[The Things They Carried Tim O Brien Epub 33
Virginie Fayad
While the story is well worth reading for its own sake, what has stuck in my mind since I first read it is the idea that the things we carry reveal a great deal about us. Oddly enough, this has become more true as more of the things we carry get eaten by smartphone apps. The things you carry, both on and off your phone, now say a lot more about you. Because they are mostly not determined by necessity; they are determined by possibilities.
My current inventory is: phone, keys, wallet, coffee mug, laptop backpack with either a notebook or a clipboard and plenty of ballpoint pens. I sometimes have as many as a dozen ballpoint pens in my backpack.
All of these are commonplace things to carry. Psychologically significant parts of the extended human phenotype, but not unique to me. I polled friends on Facebook about unique things they carry and their responses made me realize I am a rather boring person from a things-carried perspective.
Apparent commodities turn into unique things carried once you attach a story to them. To the economist or CEO, a thing is a commodity to the extent competition in its market is driven by cost. But to the user, a thing is a commodity if there is nothing special about how you own it, and you feel nothing when the time comes to replace it.
For years, that Buddha was a thing-I-carried (or thing-I-drove-around, rather). At some point, the poster square dried out and the Buddha started falling off repeatedly. I got tired of sticking it back on, and it made its way into the glove compartment and stayed there. Thus ended my great experiment with sentimental carrying-of-things.
My experiments with sentimentality though, opened me up to a whole world of spectatorship, as I began to observe and understand people who do naturally relate to the things they carry in deeply sentimental ways.
Sentimentality in ownership, as far as I can tell, has three components that find behavioral expression in the way things are carried: emotions of belongingness, emotions of individuality, and sensual pleasure.
My Moleskine came with a little philosophy guide in a back-cover insert explaining how to be sentimental about owning one. The thing reminded me of the famous pet rock booklet. Reading it, I found myself wondering whether Moleskine owners smile meaningfully and significantly at each other in coffee shops and become friends.
Maps of any sort, geographic, temporal or ontological, illustrate the cowpaths-of-mind principle particularly well. If you carry a map around and refer to it frequently for years, the map gets burned into your mind, until it becomes an efficiently organized in-memory database. One effect of this is that associational, System 1 thinking in the domain covered by the map becomes very, very efficient, especially if you also have a natural comfort with metaphor. This is valuable because it allows you to perform very well in real-time conversations in that domain.
There are many things-carried that really should be apps of this sort, which combine tools-for-seeing with maps-of-things-to-see. Birdwatching field guides, travel guides, product catalogs, foreign language phrasebooks and so forth. And of course maps of physical geography.
The Apps You Carry, specifically the most-used ones, say a lot more about you than the simpler physical things you carry. I barely touch the iTunes app, often take photographs of random things around me, and check Facebook, Twitter and email frequently. I only use the more yuppie-urban-life sorts of apps (Uber, Yelp, movie timings) occasionally. So the Apps I Carry reveal a lifestyle involving a lot of waterfront walks with virtual friends.
I was very amused to read an article recently about how monasteries in Thailand have been forced to allow initiates to have phones, as a stop-loss measure. It reminded me of similar news a couple of decades back about young monks being hooked on soccer games on TV.
The Apps You Carry establish a very specific pattern of connection and disconnection from your environment. Music disconnects you from the sounds of the present and connects you to the sounds of a cultural context distant in space and/or time. Leaving push notifications for Twitter and chat on weakens your connection to the people around and strengthens your connection to distant people.
Shoes disconnect you from the feel of the gravel you are walking on. Carrying a utility knife (whether or not you know how to use it) amplifies your independent survival tendencies and speaks to a weakened connection to, and trust in, the society around you. Somebody who carries a concealed gun at all times inhabits a more Hobbesian escaped reality of their own construction than somebody who does not.
For a while, I was inhabiting an escaped reality full of crimes requiring detection and with dangers that required ropes and knives to face at every turn. Being a kid, of course I was smart enough to realize I was just pretending. Many lose those smarts when they grow up and become blind to the self-constructed and virtual nature of the realities they inhabit.
