Here is chapter one of my book Deep Response: An Emergency Education in Post-Consumer Praxis.
1. You Are Walking Into A Trap
I used to think that climate change, overpopulation, and biospheric degradation were problems. In identifying them as problems, I assumed there were solutions, which kept me from seeing that my way of life had to change.
--Peter Kalmus
I’m standing in the rain on the sidewalk outside of the house I lived in twelve years ago, near Telegraph and 61st Street in Oakland. The old post-war bungalow is as I remember it: tired-looking, layers of paint softening its lines and giving it the illusion of pulling into itself.
I let myself in and open the door to the first room on the right. It’s a small bedroom. The mattress pushed into the corner takes up most of the space. Immediately inside the door is a desk piled with books, pads of green graph paper, empty coffee mugs and beer bottles, and a beat up laptop with glowing red keys.
And there I am. There he is. I mean, my twenty-five year-old self is sitting with his feet up on the desk, big over-ear headphones on, a book in his lap. He scowls up at the intrusion and then his face freezes as he recognizes me.
Apparently he was not expecting his thirty-eight year old self to burst into his room tonight.
He pulls the headphones down around his neck and I can hear the music clearly now. It sounds like Wolves in the Throne Room, which seems appropriate.
“Hi,” I say. “We need to talk.”
He pulls the plug on his headphones and tries to speak but it comes out a croak. He tries again: “What?”
“I’m you, visiting from twenty twenty-four. There are some things I need to tell you about.”
He stands and steps right up to me, well inside my comfort zone, and studies my face. I’m oddly okay with it. I suppose it is our comfort zone, after all. This is going to be a strange night.
He’s got a good ten to fifteen pounds of muscle on me, a remnant of my college powerlifting phase, but he looks softer. I’m leaner and harder now. He could probably beat me in an arm-wrestling match but I know I would outpace him on a long trek in the mountains with a heavy pack.
I watch him study me. He’s got my signature scowl, all right. It doesn’t mean he’s mad, it means he’s thinking. His eyes settle on mine and I can see their question: Is it true? Are you me? I hold his gaze calmly. His scowl fades to neutral, which is as close as I got back then to expressing surprise.
“Holy shit,” he says softly.
I put my hand out and he shakes it reflexively. “It’s good to see you again. I know this is a lot, but I need your attention right now. I need all of your attention. So why don’t you get any questions out of your system before we dive in.”
He blinks at me and opens his mouth but doesn’t say anything. He’s going to need a moment to get his brain back online. I never was terribly quick on my feet. I walk into the kitchen to give him some space.
“Roommates are out, right?” I call over my shoulder as I start opening cupboards. It’s been twelve years, I don’t remember where I kept stuff.
“Yeah, they’re at a wedding or something.”
“Good. They’d probably think this was weird.” Ah, there it is. A bottle of rye bourbon whiskey, middle shelf stuff. I grab it, sniff check two small mason jars, and come back to sit on the couch in the living room. My younger self is standing in the doorway to my room now, staring at me.
“You don’t have any questions?” I ask.
“What’s the future like? You’re time traveling? How? Is that a normal thing? Did aliens come and give humanity time travel tech, or--”
I hold up my hand to slow him down. Apparently his brain engaged. “Yes, I’m time traveling. No, it isn’t typical. Honestly it’s a long boring story that isn’t relevant. No aliens yet. The future is – we’ll get into that, that’s central to what I need to talk about. Any other questions?”
He thinks for a second. “Do you have kids?”
“No,” I say.
He nods. “I can’t think of anything else. Why are you here?”
“I am here,” I say, “to discuss the next ten years of your life with you.” I hold a jar of bourbon out to him.
He takes it and sits and squints at me.
“Are there, like, killer robots running around in the future that I have to kill the inventor of? A big catastrophe the future needs me to do something to avert?”
“No, nothing that cool. Sorry.” I genuinely am sorry. This would be a much simpler conversation. “Almost precisely the opposite, really.”
His eyes narrow. “What does that mean?”
I clear my throat and ignore his question. “Tell me about your life.”
“My life? You already know about my life. You should tell me about yours.”
I wave him off. “I will. It’s been twelve years, my memory isn’t that good. I want to hear how you think and feel about your life right now. What’s going on? What’s it like? How are you thinking about your future?”
He sits back and blinks a few times. “Life is good. I’m having a lot of fun. Work is great, I’m getting to work on some really cool projects. And people mostly just leave me alone and let me crank. I don’t get micromanaged at all. I spent the winter running around with Occupy Oakland, which was…”
I smile. “…a lot of fun. I remember that.”
