#114 - High-Functioning Sleepwalkers

This companion piece to this week’s episode. The podcast is the full, unedited, and raw version; this is just the rundown of what I talked about.

You can listen to this episode on Spotify, and Apple Podcasts for audio only.

Station Eleven. A friend recommended the series, then I found out there was a book, so I am reading that first. It is post-apocalyptic, which usually means dark, and this one has a lightness to it that I did not expect. There is a travelling symphony that walks from town to town playing music in the new world, and the rest is their daily life and their memories of the old one. I am about halfway through and it is beautiful.

The passage. A management consultant is doing 360 interviews at a company, the kind where the brief is to smooth out an executive’s rough edges rather than remove him. He asks an employee about her CEO and she says something that goes further than the question. The corporate world is full of ghosts, she tells him, and then corrects herself, because her parents were academics and she has watched that horror show too, so the fairer thing to say is that adulthood is full of ghosts. People who ended up in one life instead of another, who did what was expected, who want something different and cannot have it now because there is a mortgage and there are children and it is too late. Her CEO is one of them and does not know it. High-functioning sleepwalkers, she calls them, and nothing ever shows them awake.

What passes for happiness. The consultant asks whether the man would call himself unhappy, and she says no, because people like him think work is meant to be drudgery with occasional moments of happiness in it, except what she means by happiness is mostly distraction. You go to the break room, someone tells a funny story, you laugh, you feel included, and you go back to your desk with a kind of afterglow. By five o’clock it has turned into another ordinary day. Then you look forward to five o’clock again, and the weekend, and the two or three weeks of annual leave, and that is what happens to your life. The consultant, listening, remembers laughing in the break room the day before at somebody’s impression of a bit from a comedy show, and asks himself when he was last genuinely moved by anything.

Why it stayed with me. Most of us get carried into this without ever choosing it. You finish school, you go to university, you do the things you are supposed to do, and you arrive in a job where you are not unhappy exactly, you are just on automatic. A day goes, a week goes, a year goes, and then you are forty or fifty and wondering where all of it went.

The numbing is not the problem. Drinks after work, dinners, series, the phone, games. None of it is wrong and all of it is fine. What matters is the relationship you have with it, because the same activity can be genuine enjoyment or a way of not being present, and the difference is whether there is any awareness in it at all. Over-consumption of anything is usually a way of avoiding the question you would otherwise have to sit with.

We forgot how to be amazed. What sleepwalking actually costs you is wonder, curiosity, the capacity to be inspired by something and to feel it properly. Lose that and you lose your connection to yourself, and after that to everyone and everything else.

What the body is for. We use a tiny fraction of what we are. The whole system, the emotional and spiritual and creative layers, this antenna that can feel and receive and connect to everything at once, and we have built a working life around one narrow slice of it. Look at what we pay people to do and a lot of it comes close to a dishonour to the body doing it. Giving eight percent of yourself, day after day, is draining in a way that has nothing to do with hours worked.

Which is why I am not worried about AI. Most of the tasks we are paid for can be done faster and better by machines, and I think they should be. My guess is that the next decades bring a slow return to respecting what we actually are, and a civilisation organised around humanity rather than money. I have nothing against money. It is a useful vehicle and we all need it in the system we have. It is the relationship again, the same as with everything else.

Novels count. You do not need non-fiction to find this. Some of the best thinking arrives inside a story, and this one arrived inside a book about a symphony walking between towns after the end of the world.

What I am reading. Big Magic, The Creative Act, and The War of Art in recent weeks, all three worth your time. Art and Fear is next, then Eat Pray Love and Steal Like an Artist. I want to give Big Magic a whole episode at some point, because there is too much in it for a passing mention.

The invitation. Ask yourself what you are distracting yourself from, and be honest about the answer even if you do nothing with it yet. Then ask a better one: are you actually here, and when were you last properly moved by something? Kick the ball out and stay curious about how it comes back, as an elephant or a butterfly or something you have no name for, and let curiosity lead rather than should.