which Mark Slouka panegyrized in last September’s Harper’s:

The humanities … teach us incrementally, endlessly, not what to do but how to be. …[They] are a superb delivery mechanism for what we might call democratic values.

OK, yet are we to count solitude as a “democratic value”? Yes indeed, for solitude is conducive to thought and introspection, and introspection conduces to empathy and education, and thus to George Washington’s ideal of an “enlightened” citizenry.

“Thought is neither instant nor noisy,” Wallace Stegner reminds us:

… It thrives best in solitude, in quiet, and in the company of the past, the great community of recorded human experience. That recorded experience is essential whether one hopes to reassert some aspect of it, or attack it.

Writing back in the 1500s, Michel De Montaigne assures us:

It is not good enough to have gotten away from the crowd, it is not enough to move; we must get away from the love of crowds that is within us, we must sequester ourselves and regain possession of ourselves. … That is what it is to choose wisely the treasures that can be secured from harm, and to hide them in a place where no one may go and which can be betrayed only by ourselves. … The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to ourselves.*

And Thoreau tells us in 1863:

When our life ceases to be inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip. … Shall the mind be a public arena, where the affairs of the street and the gossip of the tea-table chiefly are discussed? Or shall it be a quarter of heaven itself ,— an hypaethral [open to the sky] temple, consecrated to the service of the gods?… It is important to preserve the mind’s chastity. …I believe that the mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things, so that all our thoughts shall be tinged with triviality.

And Nietzsche tells us in 1888:

Slow is the experience of all deep fountains: long have they to wait until they know what hath fallen into their depths. / Away from the marketplace and from fame taketh place all that is great: away from the marketplace and from fame have ever dwelt the devisers of new values. / Flee, my friend, into thy solitude…

By contrast to these enduring voices from Stegner’s “great community,” our present day culture of Reality TV and Social Media sends us the subtle but insidious messages that 1) being alone amounts to humiliation and inferiority, and 2) being unknown amounts to worthlessness and disgrace.

Writer Dave Eggers touched on this concept beautifully in his book A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius:

We’ve grown up thinking of ourselves in relation to the political-media-entertainment ephemera, in our safe and comfortable homes … how we would fit into this or that band or TV show or movie, and how we would look doing it. [We] are people for whom the idea of anonymity is existentially irrational, indefensible.

“You are worthy or desirable,” declares the culture of today, “inasmuch as you can demonstrate acceptance by others via circuits and cables” (or in the case of reality TV, inasmuch as you remain in the group and avoid getting kicked off the show).

Similarly, we hear it declaimed: “You are valid, you are real, inasmuch as you publish evidence daily — even hourly (Twitter, anyone?) — of your existence, your validity.”

The unavoidable problem here, however, is that as much as we crave to avoid isolation and seek verification that we exist, the selves we wish verified are actually becoming less and less singular or unique, at least in the principle realm we use to verify them, the Internet.

Online we are more isolated than ever, but without the soul-shaping benefits of real aloneness. Why log on unless you hope to connect with somebody, or at any rate feel connected to the buzz of the day? Granted, the Web is more than minute-to-minute media (may we doff modesty a moment to take this blog as an example?), but you get my drift.

The Internet, by itself, also cannot provide us with real community. An e-mail is not a handshake. Nor are most Facebook friends likely to live close enough to keep an eye on your house while you’re away.

(Blogger’s note: Herewith, I face an incontrovertible irony — employing the Internet to outline the Internet’s dangers and deficiencies as today’s medium of choice. But hey, that the medium is good for some things can’t be denied. Onward, then.)

Online we live in the thick of one another’s quasi selves, what writer Neil Postman called “a neighborhood of strangers.” And however manifold are the “activities” we initiate or the information we access on the Internet, the medium demands that we stare at a screen, and therefore it cannot enable individuality. To the contrary, screen-time can only act as a force of psycho-physical leveling. To stare at a screen is, for everyone who does it, the same experience.

So, one cannot be beneficially alone on the Internet, and in a very real sense one cannot be wholly oneself, for individuality, personality, and independent thought are conditioned not by the acquisition of information or fiber optic “access” to others, but by varied experience (i.e. away from the terminal).

“The drift in the United States today is toward the submergence of the self into the Mass Mind,” writes Morris Berman in his book The Twilight of American Culture,

a trend that is powerfully encouraged by corporate culture and the new technology. Along with this — as in the early Middle Ages — we see the dissolution of interiority.

Berman’s pungent phrase “submergence of the self into the Mass Mind” inevitably conjures Aldous Huxley’s classic Brave New World (1932), which envisions a blissful and soulless future “paradise” expurgated of societal “ills” such as individuality, books, religion, marital life, and yes, personal solitude — all in the interest of industry (read: economic superiority), harmony (read: societal conformity and obedience), and ceaseless pleasure (read: distraction).

