![]() Can we descend into deep work together? Genuine sex requires at least a pair and improvisational jazz typically involves a trio or a quartet how about a fully aligned sports team? Through a plethora of management metaphors, business leaders are already fantasizing about an entire corporation that is fully aligned in deep work. Can we liberate our brains from our easily distracted individual bodies? Buddhists, cognitive scientists, and philosophers have all made persuasive arguments that nothing is like a “fixed self.” There is no thinker behind our thoughts. Today’s societal challenges necessitate us to reach beyond our solipsistic, Humanist worldview. The issue with deep work, it seems, is that it is work done alone-in the depths of one’s mind. The modern workspace is implicitly a program that describes a space for collective work toward capital gain, not individual reflection. Yet, we question whether a battery of studioli throughout our offices would be a panacea. New calls for separation and isolation appeared. As the pandemic raged, our open landscapes of co-working stations, kombucha taps, huddle rooms, and drop-down desks were abruptly abandoned: no more peer pressure, no more hackathons, no more group churn. ![]() Our contemporary pandemonium has exacerbated the contention surrounding the latest paradigms of office space for being overcrowded, unkind to introverts, surveilled, and mired with distractions. And for the space of four hours, I forget the world, remember no vexations, fear poverty no more, tremble no more at death: I pass into their world.” 1 Then I make bold to speak to them and ask the motives for their actions, and they, in their humanity, reply to me. ![]() On the threshold, I strip off my muddy, sweaty workday clothes, and put on the robes of court and palace, and in this graver dress I enter the antique courts of the ancients and am welcomed by them…. Niccolò Machiavelli described the kind of personal retreat such a room represented: “When evening comes, I return home and go into my study. As the result of material and spiritual crafts, these small, image-filled chambers follow the ancient tradition of open-ended models conceived of to activate the imagination and exercise the memory. Must we reconsider a renaissance classic, the studiolo? A necessity for every uomo universalis, the studiolo may be described as a treasury of emblems: it does not contain things but rather images of things. Besides eliminating all negative distractions and situating oneself in a perfect soothing sensory envelope, we need positive stimulants. But isolation and comfort alone do not yet put us in the “right” frame of mind. We could imagine some sort of “smart” cocoon: a cross between an anechoic chamber, a faraday cage, a float tank, and an infinity pool, drenched in circadian lighting and olfactory infusions, with salubrious psithurism and chirruping birds in the background-all calibrated to each unique individual. As comfort is a phenomenological cocktail of temperature, humidity, airflow, light, and acoustics, optimized wavefields differ from body to body. Like the strategy employed by Benedictine monks, today, it seems as though depth can only be achieved through voluntary exile, cutting out any sensorial signal that might interfere. “I work, therefore I am.” The desire to access a space for deep work presupposes that, as humans, we-or at least a privileged cohort of us-are on this planet to engage in “mind work.” Deferring questions about the consequences of this pursuit, can we imagine a space that aligns our brains perfectly with the tools and interfaces that record our most profound thoughts and transform our most in-depth insights into valuable assets for ourselves and perhaps for others? In an ideal natural state, work grants a sense of purpose. No, here, in this space, the brain is “total” and “perfect.” It’s not daydreaming or loitering around in its shallower registers, accessing superficial thoughts, gossipy insights, and banal fantasies. During deep work, the brain is functioning at its fullest capacity and is wholeheartedly dedicated to the task at hand. It demands discipline to embark on long stints of undistracted mind work. The notion evokes monastic imagery, a Benedictine life. No, we desire something more profound.Ī fresh moniker for an age-old concept, “deep work” comes with its own predicaments. Not just an ordinary workspace, with a desk and chair and, most likely, some type of recording instrument. “Going down, together”, February 10, 2022
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