Modern life is a state of oppressive symmetry.

The activities of we moderns are largely the same every day. They work roughly the same hours. They do roughly the same tasks. They get paid the same amount, on schedule. They acquire food at the same times and in the same means. In other words, modern life is extremely symmetric.

I began reflecting on this after I started carrying a pocket notebook with me everywhere, in an attempt to put some distance between me and my cell phone. I am constantly thinking about something, a problem which is exacerbated by my little pocket computer, which provides an instantaneous means to investigate any idea as quickly as I can type. Before I know it, I’m researching the timeline of the Glorious Revolution, or assessing the economic risks of post-quantum cryptography on Bitcoin. It’s fun, but not productive. When I have my phone, I rarely sit with an idea and decide whether it is really worth my time to ponder. When I don’t have my phone, I gain new mental space to reflect upon it. Sometimes it really sticks with me, and I have to look into it. Other times, I forget about it. Sometimes I write it down and look into it the next time I open my notebook. Most times I just cross it out.

By purposefully avoiding the symmetry of being constantly informed, my life falls back into the natural asymmetry of being occasionally informed. In the absence of limitless information, the ebbs and flows of daily life are a helpful filter for the ideas which pop in and out of my head. The less important ideas fall into the background noise of the basic tasks and obligations my mind must work on during the day, while the more important ideas are given the privileged status of having precious mental resources allocated to them. It’s not psychology, it’s just thermodynamics; thinking takes energy, and we only have so much of it. In my case, an idea or question will only survive until I find the time to look it up on the internet, which generally happens a few times a day. The filtering effect would be amplified if I was only able to check the internet once a week, and would intensify further if I was only limited to books. This isn’t a bad thing. We want our intellectuals to be clear-minded, and this clear-mindedness requires an asymmetric life to facilitate the filtering process. I have always wondered if the agrarian-intellectual life would be the best kind of life; the natural duties of physical labor and mindless farm chores provide the best backdrop for intellectual rumination, and the fresh air and endorphins are a good cure for academic moodiness.

Asymmetry also benefits communication. In the symmetric state of modern life, we are always connected. A random thought can be propagated to the world on social media at 500 megabits per second. A nasty email, a hurtful text, or other damaging interactions that we later regret can be sent at the same speed. Wisdom tells us to cool off before communicating in an emotionally charged way online. However, the asymmetric state of occasional connection is wise almost automatically, allowing time between bouts of communication for us to reflect upon what was said and craft our response appropriately. My late emails are my best ones, and I’ve pretty much always regretted making hasty responses. The filtering effect is amplified the more occasionally connected you are; a man’s letter-writing is necessarily more filtered than his social media postings are.

Asymmetry is a filter. It sorts out items which are not resilient enough to make it through the randomness of life’s ebbs and flows. Eating the same thing every day will give you nutrient deficiencies. Exercising the same way every day will give you weak points. Working the same job every day will burn you out. Symmetry is stale and inflexible. Asymmetry blows out the cobwebs, exposing your life to the necessary filters that keep sickness at bay.

Premodern life abounds in asymmmetry. Compare modern work to premodern work. The former has a set schedule which can be protected by modern amenities, like lights and HVAC. The latter is helped or hampered by the weather, the seasons, and the crop cycle, providing the worker with the necessary stress to push harder sometimes as well as the necessary relief to take a step back and rest. Seasonal work is a good strategy, especially for moderns. A typical year should emphasize different things each seasons, such as resting/reflecting/planning (winter), planting/initiating (spring), maintaining/working (summer), and reaping/feasting (autumn). The seasons are a filter, keeping different aspects of human life in their proper balance. But they are also the opposite of a filter, an antifilter, which generates desirable elements at their appropriate times (such as rest and reflection during the winter). Gym bros artificially limit their workouts to certain rep ranges for specific periods of time to bring about new gains; this is called periodization. Garden plots that are rotated and allowed to rest remain more fertile than ones that recieve the same annual soil amendments; this is crop rotation. Lawyers who take more vacation time increase their annual billable hours; this is “work-life balance”. This is asymmetric production: things are most productive when they are not constantly pushed to their limits.