Huxley’s future world is no authoritarian dystopia. Rather, it’s a smoothly functioning society whose citizens, as far as they can imagine, couldn’t be happier or more productive. They are prosperous, well fed, pleasantly medicated, entertained, sexually promiscuous (it’s the norm, “everybody belongs to everybody else”), and desire nothing other than what’s offered to them by their station in the societal hierarchy. The key to their societal health and harmony is the eradication of individual desire through systematic “conditioning” begun at birth. A crucial component of this “conditioning” is an uninterrupted involvement in communal life, a forbiddance — and inculcated horror of — solitude

The following bit from the novel describes this culture of mass-identity.

The group was now complete, the solidarity circle perfect and without flaw. Man, woman, man, in a ring of endless alteration round the table. Twelve of them ready to be made one, to be fused, to lose their twelve separate identities in a larger being.

Now put them around the globe instead of around the table, make them a billion instead of twelve, and change “solidarity circle” to Internet. Creepy, for sure. Fortunately perhaps, the present climate of the Internet is much more fractious (at its best, articulate debate defines it) than Huxley’s gray-eyed group-think. But the point remains that we relinquish something quintessentially human in being constantly logged on, “accessible,” and vulnerable to the manipulation of our focus and the depletion of our attention-spans.

“Being online,” writes Sven Birkerts, “and having the subjective experience of depth, of existential coherence, are mutually exclusive situations.”

Meanwhile, the vocation of selfhood, the cultivation of personal, psychic, and spiritual independence, remains — and will remain, as ever — inescapably tied to solitude and its concomitants: privacy, slowness, inner quietude, and anonymity. All of which, of course, contradict our culture of connectivity and instantaneousness.

We modern mortals, like the generations before us, need to be re-set on a regular basis, reconditioned to the natural, non-mechanical pace of the world and of our own souls. Our age-old impulse toward meditation and prayer can itself reveal the intrinsic human impulse toward solitude.

Let the world’s course be what it may, you will always find a physician and helper, a new energy and future within yourself, in your poor, ill-used, tractable, indestructible soul.—Hermann Hesse (1917)**

Next week I’ll conclude this Defense with Part Two. Right now, I’m powering off in pursuit of solitude.

*Montaigne translation by Donald M. Frame, Selected Essays of Michel De Montaigne, Walter J. Black, NY, 1943.

**Hesse translation by Denver Lindley, My Belief: Essays on Life and Art by Hermann Hesse, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, NY, 1974.

(This post comes from the Soul Shelter archives)

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“On Slowness”

“Soul School”

“In Defense of ‘Aimless’ Learning”

A few years ago my back gave out when both my kids jumped on me at the same time. After a doctor visit and x-rays confirming the absence of serious injury, I received the standard issue medical advice for 90% of all back problems: “Take it easy and it will clear up in time.”

I did, and it did, but the experience was a stunning reminder that nothing can replace the good fortune of health. I stared in alarm at a photograph of myself: a sagging-posture “office physique” 40 pounds heftier than what I weighed in college. Without change, my physical condition would slowly deteriorate.

Well, it took time and hard work, but I’m finally back in shape. Though I’d never formally considered how I went about it, after reading Get Fit Slowly, I sat down and tried to distill the key points of my “program.” Here’s what I came up with: Four Simple Steps to Getting Fit (they’re not easy, but they’re simple).

Step 1. Stop eating while you’re still hungry

Most of us are accustomed to eating until we feel full. But if you feel full, you’ve already overeaten. Stop. Think. Chew your food slowly and thoroughly, and pay attention to how you feel as you proceed through your meal. If you attend closely to your eating, you’ll feel yourself gradually filling up. Stop eating when you feel about 80% full (don’t worry, you won’t starve. In Japan, this is known as hara-hachibun: the “80% full” policy—it helps you distinguish between eating to refuel and eating because it tastes good). If you decide to drink alcohol with your meal, eat less food to compensate for the additional volume (remember, stop when you feel 80% full). From the standpoint of losing weight, this 80% rule is the most important of the Four Steps.

Step 2. Weigh yourself twice a day

Weigh yourself first thing in the morning and again before you go to bed at night. Do this not to obsess about results, but to see what happens when you drink a beer late at night, or how constipation or poor elimination affects your weight. Weigh consistently, and you’ll quickly see the results of Step 1 reflected in the numbers. An enormously successful Japanese diet plan consists of doing nothing but recording one’s weight—writing it down in a special journal—several times per day. Paying attention to and becoming conscious of your weight is an extremely effective strategy. Do it religiously and the rest of your behavior will fall in line.

Step 3. Drink plenty of water and take psyllium fiber daily

Drink a couple of big glasses of water as soon as you get up, and after breakfast, drink another big glass of water or juice with a hefty teaspoonful of psyllium fiber (Metamucil is an inexpensive but poor substitute—it has tons of added sucrose). The fiber will fill you up, and—to put it rather undelicately—make you crap like a horse. And no, unlike laxatives, which loosen your bowels through chemical action, fiber strengthens your guts by making them work harder. My doctor recommended this as a way to reduce my high blood pressure, and I’ve been a fiber fan since.

Step 4. Start an exercise routine

This is the least important Step from the standpoint of losing weight, but the most important from the standpoint of becoming fit. Sticking to an exercise routine—just like the routine of weighing yourself, the fiber regimen, and the habit of conscious eating—strengthens your overall program. I got professional help from a corrective exercise specialist, who immediately perceived my biggest problem—poor posture—and designed a trunk-strengthening program for me.

