In several conversations with a friend I was invited to revisit some prior beliefs I had posited on the relationship between the environment and the self; at various times in my life this position has reversed, then reversed again, but I think it’s reaching a more nuanced, unified position.
The initial position was this: places bring out a different person within you, so changing environment brings changes in yourself.1 This applied both to your personal environment, like your room, your house, the tools on hand, the things that are easier or harder to do, and to your broader environment, that is, what’s more easily facilitated in the place where you live.
My priest once said that a place is only important insofar as it complements your goals, and the bar for him was quite low. It’s more about not choosing a place that harms your goals than to optimise the place-setting. After all, for so long in my life I had moved from place to place because nowhere felt right; I constantly felt like I was stuck, not going to the next stage, hitting some ceiling I couldn’t understand. And I’ve stopped feeling that, so either Montreal is simply the right place, or I’ve gotten old enough that place doesn’t matter, and my fundamental restlessness is abating.
My friend didn’t wholly agree with my initial position here, because a lot of it ignores what you yourself bring to a place; she facilitates entire social scenes, she is the circle by which planets came into being; she is used to becoming gravity. I think this is a useful skill, insofar as you draw the same sediment wherever you are placed. At the time I meant that different environments have different compositions that better complement the end-goal, even if the process replicates in different places.
I didn’t really realise this until I had moved a few places and gave it a shot; saw different outcomes for my social scenes and for my career prospects, and saw myself also valuing different things in turn. I don’t know if it’s fair to wholly attribute this to a city’s culture; cities seem to privilege things to me insofar as different parts of my life more easily get prestige placement, more easily get prioritised. But that’s purely a matter of what was available to me to uncover.
If I think of myself as a process that runs wherever it’s placed, what was easier to uncover seems to point to an underlying abundance; but it’s probably not wholly correct to rely on that as an absolute truth, so much as a matter of circumstance. The relative probabilistic emphasis is unclear to me.
I do think that different places and different people bring out different people inside of you; but you’re also always in the process of selecting the place and person, of privileging a world in which you are cast into some part. There is an enactivistic element to this, but the mutability within all of us is still somewhat subordinate to an everyday choice that could cultivate similar things with relative difficulties wherever you are.
private missions
Now, I think the relative difficulty involved becomes a bit obvious when you leave any urban centre. You won’t be able to create massive social scenes in the average suburb, and rural areas will remind you that philosophy once was a parlour game. There’s a mode of conversation that only really happens in letters; there’s a mode of conversation restricted to theses. If your aim is the common ground of a truth, reduce noise and reduce audience.2
This might not matter if the mission is simple enough. What kind of life you want — how much you have to optimise — depends on the amount of leverage you want to have on the world, and I’ve started to renounce wanting ‘leverage’ over anything. I mean, lately I’ve spent time thinking about how to best use my skills toward loving other people, serving other people, à la the parable of the talents but my partner leads me to think this still ultimately worships an optimisation of self, a right-use mentality that leads one toward a primary and secondary telos for bodies, minds, peoples …
There has to be a better or a worse way to live; but if I follow the original advice I received back when I first started moving towns, the bar might just be lower than I think, and yet also ironically a harder bar to hit. What preserves my capacity to see the personhood of another? What keeps me focussed on the capacity to wholly love and serve who is before me?
What prevents me from optimising and filtering through places and people in search of, in search of, in search of … ?
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A poem I wrote a few years ago was about this; I believed that it was my habits that reshaped my brain, that made me better or worse at specific things, and optimised me for some purpose, and my habits clearly weren’t bringing anything good out of me, so I needed to withdraw entirely. Honestly, I think it is probably true that I have to keep myself deductive and not reflexive, reflective and not reactive, and that’s a matter of stimulation threshold. But I also think that withdrawing from others didn’t make me loving. My priority at the time wasn’t love. It was optimising myself for some grander, more ambitious idea of who I might be one day, that didn’t really have a shape or target. I simply wasn’t enough. ↩
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Reminded of MacIntyre’s After Virtue; people speak in entirely incoherent philosophical traditions that share the same words, and so speak past each other. He emphatically advocated for an emergent cross-cultural virtue ethics that might navigate the challenges of liberalism, instead of competing ideas of the good in social blocs taking power from each other over and over again. You may have to start taking ecumenicalism as something other than theological, as a process by which you can identify shared telos and opposed means; you may need to adopt the ability to discern the underlying good and when to argue with others, and when there is no underlying sense of the ‘good’ within your opponent at all. I’m terrible at all of these, by the way. ↩