Dr. Richard Swenson in The Overload Syndrome calls this “working from margin”. A productive life keeps reserves, ramping up and down as the various duties and activities of different seasons of life change, tapping into or restocking those reserves as the circumstances allow. This is counterintuitive to us moderns. We are more accustomed to machines than plants. Machines like symmetry. They like to be operated predictably and oiled on schedule. Give a car a “rest” in your driveway, and the poor thing will rust apart. The way you optimize the productivity of a machine is by getting it to hum along at a steady pace, tuned perfectly for its steady environmental conditions; perfect symmetry. Even chainsaws, simple machines designed to be trekked into rugged country and perform in a variety of adverse conditions like their carburetor adjusted for elevation. Chainsaws like symmetric air-fuel stoichiometry.

Industrial society taught us, wrongly, that people work this way too. Machines have become the gold standard of productivity; we now implicitly compare human workers to machines. We set consistent hours for their daily labor and expect consistent daily/weekly/monthly results. We assume that men work best when they work like machines. For machines, symmetry maximizes utility. It must be the same for us, right?

But men are not machines. Machines thrive in symmetric conditions which deplete men. Anyone who’s ever worked a job knows that work is asymmetric; there are good days, and there are bad days. My hypothesis is that too many bad days in a row could be a signal that things have gotten too stale. A typical modern day will have you sitting constantly, drinking the same cup of coffee, eating the same foods, doing the same tasks, getting paid the same amount on the same schedule, scrolling the same feeds on the same social media apps. For most of us, whether it is summer or winter, rain or shine, our day looks almost exactly the same. This a recipe for metabolic problems, micronutrient deficiencies, disorders, imbalances, weaknesses, boredoms, and burnouts. Sound familiar? Is it any wonder we are so rich, yet so unhealthy and so unhappy?

Obviously, too much “asymmetry” is also bad. You have to have a somewhat steady frame of living in order to operate at all. You need a routine, a support system, a network of connections, and some decent expectations of what the future brings. A life drowing in randomness is a life in pure survival mode. But constant chaos, paradoxically, is a kind of symmetry. It might mnifest itself in consistently elevated stress hormones, or a bank account that is drained every month, or nightly arguments with your spouse. These also seem to be modern problems.

My friends all make fun of me because I refuse to hire someone to plow my driveway in the winter. I have a driveway that’s about a hundred feet long, and I prefer to shovel it clear. It takes about 30 minutes if I’m hustling. Not only does it save me money, I also legitimately enjoy it. It keeps me active during the long, cold months we get in the northeast. I get cardiovascular exercise, cold exposure, and a thing to “manage” mentally (how clear the driveway is). It checks all the boxes of a good asymmetric element of my life: seasonality, contrasting work, and randomness. To me, the deliberate pursuit of asymmetry is the medicine to the modern malaise. I could go buy a piece of equipment to plow my driveway, or hire someone to do it, but I chose not to do that. There are many modern amenities at our disposal to make things fast-n-easy, and this is really wonderful. I mean it. But my working economic premiss is that fast-n-easy is not the measure of utility; goodness is. And for goodness’ sake, we have to say no sometimes.

Many books could be filled with at-home remedies for fast-n-easy addicts, but these are just a few that I’m trying to implement:

• Schedule (and enforce!) daily time away from your phone and computer.
• Give up daily use of coffee and other stimulants.
• Go to bed when it gets dark out.
• Let your body get up naturally before your alarm clock.
• Tie your life into the seasons by gardening, raising livestock, or hunting.
• Humble yourself to recognize what the current season requires of you.
• Incorporate contrasting work into your life. Become the agrarian-intellectual, the working-class Victorian.
• Get outside.
• Read widely. Study something new every day. Keep up with learning Latin and brushing up on Logic.
• Simplify your life. Create margin.
• Skip work sometimes, and have fun instead.
• Don’t optimize, harmonize.