Well, that’s everything I know about losing weight and getting fit, and therefore my first and last post on the subject. It’s all well-known stuff, but I learned the Four Simple Steps by doing them, and they worked for me. Maybe they’ll work for you, too.

(This post is from the Soul Shelter archives. A slightly modified version first appeared at Get Fit Slowly.)

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“A Moment of Fulfillment“

Before we cue Taps, let’s all step away from the media juggernaut, take a deep breath of reason, and recall a few (just a few!) of the attributes, consistently neglected in the now-daily hubbub, that continue to make the old-fashioned book not only a viable technology, but, well, a profoundly wonderful one we really don’t want to lose.

1 . The book unites delivery device and content. E-readers, drained of battery power, revert to hunks of plastic.

2. The book begets libraries and independent bookstores, irreplaceable bastions of culture and community.

3. The book, beyond cover price, comes with no proprietary fee. Your preferred e-reader sets you back $250 to $500.

4. The book is not an inventory portal, therefore not subject to proprietary restrictions in content; i.e.: Due to licensing or discretionary considerations, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley cannot be downloaded to this e-reading device. (Think this is a joke? See note* below.)

5. The book is not a brand, therefore free from functional limitations imposed by a manufacturer; i.e.: The e-book you’re requesting is not supported by your e-reader’s operating system. Upgrade to our newest e-reader or follow this link to our checkout to download OS-2011.5.

6. The book withstands excessive dust, direct sunlight, splashed soup, or dropped potatoes.

7. The book is hard to eradicate except by fire. Is any e-reading device likely to reach — with zero loss of content — an age comparable to civilization’s oldest incunabula?

8. The book, presented as gift, shows regard for the recipient’s tastes, being a single selection and/or bearing the giver’s handwritten inscription.

9. The book can be autographed by its author.

10. The book, by conspicuous display of title and/or author, occasions conversation between mutually inclined strangers.

11. The book may be safely read in the bath.

12. The book relieves you of the screen in an age of relentless screen-media assaults upon the eye.

13. The book is not an immediate access point for innumerable diversions (e-mail, video games, etc.).

14. The book’s printed editions are traceably distinct, a defense against manipulations of fact or history.

15. The book does not “transmit and receive,” except in mysterious ways. No need to fear an Orwellian eye embedded in the page.

16. The book cannot be “swiped remotely” by the powers that be.

17. The book’s publisher may go broke without imperiling access to additional content.

18. The book, bought second-hand or borrowed, yields up fascinating ephemera: grocery lists, love notes, locks of hair, receipts, etc., bringing the reader into poignant contact with an unknown fellow human being.

19. The book complements your mantelpiece.

20. The book boasts many practical uses beyond communication (as furniture, makeshift stairs, etc.). E-readers — oddly shaped and breakable — are as obsolescent as other computer junk once they quit working.

21. The book is not invariably manufactured in China.

22. The book accommodates ingenuity of format: children’s books, art books, illuminated texts, pop-up books, fold-out maps, etc.

23. The book makes a meaningful heirloom.

24. The book may be safely left unattended on the beach. As gizmo it is not a hot steal.

25. The book is not a shopping cart.

*“Last week…the creators of a Web comic version of the classic novel, called “Ulysses Seen,” said that Apple required them to remove any images containing nudity before the comic was approved as an application for the iPad.” –New York Times, June 13, 2010

UPDATE: June 16, 2010 — Apple recants. Still, a defender of literature this does not make.

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Accepting a Digitized World

Upon completion of the final draft of my latest novel three years ago, I sent out an e-mail to my family and closest friends. Subject heading: “What Has Mark Been Doing for the Last Six Years?” The message field was empty. The e-mail contained nothing but the following image.

Those manuscript pages, towering at six inches, said it all. Though my book wouldn’t appear in hardcover for another year or so, it had already become gloriously material. (Actually, the book started out materially, as I generated the first draft entirely by longhand, but there had been a long, sensory-deprived period of computer entry.)

I’ve always been somewhat uncomfortable with the term Word-processing. To me, its connotations are too industrial. I picture language mashed into paste, dunked in preservatives, and canned for a lengthy shelf-life.

(What term might we substitute? Anything measurably less utilitarian. Word-pruning? Word-arranging? Word-massaging?)

But my aversion, I suppose, extends beyond the jargon itself to the technology that spawned it. As noted in prior posts, I can take only so much of staring at a screen, watching the phantasmal flash of the cursor, straining to translate my inward human imaginings into ciphers of inhuman electronic light.

Paper is better. You can feel a clean white page. Each new leaf is cool to the touch. It crackles in the hands. It is of the body. On the page, the inwardly human becomes outwardly human — no cyber-middleman required. And for the novelist, a pile of papers is a thing of beauty, signifying a task slowly and inarguably surmounted, a vision taking physical form.

For these reasons I’ve recently invested in a technological downgrade of unparalleled value. Here’s a photo:

That’s right, a Royal H-H Typewriter, circa 1958.

