Flattened
Mid-scroll, Midjourney
"Be interesting," my aunt told me. I was 24, or thereabouts. I thought about this for awhile. The next time I saw her, I asked, "How do I become interesting, 이모?" 1
"Well, interested is interesting," she said. "You're interesting to others when they feel you're interested in them. But, it mostly comes with age."
Ah, age, that thing we never have the right amount of. Or patience or life experience or sand in the hourglass. So,"interesting" doesn't need be rushed. What a relief it was to that neurotic 24-year-old.
I have aged since that conversation. The wrinkles on my face that once sent me into a skincare spiral now seem normal, on some days, even dignified. Many of the worries that troubled a younger Ethan have since been cast aside, but this one still lurks:
What if time is not a friend to interestingness but a foe? What if the sun, even as it perturbs my skin cells, is setting on my uniqueness? What if, as my telomeres shorten and my ability to digest night-time burritos wanes, I'm fitting myself into fewer and fewer dimensions? What if I'm becoming... flat?
Excuse me, where does this flow go?
I went to a waterpark once as a kid, and it seemed pretty dangerous. The least dangerous attraction was called the Lazy River. In the Lazy River, you could... laze, and be gently circulated, along with other kids and their urine, around and around. Going with the flow in the Lazy River context meant a pleasant, if pee-filled, float around the park.
Going with the flow in the context of life, while also not acutely dangerous, has risks. The one I've been worrying about lately is the risk of becoming flat.
More specifically, I worry that separate streams of work, media, and biology converge to form a fast-flowing river that smooth the jagged irregularities of those plucky rocks bouncing along its craggy bottom.
The flow seems like a great way to lose your edge.
Work
Work is one of the great flatteners.
It stands to reason that the thing you spend most of your time doing will, over time, shape your brain to fit that thing. To your employers, to your colleagues, maybe to yourself, what you do for money is what you are.
In the US, many of us, consciously or no, define ourselves by our occupation, particularly when we believe it to represent our main contribution to society. And maybe because of that belief (or maybe the causal arrow points the other direction), someone's job tends to be a reasonable proxy for their education level, income, and to a lesser but significant extent, their values. When I ask you what you do, I'm really asking what type of person you are.
On my first ever business trip to Ireland and the UK, I noticed a peculiar linguistic difference: they say "lift" instead of "elevator"! Lift... can you imagine? No, sorry, the one I noticed that's relevant to this paragraph: when describing their roles, people used the term "look after," as in, "I look after field marketing for the Benelux region." To my American mind, this turn of phrase evokes a caretaker. Benelux field marketing is out there toddling around, and it needs looking after.
I am less inclined to equate the person with the job in the "look after" part of the world as I am in the "I'm the Head of US Field Marketing" part of the world. The job is a role, and the doer is playing it, and maybe tomorrow, they'll play a different role or look after something else, like their actual toddler.
Do children make you flat or keep you jagged - an interlude
I don't know for sure, because I've never done it, but I imagine that having children is a good mitigation against becoming a 2D projection. Biology is strong, and whether we have selfish genes or selfish genomes, children seem to be a strong hedge against total reduction in dimensionality (assuming one maintains other dimensions, which is a big assumption).
Does having kids make you more interesting? Probably not by default, and, in my limited life experience, other people's kids are pretty uninteresting — generally not bringing a lot to the table beyond juice spilled directly onto the table.
Having children (that you actually raise yourself) strikes me as a powerful hedge: with kids, the ceiling on your Interestingness Quotient is lower, but your floor is much higher.
Media
Media-flattening is both a demand-side and supply-side phenomenon.
Let's start with demand (and if you're wondering what the demand side for media is, it's you. You, and me and most of the internet-connected world positively demand entertainment.)
From penny-newspapers, to radio, to TV, to 1-minute snippet to 20-second video infinite scroll — all supported by the same business model by the way(!) — media is (d)evolving to speak to the older, less differentiated, less interesting part of your brain, the part colloquially compared to that of a monkey or a lizard. The most modern of media offers glimpses, flashes, and the easy, breezy, beautiful feeling of learning something without the effort of actually learning. Eventually, you have trouble choosing otherwise. You can't be taught, or at least teaching you is more difficult, so instead you are reaffirmed and reinforced, and over time fashioned into the collection your most readily-mimicked impulses. Depth of thought has always been the harder path, but shallowness (read: flatness), has become exponentially easier, just a word, a glance, a tap away. This point has been more elegantly made in several tomes, so I won't dally longer on it.2
When analyzing the devolution of the media landscape, it's helpful to think on the margin: what is this entertainment / medium / 20-second video replacing? Generally, time spent with the algorithmically-driven "new" media forms do not replace time spent on intentional "okay I'm going to sit down now to be entertained"entertainment. It's more of a "yes, and" situation. What gets crowded out is the quiet time, the synthesis time, the processing time, the prerequisites for the brain to reveal itself to itself.
