Two of a Kind: Inconspicuous Consumption Meets The Art of Noticing
A talk with The Art of Noticing’s Rob Walker, whose sensibility will likely appeal to Inconspicuous Consumption readers.
Editor’s Note: This post is not paywalled and is available to all. Enjoy! — Paul
Back in 1997, I wrote a book. A guy named Rob Walker, who I’d never heard of before, reviewed it for the leftist magazine The Nation. It was a smart review — mostly positive, but also with some intelligent critiques. What really intrigued me about it, though, was the little writer’s bio at the end: “Rob Walker is an editor at SmartMoney.”
SmartMoney no longer exists, but at the time it was a personal finance magazine owned by The Wall Street Journal. In other words, it was very capitalist. So this Rob Walker guy seemed like a pretty interesting character — I mean, who the hell works for SmartMoney and moonlights for The Nation? I happened to know someone at SmartMoney, so I called her and asked about Rob Walker. She said, “Oh, he’s right here — hold on, I’m handing him the phone.”
And that’s how I met Rob Walker, who quickly became one of my favorite people and best friends. Like me, he’s spent most of his career as a freelance writer with lots of extracurricular creative projects (you can see a good rundown here). We also share a love of object-based storytelling, a sort of skeptical fascination with consumer culture, and, most of all, a strong interest in things that most other people take for granted. As a small but brilliant example of that, Rob likes to document all the various poses of the stick figure on “Caution: Wet Floor” signs (or as Rob calls him, “Cuidado Man”), a brilliant project that I wish I’d thought of myself:
In 2019 Rob published a book called The Art of Noticing, which features more than 100 exercises designed to spark creativity and joy by leading a more observant, curious life (“Find Something You Weren’t Looking For,” say, or “Take a Long Walk Through an Unfamiliar Part of Town”). If that mindset sounds a lot like what we do here at Inconspicuous Consumption, then you can understand why Rob and I are such good friends. I even got to contribute one of the exercises in that book, as you can see here:
Around the time that The Art of Noticing was published, Rob launched a newsletter (also called The Art of Noticing), which is still going strong on Substack today and has essentially become an ongoing workshop for developing a more active sense of awareness and curiosity. I’m a big fan, of course. Much like IC, TAoN has its own community of readers who are very actively engaged in spotting things that most other people overlook.
Rob is based in New Orleans these days, but we keep in touch and see each other in person when circumstances allow. Since our Venn diagrams have a fair amount of overlap, so to speak, we’ve sometimes discussed how IC readers would probably enjoy TAoN, and vicey-versey. The two sites seem almost like sister cities, waiting to connect. With that in mind, Rob and I recently decided to sit down and interview each other via Zoom, and today we’re running the interview transcript on both of our Substacks without any paywalls. We hope our respective readership communities will enjoy learning about each other, ideally leading to some cross-pollination that will be to everyone’s benefit.
The interview is long, but I think you’ll enjoy it. We talked about noticing inconspicuous things, our working methods, our readers, the similarities and differences between our approaches, and more. You can read the discussion either on Rob’s site or here on IC. If you like what you see, we hope you’ll explore the TAoN archive and the IC archive. And if you really like what you see, we hope you’ll consider subscribing to Rob's Substack and/or to mine.
Okay, enough preliminaries. This interview took place on July 11th. Rob and I each did our own editing on the transcript, so the version on his site isn’t exactly the same as the one here (plus we also used different photos/graphics/etc.), but the differences are minor. Here we go!
Paul Lukas: For people who aren’t familiar with The Art of Noticing — either the book or the Substack — how would you describe it?
Rob Walker: Well, it has to start with the book, which was a collection of exercises meant to help people pay attention to something other than what the rest of the world wants them to pay attention to. And it was indirectly inspired by my reading a book called Draw It With Your Eyes Closed, which is an anthology of art assignments. I was starting to teach at the same time that I read that book, so I became interested in this almost prescriptive form of writing where I’m saying, “Go take a color walk,” go do this, go do that. And I was also sharing my own experiences: “I did this and here’s what I got out of it.”
That got me interested in the assignment as a form. I’d never done that form of writing before, but I also see it as descended from the branding- and advertising-related writing that I’ve done in the past. I was kind of aware of this idea of the “attention economy” before it had a name, and I thought it was important to have some sort of antidotes to that culture, which was only getting stronger. So that led to the book.