While I’m still in the longhand stage of my new novel’s composition — and will eventually have to, ahem, word-process, the Royal allows me to get a clean (well, clean enough) printout without submitting to the numbing cursor.

Here, in summary, are a few valuable benefits — creative and I daresay spiritual — found in this “downgrade”:

1. Eschewing instantaneousness.
It’s a long, hard road one must walk when writing a novel. Patience becomes a most useful virtue. But instantaneousness, or a technology that predisposes you to it, is counterproductive. Spontaneity, okay. An adventuresome spirit, sure. But good books aren’t generally written quickly.

2. Producing hard copy as you go.
Typewritten pages provide a record of the creative process, a physical imprint direct from the imagination, a trail of decisions and revisions made along the way. This can be invaluable when it turns out that your inner editor has overstepped his bounds. Give him use of a computer’s Backspace key and that guy’ll expunge everything.

3. Avoiding repetitive-stress injury.
The Royal H-H is a twenty-pound hunk of metal with innards of good ol’ fashioned, elegantly designed moving parts. You’ve got to employ fingers and arms in a variety of interesting ways to work this machine. Every new page requires hand-loading, alignment, and knob-twisting advancement. The carriage return demands that you lift a hand from the keys after every line. The Royal keeps you limber.

4. Stimulating the senses.
Unlike staring at a screen, staring at a piece of paper rolled snugly against the platen threatens no deleterious effects upon your eyesight. What’s more, you can whiff the typewriter ribbon and the oiled key-hammers. You can delight in the rewarding chime at the end of each line, followed by the clickety-slide of the carriage return. (The whimsical musicality of the typewriter is celebrated delightfully here.)

5. Opportunity for further consideration, revision, refining.
Once the typewriter draft is done, I must re-type the entire manuscript into a computer document for ease of transmission, copy-edits, book design, etc. This provides further ample opportunity to review the work and weigh the choices I’ve made.

Well, enough hobby writing.

(This post clatters forth from the Soul Shelter archives)

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Unleashing Ideas: A Four-Fold Approach

As an Internet and Virtual Reality trailblazer, Jaron Lanier helped to change the world as we know it. Now he wants to do it again, only this time by advocating for reform of the online culture he in part created.

In his book You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, published last month, Lanier gives an impassioned call for a renewed Internet characterized by technological humanism, intellectual modesty on the part of technologists, and civility of discourse by all who log on. In other words, in his view the Web ought to be about—and its designs ought to encourage and empower:

• Individuals rather than ads;
• Decorum and exchange rather than mean-spiritedness and polarization;
• Unique, idiosyncratic voices rather than an anonymous hive;
• Original creative expression rather than rehashes and mashups (what Lanier calls “Second-order expression”);
• Artistic entrepreneurship rather than the Web-giveaways of thought, labor, and creativity now expected in our “crowd-sourced” world.

Where the trendsetters of today’s Internet (“Web 2.0”) extol its liberating, ultra-democratic spirit, pointing to Social Media (Facebook, etc.) and Open Culture (Wikipedia, etc.), Lanier fears an Internet that institutionalizes bad Web design and a Web-mentality that celebrates constrictive, data-centric technology over infinite human creativity, and does so largely because that technology serves advertising and thus enriches data-gatherers and “cloud-lords” (those few technologists who’ve cornered the market on connecting the crowds).

Writes Lanier:

The central mistake of recent digital culture is to chop up a network of individuals so finely that you end up with a mush. You then start to care about the abstraction of the network more than the real people who are networked, even though the network by itself is meaningless. Only the people were ever meaningful.

That’s Lanier’s sharp left hook to the jaw of “cybernetic totalism,” the predominant religion of Silicon Valley. Cybernetic totalists believe in “the noosphere … a collective consciousness [that] emerges from all the users on the Web,” and also in “The Singularity,” a kind of techno-Rapture which involves “people dying in the flesh and being uploaded into a computer and remaining conscious.”

No kidding.

The cybernetic totalists live to serve their faith by implementing Web designs that nourish the crowd, the “digital cloud,” a super-consciousness before which the point of view of the individual human ceases to matter. The Cloud, at any given moment, knows all that mankind can ever know. The implications of such beliefs are vast. It follows, for instance, that instead of books, we will have one global book authored by this electronic super-consciousness (i.e. by everybody and thus…nobody).

Sound a little bit like technological fascism? Alas, how blurry grows the line between creative/social idealism and destructive folly!

A half century ago Aldous Huxley wrote the following in Brave New World Revisited. In light of the ascendant culture criticized in You Are Not a Gadget, do you find Huxley’s words as chilling as I do?

A new Social Ethic is replacing our traditional ethic system—the system in which the individual is primary. The key words in this Social Ethic are ‘adjustment,’ ‘adaptation,’ socially oriented behavior,’ ‘belongingness,’ ‘acquisition of social skills,’ ‘team work,’ ‘group living,’ ‘group loyalty,’ ‘group dynamics,’ ‘group thinking,’ ‘group creativity.’ Its basic assumption is that the social whole has greater worth and significance than its individual parts. … However hard they try, men cannot create a social organism, they can only create an organization. In the process of trying to create an organism they will merely create a totalitarian despotism.

