Love is good, no matter how many engage in it
The writer Darren Allen has been one of the biggest influences of my thought, and this 3-part series on my worldview is summarized very well by his post titled It really doesn't matter. Essentially, his point is that civilization is collapsing no matter what. He argues how man-caused climate change is a very real thing 1, but even if it was somehow shown to be a hoax, it wouldn't matter. There are simply far too many ways in which society is utterly unsustainable, such as its energy situation, like I've outlined in my previous essay on global pessimism.
Society is collapsing, and the way it is hidden is not through lies, but through facts that all serve the same narrative: that we can somehow keep growing exponentially, forever, on a finite planet. This is reminiscent of how some people manage to convince themselves that they've built a perpetual motion machine. The laws of thermodynamics simply show that such a feat is impossible, but by building an incredibly complicated machine in one's mind, it becomes very difficult to track where the contradiction lies.
I would suggest that society works much the same way. The system we live in today is far too complex for anyone to grasp, which means that one needs to build mental models to make sense of it, which are still incredibly complicated but more manageable to our simplistic cause-and-effect minds. The problem is that all these complications obscure the fact that society is inherently aligned with perpetual growth, which is impossible to maintain in the long term. But those who end up fixating on the trees of their theories, whether economical, political or social, completely lose track of the forest of this basic impossibility.
In a sense, it is not even that we are 'collapsing', it is more that we got drunk with this ideal of growth and technological progress, which had its truth for a while, until we started to run into hard limits of our ambient ecosystem and the unsustainable processes which do not account for externalities: pollution in water streams, our atmosphere, material waste, etc.
So, enough with the global pessimism lens, and let's examine what is possible within a declining society. As Darren Allen puts it at the end of his essay:
Chill out. Go into the garden. Chat up that girl who works in the coffee shop. Cook a nice curry. Read a big book. Take a walk in the woods. For God’s sake do what you love. Life is good, even facing the end. Especially facing the end.
Many of the problems that plague Western people nowadays seem to revolve around a lack of nourishing relationships. I mean, people talk to their colleagues, but they might not necessarily get close to them. In a sense that's understandable, as a lot of people are really boring.
In a declining society, it really doesn't make sense to invest in your 'career'. Those 'skills' don't amount to anything when the fragile hyper-complicated technological system starts to fall apart. On the other hand, everyone can learn to live on much simpler means, which actually has a way of making your life better because it leaves you more time to spend on what you actually want to do.
These practices are great and I mention them because they're actionable even for someone who still lives a lifestyle tied in to the system. Still, it is worth mentioning that they will not provide you with food, water, heating or clothing. To live in a way that is completely independent from the system requires a community aligned with that goal, really, as human beings have never lived by themselves. The current trend of individualism is a complete anomaly in history, and even merely living far away from one's family is a recent thing - in the past people took up the family business.
But even if someone is not in a place to develop skills and communities that can persist the inevitable decline of society, they can always turn to the cultivation of relationships. Yes, I am very serious, they are that important in my opinion. I don't believe in politics (global solutions), I believe in friendships and communities.
As I’ve said, I would attribute many of the problems that modern people experience as being downstream of a lack of a supportive environment: loneliness of course, the general apathy and numbness towards life, trauma or broadly speaking unresolved emotional wounds, self-coercion and even self-bullying, a scattered will (wanting to do one thing but then wanting to do another a few days after), and an overall sense of meaninglessness.
The so-called Death of God has resulted in something far worse in my opinion: the Death of church. Not the institution, but the regular practice of communal gathering around a shared sense of meaning. People are now scattered in their individual job, which they probably dislike or even hate, which is unlikely to be the place where one gets a sense of belonging from. The same thing is true for one's neighborhood, or perhaps even one's family. Spending time together is something that people do on their ‘free’ time, not part of life itself.
Belonging has become a rare experience, and without this bedrock of safety and connection, many things become extremely difficult: why would you feel connected to something higher if you only live for yourself? why go above and beyond basic survival and some amount of pleasure? why attempt to build things that will last?
Many of those questions don't make sense for someone who only lives for themselves, and even worse, for their own ego, the story about themselves. But within the context of a community, the answer of many of those ‘why’ questions is rather obvious: to develop love around myself of course, whether indirectly through providing safety for my community, or directly through our interactions and willingness to connect.
Ideally those relationships would be found around oneself rather than online, but because of the isolating forces of the modern world, people find themselves in situations where this is not possible in the short term. There are many problems with being online of course: interacting through text alone personally drives me crazy because of how much communication is lost in the process, commitment is way, way low on the internet and the same stuff that can be used to connect with others has a tendency to be used by parasitic collectives to spread their territory in the global narrative war. 3
But amidst all this, I'd say an honest online relationship beats twenty shallow and closed real-life acquaintances. Having more choice as to who you spend your time with is a huge advantage as well. People often complain that social media promotes outrage, and while I can see the systemic reasons for why that happens, there's a part of me that just thinks: how about ... not doing that? How about spending your time in a way that makes your life richer? Find the people who grow you rather than make you feel small and scared.
