I spoke with an old friend and colleague recently. His professional situation has settled into something comfortable and sustainable. But his aim, from the beginning, has always been to figure out how to bring his unique skills and perspective to bear in order to have a positive impact on the world. He's in a place where his work is good, as in, it's honorable work that ultimately needs to be done and makes the world a better place, but its hardly "moving the needle" in the way he wants it to. This keeps him up at night.
I sympathize with this, of course. The first decade of my career was an obsessive hunt for impact. I was trying to figure out how I could solve climate change all by myself. Not really, but kind of.
Imagine that you have tied your notion of career success to “reducing the carbon footprint of humanity in order to avert global catastrophe”, and every year you check in on this graph:
Credit: NOAA
There’s not even a blip in there. That’s not a good feel. Maybe your work prevented some amount of CO2e from getting into the atmosphere, but also maybe not. The world is a complicated system. It’s possible that efforts to make buildings or vehicles more energy efficient are just sending signals to the market to build more of them, resulting in a greater embodied carbon footprint or "carbon belch", ultimately hastening the destabilization of our climate system and humanity's descent into planetary chaos.
The active skeptic gives up the attachment to optimistic hope and simply does what seems called for. There is a deep freedom in that.
I like this line by Per Espen Stoknes quite a bit.
For over decade, I lived with these two thoughts in my head: “1) My lifestyle is part of the problem, and 2) my work is part of the solution… I’m pretty sure.”
When I began my career, it seemed simple and clear that I was part of the bright green future of humanity. As the years ground on and I learned more about the Problem, I became less sure that my work was part of the solution. I became less sure that anyone would ever be capable of knowing if everything we were doing was making a damn bit of difference.
I began to wonder if the solution-orientedness of my work made up for the problematic nature of my lifestyle. I began to wonder if it was healthy for my life to be so split, to be in such dissonant tension. I began to wonder if my Problem Lifestyle could be blinding me to more effective and impactful ways of executing my Solution Career.
I began to wonder if the idea that there exist Solutions to the Problems of the World that I could Work on in my Career was even a coherent notion.
As you know by now, eventually I snapped, found ERE (or radical simplicity, or whatever you want to call it), and began the (ongoing!) work of crafting my lifestyle into something that isn’t part of the problem.
Do I think that my lifestyle change is going to make a difference? I reject the question. Actually: I have come to despise that particular question. I think the mindset behind that particular question is part of the Problem.
In The Mask of Command, Keegan writes that the defining feature of the Heroic leader was a contempt for death and the future. The only thing that mattered was to act correctly; outcomes were in the hands of fate. This Heroic ideal is the same to me as Per Espen Stoknes’ idea of abandoning hope and ‘doing what seems called for.’
However you want to frame it, there’s profound peace and freedom in letting go of the future and just doing what seems right. This is not some YOLO trash, not some “just do what feels good man” garbage. This is the moral philosophy of kicking ass.
What seems most urgently right to me is to “innovate” a quality way of life that can persist within planetary boundaries, to live it as a sort of human proof of concept, and to hold it up for scrutiny to expose the lie that the only good lives are highly consumptive ones.
All of the mainstream Solutions are attempting to figure out how to make it possible to live First World, 21st century, Star Trek lifestyles in such a way that doesn't wreck the planet. This is the Great Swap: the idea that we can have our cake and eat it too, because we’ll power our McMansions with fusion or something. I think this approach is a symptom of the kind of thinking that got us into this mess in the first place, and is therefore doomed.
Changing my life, therefore, isn’t just about reducing my carbon footprint. It’s about changing how I think. It’s about forcing my understanding of the world to change because I’m embodying a different way of living and engaging with the world.
My plan isn’t to just disappear into the woods, smugly living a no-impact lifestyle. I assume that once I’ve got a radically simplified lifestyle dialed, I’m going to expand my scope and scale and do other stuff. My point is that changing my life necessarily comes first, because I won’t have the embodied wisdom of a shifted perspective unless I change my actions.
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm dooming myself to a life of insignificance.
But...
Tonight, go outside, and look up. Go tell the stars what impact you're going to have here on this rock hurtling through space.
Like them, I no longer care.