In the dominant ideology now shaping the Internet, the Cloud is all. And the Cloud, specifically, is the Crowd.

Lanier argues that current software designs (“Twitter’s adoration of fragments ; Facebook…organizing people into multiple-choice identities; Wikipedia eras[ing] point of view entirely”) implicitly encourage us to depersonalize ourselves, to reduce to base technological definitions important human things like friendship, individual expression, and personal attributes. We’re each coaxed to become but a facet of the Crowd, to dissolve into digital ether, no longer characterized, no longer really human, but wholly Cloud. “Authorship…is not a priority of the new ideology,” hence: “the digital flattening of expression into a global mush.”

Lanier revolts:

It is true that by using [online] tools individuals can author books or blogs or whatever, but people are encouraged by the economics of free content, crowd dynamics, and lord aggregators to serve up fragments instead of considered whole expressions or arguments. …The one collective book will absolutely not be the same thing as the library of books by individuals it is bankrupting. Some believe it will be better; others, including me, believe it will be disastrously worse.

And here, knowingly or not, he goes on to echo Huxley:

Any singular, exclusive book, even the collective one accumulating in the cloud, will become a cruel book if it is the only one available.

The medium is the message, indeed. In a modern world that lives by and worships technology, one ideology or another will prove a force we can’t ignore. So it turns out that questions as seemingly arcane as online design bear strongly on the universal matters of freedom, democracy, cultural well-being, and spiritual health.

As the great cultural critic Neil Postman asked,

Can a nation preserve its history, originality, and humanity by submitting itself totally to the sovereignty of a technological thought-world?

Lanier, who in many ways fits Postman’s description of a technological “resistance fighter,” explores those big societal questions throughout his book, and outlines the dispiriting new economic order resulting from Web 2.0: a broad disenfranchisement of artists and creative entrepreneurs; i.e. of culturally enriching creative expression.

If some free video of a silly stunt will draw as many eyeballs as the product of a professional filmmaker on a given day, then why pay the filmmaker? If an algorithm can use cloud-based data to unite those eyeballs with the video clip of the moment, why pay editors or impresarios?

Specifically, Lanier sees an emergent generation of unpaid “digital peasants,” those who labor and think in service to the so-called “noosphere,” even while disempowered—and largely dehumanized—by the decisions of digital lords, rulers of the Cloud. His outrage is heartening:

It is utterly strange to hear my many old friends in the world of digital culture claim to be the true sons of the Renaissance without realizing that using computers to reduce individual expression is a primitive, retrograde activity, no matter how sophisticated your tools are.

Personally I part company with Lanier toward his conclusion, where his techie fervor stirs him to swooning descriptions of the ultimate entertainment: computerized alternate worlds, immersive virtual realms yet to be realized. Admittedly, Virtual Reality can serve us in obviously constructive ways, for example its use in surgical procedures, but Lanier’s boosterism of the technology for its own sake seems to contradict the general spirit of his book at its close.

Still, You Are Not A Gadget is a brilliant, almost mind-altering read. Though Lanier’s aim may be manifesto, his tone is winningly conversational throughout. We hear the voice of an aggrieved forefather pleading for reason, technological temperance, and good old humanism amid an accelerating technocracy. And he’s not short on constructive ideas, both macro and micro, assuring us there’s still hope for a positive Web renewal because the design mentalities driving Web 2.0 are not yet incontrovertibly locked-in, not quite. The way of the “noosphere” needn’t necessarily be our future.

But how is the average non-techie Internet user to help shift the cultural tide?

There are things you can do to be a person instead of a source of fragments to be exploited by others …

—and proposed within an encouraging list of creative ideas, Lanier offers this antidote to the fetish of fragments and bits (it’s representative of the book’s constructive spirit):

Write a blog post that took weeks of reflection before you heard the inner voice that needed to come out.

With Soul Shelter’s modus operandi so nicely endorsed, how could we fail to sing the praises of this timely manifesto?

(Read Lanier’s recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal)

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Once upon a time, a young Apple Computer attorney named Randy Komisar negotiated a deal that might have turned the personal computing industry upside down—and changed the world.

Komisar struck an agreement with Apollo Computer to license the Macintosh operating system. The move was the very embodiment of “Computing for the Rest of Us,” Apple’s Big Idea, the grand and good mission that inspired Apple employees and fans alike. Later Komisar would write:

Along with many others inside Apple, I was a strong proponent of licensing the Macintosh operating system in order to preempt Microsoft in setting the standard for user-friendly computing. After all, it was Apple’s birthright, its overriding mission. It would mean cannibalizing our own model, sacrificing margins for volume and market share, but it seemed better than circling the wagons and defending an ever-declining piece of the PC business.

But at the last minute, John Sculley, the brilliant Pepsi-Cola executive who at Steve Job’s behest famously gave up “selling sugar water” to lead Apple, scuttled the deal. Sculley undercut the company’s greater mission in order to preserve Apple’s high-margin end-to-end hardware/software business model.

Apple’s share of the worldwide personal computer market subsequently plummeted, and today it stands at just under three percent (3%). Would Sculley have made the same decision if he could have known that, years later, the reality of Apple’s vision would be Computing for Three Percent of Us?