The newsletter started because I had a mailing list with a thousand people on it, which I used to bother people whenever I had a new project out. So I thought, “Okay, I’ll do The Art of Noticing newsletter once every couple of weeks.” And it ended up taking on a life of its own and has arguably become more popular than the book.
Paul: And the newsletter still has that basic premise that drove the advent of the book, right?
Rob: Yeah, exactly. The book originally started out as me thinking about how to address the problem of the attention economy — everyone’s stealing your attention. That type of book has now been written several times over, by lots of people, so I felt like we kind of knew the problem. I mean, you don’t even need a book to know that your phone is pinging all the time and you’re missing a lot of the world around you. You read these books that spend 190 pages saying that there’s this big problem, and then at the end there’s 10 pages saying, “Here are some things you can do about it.” And I realized that I wanted to flip that. I wanted 190 pages of “Here are things you can do” and 10 pages at the beginning about the problem — just a quick recap about the attention economy, because most people already know there’s a problem. And then the newsletter just developed into more and more things we can do about it.
Paul: I remember when you were putting the book together, you asked me to create an exercise, although I don’t recall if you phrased it that way. And I told you that when I see something in the world, I often ask myself “How did that get that way?” And you included that in the book. I think that exercise is a pretty apt way of describing what I do with Inconspicuous Consumption, because I tend to look at things and ask questions: Why is it there? How did it get there? Who made it? Who designed it? Who decided it was necessary?
And the more ordinary or quotidian the thing, the more interested I am in how it got that way, because those are the things we tend to take it for granted. I think in your book, I used the example of a doorknob or something like that, which is the simplest possible object, right? And it’s just functional. But if you actually go to a hardware store or look in an online catalog, or if you’re a builder or an architect creating a building with doors, there’s a million doorknobs for you to choose from. How did that choice get made? What drove that choice? What drove the manufacturer to offer certain choices but not other choices?
I’m always interested in that kind of thing, and I kind of fixate and obsess over them. And for me, I guess my attention economy — and it’s sometimes to my detriment — is that I sometimes get so deep in the weeds with these things, but I do enjoy going down these rabbit holes of how things get to be a certain way. And this is all what I refer to as the inconspicuous. I really enjoy finding some sort of revelation, learning something, and then I get very excited about sharing what I’ve learned with my readers.
So when it comes to noticing things, my approach is less prescriptive than yours, but I like to think that I at least set a good example. How else would you describe both the similarities and the differences in our approaches?
Rob: I think probably I’m a little bit more driven by a kind of contrarianism. I don’t know if it comes through in the writing, but it drives a lot of my curiosity. Basically, I think that there’s an awful lot of things that people dismiss that I think should be taken more seriously. I wrote a lot about consumer culture for a long time, and a lot of people just find that work trivial, but I think it’s incredibly important. And I feel like your work is less trying to score points in some ideological debate, which I’m sometimes doing.
Paul: That’s interesting. For what it’s worth, I think of my work as somewhat ideological too, and definitely contrarian, because I’m writing about things that most people take for granted. Also, I come from a punk/indie-rock zine background, so I’m inherently suspicious of corporate culture. I mean, back around the time that you and I met in the late ’90s, I had that marketing column in Fortune magazine called “One-Man Focus Group,” where I basically made fun of mainstream corporate marketing every couple of weeks.
But my career in business journalism is nothing compared to yours. You mentioned earlier how The Art of Noticing sort of emerged from your business writing. Could you talk a bit more about that?
Rob: It’s sort of a different way of thinking about the same issues surrounding commerce and commercial persuasion. I had an earlier book in 2008, called Buying In, where I used that term, “commercial persuasion,” to get at the idea of branding and all that. And of course, our culture has only become even more soaked in commercial persuasion since then. Now it’s supplemented by this “influencer” idea and increasingly murky forms of marketing, which is another subject I’ve written about. So in a way, The Art of Noticing is the flip side of that coin, saying, “What do we do about it?” But it’s also a departure in that it’s more directly me than I’ve traditionally been through most of my career. That’s another difference between your work and mine — you’re way more personal and comfortable being a public figure than I am.
