It’s difficult to accuse Mashable of being thought provoking, but I have to admit that “After Harper Lee, will there be another literary recluse?” made me think. The article also brings up JD Salinger. Both the concerned books are personal favourites. Bill Watterson immediately comes to mind in this context of people who did not care for an encore. I can relate more to him because it seems more recent. I discovered the works of Harper Lee and Salinger decades after they became the classics they are.
It is indeed tough to imagine creators of this era shying away from the public eye. In fact, I’d be surprised if they didn’t do exactly the opposite. Most of the world would consider that silly! After all, if one is pragmatic, it is easy to see that most art is business. And even if the business is niche, the select target audience needs to hear of it. Even in the cases that it isn’t a business, they are a method of self expression, and in the era of social media, sharing that point of view and starting a debate on it is easy and cheap. Just to clarify, this is not about being judgmental about it, after all these are choices.
What this set me thinking on was choice, its relationship with convenience, and their relationship with who I become. Across various kinds of consumption, communication, experiences (and so on) this is a time of abundance in terms of choices. I’m conscious of poverty stats, but for people like me, Uber, Zomato, Netflix, Amazon all speak one or both – choice and convenience. What does such ease and abundance do to one’s identity? It is after all so easy to be non-mindful and get conditioned. Maybe that’s what prompted Andrew Smith – “In this century, it seems to me, our greatest enemy will not be drones or Isis or perhaps even climate change: it will be convenience.” (via)
But then again, what is wrong with convenience? What is the trade off, and how does it matter? I found my answer in this phenomenally poignant article about the decline of video stores, written by a person who worked in them for 28 years. The enemy of video stores was convenience. The victim of convenience is conscious choice. Mindless consumption is indeed possible, even more so than before. And if we do lose the idea of conscious choice in our daily consumption, I think there is another casualty as well – the concept of restraint. And when I take that forward, I find that conscious choices and restraint are both required for me to be at peace with myself. Summed up quite well by Atticus Finch
(via)