Short story

Let’s do a quick thought experiment: you’re at the departure gate of a Ryanair flight. You’re travelling on a tight budget, so you went for the “one bag ticket”. Although really good at carving out space from backpacks, you shoved in there all you were able to without too much care. As a result, your bag looks really packed and definitely out of the permitted limits.

That’s not uncommon, isn’t it?

They say Fortune’s goddess is blindfolded, but who’s certainly not blindfolded is the Ryanair employee at the gate, and your bag caught her attention immediately. You two go into an argument and turns out an extra price must be paid in order to get the backpack on the aircraft.

Let’s say you’re a bit angry at this point, which is understandable because you hoped you could get away with it pretty easily. Anyways, luck didn’t assist you, it’s time to take out the credit card and pay for that doomed backpack to be onboarded.

As if it were all staged, the card payment fails: Fortune’s goddess seems not only to be blindfolded, she’s definitely on a long vacation too. You feel the urge to justify yourself: “I’m not broke, am I?” you joke with the Ryanair employee, as if she cared about your jokes.

The card has been rejected for technical reasons: it belongs to a payment circuit not supported by Ryanair systems. Which doesn’t make you broke, but definitely unable to pay.

What are you doing?

Although fictional, this short story describes something that could have happened to anyone. In fact, something similar happened to the woman next to me during a real Ryanair flight.

I happened to be on the same flight, on the other side of the aisle, with a bag way more “out of limits” than the one belonging to the unlucky woman.

Having assisted to all that, a couple of thoughts sprung to my mind:

  1. Wow, I got really lucky, I could have been in her shoes now;
  2. Is it even possible for someone to not know what payment circut is her card using?! And bare with me, this could have happened to a man too, it’s not a matter of sex.

Then I realized that:

  1. Yes, I got lucky;
  2. Is it the payment circuit really the interesting matter in this story, or is there something more about this to unpack? Sure, “always carry some cash” is possibly a relevant insight, but Ryanair doesn’t accept that either so it’s not of any use in such situations.

I don’t want to set this up as a trial for the woman in the story: this could have happened to anyone. All this reminded me of a sentence I read somewhere weeks ago and forgot about:

What are we doing when we are doing what we are doing?

What are we really doing when we take out our card to pay something? What are we really doing when we write chat messages using a messaging app? What are we really doing when we are driving our car or walking with a friend in a park?

Turns out, we don’t know. We have limited attention span, senses can take so much as an input. We don’t know what happens under the hood of a credit card payment, we just digested the process as I take out the card, I touch the contactless device, it says ‘done’, then I’m done. Is this superficial knowledge enough to state that we know what we’re doing?

I don’t think so.

Words, routines and invisible packaging

In 1917 a russian guy named Viktor Shklowsky published an article titled Art as a Device, which is nowadays considered one of the most important pieces of literary critique ever written. You probably heard of him during literature lessons.

In the middle of that article, Shklowsky writes out the following extract from Tolstoj’s diary:

“I had cleaned my room, and after going around the room, I approached the sofa, unable to remember whether I had dusted it or not. Since these movements are habitual and unconscious, I couldn’t even realize that it was now impossible to remember. So, if I had already cleaned the sofa and had forgotten it, that is, if I had acted unconsciously, it was as if I hadn’t done it at all. If someone had consciously seen me, they could have reminded me: but if no one had seen, or had seen but unconsciously; if the entire complex life of many passes unconsciously, then it is as if it had never existed.”

In that article, Shklowsly theorizes the concept of defamiliarization, stating that it is a needed feature for art - specifically poetry - in order to express its true calling: making things (we’re used to) alive again.

To make rocks rocks again, as they say.

But why are things not alive anymore?

Practical language has a specific role: it needs to be dense, minimizing the effort needed to vehicle a concept. This effect even manifests itself with the tendency for civilizations to enrich gradually their official vocabulary with new words, often packing into a single word a universe of meanings that would otherwise need a longer phrasing to be expressed. As a consequence, our brains evolved with language in a strange manner: when we hear the word “sun” we get its practical meaning, but we don’t inherit the plethora of feelings related to that word. We don’t feel the warming power of sunlight every time we say or hear the word “sun”, for instance. As a result, sun passes unconsciously in front of us, wrapped in a transparent envelope we don’t bother opening.

What happens with language and words, can be experienced also with regards to actions and routines. Some actions we do daily are dense and full of meaning, but we gradually dismissed our willingness to do them mindfully. Routines flow in front of us as if what they contained were meaningless sets of cheap actions.

Clearly, considering mechanical and repetitive actions as such it’s cheaper and less resource intensive for our brain, so that’s not an issue by itself. But when the compounded effect of mindfulness suppression reaches high levels, what we turn out to be living is not a “life”, it turns into an extended sleepwalking session.

Waking sleepwalkers

A friend of mine once told me an anectode happened to one of her school mates: they had this guy sleepwalking around and a friend of his decided to wake him up. The sleepwalker, once awake, punched his friend in the face.

Now, I did a bit of research and it doesn’t seem to be scientifically dangerous to wake a sleepwalker, so I guess that anectode serves only as a funny story without too much teachings.

However, what I do know is that in the case of “life sleepwalkers” - which all of us are, in one field or another - the awaking part could be the most painful and disturbing one. It can come in the form of a car crash, a romantic story falling apart, a credit card being rejected without an apparent reason. Here I’m not referring to any sort of spiritual awaking, nor to any mistic or religious ephipany: to me, the breaking of a pattern is an awaking, an “ah-ah!” moment if you will.

