How to say this in a way that you'll care, that you might find relevant? I don't know you. But I'd like to relate my experiences in a way that resonates with you. From that resonance, from that understanding that we're not that different, maybe then I can take you someplace in your imagination that you otherwise wouldn't have been.
Okay.
I'm not a simple man. I wish I was, but I'm not. I overthink everything. I think in circles, or spirals rather, going over the same ground in minute detail. Assuming it matters, I return again and again to the same cognitive ground, looking for things I missed, new angles. This is just how I'm wired, but there are consequences. I take myself, and the world, too seriously sometimes. I can lose perspective. My best relationships are with people who can knock me out of my own head every once in a while and force me to just experience something, and realize that I was getting really worked up over some tiny little detail.
I can do this all day
I've been obsessed with climate change, peak oil/soil/fill-in-the-blank-finite-resource-that-our-industrial-civilization-depends-upon, and the dynamics of growth for my entire adult life. I devoted my 20's to an idea of helping society solve its problems related to the greenhouse gas emissions of the built environment. I never thought that engineering was The Answer, but it seemed reasonable that we could help, that we could be part of the solution.
So I threw my life at this work, as if lives depended on my efforts. But, as we engineers are fond of saying, particularly in meetings with important people who are trying to get us to commit to whether some scheme is feasible or not, "it's not that simple."
This is a huge problem that's almost completely non-understandable. It's a complex system.
We can't know how our efforts to solve the problem will actually effect outcomes. The risk of trying to help, but wind up hurting, is huge here. I spent many late nights wondering if the best thing I could do was just... nothing. See: Jevon's paradox, iatrogenics, wicked problems, well-intentioned interventions that make the problem worse.
Basically, my efforts might help today, but hurt tomorrow.
Beyond the general fog of uncertainty about the long term effects of my actions, it began to dawn on me that I wasn't exactly sure what it was I was trying to save in the first place. "Save the planet" is totally meaningless - this ol' rock is going nowhere. Most people think what that phrase means is, they want to save the forests, the salmon, wild animals, ecosystems, rivers, the ocean. I do want to stop the destruction of those things.
But most sustainability work isn't actually focused on savings those things, not really, not as a first priority. It's focused on saving This Arrangement, This Society, This Civilization, by figuring out how we can maintain This Arrangement more or less, but with fewer dead salmon. Almost all sustainability work, all sustainability "solutions", is some form of "let's keep doing things the way we're doing things, but have it cause less harm."
The conversation goes something like this:
"Oh, goodness, I just ran the numbers, and living in this enormous house with an air conditioner and lots of lights and a TV and a heated pool has a really big negative impact on natural systems. I’m a good person - I don’t want that! How can I make it so that this enormous house doesn't negatively impact those systems? How many solar panels do I need to run my TV and stuff? How can I reduce the heat loss of my pool?"
The question is this, across our whole civilization: "I have X. Having X causes Y harm. How can I decrease Y harm while still having X?"
X equals automobiles, netflix, flying, Doritos, fiberglass, really big houses, polyester clothing, virtual reality headsets, roller coasters, vacations thousands of miles away, nail polish, GIFs, Instagram, cargo ships, jet-skis, refrigerants, skyscrapers, NFTs, dirt bikes, cruise ships, and pink plastic flamingos.
Y equals dead salmon, clear-cut forests, greenhouse gas emissions, rising seas, weather-related catastrophes, birds coated in oil, summer air filled with smoke, trash gyres, tap water that you can light on fire, Teflon in Siberian life forms, and oceanic dead zones.
Y also equals cancer, leukemia, depression, suicide, anomie, a droning sense of meaninglessness and aloneness.
Y also equals being distracted, having a short attention span, thinking that buying things will make us happy (because that's what we're told, over and over and over again in explicit and implicit ways), being psychologically damaged.
At some point I realized I might be working on an impossible problem, that I might be involved in an enormous project of getting people to pretend that the symptoms are what needs to be focused on, that no one is being honest about what the actual cause of all of the harm is. I'm not a conspiracy theorist - I don't think there is an evil cabal of "they" who are trying to pull the wool over our eyes. My instinct is to blame poorly designed systems, to blame unintended consequences of a certain way that incentives are arranged.
No one has any incentive to say "hey, wait a minute, do we, like, need all this X? Why are jet-skis more important than salmon, again?" And our culture, being our culture, has no real way of allowing us to imagine anything other than our culture. Our culture has a monopoly - a hegemony - on our imaginations. We don't know how to imagine anything different that what we've lived our entire lives having. Our culture, how our lives work, the things we have, is a given. We don't get to question these things. We're only allowed to ask how we can make these things less harmful.
I've come to believe that while we can make these things less harmful, we can't make these things not harmful, and that that's not good enough, at least not at the scale that our civilization operates. The best case scenario for this approach is that it takes us a little longer to achieve a world with no salmon, no Amazon, no clean air, no coral reefs, no humans who aren't depressed, anxious, and distracted.
I don't know exactly what to do about it. I'm not writing to tell you that I have it all figured out, "just follow these 11 tips and you too can throw off the shackles of an unguided emergent malignant socio-industrial system bent on the destruction of everything good and beautiful on this planet!" - no, but I have some ideas of what to try.
I have a hunch that a lot of people are going to have to figure out other ways of living their lives. I think the huge project isn't in how to green our cities or make carbon capture technology economically feasible, it is in figuring out how to think outside the imaginative hegemony of our culture. It's figuring out how to live lives that don't involve any X at all, and therefore don't cause any Y at all. Lives that reject the assumptions of what "we deserve." Lives that realize that buying in to the narratives of our culture are spiritually demeaning, intellectually insulting, emotionally wounding, and socially toxic.
I expect this to be very difficult for everyone. I expect some people to agree, dip a toe in to the project, and say "NOPE!" and not come back for another several years, if ever. That's the story of the last twelve years of my life. I have compassion for that. There's a good chance that I'm going to hit some limit in my ability at some point in the near future, take this blog down, revert to the dominant culture's values again, and drink my cognitive dissonance and despair to sleep again. I hope not. But it won't be the first time.
The good news is that it is becoming more and more apparent that we can build better lives. Not wealthier lives, but better lives. We can build lives that are less depressing, lives that we don't feel the need to numb every night, lives that fill us up to bursting with meaning and fulfillment. Every step of our journeys are going to hurt, but they're going to be sweet, too. And we'll die well, not with terror and regret but with smiles, knowing that we lived as if our lives mattered.