Paul: Speaking of that, though, one thing I find really interesting about The Art of Noticing is that you seem to have reinvented yourself almost as a self-help authority — dispensing wisdom, giving tips and advice, suggesting exercises almost like homework. And I have to say, as somebody who’s known you a long time, that’s not a role I ever would’ve expected for you. Is that a role you intended to carve out, or did it just sort of evolve organically?
Rob: I don’t think anyone’s ever directly said that to me before, but I think a lot of people think that this project seems very different than anything they would’ve predicted me doing. And it is different, so I’m a bit surprised too, but it also feels very natural. It feels very organic, and it is definitely very sincere. And I’m just at a different place, a different life stage. And part of it is that I have skipped around in terms of the kinds of forms I’ve worked in, because I’ve done very traditional journalism, like New York Times Magazine cover stories and things like that, and then the “Consumed” column kind of walked a tightrope between trend journalism and business journalism, and then I wrote an advice column for years, “The Workologist.”
Paul: Oh, right — I forgot about that one!
Rob: So I’m interested in different forms. A new form excites me. But regardless of the form, I think you can see the connections that run through my work. What about you? What do you think is the throughline in your work?
Paul: Well, you might remember that Uni Watch’s slogan was “For People Who Get It.” And I feel like that pretty much applies to my whole career. Like, at various points I’ve had steady gigs writing about consumer culture, marketing, travel, food, design, sports, and more, I’ve approached all of those using the same sensibility of the inconspicuous, because that’s just how I look at things. Some people get it and some people just don’t understand or care why I’m fascinated by the things I like to write about. And some of them trivialize or dismiss it, like you were saying about certain details of consumerism, but I’ve learned to accept that. And yeah, that throughline goes back to the start of my career, and even to my childhood.
Rob: Yeah, I wondered about that.
Paul: My brain just seems to be wired a certain way, which drives how I see the world. I’ve learned that certain other people have similar wiring that allows them to appreciate my work, and other people don’t have that wiring and don’t get it, all of which is fine. But that’s why I find it so interesting that you’re kind of trying to teach people to rewire their own brains! And that brings up an interesting question: When it comes to noticing inconspicuous things, how much of that do you think is innate, and how much of it can be learned or taught?
Rob: I think you can give people prompts. But my readers are essentially self-selected, so they’re people who already have this sort of worldview already, at least somewhat, and they’re excited to discover someone else who thinks kind of the way they think, but a little bit different enough that they can get something new out of it. So to a certain extent I’m just preaching to the choir, but in this case it’s a choir that’s looking for instruction.
Also, I think there are people who are very interested in this more murky territory where I think creativity comes from. I mean, the underlying question here, for both of us, is basically “What’s the point of paying attention to what other people don’t pay attention to?” And it’s like, that’s where originality and creativity come from.
Paul: That brings up something I wanted to ask you about: Your project is called The ART of Noticing. Now, I know that’s sort a catchphrase, like the art of war, the art of the deal, or the art of whatever. But when you chose that name, was it just a turn of a familiar phrase, or do you truly think there’s an art to noticing? And one reason I ask is that you and I are both journalists who’ve engaged in a lot of extracurricular creative projects. Neither of us is an artist, at least in the traditional sense of the term, like a visual artist, but I think it’s fair to say we’ve both done a lot of art projects and that we like to create art projects. So I’m wondering if a creative, artistic mindset is helpful when it comes to noticing inconspicuous things, and is that part of why you chose the name?
Rob: It probably wasn’t quite as direct as the way you’re describing it, but I definitely would never have called it the science of noticing, because that’s a completely different book. And yes, I do think it’s more of an art. And a lot of the examples in the book came from artists and artist-type people like you. There are no longitudinal studies in the book.
Paul: Do you sense that a lot of your readers are artists?
Rob: I think that there are creative types. I’ve been doing this series called the Supporter Spotlight, where I’m sort of interviewing some of my readers. One of them is an accountant, which I wouldn’t have anticipated, so you never know. I just made it sound like being an accountant isn’t creative, but creativity takes many forms. What about your readership — do you think it’s an artsy audience?
Paul: I haven’t really thought about that. A lot of what I do is so geeky and programmatic — like, I love catalogs, and often write about them, because I find something fascinating about systems and taxonomies and categories and things like that, which some people might argue works against creativity. I mean, I don’t think that’s the case, but I would understand if that’s how some people view it, because they might think creativity comes from having a more freewheeling mindset. So for those people, my way of finding delight in systems and structures might be the antithesis of creativity. I don’t see it that way myself, but I can see why some people might.
