Why Do Anything? A Meditation on Procrastination
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
This new algorithm is really annoying.
While perfectionism CAN sometimes lead to procrastination and procrastination occasionally manifests itself as idleness, they are distinctly different phenomena arising from different mental states.
But that's not all. Read the column a little bit further and you find the author introduces yet another romantic notion to support his argument: nothingness.
> Idleness, then, reveals an experience of nothingness. While nothingness tends to occupy a central position in Eastern traditions like Buddhism and Taoism...
Nothingness ("Shunyata", in Sanskrit) is not about idleness or vacuum but means something very specific. It refers to the absence of a solid, tangible self (or an ego, if you must use a Western term). Buddhism's core practice is often mis-interpreted as "don't do something, sit there!" but it couldn't be farther from the truth.
Zen Buddhism and Taoism's idea of "nothingness" is not about inactivity but about keeping the "self" out of activity.
But he distinguishes them later:
The drama of procrastination comes from its split nature. Just like the architect from Shiraz, the procrastinator is smitten by the perfect picture of that which is yet to be born; he falls under the spell of all that purity and splendor. What he is beholding is something whole, uncorrupted by time, untainted by the workings of a messed-up world. At the same time, though, the procrastinator is fully aware that all that has to go. No sooner does he get a glimpse of the perfection that precedes actualization than he is doomed to become part of the actualization process himself, to be the one who defaces the ideal and brings into the world a precarious copy, unlike the architect who saves it by burning the plans.
So in this view procrastination is not his idealized perfectionism ("burning the plans") or his idealized idleness ("intuiting a cosmic meaninglessness, which comes along with the realization that, with every action, we get only more entangled in the universal farce"). It has a split nature that's the worst of both.
Also it's possible that his reference to nothingness doesn't mean sunyata, but "making no karma" by not participating in samsara.
By avoiding action and therefore responsibility, one could still be awfully entangled in samsara. (Just ask any developer who's browsing HN or Reddit while struggling to meet a deadline!)
That said, I did like your interpretation of "making no karma", even though Buddhism makes it very clear that karma-making occurs even with the skandhas, the "sense-gate" or mental/emotional fabrications.
I think you have got it almost right. The roots of meditation is from Rig-veda's riddle hymn composed by Dhirgatamas (one who stares in infinite darkness). The hymn describes two birds one enjoying eating berries where as other simply looks at it.
Shunyata is a concept popularized by Buddhist traditions with a very specific meaning but overall the concept of "do nothing" in meditative traditions of east has nothing to do with literal meaning of doing nothing instead depending on the specific school of meditaiton it differs. Mindfulness/Vipashyana (look inside) involves being alert while not acting at all which actually improves your sensitivity and observance of the surrounding where as Sahajmarga would involve becoming one with the existence while eliminating all thought. It is actually lot of hard work!
It's a popular belief but neither Zen nor Theravadan Buddhism makes any claims about "Reality". They only talk about the lack of a substantial self. (After all, the only "reality", so to speak, from a Buddhist perspective is the reality of dukkha or suffering. The question of the reality of the material world is of no importance.)
I often wonder how much more popular quietism would be if it did not contain the seeds of its own destruction. Quietists would presumably not want to be active politically, socially, or militarily.. thus effectively not opposing any oppression they are likely to receive at the hands of the forces representing the challenged status quo. Maybe in some future utopia/distopia where all needs are taken care of by machines and one is perhaps safe in distant star systems or in VR, quietism could thrive without being driven to extinction by competing, aggressive/active ideologies.
Despite phenomena like "engaged Buddhism", Buddhism and other Asian religions such as Hinduism are still accused of quietism, for their turning away from the world and "navel gazing", and for tolerating social injustice because of their inward/spiritual focus, sometime their belief in karma (which some maintain justifies unjust/unequal/exploitative conditions as deserved for actions in a previous life), and their belief that the material world (and thus material/social circumstances) are an illusion.
Let's take architecture for example, and lets make Frank Lloyd Wright the architect. Wright created some of the most beautiful designs ever. However, I've visited a lot of his houses, and I think they make terrible houses. Wright's designs ignored many of the aspects of what makes a home good. His houses are beautiful in the sculptural sense, but in reality they were failures as houses. Their perfection wasn't destroyed by creation -- it never existed in the first place.
That being said, Wright was a visionary designer, and I'd highly recommend touring a Wright-designed building if you have a chance.
It doesn't have to be. I think my main disagreement with what you're saying starts with how you allude to the idea of idea possession. What is "your idea"? What does this mean? Many perfect ideas appear universal. Who "came up" with the idea of the perfect sphere? Or the idea of love? Or the idea of adventure? Notice how, when you try to realize any of these ideas, you fall short.
