Brinkmann, Svend. _The Joy of Missing out: The Art of Self-Restraint in an Age of Excess_. Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA: Polity Press, 2019. --- # Progressive Summary The Greeks believed that moderation (sophrosyne) was the basis of all the other virtues. Our current culture emphasizes constant development and never being content. Brinkmann has 5 arguments to support the idea of being content with less - political, existential, ethical, psychological and aesthetic. --- # Key Points Interesting use of the example of war reparations after WW1, to make the case for victors settling for less than they deserve. He links this to the Greek virtue of magnanimity (meionexia). Capitalism used to cater to needs. Now it artifically creates needs. Many companies have advertising budgets that exceed their manufacturing budgets. He agrees with Aristotle that the purpose of an economy is to liberate us financially so that we can live the good life. This means that we need to have an idea of what the good life is (telos). He argues that a good life is one that has form, which implies limits. (This makes me think of the idea that a game must have rules, or Jordan Hall's idea that in order for a rowboat to be efficient, there has to be constraints.) Norman Vincent Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking (1952) might be the most famous self-help book in history. Donald Trump owes much of his worldview to Peale, who was associated with the Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan which Trump attended as a boy. Peale later officiated the marriage of Trump and his first wife. Peale's worldview is that optimism and positive thinking can alter reality in our favour. By contrast, Stoicism is best represented by the Christian serenity prayer: ‘God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.’ --- # Questions When he writes this: > Strictly speaking, we can only will one thing if it is good we seek, as only the good is complete and indivisible. If we are to will one thing, we must therefore have the right relationship to the good. It makes me wonder: This is exactly how Philip Shepherd writes about [[Reference Notes/Radical Wholeness]]. Isn't the problem that people throughout history have labelled something as the Good (Plato) or Wholeness, and built whole arguments around the need to direct ourselves towards it, but only define it as that which we are directed towards? Seems circular to me. -- What about the spiritual pathway? Perhaps Bill Plotkins eco-awakening [[The Journey of Soul Initiation]] is a better gateway to moderation than philosophical analysis. -- Can we see this shift to a more parsimonious culture in how our movies have becomes less baroque, such as Minari or Nomadlands? --- It's important to put things in a container, to have closure. That's why I like reading slim books these days. I get a feeling of completion, which is so rare today. --- Reading a physical book is more relaxing than a web page with links, because there isn't this constant temptation to # Resonances Brinkmann notes that consumption is the key feature of our society: - > The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman described this in many of his books as the transition from a solid culture epitomised by savings books, with an emphasis on thrift and delayed gratification, to a credit card culture that encourages people to ‘pursue their dreams’ and consume at rates they cannot afford. Bauman described consumer society’s modernity as ‘liquid’, so the individual has to be liquid in order to keep up. - Barry Lord [[Art & Energy - How Culture Changes]] makes the argument that it was the shift to fossil fuel energy away from coal that caused a shift in cultural values. There's a certain Nordic folksy wisdom that it shares with [[Ten Thoughts About Time]]. __ He would probably agree with David Fleming that we need to get rid of a large part of the intermediate economy. - https://leanlogic.online/glossary/intermediate-economy/ -- He would probably agree with Gandhi's dictum: "Live simply, so that others may simply live." -- He refers to Kierkegaard's famous quote: "Purity of heart is to will one thing." This makes me think of the movie City Slickers, when Curly (Jack Palance) asks Mitch (Billy Crystal): "You know what the secret to life is?", and he holds up a finger. Mitch: "Your finger?" Curly: "One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that, and everything else don't mean shit." - <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/xtrQUoRJ_W4" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe> -- I read somewhere that the gods must become human in order to appreciate life. That things have value only from a finite perspective. (The author might have explored this in his book Standpoints.) -- Negative image as a necessary condition for form. He mentions Adam Phillips' idea that we should examine our non-lived life, the life that we live in our imaginations, in art, in dreams, as it's the things that we opt out of that defines us. Makes me think of evolution as a negative image - we are defined by all our imaginary ancestors that didn't make it. The evolutionary tree is pruned by the absence of the species that didn't have enough fitness to their environment. --- # Quotes > The ability to care enables us to surrender to something else (for example, the better argument or the loved one), and in doing so to endow our life with form and our deeds with integrity. > To be able to think innovatively in a practical way, we must first know how our time and place fits into the historical perspective. We might express this by saying that the contemporary ideal of the flexible, innovative, proactive and self-managing person, who is always willing to change, generates an in-built reluctance to ‘miss out’. > Custodians help to preserve what is important from the threat posed by the emphasis on short-term disruption. We should thank them for that. The curators and custodians of life – the maintainers, as some have started calling them – should be in demand in job advertisements and well remunerated for their efforts. They should not be ashamed that they are not artists or entrepreneurs – quite the contrary, because artistic innovation is, in fact, only possible when there are others who are curators and custodians, creating frameworks and maintaining them, rather than always pushing the boundaries and breaking things down. Being a custodian is in itself a life art, and there will be a great need for them in the future. - There's actually a podcast called Maintainers Anonymous that celebrates this: https://maintainersanonymous.com/ > The problem, according to Schwartz, is that the modern emphasis on individualism, control and choice can deprive us of our main vaccine against depression, namely our sense of belonging to and involvement in groups and contexts. It is all too easy to end up suffering from status anxiety and working ourselves to the bone to make enough money to buy the ‘right’ consumer goods (i.e. those deemed desirable by contemporary culture). Of course, the depression phenomenon is a complex problem with many background factors, but perhaps the ‘tyranny of choice’, as Schwartz describes it, is a significant factor – especially when coupled with personal responsibility, which dictates that we have only ourselves to blame whenever we make the wrong choice.