I knew a guy in college who traveled with a pair of nunchucks everywhere he went. Not to get in regular practice. He just thought it was a good idea. Apparently he was under the impression that we were in medieval China rather than twentieth-century Mumbai.
When you think about it, the fallacy we call digital dualism is actually just a narrow, specialized version of what you might call tool dualism. Tool dualism is the fallacious idea that the world highlighted and constructed by the things you carry and the world of your immediate natural environment are somehow disconnected spaces.
The best you can do is perversely and arbitrarily argue that the feel of wind on your naked skin is somehow better than the feel of gravel edited by your shoes, because apparently the shoes themselves are featureless intermediaries between objective and subjective realities. That what you can see with the naked eye is somehow better than what you can see with binoculars. That an idea you retrieve and examine from the depths of your own memory is irreconcilably different from one evoked by words or pictures on a physical glass surface a few inches from your nose.
There is a real distinction to be made. This distinction is whether you are carrying things psychotically or mindfully. A barefoot survivalist wearing only briefs, and carrying only a utility knife in the middle of Manhattan, is far less present in the situation than the most phone-obsessed geek checking Twitter updates while bumping into lamp posts.
To drop the here/not-here distinction born of tool dualism, and shift to the psychotic/mindful dualism that is actually useful, you have to really grok the McLuhan idea that all media are extensions of some human faculty.
Rule 1 is the basis for the Beloit Mindset List every September. Any child born since 2007 has always known flat rectangles with glass screens that contained secrets and games and all manner of stuff.
Yes, I think we do. When a kid imagines dangerous criminals all around and skulks around with a pocket knife, the make-believe element is clear and understood (Homo Ludens). You can pop between the two easily if you keep in mind the clearly make-believe oriented subset of things you carry.
But if the things you carry actually represent the set of likely contingencies you may have to deal with, there is no issue. Your extend self is aligned to the real world. There is no make-believe aspect as such.
Participating in a finite game of sufficient scope is the same thing as participating in multiple finite games, since when participating in a broad finite game attention gets fragmented across multiple contexts relating to the same master plan. To be present while involved in such a game, you need to consciously break the larger game into sub-games and take them one at a time. The infinite player, flitting from tightly scoped finite game to tightly scoped finite game, has no problem being present.
No matter how you argue, smartphones make beautiful woman look like idiots with a tick. This is not true for wearing small earbuds which makes them just look indifferent, which is generally a good look. The intake of soft musical mood modulating drugs, which separates someone from the environment is not problematic aesthetically, unless the music leaks out but the exposure of frequent context switches and cheap social/emotional/cognitive labor is. Suddenly everyone has become a relationship-worker everywhere and anytime, bound to their utility in the net-work, acting in tiny work packages. Now we can add a chapter about the shape of the private life of the organization man in the hive.
Of course I agree that we never go weightless but I sense this craftsmen morale which permanently seeks to apply tools and ever more tools can be kept lean, when perceived from leisure. At work I build tools / algorithms myself for doing my work and most of the times this meta-work is the unregulated aspect of it, something I reject to be micro-managed about. There are both sides.
I loved this essay. There is something about knowing the things a person carries regularly that exerts the strongest voyeuristic pull on me. I recently discovered the blog Every Day Carry; and, despite the fact that it is a thinly veiled marketing tool, the regular feature of what a person carries fascinates me. On the one hand, there is a commonality of perhaps ten items. On the other, the infinite variety of knives or watches or wallets; and the reasons advanced why one is better than another.
I have carried a pocket knife almost every day of my life since I was six or seven years old (so for 46 years). The fact that I had it through most of my elementary school days shocks people today, since in California the mere possession on a school campus is a crime. And I have to remember to leave it in my desk when I go the court a few times each week for work. Flying has become a real disappointment because I rarely check a bag; so must leave what I consider an essential tool (as much for the corkscrew as for the blade) behind. On long vacations, like my trip to the Scandinavian countries two years ago, I buy a cheap throw-away to fill the vacuum.
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