Rob: Yeah, that’s interesting.
Paul: Let’s shift gears a little. One catchphrase we hear a lot these days is that it’s better to collect experiences than things, which kind of dovetails with the whole Marie Kondo decluttering phenomenon. I bring that up because you and I are both very interested in the power of material objects, and we’ve both done a lot of object-based storytelling. You even wrote a New York Times op-ed piece in which you defended clutter. But at the same time, I think we both have a healthy skepticism about the excesses of material capitalism, and the myth that happiness is just one more material consumer purchase away. How do you balance or reconcile those impulses, and is that something you wrestle with a lot?
Rob: Somewhat. The tension that you’re getting at is something that interests me. First of all, I am very skeptical of people who claim to be anti-material objects, like objects don’t matter. I don’t try to convince them, but some object-related work gets dismissed because people think it’s shallow, it’s consumerist. You’ve contributed to a couple of the object-based projects that Josh Glenn and I have done, and like you said, it’s really object-based storytelling, and I think that’s the difference — the stories about the connections we have to certain objects. Like, if you lose your iPhone, it’s annoying, but you just get another fucking iPhone. You’re not heartbroken, it doesn’t really matter. Whereas if you lose this special knickknack that you bought on a trip with your girlfriend, that is essentially irreplaceable. So I’m interested in that tension.
Paul: So am I. I think about it a lot because I write semi-regularly about vintage items that I collect, and sometimes I’ll feel a little conflicted. Like, am I just mindlessly celebrating material culture and saying, “Look at this cool thing I bought”? Okay, so the cool thing is 70 years old, so it’s not like I just went down to the mall and bought it. And I usually delve into the item’s history, the story it has to tell, all of that. But I know that I also just like stuff, so I try to interrogate myself about that tension and sort of keep myself honest about it.
Rob: Oh, that’s interesting. But I don’t think of you as collecting stuff that is designed to be collected. Like, Pokémon or Beanie Babies or stuff like that, that’s just consumerist.
Paul: Right, that kind of thing doesn’t interest me. For me, collecting is, in its way, a creative exercise, or at least I like to think of it that way. In the past few years I’ve created small collections of vintage moth vaporizer tins and typewriter ribbon canisters, just because I think they’re beautiful and interesting, and I used to have a big pencil sharpener collection. Those have all been creative and fun, because it’s like inventing a new category. But again, I try to interrogate myself and my motives, because I know I can sometimes be tempted by the appeal of material accumulation.
Rob: Well, I’m defending you. And I want to circle back to something you mentioned before. You said you like to go down rabbit holes, “sometimes to my detriment.” So what’s the detriment? Do you mean professionally, like these are hard stories to sell? Or do you mean something else?
Paul: Well, since you mentioned that, sometimes these are hard stories to sell. It doesn’t matter that much at this stage of my career, because these days I write almost exclusively on my own platforms. But back when I was pitching stories to magazines and websites, the whole “For People Who Get It” thing also applied to editors. I always had to rely on editors with that particular sensibility, editors who get it, and those aren’t always easy to find!
But that’s not the detriment I was referring to. What I meant was that I tend to be fairly obsessive about my pursuits of this or that. Sometimes I’ll poke fun at that tendency and kind of riff on it, like the whole point of looking at anything is to go as far down the rabbit hole as possible, to the point where the obsessiveness becomes its own reward. And sometimes maybe that can be a little too much, so that’s the detriment. Like, I’ve mostly made this obsessive approach work for me professionally and creatively, but sometimes I wonder if it’s always a healthy impulse. Again, it’s a case of interrogating myself.
Rob: How often do you get interested in something that doesn’t work out? I mean, are you sometimes thinking, “I want to go down this rabbit hole, but is it worth it?” What is your hit rate on things? Do you sometimes go down the rabbit hole and then decide, well, it’s not that interesting?
Paul: It happens occasionally, but not often. I don’t have a huge discard pile of ideas I explored and then scrapped. Once I decide to actually start writing about something, I usually finish the piece and it gets published. Maybe once or twice a year I’ll kill one of my own written pieces. There are also a few instances where I’ll think, yeah, this is a good idea, I want to pursue this idea, and then I do some preliminary work and either get bored or decide it’s not such a good idea after all. That happens a few more times a year. Generally, though, I know what works for me, so I don’t have many false starts.
