WALDEN TODAY: WHO HAS THE COURAGE TO DO NOTHING?
And How Creativity Is an Act of Disobedience
One weekend, my mother brought me two heads of cauliflower from the farm, along with a bouquet of rosemary, chili peppers, green onions, lemon balm, collard greens, a bag of pink lemons, some cheese, and a jar of dulce de leche. I took some time during the day to prepare the food, and later we talked on the phone about how the farm’s abundance allows for this multiplication of food. In my innocence or in my limited cosmology, despite these roots, I’ve been immersed in the digital world for a decade and a half. I remarked to her that, despite the hard work, the farm produces a lot, and a garden can feed many people.
She, with her wisdom rooted in the cosmology of someone who was born and raised in close contact with farming, told me that it wasn’t hard work. My father plants, and she takes care of the farm. Every day she goes there and does a little bit — clears some weeds, waters the plants — and in this different perception of time, the farm gradually bears its fruits.
Time and its perception are themes that have constantly populated my imagination. In the past two years, the books that have impacted me the most are those that reflect on how we use our time and how the cosmology we live in conditions us to perceive time in one way or another. Last year, it was the book Walden, or Life in the Woods by the American author, poet, naturalist, and historian Henry David Thoreau (translated by Alexandre Barbosa de Souza), and this year, it was the book The True Creator of Everything: How the Human Brain Shaped the Universe as We Know It by the Brazilian neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis, for whom I have deep admiration, both as a researcher and as a thinker of our time.
Separated by more than 150 years, the two authors, through different means, sought to investigate how our way of living in time and what we call living in society are mental conventions that can be questioned just like any other human mental abstractions, such as religions and various rituals.
Thoreau, a great critic of the industrial civilization of his time, decided to withdraw from society in 1845 to live on a property beside Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts. He lived there for two years, during which he built his own cabin and grew what he needed to eat. During this process, he wrote the work where he questions the concepts of leisure, work, self-sufficiency, and how much the industrial man of that time was disconnected from what we call nature — this distant and abstract entity that was once our only home.
Even after so much time, the book remains a reference in humanistic reflection on what we call “living in society” and the demands imposed on us by the prevailing mode of production. It also explores how many of the needs we internalize from this system are often just embellishments that seek to justify excessive work and are far removed from our basic survival needs.
Thoreau detailed everything he spent on seeds, an axe, and any initial demands that he couldn’t provide for himself, and it was indeed very little compared to what the lifestyle of industrial society imposed on him. At the core of his subsistence needs were tending to his garden, gathering firewood, cooking, and making any necessary repairs to his cabin. All of this required far less time than the work of men in American cities, even in the 19th century. This left him with much of the day to dedicate to other activities, such as reading, observing the transformations of Walden Pond through the seasons, meditating on various aspects of his experiment in isolation, writing, paying attention to the animals that visited him, among many other possibilities available to someone whose time was not drained by work.
What would Thoreau think, seeing how much we work today in 2024, under a model that promises so much prosperity for human society, yet each year squeezes more and more of everyone’s time like a steamroller, offering in return very little or no dignity? Nevertheless, it creates more and more needs each day for us to fill the voids of this systemic decay with products or “lifestyle” practices, so that all our relationships and our way of being in the world are mediated by money.
The religion of the market and money is so efficient that, even as society experiences the mental and physical collapse of this production model, it still believes it is acting out of its own will and, worse, judges as failures those who do not follow this model. I can’t forget a question from my uncle, who was born and has always lived on a farm: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” And, faced with my uncertainty in answering, he said, “When I grow up, I want to be a farmer.” And that’s how I’ve seen him since I was born, with his horse and some dog for company, living on his land, living life on his own terms. Certainly a failure in the eyes of the industrial man and, today, of the virtual man of late capitalism, who pays for everything he interacts with, knows nothing of silence and privacy, and would surely die quickly if he got lost in even a small patch of forest. The success of this man or woman is only possible in their anthropic and artificial habitat, like a bird born in captivity that only knows how to sing in a cage. A sad song, however, that it doesn’t even recognize as sad, not knowing the intensity of a Green-Winged Saltator singing in the wild, a Lined Seedeater, a Chopi Balckbird.
Professor Nicolelis, on the other hand, with his theory of the relativistic brain, whose nuances I could never fully describe, being a researcher in neuroscience for nearly four decades, presents a view that our cosmology is entirely constructed by our brain. All our conceptions of culture, society, how far physics has advanced in understanding the universe, and the concept of time are all products of our brain and, therefore, are conditioned by its point of view.
