I’ve been listening to Chuck Klosterman IV. In 1996, he only ate Chicken McNuggets for a week.
American culture is nothing more than a pastiche of fixations. We are obsessed with health. We are obsessed with pleasure. We are obsessed with speed. We are obsessed with efficiency. In simplest terms, we are obsessed by the desire to accelerate every element of our existence in a futile attempt to experience as much life as we can in the shortest possible time. We have all entered a race to devour the largest volume of gratification before it kills us.
I’ve fallen into this trap. Not the nuggets. The trap of speed and efficiency. I’m sitting in it right now.
- I want to write this post as quickly as possible.
- I don’t want to revise because that’s slow so I want to make sure I have some structure
- I want to build that structure as quickly as possible
Then I get into this thing of becoming efficient, freeing up time, then filling in that free time with more things to make more efficient.
This morning I was listening to What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (because, of course, listening to book is faster if you do it while you’re doing other things) and came across this:
As I run, I don’t think much of anything worth mentioning. I just run. I run in a void. Or maybe I should put it the other way: I run in order to acquire a void.
Every day I write down that I want to live an unrushed life. (Among other things. The other things also somehow probably originated from some Tim Ferriss podcast.) Then I go off and try to see how I can do things as fast and efficiently as possible.
Anyway, I need to think about living a life of unfilled voids. A life of premium-quality, 100 percent white chicken breast meat Chicken Selects instead of Chicken McNuggets.