Stories help us make sense of our place in the world, and can help us think about our purpose, our mission. I think industrial civilization is a large ship on the ocean that has just struck an iceberg. Most people are scrambling about, trying to figure out how to save the ship. I no longer think the ship can be saved. I am trying to find and help the other passengers who are also diligently attempting to build a lifeboat flotilla that we can move to. The lifeboat flotilla will not have a fully stocked bar and nightly extravagant entertainments, but it will have the distinct advantage of not being at the bottom of the ocean soon.
The flotilla is why I bother rolling out of bed in the morning.
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Transcript
I’d like to clarify something here.
I’m not trying to convince anyone that the consumer mindset is dysfunctional if you don’t already have at least some sense of unease with it. A ton of work has already been done on the consumer-culture criticism side of things by some really smart people going all the way back to, let’s go with Thorough somewhat arbitrarily, and I don’t have anything to add to it. It’s a pretty mature field of inquiry, as far as I’m concerned.
A space that is far less mature, I think, is the space of “what to DO with that criticism, in our own lives, actually, as in, on Tuesday, how ought all this smart criticism inform my actions?” So if, like me, you’re on board with the criticisms of consumer culture and industrial civilization, but you’re starved for material on how to action that criticism, this is the podcast for you.
I’m basically trying to make the podcast I wish I had listened to five years ago. I was deeply troubled by consumer culture and the symptoms of industrial civilization like climate change, resource depletion, and the like, but I wasn’t sure what to do about it. There is a lot written on things you can do, but none of it made total sense to me - it all had something missing, or it was an approach designed for a different personality type and didn’t resonate with me, or there were flaws in their critique that didn’t sit well with me - so I was really beating my head against a wall on all of it. Should I keep doing professional sustainability in the built environment? Should I become an activist dirtbag and go all in with the Extinction Rebellion people? What about the derrick Jensen Deep Green Resistance approach, should I become an eco-saboteur? Around and around in circles in my head I went. I was stuck. And it was deeply frustrating.
Just over two years ago, I got unstuck. I saw myself spending a lot of money, being a part of the problem as I saw it, and not heading in the direction of increased autonomy, and I freaked out a bit, and I looked under one more rock, and I found some stuff that ejected me from the loop I was in. I’m referring to the work of Jacob Lund Fisker. It “clicked” for me. Now, the thing is, what was compelling to me wasn’t any new information he has, it’s the way he tied together information I already had. He connected the dots in a way that I’d been unable to, and so when I read his stuff all of a sudden all of this information I’d been reading for years made sense and related in a clear way.
The thing about his work is that I had to read in between the lines to be able to tell that his stuff was relevant to my stuckness. In fact I’d read his book years earlier, in 2016 or so, and it didn’t click at all - I thought it was just some OG FI book. He buried the big picture of his work - for good reasons - in such a way that it takes effort to uncover if you’re coming at it from the angle I was, which was trying to figure out what to do about consumer culture and industrial civilization. That’s why I don’t refer to his stuff by name very often, because it’s very easy to get distracted by the surface level of what it claims to be. There’s layers to it. It takes digging to get to the gold, and it’s easy to get turned off.
This podcast - and my blog - is largely my excavation efforts - my project of taking those connected dots and explaining them in a way that I’d have been able to understand five years ago. Because that place I was stuck in - I know I wasn’t alone there. I’m not the only person to get stuck, to beat my forehead against that particular brick wall. Now that I’ve found a way around it, I feel duty-bound to send back some notes, a scribbled map, directions, anything that might be useful to anyone else still back there.
Because this world needs more unstuck people.
At any rate, point is, if you’re not stuck in that place or somewhere on the path around it, this podcast might not be for you. I’m not going to spend any time “convincing” anyone that it’s a good idea to evolve beyond the consumer mindset. I’m talking to people who already accept that idea, who are impatient with yet another screed about how consumer culture is bad, and just want some good information on what to do about it that makes sense to them, that they can use. If you happen to think consumerism and endless industrial-based economic growth is a good thing, I’m not going to argue with you, or spend any time trying to change your mind. It’s not my work.
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Speaking of work, let’s talk about The Work.
In episode 2 I made a case that achieving autonomy, freedom of action, is important for more reasons than just being fun, although it is that. In episode three I talked about the relationship between skills and autonomy, how mastery and broad competence can be used to gain that freedom, and that increased freedom can then be spent gaining more skills and higher levels of broad mastery. I called it the Skill Ratchet. Technically it’s a positive feedback loop.
But so what? What’s the point of it all? Are autonomy and mastery worthy goals in and of themselves?
