Jigsaw Pieces & Artefacts

There are also powerful interests at work to keep us at home. Big tech firms like Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Apple love these arrangements because it ties their customers even further to their cloud-based collaboration subscription models. The giant media providers see more people at home clicking on their content. Big retail firms are enjoying the surge in online sales driven by bored, unsupervised workers. And corporate employers are sniffing big savings in real estate costs as well as the ability to hire better (and cheaper) talent regardless of geographic limitations.

My default filing system is not the orthodox A to Z but a more idiosyncratic and organic arrangement using the Crap method (Crap stands for chronological, random ascending pile). They are tepuis made of paper. I instinctively know how long it takes for the pile to build up, so I also know where the tax files should be. It's a combination of geology and archiving. I am an archeologist of my own stuff.

I think through all of this it’s clear that quarantine is an ultimate unknown, and we are reacting to the vagaries of it by telling each other off for not doing it properly, a relic from the old society we had, when we were allowed to go outside. My prediction is this sort of tone-policing will drop off shortly, when the actual impact of coronavirus proper starts to take hold and quarantine becomes less a weird series of days with the taste and flavour of a wasted bank holiday, and instead becomes a new normal that we have all adjusted sharply to.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.

“Avoiding climate breakdown will require cathedral thinking,” she said. “We must lay the foundation while we may not know exactly how to build the ceiling.”

There is a line from the Super Bowl-winning coach Bill Walsh about how most individuals are like water, they naturally seek out lower ground. By that he meant that without discipline or order, we are not our best selves. Ultimately, this is what routine is about: creating practices and habits and rules that force us to be better. Without a routine of any kind, Resistance is given too much room to operate. Doubt, chaos, laziness — if you give them an inch, they’ll take a mile. Routines are essential in that battle.