how do i hold the long spoon?
do you remember that tweet from 2020, or maybe 2016, that was like
“i don’t know how to explain to you that you should care about other people”
?
i feel like’ve ricocheted off of an attempt to explain why one should care about others every 6 months, my entire adult life.
my pattern of approach has been to try reading some ethics text or another for a few weeks, with growing embarrassment about my search for a concrete answer to something that i should just fucking get (as a human, because it’s not something that needs to be proven to be done), until i finally surrender theory for a direct-action nonanswer like buying groceries for old people.
it’s honestly not hard to get it and just do it. i’m sure this feeling is part of why some people do crazy shit like eat vegan, volunteer at hospice facilities, or go to med school to work in the baby ER. i think leaving it unexplored is fine, possibly even better than fine, because it would really suck to discover something that puts you off altruism. but, like, how can one resist thinking about it?
personally, my “reaching” of “maturity” has been the result of haphazardly staking out social and ethical boundaries that align with “values” i’ve found, inherited, or inherited but thought i found (secret third type). when i demonstrated to myself that i could pick them up and move them with me, throughout different social contexts, like a crinoline defining the shape of my character, i actually did feel quite mature. but i’m actually hugely naive and toddler-like in almost every way, even those in which i feel accomplished.
i’m kinda old-ish now (some scoff, some nod as if i am brave), and i’m not so easily embarrassed by myself any more, which is the first blush of boomer ruin, so i was thinking i could write about what i think, as i think it, publicly, on the internet. it sounds fucking insane as i type it.
although i loved reading smart adult’s blogs in the early 2000s, it is my firm opinion that nobody should ever post. horrifyingly, some of my smartest friends do it now. if it’s my fate now, as an adult, to debase myself, why not do it up?
i’m tagging everything i post with #longspoon, so i can: a) easily delete it all when i get embarrassed or cancelled; b) (with hubris) tag it all for RSS; c) (hubris fading to trepidation) keep this blog organized if i ever post other types of things.
why “long spoon”?
before i explain this, i want to just say 2 things.
that i don’t buy “heaven” or “hell” as scenarios. i believe only hell is real, we are all living in it right now, and it’s actually not as bad as you hear (but it still sucks a lot).
that this will not be brief so take a bathroom break now.
not the onion.
there isn’t a single parable-form telling of it online that doesn’t reek of clinically uncool self-help language. here’s my version:
basically, imagine a banquet table laid with the most succulent soup-feast imaginable. we’re talking stew, soup dumplings, matzo ball soup, pot pie filling, everything good and hot you can eat with a spoon. but the people seated at this banquet are gaunt and starving. they are unable to eat the soup, because the spoons they’ve been given are too long to reach to their own mouths. here you might ask, “why not simply choke up on the spoon handle so it functions as a shorter one?” shut up, and get out of my temple, that’s why! for some reason they cannot do that. neither can they reach the soup with their bare hands, or faces. maybe they get a few bites that way, but it doesn’t really work to nourish them. “but why do they have these impractical spoons?” here is the moment where jesus or buddha or lord siddhartha twists his nasty little face into a grinch smile because you’ve asked him just the question he was hoping for. the spoons are not supposed to be used for feeding oneself. they aren’t meant to be used that way. in the 90s, don norman would have passed by and pointed out that the spoon’s long handle is clearly an affordance which telegraphs its purpose*. (nowadays he is either cancelled or explaining that it is actually called a signifier and an affordance is something else, thus justifying his book’s sustained $30 price tag.) the guests at this banquet are too fucking selfish and hangry to read affordances. they do not understand that they are meant to use their long-handled spoons to feed the person across the table from them, who in turn is meant to feed them. i don’t think anyone is seated at the head or foot of the table. if so, they have extra special long spoon handles which are arched in some manner. this is not a fun banquet.
for our purposes, we’re gonna stay away from that. i don’t think the heavenly version of the banquet exists. it’s more an architectural rendering of how a long-utensil-style banquet could potentially work, given enough budget.