What makes me optimistic about local agency, rather than global solutions, is that the moves to make our lives better are simply out there. They're not found in some extraordinary La La Land, or some obscure esoteric system which requires 20 years of commitment to get any results whatsoever. In terms of relationships, I would say the moves are rather straightforward if one continually applies them:
People often despair at how much people tend to resemble those around them, how much human beings are steeped in mimesis rather than personal will or choice. I would say, use that to your advantage rather than fight it. Find people who bring the best in you, make you laugh, inspire you, make you want to work at your projects and share, in other words, find people you want to thrive with.
There is no 'should' or 'must' here. Everyone benefits from having a supportive environment, from having friends to share moments of intimacy with. People want to connect, talk about what interests them, and feel like their work is part of something greater than themselves. And so my optimism resides in the fact that these insights around relationships are incredibly simple to have. Unfortunately, people have a way of getting stuck with their misery. Convincing themselves somehow that they "must" understand it, fight with it, solve it. Those might be useful, but then again, focusing on what you want to see in life might be far simpler and far more enjoyable.
So what does finding people look like in practice? There are obviously many ways to go about it, so I'll just share the basic template I'm following. I believe that for those type of things, it's better to provide an explicit plan that one could adjust, rather than talk about abstract generalities.
Obviously this plan doesn't describe any content of interactions, but once again, I would reiterate that bonding over negativity is a rather dangerous thing to do. In the short term it can provide a sense of comfort, for instance finally finding people who understand your struggles. But in the long term you cannot expect those same people to be building towards things that would add to your life. This means that finding people to do cool and interesting things might be harder but it's that much more rewarding.
I'm hesitant on writing this part because many of the groups that now take part in the global narrative war probably started as simple and local initiatives to improve one's life, grounded in human values rather than the bureaucratic needs for power. That being said, I have such a non-existent audience that I don't think I have much to fear in that regard.
The possibility for bigger change comes from, once again, the fact that there are many moves that can add to people's lives without taking from others. I have written about relationships so far, because in my opinion it is the most tangible aspect for most people, in terms of what is available but also in terms of what makes someone's life easier, but obviously there are many other areas: health (not just physical but also emotional, mental and even spiritual), meaningful work, independence from the system, building an inner life (through reading or spirituality for example), all of which are facilitated by having good friends.
It is worth contrasting that with the way that society rarely addresses any of its problems at theirs roots, and instead it tends to export them, whether in space — to 3rd world countries usually — or in time — using up non-renewable resources like fossil fuels, delaying the inherent impossibility of perpetual growth.
Individuals sometimes do the same, for instance convincing themselves that the way for society to be "saved" — huge red flag — is by sacrificing themselves: working long hours to acquire a lot of money which will then be given to charities. In my opinion this rescuer narrative is complete horseshit. A society which requires people to sacrifice themselves to maintain it is not worth maintaining in the first place. And if anything is going to move humanity through its current problems, it cannot ever, ever, come from coercion, whether from the outside or self-inflicted. This is because coercion is one of the main reasons for why society is such a miserable place to live with in the first place, thus it cannot be part of the solution.
Something which has a chance of succeeding in creating positive global change would instead focus on:
These are very rough ideas I know, which is why I tend to prefer thinking about specific actions, such as the ones highlighted in the previous section on relationships. But the key point I'm trying to make here is the following: possibilities and capacity are better than tring to make people adopt a specific worldview. The attempt to homogenize human beings into one "correct" worldview to live by is exactly what gave us the global narrative war in the first place. And because human beings are so different, I do not think it is a good idea to try to fight that current reality. Rather, I find differences to not only be perfectly acceptable, but even beautiful manifestations of how broad our reality is that people can hold such different worldviews. The problem doesn't lie in differences or disagreements, the problem lies in warfare.
Fortunately, not taking part in the narrative war and focusing on what one wishes to see instead is not a matter of dogma, it's a matter of consciously realizing a simple truth: that ultimately we create our local reality.
1 As do I. Here's an interesting anecdote: my parents’ house got hit by a flood a few years ago, something which didn't happen in the last 150 years or so in the part of Europe they live in. I'm still convinced that anthropogenic climate change played a major part in that, as well as the utter lack of maintenance of the dams and floodgates, which is another important sign of societal decline.
2 The initial campaign that highlighted the importance of recycling had in fact 3 R's. In order of decreasing importance, those were: Reducing, reusing, recycling. This means that recycling is only useful when the other options are not possible. Needless to say, the collective didn't remember the first 2 R's, which are heavily disruptive to the consumption economy that the technological system thrives on.
3 In other words: outrage porn, polarizing opinions which only lead to hate and pointless arguing, ‘news’ that only serve in making you feel powerless and scared rather than making you an actor in the world, amongst many other things.
Go back to the list of blog posts
2024-01-16