Like an octopus, juggling different things across different domains
Our weekly column ‘Notes on Resilience’ takes on questions of resilience and hope that have come to the fore because of the pandemic.
This week, we explore burnout, the heightened importance of communication with one another and the changing conditions of writing and publishing with Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, a Nebula-nominated science fiction author and data scientist.
Yudhanjaya is the author of Number caste and The Inhuman Race. His audio book, The Salvage Crew, was narrated by Nathan Fillion and was released in October this year. The book uses Open AI technology and Markov Chains to test a human and Artificial Intelligence collaborative experiment in creating art. When not writing, he is a senior researcher with the Data, Algorithms and Policy team at LIRNE asia. He blogs at Yudhanjaya.com
How did the pandemic affect the work you do? How did you have to adjust?
To answer the first part of your question I’m quite fortunate in that a lot of the work that I do can essentially be done from a distance over the internet. For example the way LIRNEasia, the think tank that I work at, is set up, working from home and actually being able to work from other countries in other time zones is very much a natural part of that work environment. And of course, when it comes to writing, all I require is a laptop and sometimes not often an Internet connection and some paper and pencils. My timelines are in the range of months and years, and very rarely days. A large part of research is reading, thinking, experimenting, and returning when results are at hand, and the same goes for writing. I’m also quite introverted: give me my space and I’ll be a very happy camper, free to sit and think for a living, which is basically what I do. So in that sense the work I do is really privileged and optimized to take use of something like a pandemic.
What I didn’t expect, however, was that I had at the time approached burnout, gone through burnout, and sort of appeared on the other side of the event horizon, so to speak, and not being able to go out, to meet friends, to have a drink, to indulge in all these little rituals that we have to keep the grind at bay – that actually complicated things.
Despite the near-ideal conditions for work, I would wake up and spend my days and not be able to recount how I spent them. I started forgetting things like names, commonplace objects, and even tasks that I had set myself to do. And I began to rely quite heavily on digital sticky notes and complex systems of to-do lists to actually provide my day with some sort of structure, so that when I woke up and sat myself down in front of the computer i.e. had at least some textual representation of what I was supposed to do. Thanks to the structure of my work and the flexibility that it offers, I was able to at least keep myself on track but in practice, it was hell. While it would be laughable to compare it to the work of anyone at actual risk, things were not as easy in practice as they should have been in theory.
In a year of upheaval how have you been building personal resilience?
I would not necessarily say that I built personal resilience during this year of upheaval. If anything I’ve gone in the opposite direction and started exploring more towards personal vulnerability, which of course comes with its own caveats. But if we are to talk about anchoring, then ritual and a better understanding of how I think and work have been my strongest tools this year. Giving myself space, learning to do things that don’t have timelines or expectations attached to them, learning to set more reasonable deadlines for myself, and generally aiming to be more effective rather than purely productive, has been quite useful.
Of course this has also significantly impacted the publishing industry, research funding, and various aspects in ways that have yet to be resolved. I’ve always been rather bored with two concepts. The first being following a single interest, which I think is a fantastically stupid legacy of hyperspecialization brought about by the Industrial Revolution. And the second being meatspace itself – the physical world, as opposed to cyberspace or a virtual environment.
So first, I’ve become comfortable stretching myself across multiple domains and interests, with the understanding that breadth and cross-connection is a type of hidden depth all on its own. Second, I’ve always, in my career as a writer leaned far more strongly towards digital publishing delivery and logistics – which always seemed to me to be a fantastic way of making your work available to the entire world without having to rely on international logistics or sacrifice billions of trees in the process. And in a pandemic, both of these attributes turn out to be ideal for surviving both publishing infrastructure disruptions and sudden focus shifts in research funding.
Sometimes these things can be made to combine in all sorts of interesting ways. The Salvage Crew, for example, is on one level an audiobook-first publication narrated by a celebrity actor, delivered months before the paperbacks and hardcovers will find their ways into US bookstores. And on the other level it is a fusion of my interests in collaborative literature and artificial intelligence in art, my version of a literary Turing Test conducted on the world. On one level it’s a giant practical joke on my friends who reckoned AI-generated art was meaningless. And on another level it’s also a step towards an entirely different style of writing altogether for myself, one that enables me to create faster, stranger, and in a different mode.
So I suppose my personal way of building resilience is to be an octopus; to juggle many different things across many different domains that all feed into each other and enrich each other.
If we were to start thinking of life after the coronavirus, what are the skills that have become essential in the fields you work in?
Communication. One of the most underappreciated things in any group of people – be they friends or an organization. So much of how we get on with each other is a) body language and b) contextual, built around common rituals or objects rooted in meatspace and c) inherently reliant on random communication, be it a simple greeting or water cooler conversation. Take those away, and what you have is something streamlined to the point of oppressiveness, stripped bare of everything that gives us an actual sense of humans on the other side of this screen. Over-communicating, verbosity, even the ability to have an hour-long chat – these are things that have become far more essential than before.
What are you most grateful for this year?
So many things. I’m grateful neither myself nor the mothership have caught COVID. I’m grateful that I was able to publish a novel, and do many things across this year in multiple careers that keep my brain engaged. I’m grateful that these things can be worked on with relatively little disruption, compared to the lives of drivers and farmers and warehouse packers and all others on whom the engine of civilization truly relies. I’m glad, in a sense, that I am not essential. There’s the added bonus of that being an excellent check on an ego; as someone who, not too long ago, used to work in a shop in a mall selling items to people, it is an extraordinary privilege that I enjoy right now.
And last, but not least, I’m grateful for my friends and our relationships. Time, it seems, has culled the dross, and left me with a handful that I can genuinely care about, and be cared about for in turn. Such things make up a life.