Book diary: Go right!

A technique for coping with our "literal mindedness" (one for the Iain McGilchrist fans)

I’ve been a little remiss here in sharing book diary entries. I’m sorry!

I’ve been stupidly distracted and it’s got me down. Which has prompted me to go back to using the Pomodoro Technique, which I write about here. I’m using it to write this to you now.

(If you’re new here, you can catch up on previous instalments in this Book Diary series, in which I share chapters as I write them, here, here and here.)

The desktop app version allows me to put in tasks that I can do in my five-minute and 25-minute breaks¹. I input all the guff I know I could distract myself with and suddenly I have a to-do list that I can only access at ordained times. It’s all very much a mental straight jacket for A-type dopamine chasers, and it feels gloriously snug.

Shall we get granular? Here’s what’s in my task list right now:

The phillips head excursion? This is my 25-minute break dopamine hit and it entails taking a component of the computer monitor (the stand) that I bought two days ago out into the street in the hope I’ll find a labourer somewhere with a toolkit. I’d then ask if I can borrow a Phillips head screwdriver with which to tighten the 7 screws that hold the thing together. I’d got 60 per cent there with a butter knife.

And the dating apps? Yeah, checking the two I’m on for new messages is the most cringy of my dopamine chasing habits. I’m happy to own this and be subjected to your feedback, so place a “comment” button below for your convenience.

But to the lacking book chapter. Wonderfully, I managed to actually write it using the above technique.

As a bit of preamble, this emerging book is loosely about the shitshow we are in, but it won’t be about said shitshow, it will be about insights, consultations, truths and wisdoms for coping as the shitshow goes down. Many of you here probably know what I mean by shitshow. I’m not wanting to “give away” the whole pitch for my book, but this week’s Wild episode with energy futurist Nate Hagens, probably gives you an idea.

One of the issues that I will have to explore is the very fact that

1. we can’t fathom the complexity and enormity and Black Swan-ness and hypernormality of the shitshow we’re all in…it’s just too big for our brains; and, related,

2. we can’t communicate our way (kindly, effectively) through this too-big-for-our-brains complexity.

Fathoming it all is entirely impossible. But we can choose to communicate more beautifully from within the unfathomability, dissonance and frustration. In many ways this entails letting go of arrogant notions of being able to cognitively fathom it all, to sum it up neatly in a pithy generalisation of some such. Preceding “chapters” will explain this. And I’ve previously written about how to do beautiful apologies and fluent bullshit, which feed into this thesis.

Right. Now for a chapter on… Going Right.