I’ll usually hop on YouTube and watch a video essay or two whenever I have a spare moment. These videos are perfect for me. They are academic enough but not to the point of being pedantic, and the perspectives these creators bring are rather illuminating… to a point.

After watching some of these critique-based video essays, I started to realise that I might be getting a kick out of the wrong thing. What started as a kind of intellectual curiosity slowly turned into a hunt for the “gotcha” moments whenever a video essayist makes a provocative point.

It made me feel like a smartass. After all, I’m acquainted with the statistics, arguments and figures via video essays and my research, right? I can spot all the hidden forces and malicious intentions in this screwed-up world we are in. But after a while of being in that world of critique, my way of viewing the world started to change.

I can’t watch a film without picking it apart…

I can’t read a book without questioning its integrity…

And I can’t take anything at face value.

What started as a good-faith engagement turned into a snarky and aloof view of everything. The hidden fear is that if I start enjoying what everyone else is enjoying, I’ll lose my status as a critical thinker, right? Except in this case, after assessing the situation, I’ve concluded that critical thinking is a tool while being negative is a choice.

Sometimes in life, things are a lot less complicated than we make them out to be and problems start to crop up if we believe we’re smart enough to ruminate, but too stupid to take the first step. This is precisely what happened to me when I tried to deal with an extended period of burnout midway through my honour’s year, and after a few consultations with my therapist, I found myself looking into her eyes, confounded:   

"It can't be that simple, can it?" I said.

"Give it a go and I'll see you next week." She walked me out of her office after she attributed everything to insomnia and prescribed a cure.

Ever since I started my honours year, sleep became what drugs were in high school. I was surrounded by other people who averaged 8 hours a day while I stayed up late, head-deep in research and writing. After an entire semester of preferring reading over sleep, I developed a constant state of irritation and was prone to exhaustion. At times, I needed two coffees just to get into the zone of work. This total sleep deprivation, after a while, started to resemble somewhat of a Byronic temperament, and alongside a bit of acquired intelligence, I was in full possession of the two main ingredients in an excellent critic.

"Or an asshole." My girlfriend said over a coffee break after noticing the dark circles under my eyes. Upon reflection, there is a real thin line between the two. Merve Emre once wrote in The New Yorker that the Modern Critic is a "contemptible creature" who is always "quacking of the infirm and diseased Parts of Books". And if such a Critic ever escapes their literary containment, then we'll end up with an asshole who's forever quacking of the "diseased Parts of the World".

We're all familiar with the feeling of a reading slump. Books that used to enchant us have lost their spark. Stories that pulled us through hundreds of pages start to put us to sleep. We find ourselves gliding our eyes across the words secretly wishing that the book would soon come to an end. When this happens, we find ourselves caught in the dilemma of the reading slump: should we keep reading or do something else?

Generally speaking, a reading slump stems from the tension between what we think we want to read and what we actually want to read. Sometimes the two worlds align. We're enjoying a book we think we'd enjoy. But sometimes they don't and we find ourselves straining against our instincts. As Robert Escarpit wrote, the "cultured man" who knows Racine will never be so foolhardy as to admit that what he really loves is Tintin (cited in Felski 53)1. We find it hard to swallow our pride and ditch a book we don't enjoy because we don't want to admit that we've misjudged our own taste.

This toil has a pretty obvious solution: we need to remain open and adjust our reading habits to what we're attuned to. In other words, we need to read the right book at the right time to fully enjoy it. But to achieve this, we have to understand how attunement works.

The worst time to be in the city is late afternoon when the cafes are all packing up. On those days when I picked a late shift at work or missed an earlier train, coming into a city full of closed cafés was like drifting through the boundless sea without a visible harbour, swayed by the constant wave to keep moving without a pause.

Fran Lebowitz in her 2010 documentary: Public Speaking said:

“It’s very important, I think, for getting ideas or thinking of new things. That comes from hanging around with other people. That life, sitting in bars smoking cigarettes, that’s the history of art1.”

Lebowitz perfectly described the art of lingering, and there’s something deeply appealing to creative people about spaces and times that permit this aimless hanging around. In cities based around commerce, there is very little space to pause. We have to fight our way to a public park, a pub or a café that doesn’t chase us away at 2 pm. In a city centred around culture, however, more spaces permit lingering. When I was in Paris, sitting at Café de Flore, not a single waiter pressured me to move despite the long line. “We close at 22h, relax.” One of them said when he took my order.

