Two links about the trades that I only scanned through but that I want to keep here in case it's ever relevant for me. First link is about the 'trade scam', not the fact that all trades are bad as jobs, but that many of them have become riddled with huge problems, such as the intense competition due to mass-migration, the awful pay in some cases, the terrible work conditions, and how they led to a secondary industry that charges people a lot of money for substandard training.
The second link is about coming into contact with the sheer physical labor of trades, because it's one thing to 'know' how difficult physical labor, and it's another thing to know it in your bones (and muscles) how hard it really, really is.
'Get a trade job' has almost become the new 'learn to code'. Almost, because I don't think many people are really following the former advice, though it certainly sounds good on paper. Older generations on the right-wing have an interesting blind spot, where they both see the problems with mass-migration, but they don't seem to realize how much it seeps into the trades, which are by and large flooded with migrants, driving the pay down and making the general conditions worse (because migrants don't have the privilege to complain, so they uncritically accept harsher conditions), because it's the most direct route for them to make money in a foreign country. This shows that, predictably, most advice is part of a racket, even if that racket is aware of the racket of the other side (how deluded the left-wing can be).
The only way to have reliable information is to ask people who are working in that field, and who have no incentive to lie to you. With the internet, that kind of information is becoming more and more readily available, so there is really no excuse to get into a field without a minimum amount of research about the work conditions and the pay. Spending a few dozen hours on that type of research is well worth the time if you seriously consider getting into that type of profession, for the sake of your time, energy, but also your physical health.
From an old Ran Prieur post (June 14, 2006).
Last night I watched Grizzly Man, Werner Herzog's documentary about Timothy Treadwell, and one bit really stuck out. It was when a summer drought lowered the water so much that the fish couldn't swim up to the bears, and the bears were starving, and Treadwell tried to make a path for the fish to get up. Herzog couldn't help editorializing that Treadwell was "interfering with nature," and with that comment, the cynical film director revealed that he romanticizes nature more than a guy who lived with deadly giant bears.
Westerners think nature is some kind of magical other world that needs to be completely left alone, and if you can't leave it alone, you might as well just make parking lots and office buildings. In the book Keeping it Living, Nancy Turner looks at the journal entries of the first European visitors to the Pacific Northwest, and how they missed the overwhelming evidence that the natives were actively building natural abundance, because their culture didn't contain that concept. Civilized humans know only two ways of relating to anything: absolute control, or absolute detachment.
In fact, nature is all about "interference." One of the principles of permaculture is that everything gardens. Every creature tweaks the environment for its own interests. The key question, the difference between participation and exploitation, is whether you respect other creatures. If humans can learn to relate to other life respectfully, on equal terms, we can use our giant brains and opposable thumbs to make the biosphere ten times as good as it would be without us.
The reason why human beings typically swing from one extreme to another is because real balance, i.e. harmony, requires consciousness in order to be in touch with the context. For instance, a common response to the degenerate behaviors that result from unchecked, low-grade pleasure, the kind that leads to addictions and hedonism, is to swing back all the way to asceticism, privation, and a general condemnation of worldly pleasure. The problem isn't so much with pleasure, but pleasure detached from embodied presence, that allows you to attune to the subtle pleasures of being alive, and of softly taking in a scenery, and the conscious love that allows you to experience intimacy with another person.
Such a conscious relationship to pleasure, or in this case nature, is however not legible, it's not the kind of thing you can literally describe, but rather something that you experience first and foremost, because real limits are not literal, they are felt from within. The way you stop problematic behavior is similar to how you know when you are talking too much in a conversation, rather than the way that limits manifest in our society, which are through rigid, systemic fences and systems that punish certain behaviors, regardless of the context in which they arise from.
Or to phrase it in Darren Allen terms, self cannot self, self has to be in touch with Unself in order to be informed by real, harmonious limits. When self imposes limits, either on itself or another self, it leads to coercion, conflicts, arms races (in the type of strategies that criminals use to evade the law for instance) and more internal division.
My first Substack is called two-sided freedom, because as I viewed it back then, freedom cannot simply be defined in terms of stuff that you dislike and that you wish to run away from, but it also has to be aimed towards something, a process which comes with real costs, such as pain, loss (of opportunities) and responsibility.
