The Secret Life of You
In our wired world, to be offline and alone feels rare. Recent books such as Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing and Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism have become popular guidebooks for resisting the corrosive attention economy and embracing analogue activities in the name of solitude and self-reflection.
Writer and columnist Kerri Sackville joins the chorus with The Secret Life of You, arguing for a return to inner contemplation to gain “the life-changing benefits of learning to be comfortable in your company”. The book first takes stock of the social and cultural biases against being alone. These range from how society places moral judgements on people based on their relationships or lack thereof, to practices of daily life, such as career and sport, that favour collaboration over individual effort. “We don’t see solitariness as a positive choice,” Sackville writes. “We see it only as a withdrawal from society.”
Sackville’s own stories about avoiding time alone with technology while she navigated the fallout from her divorce are touching and relatable. We often chase distraction to escape our emotional turmoil, she says. Despite the stigma, there are enormous benefits for carving out time for self-reflection. Those who dedicate time to being alone – whether for mindfulness, thinking or daydreaming – enjoy greater creativity, show higher empathy and can better regulate their emotions. She suggests techniques to cultivate a rich inner life, from solitary sojourns in nature to regularly asking oneself open-ended questions.
While The Secret Life of You is a noble project, its approach is unsatisfying and generalised. Short chapters with punny subheadings read like self-contained columns and are often slim on insight.
The nods Sackville makes to other books on silence and re-engaging with our tactile world, such as Quiet by Susan Cain or Nir Eyal’s Indistractable, are brief but insightful, which makes you more interested in seeking out these seemingly richer sources. Elsewhere, some claims are jarring – such as our minds being untapped “content creators generating endless material” – while often the interview material, including many anonymised social media messages, is unanchored and tenuous.
This earnest attempt to argue the possibility of a more profound inner life is hamstrung by its reliance on truisms and psychobabble. The Secret Life of You leaves you wanting more substance and instruction – which may be more likely found by seeking out the titles in the end notes.
Pantera Press, 320pp, $34.99
I haven’t always liked fungus but, lately, it’s been growing on me. I’ve just finished reading Alison Pouliot’s Underground Lovers, and while the book does not focus on magic mushrooms and psychedelic spores, I nevertheless feel like I’ve macrodosed.
Underground Lovers isn’t a bit of
Sunday afternoon light reading. Pouliot is a mycologist whose knowledge of fungi is extraordinarily vast and intricate. She’s so obsessed that she divides her year between hemispheres, living in an eternal autumn, so she can maximise her fungi bonding-time. In this book she attempts to share what she knows about fungi with a non-specialist reading audience. Pouliot is conscious of the esotericism that can accompany such niche expertise: in a section on truffles, for example, she says she doesn’t want to “dumb down the complex lives of these funky underground lumps” but will acquiesce to “simplify things” by “using the word ‘truffle’ to collectively refer to the various types of hypogeous fungi”. That’s about the extent to which Pouliot “dumbs down” anything in this text: it is dense with scientific terminology, Latin etymological roots and complex biological observations.
However, if you let yourself sink into the rhythm of the text, accepting that some of the nuance may well pass you by, there is a lot to learn. Pouliot argues that people don’t care very much about fungi because they are commonly assumed to be parasitic and non-sentient, and because they are arguably not very aesthetically pleasing. This is