I’ve noticed a recent spike in articles on either side of the “lifestyle change or system change?” debate. If you aren’t familiar, there is a We ought to each reduce our individual ecological footprint camp, and a We ought to protest and get governments and corporations to change their evil polluting ways camp. Each camp thinks the other camp is Doing it Wrong.
The either/or framing of the argument is lunacy, of course.
Everyone's lifestyles are going to change whether we want them to or not. The sooner we change them, the less catastrophic our future will be.
All of our systems are going to change whether we want them to or not. The sooner we change them, the less catastrophic our future will be.
Our lifestyles and our systems continuously co-create each other. Our current lifestyles demand these present systems continue to exist. These present systems (re)generate and sustain our current lifestyles.
Asking our systems to change as radically as they need to change without concurrent lifestyle change is a lot like asking someone else to cut the tree branch we’re standing on. And a few billion other people are also standing on the same branch, and even more are climbing up the tree trying to join us. We need to get off the branch! And let other people know that this branch is kind of dumb anyways, they should climb to a different one. Anyways, this one’s rotted and about to crumble under our weight as it is.
The New Lifestyles suck less, You Idiots
But the biggest, most glaring error both camps make is the assumption that the lifestyle change necessary implies a sacrifice, that our lives have to get worse in order to attain a low-impact lifestyle. I’ve written already about how and why that assumption is false: lives of material sufficiency and increased autonomy can be higher quality than those steeped in the hyperactive slumbering frenzy of consumer culture.
The trick is agency. No one wants to be forced into a different lifestyle. I’m having real fun with my weird life choices in large part because I chose them freely. Compelling large numbers of people to do something like what I’m doing would rightly be some sort of human rights violation.
Unfortunately, over the course of this century, most people’s lifestyles (and the systems those lifestyles are enmeshed with) are going to be compelled to change by natural limits to growth as governed by, well, physics. The more people freely choose to change their lives for the better now, the less suffering overall.
It’s a really interesting mega-ethical issue of timing, isn’t it. If you change now, of your own free will, you’ll probably like it. Wait too long, and you’ll hate every second of it. Hence, collapse now and avoid the rush.
The Process of Co-Creation requires simultaneous change
In the same way that current first world lifestyles require the systems that currently support them, our post-industrial lifestyles are going to require different systems to support them.
And in the same way that current lifestyles and systems co-create each other, our post-industrial lifestyles and systems will co-create each other as well.
Framed another way: how on earth can we accurately know what to change our current systems to if we aren’t already attempting to live the kinds of lifestyles those systems will be in support of?
If we’re still living industrial consumer lifestyles, in other words, we simply aren’t qualified to do the work of deciding what to change our post-industrial, non-consumer systems to. That’s like handing a saw to someone still standing on the branch to be cut. In order to be competent and qualified designers and builders of our new world, we have to actually start living that new world in our own lives in all the ways we can.