When we speak of efficiency, the pursuit of saving time and effort, we are implicitly essentialising an activity towards its desired outcome. The outcome becomes the gravitational force, its looming figure overshadowing the majority of potential benefits hidden along the process itself.
By ‘essentialising’, I mean that the we are defining the activity in its most skeletal form: the action as thee starting point and the desired outcome as the finish line. So, given that the essence of the activity is the outcome, to be efficient means to strip the activity down to its essence, which is to get to the outcome as quickly and effortlessly as possible. Everything else is seen as accessory, just a means to arrive to the outcome, which can be replaced if we devise a more efficient alternative. Hence, the activity that we set out to perform more efficiently is ultimately reduced -in its most essential, distilled form- to the will to execute a certain outcome with minimal expenditure of time, effort and other resources.
The path to the outcome becomes accessory. It is not a part of the essence of what we mean to do. If we want to have a coffee at a café, the process to get there is secondary to this action. We don’t think to ourselves that ‘we want to have a coffee in an exalted mood, on a windy day, after having heard great news, at a café where my crush waits on tables, coming to an important realisation along the way’. In reality, we think ‘we are going to have a coffee at the café’, everything else is another action, or an accessory circumstance, event that happens on top of the simple act of going to a café to drink coffee.
Sure, we can articulate all these as pre-conditions to ourselves, but truth remains that they are all secondary, and that only the ‘drinking coffee at a café’ part is essential.
How do we know this? The test is simple: we can strip away all these conditions from our statement, and the activity remains the same: we are still going to be drinking coffee. However, if we remove the ‘drinking coffee’ part, then the activity falls apart. All the other pre-conditions conditions were dependent on this specific, essential component. This is the essence of the concept of essence. Essence is indispensable.
I believe there is another concept adjacent to the distinction between essence and accessory. It is the concept of witnessed methodology.
If we went purely by its etymological roots, methodology refers to the path that we choose to take to get somewhere1. Bruno Latour offers an enlightening observation about this word:
If earnest scholars do not find it dignifying to compare an introduction of a science to a travel guide, be they kindly reminded that ‘where to travel’ and ‘what is worth seeing there’ is nothing but a way of saying in plain English what is usually said under the pompous Greek name of ‘method’ or, even worse, ‘methodology’ 2
It can be thus seen as a series of signs scattered across a territory guiding you along. They tell you where the path is, where to turn, and recommend what to look at, what to ignore, and so on.
From there, a witnessed methodology is one where you are aware that you are following a path to get somewhere, that you are seeking something specific, but you also remain open to witnessing what the path can offer.
With a witnessed methodology we are essentialising the whole path a posteriori. Once we reach our goal, we can take stock of what we experienced, not in terms of how effectively it took us to the end, but of what happened along the way, what made it an essentially unique journey. We can find a name for what we experienced. Then, we can seek to repeat that experience, to transform it into a kind of ritual -or routine-. We can seek to understand the benefits that it produced, pursue them further, and adjust the conditions of our life to make this methodology more accessible and repeatable.
In an essentialised methodology, any part of the journey can serve as an end in itself. Without these parts, the activity itself ceases to exist, as they are all essential to its nature. Witnessing a methodology simply means that we are retroactively tracing it, not by evaluating it in terms of how efficiently it led to the outcome, but by reflecting on what happened along the way that we consider essential to it and desirable to be perpetuated.
For instance, we might come across something in a post, such as a particular, unique image. We choose to explore its origins. We can check online what that image is about, where it comes from, and so on, or we can ask the author of the post directly about where they found it, why they chose it, what it means to them. Similarly, instead of consulting a large language model for a solution to a problem, we might ask someone personally. We ask for directions from a passerby, or inquire about a song that is playing instead of relying on Shazam3.
The destination remains the same, but with a different methodology we open a small conduct -or a door, whatever metaphor you wish- to human connection and interaction. We might learn other things that we weren’t actively seeking but that we needed, or that delight us. We are invoking those moods that infuse our surroundings with an invigorating, encouraging energy, beneficial not only at the individual and interpersonal level, but more broadly at the societal level by fostering social cohesion.
These are moods such as generosity, feeling useful to someone else, gratitude, selfless collaboration, and the list goes on. And we are ultimately exposing ourselves, affirming our presence in the world, and perhaps leaving an imprint in the minds of other people (as they do in our minds).
We are making a statement about the fundamentally human habit of reaching out to one another for answers. Above all, we are engaging with a fellow person by treating them more as an end in themselves than as a means to an external goal.
And this is just one of many examples. Another one is living in a relatively small city and choosing to take the bus instead of riding a bicycle to get somewhere. Beyond all considerations of efficiency, you are opting for a mode of transportation that costs money and that in total takes longer to get you to your destination. While with a bike you might get there sooner, exercise, breathe fresh air and save money, you will miss an opportunity for reflection and quiet.