My current frame is a bit different, focusing more on the version of freedom of self, versus that of the conscious I, but still, the idea that freedom comes with a cost (to the self) remains with me.
Freedom from coercive, unconscious collectives is undeniably vital, because your conscious life withers under those constraints, but freedom as a lifestyle, the type of life where you spend most of your time travelling around the globe, and refuse to be tied down to anyone or anything? That is a form of hell. I want stability and commitment, but only to the right things.
Incidentally, that is also why I am heavily against polyamory. In some exceptional circumstances, and with the right set of people, it might work, but more often than not it leads to incredibly messy dynamics, and to arrested developments in the people who partake in it. Giving modern people a permanent access to an escape hatch in everything they do is a terrible idea, because modernity itself already starts from a place of high optionality, low commitment, and thus low responsibility.
It is not necessarily the case that going against the tendencies of our times makes us more conscious, but I do think it is a good heuristic when we are young, because it exposes us to broader aspects of life, and confronts us with the unquestioned assumptions of the world we live in. It's also helpful in the sense that people by and large in our times are incredibly unhappy, despite having access to material comforts that people in the past couldn't even dream of. If a lifestyle doesn't seem conclusive to happiness, then it is worth inspecting.
A video on how nostalgia destroys souls. The topic of that video was more so on a very modern form of 'nostalgia', which focuses on the forms of media that one engaged with as a kid, rather than real, genuine culture (which hardly exists in our times). Hence, people watching over and over again the shows they watched as children, or dissecting and speedrunning their childhood games to death, that type of thing.
We could contrast this form of 'consumer nostalgia' with something like 'historical nostalgia', which is still heavily romanticized and distorted by our present-day fantasies, but at least informed by more lasting aspects of the past, and a general atmosphere which is now missing.
As for myself, it is not so much the past that I miss, and certainly no specific form in it, but more this sense of wonder, discovery, and mystery that I used to have as a child, that isn't as present anymore. My life feels more and more entrenched in routines and structures, and it doesn't feel like there is any mind-bending sense of awe when I learn about things anymore, it just feels like more ... structures, which I could learn to understand and manipulate if I spent time on it, but which I don't really feel compelled to.
The lesson we get from Eastern traditions is that we shouldn't get emotionally attached to things that don't last, though of course there is nothing wrong with softly delighting in them as they happen, but the worrying aspect of Liquid Modernity is that essentially everything in it is incredibly transient. From the news and events, to the movies, games, songs, to the discourse, to the vision of the future, to the jobs and the economy, down to even the physical places, it feels like hardly anything has stability at this point.
Which is probably why people on the internet tend to get obsessed with certain aspects of their childhood and try to cling onto them. It's a form of unprocessed grief, something which our deathless, infantile culture is terrible at. But alas, everything changes, and everything ends sooner or later, including our society which is now facing its inevitable collapse.
From Darren Allen's Book of Love:
The right-wing are much exercised by the idea of marriage. When they are not dreaming of commodified sex-objects, they are fantasising about a tidy white world of nineteen-fifties American ‘tradwives’—which is to say, the outrageous wealth that American men once possessed to support obedient women in gilded cages.
The conscious truth of nostalgia is that there is a sweetness and innocence about the past, particularly about the past of our childhood as mentioned above, which can be missing in our nitty-gritty, complicated and messy present lives. But what self does is hold onto certain past forms and tries to re-create them, even though they simply can't, which is most obvious with the decades before us, when people enjoyed far more wealth (per individual), far more stability in their lives, and a more cohesive world, one that wasn't destroyed by the impacts of offshoring industries, the shattered reality that followed from the internet, and the consequences of mass-migration (which in a sense is necessary from the point of view of the system, to drive down the cost of labor, and increase the demand for housing in a declining society).
A typical idea that comes up again and again with regards to building a better future, one that isn't so atomized and meaningless, is to work on intentional communities. The intention is commendable, and the idea makes sense: if people are increasingly isolated from one another, and feel more and more alienated from the structures of the main society they are a part of, leading to massive emotional difficulties, financial troubles, and fragilities in social structures, and if the internet has made it easier to choose the type of people you want to be with, then intentional communities sound like a good, modern way of meeting modern problems.
