Hi Everyone 👋🏽

If you're new here, welcome to Growth Imperatives, a curation of found ideas I send every other week that asks how we can imagine the world differently.

Following last week's article about dualism, I thought it might be interesting to share some articles about how we separate—or "atomize"—the different parts of our daily lives and what effect that has on us. Hint: it's not a good one (but there is a way out).

This week

🤖 Atomization of Life
🍃 Atomization of Nature
🪓 OK, atomization isn't allll bad

🤖 Atomization of life

Are we over-reliant on efficiency? While atomized activities may allow us to concentrate and be productive, that same atomization can also create distance between us and the people in our lives, making us less happy, and, eventually, more polarized.

If we stress work/life balance, why does so much of life continue to feel like work? This article may have the answer 👇🏽

[A]tomization encourages us to reduce multivariate experiences, often the most important parts of life, to their single most obvious element:

Biking is about exercise, and scheduling with friends and planning a route and inflating your tires all get in the way of that.

Eating is about sustenance, and inviting friends and getting groceries and cooking all get in the way of that.

Relationships are about talking, and meeting up in person and leaving the house and scheduling are all inconveneiences.

Work is about checking off tasks, so spending time commuting to an office where you might goof off and socialize all get in the way of that.

Then when we feel lonely, painfully isolated by our atomized life, we schedule some atomized social time like going to a bar or coffee to see friends in between our lonely work and lonely dinner because we’ve removed most of the natural socializing elements from all of the other parts of life. Atomization turns an integrated day of socializing, eating, exercising, and working into discrete hurried chunks of trying to move from one thing to another, wondering why we never seem to have time for everything. [...]

The solution to the atomization curse that both gives us significantly more time back, and makes us much happier, is to seek to reintegrate these various foci of life as much as possible. How do you turn food back into a rich, multivariate experience with friends, fun, exploration, and relaxation? How do you blend socialization and exercise and community? How do you spend less time having shallower atomized relationships through a screen, and more time having rich in-person relationships where you get the full experience of other people? [...]

Instead of looking at some problem like “I don’t see enough friends,” or “I don’t work out enough,” or “I don’t have enough fun,” and then trying to find time to fit those priorities into, we should see how we can incorporate them into what we’re already doing. Could you make your workout less perfectly optimized so you can do it with friends? Can you loosen the reigns on your Super Duper Productive Routine to hang at a coffee shop with friends for a few hours a week? And for the love of God, can you please stop drinking fucking Huel or Soylent at your desk and talk to someone instead?

Read De-Atomization is the Secret to Happiness by Nat Eliason

🍃 Atomization of Nature

The grammar we use impacts how we see and interact with the world. Kimmerer here explores using the singular “ki”—a word based on the Potawatomi word for land—and the plural “kin,” an existing English word, to refer to the living beings surrounding us.

In contrast to the distance created by saying “it,” could these words help us to respect and connect with nature?

We have a special grammar for personhood. We would never say of our late neighbor, “It is buried in Oakwood Cemetery.” Such language would be deeply disrespectful and would rob him of his humanity. We use instead a special grammar for humans: we distinguish them with the use of he or she, a grammar of personhood for both living and dead Homo sapiens. Yet we say of the oriole warbling comfort to mourners from the treetops or the oak tree herself beneath whom we stand, “It lives in Oakwood Cemetery.” In the English language, a human alone has distinction while all other living beings are lumped with the nonliving “its.” [...]

The language that my grandfather was forbidden to speak is composed primarily of verbs, ways to describe the vital beingness of the world. Both nouns and verbs come in two forms, the animate and the inanimate. You hear a blue jay with a different verb than you hear an airplane, distinguishing that which possesses the quality of life from that which is merely an object. Birds, bugs, and berries are spoken of with the same respectful grammar as humans are, as if we were all members of the same family. [...]

The language we speak is an affront to the ears of the colonist in every way, because it is a language that challenges the fundamental tenets of Western thinking—that humans alone are possessed of rights and all the rest of the living world exists for human use. Those whom my ancestors called relatives were renamed natural resources. In contrast to verb-based Potawatomi, the English language is made up primarily of nouns, somehow appropriate for a culture so obsessed with things. [...]