He nods. “I’m single now, which is great. I just finished paying off my student loans so I’m going to be saving up now. I feel really unencumbered. My roommates are great. I feel really free and like I’m on the right path. Seriously, though, why are you here?”
“What do you care about most?” I ask, ignoring his question. He gives me a puzzled look. "What do you care about? What's your purpose? What gets you out of bed in the morning?"
“I care about decarbonizing the built environment in order to mitigate climate catastrophe,” he says, “and I care about reducing resource demand to a point where we aren't destroying ecosystems in order to keep our society running. I care about having a built environment that is beautiful and healthy, not ugly and toxic. Everything is designed wrong and I want to help make it better.”
“How's that going?” I ask.
“It’s going well,” he says. “I've been working in the sustainable built environment for three years and it feels like I've just about got my bearings. I’m working on innovative projects with other smart people who share my vision. The company I’m working for only takes worthwhile projects. It's an exciting time.”
“And what are your plans for the future?” I ask. “What’s your vision for the next five to ten years?”
He eyes me uneasily, sensing that I'm talking him into a trap. He’s right. “I want to be an expert at this. All of the projects I work on will be zero net carbon, regenerative, probably Living Building Challenge certified. The firm won't seem so cutting edge because the industry will have begun to catch up, and making beautiful low-resource-consumption buildings will be status quo. I'll be part of that, working to spread the knowledge around the industry. The sense will be that we're making steady progress towards a world that is put together well, a world that sucks less than this one.”
“How about your life outside of work?” I ask.
He blinks a few times, looks around the room as if noticing it for the first time, then shrugs. “I don’t think I’ll be in the city for very long. I like the idea of fixing up a classic trailer, living somewhere close to trailheads in the mountains, and working remotely. Take breaks from work to ride the trails or backpack or climb. That sounds like a solid life I could do for a long time.”
I nod. “That’s about what I remember. This is a really good year for you.”
“Yes, this is a great year,” he says. “Especially after the last three.”
I nod again and clear my throat. He looks at me. I look at him. He frowns. “What?”
“You fuck it all up,” I say.
“What?”
“You are running into a trap,” I say. “That’s why I’m here. I need to explain the trap to you and tell you how to avoid it.”
His eyes dart around the room as if looking for tripwires or thugs lurking in the shadows. “What trap? What are you talking about?”
“You spend the next eight years burning yourself out physically and emotionally. You do work on some cool projects. You will become an expert in a few domains. But in eight years you will feel like the world you want is moving away from you faster than you're moving towards it. You will not feel like you're making steady progress towards a world that is put together well. You will actually be profoundly uncertain if you're doing any good at all. The idea that you might be causing unintentional negative side effects will keep you up at night. You become unconvinced that the strategy you're pursuing is an effective one. You sense that there is something seriously wrong with your understanding of how the world works and you work very, very hard to figure it out. But you don't figure it out.
“Along the way you'll bounce between states of manic, existentially panicked workaholism and lethargic states of despair that anything you're doing matters. You'll sporadically distract yourself with alcohol, dysfunctional relationships, and daydreams that you never do much about. But you aren't wired to numb and look away for long. You keep returning to it, beating your head against the wall.
“On the surface your life will look okay, but under the hood all is not well. The more clear it becomes that your vision of contributing to making the world a better place is not happening, the more you thrash. The more you thrash, the less effective you become. In eight years, despite throwing yourself at professional and personal projects aimed at contributing to the crises facing humanity for most of a decade, you exist in a twilight state between despair that your life will ever mean anything and anger that you're in this position in the first place. In short, you fizzle.”
He looks like he just swallowed a cupful of fermented swampwater. I am describing his worst nightmare. “I fizzle,” he says. “I don’t understand. How?”
“Your fundamental mistake is that you think what's broken is out there,” I gesture vaguely at the world outside the walls of his house. “You've correctly identified a large number of technical problems with how society functions. Buildings use too much energy to operate and require too much carbon to build. Too many of the materials used in our built environment are toxic and are poisoning us. Our cities are designed for cars, not humans. You've identified a number of technical solutions to these technical problems: use better design to build buildings out of non-toxic materials, require less energy to operate, and require less carbon to build. Arrange them in a way that makes it feasible to use public transportation, bicycles, and legs. These technical solutions are all well and good, but if the whole world adopted these technical solutions everything would still burn. We'd still wreck the planet.
“You think that since you've identified these technical problems, and can see technical solutions to these problems, and possess the skills necessary to implement those solutions, that you are part of the solution. You aren't. You're part still of the problem.”
“What's the solution then?” he asks.
