I went to the town library with the family today for the first time in ages, and it was lovely. The kids enjoyed browsing in the childrens’ section and beginning to realise that there’s a lot more beyond; my wife couldn’t decide whether to look first for fact or fiction, and if in the factual section, what, exactly, did she want to discover? She settled in the end on a biography, a baking book, and a novel.

I knew exactly where to go. The last time I had been, back then, in pre-pandemic times, I had curiously and cautiously browsed the philosophy section, alighting on books about and by Jürgen Habermas and Hans-Georg Gadamer. After flicking through a few pages of each, I put them back on the shelf and left, with the feeling that I should first finish what I was reading before expanding out onto new stuff. This time around, I made a beeline for that same shelf, and grabbed Gadamer’s Wahrheit und Methode. The method in this new madness was that, from reading Back to the Rough Ground, Gadamer seemed more likeable to me than did Habermas; and, I wanted to challenge myself by reading a “real”, original philosophical text, rather than reading about them.

I was also genuinely curious about hermeneutics (the philosophical perspective of interpretation and understanding), and felt it would enrich rather than distract from my other current readings (more about that soon!)

As the rest of the family diffused around the library, I started on the introduction, contentedly taking notes on my mobile as I went… and swiftly realised that most of these notes were about how distracted I was (not by the phone, though, not this time!), and how I couldn’t take in the meaning; I actually wrote “reading the words, but not ‘breathing them in’”, noting that, whilst this phrase came to mind automatically, without a strategy, it felt non-random, influenced my glasses fogging up and that slight resistance in breathing from the mask I was wearing.

But slowly I was able to sink into the text and begin to grasp what it was Gadamer was trying to say - more on that later, too - and then distracted myself again by thinking: hey, wasn't one of the original points of my blog to chart my development in philosophy, not just writing fixed, monolithic-feeling essays that I keep drafting and not finishing?

Read, reflect, write

I’ve also not been charting my reading at all, nor reflecting sufficiently on it, passively or - better - by writing to express my understanding of it. Hence the title of this post: whilst I may not have been reading too much (but perhaps too widely), I certainly haven’t been writing enough.

So, in that spirit, this post: to remind myself that I wanted to be writing much more than I have been, and to be much lighter on my feet about it.

My previous post was about what I term a "field perspective" of work, which started out as a tangential idea on the engineering profession and our tools and was generally a happy, contented thing. When I encountered this heartfelt account from journalist Elle Hunt about her struggles with burnout a few days ago, I had to acknowledge it. She writes very openly about it:

The crash, when it inevitably came, was more of a hard stop. At around 11.30am my hands froze on the keyboard: I simply could not type another word. Trying to will myself on was a surprisingly physical sensation. I was pushing on a pedal that had got me this far – and finding, with mounting distress, that the tank was bone dry. Closing my laptop felt like a failure.

Burnout is a negative mode to the extreme within the spectrum of strive and thrive, stumble and fail, within those fields of perceived wants and needs that lead to plans and work, all within our own professional fields as well as the personal and the grand political fields. We are often left to manage these forces and strains by ourselves; sometimes the feeling that we're unable to cope encroaches ever nearer.

Discussing the stresses of work is really important, even more so as the burnout wall approaches. The dilemma is that the closer we get to burnout, the harder it is to talk about it. Elle's take on it is the right one:

I am sharing my story not because it is exceptional, but because I’m convinced it isn’t.

It was her introduction to the book that got me reading James Suzman's Work, A History of How We Spend Our Time. Hopefully she can use the New Year to reset her relationship with work, whilst I keep firming up my own thoughts on Work: or what we do to ourselves as engineers.

My previous post was about what I term a “field perspective” of work, which started out as a tangential idea on the engineering profession and our tools and was generally a happy, contented thing. When I encountered this heartfelt account from journalist Elle Hunt about her struggles with burnout a few days ago, I had to acknowledge it. She writes very openly about it:

The crash, when it inevitably came, was more of a hard stop. At around 11.30am my hands froze on the keyboard: I simply could not type another word. Trying to will myself on was a surprisingly physical sensation. I was pushing on a pedal that had got me this far – and finding, with mounting distress, that the tank was bone dry. Closing my laptop felt like a failure.

Burnout is a negative mode to the extreme within the spectrum of strive and thrive, stumble and fail, within those fields of perceived wants and needs that lead to plans and work, all within our own professional fields as well as the personal and the grand political fields. We are often left to manage these forces and strains by ourselves; sometimes the feeling that we’re unable to cope encroaches ever nearer.

Discussing the stresses of work is really important, even more so as the burnout wall approaches. The dilemma is that the closer we get to burnout, the harder it is to talk about it. Elle’s take on it is the right one:

I am sharing my story not because it is exceptional, but because I’m convinced it isn’t.

It was her introduction to the book that got me reading James Suzman’s Work, A History of How We Spend Our Time. Hopefully she can use the New Year to reset her relationship with work, whilst I keep firming up my own thoughts on Work: or what we do to ourselves as engineers.