Intention comes from ‘tension’, from ‘stretching yourself towards something’. Like a sponge, if we stretch too much towards something, like an essentialising goal, an absolute intention, we lose permeability. We become impervious to the real richness of the world.
On the bus, you have time to sit and contemplate, to let thoughts surface, to observe both your surroundings and your inner subjective processes. In a sense, choosing to ride a bike every time can make you a victim of your routine and your limited intentions. You get from point A to point B, where you want to get quicker, but in order to do so you need to ride on the road, to be exposed to the elements, to pay attention to your surroundings, push pedals, change gears, use brakes.
Hence, there is a danger of over-occupying one’s day with pre-conceived tasks and activities, and the places where we will carry them out, leaving little room for the breathing space in-between. That permeable membrane that makes the world around us more fecund, fertile and rich, instead of a constant means to get somewhere else. It spares us from constantly thrusting the force of our intentions upon our environment, when maybe the right next step forward is hiding somewhere along the way, or we realise that the activity’s goal was actually a dispensable stepping stone to what we were truly seeking.
So, returning to the distinction between essence and accessory. Commuting by bike or bus are different things. The bike or the bus are not accessory to the act of commuting. Each one implies a different state of being, almost like different rituals meant to bathe the day with different tones, scents and impressions. If one were to look back at it from a standpoint of a witnessed methodology, one would notice and reflect on the differences that each type of experience generated. One would trace the method, the path that this experience took, with all its unexpected stops and effects, such as connecting with another human, or finding the answer to a difficult decision and a renewed sense of inspiration during a bus ride. Then, next time, one would take them into consideration when deciding on how they want to get somewhere, be it literally or metaphorically.
Yes, this is definitely a long-winded way of saying ‘life is about the journey, not the destination’. Yet, it also introduces a way to put this into practice with more assiduity and, dare I say, humanity.
As a coda, I share this passage from Keith Richards autobiography “Life”. Faced with the sudden death of a friend, Richards decides to embark on a quest after an arbitrary target that will take him along to an adventure with a friend. The target is to find who he says is ‘the most beautiful woman in the world‘, a girl he had met once or twice and who happened to live in Munich, which was close to Innsbruck where he was staying at the time:
In order to deal with Gram’s death, I said, I can’t stay in Innsbruck tonight. I’m going to rent a car, and we’re going to Munich and we’re going on an impossible task. We’re going to look for one woman. Because I knew about her, I’d seen her once or twice, and she fascinated me. I know this is pointless, but we’re going to go into Munich to look for her. Let’s go tonight. Let’s just forget about it and go do something else. I hate all that crying shit, and moping. There’s nothing you can do about it. The fucker’s dead and all you do is get mad at him for dying. So you take your mind off it. I’m going to look for one of the most beautiful women in the world. I’ll never find her, but that’s what we’ll go for. A focus. A target. And Bobby and Irented a BMW, this was one in the morning, and took off. The target was Uschi Obermaier. If there was one thing that could soothe my soul, it was her. “
And eventually they find her:
George, will you go up and say that KR’s looking for her? I was determined to make the full circle with GP dying. And George goes up and knocks on her door, and out she struts, just to the window, and goes, who are you Why? I don’t know why, a friend of mine’s just died, and I’m pretty fucked up. I just want to say hello. You were the target, and we found you. We’ll leave it at that. Then she came down and gave me a kiss and went back upstairs. But hey, we actually pulled it off! Mission accomplished.
In this more radical example, the arbitrariness of his target makes the tracing of a path, a methodology, the essence itself of his action. After all, to be alive, to be human, is to be in movement. There is no sentence without a verb. From the moment we are born our heart keeps on beating, and we never cease breathing, thinking, stretching our minds towards something. To be alive is to engage with the world in constant movement, armed with a rather faulty compass, always walking with a keen mind, ready to take turns along the way because we realise they are better. We connect with others, we build things with them, every once in a whiles stealing a glance at our elusive star.
I suspect that the methodologies that we witness and make ours are the itineraries that, as they layer upon each other in our inner subjective cartography, slowly carve the essence of our individuality. They are our ways of doing thing, of choosing paths in life, that emerge from our whole being, the intellectual, the emotional, the sensorial, the full exprience.
- It is rooted in the ancient Greek word μέθοδος, or méthodos in latin script. This word translates to the ‘transcending path’. That is, it is a roadmap, an itinerary to get somewhere that can exist statically, suspended somewhere in the realm of ideas. Read more ↩︎
- Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. New York: Oxford University Press. ↩︎
- That is, using the app Shazam to identify a song. ↩︎
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