It’s Okay to Take a Break from the Outrage - Issue #13

This past week was a disaster. Let's talk about something else.

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Jan 08, 2021

Happy New Year, friends! So, this past week, and specifically the failed coup attempt on Wednesday, was…terrifying, disheartening, depressing, disgusting. While there is a lot to say, you will find no (more) direct comment on current events in this week’s issue. What we offer instead in this first issue of 2021 is a reflection on what should be seen as one of the root causes of our current mess: outrage culture. Below, you’ll find “Outrage is a Drug, and Not a Very Good One” by a new contributor to the newsletter, our friend Jon Busch, a writer in Colorado. But, before we get to JB’s piece, Fitz has a short reflection on a potential antidote to outrage culture: quiet time.

One last thing before we dive in: in this new year, we’d really like to push a bit to increase our readership, so we’re asking if you, our readers, would be willing to share the newsletter widely. If each of you helped us bring in just one new reader, our subscription count would double (MATH!). Thanks, friends!

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I Want a Quiet Life

by Fitz

I’ve been staying up too late at night. Like, too late past too late. Even after the kids go to bed and Steph and I watch some TV or play a game or talk, after she goes to bed, I stay up even later. This has become my quiet time, when there is no work left to do, just a record or two on the turntable, a book, and my thoughts. Steph says it’s my favorite time of day. Some days, she’s right.

One morning after staying up too late reading, I told her that I think I figured out why I so enjoy this evening ritual. “I want a quiet life,” I told her. She laughed at me.

And yet, our house is actually set up quite nicely for a quiet life. There’s the aforementioned turntable with a growing collection of records, a personal library of books representing decades of reading, there’s the wood stove, and even the dog curled up at my feet (because, by the late evening hours, he’s tired himself out from being obnoxious all day).

Of course, in this overly romanticized tour of my house, you’ll notice one large omission: other people, and, more specifically, kids. Young kids are not conducive to a quiet life. At all. Ever. So, though I try to live in the moment, I sometimes like to think of the way our house is set up as an investment in a future quiet life, and between the hours of 10:00 PM and midnight, I offer myself a glimpse of what that could look like.

As I was thinking about this recently, I was reminded of an article I must’ve read nearly a decade ago that summarized the research of Virginia Tech professor Roger Ekirch on the history of sleep. He found, by examining historical documents and literature, that our contemporary ideal of 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep is a relatively new phenomenon. Throughout much of history, it appears, people slept in two distinct chunks of time; Ekirch calls this “segmented sleep.” In an article titled “Sleep We Have Lost: Pre-industrial Slumber in the British Isles,” he writes, “Until the close of the early modern era, Western Europeans on most evenings experienced two major intervals of sleep bridged by up to an hour or more of quiet wakefulness.”

Ekirch notes the connection between this segmented sleep pattern and “early Christian experience,” noting that St. Benedict ordered his monks to “rise after midnight for the recital of verses and psalms” and that, as a result, “by the High Middle Ages, the Catholic Church actively encouraged early morning prayer among Christians as a means of appealing to God during the still hours of darkness.” While the connection is interesting, segmented sleep predates Christianity and appears in the literature of non-Christian cultures as well.

So, why did our forebearers sleep in segmented chunks, and what changed? For Ekrich, “the explanation likely rests in the darkness that enveloped most pre-industrial families.” And what changed is, of course, artificial light. Ekrich’s article, written in 2001, and the research he cites, appears far ahead of its time in its exploration of the deleterious effects of electric light on our sleep. This is why experts recommend we not look at screens before bed and why my iPhone goes into Bedtime mode twenty minutes before the bedtime I designated (and frequently ignore).

While I don’t intend to try out this segmented sleep pattern, it does go a long way to explaining (or at least contextualizing) my craving for late night quiet time. Ekrich writes that, according to his research, “people used this shrouded interval of solitude to immerse themselves in contemplation—to ponder events of the preceding day and to prepare for the arrival of dawn. At no other time, during the day or night, were distractions so few and privacy so great.” He quotes Nathaniel Hawthorne, “If you could choose an hour of wakefulness out of the whole night, it would be this…You have found an intermediate space, where the business of life does not intrude; where the passing moment lingers, and becomes truly the present.”

This is what I get from my quiet time between 10:00 PM and midnight (and sometimes later). This intermediate space, as Steph said, may just be my favorite time of the day. If the advent of electric light is what doomed the practice of segmented sleep, certainly the electric light radiating from our phones and tablets and TVs, to say nothing of the content that comes across them, has only further eroded, if not our sleep, than the time we allot for contemplation and pondering the events of the preceding day.

