To pause in the polycrisis

After my dentist appointment this week (I got an A+), I went to one of my long-time favorite cafes. I sat down, ordered a dirty chai and a biscotti, opened my notebook, and wrote down a list of nearly everything I witnessed.

A sampling:

Wild to see a fan running when it’s 13 degrees out.

There’s a balding man at a table with his laptop, looking like a serious writer: Worn black corduroy pants, brown sweater with elbow patches, an enormous blue mug (his only order? Is this his regular table?).

Cherry pie, blueberry pie, lemon square, chocolate peanut butter tart (vegan & gluten-free)

Everyone loves their big mugs.

Some people look like they spend more time being aggravated than delighted.

We love to drink out of our big mugs with both hands!

Is this the lunch rush?

The waiter does not want to turn the fan down. (The women could have sat elsewhere!)

Old chart on the wall illustrating various “yogasana.” I would hang this in my home.

This wasn’t a writing activity, but an attention game of sorts. I learned about it from Punch List, an architecture newsletter in which the writer describes a practice performed by the experimental French writer Georges Perec. In Perec’s book, An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, he simply sits at Place Saint-Sulpice and writes down everything he sees over the course of a few days. He “exhausts” it.

Punch List’s author, Christopher Hawthorne, tries the same experiment (in the same plaza, no less). At the end of his hour of observation, Hawthorne writes that he felt “a significantly sharpened sense of perception, not to mention a pleasing sort of mental calm.” He wondered if this was something that should become a regular part of his routine, a practice to fill his mind with “non-digital information by mentally clearing the world around us of objects.”

Last week, my nerves felt downright singed. How could they not? The world is grinding its collective teeth over new video angles of murder footage, while Silicon Valley protein-maxxers code the middle class out of existence. It turns out this era is considered a polycrisis, a term used by social scientists to describe a period when crises become stacked (think: Greece circa 2008-2020 when the country experienced a simultaneous migration crisis, energy crisis, and economic crisis). A polycrisis has another common trait: Those living through it struggle to picture their future, which can make us feel even more untethered.

So here we are, ungrounded by our incapacitation, and overwhelmed by the rate and intensity at which the bad is coming. It terrifies and exhausts us. As Caitlin Dewey wrote this week in Links I Would Gchat You, “widespread apathy and nihilism and boredom, most of all, enable and even fuel our degraded politics. I see this most clearly in the desperate, headlong rush to turn absolutely everything into entertainment — and to ensure that everyone is entertained at all times.”

She’s referring primarily to dark political memes and AI-sloppified images of dead individuals. But it’s such a perfect critique of how the need for constant stimulation (which begets more extreme ways to harvest arousal) has made so much of our world feel unbearable in a distinctly rapid and profound manner. And I can’t even begin to address the whole concept of the attention economy (it’s horrifying. Look it up!).

I’m someone who lives with a pretty wide aperture: I like to take it all in, baby! I love color, texture, noise, crowds, density, and snack trays featuring an ungodly array of regional cheeses. Which is all to say: My nervous system is bloated right now. I am a twice-baked irritato.

In learning that polycrises make it hard to wrap our minds around the future, and in understanding that we are being force-fed the worst of humanity, it’s difficult to make the case for “being present.” What’s here is bad! We can’t escape it even if we tried! 

Yet there was something about Perec’s concept — of exhausting a single location — that sounded deeply appealing. Interestingly, The New York Review of Architecture ran an essay in 2024 about the “attention liberation movement.” Are the architects onto something? Could zooming into the physical environment be the key to freeing us from our doomscroll reality?

Maybe it would help if I could get hyper-present. Maybe I could become deeply engrossed in my immediate surroundings. Maybe I could only have thoughts on what I was witnessing in that exact moment.

I only dedicated about 30 minutes to “exhausting” my spot at the cafe — I still have to work! — and it was pleasant. When I bundled up and started heading home, that’s when I actually felt the lingering effects: I was still looking around, wide-eyed and actually kind of delighted. I texted my friend Lacy:

Just saw a couple of older lesbians greet one another with some hearty slaps on the back and it ruled.

Moments later two pitbulls in very cool hoodies took turns peeing on a tree near me 

She responded, “You had a great outing.”

And I did, because all I did was See Some Stuff Right There. The wide aperture isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it just has to be retrained or refocused to offer a little relief.