I want to write about a small internal shift I have, in the last few years, started noticing in myself, and that I am not yet sure I trust enough to fully describe, but that I think is worth setting down before I lose track of how it actually arrived.
The shift is this. I have, for most of my adult life, conducted a particular background activity in the presence of other people’s lives. The activity has involved a small ongoing scan for evidence that, in some specific dimension, I was doing better than they were. The dimension varied. Sometimes it was professional. Sometimes it was financial. Sometimes it was relational. Sometimes it was about something as small as how a person seemed to be aging, or how well their dog was behaving in the park, or how their travel plans for the summer were shaping up compared to mine. The scan was not, in most cases, conscious. The scan was, more accurately, what my apparatus did by default whenever I encountered information about another person’s life.
Somewhere in the last two or three years, the scan has, on close examination, stopped. I want to be careful in how I describe the stopping. The stopping is not, by any honest accounting, the result of any deliberate work on my part. I did not, at any identifiable moment, decide to stop. The stopping has occurred, more accurately, by some combination of factors I cannot fully reconstruct, and the result is that I now encounter information about other people’s lives without the small ongoing background activity that used to accompany it. The encounter is, in some real way, different. The difference is what I want to try to describe.
What the scan was actually doing
It is worth being precise about what the scan was, in fact, accomplishing, because I do not, until I started writing this, ever named it clearly to myself.
The scan was producing, in any given encounter, a small piece of comparative information. The comparative information was the answer to a question that my apparatus was, in the background, continuously asking. The question was, in some real way, “how am I doing, relative to this person, on the dimensions I currently care about.” The answer the scan produced was, in most cases, partial and not particularly reliable. The answer was, however, what the apparatus was looking for. The answer arrived. The apparatus processed it. The apparatus moved on to the next encounter.
The processing produced, in any given case, a small ephemeral feeling. If the comparison came out favorably, the feeling was a small ephemeral satisfaction. If the comparison came out unfavorably, the feeling was a small ephemeral unease. The feelings were not, in any single case, dramatic. The feelings were the small daily climate the scan produced. The climate was, by long habit, what I assumed adult life felt like.
I want to acknowledge that the scan was, in some real way, doing a particular kind of work for me. The work was not entirely useless. The work was a kind of ongoing internal status check that kept me, in some real way, oriented in a competitive social environment that I had absorbed, somewhere in my upbringing and my twenties, as the relevant environment to be operating in. The scan was, on close examination, a tool calibrated for a particular kind of life. The tool was useful, in that life, in particular ways. The tool was, on the available evidence, also expensive in ways I did not, until recently, fully register.
What the scan was costing
The cost of the scan was, in any single instance, small. The cost of the scan, in cumulative form across decades, was not small.
The first cost was the bandwidth. The scan was, by structural necessity, consuming a particular fraction of my attentional capacity whenever I encountered another person’s life. The fraction was not, in any single instance, large. The cumulative fraction, across the thousands of encounters that constituted my adult social life, was considerable. The bandwidth was being spent on the scan. The bandwidth was, accordingly, not available for the actual encounter. I was, in some real way, less fully present in the encounter than I would have been if the scan had not been running. The encounter, accordingly, returned less to me than it would have if I had been fully there.
The second cost was the corrosion. The scan was, by its structure, organized around the assumption that other people’s lives existed primarily as data points for my own self-assessment. The assumption was not, in any explicit sense, what I believed about other people. The assumption was, more accurately, the operating logic of the apparatus running the scan. The operating logic was, on close examination, slightly corrosive to the actual relationships the scan was running in the background of. The corrosion was small. The corrosion accumulated. Across enough years, the cumulative corrosion produced a particular kind of low-grade distance from the people I was supposedly close to. The distance was not, in any single moment, visible. The distance was, in cumulative form, structurally real.
The third cost, and this is the one I find hardest to describe, was that the scan was producing, in me, a particular kind of person I would not, on close examination, have chosen to be. The person produced by the scan was someone whose primary relationship to other people’s flourishing was a small ongoing assessment of whether the flourishing was outpacing his own. The relationship was not what I would have described, in conscious terms, as my actual relationship to the people in my life. The relationship was, however, the operating logic the scan was running. The operating logic was, in some real way, who I was being in the background of every encounter. The being was not something I was particularly proud of, when I eventually looked at it directly.
What happened when it stopped
The stopping was gradual. I want to be honest about this, because the gradualness is, I think, part of why I did not register what was happening until well after it had occurred.