Rob: Do you have anybody you bounce ideas off of? Because I sort of do low-grade audience research and just have conversations with people. I’ll just kind of mention, “Hey, what do you think about whatever?” and see how they react.
Paul: Generally, I’ve learned to trust my nose, kind of follow my nose. After more than 30 years of doing this, history shows that if I’m enthusiastic or excited about something and want to express that excitement by writing about it and sharing what I’ve learned, there will usually be an audience that’s receptive to it. It may not always be a mass audience, but I’m okay with that.
And if I write something that people don’t respond to, well, honestly, I’m okay with that too, as long as I’m happy with what I’ve written. And as long as it doesn’t happen too often. I said before that we’re not artists in the traditional sense, so I don’t want to overwork this metaphor, but think about a painter working in his studio. Like, I’m sure he wants to sell the painting, but he really just wants to make the painting and he hopes people will find some connection there. And that’s sort of how I am — I just want to express what I want to express, and I’m lucky enough to know that there are usually some people out there who like my paintings, so to speak.
The other day I picked up a prescription refill from the pharmacy and that night I opened the pill bottle, and the pills looked different. They’re usually sort of square-ish, and these were round. Did they give me the wrong medication? Then I noticed there was this green label that said, basically, “This is the same medication you’ve been getting; color, size or shape may appear different.”
We’ve all seen labels like these. Sometimes it says, “Take with food,” or whatever. They’re always brightly colored. And I thought, oh, these things are classically inconspicuous. How many variations are there? And I ended up — I guess this is what I meant by “sometimes to my detriment” — instead of going to bed, I spent the next two hours obsessed with looking at the world of these labels, which it turns out are called auxiliary prescription labels. And they’re sold by, as you would expect, pharmacy supply operations. But you can also order them on Amazon.
I found well over a hundred different examples, including nine different ones just relating to refrigeration — like, “Refrigerate before opening,” “Refrigerate after opening,” “Refrigerate until opening,” “Refrigerate and shake.” And I mean, for me, this was perfect. This was the exact thing I love. It’s small. It’s right in front of us — every single person has dealt with these, right? Everybody has encountered these, but most people don’t think about them. They’re brightly colored and there’s so many of them and they break down into kind of categories, so it almost feels collectible, or categorizable in a way that appeals to me. There’s sort of a programmatic structure to it.
And I learned that different vendors have different versions. So there is no official “May cause drowsiness” label — there are dozens of different ones. And of course I tried to find as many as I could. That’s my nature. And so this to me was a classically inconspicuous thing that I happened upon and discovered and investigated in a classically Paul Lukas way.
And so to answer your question, did I get any feedback from anybody for this story idea? No. The piece is mostly written and I mean, I’m just going to publish that fucker. I’m not too concerned about “Are people going to get it?” The people who like what I do will get it, I’m fairly positive of that. And if they don’t, oh well. I’ve had so much fun doing working on it, and I’ve learned so much, so that’s enough for me. [The piece was published a few days after this interview and was generally well received.]
Rob: Let’s use this as a transition to the most important question. So some reader of mine who’s not familiar with your work, reading this just now about a deep dive on the sticker on a prescription bottle, they might ask you the same question that people often ask me: What is the value in reading about that? Or let’s not say the value, but what’s the appeal? You’ve had now years of experience of running across people who clearly value your work highly. What are they getting out of it?
Paul: When I was looking at the prescription bottle and I saw the label and it suddenly occurred to me that I could write about it, the metaphorical light bulb went on over my head. And I think that’s the appeal, both for me and for the readers. I think when people come across this stuff, a certain light bulb goes on over their heads. There’s a pleasure in that, a delight and a sense of discovery in learning something that you didn’t realize was even there to be learned.
Also, I think there’s a tribalism there, where it’s not just the discovery of this thing you find interesting, but also the sense that you’re in the minority maybe that you’re sort of a little —
Rob: Weird?