The atomic unit of entertainment has shrunk so significantly that it has become like liquid, flowing into empty spaces in our days, assuming the shape of its container, and over time, eroding what was there before. We can choose to be entertained every waking moment of our lives, and in doing so, we can choose to drown out much of the life of the mind that makes us sharp, jagged, interesting. In the world of algorithmically-driven entertainment, you are what you eat, and the buffet is always open, except over-consumption of this kind doesn't make you fat; it makes you flat.
Onto stocking the buffet, or the supply side, and I'll keep this shorter, because I have less personal experience as a chef than as a diner.
The standard advice given to creators is "find your niche." I don't think that's deviously bad advice, but you can see how it leads to flat creations from flat creators. Your audience might get confused and frightened if your content indicates that you're a full, complex human being, so it's best to just be one thing. You contain multitudes, but that's inconvenient.
David Graber was an American anthropologist, and he noticed what he termed "a funny thing." Graber achieved international renown with his 2011 work, Debt: The First 5,000 Years. As he began to research other areas of interest, he noticed he was being explicitly and implicitly told to stay the course rather than apply his skills to other pastures.
I will conclude this section with Dr. Graber's full quote below:
"There's a funny thing where if you say something that a number of people consider interesting, new, sort of unusual, and you show you have a capacity to do that, it's almost as if the world will conspire to make sure you never do that again. They will try to make you give the same talk, write the same book, do the same thing for the rest of your life."
Biology
You are flattened due to my lack of imagination. Others are flat in your eyes, and you are flat in theirs.
We are quite unimaginative, especially when it comes to constructing the reality of another. I can imagine how you might feel about one thing, maybe two different things at a time, but imagining that you have an inner life as complex and rich as mine? Nah, that's crazy, bro. The human brain cannot even construct a human face from scratch, which is why your dreams and nightmares are full of humanoids with featureless faces or else extras whose faces you've seen before but only part of your mind remembers.
It's not really your fault (in absolving you, I'm also absolving myself). Every moment of my lived experience has confirmed my sneaking suspicion that I am the most interesting and important person in the world. Unless you are a Brahmin or a psychedelic enthusiast, I suspect that you suspect the same about yourself. The brilliance of the 1998 movie The Truman Show was to capture this feeling. Most of us watched Truman Burbank (played by the inimitable Jim Carey), truly the center of his own personal universe, and we immediately identified with the horror of his situation: utterly alone and constantly manipulated for the entertainment of a global audience and the enrichment of companies who advertise and sell ads on the show. We all watched that psychological horror movie that culminates in the hero unsubscribing from the only reality he's ever known, and we thought, "Yep, that about captures it."
Because of our human limitations, it takes hard mental work (very much not a dip in the highly-chlorinated-for-very-good-reason Lazy River) to imagine that another might be as human as our self. It's probably an impossible goal for most of us. Is it worth the effort to swim against or at least perpendicular to the tide, to the flow, to be truly interested in someone else's experience? The wisdom of the ancients, the primacy of love as secular/religious redemption, and the apparent contentedness of people who make this effort all seem to point to "YES." I'm not sure yet about redemption, but to me, making the effort to stay interested seems a worthwhile defense against The Flattening.
In conclusion
Because all of these blog posts for some reason have to impart some advice or call you to some action, my advice is: beware the flattening flow. Stay sharp, keep your edge, at least stay oblong. Better yet, stay lumpy.
The next time you're saying goodbye to a good friend, instead of saying "Bye" or "Be good" or "Stay golden," try "Stay Lumpy." They'll probably think you're weird, but better that... than flat.
Notes
“Imo” — the Korean word for “aunt” (technically, your mother’s sister)
I guess this is the Further Reading footnote. The works that I’m thinking of are: Infinite Jest, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Stand Out of Our Light, Attention Merchants.