How to lose sight of what’s important

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The number of films I have seen this year is zero. The number of books I’ve read this year is zero. It’s five months since I last saw a play, and seven months since I last visited a gallery. On both occasions, I was planning an exit before the show was half done.

What might sound like philistine posturing is medical necessity. Last December my left eye blew a gasket. You don’t need to know the cause, only the effect, which is that I can’t hold my attention on anything for long. A good day might mean 45 minutes of televised football, though I’ll soon be counting each head knock and VAR check in dread of injury time. On average days, I max out at one episode of Bluey.

This creates a problem, having been asked to write for a section called Life & Arts, as I have little recent experience of either.

To be sure, better writers have done more with less. John Milton went blind then wrote Paradise Lost. Alice Walker lost her sight in one eye and won a Pulitzer. Fading eyesight inspired Jorge Luis Borges and James Joyce to reinvent contemporary fiction, but they must have lacked my capacity for self-pity. The only human condition I can think to talk about is my own.

It all boils down to one problem: too much information.

The most common response when you tell someone of your incurable condition is for them to tell you about their incurable condition. A fortunate few who have nothing to report will cast around family, friends and neighbours for any malignancy. The world is now full of strangers I know only by their faulty gonads and gallbladders. Giving away too much about myself would only mean that I’d instead hear about all the ways an eye can fail, so this, relatively, is better.

Everyone, too, has a story about the National Health Service. You don’t need to read again about how it’s a broken organisation full of heroes who work in intolerable conditions. My experiences of waiting lists, lost records and wards at breaking point are no different from anyone else’s. We’re all in the same mess.

But learning to navigate the NHS is part of the coursework that comes with a chronic condition. Each prognosis has footnotes. Every appointment is a new adventure in dysfunction. Microbiological or macropolitical, there’s always something to learn about how complex systems fail.

And mostly, it’s independent learning. The eyeball is structurally a simple thing, a few crystallin proteins buffered by goop. How it connects to the brain is complicated, and aphasia takes many forms. Whether mine is similar to migraine-like distortions caused by patchy vision, or whether it’s the kind of ceaseless degeneration that leads men to mistake wives for hats, won’t be investigated until the effects can no longer be ignored. Neurologists are busy. The needs of others are much more urgent. Still, anticipating what comes next is extra homework.

Information overload might be why I don’t miss films and books enough to countervail their absence. Podcasts that might fill the void have not, because what I listen to instead is pabulum: minimal dubstep and metronomic techno; compilations with names such as 10hr Lo-Fi Study Mix; media devoid of meaning.

It’s a trend I’ve come to very late. Years before the pandemic, YouTube content factories were drawing huge audiences to hardcore pabulum of pressure washers and sand slicers. These videos, along with rediscovered antecedents such as Bob Ross’s The Joy of Painting, made mindfulness mainstream-compatible by preserving its vacancy while removing all the quacky overtones. No-brow has overtaken low-brow.

Recently on these pages, Janan Ganesh annoyed centrist dads by arguing that Oasis have a more significant cultural wake than their art-rock contemporaries. I’d go further. Three-minute pop songs are too much information. The most important artist working today is C418, who writes incidental music for Minecraft. Like a pressure-washed patio, C418’s music has no meaning beyond itself. It’s Brian Eno shorn of mid-wit intellectualism. Measured by minutes played, C418 may be the most popular composer ever to have lived.

And I think I understand why. Going half-blind has taught me about always feeling vulnerable in unfamiliar ways, surrounded by critical system failures and talk of negative outcomes. It’s a common life experience, I imagine, and a big ask for escapism by the established routes.

What works better is nothing. Even if my eyes allowed it, I’m not sure I’d have the bandwidth left to read a whole book or watch a whole film. The only antidote for too much information is the opposite.

Bryce Elder is the FT’s City Editor, Alphaville

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