Dear J,
I’ve been working on stitching together a couple different threads:
With a world simultaneously on the precipice of unfolding megacatastrophe and at an apparent high point of many positive indicators (mortality, disease, education, etc).
In what ways is our culture inadequate to the task of 'midwifing modernity', and what tweaks -- or bifurcations -- do we need to make, and how can we do that at the scale of our own lives?
How can we live in these confusing and un-knowable times and still piece together good lives?
In terms of crisis mitigation much gets talked about at the level of policy response: we should have a government program for this, we should incentivize entrepreneurship for that, we should get the world's best and brightest aligned and focused on these issues. We need an Apollo scale program for X different crises!
I agree, and I'm all for that. In a small way I'm involved in one niche of that myself (mitigating the contributions of the built environment to climate change and resource consumption, ruggedizing infrastructure for the already-baked-in environmental perturbations of the coming decades, chipping away at the health impact of unhealthy/toxic indoor environments, etc).
There are truckloads of books published every year on what governments, companies, and ambitious professionals can do about the challenges of navigating the 21st century.
But what about the rest of us? I mean, what about normal-ass everyday people? And even for the professionals with careers related to Our Predicament, what guidance do we have for the non-professional dimensions of our lives?
Where are the books and resources and podcasts for people who are not government policy decision-makers, or scientists, or engineers, or just otherwise have other shit going on in their lives and can't or won't get involved at the higher scales, but want to do something about it all either out of a desire to contribute, a desire to become less vulnerable to personal disaster, or both?
Every once in a while you'll find a few paragraphs in the last chapter of a book about what people can do about it and it's always a letdown. Here are some common "what you can do about it" tropes:
Try not to get too scared or do anything rash
Get informed
Talk to people in your life about this stuff, don't stew by yourself
idk like maybe grow a garden?
Practice mindfulness
Talk with your neighbors: community is important!
Really? That's the best we can come up with? This is patronizing pat-on-the-head shh-not-now-the-adults-are-talking level advice. It's evidence that either nobody is actually considering the impact a few billion people can have on the state of the world, or that they think we're all useless. Honestly this kind of ‘advice’ is one of the scariest aspects of Our Predicament.
Anyways, I can’t find good brass tacks advice for what people can actually DO about it all that I find satisfactory, so I’m going to collect, organize, and write it myself.
The idea is to take the idea of a pattern language and then organize it like a zettelkasten system. So the project involves identifying and listing patterns of response to the Predicament we find ourselves in, and then spending a lot of time thinking about principles of composition - aka HOW to combine those patterns in interesting and useful ways.
I mean the simple way to explain it is I’m trying to list out a bunch of ingredients, and then write a recipe book. So people can read the recipe book and find recipes that sound enticing and within their abilities and cook it up.
The patterns themselves are mostly boring.
I think the compositions -the recipes - are what is cool.
Anyways, I have some work to do before I can take this thing public I’ve got to flesh it out a bit, get enough meat on the bones so people can see what the whole idea is. But the plan is to work it out ‘in public.’
Alright that’s enough of my project. Other than that it’s been a quiet month. Jack and I went on a long walk. I’m working on the business, chipping away at getting the product ready for launch and all of our systems dialed in. I’m improving my homemade pizza game. I’m looking forward to the return of darkness - I haven’t seen nighttime in months now, and I never knew it was the kind of thing one could miss.
Best,
T
These are some of the things I’ve been reading feeding into these thoughts:
Moral Ambition, Rutger Bregman
Abundance, Klein and Thompson
At Work In The Ruins, Dougald Hine
The Great Simplification, Nate Hagens
The Gifted Adult, Mary Elaine-Jacobsen
A Pattern Language, Christopher Alexander
Taking Smart Notes, Sonke Ahrens