Many years ago, I can’t recall where, I read an interesting remark about a cultural difference between the United States and Japan. Americans tend to seek out wide-open outdoor spaces when they are looking for perspective. The Japanese, on the other hand, tend to withdraw to small, intimate indoor spaces. I don’t know how true this is, but it strikes me as an intriguing distinction.
It certainly seems more natural, when seeking perspective, to head towards high ground. Towards places that afford you the opportunity to see as much of your environment as possible at a glance.
Like this view of the Los Angeles cityscape from a high viewpoint in Runyon Canyon. You can take in the sprawling scale of the city at a glance, and get a sense of your own place within it.
It seems less natural to head to places where your view of your environment is more restricted. Like this view from inside Descanso Botanical Gardens, a small park featuring a variety of micro-habitats but no views of the city.
This is a view in which, quite literally, you cannot see the forest for the trees. This is still outdoors, but closer to what indoor perspective taking feels like.
Call the two panoramic versus myopic perspective-taking. Depending on my mood, I enjoy both, but 2020 is a year that I think calls for the latter.
***
These literal, spatial understandings of perspective are what we unconsciously bring to the more conceptual exercises like annual reviews.
There are panoramic ways of looking out at your life in time — looking at the past and future at a scale of years or decades, in terms of long-term goals and plans. And there are myopic ways of doing so, in terms of the here-and-now entanglements that enmesh you viscerally in the present. Systems like GTD attempt to bridge the two, allowing you to zoom in and out to some extent.
But truth be told, you can’t adopt panoramic and myopic views at the same time. And trying to alternate rapidly just leads to nausea. Life is not quite as fractal as some wish it were. You must choose.
If you think about it, neither perspective — panoramic or myopic — is more natural in any absolute way.
Panoramic perspective-taking allows you to take in more at a glance — but at the cost of detachment. You can see the forest, but you’re not involved in the forest (or in this case, the cityscape). The view is missing a certain element of subjectivity; it lacks a certain calibration of personal distances; a certain set of distortions that make it your view.
Myopic perspective-taking on the other hand, limits the total scope of what you see, but gives you a richer sense of your own involvement and entanglement with the environment. A more visceral sense of your own personal relationship to what is around you. Perspective is even the wrong word, since it is a tactile rather than visual sort of sense-making.
Panoramic perspectives give you the best view of the contents of your life, but myopic ones, arguably, give you the best feel for the meanings of your life.
2020, it strikes me, is about meanings more than it is about contents. It is a year for myopic rather than panoramic views of your life.
***
Life in the indie consulting world is naturally more myopic. In 2020, it’s been doubly so, as we’ve been forced indoors and inwards, towards solitude and privacy.
The lifestyle drags your attention towards minutes, hours, days, and weeks, rather than towards quarters, years, or decades. Money is a gig-to-gig, invoice-to-invoice uncertain variable, not a promotion-to-promotion quasi-stable constant. Three, five, or seven-year plans — natural for larger organizational contexts — seem either deluded or self-aggrandizing in the indie context. Your clients may have such plans, but you are likely on the margins of them. You’re not truly a part of them.
I don’t know about you, but my life doesn’t have much long-term logic to it, and I like it that way. I like my days and weeks to be predictable, but my months and years to be unexpected surprises. I like the illegibility. It is anxiety-provoking, but still oddly satisfying.
The anxiety-provoking everyday uncertainty of indie life is perhaps why people in our world seem more attracted to exercises like annual reviews. It is less about perspective-taking, and more about imposing a temporary legibility and short-lived order onto life, before it all falls apart again by the end of January.
That doesn’t mean perspective-taking impulses are bad. It merely means you should be skeptical about panoramic perspective taking outside of the large institutions where they are natural. Do panoramic perspectives actually do anything for you? Or do they merely serve a palliative function?
The older I get, the more I suspect they function in palliative ways, especially for free agents.
The more of a free agent you are, the more the function is palliative, because freedom is sometimes just the flip side of anxiety, and panoramic perspectives, paradoxically, allow you to lock yourself up in a less free life for a while.
But there’s an alternative: what I call appreciative myopia.
***
Many of you are likely planning on doing some sort of annual review exercise, or have already completed one.
Chances are, you’re doing it the panoramic way — trying to rise above the weeds and climb to a hard-earned panoramic perspective of your life and work. If you are a fan of GTD for instance, you might start down in the weeds by taking stock of your various inboxes (while driving them to zero), assessing the state of play of various activities. You might be attempting to rise above it all to a grander view of your life. Framed perhaps in terms of missions, visions, five-year plans, and other such panoramic mental constructs. The effort is not unlike the effort of climbing up a hill.
This approach is perhaps especially tempting this year, given all the uncertainties around us. Setting 2021 goals will definitely provide some relief for a few weeks. Hell, maybe you’ll even set interesting decadal goals, for things to get done by 2030.
Those are not bad things to attempt, but let me suggest an alternative that you could try instead of, or in addition to, such panoramic reviewing: an appreciative-myopic perspective.
Rather than attempting to rise above the fray of action by forcing it into a transient legible state, consider just pausing and taking a close-up, myopic look at how you’re entangled in your world. At least for a while.
Stop doing things for a bit, but don’t step back. Instead step aside. What does that look like? What does your life look like in profile view, from a close adjacency, as opposed to a panoramic top-down view?
Curiously, there seem to be no systematic techniques for this. But I have a few ideas, based on what I seem to do naturally when I get stuck and panoramic perspectives don’t get me unstuck.
***
Look at your desk and your chair. What do they say about your life? Which books are within arm’s reach? Why? Which books seem untouched and forgotten? Why?
Pick up one of those long-untouched books and live in that adjacent possible life for a moment, in which that book was one of the heavily used ones.