The field of philosophy is full of bad writing. Most philosophers are convinced that if their ideas are good enough, then the writing will simply take care of itself. This is how we end up with prose like this:

As for periodization, its practice is clearly enveloped by that basic Althusserian conceptual target designated as "historicism"; and it can be admitted that any rewarding use of the notion of a historical or cultural period tends in spite of itself to give the impression of a facile totalization, a seamless web of phenomena each of which, in its own way, "expresses" some unified inner truth-a world-view or a period style or a set of structural categories which marks the whole length and breadth of the "period" in question (Jameson 12)1.

That was one sentence that ballooned into a paragraph from The Political Unconscious. Its author Fredric Jameson won The Bad Writing Contest2 (sponsored by the Philosophy and Literature Journal) in 1997. The judges even went as far as to say that Jameson was

“A man who on the evidence of his many admired books finds it difficult to write intelligibly and impossible to write well.”

On the other end of the extreme, you’ll end up with a philosopher who writes like this:

I noticed this strange thing that happens to people in love. If the relationship is healthy, they tend to “chill out” a little. This happened to my friend H. When he was single, he fancied himself a romantic hero and defined success as pulling bombastic leaps in his career. But after a year into his relationship, his output became steady and considered. His career no longer moves in spikes but in measured quarters. From the outset, it might seem like this guy has “lost his edge”, but his work is objectively better from a tempered place.

A similar thing happened to me when I fell in love with my partner. Like H, I too fancied myself a romantic hero in letters. I lived and breathed my identity as a writer and scholar. But when she entered my life, it was as if my feet had landed on solid ground. I started making healthier choices and found joy in cooking, appreciating a morning coffee and taking life slowly. During the first few months of our relationship, I also felt like I had “lost my edge”. But in reality, I was only letting go of my neurotic self.

“Work” is an aestheticized term in our media discourse. We associate work with beautiful desk setups, highly curated morning routines and a deep pride when we stay past our allocated work hours. The ideal human becomes an efficient working machine, while the ideal student becomes the one who spends the least amount of time producing the most amount of intellectual work.

My thesis advisor, during our first meeting, expressed his concerns about the future of university culture. “Just wait until you start marking essays from undergrads”, he said, “it’s repetitive work. Sometimes I wonder if the same person wrote all these essays under different names.” 

This repetition my professor alluded to results from vulgar readings or vulgar critiques. In literary criticism, for example, theories that were innovative in the 1960s are now routinely used in undergraduate essays. However, since the discourse has shifted from genuine critique to efficiency, it’s easy for students to sacrifice deeper insights to turn in work on time. French writer Michel Butor observed:

Time speeds up as we get older. I still remember being boxed into the four walls of my childhood bedroom, yearning for an escape. Everything, from taking a train ride into the city to sneaking into a park in the middle of the night, felt like an adventure. And my favourite adventure was going to the cinema with friends.

We didn’t care about the movies, but we cared about the ritual of going to the movies. The simple acts of meeting up, lining up and discussing the movie afterwards over frozen yoghurt cemented those dates into unforgettable memories. However, as I got older, going to the cinema was no longer a priority. I slipped it into the cracks of my schedule and preferred Netflix over heading to the cinema. As the ritual of going to the movies disappeared, memories faded into countless films I could not recall watching.

Writers are always looking for the nearest fire escape when people ask about their process, and the Italian novelist Umberto Eco is not an exception. In a 2015 interview1, when Tonny Vorm asked Eco how he wrote his first novel, The Name of The Rose, he replied:

“It happens when you feel that you have to piss, and you have to run to the toilet.”

And added that:

“I cannot understand those novelists that [publish] a book every year. They lose this pleasure of spending six, seven, eight years to prepare a story.”

But our economy doesn’t give writers the luxury of marinating ideas today. In College, courses allow very little time for writing essays. In the publishing industry, magazines operate on tight timelines. Consistency becomes the key metric for evaluating online writers, and the writing economy encourages us, using Eco’s toilet analogy, to piss before we have the urge.

Writing turns into a tradable commodity instead of the result of deliberate contemplation. And given the conditions, it’s time to call out this “fetishized productivity” and re-cultivate the pleasure of preparing ideas patiently.