The problem is that this idea is hardly new, and its track record is incredibly poor. The main reference I have from this is this article by John Michael Greer on the failed projects of intentional communities. I am going to shamelessly copy lots of passages from his article, because I think he makes very good points that I do not feel the need to add anything to them.
1 - The average lifespan of intentional communities:
The point that matters is that there’s a long history of intentional communities at this point, and it’s a history of nearly unrelieved failure. The average lifespan of an intentional community is around two years. Yes, that means that half of them don’t last even that long.
2 - Organically grown communities versus top-down, rationally designed collectives:
That communities are organic growths rather than manufactured products, that human beings can’t be made to behave according to a prearranged script no matter how allegedly perfect that script might be—these unwelcome but necessary realizations are anathema to the Faustian mind. They contradict the will to power that is the rarely acknowledged mainspring behind the entire Western project.
3 - Faustian imagination and infinite expansion:
Our civilization—Faustian civilization, as Oswald Spengler called it, the great culture born around the year 1000 in the valleys of the Thames, the Seine, and the Rhine, which overran most of the planet in the centuries that followed 1492 and is now more than a century down the well-greased slope of its decline and fall—is unusually prone to such vagaries. No other civilization in recorded history has so overwhelming an obsession with infinite expansion. To the Faustian imagination there can be no lasting limits; every barrier is made to be broken, every record must be surpassed.
4 - The Faustian myth of "the ones who find the truth":
You can see that will to power clearly in the Faustian monomyth, a story we might as well call “The One who Finds the Truth.” [...] Once upon a time, the story goes, people trudged through lives of misery, burdened by ignorance and error. Then somebody discovered the truth. Of course most people rejected the truth at first, because they were stuck in ignorance and error, but in due time the discoverer is hailed as a hero, all but a few benighted souls embrace his discovery, and the truth triumphed, or is triumphing, or will triumph. [...]
Until relatively recently, in turn, founders of intentional communities very often claimed to be the One who Finds the Truth—the truth in question being, of course, the right way to live with others. As it happens, that’s one of the central reasons why intentional communities fail so reliably. The great problem with The One who Finds the Truth is that, compared to most other mythic narratives, it has very few roles available to those who try to act it out. There’s one starring role, the visionary who finds the truth. The rest of the cast consists of loyal followers who recognize the truth and follow the visionary without ever having a single original thought of their own, and opponents of the visionary who mutter dolefully about the horrible things that will happen if ignorance and error are overthrown.
That being the case, anybody with the least trace of ambition wants to be the One who Finds the Truth. How do you fulfill that role? By insisting that the ways your community does things are ignorance and error, and proclaiming your own unique truth as the path for everyone else to follow. So in any situation where people are trying to act out the story of the One who Finds the Truth, you very quickly end up with a bunch of would-be visionary leaders, each setting themselves in opposition to the community and finding fault with everything everyone else is doing. It doesn’t take much of this before people start walking away and your “meaningful, synergistic community” crashes down in ruin.
5 - The (formal) reversal of that myth into the 'Dances With Wolves' myth:
Here the One who Finds the Truth doesn’t find it by being original and cutting-edge, he finds it among the people who are usually assigned the role of doleful mutterers, the defenders of tradition and the past. Of course this means that the visionary ends up on the losing side; even among those who can’t believe in the immaculate goodness of progress, it’s rare for anyone to go so far as to question its omnipotence, so the cast strikes a pose of tragic heroism at the finale while the audience sniffles.
This has been a standard pose of religious conservatives for some time now. Many seem to relish their role as defenders of a beleaguered truth, doomed to fail—but oh, how nobly! There’s a wry amusement to be had by mentioning to them Oswald Spengler’s concept of the Second Religiosity. Spengler argued that each great culture’s age of reason ends in intellectual and moral bankruptcy, as ours is doing now, and what follows is a revival of traditional religious forms—the Second Religiosity—as a bulwark against inner and outer chaos. You’d think that religious conservatives would be delighted by this, wouldn’t you? Some do. Others get sulky and insist it can’t happen.
