Monthly log of changes and updates.
Changes and Updates:
I made a quest journal page.
I got my windows installed, finally. Bring it, winter. I am unaccountably pleased with the aesthetics of my louver, although it’s covered in this picture with my hasty hurricane batten. My hurricane batten. Hurricane. California.
My batteries no longer hold a charge. My fridge trips the inverter in the middle of the night and in the morning it will be in the 50's F. I’m researching a direct solar setup and transitioning away from batteries altogether, or going to a very small battery for nighttime DC lighting only.
I salvaged more solar panels and panel racks from a neighbor, and found a mountain of free salvage dimension lumber in town.
I'm building a shade shelter out of almost entirely salvaged materials.
pic: Jetze
A friend from the forum is living with me for a month, helping with projects and joining for mountain adventures. He got here a few days ago. I’m excited for a) what this is and b) the pattern it hopefully sets for the future.
I took this picture of a lightning storm:
I also took about 40 pictures of darkness.
Unfiltered Thoughts:
'Ready for Trouble' as an organizing theme for my Web of Goals fell out of my brain on to paper, and I looked at it and went 'oh'. It ties together a lot of subthemes and areas of inquiry that I hadn’t quite threaded together yet. My idea of Ready for Trouble very much vibes with the other thing I’ve been thinking about, which is
Existential exuberance, aka energetic enthusiasm in the face of the metacrisis / Trouble we're all in for. I'm not into toxic positivity. But the internet is full of people who ignore/deny the Trouble on the one hand, and people who do nothing but talk very seriously about how bad the Trouble is (/going to be) and how stupid humans are to have gotten in to it and oh isn't it terrible.
Now obviously I'm in the 'trouble is here with worse on the way' camp but I am soooo over being shoegazy and mad about it. It’s not that they’re wrong, it’s that I'm just done with that mode of response.
I'm into a response more like 'well, as long as there's no getting around it, might as well paint our faces and invent a battle cry and wring every possible iota of meaning out of the circumstances as we possibly can.' I am in to courage and gallows humor because as Gary Snyder said “It is a matter of character and a matter of style.”
Somewhat related, I went down an internet wormhole and discovered hackbases, which are like hackerspaces + coops. There are even permaculture eco hackbase farms, although I’m not sure how many of those actually exist outside of anyone’s brain. Neat.
Miscellaneous
Desired Outcome: To live and die well in the 21st century.
Problem: Broadscale slow collapse (of politics, social fabric, ecosystems, attention capital, energy infrastructure…) and an obsolete paradigm that locks individuals in to distraction, irrelevance, enfeeblement, loss of cultural narrative, the hedonic treadmill, dependence, uncertainty, isolation, and a vague sense of roaring submerged grief.
A Path: Postconsumer praxis unlocks individual potential and autonomy, common sense systems thinking enables people to problem-solve the issues they actually face in their location, and global networks fosters creation of social bonds between post-consumers and adaptive emergent behavior.
The Big Ideas:
Radical frugality is magic,
QoL=f($, skills), meaning it is possible to have a wonderful life on far less money than we’re indoctrinated to assume,
applied systems thinking can help us get all of the ‘parts’ of our lives aligned according to our values and desires,
many of us need some space to breath away from normal busy-modern-life obligations to sort out our traumas and make progress on wholing ourselves,
the lifeboat flotilla, the multifarious decentralized ground-up loosely coupled network of groups of humans working towards building the seeds of the successor cultures that will unfold over the next several centuries, is worth our time and attention.
Unsorted
I’m going through some kind of phase change. I haven’t got it figured yet. Some things got clarified on my bike ride and when I got back I began executing those things.
Other things that were clear before my ride became less clear after it, though.
I’ve been adamant that I’m not trying to generate advice. I’m allergic to telling other people what to do. What’s good care for my light is negligence for yours, and vice versa, or it might be, who am I to say?
I’m not trying to generate advice. I’m trying to document a certain kind of process that I’ve committed to. The best word for this process I think is ‘education’. I committed to self-education so far back and in such an unreflective way that I can’t say at all when it started. It certainly just emerged from the circumstances of my first few decades, what with the homeschooling and the necessary childhood survival tactic of self-occupation. (That is, learning to occupy myself, not necessarily to be occupied with myself, although, yeah, maybe that too :/ .)