No one knows, of course, what might have happened had Apple stuck to its ideals and licensed its operating system. But in The Monk and the Riddle, the best-seller detailing the episode, Komisar illuminates the point by distinguishing between passion and drive. Passion and drive are not the same at all, he writes:

Passion pulls you toward something you cannot resist. Drive pushes you toward something you feel compelled or obligated to do.

Passion pulled Apple Computer toward its mission of making computing available to everyman, but drive forced management to choose predictable profitability and lower risk. Here’s my takeaway: Drive arises from will, passion from the soul.

The distinction is useful. Komisar goes on to make the key point of his book, a rejection of what he calls the “Deferred Life Plan.”

The Deferred Life Plan consists of two steps:

1. Do what you have to do, then

2. Do what you want to do

To achieve the “promise of full coverage under the plan,” writes Komisar, you should divide life into two distinct parts. In Part One you do whatever it takes to become financially secure. In Part Two, you retire and do exactly what you want (it may hardly be necessary to note that the Deferred Life Plan is fueled by drive rather than passion).

The problem, of course, is that those who achieve financial security through drive rather than passion often discover the hollowness of victory. To use a self-help cliché, the success ladder they struggled so hard to climb was leaning against the wrong building.

I experienced this for myself when I sold my company in 2000. I’d started my firm in 1994 based on a passion: exploiting the Internet’s ability to convert high variable communications costs into low fixed costs on behalf of Japanese consumers, who’d long suffered from expensive metered-rate telecommunications services. The Internet also promised a curiously powerful mix of intimacy and anonymity, something perfectly matching the Japanese communication style.

That passion sustained me through the tough early years. Later, as our services were sought by higher and higher profile customers, the exigencies of business—and my drive to succeed—steadily overtook passion. Soon my business became one of helping online retailers sell more, more, more into Japan, Taiwan, and Korea. By the time we sold out, I, too, had “sold out” my Big Idea—my original vision—while fatigue and world-weary “success” blurred my recognition of that very truth. Maybe that’s why Komisar’s story struck me with such force.

Received Western wisdom continues to enthusiastically endorse the Deferred Life Plan, as it has for more than 200 years (see Mark’s post about Charles Lamb’s surprisingly mixed feelings upon his “deliverance” from a life of office drudgery in the early nineteenth century).

Opting out of the Deferred Life Plan is no easy task. It’s a struggle demanding discipline, not just of the will, but of the soul.

(This post appears from the Soul Shelter archives)

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Soul School

I work entirely from home, and unless I make a concerted effort I can go weeks without seeing other human beings face-to-face, save my wife (and soon my child). But because this weird lifestyle helps me remain prolific, today I’ll share a few habits that keep me keeping on.

I believe each of the following points may be applicable to the lifestyle and/or profession of anybody seeking to increase and maintain productivity, whether in the workplace or in some as-yet uncultivated personal or creative aspect of life. So even if you don’t stay at home alone everyday dreaming up characters and writing novels and short stories, take a look.

1. Wake Up Early (Engage the Process)

I get up every weekday at 6:45am. I make my wife’s lunch and see her off to work, then settle into my daily rhythm at the desk, amidst my books and papers. Now, most people have to rise and shine and be at the workplace by 7:30, 8:00, 9:00 a.m., so this may not seem like news. But I include it because for me, waking up early is about more than the literal act of rising from bed in order to arrive at my desk “on time.” It’s about consciously putting my day before me, giving myself the time to envision its many possibilities, then easing into all that possibility with a sense of purpose and an awareness of each day as an incremental accomplishment on the way to a larger goal. The process is more important than the result; without the former there can be no latter.

2. Get Dressed & Put On Your Shoes (Establish a Ritual Act)

I never sit down at the desk without first changing out of my pajamas and slippers. For me, this outer preparation facilitates an inner one. I guess you could call it a ritual act. It helps me feel more focused or centered. Somehow it also validates or elevates my sense of the work I’m going to do. I arrive at the desk feeling put-together, more equal to the challenge, the seriousness, of what’s before me. “Look the part,” they say in the business world. Translated: If you seek a high-powered executive job, you’d better arrive at the interview dressed like a high-powered executive. That’s one element of my meaning here, sure. But more importantly, I’m talking about establishing some active personal ritual, however simple, by which you prepare yourself, body and mind, for immersion into your work.

3. Use an “Isolation Booth” (Nurture Concentration)

There is no greater danger to productivity than distraction. I suspect this is true in many professions. And silence (sometimes soft music) is to the writer what a steady hand is to the surgeon. Concentration and productivity are symbiotic. I believe that the buzzword “multitasking” is merely a benign-sounding synonym for distraction. I’m a big proponent of mono-tasking, and for that very purpose I’ve set up a detached writing studio in my backyard. This studio is unprofaned by the telephone or Internet. It’s my sacrosanct creative space. All one really needs is a designated area, preferably shut off from everything about, where one may focus exclusively on a particular task.

