Since I am not currently creating a single, comprehensive argument covering all of my insightsnot to mention that the blog format does not seem as well suited to such an endeavor as a book, but only jotting snippets down over time, this pattern of encapsulating a thought-system within a project provides a natural means of blog consumption.

Then, as the blog progresses, I may also identify gaps in insight or documentation to fill in order to round out the context or argument within a project.

I would dwell on the implications of this more elsewhere. For now, I’d just like to note that one practical, albeit minor, consequence of this is that I can slightly improve the quality of my thinking by slowing it down via deliberately limiting my rate of outputwhich, in the case of writing on a device, is also my rate of input, in words per minute.

In the particular case of blog-writing, I would like to start using the smartphoneas opposed to the laptop when drafting pieces, especially exploratory ones where my thoughts on a topic are not yet well-formed, as the rate-limitation of touchscreen input also constrains the rate of expression, thereby slowing down my thinking and improving the quality of the first attempt, on which future revisions are based.

• In consumption, you place the object in front of you, to consume it. In production, you place the object behind you, to drive you, even as you also project before you an objective, a vision of something to be brought into existence. Therefore consumption is at best non-destructive, while production is at best creative, if not ex nihiloI should not presume that anyone but God can create something out of nothing, but perhaps the highest form of creativity involves coming up with something asymptotically new.
• Because production involves doing something that changes your surroundings, it is a high-agency activity. Consumption not so much.

In the Christian worldview:

• Love is a productionistic attitude. Self-centeredness, greed, and lust are all consumptionistic attitudes.
• Work, as a pre-fall institution, is productionistic. Entertainment, in its most popular forms, is consumptionistic. So, as the internet is packages most information as entertainment, it tends to be the case that most people’s time on the internet molds their minds toward consumption.
• Study, or reading a book, or listening to a podcast, is consumptionistic by default, unless it is transformed through note-taking, written reflections, and other products of understanding into something productionistic.

I find that it takes a lot of deliberate effort to switch your mental mode from consumption toward production, but it takes no effort at all to switch back to consumption. Yet it is clear by most of the examples above that the productionistic mode is the more virtuousI’m using this word in a roughly Aristotelian sense: it seems to me that, at least in modern Western culture, leaning a bit more productionistic may help correct the excesses of consumptionism and guide one back toward the Golden Mean. and desirable one for bringing about long-term good to one’s life and the lives of one’s neighbors.

Hence, if you want to work well or love well, do not start the day with consumption. And if you do find yourself in this mode—as we are wont to if, for example, we need to use the internet for work—do not spend too long in consumption, lest you mire in an antiproductionisitc inertia that grows ever harder to overcome.

This piece of advice also overlaps with an insight from my entry on the danger of aboutness: to avoid engaging in too much aboutness, you can convert an aboutness activity into isness by declaring it to be a thing to be done in itself. Notice that doing this also helps you convert a consumptionistic activity into a productionistic one by turning a usually passive activity into a proactive one. What remains missing in this heuristic, however, and which would then be good to add, is to “productionize” that activity by adding a commitment to create some deliverable on the thing that you are consumingYes, I know, this ends up adding in yet another layer of aboutness, but that layer is immediately converted into isness by being embedded in a goal—a thing to be done in itself.. So if you wish to live more in isness and production even while consuming otherwise useful information, consider converting that activity into a task with a predefined deliverable.

Aboutness is a particular habit of mind which is often useful, but when misapplied or over-applied becomes an insidious trap.

On the surface, it may seem that media on the internet are not much different from offline media such as books. But consider a difference in the relative proportions of two types of content:

• first-hand information vs. second-hand / third-hand / fourth-hand — i.e., derivative — information;
• any content vs. a summary of that content, or a retelling of that content;
• content that is the thing in itself vs. content that is about other contents.

Let me define aboutness as the quality of something being about something else. In contrast, then, let me define isness as the quality of something being itself.