Paul: Yeah. And that finding commonality with other weirdos is edifying and gratifying, and maybe there’s a little bit of a relief to know that you’re not alone. I’ve had readers say to me, “Oh, thank God I found your work, I thought I was the only one” — there’s a sense of gratitude and relief there. So there’s a sense of community. And what is community in this case? It’s people with a shared sensibility. Not necessarily a specific interest, but a sensibility. And if you are used to being told that your sensibility is a little off, or if other people don’t get it, there’s a comfort in finding that other people feel the way you do. And here’s someone writing about it and expressing it and kind of articulating it.
Anyway, getting back to your question about what’s the value here, I’d say that aside from the sense of community and commonality with like-minded people, I think the light bulb effect — getting your brain to flex in different directions than you would normally flex it — can pay off in other ways that has other dividends later on. So that’s the payoff.
Rob: Clearly. I believe that pretty strongly. So that would be an attraction to your site. The only thing I can add to that is something I tell students, which is that there’s a real tendency — especially when you’re student age and trying to figure out what you’re doing — to really be up on what everyone else is talking about, to be conversant in the mainstream thing. And if you are interested in, to go back to your weirdo theme, if you’re interested in something that no one else is interested in, it feels wrong. It feels like you shouldn’t pursue it.
But the truth is the exact opposite. That stuff that everyone else is overlooking is exactly the thing you should pursue, because that’s what makes you different. And that’s only going to become more important in an AI-driven environment. We won’t go down that road, but the important point is that the hunger for being an individual is what I think that you’re feeding on some level. And it’s definitely what I’m trying to feed.
Paul: Yeah, I think you’re right. I hadn’t thought about that regarding students, but the pressure to conform and to fit in — to be a contrarian at that age is tricky.
Rob: In some ways, that pressure to conform never goes away. To your point about seeing the light bulb go off: There’s a contingent of people out there who don’t even have the light bulb, and there’s only so much you can do. But if you’ve got the light bulb, you’re looking for something to make it go on! I think that’s what you’re trying to do, make that bulb light up. And that’s what I’m trying to do.
Paul: This is the last question I have written down. I’ve noticed that in The Art of Noticing, you will sometimes refer to an activity as a “practice” or a “daily practice” or a “repeated practice.” And I have to admit, I am somewhat suspicious of that term. And also the term “mindfulness,” which occasionally comes up on The Art of Noticing as well. These terms feel sort of New Age-y or woo-woo to me. Like, I go for a bike ride every day — is that a practice? What about making my bed, or calling my mom regularly, or brushing my teeth?
I say all this not to critique your use of these terms, but rather to ask: What am I missing? Because if my good friend Rob is using these terms, then there must be more to them than I thought.
Rob [laughs]: Well, I have a two-part answer. We’ll start with mindfulness. When I embarked on this project, I had an awareness of the idea of mindfulness —
Paul: An awareness of mindfulness?
Rob [laughs some more]: That does sound ridiculous. I mean, I knew that there were books and basically a whole culture around mindfulness. But I wasn’t like, “Oh, that’s my audience.” Since then, I have come to accept and really to welcome that what I am doing does overlap with those “practices,” if you will. It overlaps with those audiences. People would come to me through those channels, and they were finding things in The Art of Noticing that I hadn’t really thought about in the way they were thinking about it, but that resonated with me. Writers are always saying, well, I learned so much from my readers. I really did learn a lot from my readers about this.
There’s this app called Waking Up, which is a meditation mindfulness app with a lot of original content. I did a series for them about The Art of Noticing and it was interesting, because I got a lot of new readers, some of whom were pushing back on what I was doing. A lot of my exercises involve imagination; I see that as a way of creative engagement with the world. A more traditional mindfulness meditation approach would not, because you’re not in a state of awareness, you’re outside the moment. We don’t have to get into the into the gnarly details of it, but it brought me in contact with a group of readers that I wasn’t really aware of, but we clearly have things in common, which I find interesting. I’m not going to change what I’m doing, but I have to think about, say, “What are the values of what they’re doing and how do they overlap with mine?”
Now, the word “practice” is a separate thing. I associate that with art — with an art “practice.” And I think my use of it is often a little tongue-in-cheek.
Paul: You had a post recently — it wasn’t your idea, I think you were quoting someone else — but the idea was to put the fork down between bites when you’re eating, to just experience the food. And it was referred to — I think both by the person who came up with it and by you — as a “practice.”
