Philip Maughan, Writer

Philip Maughan is a writer and researcher who has written on food technology, extreme agriculture, cutting edge science, speculative interfaces and more.

APOSSIBLE™ is a non-profit bringing psychologists, technologists, artists and creatives together to explore how technology can better support creativity and human fulfillment. In this ongoing interview series we’re discovering what people value, what makes their lives fulfilling, and what kinds of relationships to technology they already cherish.

1. What is a ritual, practice, or routine in your life that is important for your psychological wellbeing and/or fulfillment? Why?

I probably think more than most people do about the impact each of their habits will have when repeated over weeks, seasons, years. Whatever I’m working on, I generally set my own schedule, stepping out of it now and then but otherwise defaulting to my preferred routine.

I have lots of habits that structure a good day – phone on airplane mode until lunch, 30 minute breaks between work bouts in which I get up to clean the house or go outside – but the practice that has led to most breakthroughs over the years is probably the most banal.

I start every day with a walk. I try to end it with one, too. In the morning, lately, I’ve been leaving my phone at home but some days I take it with me, mostly to use as a notepad.

Even in the depths of winter, I wake up, drink water, brush my teeth and go outside for 30-45 minutes. If I don’t do this I feel trapped. It’s the moment when I plan my day, calm my nerves, reflect on my dreams from the previous night, or just let my mind wander wherever it wants.

2. What is a human-made creation that brings out the best in you? Why?

Hmm, this is hard. The boundaries of what’s human-made, non-human made, and unmade can be hard to detect sometimes. For example, the ragged, wild-appearing park near my home is largely human-made, but we thank nature for its calming influence. Social rituals like meeting for a drink or attending a party (even one based on the most insubstantial premises) can feel human-made and unconscious at the same time, something we simply do as animals rather than a plan we invented.

Maybe because I am fascinated by infrastructure I will say the transport network. I include cycle lanes and public walkways in this. It gets the best out of me by extending my body across the city, by forcing me to think, walk, run, and get in close proximity with others. London’s transport network isn’t easy. It’s something you have to learn to use and become better at with time. You can contrast the transport network – a system of roads, rails, carriages, apps, drivers, administrators – which requires something of me to other social-technical systems like airports or hospitals. These are systems you have no real choice but to give yourself over to. When I was younger I loved this feeling – placing my body and plans in the hands of this complex relay of processes. Today I’d say there’s a much greater separation between head and heart.

I believe that humans are capable of running efficient systems where strict protocols enable maximum safety, trust, comfort, and service to passengers, patients, guests. It’s also worth my pointing out that these are places where so much of my free thinking happens, in large part because the immediate next step is out of my control.) It’s also a taste of an actually existing utopia, a pragmatic Eden, which reminds me of this answer from a legendary interview with intellectual historian Fred Turner which I cross-published while an editor at 032c.

He writes: "I’ve always found it very hard to think about any system, any planned, top-down system as, by definition, benevolent. The best systems and institutions are constantly focused on negotiation, on structured negotiation. So, the best institutions are places that have a constant system of check and balances.

My idea of utopia is actually a hospital. [Laughs] A hospital is a place where people get together, work very hard over very long periods of time in defined roles, checking and rechecking each other’s work, and they work toward a benevolent goal of saving lives. If you were to build a society built along similar lines, hopefully not one where everybody wears scrubs and white jackets, that starts to be a better place. So, the building is architected, so the systems are architected, but the negotiation is constant. That’s what I’d like to see."

3. When do you cherish the slow or hard way of doing something? Why?

Many of the things that I consider a chore become an immense pleasure when I have time to dedicate to them. Ironing, washing the dishes, transcribing an interview, etc. It seems as though most things can become enjoyable given the right conditions. When I have nothing but time, sunlight, security, and healthy constraints (think of a mid-summer rainy day as the ideal constraint, in which you suddenly find yourself happy and grateful to be inside doing something useful), I take pleasure in doing them. By contrast, it’s when time is lacking that I start doing things poorly, enjoying them less, wasting time. Busy mode can be exhilarating, but if you keep vibrating at maximum frequency for too long you do not allow yourself the time to be original. I think we all should commit to being weird. It’s the same with intellectual work. It takes time to be original, annoying as that might be.

4. What is something you appreciate or long for from the past? Why?

I’m interested in the question of how ideas – particularly shared ones – influence the future direction of society. Yesterday I was reading this article about “collective mental time travel.” There’s a psychologist quoted in there, Meymune Topçu, who says based on her research that “when we think about our own futures, we tend to have an optimism bias, but when people are asked to think about the future of their countries, they often focus more on potentially worrisome, rather than potentially exciting, possibilities. (These findings have not been found to be culturally universal: some newer research with Chinese participants has shown that such positive and negative biases are not present in those study groups.)”

It was nice to see this confirmed, as based on comments by people I know, there’s a lot of disapproval of the world outside that contrasts with how people feel about their own future. For whatever reason I feel the opposite. For about 3 years now I have felt cautiously optimistic about the future of humanity but largely pessimistic about the years I still have left to live. I’m not sure how to shake this. I can see many hopeful futures for humanity even despite the daily bombardment of negativity in the news and elsewhere. But for whatever reason, it feels way harder to imagine change in my own life. So if I were to long for anything from my personal history, perhaps it would be the messianic self-confidence I had when I was in my teens and early twenties. It’s not that I was callous or obnoxious, I was just still in main character mode, which I’m not any more. I think it’s possible to get it back but I would need a steady stream of wins over quite a long period. Back then everything could be going terribly and I still felt anointed. The irony of all this is that I get great satisfaction from thinking deeply about society and the systems that run it (agriculture, government, computation, climate/the weather, the natural world). From this perspective I hardly matter at all.