People who created this, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_plaque
are betting that universal ideas do indeed exist, and that intelligent enough creatures are bound to have them.
When you realize something imperfect, you are bound to lose some connection with the perfect idea that you started with. This does not mean there was something wrong with the original idea, that it was "bad" or "wrong" in some sense. You cannot create a perfect sphere, but is the idea of a perfect sphere bad or wrong?
> Their perfection wasn't destroyed by creation -- it never existed in the first place.
About your example with Lloyd Wright: that perfection existed in a sense. It existed in his mind. Maybe not the plan for the house that would actually be executed, but the idea, the feeling of living in such a house. Where do you draw the border between pure concept and practicalities?
I remember being a kid and wanting to create computer games. I had very clear ideas on how the best game ever should feel like. The things I actually created were shit, and ended up destroying my ability to preserve these initial feeling of an ideal game. Don't you see how doing can be destructive in the realm of ideas?
It is funny that what I am saying here does not feel controversial to me (famous thinkers said this sort of thing millennia ago), but it does feel blasphemous in current western society. We worship productivity, and forget to question the very idea of productivity to begin with.
For another metaphor, the imagined perfection of a member of the opposite sex, and the inability of reality to match that expectation, is a consistent trope in art and media. Happy Together, by the Turtles, pretty much any song written by River Cuomo (Weezer), 500 Days of Summer, etc.
I think the issue is that our individual understanding of perfection is flawed. Perfection is more like Plato's forms, in the sense that something perfect might exist, but we can only begin to imagine what that is. Perhaps Plato is right, and perfection cannot exist in reality, but failure to attain perfection in reality would not cause the true form of something to be any less true.
Some Gnostics did believe the demiurge was merely mistaken (arrogantly thinking himself the only true God or blundering in creating when trying to imitate the creation of the true God), others believed him insane, or even intentionally evil.
At root, the Gnostics were wrestling with the problem of evil. That is, how can evil exist in the world (or how can this world be as evil as it is) if God is perfectly good, omniscient, and ominipotent? To perhaps oversimplify it even further: how can imperfection arise out of perfection?
Their solution was to say that "true" God didn't create the world, and didn't create evil, but rather that it was the demiurge (and his minions, the archons) that did it. This demiurge was the creator God of the Old Testament, the false God that what has come to be mainstream Christianity worships.
The Gnostics tried to put as much cosmological distance as possible between their true God and the demiurge. To them not only did the true God not create the world, but he didn't even create the demiurge. The demiurge was created by an intermediary, who mistakenly tried to imitate the true God and created the demiurge.
They further distanced the evil material world that was the creation of the demiurge from the perfect realm of the true God by positing the existance of many intermediary realms and intermediary superhuman beings, each less perfect than the last, the further they get away from the true God and the closer they get to this evil world.
The result is that in their eyes the true God is absolved of responsibility for evil or this evil world, and he can remain perfect, omniscient, and ominpotent as he is infinitely remote from the muck that us material beings dwell in. But humans have a divine spark in them, and are capable of realizing their divine origin and thereby escaping the material prison they are trapped in.. but that is a story for another day.
There's a lot more to say about the Gnostics and their beliefs, but I'll just note that decades ago scholars were debating whether to abandon the terms "Gnostic" and "Gnosticism", as the people and beliefs so designated were so different from each other that using a single term for them would be misleading.
It's a bit like "Hinduism", which is not a single religion at all, but could be thought of as a family of religions, with many different and often conflicting beliefs. So what I say above (and what the original article says) about gnostic beliefs does not necessarily apply to all or even most Gnostics.
Anyone interested in learning more about this is encouraged to read the Wikipedia articles on Gnosticism (which are actually pretty good) and some books. Pagels' books are some of the most popular. But her perspective on Gnosticism is itself but one of many. Hans Jonas is a fascinating source, especially for his additional link to Heidegger. An interesting fictional, non-scholarly source is Philip K Dick, who incorporated his own reimagining of Gnostic ideas in to much of his own work.
[1]: on archive.org I found a book that I wanted so much that I converted it to a black and white PDF and printed a hard cover copy for myself on lulu.com; but first I had to find the right version, since the original book was written in Spanish; so I compared the various English translations ranging from the early 1800s to the early 1900s, and at some point in the middle 1800s, the words it chose when translating were wayyyy less accurate than alternative ones. It seems that they chose what we would call more "modern" words, or at least words with more modern definitions to our own sensibilities, to translate these words, and then it just kept snowballing. I still don't know the cause of this, but I'm pretty annoyed by it. Because dammit, affection is a way different noun than love or even charity, and you completely miss the meaning of a sentence from the original author's perspective when it's not translated accuratel.