What I noticed, in the first months of the gradual stopping, was that certain interactions had become, in some real way, easier. Conversations with people whose lives were, by various external measures, going better than mine had become less weighted with the small background discomfort they used to carry. Conversations with people whose lives were going worse had become less weighted with the small background satisfaction they used to carry. The interactions were, in some real way, just the interactions. The information about the other person’s life was just the information. The apparatus had stopped converting the information into comparative material. The information was, accordingly, free to be what it actually was: news from someone else’s life, unrelated to my own ongoing internal accounting.
I want to be careful not to claim that this represents any moral achievement on my part. The cessation of the scan was not, in any active sense, accomplished by me. The cessation was, more accurately, what occurred when the scan stopped being something my apparatus was structurally invested in running. The investment had been operating for decades. The investment had, somewhere in the last few years, quietly run out. The running-out was not, on close examination, the result of any virtue. The running-out was, more accurately, the result of the scan having stopped delivering anything that my current life was, in fact, organized around acquiring.
This is, I think, the actual mechanism. The scan was calibrated to deliver competitive information that was useful in a particular configuration of life. The configuration was the configuration of my twenties and early thirties, in which I was actively organized around various forms of acquisition and external achievement. In that configuration, the scan was, in some real way, doing useful work. The work was helping me orient in a competitive environment in which competitive orientation was, by the configuration of my life, what I was doing.
The configuration has, in the last few years, changed. I am no longer organized around the various forms of acquisition that the scan was calibrated to assess. The scan, accordingly, has been delivering information that my current configuration is not, in any active sense, using. The information arrives. The information sits unused. The apparatus, by some combination of accumulated unused output and the natural reluctance of any system to keep running processes that produce nothing it needs, has slowly stopped running the scan.
What the released energy is doing
It is worth being precise about what the bandwidth, freed up by the cessation, has actually been doing. The cultural register would, in this kind of article, tend to suggest that the freed bandwidth has been redirected into some loftier purpose. I do not, on close examination, want to make that claim. The freed bandwidth has not been redirected into anything particularly lofty. It has been redirected, more modestly, into the actual ordinary present-tense experience of being in rooms with people.
The redirection is small. The redirection is also, on close examination, what most of the pleasure of the last few years has, in some real way, consisted of. I am, in conversations, slightly more present than I used to be. I am, in encounters with old friends, slightly more available to the actual content of what they are telling me. I am, in my walks with the dogs, slightly more aware of the dogs themselves rather than the various comparative thoughts that used to run in the background of any solitary activity. The slightly-more-presence is, in some real way, what most of late-thirties contentment has, for me, turned out to consist of. The contentment is not dramatic. The contentment is, more accurately, the small ongoing dividend the apparatus pays out when it is no longer running expensive background processes that were not, on close examination, producing anything I needed.
The honest acknowledgment
I do not, by any honest accounting, believe that I have become a better person. The scan has stopped. The scan has not stopped because of any moral work I have done. The scan has stopped because the scan was no longer paying out anything my current life requires. The cessation is, in some real way, structural rather than moral. The cessation is also, on the available evidence, one of the more important shifts I have noticed in myself in the last several years.
What I have, instead of the scan, is a particular kind of small daily contentment that does not require me to be doing better than anyone else in order to be functional. The contentment is calibrated to my actual life rather than to my comparative position. The comparative position used to be the operating variable. The actual life is, increasingly, the operating variable. The shift between these is, on examination, what I now think happiness, in any genuine sense, structurally consists of.
The other people’s lives are, in this configuration, just other people’s lives. They are not, in my apparatus, currently being processed as comparative material. They are, more accurately, free to be the things they actually are. I am free, in turn, to engage with them on their own terms rather than as data points in my own ongoing internal accounting. The freedom is, in some real way, a kind of relief that the scan, in all the decades it was running, was structurally preventing me from accessing.
The relief is what I would, if asked, now describe as the actual texture of being thirty-eight. The texture is, in some real way, what I have been waiting, without quite knowing it, for the apparatus to deliver. The apparatus has, finally, delivered it. The delivery did not come, on examination, from any active work on my part. The delivery came from the apparatus eventually figuring out that the scan was no longer useful and quietly retiring it. The retirement is, on the available evidence, one of the best things that has, in my apparatus, ever happened. The strange thing is how little I had to do for it to occur.
