🚶Walking as a lifestyle🚶

& what can we learn from the French concept of flâneuring?

Today’s Daily Concept explores a concept that has its origins in 19th century Paris: the flâneur.

Flâneurs are individuals who spend their time walking leisurely through cities.

The original term refers to men, but many women (including one of our newest subscribers!) identify as flâneuses.

Flâneurs bask in urban life. They take great pleasure in watching the mix of humanity pass them by as they stroll through city streets.

The term was coined by French poet Charles Baudelaire in an 1863 essay entitled “The Painter of Modern Life.”

In the essay, he discussed the lifestyle pursued by French painter Constantin Guys.

Guys spent his days wandering around Paris, observing the people and using his observations as inspiration for his art.

The term flâneur comes from the Norse verb flana, meaning “to wander with no purpose.”

You can wander with no purpose, but that doesn’t mean that being a flâneur is pointless. Far from it.

Baudelaire explained the flâneuring lifestyle in his essay:

“The crowd is his domain, just as the air is the bird’s, and water that of the fish. His passion and his profession is to merge with the crowd.

For the perfect idler, for the passionate observer it becomes an immense source of enjoyment to establish his dwelling in the throng, in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite.

To be away from home and yet to feel at home anywhere; to see the world, to be at the very centre of the world, and yet to be unseen of the world.”

While the concept of the flâneur was developed in response to the particularities of life in 19th century Paris, many writers and intellectuals have adapted the term to the present day.

Erika Owen, who published her book The Art of Flaneuring: How to Wander with Intention and Discover a Better Life in 2019, defined flâneuring as:

experiencing your environment without interacting with it.... [and enjoying the] sense of quiet solitude that comes with choosing to observe the chaos in front of you over interacting with it.

In an interview about her book, Owens said that flâneuring had helped her recapture moments of spontaneity in a life that could feel overwhelmed by schedule and routine.

It also helped her to:

• rediscover her creativity

• talk to people more easily

• become more calm

• become more resilient to difficulties in life

• re-connect to her body

There is also a newer version of the concept: the cyberflâneur.

This new term was coined to explain the process of scrolling through the Internet without a purpose.

It’s also been called surfing the web, but the cyberflâneur concept captures the way that we gain something from wandering (or scrolling) aimlessly.

Instead of walking the streets, we follow our curiosity as it pulls us down different digital pathways.

The term was defined by writer John Hendel in a 2012 Atlantic article titled The Life of the Cyberflâneur:

A cyberflâneur, by definition, strolls through the Internet.

Little purpose guides his journey, and hours slip by as the individual explores the many different crevices of the ever-growing web, from Wikipedia to Tumblr, from popular news sites to Twitter, from obscure journals to social media.

Hendel and other observers of digital culture like Evgeny Morozov observed, in 2012, that the Internet of the cyberflâneur was slowly dying.

In his 2012 New York Times essay “The Death of the Cyberflâneur”, Morozov observed that the growth of social media platforms like Facebook were making it harder to scroll the Internet aimlessly.

Morozov wrote:

“Transcending its original playful identity, [the Internet] is no longer a place for strolling - it's a place for getting stuff done.”

Because we are all on major social networks like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn now, it’s much harder to explore the Internet than it was 20 or even 10 years ago. (see the cover of the 1997 book Exploring the Internet below)

All the content we see on these platforms is delivered to us algorithmically, with the multi-billion dollar companies behind them attempting to keep us on their platforms for as long as possible.

Why? So that we spend more time looking at the ads they sell based on hyper-specific data they collect about us.

So, what can we take away from the idea of the flâneur and cyberflâneur? I humbly offer a few recommendations:

1. Take more walks — especially unplanned walks with no destination or goal in mind.

2. When you use the Internet, be mindful of what you’re consuming. Don’t doomscroll on Instagram or TikTok, which are designed to be highly addictive.

   
   Instead, seek out interesting communities or websites that don’t feed the social media machine.

If you do both of these things, you’re well on your way to becoming a (cyber)flâneur.

Happy Trails to you, until we meet again.

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ART OF THE DAY

Today’s Art of the Day is a painting titled “Meeting on the Promenade” by Constantin Guys, the French painter who Baudelaire wrote about in his flâneur essay.