Replacing the aboriginal idea of land as a revered living being with the colonial understanding of land as a warehouse of natural resources was essential to Manifest Destiny, so languages that told a different story were an enemy. Indigenous languages and thought were as much an impediment to land-taking as were the vast herds of buffalo, and so were likewise targeted for extermination. [...]

English encodes human exceptionalism, which privileges the needs and wants of humans above all others and understands us as detached from the commonwealth of life. But I wonder if it was always that way. I can’t help but think that the land spoke clearly to early Anglo-Saxons, just as it did to the Potawatomi. Robert Macfarlane’s wonderful book Landmarks, about land and language, documents myriad place names of great particularity that illuminate an ancient Anglo-Saxon intimacy with the land and her beings. It is said that we are known by the company we keep, and I wonder if English sharpened its verbal ax and lost the companionship of oaks and primroses when it began to keep company with capitalism. [...]

Inspired by the grammar of animacy in Potawatomi that feels so right and true, I’ve been searching for a new expression that could be slipped into the English language in place of it when we are speaking of living beings. [...]

The grammar of animacy is an antidote to arrogance; it reminds us that we are not alone. [...]

Another student, Amanda, adds, “Having this word makes me regard the trees more as individuals. Before, I would just call them all ‘oak’ as if they were a species and not individuals. That’s how we learn it in dendrology, but using ki makes me think of them each, as not just ‘oak,’ but as that particular oak, the one with the broken branch and the brown leaves.”

Read Speaking of Nature by Robin Kimmerer

🪓 Atomization isn't allll bad

Maybe there are some cases where we should embrace atomization...?

Based on Apple's 'anti-creative' Crush ad from last month, L. M. Sacasas looks between the lines at the implications of all that creative destruction. Ultimately he leaves us with two paths forward, but I'll let you read the article to find out what those are. 😉

The ad conveyed the company’s incipient ideology with exquisite clarity: like the ring of Sauron, the iPad here appears as the one device to rule them all, chiefly by overthrowing and displacing them. Are you worried that digital devices will obsolesce the rich and multifaceted array of analog tools and instruments? Apple wants you to know that, yes, this is what it is aiming at. Are you concerned about the flattening of human experience under digital conditions? Boy does Apple have just the visual metaphor to confirm your suspicions. [...]

[Albert] Borgmann, who passed away just over a year ago, was a German-American philosopher of technology. [...]

Borgmann identified what he called the device paradigm. The logic of the device paradigm is pretty straightforward. It describes the tendency to hide the complex machinery of a technology below a slick, commodious surface that makes the output of a device available to the user with minimal effort. The goods a device offers its users are “rendered instantaneous, ubiquitous, safe, and easy.” “A commodity is truly available,” Borgmann writes, “when it can be enjoyed as a mere end, unencumbered by means.” Apple products have long been leading exemplars of the device paradigm.

But this is only part of the picture. Borgmann opposed devices to what he called focal things. Focal things demand something of us. They require a measure of care, practice, and engagement that devices do not. Our use of them induces our focus, which they invite by design. “The experience of a [focal] thing,” Borgmann also notes, “is always and also a bodily and social engagement with the thing’s world.” There are, in other words, embodied and communal dimensions to the use of a focal thing. They involve our bodies, and they involve us in relationships to a degree that devices do not. [...]

in relation to devices we tend to be relegated to the status of user, who may more often than not be the one being used. But no one would describe a musician as a user. Yes, they use the instrument, but their richness of the relationship between the musician and their instrument demands a different term, one that signals the degree to which a skill is cultivated in relation to the focal thing. We speak of musicians, not users of musical instruments because the musician is characterized by a set of skills they have cultivated in order to make something with the instrument. [...]

Read The Stuff of (a Well-Lived) Life by L. M. Sacasas

That's all for this week! Thanks for reading.

To help these ideas spread, please consider sharing a link to this issue or the entire newsletter with your friends or on social media.