Among the various chapters and the many implications this has across different fields of human production, in the final chapters, the professor offers a reflection as interesting as it is frightening on the effect of human brain interaction with digital systems in the internet era. Contrary to the AI marketers who sell the possibility of reproducing the human brain, the professor is unequivocal and clear in his theory regarding the impossibility of any digital system ever being able to reproduce or even capture the nuances of this organic computer filled with non-computable information and capable of changing its point of view and configuration at any moment. However, he warns of the opposite risk: our overexposure to virtual systems could lead to the loss of the intrinsic and non-computable characteristics of our brains that have brought us this far, and begin to behave according to the binary logic of digital systems.
Of course, I lack the lexicon to delve into the technical aspects of this in the field of neuroscience, but the philosophical reflection that the professor brings, which is more tangible, is how tribalized we are on the internet. Virtual systems operate on a rather binary reward logic, an extreme logic — either you are this, or you are that; either you agree with this, or you completely disagree — and this is what is rewarded to the brain in the form of pleasure hormones. As we enter this universe of reward algorithms without a minimum of prior reflection, we expose ourselves to nebulous algorithms with unprecedented potential in our history to spread what the professor calls “informational viruses” in record time. A single post by someone with a broad reach can synchronize an entire brainet (a concept of brain networks also developed by Nicolelis) in seconds, and the more extreme this position is, the greater its reach. Perhaps that’s why the political reflection of this is not surprising, in the rise of increasingly extremist and intolerant political projects worldwide.
The professor believes we are at a crossroads in our history: either we regain control of our interaction with these systems and preserve the characteristics of our organic computer that brought us here, such as creativity, nuanced reasoning, and, the part that interests me most, language, or we fully surrender to the fate of becoming digital zombies or “nannies” for computers in the AI era. AI will not be capable of mentally reproducing us, but we can, however, outsource our thinking and reasoning to them and reduce ourselves to a binary system that knows little and copies much — exactly what virtual systems like AI do: copy. It will never be able to create something new, but rather reproduce what has been fed into its database through sophisticated multivariate statistical systems, often with the precarious labor of impoverished populations in third-world countries. Therefore, it is neither artificial nor intelligent, as the professor points out. On the other hand, we will be so standardized in binary logic (if we aren’t already) that we will lose our creativity and inventive capacity by delegating so much to these systems, which only regurgitate what they have been fed, the responsibility of “thinking” for us.
The professor often sums this up in a single phrase: “a future without a future,” because it is entirely based on the past, on the databases of what was once produced by humans and fed these systems, from which humans may become zombies and stop producing new things — something digital systems, by their nature, do not produce. This is already reflected in some phenomena, such as identical essays and exam answers in universities, driven by the use of AI systems like the precursor of this new wave, ChatGPT. The human brain is endowed with such plasticity, as the professor points out, that if it is required to behave like a digital system in order to receive all the rewards of the external world, it will do so. In his words,
“Once the external world rewards more those individuals who behave like digital machines in jobs, schools, at home, or in any type of human interaction, the brain begins to adapt to the ‘new rules of the game,’ radically changing its routine way of operating. This plastic reorganization, as well as the changes in human behavior it triggers, would once again be driven by the brain’s attempt to maximize the hedonic sensations generated by the release of dopamine and other neurotransmitters in the neural circuits that mediate our sense of pleasure.” Nicolelis quotes journalist Nicholas Carr to highlight the core of this thought: “As we begin to rely on computers to mediate all our understanding of the world, it is our intelligence that is reduced to that generated by artificial intelligence.”
The analog and contemplative experience of Henry Thoreau, Miguel Nicolelis’ Theory of the Relativistic Brain, and the impact of digital systems on how we think, as well as the vegetables my mother brought me from the farm, converged at the improbable crossroads of my thoughts and reflections on time and its perception, as I realized how necessary free time is for creativity to generate language. Simply put, leisure is necessary for writing and creating — leisure in the sense described by Thoreau, and scarce in the age of digital systems, the leisure of contemplation and the absence of stimuli and noise, whether from the industrial society of the 19th century or the digital society of the 21st century. I realized this the hard way, through mental exhaustion from work, which in practice means sitting in front of a screen for hours and hours on end, from sunrise until after sunset. Even so, I am in much more favorable conditions than most workers of this time in Brazil and other parts of the world, working in precarious jobs that pay very little and do not guarantee even minimal social security in exhausting workdays that consume more than half of each day.
