In my last post I began the work of figuring out what to do with the rest of my life by spewing a handful of mental models and worldviews. It's the written equivalent of dumping my junk drawer on the kitchen table so I can at least see all my stuff, notice what's missing, and start to sort things out.
This process is necessary because many people, myself included, find themselves to be inadequate justification for their own lives. Few people get to the end of their days and report that living according to their own hedonic whims resulted in a life of rich fulfillment. People often find meaning in devoting themselves to causes, which can range from their nation to their families, helping the poor to contributing to a political movement. I'm no different. In a very real way, I need something to believe in, something I can convince myself is worth fighting for. I say "need" here because, lacking some external construct that matters to me more than I do, I agree with Camus that it's impossible to rationalize living.
Pawing through the contents of my junk drawer of mental frameworks, there's an obvious theme. Humanity is in a tight spot. Our society has gotten away from us, taken on a mind of its own. The machine used to be in service of humankind, but now humans seem to be in service of the machine. And the purpose of the machine is to eat the world.
This crisis is both so vast and so complex, so gargantuan and so elusive, it's maddeningly difficult to pin down and know even where to start. This must be why there are so few people actually doing anything about it - it's almost impossible to derive a satisfactory answer of "what to do?" in a way that makes sense to us. The metacrisis is more than our hominid brains are capable of grappling with.
The elevator pitch for our species is that we need to stop burning fossil fuels, fundamentally restructure society (in order to stop eating the world), and begin adapting to a world that behaves very differently to the one we've lived in for the past ten thousand years. Everything else is just details.
Stop burning fossil fuels
Fundamentally restructure society
Adapt to the unfolding world-system changes we've already baked in (i.e. stop thinking as if we still lived in the 20th century)
If humanity had a cubicle office, there would be a sticky note stuck to the monitor with this scribbled on it.
These are existential and non-optional imperatives. One way or another, in 100 or 500 years, there isn't going to be very much fossil fuel burning going on, society is going to be radically different, and we'll be adapted to the unfolded world-system changes. There are real limits to the world we live on, and there's no getting around it. Our Star Trek future has been canceled permanently. The only choice is in how we're going to attain these imperatives. The more we resist them, the more suffering we bake into the cake.
All three imperatives are interrelated. Because we have to stop burning fossil fuels, we won't be able to as cheaply ship around massive amounts of goods including food, which means our society will be fundamentally restructured in terms of economics, production (including food), culture, and geopolitics. Because our climate is going to destabilize, we can't rely on a small handful of agricultural breadbaskets (even if we could afford the fuel burning to distribute the food from those places, which we can't), therefore we'll have to adapt by radically decentralizing food production and diets on a regional basis. It's all tied together.
At any rate, this is relevant to deciding what to do with my life for two reasons:
This is the world I'm going to live in, and so whatever I come up with to do with my life has to take into account this reality, not the reality I was born to. Time is moving fast now.
The metacrisis is the greatest opportunity for heroics our species will ever encounter. The stakes are enormous, the strategies complex, the potential future branches of our species wide. We're in a sort of trajectory bottleneck. We got to this point, but now the system parameters are about to go non-deterministic, and any variety of future realities are on the table. Right now is an excellent time to devote myself to something that has a better than average chance of actually mattering to other beings.
These two points are good news from a deciding-what-to-do-with-my-life perspective, because they make it very simple. And - bonus - almost no one can agree on what we should actually, like, do about it all, which means it’s all on the table. The world is a buffet of meaning-making activities in a way it hasn't been since maybe ever. Should you work on cold fusion or throw your energies into agitating for political change with Extinction Rebellion? Who knows? Pick whatever sounds good and do it! Should you quit money like Mark Boyle, become a green simple-living warrior like Rob Greenfield, or amass a bunch of financial wealth and strategically invest it with world-changing startups? Whatever floats your boat.
I’ve yet narrow down what I want to do specifically, but I’ve identified what I think the most important work for my species is, which helps point my thinking in the right direction. I can use this understanding as a litmus test for whatever I come up with to work on in my own life.