I don’t know why us humans tend to fall into these sleepwalking traps. I guess it’s cheaper - from an energetic perspective - to just set the autopilot up and get on with whatever it brings to us.

Our lives are flooded with complexity, all around us things work (or stop working) according to phisical and psychological processes we barely know about. As an example, I used to sit in a hundred years old university building and focus on books I had to study. Clearly, I never thought about being trusting unknown engineers that built that structure, I’ve never thought about the trust I had in the chair not breaking all of a sudden. The only thing I did was committing my mental energy to the activity at hand, nothing else. Channeling resources on one thing makes my senses unable to see much else, as you would expect.

But viscerally we know that things can break, and once they do we’re left with a void, a glimpse of uncertainty unveiling to us the complexity of the surroundings. The more complex the social, phisical, economical infrastructure we’re surrounded by, the more we tend to delegate chuncks of its understanding to someone else, being that a machine, a human being or an institution. As a consequence, we’re less independent; less independence is associated with lower awareness. The more attractive perspective is to set up a foundational set of axioms, and then give them for granted so that we can avoid bothering further.

Alternatives make us uncomfortable

As you can imagine, I don’t have a solution for this “complexity” issue.

You can’t avoid living in a complex environment as a whole, but you can think hard about social, economical and phisical environments you’ve chosen consciously to place yourself into.

“What’s the goal here?” you could ask. To me, it’s just to be a little more prepared when life decides to wake me up from my sleepwalking sessions.

Clearly, “thinking hard” about something is not of any use if “thinking” doesn’t evolve into “doing” - which, as a side remark, is possibly the most difficult part. Therefore, I really believe that using alternative tools is a good strategy to expose ourselves to the complexity of specific activities we are used to carry on. Just try to live a month without using Google Maps, you’ll have your “ah-ah!” moment too, if you know what I mean.

But what are the “alternative tools” I’m riffing about?

I would define those as techniques, tools, behaviours that still lead to the final goal but force you to take uncommon paths towards it. By facing a task equipped with an uncommon set of tools, you can deepen your understanding of its inner workings and be a little more prepared for when uncertainty and discomfort arrive.

The cliché of “doing difficult things”, that is so annoyingly common in the underground internet culture nowadays, is somehow related to this: often “doing difficult things” and “tackling problems with unusual tools, from uncommon points of view” are pretty much the same thing.

Clearly, doing something with alternative tools could allegedly make your life worse, it can turn easy things into complex. For example, rejecting the idea of using a car to move about and only going by bike is an alternative choice that comes with several cons. If that is a painful choice and it does make your life more difficult, is it worth it? In my opinion, sometimes it is. As for an another example, I believe it’s worth forcing yourself to approach new people without the help of dating apps, even if that will make you look like a weirdo.

It turns out that we better grasp “what we are really doing when we are doing what we are doing” if we try to do it differently. And sometimes “differently” means avoiding conformism. Someone takes this to the extremes: there’s this Pilkington guy in the Ricky Gervais Show that once decided to do its gardening job without using his thumbs. Gardening certainly took a lot more time and, presumably, he did a worse job than if he did use his “full gripping ability”.

I can hear your thoughts going “mmm, that’s very unusual and weird”.

True, but here we go: that’s an alternative way to wake up to the world complexity. Surely Mr Pilkington understood at his expenses what are the set of assumptions we give for granted when doing manual work, even if their solidity is rooted in a little - although huge in evolutionary terms - phisical feature. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t consider “opposable thumbs” as an hidden pattern we shall be awaken from. And please, I don’t suggest going out trying to drive blindfolded or doing anything dangerous. You decide what’s hidden for you, what activities are worth exploring with different means.

Unavodables

Again, I can imagine the obvious and plausible objection at this point: “not everything can be done in an ‘alternative manner’”.

True, alternatives are viable only when they exist, which is not always the case. From time to time, we carry on with activities, jobs not really detachable from the tools we use to complete them.

The woman at the Ryanair departure gate couldn’t avoid using her credit card to pay for the backpack to be onboarded. Nonetheless, if she had a bit more awareness about the tools she was going to use abroad, she could have checked if her credit card circuit were widely accepted and possibly setup some alternatives (never heard of Revolut?). At the end of the day, having more financial streams to plunder from is always a good idea.

Seeking answers to a simple question like “how does a credit card payment work?” could explain a lot about the tool, about the assumptions you make while using it. Ultimately, it makes you aware of what you’re really doing when you are doing it. Again, you don’t have to be an engineer, an expert on something to start investigating. Often scratching the surface of a discipline is enough to gain some awareness and independence.

Takeouts

I know, this is not an easy task and I’m struggling at doing it too, because as humans we tend to converge towards standardization of behaviours and conformism. And conformism leads to apathy for things that just work. Moreover, if not annoyed enough with all the baggage of practical complexity associated with my proposed “technique of the alternatives”, you have to know that doing things differently exposes you to judgement.

Whe are you bothering with all this uneeded complexity?

will be the most recurring question you’ll get. And you’ll better have a strong reason to unveil, otherwise you’ll be labeled as “weird”. I’d argue that any reason you’ll provide will sound strange to whom asked you that question, you’re better off estinguishing that discussion with a laugh.

I believe it’s generally worth taking a longer route, seeking an alternative path. The ultimate end is to be awake before things fall apart for you. Will that cost a bit more in terms of difficulties today? I guess so, and I guess you’ll be fine with those too.

Oh, and if you’re wondering how the story at the departure gate ended: a friend of the woman paid her bill. So probably all this riffing of mine could be swapped with a more dense and coincise takeaway:

get along with people that use widely accepted credit cards so that you don’t have to do your own research.

Thoughts