I hear people say, after weeks like these, that there is just too much news and it’s impossible to process. I get that; I feel it too. But I’m coming to see that “processing,” whatever that might mean for each of us, isn’t an automatic function. For me, I need a designated space and time for that processing to happen. This doesn’t mean meditation, necessarily—I’ve never been very good at trying to clear my mind—but rather contemplative acts like reading and listening to music. In the busyness of life, this intermediate space doesn’t just happen; it has to be created.

I need this time now more than ever, but given how early 6:00 AM comes after staying up past midnight, perhaps I should consider starting earlier and segmenting my sleep after all.

Outrage is a Drug, and Not a Very Good One

by JB

I listen to a lot of podcasts. Like, an annoying amount. To the point where when someone starts to talk to me about a given topic, I have to stop myself from saying, “Oh, I just heard a podcast about that.” Even though it’s a near certainty that I have.

One of my all-time favorites is NPR’s Hidden Brain with Shankar Vedantam. In one of their most memorable, most relevant episodes, “Screaming into the Void, Vedantam and his team explain why evolutionarily and neurologically, getting outraged about things actually feels good.

This gave voice to something I’ve actually known all along, but never thought much about. I love my anger. I revel in it. At times I use it to propel me to get stuff done. Other times I wallow in it as I doom-scroll through my Twitter feed.

I had a friend who used to say that his favorite emotion was righteous indignation. This was a joke to some extent, but it resonated with me so much that I stole the quip for myself and have used it on occasion over the years.

Lately, though, that drug isn’t feeling as good as it used to. Much like my experience with alcohol as I get older, the highs aren’t as high and often I seem to skip the buzz entirely and go straight to the headache.

See, according to Hidden Brain, outrage used to play an important role back when we lived in more tribal societies. When a member of the tribe broke the social contract, they would be called out, shamed, and/or punished.

But crucially, because the violating member lived in the house, or hut, or cave next door, they would have the opportunity to atone for their wrongdoing, and be accepted back into the good graces of the tribe. No such atonement is really possible for the people we are yelling at on the Internet.

Outrage can be a good thing. Even Jesus lost his cool from time to time, especially when it came to things like hypocrisy and greed.

I generally start and end my day with some outrage-sparking headlines, and while out for a bike ride or at the gym, I’ll listen to a podcast that gets me outraged in more depth. Personally, I don’t watch much live TV, but I know millions of folks tune in to be outraged by their favorite political pundits on a nightly basis.

But just like too much of any good thing, outrage can harm us. If you don’t believe me, try a little experiment I call the “Tucker Carlson Face.” To make the face, just curl your lip and furrow brow simultaneously, almost like you want them to meet at your nose.

Are you trying it? Do you feel the indignation? Don’t you feel put upon by these people (whoever they are)? Excellent. Now, it might actually feel good to flex your face muscles in such a manner at first, like a good stretch, but just hold it there for a minute. Good.

Hold it…

See? It hurts.

You hold your outrage for that long, your face can get stuck that way. Or at least that’s what I’ve heard.

And without even the opportunity for reconciliation with the folks we’re so outraged with, we no longer have a naturally occurring method for letting go of our outrage. For me, I often just stew in my outrage to the point of exhaustion.

And so I’m trying to moderate it to some degree.

I hope you won’t think of this as a call for complacency or a throwing up of hands. I’m certainly not advocating for Outrage Prohibition. But I’m working on limiting myself to a glass or two of outrage per day, lest it begin to negatively impact my family, work, or social life.

And I’m trying to channel that outrage into productive activity. It’s pretty easy to find things to be outraged by, after all. Much more challenging, I find, is figuring out how to channel that outrage into positive change.

What We’re Reading…

Fitz: For Christmas, Steph got me Transcendent Kingdom, by Ghanian-American author Yaa Gyasi, and I am loving it. I just want to keep living in the narrator’s head. She’s an immigrant PhD candidate who was raised evangelical and whose studies are motivated by the impact of addiction on her family. That’s a lot of boxes checked for me.

What' We’re Listening To…

Fitz: Kids music. So much kids music. With the whole family home, it’s not often I get control over the tunes. That said, I recently started listening to the ambient duo Hammock and this recently released single (which features The Album Leaf, another favorite) is beautiful, and, bonus, the title is appropriate to today’s issue: “Slow Down.”

JB: Okay, look. I’ve been listening to a lot of Turbonegro. Not sure I can give them a whole-hearted endorsement, but I have a soft spot for sort of obnoxiously-provocative-yet-stupidly-self-aware rock ‘n roll and tend to give it a looser leash than a lot of other content I consume, which a song like “Tight Jeans, Loose Leash,” tends to require.

Thank you, as always, for reading.