“Realizing that there is no problem,” I say. He gives me a blank look. “The issue isn't that you can't solve the problem, it's that you're confused about what the real problem even is. This confusion contributes to a lot of dysfunctional behavior in your life. The real problem is that very few people understand the true nature of what we're facing. It seems hopelessly difficult because the technical nature of what appears to be the problem is monstrously complex. No brain could disentangle it or make sense of it.”
“So, then, what can I do?” he asks.
“When you find yourself beating your head against a brick wall, try looking to the sides and see if maybe you can just walk around the thing. You're trying to figure out how to make things work within the logic of the system that exists, and it seems impossible. What's one possible obvious explanation for that?”
“Maybe it is impossible to make things work within the logic of the system,” he says.
I nod. “And it's very popular to talk about thinking outside of the system, but almost no one actually does. For the most part people just dress a little differently. They're cargo-culting the revolution. It's actually very, very difficult to undergo a fundamental shift in paradigm. But that's the actual next step.”
He shakes his head. “I don't get it. I'm working on decarbonizing the built environment. That's what I actually do 40 to 80 hours a week. And that's basic thermodynamics: we need to be pumping less carbon into the atmosphere or we're hosed. There's no woo-woo paradigm shift that needs to happen, it's just simple physics. Decarbonize or die.”
“Yes, but is what you're doing actually decarbonizing the built environment? Or is what you're doing slightly decreasing the life-cycle carbon footprint of expansionary commercial real estate development that is cruising along with the business cycle like it always has? Is your work just another case study of Jevon’s Paradox? And when was the last time you felt like one of the buildings you built needed to get built, like it was a critical and valuable addition to the lives of the human and more-than-human world? Convince me, right now, that what you're doing isn't just splashing green paint on the same boring story.”
He doesn't say anything because I know he's already begun having his doubts, already begun asking himself these questions. He just doesn’t know that he isn’t going to find satisfying answers for another eight years.
“What the world needs is not cleverer technological fixes at the same level of thinking that got us in this mess in the first place. What the world needs is fundamentally different thinking. And you are not thinking as fundamentally different as you think you are,” I say.
“What do you mean?” he asks.
“Your highest-level criticism of the way society currently runs is that it's using too many resources, right? That it's consuming more resources than the earth can supply on a renewable basis?”
“Yeah, of course,” he says.
“And how much debt are you carrying right now?” I ask.
He shifts in his seat and breaks eye contact. “It's just a few thousand, but that's because I just moved and I'm about to pay it—”
“You don't pay it off,” I snap. “You carry five figures of credit card debt for most of the next decade. You don't know how to live below your means as an individual, and you think you're qualified to help the world bring its consumption within planetary limits? You talk ecology and thermodynamics but you live debt and overshoot. How could you possibly contribute to the ecological function of the world if you can't pull basic ecological function off at scale of your own life, which you actually have total control over?”
“I don’t understand how you go into that much debt and hold it for so long,” he says. “That seems deeply uncharacteristic of me.”
“That’s exactly the problem,” I say. “You’ve got some weird psychological contradictions that cause fundamental dysfunction in the economy of your household system. And you’re not that abnormal. Living slightly above one’s means is average behavior. What’s weird about you is that your values are in stark contrast to your actions, so you live with a heavy load of cognitive dissonance. Even if you did live just below your means instead of just over it, you’d still be far from operating in the space of ecological economy you say you want for the whole world.”
“But that’s hard,” he says. “I mean, society isn’t set up to allow that. The modern world is set up for people to live mostly paycheck to paycheck. Housing is insanely expensive. Supply chains are just in time. The whole thing is set up in an insane way, that’s part of what I want to change.”
“And this exactly is your error,” I say. “You think the first thing you need to do is change the world, and then your personal life will fall in line. You’ve got it precisely backwards. You’re trying to change the world from System A to System B while running System A software in your head. That’s impossible. That’s like trying to invent an electric car by incrementally making improvements to internal combustion engines. You can make a much more efficient internal combustion engine, but you’re not going to make an electric car, ever, with that approach. What you want to do is to contribute to a totally different kind of society, a culture that operates according to totally different rules. But you insist on playing by the old rules in your personal life. That’s why you get nowhere.”
“So, what do I do, then?” he asks. “What are the new rules?”
Get Your Own House in Order First
“Learn how to live below your means. Develop a broad skill set. Learn how to have functional relationships. Figure out why you're addicted to broken things. Develop resilient systems at the household scale. Internalize systems thinking within your own life. As you develop competence and work with a new paradigm at the personal scale, then you can start expanding outwards.”
“We don't have time for turning inwards, for being selfish,” he says impatiently.