I posit that content on the internet has a much higher degree of aboutness and, at the same time, much less isness, than the content that isn’t online. This applies to many aspects of my experience of the internet:

• Aboutness is natural: Of course, as the internet is an information system, its virtuality readily lends itself to aboutness, just as a walk in nature unites the person with his surroundings, lending itself to the experience of isness. Instead of traveling, we watch travel vlogs. Instead of eating, we watch Somebody Feed Phil. Instead of playing videogames (which are themselves already virtual), we watch streamers play Fornite on Twitch. When I spend too much time in the midst of aboutness, I feel alienated from my surroundings. Do you? The tongue-in-cheek mutual exhortation to “touch grass” is a netizen’s yearning originating from the depths of the trap of aboutness. Life on the internet is, somehow, at tension with lived experience, and it feels good to humans to go back to nature once in a while.
• Aboutness runs rampant: But there is more to this phenomenon. Whereas primary source used to be prioritized by news media, it is now traveling by way of regurgitation through an increasingly longer chain of people (and bots) on the internet. Through the long chain of telephone, the information has become a different thing from the original. Lane Brown captures this well in his New York Magazine article “A Theory of Dumb” (which, by the way, is humorous and worth a read):

  There’s less reporting and more commentary about reporting, and sometimes just commentary about that commentary. What used to be a pyramid of original reporting topped by a layer of interpretation has flipped upside down into a wide base of takes wobbling on a shrinking nub of facts.

• Aboutness becomes inescapable: Now let’s say you are picking up a new hobby. You google how to do it. It gives you useful tutorials and wonderful examples, as well as lots of stories about others doing the hobby, including how someone spent his life perfecting the craft — what an honor it is to see a master in his element! Surrounded by an abundance of interesting stories, you begin consuming the content insatiably. Unfortunately, as you spend more time reading about and watching those who have gone before you, you devote less time to actually trying out your hobby, until one day, you realize that you didn’t end up pick up the hobby at all. You’ve channeled your original motivation to engage in the hobby into vicarious participation in others’ experiences of it. It wasn’t real at all. You’ve been led astray by the aboutness rabbit hole.

This kind of rabbit hole is everywhere on the internet. As a vast repository of other people’s experiences, the internet has transformed many a strong initial motivation into second-tier, third-hand experience. And while hobbies are not as big of a deal, this wasted potential also devours real work as well. As soon as you are consuming content about others doing something (beyond what you need to know how to do that thing), you are eroding your willingness to do the thing itself. Insidiously, the aboutness habit may eventually reach the point where you feel uncomfortable approaching anything without first painting a comprehensive framework of understanding that thing through the lens of all who have gone before you. You lose faith in trusting your own judgments for navigating an unfamiliar terrain. You’ve traded doing for thinking about doing. You’ve become alienated from action.

I should note that the aboutness habit of mind extends beyond the internet. It has countless analogues, including in academics — the student often spends too much time learning about doing something than doing it at all — and in business — bureaucratized companies often experience a slow “death by meeting,” in which much is said about work but not work is done.

Now I should add that aboutness is in fact very important. Anything that can be said about anything, including most speech and writing, engages in aboutness. Without it, humans cannot gain but a tacit understanding of reality, and education becomes nearly impossible. Notice also that aboutness is a recursive concept: each layer of aboutness becomes something different from the thing it is about. White collar work, for example, primarily involves living and manipulating concepts at certain level(s) of aboutness. I do not argue against this form of aboutness, because for people working at these levels, aboutness becomes the work itself. Rather, I warn against applying aboutness one or more levels too far. It is only when aboutness encroaches on the underlying isness that it becomes a problem. And no medium more intensively and extensively trains the mind to frame everything by way of aboutness than the current state the internet.

So what is to be done?

For now, I just want you to pay attention to whether browsing the internet (or in any high-aboutness setting) is becoming a substitute for doing the thing that you’ve set out to do. For example, even this article is high in aboutness. Read it, but don’t spend too much time on it.

Instead: Do something. Whether that is a physical activity or a mental one. Don’t spend too much time thinking about doing it. Just do it. And live in the experience itself, not analyzing it or performing it for someone else.

And as you do it, breathe in the isness.

Be.