One of the last fiction books I read would have been Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. I was around eight years old, and had raced through the previous five instalments. Even going so-far as to seek out The Order of the Phoenix in passing bookshops in order to read a single page during family trips to the high-street on Saturday mornings. Like many families in Britain at the time, we eagerly watched each film at the cinema (although, at four years-old, I was not a fan of the basilisk and had to crawl into my mum's lap), as well as queuing up for the midnight publication of The Deathly Hallows, complete in costume with scars felt-tipped onto the foreheads of my brother and me. I of course delved into seventh book after my mum and brother had read it, but unfortunately the now nine-year-old me got bored of the several chapters of camping, so I put the book down and never finished it: a transgression for which my brother has never forgiven me. After that, reading was replaced by the likes of Minecraft and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare - I wish it wasn't that simple.
A few years later, at sixteen, I was beckoned by the alluring call YouTube algorithms of
self-help, and the corresponding book genre.
Here was this wealth of knowledge that, if harnessed, could turn you into a better person.
It could make you better with people, more organised, and more productive, which could lead to better grades, a
better job, and more money. It could make you successful.
Why wouldn't you optimise, find efficiencies, and track habits in your daily life? Whoever's not doing
this stuff is losing out, it's a no brainer.
So, there I was, adept in the subtle art of not giving a F*ck, and using the productivity system of a management
consultant to pass my GCSEs.
This mindset did equip me with useful techniques to get through my education, as well an early exposure to
practical advice on important topics like sleep and money-management.
On the other hand, such thinking formed a deep link between reading and optimisation, and caused me to
spurn any book that didn't provide any kind of inherent utility.
Even back then, I had an awareness of reading being an investment, an overtly purposeful act in our attention
economy. If you were to pick up a book, you may as well learn something worthwhile.
The implication here being, of course, that nothing worthwhile could possibly be learned from things that weren't
real.
Not to absolve all personal responsibility here, but some blame can perhaps be laid at the foot of secondary (high) school english-literature classes. Fourteen year olds are simply not inspired by Macbeth or Carol Ann-Duffy. My adolescent perception of over-analysis that English teachers engaged in (i.e. maybe the author just liked blue curtains) wasn't helped by spending twelve weeks discussing the symbolism of Curly's Wife. I can't remember ever being told the holistic value of literary analysis or literature's role in society, or even just why art matters. Understandably though, it must be incredibly difficult as an underpaid teacher to cover what is most likely a bureaucratic and flawed syllabus to an over-sized classroom of teenagers who think being performatively-ignorant is quite a cool thing to do actually. Undoubtably this topic will have been covered by others, but regrettably, as a former perpetrator of this thinking, it only reinforced the solution-led, value-added philosophy I had formed around books.
Looking back a decade later though, it's clear that instead of making you a better person, self-improvement books make the you more valuable to Capital, and trade upon the hyper-individualised 'pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps' ideology of neoliberalism. Today however, with the social-contract further unravelled, contemporary self-improvement often takes the form of how to resist the traditional educational system, and how to get rich quick, acting as a conduit to the Manosphere of Joe Rogan, Andrew Tate, and others. Thankfully I stopped reading these kinds of books at University as more specific areas of interests took over. While a new kind of intellectualism and autodidactism had gripped me, it only led for my thinking to crystallise in the opinion that things like climate-change, politics, and philosophy were always more important than the plights of fictional characters.
And so we arrive at a few weeks ago. Amidst a week of me acquiescing to my boss giving me more responsibility at
work, I was wondering how to preserve my sense-of-self as I seemingly sold my soul to Sapit- Capitalism.
The answer, as it happened, was contained in James Mangold's Bob Dylan biopic: A Complete Unknown.
For all its (valid) criticisms, the film's depiction of creativity, artistry, expression, and, humanity was so
rich and vivid that I found myself caught off guard.
Having failed to recognise the value of the written word, outside of manifestos, as a vehicle for social change, the film highlighted the powerful intersection of politics and the pen. It was exciting to know that music had once oiled the wheels of a counter-cultural movement - a concept that today seems so distant in the hollowed out post-modernist world of late-stage capitalism. I'd had an awareness of the prevalence of music during the 1960s, but always viewed the bands at the time as accompanying social change, rather than catalysing it. The release of Sergeant Pepper should really be taught in schools. I'd like to be able to make more observations here about the power of art but I can't. I don't really know what I'm talking about, because, as above, I've never intellectually engaged with it. The film showed music is powerful and it made me feel good is really the only thing I can offer - none of the self-help gurus ever warned about a stunted media literacy.
So allow me here to learn what many discover a decade prior, that creative endeavours have value. Maybe their exploration of the human condition allow us to discover parts of ourselves we didn't know were there. Maybe they contain just as much wisdom, if not more, as the 'Smart Thinking' section of a Waterstones. Maybe there's more to life than the real world - reading twitter all day and watching a news show on Youtube and reading the Financial Times. Maybe reading yet another book about our current economic system is not the path to enlightenment. Maybe my Computer Science degree and Web Developer day-job enshrine rationality, logic, and truth to a fault.
Unbeknownst to me, literature, poetry, music can all be a mirror to society, and therefore their place in society is more important than ever. This is me releasing I've had the cultural diet equivalent to only eating Huel. Lifeless, clinical, cold. Perhaps it's time to admit the body, if not the soul, needs the humanity, vitality, and nourishment of stories. In the words of Virginia Woolf: What does the brain matter compared with the heart?