How many pens and pencils are in your pencil stand? Why that number? What’s the story of each pen or pencil? If you favor pens, when was the last time you used a pencil, or vice-versa? Try writing something with the less-used instrument.
Do you have a favorite shirt? What about a shirt you almost never wear anymore? How about trying that on for a couple of minutes?
How has your life environment been disturbed by Covid, and what has that taught you about your life?
Where do you hang your masks? Where is the bottle of hand-sanitizer? What used to be where those new things are? Where are those things now?
Forget your five-year plans for a minute, and look around at your furniture. Did you buy any new furniture in 2020? How did it alter the flows and energies of your life? I bought a whiteboard and workbench after we moved to a new place this year, with a full-room home office for me, and that has definitely radically rewired the energy flows of my life.
Take a look at your inbox without attempting to drive it to zero. Who is emailing you and why? Look at your Sent and Drafts folders. Who are you emailing and why? What would a forensic investigator think about your inbox? What might they find sad about it? What might they envy about it?
Take a little walking tour of all your inboxes — the paper ones, the places where bookmarks accumulate, the various messaging apps. If you do any sort of journaling or writing, dip in randomly into the contents.
Forget processing any of it. What do the patterns of your communications say about where your attention naturally flows? Before you dive in to judge, reshape and optimize those patterns, ask yourself — what do those patterns mean?
If a novelist were to weave those patterns into a character study, what sort of literary invention would emerge?
***
Pretend you’re a consultant in your own life, attempting to make sense of it from the outside, based on the clues in the arrangement of things. You’re not trying to organize things, but interpret them, like tea leaves. Look at your life, but imagine the risks and responsibilities embodied by those things belong to someone else. What sort of person are you looking at? What detached advice would you give them?
You’re looking at the potentialities of your life, asking what-if questions about it, like any good consultant. What are the lives-not-lived next door to the one you’re living? What are the latent possible worlds adjacent to the one you inhabit everyday? The worlds that would take you only a slight shift in perspective to inhabit?
Because one of the weird things about the gig life is the amount of readily accessible potential you can access right next door to the life you live, but don’t. The meanings latent in your life environment are much less constrained than those in a salaried person’s life environment. Going indie is the big step, but it is often easy to forget that it is a big step primarily because so many smaller next steps open up once you take the big one.
There are many lives you could live, but none you have to live. All next door to the one you are living.
Yet despite the close presence of potentialities they work so hard to access, indies often end up living lives that are no more complex than the ones they left behind. All that risk, so little to show for it. All that extra optionality, so little extra dimensionality.
Forget about what sort of life is a five-year plan away. What sort of life is just a rearranged bookshelf away? Is anything really stopping you from living that life instead of the one you are?
Look at your life environment like a crime scene or an archaeological dig. Does it reveal your life to be neat and tidy or messy and chaotic? Does an anxious or serene person sit in that chair?
What sort of person lives here? What other kinds of persons could possibly live there? Could you be one of those adjacent possible alt-yous instead of the person you are?
Try messing with things a bit. Turn your chair around so it faces the other way. Does it make you anxious or feel surprisingly more right?
Drink coffee from a mug you haven’t touched in a while.
Rearrange the icons on your computer screen. If you’re an everything-in-folders type of person, open all the big folders up and tile them so it’s overwhelming. Stay with that feeling for a while.
If you’re an everything-in-view type, try shoving it all into a directory to experiment with what a clean desktop makes you feel. Stay with that feeling for a while.
Disturb your life ever so slightly, and watch how it vibrates around in its adjacent possible band. Listen to the music of those vibrations. What key is it in? Could it be tuned to a different key?
Resist the urge to judge, organize, make to-do lists, or tidy up. Hold off on those resolutions and goals. Don’t ask yet whether it sparks joy.
Ask what all of it means. And what else it could mean.
***
Rather than taking stock of your world, to reshape it top-down, which is the point of panoramic perspective-taking, appreciative myopia is about re-sensitizing yourself to the flows of your world, by making yourself a stranger to it.
Surprisingly, even though we spend hours and hours every day in our life environments, we get so used to inhabiting them with an action-oriented mindset, seeing them only in instrumental ways, in light of the next thing we want to do (or worse, our five-year plans), we rarely ever see them for what they are, and what they reveal.
The older (and more set in my ways) I get, the harder it gets to see the grooves and ruts of my life, but the easier it gets to just flow along in them. Even though changing course would not be as hard as it once was, in another life.
The panoramic perspective is easy. I don’t have to stop to take stock to simply rattle off all my major projects and activities, and their respective current states. Off the top of my head, I can approximately tell you the state of various gigs, and the overall financial condition of my consulting practice.
What I can’t see is all the little things that have crept in and accumulated unnoticed, as the emergent ruts and grooves. The fields and flows shaping the tempo of my life.
The big picture is not the hard picture to stay aware of. It’s the little picture. The close-in, close-up environment of life. The tip of your own nose. The weeds are hard to see, both when you are caught up in them in the heat of action, and when you attempt to step back from them, in a spirit of earnest contemplation, rationalization, and optimization.
Stepping back from your life is easy. Stepping aside from your life is hard.
Stepping back inevitably takes you towards the detached view, the panoramic view. And the legibilizing, confining, palliative intervention.
But stepping aside? It makes you a stranger to your own life, able to see it once again for what it is and could be, rather than what it does. As a state of being rather than instrument of doing. As a functionally unfixed situation that can mean many things, rather than the state of play of a specific grand plan that can mean only one thing.
So in a year when visiting family and friends is going to be hard for most of us, maybe the thing to do is to visit a very familiar stranger you probably haven’t visited in a long time — yourself.