4. Write Longhand (Go Analog)

The advantages of an analog working method are nearly countless. I usually write my first drafts on paper (I filled nine notebooks while working on my last novel). Word processing programs are invaluable later in the writing process, but early on, the backspace key imperils productivity. I produce far more by opening a notebook than by switching on my laptop. Surrendering to the imperfection of the first draft, I escape writerly paralysis. On paper, there’s no “highlight and delete” function, hence no compulsive scrapping of text. Sentences, paragraphs, pages are allowed to accumulate in all their lovely inadequacy. A book takes shape this way, flawed at first, and later sculpted and refined. And I suspect that for all those insufficiencies of the early draft, I am a better writer on paper, because my thoughts move more slowly and each of my imaginings is allowed to deepen in that process. Nuances come to light that I might have missed altogether in the hurried tapping of a keyboard. As a bonus, paper productivity allows me to retain a visible record of all my deletions, in case I should later rethink my first impulses; i.e. ‘This sentence didn’t work in this particular place, but it will go nicely over there!’ Check out Tim’s preachments on the value of avoiding e-mail and turning off your computer.

5. Think Progress, Not Completion (Stay in the Rhythm)

Avoid overwhelming yourself with the magnitude of the task before you. Trust your process. Novelist E.L. Doctorow said:

Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

All one can do is orient oneself to the daily act. By putting one’s focus into each moment at hand rather than far out ahead at some hazy eventual destination, one does better and more meaningful work–or, to amend Doctorow’s analogy, one avoids crashing the car.

The Lonely Novelist’s Five Point Productivity Plan is simple, but works for me. Allow me to cap it off with a favorite quote (which you may have seen in a previous post):

Be intent on action, not on the fruits of action. Avoid attraction to the fruits and attachment to inaction.

(This post has resurfaced from the deep Soul Shelter archives)

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This month we ring in Year Number Three for Soul Shelter! Hard to believe we’ve been around so long already — we’ll soon be grayhairs by the standards of the Web.

We’ve grown Soul Shelter slowly and gently these last two years. Every step of the way we’ve sought to make it unfailingly inspirational, helpful, fun, and informative. Now we’d like to ask you, Dear Reader, to help us celebrate our third year.

If you:

• appreciate Soul Shelter’s perspectives
• find yourself awaiting your weekly Soul Shelter epistles
• have ever caught yourself reflecting — offline — on something you read at Soul Shelter

and/or …

• believe we’ve delivered on the Soul Shelter pledge “to provide a stabilizing, reliably worthy alternative” to the breathless chatter of the blogosphere,

then snap on a bright party hat on our behalf and help us make some celebratory noise: Share us with your friends, Tweet us, Stumble us, Digg us, Forward us, Facebook us, link to us, add us to your blogroll, make us your homepage, and otherwise spread the good Soul Shelter news. We’d love to widen our fold, and what better route to new but long-destined readers than through our faithful current ones?

And allow us to thank You, our loyal visitors and subscribers. We’re in your debt. Without your valued readership and comments, we’d have shriveled long ago.

Today, to further mark our anniversary, we offer the following Soul Shelter round-up. Here’s a Best-Of from our first two years — ten posts of which we’re particularly proud. Maybe you missed them the first time around, maybe they’re a good place to start for any new  readers you’d care to point our way.

And maybe you’d like to add your own favorite Soul Shelter post to the list?

Enjoy, and here’s to the good year ahead.

A Message to Those Aspiring to Blend Meaning and Money

Too often, pay doesn’t parallel passion. Fortune falls behind fulfillment. Money and meaning are mismatched. What’s a seeker of reasonable balance to do?

You Don’t Have to Be An Insider

I’m living proof that one needs no golden key or inside connections to pursue the work one most desires. If you find doors closed against you, set your shoulder to them. Push.

Losing a Job, Reclaiming a Life

That mindset — that your well-being and success depends on an organization — just blows me away. Now that I’m older, I see how I’m the one creating value, I’m the one who makes things happen.

Are You An Amateur? Why Not?

Here’s a wonderful but much too uncelebrated means of personal fulfillment and life enrichment: the learning and doing of a thing purely for the love of it — otherwise known as amateurism.

The Rainbow Vanishes

I wanted my kids to understand that someday, all too soon, it would be their father lying before them, cold and lifeless. But they didn’t understand. How could they, when I was just beginning to understand?

The Risk of Happiness

There comes a time when one must recognize that the pursuit of happiness, in its multifarious forms, will always involve a feeling of risk, of embracing a financial or emotional unknown (or sometimes both at once).

Coffee Breakthrough

Dave proudly displayed his brand new, Swiss-made, fully automatic espresso machine, for which he’d slapped down a cool $945. It must be nice to be able to afford a high-end, fully automatic espresso maker, I mused aloud. Dave’s response snapped me to attention. ‘Actually, I can’t afford not to own one.’

The Value of Travel — One Household’s Mild Manifesto

Travel means engaging a larger world, not merely retreating from the one we know. Travel means joining in the human experience.

Time to Give In, Time to Give Up

Suddenly, all bets were off. … Everything was canceled. It was the beginning of Portland’s biggest snowfall in 40 years.

