Finding Freedom in Times of Turbulence

Some thoughts on Solitude, Creativity, Attention, and the Cultivation of the Inner Self

My own “back shop.” Photo by author.

The Story

I try to keep this project apolitical, so I hope you will consider the next few sentences as coming from a humanistic, rather than a political perspective. I live in Minnesota, which is a wonderful place filled with wonderful people, but our president recently called 80,000 of my wonderful fellow citizens here garbage. First, I don’t see how it is okay under any circumstances for one human being to call another human being garbage, nor can I accept the hate, cruelty, and terrorizing of our fellow Americans. Minnesotans know that our Somali American neighbors contribute to our community, participate in our workforce, share their culture, and help make our great state even greater. They are our civil servants, police officers, healthcare providers, retailers, restaurateurs, teachers, and students, as well as our neighbors, colleagues, and friends. What really bothers me is that this statement by the president makes it difficult to think about relaxing and getting into the “holiday spirit” when you know that people in your community are frightened. And it is just another example of the constant disruption, misdirection, and distraction that we are all subjected to on a daily basis, as our government officials, the media, and “influencers” continue to “flood the zone with shit,” as Steve Bannon so bluntly put it. But how can we keep it together, stay positive, focused, and productive, and do important work, when every morning we wake up to news of another crazy announcement, event, tariff, insult, lawsuit, or military action? It is all very heavy, and I don’t presume to have all the answers, but I am going to offer a few ideas on how to escape that cycle—ideas about solitude, minimizing distraction, increasing attention, and creating the personal space that will bring you some freedom.

Solitude

A long time ago, when I was single and living alone in an apartment in Philadelphia without a television, I read a lot of books. I remember many of them well – those that really penetrated and made sense to me personally. One of those books was Solitude: A Return to the Self, by psychologist and psychotherapist Anthony Storr. His thesis was that, despite the consensus that interpersonal relationships are the foundation of a healthy emotional and personal life, being alone—solitude—is not only not a bad thing but rather is necessary for the act of creativity and for personal growth. Other than a couple of longer-term relationships, I was more often single than not back in those days, and over fifteen years, I learned how to be alone and enjoy it. I read, wrote, taught myself watercolors and woodblock printing, and took short story and essay writing classes. I also moonlighted, doing renderings and models for other architects. All of these interests and projects meant that I often stayed up late at night, listening to music or the radio, alone with my thoughts in a dark room illuminated only by task lamps, running a wash of alizarin crimson across a sheet of 140 lb. cold-press watercolor paper, or typing a short story. It was a great time in my life, and Storr’s book reinforced for me that what I was doing not only made me feel happy and fulfilled but was good for me. One downside to architectural education is that it promotes an unrealistic culture of the “solitary genius-artist” in its students. Yet in my own professional life, my best experiences have been working on big projects with big teams of smart and talented people. Still, I have always reserved an activity, project, or interest that is mine and mine alone. You can do great things with teamwork, but there is also something to be said for being the sole creator or author of a project—where you live and die by your own sword, creatively speaking. I’m glad I developed those habits back then, because they have continued to serve me well and given me strength through difficult personal times. Unfortunately, blocking out the external world—eliminating distraction and creating space for attention—has become more difficult in recent years. I still remember well—because I copied it into a journal, nearly forty years ago—Storr’s quoting of French thinker and essayist Michel de Montaigne, whose words summed up the whole point of the book for me:

“We must reserve a little back-shop, all our own, entirely free, wherein to establish our true liberty and principal retreat and solitude.”¹

Distraction and Attention

In his 2008 book, Distraction: A Philosopher’s Guide to Being Free, Australian philosopher, writer, and commentator Damon Young offers a study of other philosophers, artists, and political thinkers, from Karl Marx and Hannah Arendt to Henri Matisse and Henry James, who have all found ways to eliminate distractions and focus their energy on an important endeavor. Distraction affected those people, too, and indeed is nothing new, but it has been exacerbated by technology. Young cites an article in The Guardian describing a psychological study of the effects of email on British workers, where the big finding was that,

“The distractions of constant emails, texts, and phone messages are a greater threat to IQ and concentration than taking cannabis.”²

For Young, it is all about eliminating distractions and focusing our attention, because what we pay attention to determines the product and quality of our lives.