The aim of my education has always been to learn how to live well, and along the way I learned that part of that was learning how to die well so I write it ‘the aim of my education is to learn how to live and die well’, and I’m going to die in this century almost certainly and whoa this century is shaping up to be a whole bundle of fun, so it’s relevant to contextualize my lessons and state ‘the aim of my education is to learn how to live and die well in the 21st century’. I’ll leave it at that for now.
The point being: the narrative arc here is sketching out the outlines, and then logging and reflecting upon, my education in the world. What do I learn month by month, and how is that relating to the whole, my conception of the world I live in and my place in it?
Sometimes I feel like I’m having insights and learning new things and so it’s easy to write about that. It’s easy to share forward progress.
But sometimes I feel lost or uncertain about where exactly I am and where exactly it is I’m trying to go. I lose the thread. I’m not sure what’s supposed to happen next. I find myself doubting everything I’m doing.
It’s difficult to talk about this place of uncertainty. I don’t know what to say. Hey guys, just checking in, I’m totally fucking lost and have no idea what’s happening in the world or in myself. Cheers. Updates of this sort don’t feel very useful but I think I should try harder to share being in these places of doubt, because I think the patches of uncertainty and doubt are part of the process.
I think the patches of uncertainty and doubt are part of the process.
I think it’s harmful to not share these parts. I think it’s just as important to share these parts as it is to share the parts where I do feel like I know where I am and where I’m going. I think it’s important to talk about the uncertainty because it’s these patches where we quit.
And if I only ever talked about the exhilaration of forward momentum then you might get the sense that it’s all forward momentum, and losing that sense of exhilaration is a sign that you’ve failed and might as well give up. Only sharing the good stuff is toxic.
The fear, uncertainty, and doubt are integral to any endeavor. They’re integral to being human. The secret sauce of living a good life is learning how to deal with the uncertainty with grace, not in how to entirely escape them.
Excerpts / Book Recommendation of the Month
There appears to be no achievement, material item, or endgame that can solve all the problems we face as individuals or as a species. There is greed, tragedy, and malevolence in this world that we have and will continue to experience. And at any moment, our lives could end - this whole world and humanity could end - and at some moment, the will certainly end. But despite everything that was just said, the thought of it all ending should and does make us sad and tremble with fear. We don't want it to end. Despite the chaos, uncertainties, and hardships, we want to go on, we want to endure, we want to see what we can do, overcome, and experience in the face of it all. In this, we find the hopeful spirit and strength of humankind. We find the optimism in the pessimism.
...
There is courage in facing the realities of pessimism and there is strength to be formed in its name. We must be pessimistic about life's conditions in order to face their realities, but we must also be optimistic about our ability to face their realities and form strength, meaning, and experience through them.
Rather than being optimistic about the possibility of finding things and ideas that will rid us and our lives of disorder, defectiveness, confusion, and vulnerability, perhaps we should attempt to be optimistic about the potential value that we can find in accepting and enduring these things. We should be optimistic about our ability to turn the ups-and-downs into an interesting and beautiful ride.
—The Art of Living a Meaningless Existence, by Robert Pantano
Blog Recommendation
Tom Murphy of Do the Math is exploring a new-to-him direction of inquiry into the metacrisis. I highly recommend following along now that he’s actively posting again. I always found his writing very clear and to the point.
“But the more I dug into the details, the more concerned I became that such a grand vision is an illusion built on top of a highly anomalous period in human history when we over-exploited finite resources on Earth in a one-time bonanza—using those resources to access remaining resources ever faster in an accelerating cycle. I constantly sought reassurance as to what I had wrong about this picture, but found little solace. Those who tried to ease my mind spoke in vague praise of human capabilities and pointed to the arc of history as a reliable pattern by which to understand the future. I did not get the impression that they had confronted my specific concerns and had a blueprint for how to navigate past the pile-up of global-scale problems and irreversible consumption of our inheritance.” -Tom Murphy, Human Exceptionalism