The world is getting faster and we only have two options: get left behind or become stressed out. I found a solution recently in the concept of “personal density“ as introduced by Alan Jacobs.
He wrote a book recently called Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader's Guide to a More Tranquil Mind. In it he presents the antidote to “social acceleration” and encourages we have relationships with people who are different from us.
His argument is that our world has become increasingly locked into the present moment, and that present moment keeps getting quicker.
We feel like everything is moving so fast, and yet we feel frozen in one position, devoid of meaningful progress. We are locked into a “frenetic standstill”, feeling paralyzed by the tremendous flow of information all around us and our inability to keep up.
The solution, Jacobs says, is to deepen our perspective and personal depth, to increase our temporal bandwidth from focusing on the present moment to focusing on bigger chunks of time, including the past and the future.
In order to rise above the tyranny of the present moment, we have to develop personal depth.
The goal is that we would be able to put off this social acceleration and engage in a triage that filters the important out from among the urgent, finding the meaningful amidst the onslaught of information.
If we don’t address this, what is at stake is our very humanity, our intuition, our wisdom, and our very way of life.
So how do we fix it?
We do the work to increase our temporal bandwidth—we get wider—so that we can field more of this frenetic madness at once and turn it into meaning.
Jacobs says, “I am going to try to convince you that the deeper your understanding of the past, the greater personal density you will accumulate.”
He goes on to say, “I want to argue that you can’t understand the place and time you’re in by immersion; the opposite’s true. You have to step out and away and back and forward, and you have to do it regularly.”
The only way to increase our personal density is to see ourselves from a new (and often opposing) perspective; which is to say, “personal density is largely achieved through encounters with un-likeness.”
This gets at the core of the lesson.
Instead of running from opposition, we have to accept it. Instead of running from difficulty, we need to embrace it.
We need to pay attention to those who disagree with us, whether they be dead and on a shelf or alive and in person.
We have to invite ”weird” people into our lives to be our neighbors, whether on the bookshelf or in person.
It doesn’t make sense.
Typically we only let people into our lives who are similar to us; typically we don’t like being around people we think are “weird.”
It’s true, birds of a feather flock together, but we’re not birds.