Is it almost a marketing term? If I go to the gym, I have a gym subscription. But if I go to yoga, I have a yoga practice. This morning, Ezra Klein had a new podcast episode and literally the first words out of his mouth were, “For 15 years I’ve had a daily meditation practice.”
Rob: I hadn’t consciously thought about how closely associated that term is with that [New Age-y] world. I picked it up as an art world term, as an artist saying, “My practice consists of” whatever. If part of Robert Rauschenberg’s practice was to walk around the block and collect detritus that he subsequently used in collage work, that’s part of his work. That’s part of his practice. That’s not an additional side activity.
Paul: I get the work part; I don’t get the practice part, I guess. Maybe it’s his “method”? I don’t know, just something about that word.
Rob: I think that you can have that objection. I’m going to think about that word now and probably use it more sparingly! I think that there are enough readers who are comfortable with that term to mean habit or exercise or whatever that they relate to it. And sometimes I’m trying to meet readers where they are.
Paul: That’s a really generous-spirited mindset. Is that something you constantly strive to do with this project?
Rob: Everything is for the reader. I work for the reader. I mean, I’m trying to get away with doing my thing, of course. But the final focal point has to be the reader, that’s who the boss is. It doesn’t mean you pander, but ultimately you have to respect readers, and their influence. So the word “practice” — we’re getting too carried away with that one word, but it comes from that tendency, too. I feel like readers are comfortable with it and they know what I’m saying.
Paul: Hmmm, now I’m wondering about my own approach. You asked earlier if I get feedback ahead of time and I said, no, I’m just going to do it if I believe in the story or the topic or whatever. And maybe that’s not meeting the reader where they are. Maybe that’s just me being selfish and doing what I want to do. But I feel like I have learned from experience that if I trust myself, my readers will go along for the ride as well.
Rob: That seems right. When I’m sort of fake focus-grouping a subject, just by casually mentioning things, it’s because I’m not sure about it yet and I’m sort of seeing what kind of reaction I’m getting. But there are also times when I have just abandoned all that and say, “Look, I don’t care if no one likes this. I’ve got to say it.”
Paul: I think that’s a good place to stop. But wait, you recently told me about a great question that someone asked you: What would you do if you had a billion dollars?
Rob: I’d write.
Paul: Yeah, me too.
Rob: I think that that’s an important commonality that we have. And I guess any real writer has that.
Paul: Yeah. Last summer I took two months off from writing. The first week of that was okay, and then the rest of it — it was a miserable two months. It’s not just that I missed writing, it’s I missed making something. I missed the process of building a story, and that’s especially true when you’re running your own website or newsletter like we are. So yeah, if I had a billion dollars, I’d keep doing this.
Rob: But the scale of the work might change a little bit.
Paul [laughs]: Slightly.
Rob: Maybe it might influence your practice.
Paul: Touché.
And there you have it. Super-duper thanks to Rob for doing this with me! One more time, here are the links for his Substack, his subscription page, and his personal website.
Before we wrap, I want to add that Rob recently did a short audio essay that I love so much. It’s less than three minutes long but really captures what makes The Art of Noticing so special (plus, as I think you’ll agree, Rob has a fantastic reading voice). Check it out here, or just use the player below:
Paul Lukas has been obsessing over the inconspicuous for most of his life, and has been writing about those obsessions for more than 30 years. You can contact him here.
"I’m not too concerned about “Are people going to get it?” The people who like what I do will get it, I’m fairly positive of that. And if they don’t, oh well. I’ve had so much fun doing working on it, and I’ve learned so much, so that’s enough for me."
This passage really spoke to me.
I've spent the last six months writing and releasing a content series that - if I'm being brutally honest - has not received the views or reaction I was hoping for. And for a while - especially in the beginning of the release cycle - that really had me down.
But recently I've adopted your mindset above. The process was a fun challenge. I enjoyed the rabbit holes I've gone down. So, even if nobody wants to read about college football Grid Graphs of the 1920s (https://www.si.com/college/nebraska/football/dave-feit-s-greatest-huskers-by-the-numbers-24-lloyd-cardwell-brandon-rigoni-grid-graph), I'm proud of the end result.
Thank you
Loved this interview (though I knew I would)! Also: “I think when people come across this stuff, a certain light bulb goes on over their heads. There’s a pleasure in that, a delight and a sense of discovery in learning something that you didn’t realize was even there to be learned.” Yes! That’s exactly it!