“You Are Disturbing Me. I Am Picking Mushrooms.”

Amol Kapila

Grigory Perelman does not want our attention but he may merit it. He offers a model of behavior which very well may be foreign to our time, but, still, we ought to know that it’s an available option: grumpiness, misanthropy, and a radical lack of interest in publicity—and, it seems, money, too.

To be able to close the door. To slam the door.

Perelman is a mathematician from St. Petersburg, Russia—where he lives with his mother and sister—who, a few years ago, solved a century-old math problem, Poincaré’s conjecture. This is one of seven fabled math problems, the solution for which the Clay Mathematics Institute in Cambridge, Mass., has offered $1 million—for each solution.

Perelman has not only so far shunned the dough, but when reached by a reporter said, with fabulous succinctness and practicality: “You are disturbing me. I am picking mushrooms.”

I have always wished that we lived in a world in which people valued solitude more. In my experience, anyone who likes to be left alone is considered weird, antisocial, and potentially bad news.

William Deresiewicz writes in a similar vein, emphasizing that it is important to control the constant stream of stimulus we receive from the outside and the demands that others place on us in order to think for ourselves and to grow:

Here’s the other problem with Facebook and Twitter and even The New York Times. When you expose yourself to those things, especially in the constant way that people do now—older people as well as younger people—you are continuously bombarding yourself with a stream of other people’s thoughts. You are marinating yourself in the conventional wisdom. In other people’s reality: for others, not for yourself. You are creating a cacophony in which it is impossible to hear your own voice, whether it’s yourself you’re thinking about or anything else. (Italics mine)

I can relate, in particular, to the last two sentences above, italicized. Over the past couple of years, I have come to realize that it is of the utmost importance to give yourself space to think, that is, to think in your own idiosyncratic way, on your own terms, without regard to what other people may think of how you think. Constant exposure to the thoughts of others seems to get in the way of this (e.g., blogs, RSS, the Internet in general, television). Of course, we can discipline ourselves better and rise to the attention-economy challenge posed by the Internet, but I don’t think that such discipline will completely solve the problem. Our ability to think for ourselves will still be inhibited more than it would have been otherwise.

Some people manage just fine the challenge of thinking on their own terms, while simultaneously exposing themselves to a constant stream of others’ thoughts. Often times, in those cases, they don’t produce anything that original or interesting. Regarding those that do, I wonder if they actually listen to the thoughts of others when exposed to them, or just listen to their own evaluations of the thoughts of others. The latter, while preserving one’s mental autonomy, would negate some of the value of exposure to others’ ideas. It is also, in my view, an indicator of biased thinking.

A summary of the two articles linked to above can be found here. (HT: Chris).