6 - And one suggestion of an alternative to Faustian myths:
The image of community called into being by the vision of Tamanous differs just as sharply from those of the other two patterns we’ve discussed. If you’ve spent time “on the res” with Native Americans you’ll have noticed what, to the Faustian mind, is a weird formlessness in social events. People drift in and out, there’s no schedule and no agenda, things happen when they happen, but somehow everything gets done. It’s endlessly frustrating to the Faustian mentality, and I suspect it’s just as baffling from within the world of Sobornost, because there’s no collective structure of consciousness guiding things. Everybody’s following their own inspiration, and community is born organically out of the dance of individuals, rather than being the deep source from which individuals emerge.
Here is a tweet that points to a book about alternative communities, the book being The Modern Utopian: Alternative Communities of the '60s and '70s.
I highly recommend this book on the 'let's repeat communes which failed' idea. Every single one fails for (predictable) reasons, except one... which is a village with a hierarchy and a clear leader
Another tweet:
Half of my Twitter friends want to start an intentional community, meanwhile every single person I know who grew up in one doesnt want to set their foot again in one. Do you think you can avoid it? How?
I think that the John Michael Greer article describes the main structural reasons as to why intentional communities fail, which is the fact that they are born from a top-down, contrarian impulse to reject the status quo and find The One True(TM) Way to Live, and thus perpetuate the same mistakes that the Faustian myths and lifestyles created to begin with.
More down-to-earth reasons that I have seen mentioned in the comments are that:
As alluded to in my piece about charnel grounds, I think that hope is a poison that slowly kills you on the inside, because it makes you more tethered to the world and your (mortal) self, thus making you more and more dependent on hope. Just like pleasure (as conventionally understood) excites your self, in that the high leads to a low (sadness, boredom) that compels the self to seek another high, so then does worldly hope compel the self to build up defenses, whether physical, mental or emotional, to cling to a version of Reality that it prefers. Unfortunately for the self, there is no worldly solution to its fundamental problems, and the society it engenders. Give up worldly hope.
Worldly hope is praying that your self and the society you are in will be doing fine forever essentially. A complete fantasy if there ever was one. Conscious faith is praying to have the strength to face whatever happens to you, even if it's your total annihilation, and to have the strength to remain in integrity even in the face of corruption. I guess that's why I resonate with Gnosticism more than anything else. Not the systems or the ideas of Gnosticism, but the fundamental myth of the Demiurge and the false world.
It is good to engage in worldly actions, whether focusing on ourselves or trying to build a community, but ultimately we need to be prepared with the fact that every form ends sooner or later. Rather than trying to build a philosophy, or community that is aligned with the Ultimate Immortal Truth(TM), we should build things that acknowledge their transience and try to die as smoothly as possible. Philosophies that people can intelligently disagree with. Communities that people can willingly opt out of. Individuals that meet their own death with grace.
The fundamental problem with the Faustian myths, and the current form of civilization that we live in that emerges from those, is that everything is an attempt at self-perpetuation, without any acknowledgement of limits and of death. Imagine if the energy and idealism of intentional communities were channeled into more realistic experiments, such as an attempt to live with your friends for an explicit amount of time, such as 2 or 3 years, as a learning experience, from which you could share what you've learned with one another and the world at large. It would lead to a much more grounded form of knowledge, informed by real-life experience and visceral skin in the game, and it would naturally self-correct into a more lasting collective as a result.
Hoping that things magically click together is not constructive optimism, it is disastrous wishful thinking. If something is worth building, then it is worth building a smaller version of. This is the version of optimism I subscribe to: small experiments built in alignment with a constructive vision, with a full acknowledgement of the difficulties of life, the messy dynamics of human beings living with one another, and the inevitability of death.
We shouldn't try to build eternal temples based on some 'perfect' blueprint that the mind conjured up, we should learn to engage in the realm of messy, transient forms in a way that aligns with its realities, and our desires, as best as possible. Participation in environments that we can touch and feel, rather than designing worlds that we fantasize about.
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2026-07-10