In any case, my reflection concerns me, and overexposure to the screen, the digital reality, and the absence of experiences in the natural, analog world largely nullified my language during this period, whether written or spoken. The brain concentrated all its scarce energy on adapting to processing this diffuse virtual information — compiling, tabulating, processing, producing — all this vocabulary of the Market (Financial and Labor) religion that has standardized our vocabulary and our way of being in the world and experiencing time. On that day, after successive and almost exclusive weeks of work, I was able to dedicate myself to another activity: cooking what my mother brought me from the farm, the fruit of her work in the natural environment to meet the basic need of feeding, and immersing myself in this other vocabulary — turmeric, chili peppers, cauliflower, collard greens, green onions, peppers — a vocabulary full of colors, smells, and shapes, far removed from the monotonous colors, linear and predictable shapes, and the increasingly poor smell of this digital world, devoid of any pleasure of its own.
Some time later, I was able to visit her, and in the five days that flew by like the Nightjar fleeing the ground at dawn, I lived and listened to many other ways of existing and being in the world in the countryside. Both Thoreau’s industrial man and Nicolelis’s zombie-virtual man of the God Market world have been so well trained in an artificial world, according to the terms of their respective eras, that they have forgotten what it means to be the artisan of their own life, how to build the work that is their own way of living and placing themselves in the world. They enter the cattle chutes of the productive system without needing to be goaded. They don’t care about the boils of depression, anxiety, constant noise and sounds, chronic pain and anger, a life stagnated within a few square meters, as long as at the end of the day, they are offered virtual rations and salt, while they bellow about their great achievements of the day in the internet pasture — a physical workout, an expensive dinner at a prestigious place, a moment at a party. Forgotten are the fences of the corral, and they hardly realize that they are walking in circles and that these small snippets of one or two hours in a day or a week mean living other dozens of hours in a job, in a city, and in a way of life that kills more and more of their vital energy each day and increasingly limits their movements.
They try to make up for this open wound with diets, consumption, travel, and other trinkets, without realizing that they are treating the symptom without addressing the disease, like putting a bandage on a festering sore instead of removing the worm itself. But the sore has been there for so long that curing it now hurts much more than living with the flesh’s corrosion. I would never dare to offer an answer on how to solve this or say that there is a ready-made answer for all individuals, but the fact is that the feeling of this worm sucking the life out of me in a big city became unbearable, and I began to plot my way out of this universe and its cosmology as much as possible. I still can’t remove all the sores at once, but little by little, I’m drying out one or another, which at this first moment means “living far away.” Far from what? That is the question that should be asked. What is so indispensable in a big city today? Real estate speculation, people stepping over others who sleep on the streets, constant noise and traffic, exorbitant prices, and people confined, discomfort as a way of life, consumption as a promise of comfort, both physical and mental.
The production system creates the need and quickly creates the industry so that consumption can fill that void. In this process, the “self-care” industry proliferates as a rising niche of our time, offering valid care but closely aligned with the lifestyle of this production system. Care for the skin with cosmetics from a specific guide, hair care according to another guide, or body care following a specific routine. All this is overshadowed by bills due next month, for which one dedicates all the remaining time, after all, one must “pay the bills.” Disease and antidotes are sold, as if the act of caring were a rebellion within this system — taking “time for oneself,” time that, of course, does not interfere with work and routine, and sometimes becomes just another one of the countless tasks in the day. Life as if it were an eternal checklist. Many fall into the trap of justifying on their (social?) networks why they do not exercise or follow a skincare routine, boasting about working exhaustively or editing the version of life they want to show, as behind the screen, the unedited version shines much less.
Spending a few days closer to the natural world — not a guesthouse or another stay surrounded by comforts and trinkets, but the simple little house, even lacking some conveniences, where my mother lives, on her land, physical and symbolic, where she grew up and buried her loved ones, from which she left and to which she returned — put much of what I have questioned about ways of being in the world into perspective. Whether it was listening to my uncle, who said that work was only bad when it was necessary to work, so that his labor on the farm, not being mandatory or ordered by anyone, was not the toil and suffering it would be for others, or talking with an educator who moved to a smallholding with his family from a medium-sized city, doing urban exodus and receiving me with a reading of one of my poems in the middle of the forest on his land, I faced questions about ways of living and what one does with such short time and how much discomfort each choice implies. And how the concept of “discomfort” is also a mental abstraction. Living far from a bakery might be uncomfortable for someone who has never lived far from one, just as not having a garden at home might be an equally bothersome discomfort for someone who has always had cabbage, chives, manioc, or sugarcane planted in their backyard. I have been leaning more and more towards the latter option. Each choice will bring its consequences, but the consequences of an unsustainable lifestyle in big cities have appeared like the noonday demon so frequently that almost no one cares about its presence anymore. As Micheliny Verunschk cites in her book O som do rugido da onça (The Sound of the Jaguar’s roar):
“It is always impressive what people choose to be scandalized by.”
