Non-consuming consumption

I’ve caught myself a few times this week starting and ending the day with phone in hand, scrolling the screen. I’ve caught and challenged myself, asking, “is this really how you want to spend your time?”

Sure, I tend to be reading blogs and newsletters, not so much caught up by an algorithmic feed (though I do have a bad habit of compulsively loading news sites, even though I specifically subscribe to a physical paper to try to constrain how and when I read the news), so it’s easy to justify to myself that it’s “good scrolling”. It tickles something to fill my brain, but the act of digital consumption still isn’t that satisfying—I yearn for more tangible things.

This morning, happily, I kept the phone away, instead reading Sherlock Holmes. And it was good.

It was a reminder that, much fun as it may be to make things (woodworking, cooking, or so on) or go places (a spirited walk, a gallery, what have you) off-screen, consumption can be its own reward, and reading a book offers a non-digital form of consumption that isn’t so… consuming.

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• Years ago, I learned of Joan Didion’s “On Self Respect” via a post by Frank Chimero, who described it memorably as an essay that “smacked me on the back of the head at the right time”. Frank has taken that post down, so I’ll instead link to Maria Popova’s long quotation from Didion’s essay. As with Frank, reencountering Didion’s take on self respect has given me a much needed—much welcomed—smack in the head.
• Doug Stowe blogs about making things with his hands, mostly out of wood. But he also writes about education. In “The 800 lb. sore thumb”, he integrates several quotations to argue the importance of both hand- and head-work, not only to our personal development, but to democracy itself.
• Mita Williams shares her reasons for installing solar panels atop her garage. Among the many excellent reasons, Williams raises the heavy subsidies the Ontario government makes for our electricity rates: “The Ontario government will spend as much what it currents spends on all of its universities and colleges on subsidizing electricity costs for consumers, so we don’t notice anything [even as electricity rates increased by 29% in November].” The subsidy is one of those programs I periodically forget, then re-learn about, and every time it’s mind boggling. What a way to hide the true cost of energy production (and thus discourage rational economic decisions around both energy production and consumption).
• As a guy who knows a thing or two about it, Stéphane Dion has warnings about Alberta’s secession rumblings.
• What nineteenth-century cities can teach us about our own.
• For any among you who went to a Canadian elementary school, prepare for a blast from the past in CBC’s profile of Scholastic.

All the best for the week ahead!

Lucas