“You're right, we don't have time for that. But we definitely don't have time for arrogant morons running around like they're god's gift to the future just because they’ve noticed some obvious technical dysfunctions. You're liable to cause more problems than you solve with your level of thinking. You're rushing around in a panic and it isn't justified.”
“What do you mean not justified? We have to move fast—things are getting worse, we're racing toward tipping points, ecosystems are in collapse—”
“We ran out of time in the seventies,” I snap. “We had a window of opportunity in the seventies. We could have turned this whole thing around then. But we didn't. We abandoned all the work people were doing then and we stomped on the gas pedal in the eighties and nineties. Now we no longer have a problem to solve. We have a predicament to respond to.”
“A predicament to respond to?” he asks.
“Problems have solutions,”I say. “Being on a trajectory towards eventual overshoot is a problem. Reorganizing society and reducing global consumption in a timely manner was a solution for that problem that we did not implement. Being in global overshoot of carrying capacity is a predicament. You cannot solve a predicament, you can only respond to it. How we respond to the predicament of overshoot matters a great deal. Pretending that we can 'solve' what we're facing is a categorical error in grasping the reality we now live in.
“Unfolding catastrophe that unravels our infrastructure of industrial logistics is baked into the cake at this point. If we'd stuck to the momentum we built in the seventies we might have been able to glide-path society to an ecological civilization without incurring disruptive tipping points. But that's no longer the situation we're dealing with. We're operating too far above the carrying capacity of the world and our infrastructure can't handle the reversion to sustainable levels of consumption while maintaining cohesion.”
Anti-Defeatist
He gapes at me. “You are a defeatist. You become a defeatist. I can't believe it. You're talking about giving up and just trying to have a nice little life in a bunker somewhere—”
I slam my hand on the table between us. “I am not! Don’t put words in my mouth. Listen to me. You're so stuck in your narrow vision of being a hero. You don't see that what you're trying to save is the very thing that got us in this mess in the first place. You're trying to hold up something that you should let fall. You don't see that new systems will emerge from the dissolution of the old system, and those are the systems that deserve your attention and effort.”
“What new systems?” he asks.
“I mean the successor cultures that are emerging from the dissolution of this one,” I gesture around us. “Cultures that operate based on rules aligned to biophysical reality. The cultures that are growing in the cracks of the old system.
“You need to understand that you can't work on these successor cultures if you're still running the programming from the old system. If you're still trying to brute force everything and operating in a state of overshoot, unable to think in systems, fragile to disruption, enmeshed in dysfunctional psychological patterns, unable to carve out time to think and respond to the future as it arrives. In a very technical sense of the word, right now you don't deserve to work on these new cultures. You will damage them if you try to. This is why you have to collapse your scope to your personal life, to the scale of your household, and build a functional system at that scale before you expand back outwards again. You have to become the kind of person who can contribute meaningfully to these successor cultures.”
I know this is hard for him to hear. He's got so much effort already invested in his current way of thinking.
“Or,” I continue, “you can keep doing what you’re doing. Huck yourself at projects, pull overnighters, burn yourself out on projects that get canceled anyway, trash your relationships and your health, and drown in the uncertainty that any of your sacrifice is worth it. Along the way rack up five figures of consumer debt with nothing to show for it at the end. Your call.”
He gives me a steady look, and then stands up and goes into his room. He returns a moment later with a notebook and pen and sits back down on the sofa.
“All right,” he says. “You have my attention. How do I become this kind of person?”
I smile. “This is what I time traveled twelve years into my past to tell you. This is what it'll take the rest of the night to explain.”
Further Reading
Kalmus, Peter. (2017). Being the Change: Live Well and Spark a Climate Revolution. New Society Publishers.
Rowson, Jonathan. (2021, February 9). Tasting the Pickle: Ten flavours of meta-crisis and the appetite for a new civilization. Perspectiva. https://systems-souls-society.com/tasting-the-pickle-ten-flavours-of-meta-crisis-and-the-appetite-for-a-new-civilisation/
Hagens, Nate. (Host). (2022, October 26). Daniel Schmachtenberger: “Bend not break #4: Modeling the Drivers of the Metacrisis” [Audio podcast episode]. In The Great Simplification. https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/42-daniel-schmachtenberger
Greer, John Michael. (2006). Problems and Predicaments. The Archdruid Report. https://archdruidmirror.blogspot.com/2017/06/problems-and-predicaments.html
Giampietro, Mario, and Mayumi, Kozo, (2018). Unraveling the Complexity of the Jevons Paradox: The Link Between Innovation, Efficiency, and Sustainability. Frontiers in Energy Research, 6. doi: 10.3389/fenrg.2018.00026