Well, maybe. There’s certainly nothing wrong with being a hypercompetent badass, particularly if the end result is that you become a nonconsumer and stop being part of the problem. In a sense that IS the point - for great big masses of people to become free, and masterful, and nonconsumers, that solves a whole host of problems right there.
But if you’re like me, and the conceit of this podcast is that you are like me, then you want a little more of an external reason for all this effort. You want a purpose, a mission, a telos, a dharma, call it what you will, we possess a desire to expend our energies in the service of something greater than ourselves, in a real and tangible way. I don’t find just myself a compelling enough reason to roll out of bed in the morning. For better or worse I require a sense of being involved in something WITH and FOR other people.
It’s easy enough to write a list of things you could work on. Climate change, materials toxicity, clean energy, riparian restoration, rewilding, permaculture, community resilience, renewable energy policy, governance, xrisk, collective trauma work, eco psychology - the list goes on, there’s something for everyone.
And - just as an aside - if you’re highly autonomous, you can pick and choose and get after whatever kind of work stokes you out the most, even if it doesn’t pay much or at all. And if you’re broadly competent, and skilled at developing skills, you’ll likely be good at it and able to provide value in that space, and be able to make connections to other fields and areas of competence in ways that more narrowly specialized people won’t be able to.
And because you’re becoming a nonconsumer it won’t matter much if the work is paid or not. You can decouple income from the decision of where to direct your energies. And because external rewards aren’t much of a factor, you’ll bring a sense of higher agency and play to your work, which are prerequisites for intrinsic motivation, which is FUN, and correlated with creativity, insight, a sense of being tapped in to a source of clean limitless energy that fuels you and contributes to a sense of meaning and fulfillment.
Whoa. Lofty stuff. Let’s reel it in a bit. If you’ve already got something you’re stoked to pursue, that’s great, just get after it. But if you aren’t sure what you Should Do, how do you choose? How do you decide? You can spend years over analyzing and spinning your wheels trying to decide, thinking you even need to decide and pick one thing. (You don’t, by the way.) It doesn’t help that so many of these fields claim to be the One Most Important Thing. Nothing’s the one most important thing; that’s old-school enlightenment linear thinking, the kind of thing we’ve got to to evolve beyond.
It’s useful to have a way of thinking about all this stuff, to make sense of it. I’ve found it very useful indeed to have, not a framework or a structure, but a story.
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Once upon a time, there was a great ship on the ocean. It’s possible that if it had been piloted with more skill, or at a lower speed, it would have cruised the oceans for a long time.
But this ship was piloted at great speed, and although some warned of the dangers, they were not heeded. One night, the ship struck a great floating mountain of ice, and ripped a gash in its side.
Being such a large ship with many holds, it’s continued on at it’s previous pace. Immediately after the impact, the captain of the ship explained that it was just a glancing blow - a dent - a flesh wound - nothing to worry about. But as crews were sent down to investigate the damage, the picture became clearer. Seawater was entering the ship, slowly but surely.
Still, most who were aware of the problem weren’t worried. We have pumps, they said, and scores of engineers and technicians, a full machine shop, ingenious bulkheads, the best minds and the very craftspeople who built this mighty ship — they’ll think of something, and all will be well.
As time went on, and more and more holds filled with water, more and more resources were devoted to the leak. Faster, more efficient pumps were designed and built. Larger patches and more sophisticated underwater welding equipment was invented. Strategies for flooding less important holds first, like steerage, before the high rent cabins, were employed.
Meanwhile, in the passenger compartments, the party mostly raged on. Everyone knows by now that something is wrong, but the official line is that it’s being worked on and there will be no disruption to the way life is being lived on the ship.
Some passengers are skeptical. Some campaign to get the captain replaced with one who will take the problem more seriously. There is intrigue and there are power struggles. Conspiracy theories, even: there is an evil cabal of officers who secretly run the ship; there was no breach; there was no iceberg; the ship runs on ingenuity and dreams, not diesel, etc. Some campaign to stop the ship to effect repairs.
But the engines still run and the ship still displaces enough water to float, so the ship hammers ahead, the nightly extravagant entertainments continue as scheduled, and the booze continues to flow at the bar. Everything seems mostly as it was before the breach, as long as you don’t go down to the low decks and see the hatches sealed against seawater for yourself… as long as you don’t sit in on meetings of engineers and scientists arguing about pump head and Navier Stokes equations and displacement volumes, and watch the glazed, uncomprehending expressions on the faces of the captain and officers.
As long as you don’t try to hold eye contact with the divers who get sent down every day to weld yet another patch, as long as you don’t notice how many empty glasses they leave on the bar every night, as long as you don’t notice how desperately and furiously they dance.
If you do notice these things, you become alert that something is off. There’s a mismatch between the official line and the reality you observe.