In Defense of Solitude

We modern mortals, like the generations before us, need to be re-set on a regular basis, reconditioned to the natural, non-mechanical pace of the world and of our own souls. Our age-old impulse toward meditation and prayer can itself reveal the intrinsic human impulse toward solitude.

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for attending this week’s special Soul Shelter convocation. Now allow me to find my notes. … Ah, here they are.

(Shuffling papers)

Well, before we proceed I must tell you that the view from this podium is lovely. You all look just swell in your evening attire.  Please thank your servers, they’re doing a fine job, aren’t they?

(Applause)

Now for tonight’s introduction:

As regular readers well know, a recurring subject on Soul Shelter is one we refer to somewhat dramatically as Technology versus the Soul. Tonight we convene to formally acknowledge the emergence of an organism which embodies this conflict splendidly.

This organism, already amongst us but hitherto nameless, now bears a title thanks to Mr. Dalton Conley and his new book Elsewhere U.S.A: How We Got From the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, Blackberry Moms, and Economic Anxiety.

This organism Mr. Conley dubs The Intravidual .

Prophesied more than a decade ago by Sven Birkerts in The Gutenberg Elegies (1998), the characteristics of the Intravidual and the sociological implications of its existence are familiar to us by now. Here’s how Birkerts described them:

We will establish a wide lateral interaction, dealing via screen with more and more people at the same time that our sustained face-to-face encounters diminish. It will be harder and harder — we know this already — to step free of our mediating devices. There will be people who never in their lives have the experience that was, until our time, the norm — who will never stand in isolated silence among trees and stones, out of shouting distance of any other person, with no communication implement, forced to confront the slow, grainy momentum of time passing.

Most of us recall an era of Individualism. We were born in one. We were subject to the laws of time as we waited on the mail, traveled to a friend’s home, or bided the dark hours when the world’s transmissions took a pause. We were subject to ourselves: solitude and privacy were almost unavoidable. We chose and savored them or had them thrust upon us and learned to make the most of them.

Many of us kept journals or diaries, recording and reflecting in sacred secrecy. If we wished, we could clasp the covers shut with tiny locks.

In contrast, today’s Intravidual blogs his thoughts for the world (it is not the purpose of a blog to cultivate privacy). One doesn’t tuck a blog away in a drawer and allow its recorded contemplations to fructify in the soul. The Intravidual clicks “Publish,” watches pixels flash into form, and eagerly awaits comments.

We used to send messages to friends by post, endorsing our salutations with the slow intaglio of the hand and creasing the papers with care. The Intravidual defaults to e-mail (perhaps customized with colored fonts).

We used to relate voice-to-voice by telephone or face-to-face over coffee. The Intravidual defaults to text messages, or connects briefly by voice-mail to alert his correspondents to incoming e-mails. Quickness is crucial, for the Intravidual must maintain countless simultaneous connections to Intraviduals elsewhere and everywhere.

The Intravidual is determined and defined by the efficiency of his gadgets, by his light-speed inclusion in a conversation, an argument, a realm of professed opinion chattering at every hour and encompassing everywhere. The Intravidual exists in a sphere of selves, a sphere that in Mr. Conley’s terms lies perpetually elsewhere– that is, never right here right now. Through his gadgets the Intravidual channels his work directly into his home, once a private space. Fiber optics allow him to constantly import the world and export himself.

Where is nature in this new Intravidualistic order? Where is time, whose constraints once fostered privacy, silence, solitude, which things in turn begat the illuminations of art, religion, and philosophy through the ages?

Faced with what we are becoming, it’s important to recall what we have been. Dictionaries are helpful:

Individual / adj. & n. adj. 1 single 2 particular; special; not general 3 having a distinct character 4 characteristic of a particular person 5 designed for use by one person. n. 1 a single member of a class 2 a single human being as distinct from a family or group 3 colloq. a person (From Middle English = indivisible).

Individual, you might say, is soul. Poet John Keats (1795-1821) described a soul as an Intelligence that has acquired an Identity of its own.

What do we mean by “soul” here at Soul Shelter? I like Birkerts’ definition:

My use of soul is secular. I mean it to stand for inwardness, for that awareness we carry of ourselves as mysterious creatures at large in the universe. The soul is that part of us that smelts meaning and tries to derive a sense of purpose from experience. … Soul is our inwardness, our self-reflectedness, our orientation to the unknown. Soul waxes in private, wanes in public. We feel it, or feel through it, when we are in sacral spaces, when we love, when we respond to natural or artistic beauty.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Intravidual is here. Long live the individual and the soul.*

This concludes our special convocation.

*Some handy tips for cultivating anti-Intravidualism: 1) Try keeping an offline journal, for your eyes only 2) Set a time for powering on, and limit time spent online 3) Write a letter the old-fashioned way 4) Invite a friend for a face-to-face visit, or meet for conversation over coffee 5) Take a walk (longer the better, no connective devices allowed) 6) Read books.

(Thanks to reader Steve for pointing us to Conley’s book.)

(This post appears courtesy of the Soul Shelter archives.)

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“Soul School”

“Is the Internet Dangerous?”

“Why Multitasking Slows Productivity — and What To Do About It”

“Six Ways to Stretch Time”

“The Hazards of Career, the Rewards of Vocation“