Wise Words — Will's main newsletter — explores how writing can enable us to cultivate deeper, more contemplative lives, and how it can help to clarify and enrich the work we do in the world.
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On writing oneself sane
Published 5 days ago • 4 min read
Last week, in the 'Weekly Notes' that I send to a small number of trusted friends and acquaintances, I suggested that I would be using that newsletter to share —
how I'm thinking about and navigating things like work, books, writing, gardens, technology, and the attempt to live a sane and contemplative life in an era of late capitalism and collapse.
It would seem these are my 'concerns' — things which have come to attract my particular interest and attention. And it would seem that I'm wanting to use writing as a way of 'navigating' these concerns.
A good question, here, might be — Why writing, in particular?
What do I imagine I'll be doing through this process of writing — for myself, and for you the reader?
What am I hoping to 'get' through writing, which I can't or won't get by other means?
I think the answer to these questions has something to do with the last of the concerns in that list — with 'the attempt to live a sane and contemplative life in an era of late capitalism and collapse'. I suppose my view of writing is that it is, or can be, a way of cultivating and safeguarding sanity in a society which is otherwise largely insane.
Going Sane
This distinction I've made here, between sanity and insanity, can be a slippery and problematic one.
Who is to say what is 'sane' or 'insane'? Is sanity always good (and is insanity always bad)? What would a 'sane way of life' actually involve?
Adam Phillips
These questions and more are the subject of a book by one of my favourite writers, the British psychoanalyst and essayist Adam Phillips.
In Going Sane, Phillips looks at how "there is a tremendous fear in our culture about madness", but how curiously, at the same time, "there has been no particular enthusiasm for the idea of sanity".
The book explores why this might be, attempting to offer "what amounts to notes towards the definition of sanity":
Notes not merely because the history of our ideas about sanity is virtually undocumented, but because there is something about the whole notion of sanity that seems to make us averse to defining it. Unlike madness, sanity doesn't make people write well about it, or even want to. [...]
People have written, in English, from the seventeenth century onwards with great authority and conviction about pathology and diagnosis and, indeed, about the history of madness. Sanity has been equivalently underdescribed [...]
It is worth wondering why, given the sheer scale of contemporary unhappiness, there are no accounts of what a sane life would look like. Or of why a sane life might be more worth living than, say, a happy life, or a healthy life, or a successful life?
Part of the reason for this is undoubtedly that sanity — being "one of the more difficult, more perplexing ideals that we have come up with for ourselves" — is far harder to turn a profit from than such things as 'happiness', 'health' or 'success'.
A campaign from Coca Cola
Phillips gives an excellent account, in a chapter titled 'Money Mad', of how money functions as "the enigma we use — the enigma as fetish — to protect ourselves, to ward off the more disturbing enigmas of our desire". Of our desire, for instance, for a sane life; which is something that, as we've seen, might entail a certain amount of difficulty and perplexity.
Indeed, it seems to me that part of the deep insanity of our society is its insistence that life is, or at least should be, all hunky-dory; its inability to countenance the prospect that such things as difficulty, conflict, and ultimately death — might in fact be somehow essential to life, and therefore shouldn't be repressed and avoided at all costs.
Phillips examines how money has served to exacerbate this state of affairs; how it has been instrumental in giving us the "illusion of precision" in knowing what we want or desire:
money extends the empire of quantification; not only does it make us think we can quantify things that may not be suited to quantification (like feelings, thoughts, moods or desires), but it also lures us into a desire for quantification, because of its apparent benefits. Numbers are less ambiguous than words [...]
Once we think in terms of money human needing shrinks in scope. We start to need only what we can calculate; we start to need as though all we need is money.
Phillips goes on to quote the philosopher Norman O. Brown who describes, in Life Against Death (1959), how 'The desire for money' —
takes the place of all genuinely human needs. Thus the apparent accumulation of wealth is really the impoverishment of human nature, and its appropriate morality is the renunciation of human nature and desires — asceticism.
The effect is to substitute an abstraction, Homo economicus, for the concrete totality of human nature, and thus to dehumanize human nature. In this dehumanized human nature man loses contact with his own body, more specifically with his senses, with sensuality and with the pleasure principle. And this dehumanized human nature produces an inhuman consciousness whose only currency is abstractions divorced from real life — the industrious, coolly rational, economic, prosaic mind.
Capitalism has made us so stupid and one-sided that objects exist for us only if we can possess them, if they have utility.
I think this speaks very well to what I wrote in my notes last week about my frustration with LinkedIn as a container and a context for writing — in particular, about how "exposure to an algorithm starts to distort how you think about the value of what you're writing, and as a result, to dilute the possibilities of what you feel able or willing to write (if not your opinions themselves)."
Writing myself sane
Returning, then, to the question of how writing might be good for the attempt to live a sane life — I think there's a considerable amount of qualification and further thought required here, about what my sense of a sane life might be, and about what kinds of writing I imagine might play a role in such a life. Too much to include here, now.
However, I suppose that this is what I've been trying to practice in writing these notes, this evening — and I believe that doing so has edified my sanity at least in some small way. Let's call that progress, shall we?
I'll leave you with some final encouragement towards sanity from Phillips:
It should matter to us, especially now, that sanity is something we can't get excited about; that it so rarely figures among our contemporary aspirations.
It is possible that in losing heart about our sanity — in not describing it or addressing it — we are losing more than we realize. It means, even at its most minimal, that we are becoming extremely narrow-minded about what we want, about imagining possibilities for ourselves.
Imagining possibilities for ourselves involves telling stories about what we think we are like, what we think we want, and what we think we are capable of.
Thanks for reading!
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Will is a writer, researcher, and thought-partner. He works primarily with academics and business leaders, helping to refine and communicate impactful ideas.
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