I admit it, I’m not immune to the siren call of the iPhone and the habit of touching it whenever I find I have nothing to do for three minutes. But it does make me sad to stand in line at a coffee shop and see everyone looking down at their screens rather than looking up or, heaven forbid, talking to one another. Yet while I deleted the YouTube app from my phone, that hasn’t kept me from watching it through my Safari browser. My fourteen-year-old daughter makes fun of me for this, and for my current habit: short, jump-scare videos of inanimate dolls lying in the middle of the floor who move an arm or suddenly rush towards people, with the help of some fishline running right under the Barcalounger. I am not proud, and all I can say is that I try to limit my intake, but the fact is, I could have spent those 20 minutes of hollow calories practicing piano. Alas, digital distraction is real, and it steals time away from productivity. In books like Digital Minimalism, Deep Work, and Slow Productivity, Georgetown Computer Science professor Cal Newport “works at the intersection of technology, work, and the quest for depth in an increasingly distracted world.”[website] His goal is to give people practices, systems, and tools that will help them manage technology, reduce distraction, and focus on what he calls “deep work.” While Newport and Young agree that attention is the most important thing and distraction is the problem, Newport offers processes and systems to minimize distractions caused by technology and our environment, while Young suggests that, rather than machines, our minds are the cause of distraction and that this is nothing less than an existential problem.

Finitude and Time

I have a friend with similar intellectual interests, and about ten years ago, we started meeting monthly over coffee to talk about ideas. During COVID, we met weekly on Zoom, and one day we decided to read some books and articles together and then talk about them. Of all the things we read and talked about, the one that we kept talking about, again and again, was a book called This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom, by Martin Hägglund.³ A Swedish neo-Marxist philosopher and atheist, Hagglund’s two main points are simple: First, you should focus on the one life you have on earth, rather than a potential future afterlife that is not guaranteed (the atheist part). As important, life is finite, and this finitude drives us, as Hagglund summarizes bluntly:

“To be finite means primarily two things: to be dependent on others and to live in relation to death. (4)”

In other words, if you knew you were going to live forever, you would never finish anything, but finitude means you know time is running out, and you had better get to work if you hope to complete something of meaning. And since Hägglund sees life as a project, the question becomes, what will your life project be?

Hägglund’s other main point is that free time is required for freedom, and that the best way to ensure that we all have the free time we need is to move beyond our capitalist society, where most of our time is in the form of wage labor, from which we feel alienated, leaving us unable to devote ourselves to what we really value. Instead, Hägglund recommends democratic socialism, which will lead to a more just society where we can maximize our free time for the things that matter to us. In the end, Hägglund is about time, but if his prescriptions sound too abstract or atheistic or Marxist or whatever for your tastes, then consider Oliver Burkeman’s recent bestseller, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, the title of which says it all: When you think of a typical life lasting about 4,000 weeks, you can begin to grasp Hägglund’s idea of “finitude.”⁴

Freedom

Years ago, I read a handful of essays by the famous French thinker, writer, and philosopher, Michel de Montaigne, because I was reading and writing a lot of essays myself back then, and I thought I should go to the source and read a few by the man who created the literary form. Let’s start with some definitions of the word “Essay:”

Noun: A short piece of writing on a particular subject; an attempt or effort. Verb: To attempt or try. Origin: From the French Essais, meaning “attempts” or “tests.”

Montaigne lived in a time of turmoil, as the Wars of Religion were tearing France apart. He was from an important family, and in addition to being mayor of his town, he was a courtier to the king, who assigned him various duties. But then, at the age of 38, he chose to withdraw from public life and retire to the top floor of the circular tower that made up one corner of his chateau. There he could read and write surrounded by books, in a place where the names of the early Greek and Roman philosophers were etched into the beams that supported the roof. Montaigne retreated into himself and wrote hundreds of short works on a wide range of subjects, integrating anecdote, personal experience, and intellectual analysis, while creating what has become known as the “essay” in the process.