And in another passage about the ability to perceive the world around, which only those who are connected to it can see:
“Only those who are alive can hear the voice of the world, understand its language, its murmur, the desolations and luminescences of its words, and being alive is what enables one to respond.”
Time and leisure are necessary for creation and philosophy, and these activities have been subordinated for decades to the productivity imperative of the production model since the Industrial Revolution. Time is created not only by the absence of tasks but also by reducing noise, both the continuous clamor of the big city and the noise from the endless media and screens that occupy the eyes and mind almost constantly. Waking up to silence, ending the day with a clear sky to recognize constellations and their movement, observing the changes of the seasons in trees and fruits — these are comforts not quantifiable by money, perhaps why they are so difficult to translate into a society of individuals conditioned from an early age according to this standard.
How can one translate into monetary values the discovery of the life cycle of a peach tree that sheds its leaves completely and transforms into a dead-looking tree, only to finally cover itself with flowers and produce fruits so diverse in size, color, and flavor, unlike the standardized ones from genetic engineering and large-scale production sold in supermarkets? Urban society will know the price per kilogram of these engineered peaches, but will not understand the secret of this tree nurtured by human hands and natural rain. All of this takes too long compared to the convenience of buying the “perfect” peach at the supermarket, but when everything must be too fast and aesthetically pleasing, perhaps the product is our time, sold and regulated, and the beauty of what we consume or publish masks the ugliness of not owning our own time and not knowing the natural processes of the food that reaches our table, or even the simplest changes in the natural world, blocked by buildings and asphalt.
Since childhood, walking with my father in the forest has been a lesson; he recognizes countless birds and trees and is so familiar with this environment that he doesn’t need to wear armor — just sandals or boots and a shirt with rolled-up sleeves. He enters this realm without fear of scratches or animals because he is accustomed to it and feels like a part of it; the skin of the forest becomes an extension of his own skin. Sometimes, in my early childhood, I would walk with him and stumble over uneven ground. Most of the time, he wouldn’t help me up, which I initially found rude, but now I see that he was teaching me to move and balance on my own, much like in the natural world, where parents let their young ones fall to learn how to get back up.
Unfortunately, due to the necessity imposed upon me, I had to leave these activities to come and make (or lose) a living in the city, and I couldn’t learn the best from this true school. Although I have sporadically gained much more experience than many of the colleagues I met in urban life, I still haven’t reached the pinnacle of my father’s wisdom in feeling at home in what was our first home. He, who understands this environment so well and manages so adeptly within it, built his own house from the ground up and creates countless things, but to the industrial or virtual man, it holds no value because he has not “studied” the studies considered valid for this man and does not produce intellectual work without using his hands, which is what he deems more valuable. However, paraphrasing the poet Edson Cruz, both my father and my mother were my library, taught me everything; I never left them,
“She was illiterate and should / have been called Alexandria.”
Although it may seem so strange to today’s productive system, philosophizing does not imply a conclusion. It is an activity that is sufficient in itself. In an era so filled with certainties and a violent productivity cosmology that populates our imagination and confines our bodies, writing to reflect on oneself and the world seems like a waste of time.
However, question where we learned what it means to “waste time” and what it means to “gain time,” for whom and for what we guard our time, and for whom and for what we are virtually available all the time. Where did what is now called success in our current environment come from? If all this makes sense to you today, in the face of these questions, living in a big city and working to sustain a mode of working, since the gap between productivity and salary has increased considerably, as the prerogative of late capitalism is to focus on speculation rather than fair reward for work and the reduction of inequalities, if this still makes sense to you even if you are not part of the billion-dollar micro bubble that benefits from this system, perhaps you are happy and on the right path, or not asking the right questions to yourself.
Otherwise, if you listen to the discomfort, reflecting on who controls your own time might be a way to take action at some point, create a different way of life and being in the world, learn a different vocabulary beyond what is offered by algorithms and the production system, and withdrawing from some of these gears can be very beneficial in the long run. Nothing that goes against this production model under the deity of Money will be easy or painless, but there is much more life and physical and mental space outside the confines of the corral.
