Читать книгу Beyond Measure - Rachel Z. Arndt - Страница 9

MANUAL

The word nootropic comes from the Greek for “mind” and “turning.” To turn the mind—to move it over itself, like turning over an engine, spinning the parts alive—is to look inward. Or it is at least to believe that the solution comes from within, not from those around us. What solution? The specifics don’t matter; what matters is that there is a solution—something being done—that creates the problem: not being productive or efficient enough. To solve this problem, which is less a personal problem and more a symptom of society, we might try to work with others, all those workers we’re networked to; we might try to change daily demands, not to make them easier, necessarily, but to change value from quantitative to qualitative. Or we might try a nootropic, an individual, personal solution to a collective unease with the way things are.

To take a nootropic (pills called Alpha Brain or Sprint or Ciltep) is to separate oneself from the world in order to stand out in it. To take a nootropic is to demand measurement: We measure ourselves so we can compare who we are now not with other people but with previous and future versions of ourselves. Improvement, then, via nootropics and the like, becomes a necessarily solitary pursuit, with each person using the tools of the internet—apps, trackers, &c.—to keep herself separate from the rest of the internet. To take a nootropic is to insist on the self, alone and lonely, as the source of and solution to the problems of the day.

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Feel inadequate. Feel that you’re not getting enough done. Feel that other people have pulled themselves up by their bootstraps when you’re still in your socks.

2. Go online to choose a collection of drugs—a “stack,” in nootropics parlance—that appeals to the dual responsibility to be productive and to be independently so.

3. Wait for the shipment to arrive, tracking it obsessively in between visits to Facebook and pings from an app that asks, “What are you doing right now?”

4. Collect two days’ worth of work and one day to do it.

5. Set your app to quiz you at two-hour intervals, frequent enough to collect sufficient data, infrequent enough for your productivity to thrive.

6. Take a pill. Sit down at your computer.

7. Wait for the pill to kick in, to tickle the brain into action. Feel neurotransmitter activity increasing and decreasing according to the manufacturer’s promises, because if there is no change, then what you’re doing—taking a pill—is a waste of time and effort; it’s inefficient.

8. Start typing. Start annotating the pill with PowerPoint slides and Excel spreadsheets. Thank Microsoft, thank the nootropics manufacturer, thank yourself.

9. Don’t talk to other people—they may get in the way of your optimized state. If you must talk, listen to yourself: Hear your words flowing as they do for a nootropics-juiced Joe Rogan.

10. Track your output. Later, you can use these numbers as further justification for the pill. You can remind yourself, in moments of weakness, that it was not other people who got you to that “heightened state”—it was you (and some chemicals).

11. Go online to prove how focused you are.

12. Sign off. You don’t need other people to give context to your efficiency; you already have context: what you were before the nootropics kicked in, what you will become when the nootropics wear off.