It was Montaigne’s ability to create that private “back shop,” mentioned by Storr, that led Stefan Zweig to write a fascinating and timely biography of the father of the essay. Like his subject, Zweig, too, lived in turbulent times—early to mid-20^th-century Europe, as it tore itself apart with the rise of fascism and World War II. At his peak, in the 1930s, Zweig was an internationally acclaimed bestselling author of intellectual and psychological biographies of important figures. But he was also a pacifist and a German Jew who was forced to flee to England in the 1930s, and from there to Brazil. He had read some of Montaigne’s essays in his youth, but they hadn’t made an impression on him then (I had the same experience). It was only when, in middle age and in the midst of war, upheaval, and the destruction of everything important to him on the European continent, that he came across Montaigne’s complete works in the damp cellar of the house he was staying in in Rio de Janeiro, and found a soul to whom he could relate. Zweig’s profile of Montaigne reflects both the time in which it was written and the psychological mindset of the author—who would soon commit suicide—as summarized by the book’s translator, Will Stone, in his introduction:

“Zweig carried Montaigne up from the cellar, and without delay set out to tell the world why this incomparable man of letters, four centuries dead, mattered now in moral terms and how, in an intolerable period of history, Montaigne showed better than anyone else that one could still remain free.”⁵

Zweig himself summarizes Montaigne’s personal achievement this way:

“What Montaigne seeks is his interior self, that which cannot submit to state, to family, to time, to circumstances, to money, to property; this interior self, which Goethe labelled the ‘citadel,’ where all access is prohibited.”⁶

- Stefan Zweig

The Lesson

From Storr, we know that we need solitude to be creative and for personal growth. From Young and Newport, we know that attention is our most important power, and its enemy is distraction, whether caused by our minds or our environment. For Young, attention is an existential problem—without it, our lives have little meaning. Hagglund teaches us that the finitude of life drives us and that the free time to create and grow is the very essence of freedom. Both Newport and Montaigne make an argument for intentionally withdrawing to cultivate self-knowledge and to focus on deep work. And Montaigne and Zweig show us how we can still be free, even in turbulent times, if we can create our own version of Goethe’s citadel, a private place where we can cultivate our interior selves. And while they all come at it from different directions, each of these authors, thinkers, and writers is focused on freedom.

To be clear, the lesson is not to withdraw from society and bury our heads in the sand, which wouldn’t really work these days anyhow. Nor am I promising that these prescriptions will work equally well for everyone. Rather, the lesson is that if we are to be free, we must reclaim from the forces of distraction that small, private back shop and focus our attention on important work and the cultivation of our inner selves.

I said at the beginning that we are living in turbulent times, like Stefan Zweig in the 1930s and 1940s, and Michele de Montaigne, four hundred years before him. Like them, I hope that some of you will find these ideas helpful when you are feeling distracted by the latest outrage in the news, and for some of us, when you are fearful for your own and your family’s safety and liberty. My wish this season is for peace and freedom—for all of us and for our communities.

“The mind must make its own happiness; any troubles can be endured if the sufferer has resources of his own to sustain him.”

- Anthony Storr, Solitude: A Return to the Self

“Put simply, distraction and diversion, as I’ve discussed in this book, are the enemy of freedom.”

- Damon Young, Distraction

The condition of our freedom, then, is that we understand ourselves as finite. Only in light of the apprehension that we will die—that our lifetime is indefinite but finite—can we ask ourselves what we ought to do with our lives and put ourselves at stake in our activities.

- Martin Hägglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom

“If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you…”

- Rudyard Kipling, from the poem, If—

Dedication: The other night, I attended a celebration of the life of Shane Coen, who passed unexpectedly and too young, reflecting both the indefiniteness and finitude of life. Shane was a Minneapolis-based, nationally award-winning landscape architect, and he and the firm he built have designed innovative projects that have had a worldwide impact. More importantly, he was a husband, father, colleague, and friend to many. I feel fortunate to have known Shane and had the opportunity to work with him on wonderful projects that transformed the public realm in our shared city of Minneapolis. This essay is dedicated to Shane Coen.

1. Storr, Anthony, Solitude: A Return to the Self, New York: Free Press, 1988, page 17.

2. Young, Damon, Distraction: A Philosopher’s Guide to Being Free, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2008, page 66.

3. Hägglund, Martin, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom, New York: Pantheon, 2019.

4. Burkeman, Oliver, 4,000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2021.

5. Zweig, Stefan, Montaigne, London: Pushkin Press, Page 17.

6. Zweig, Montaigne, pages 86-87.