Meaning, slowly

The strange thing about this season is that we have never had more information and never been less sure what any of it is for.

There was a time when knowing a thing was hard. To learn what a word meant, you walked to a shelf. To learn what someone thought, you wrote a letter and waited. To learn what was happening in another country, you waited for a paper. The slowness was a kind of filter. Most of what reached you was, in the small economy of attention, worth your attention.

That economy is gone. What replaced it is the opposite. You receive, by lunchtime on a Tuesday, more inputs than your grandmother received in a year. None of them is exactly for you. Most are close enough to your concerns to make you stop. Almost none deserve the stopping.

I have come to think that this is the actual fatigue of our generation. Not the volume of information. The volume of near-misses. The almost-relevant, the almost-actionable, the almost-worth-it. Each one takes a little of you. None of them gives anything back.

The missing layer

There is a phrase I keep returning to, from a thinker named John Vervaeke. Relevance realization. The cognitive capacity, not to retrieve information, but to recognise what, of all that is here, matters in this room, today, for this life.

I love the phrase because it names the layer almost no one is taught to develop.

We are taught how to find information. We are not taught how to know which piece, of the thousand pieces we just found, is the one that, if you let it in, will reorganise your week. We are taught how to do things. We are not taught how to know which of the seven things on the list is the one that is alive in the deepest sense, and which six are just the noise of a life trying to look busy.

Relevance is a capacity. It is older than the information era. The contemplatives knew about it long before we had a word. The Jewish tradition called part of it kavanah — intention; the part of prayer that determined whether anything had actually happened, regardless of whether the words were said correctly. The contemplative Christian called it discernment. The therapist calls it focusing. They are all describing the same muscle. The muscle that knows, in the quiet, this matters and this does not.

Why it is not productivity

I want to be precise. Meaning is not a productivity practice. It is the thing productivity is supposed to be in service of, and it is the thing productivity, almost without exception, has displaced.

A productive life that does not know what matters is, at best, an expensive way of running away from yourself. A slow life that knows what matters is, at best, the only life that any of the old wisdom traditions ever considered worth living.

This is not a romantic claim. It is a structural one.

Information without relevance becomes noise. Relevance without meaning becomes shallow. Meaning without wise action becomes self-indulgence. Wise action without information becomes naive. The whole stack has to be standing, in that order, for a life to add up.

Almost no one I know is building the stack in that order. We are all stuck on the bottom layer, drinking from the firehose, hoping the relevance and the meaning and the wise action will somehow filter up. They do not. They have to be built downward, from a centre.

The smallest possible practice

If you have read this far, the practice is this: tonight, before you sleep, name three things that mattered today, and three things that almost mattered and did not.

Just notice. Do not improve.

By the third evening, you will see something. By the seventh, you will probably change something. By the thirtieth, you will be unrecognisable to the version of yourself who has been treating almost-relevant like the real thing for years.

This is the slow theology of attention. It is older than us. It is what every tradition I respect was doing, in different words, the whole time.

— A.C.C.