Disengage

Fernando Kaskais

Nov 1

Daytona Beach, Florida, United States, 1975. Photo by Elliott Erwitt/Magnum

Modern life subjects us to all-consuming demands. That's why we should reflect on what it means to step away from it all

David J Siegel is professor of educational leadership at East Carolina University in North Carolina. His most recent book is The Interlude in Academe: Reclaiming Time and Space for Intellectual Life (2023).

In a photographic exhibition titled 'Removed' (2015), Eric Pickersgill includes depictions of subjects in the company of other intimates, all of them captured in the act of staring blankly at their hands, where smartphones would normally be placed but have been withdrawn to create images of people alone together. Here is how the artist describes his inspiration for the project:

The work began as I sat in a café one morning. This is what I wrote about my observation: Family sitting next to me at Illium café in Troy, NY is so disconnected from one another. Not much talking. Father and two daughters have their own phones out. Mom doesn't have one or chooses to leave it put away. She stares out the window, sad and alone in the company of her closest family. Dad looks up every so often to announce some obscure piece of info he found online. Twice he goes on about a large fish that was caught. No one replies. I am saddened by the use of technology for interaction in exchange for not interacting. This has never happened before and I doubt we have scratched the surface of the social impact of this new experience. Mom has her phone out now.

Pickersgill's work is very much of a piece with broader social and economic concerns over the phenomenon of disengagement in (and from) our culture. Recently, the United States surgeon general issued a public health advisory detailing a growing epidemic of isolation and loneliness, one fuelled largely, though not exclusively, by our increasing use of digital technologies as a substitute for in-person engagement. This trend was taking shape long before the COVID-19 pandemic forced our mass removal from public space and from familiar patterns of shared life, and we are only beginning to understand that era's long-term effects on our personal and public wellbeing. Meanwhile, the moral and managerial panic over the great resignation, quiet quitting and other (even benign) forms of labour disruption in the wake of the pandemic reveals the extent to which our voluntary practices of leave-taking have been pathologised. We are, it seems, obliged to show up – to be reliably present, available and legible – for our own good or for that of the collective.

Rarely do we display much intellectual curiosity about what these practices of withdrawal might be doing for – not just to – us. Acts of disengagement are routinely met with scepticism, judgment and pushback in public discourse. What if we were to treat them instead as opportunities for open enquiry and ask what is to be gained by them? In that spirit, I propose an expanded lexicon that speaks to the benefits of escaping (even temporarily) the confines of waged work; of disconnecting from the enmeshments of a modern existence; and of seizing interludes for contemplation in a world that is chockablock with demands and distractions.

The early period of the pandemic (which approximated in many respects a kind of general labour strike) gave some of us an intimation of what life lived largely off the clock can be like when much of what passes for work is suspended or slowed and we are afforded precious 'little gaps of solitude and silence', as the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze called them, to engage in worthy pursuits that elude us under normal circumstances. We found incomparable personal freedoms and new opportunities for enrichment and fulfilment in the cessation of many of our standard operating procedures.

Then, as everyone recalls, we were summoned back to the office. But, once we had experienced this new way of being, the prospect of returning to the old order – submitting to the control, policing and surveillance of our former workaday lives – became almost unthinkable, especially for members of a chronically insecure workforce forced to endure low pay, lack of opportunity for advancement, inflexible schedules, and a multitude of everyday insults and indignities. Perhaps the chief insult to us all is the governing assumption that we must be collocated – or collated – to do our best work, despite having demonstrated our capacity for self-directed productivity from home (or other private quarters) under the most trying circumstances...

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https://aeon.co/essays/why-we-must-seize-leisurely-interludes-from-works-confines