#100: One Hundred Things that got me thinking

📚mothers + writers + ⛰️'conquerors of the useless' +🪄 manifesting

I’m approaching a whole year of writing Why Would Anyone, and am preparing an anniversary post reflecting on what I’ve learnt from the Attuned writer fellowship. On Wednesday, I’ll also share my interview with Amy Edmondson about psychological safety. She’s excellent, and I’m excited!

Today, let me just bask in the glory of those three digits.

Photo by Gajo Romário on Unsplash

This is my 100th Why Would Anyone post; my 46th in the Three Things section. So, if we exclude three posts of summer re-runs, I have written so far about 126 things that got me thinking about intrinsic motivation and why we do the things we do.

Here are today’s three:

1. Writers and mothers

2. Visiting, not conquering

3. Seeing the good in manifesting

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1. Writing mothers

I was fascinated by this Slate piece by Karen Bourrier and John Brosz, from the University of Calgary¹ (worth reading in full!). Using data from the Orlando textbase, it counters the stereotype that having children stifles women’s creativity and that women writers have no (or very few) children. The authors found that “of 1,115 British women who lived between medieval times and the present and who wrote at least one book, half (49 percent) were mothers.” They show that professional female writers have had “plenty of babies,” and challenge the idea that “you lose a book for every child” (“it might be more accurate to say that every child delayed a book by a year.”)

In an era of unrestricted childbirth, as writer Rebecca Traister argues, spinsterhood could be a powerful position for women who wanted to safeguard their time for an increasingly demanding literary career. But despite the challenges, it was far from impossible, even for women in the 19th century, to have children and write. Nineteenth-century women writers who had children had around 3.33; roughly half the number of the average 19th-century mother, but plenty from a contemporary standpoint.

The number of children born to women writers across the centuries. Karen Bourrier and John Brosz. Screenshot from Slate.com

If the narrative that women writers can’t be mothers is, at best, only half true, why do we continue to give this 100-year-old critical chestnut so much weight? Clichés about both writers and mothers are to blame. Writers are supposed to be independent, working in long stretches of unbroken solitude and living a life of the mind. Mothers, meanwhile, are supposed to epitomize selfless care and interdependence. They are also not generally held to be competent at anything other than caregiving […].

It is too early to say if and how 21st-century women writers will combine writing and motherhood, especially since parenthood is on the decline for everyone, not just writers. But the idea that it’s nigh impossible to have a child and write a book belongs in the 19th century.

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2. Visiteurs de l’inutile

Last week, I saw a man on the street wearing a Patagonia tee-shirt printed with the words: “conquerors of the useless”². I went back to Let My People Go Surfing, the autobiography of Patagonia’s contrarian founder Yvon Chouinard³, to understand the slogan. I remembered from the book that Chouinard takes pride in not approaching nature as a conqueror, so the use of the word seemed off. He writes about the 1950s:

The European attitude toward climbing mountains was to “conquer them”. All the gear was left in place to make it easier for others to follow. […]
We American climbers were brought up reading the transcendental writers like Emerson, Thoreau, and John Muir. You climb the mountains or visit the wilderness but leave no trace of having been there.

And about his time climbing in Yosemite national park:

We took special pride in the fact that climbing rocks and icefalls had no economic value in society. We were rebels from the consumer culture. […] We were like the wild species living on the edge of an ecosystem—adaptable, resilient, and tough.

I found the possible origins of the slogan later in that first chapter, when Chouinard quotes Lionel Terray’s Les Conquérants de l'Inutile⁴, translated as Conquistadors of the Useless⁵:

It’s not the goal of grand alpinism to face peril, but it is one of the tests one must undergo to deserve the joy of rising for an instant above the state of crawling grubs.

I guess “visitors of the useless” isn’t catchy enough to sell tee shirts, anyway?

Photo by Jonathan Bell on Unsplash

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3. ‘Manifesting is bull.’

It felt good to read this opening in a recent blog post by Indistractable author Nir Eyal (whom I interviewed for my first podcast episode back in April). ‘Manifesting’ describes different new-age practices that are supposed to help us reach a goal by “asking the universe” for it, through journaling or affirmations for instance. But Eyal says there are common-sense reasons why, and some evidence showing that, a positive outlook (not magical thinking and rituals) can have real-life benefits:

You might not be able to see opportunities because you’re not looking for them. Or you might misinterpret an opportunity as a risk.

It’s possible the Visionary Work Optimists were promoted not because they manifested it but because they believed they had influence over their potential promotion and thus did the work that put them ahead—unlike pessimists, who may think a job promotion is out of their hands.

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

24 October 2022 at 2.15pm CET: I’ve corrected the link in the first paragraph!

1. With thanks to my friend C. for sharing!

2. The catchphrase is also the subtitle of the documentary film “180 Degrees South”.

3. I wrote about Chouinard’s unusual business choices and quoted his book in post #90.

4. Selon le résumé du livre par la maison d’édition :

Aux critiques de son père qui ne comprend pas cette activité qui consiste à se hisser sur des montagnes où l’on ne trouve « pas seulement un billet de 100 francs au sommet », Lionel oppose la gratuité du jeu, l’éloge de l’inutile.”

5. An autobiography describing how “following World War II, when France desperately needed successes to heal its wounds, Terray emerged as a national hero, conquering summits atop the planet's highest mountains.”