I was, metaphorically speaking, one of the engineers whose job it was to make sure that the energy consumed by the ship for things like lights, computers, and air conditioning was as low as possible, so that the engines could run as fast as possible and so the pumps could pump water out as fast as possible. I began to ask questions, like, why must the ship go so fast? and - how much water do the pumps need to pump in order to save the ship?
Here’s what I’ve worked out so far: 1) Whoever built this ship didn’t bolt the damned hull plates on correctly. The only thing keeping the ship together is the pressure exerted on the bow by force of forward motion. The ship can’t stop - in fact it can’t even slow down! The captain has their hands absolutely full just maintaining speed - they can’t afford the time it takes to think ahead, otherwise the ship will break up now.
Because of this, there is no happy ending for the ship. Eventually the diesel tanks will run out, the ship will begin to slow, the hull plates will slip off, and the ship. will. founder.
The idea that the ship can be “saved”, that it can continue to cruise the seas indefinitely, is based on a faulty understanding of how the ship works, how it’s constructed.
I saw, then, that my work was just prolonging the inevitable. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing - we need all the time we can get in order to come up with some other solution - but what bothered me is that I couldn’t find anyone doing anything beyond kicking the can down the road. No one in an official capacity, anyway. So I lost faith in what I was doing. I didn’t see how my work had any real relevance to the future, and that disillusionment completely shattered my motivation to Save the Ship.
What I did discover, that gave me hope, is that there exists on the ship a subversive, mostly underground, definitely unsanctioned movement of people who are building a lifeboat flotilla. Singly and in small groups, people are ditching the official narrative and are no longer looking for direction from above. THey’re simply getting to work, putting their minds and efforts to the task of making something that people can live on that will float when the ship no longer is.
The lifeboat flotilla is unlikely to have nightly entertainments or an infinitely stocked bar, the linen service will be spotty, and the towels will definitely be less fluffy, but it will have the distinct advantage of not being at the bottom of the ocean soon.
Importantly, the lifeboat flotilla is not about merely surviving long enough for another ship to pick us up. There is no other ship. THe flotilla immediately is about surviving the foundering of the ship, yes, but then it is about being it’s own thing, being the place where people are, where people live and love and fight with each other and love each other. It will stop being the lifeboat flotilla and will just be… the flotilla. Memory of life on board the ship will fade with time, and new kinds of lives will be lived.
We’ll take as much cool stuff as we can from the ship - there’s a lot of great stuff on it, that it’d be a shame to lose forever. Some people working on the flotilla are bitter about the ship and don’t want anything to remind them of it, but I bet they’ll come around to saving a few choice things when their appendixes start to hurt.
For me, the flotilla is the story, or the metaphor, that I use to make sense of the world and my place in it. It’s my Why - why to get out of bed in the morning. It’s a direction for creativity, and a place to find like minded people and community. It’s a place to find meaning.
I can ask questions like, will this thing I'm thinking of doing help or hurt the flotilla? Is it ship relevant stuff or flotilla relevant stuff? I'd like to be doing as much flotilla relevant stuff as possible.
This podcast is flotilla related: I'm trying to reach people who have doubts about the official narrative of save the ship, let them know that there'a a flotilla to work on in case they don't already know that, and lay out a method for freeing themselves of ship related chores so they can spend more time lending a hand with the flotilla. Flotilla outreach, so to speak.
I do 3d visualization and concept design for people who have cool stuff they want to build on the flotilla, to help them think it through and get it built.
If a decent enough opportunity comes along to do 3d design for some innovative ship thing that will help the ship stay afloat longer, buying the flotilla more time, I'll do that. Particularly if it'll earn me income that I can spend on the flotilla. I'm not a purist.
I also build my own stuff from time to time with my own two hands. I just finished building a little cabin out in the desert, I spent a couple months this summer helping my friends build their skoolie they're going to live in, I have plans to build underground greenhouses and solar thermal systems - all flotilla stuff.
At the moment I'm slowtraveling round the world, partly just because it's fun and I've always wanted to, bit also because I want to visit a bunch of other people in different cultures and climates who are working on the flotilla in their corner of the wlrld, see how they're doing it, lend a hand, take notes, learn from them, maybe make some connections and get ideas for what I can do when I get back.
All of this lifestyle design stuff - freedom, autonomy, mastery, skills, - it's in pursuit of becoming the most useful member of the flotilla I can be.
So for me, the flotilla is a story that helps me think through how to approach The Work, how to make sense of my purpose in the world. I'm going to refer to it pretty often here.
By the way, I originally got the idea for the flotilla metaphor from am essay on Medium a few years ago. I lost track of that essay and can't find it now. If you happen to know what essay I'm referring to,please send me a link so I can credit the author. Email.