(Hey There,
This is the 10th provocation I’ve posted already. (You can see them all here.) Time is flying by, and my sense is it’s not going to slow down any time soon, unfortunately.
Just as a reminder, this is the one free post you’ll get each week, while the Sunday curated links post is for paid subscribers only. On that note, thanks to J.L., Z.C., and D.W. for their paid support of this work.
And just a bit of news on the subscriber front: I’m going to be donating all proceeds from paid memberships to my local food pantry this year. To date, that’s $787 that will go to supporting families here in my rural part of New Jersey who are struggling to make ends meet. (There are more of them than you might think, considering this is the 14th richest county in the country.)
As always, thanks for reading. ~W)
“Scientists the world over — until very recently a category of people we most trust and listen to — have been telling us for decades that the economic system is incompatible with a liveable planet and that continuing in this way will assure our own and its destruction, and yet somehow, we still can’t seem to imagine a way out of it.” ~Jessica Pendergrast
So, what do you do when you’re a part of an economic system that is incompatible with maintaining life on Earth and basically assures our own destruction? (Might as well cut right to the chase…)
Well, the first thing might be to look around whereever you are right now and try to find something that didn’t start it’s life cycle in the ground, in the Earth.
Thing is, you can’t.
That phone or computer you’re reading this on? From the Earth, every piece of it.
That chair you’re sitting on? From the Earth.
The house you’re living in, the clothes you’re wearing, the car you drive, the food you eat, that furnace that keeps you warm…every single part of every single thing that every single person on this planet owns or has in their possession comes from the Earth.
Even you are from the Earth.
I’ll be honest, the first time I sat and really contemplated on the fact that everything around me is an extraction from the planet, it actually changed me. It challenged me. How many of those comforts that surround me did I really need? How many of those things did I actually use? How much of what I own is basically just window dressing or the manifestation of a marketing campaign to convince me what a comfortable, “good life” is? And how does all of that make me complicit in our collective challenges?
Especially now that the nauseatingly rich who have made their billions by selling the idea a good life built on extraction and overconsumption seem to be taking over the world, maybe it’s time to finally try harder to “imagine a way out of it.”
Buy Nothing Life
Did you “celebrate” the “economic blackout” buy nothing day last Friday? I did. In fact, for the last few months, I’ve been trying to transition to what could be called a “buy nothing life,” as in not buying anything new that I don’t actually need. So far, pretty good. The only new things I’ve bought in the last few weeks (aside from food) are two car batteries which we (unfortunately) needed after a bad cold snap. Everything else was used.
But my desire to reduce my consumption isn’t driven so much by sticking it to the rich oligarchs as it is by wanting to stop being so extractive of the Earth. The ultimate irony is that those who treat the planet the best are those who are too poor to feed the economic beast that is devouring our resources and pushing us to the brink. I mean, how sad is it that those of us with privilege have to “try” to reduce our impact?
Given the circumstances of this moment, the path forward requires a personal reimagining of a) what’s really needed for a “good life,” and b) what it means to be comfortable. Both of those things are narratives that we are constantly being sold and are being imagined for us. And we’ve been taught that we are in constant competition, taught to “keep up” or our lives will be less. We’ve been conditioned to ignore that, yes, every single thing in our lives starts its journey in the Earth.
Remember:
“The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has the power to show that the ways things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary.” ~Ursula K. LeGuin
Not. Necessary.
I want a do over, but of course, that’s not possible. My message to my two young adult children goes something like this: Don’t own a lot of stuff. You’re going to need to be nimble and mobile. Find “comfort” in something other than what you buy into your life. The most important things in your lives really are free. And if you want a planet that’s worth living on, right now, less is definitely so, so much more.
Getting Uncomfortable
It would be great if that opening quote could serve as a lens for the way we look at what schools currently teach about the world. Obviously, different ideas of “comfort” and “the good life” are rarely in the mix. We’re training kids to get those good jobs so they can consume and accrue all of the trappings of wealth. We rarely talk about how everything comes from the Earth, and that much of the supply chain that brings us those comforts is marked by violence and destruction and injustice.
And, schools model the consumerism that feeds that economic model that is driving us to the brink. You need only spend one day on the vendor floor of a big education conference to understand why it’s a many multi-billion dollar industry. (How many Promethean boards are stuck in classroom closets never again to see the light of day?)
And don’t get me started on the “science” and how most of the curriculum in school is “comfortable” by design regardless of of truth and reality. If we actually did believe the scientists and acted on those beliefs, I think we might rethink a lot of what we teach and how we teach it.
What if we taught a “buy nothing new unless you absolutely need it” lifestyle? What if we taught how all that stuff we’re being sold actually gets created? What if we taught how much stuff that comes from the Earth gets thrown away from overconsumption, and how that adds to the environmental challenges we already have? What if we helped students really understand that life doesn’t have to be a consumerist competition instead of just giving that lip service and then treating everything like a competition?
What if…what if…what if…
If we are going to “imagine our way out of it,” we need to be asking and answering more of those questions.
And we’re also going to have to be willing to stop feeding the beast on our own.
As always, your thoughts are welcomed.
With gratitude,
~Will
Time is flying, yet here we are, steady in the unraveling.
The unbuying began in my cupboard with shoeboxes stacked like quiet confessions, clothes still tagged with a guilt I hadn’t yet named. Then, to the fridge, where wilted greens whispered of promises unmet, of abundance turned careless.
But that’s the discomfort, isn’t it? Sitting in it. Feeling it. Letting it chafe until action becomes the only salvation..
So, I unpick, thread by thread, choice by choice, until what is left is lighter, truer. A life forged in time with the earth, not against it.
Grateful for the provocations Wil. They land. They linger. They move.
I’ve recently realised that I’ve also become more comfortable with ‘ontological uncertainty’ - knowing what is real.
In asking more questions about the crises of the Anthropocene I ventured into deeper questions of metaphysics. Which beliefs and assumptions, learned as a child and through Western education, (mine was in the natural sciences) do I still hold without question? How do these limit my ability to imagine what’s possible? In what ways are my perspectives partial or ‘half-truths’?
As Zak Stein suggested in the recent interview you posted (Values, Education, AI, and the Metacrisis) we don’t often get down to questioning our metaphysics - perhaps partly because that can be uncomfortable. How often do teachers, policy makers and politicians go there?
I reflected on this in a journal post: https://tas-education.org/exostudies/questioning-education/