Enabling Life

My latest book, Death Stoppers Anthology, takes its name from a poem I wrote a few years ago called Death Stoppers that is included in the book. After writing the poem, I wrote a blog post that delved into some of its meaning; and in the new book's memoir section, I concluded that it embodies perhaps the best strategy for dealing with the global threat of ecological catastrophe that years of research has forced me to accept. Perhaps even more important for me personally, and others who may also be drawn toward depression after coming to terms with our situation, it presents a vision of what success might look like – something that can motivate us and serve as a source of hope while we do the hard work ahead.

Yesterday I had some time to appreciate some of the natural beauty around me, which here on the Front Range of Colorado is as easy as focusing on the Rockies that frame half our view. After recent snowfall, the mountains are particularly stunning, a stark overlay of both the immediate past and the distant past that both relaxes and challenges the mind. It occurred to me, not for the first time, that I have spent an unhealthy fraction of my life obsessed with finding and characterizing problems, and not enough time finding and characterizing – and more importantly, experiencing – the good, in people as well as the rest of Nature. Preserving, enhancing, and proliferating that good, and providing opportunities for good that we have yet to know, is, when we value life above and beyond (while including) our own, what "death stopping" enables.

When we see ourselves as "life enablers," then both our guiding value, and what we must do to honor that value, are crystallized around a vision of the kind of world we want to be part of. Death Stoppers ends with my take on that vision:

Disaster was averted

Death slowed to a crawl

Love and health became the rule

The team became us all.

The "team," of course, is the group of people who facilitate the changes that make that vision a reality, and ultimately we all must maintain it.

The rest of the poem deals with how that can be achieved, beginning with shaming those people who "didn't share... Who raped the land for fun and gain... And cared not what was fair." Sadly such people exist; but in a social environment such as our present one, where the values that cast their behavior as bad are eroded or absent, and where, increasingly, the amoral, homicidal, and ultimately suicidal philosophy that "might makes right" dominates, resistance cannot be unified and have a decent chance of prevailing. In the poem, the team understands this, and chooses to set an example at great personal risk: "To stop the death that threatened all... Without a shred of fear." Shaming is one way to have a discussion about values, by introducing them explicitly as a reason for observable action (which is focused on stopping behavior), but such a discussion can also be facilitated by celebrating existing examples of how the alternative, preferred values translate into experience we might (and I believe most of us would) want more.

In my recent post "Evaluating Competition," I laid out a case for assessing the values that are embodied in a competition's goals, rules, and full set of consequences in order to decide whether the competition is worth our participation and our society's support. Death Stoppers displays an application of this, where the team rejects those aspects of economic competition that value the happiness of a minority over long-term fairness and survival for the majority. The team is initially assisted by many others because their individual happiness has suffered, and it must demonstrate healthy replacements for the needs that the current competition serves before its values can be fully accepted and incorporated into a longer-lasting way of living (the economic aspects of which were described in my post "Spaceship Finance").

I hold on to some hope that this process can be hastened by the shortcut of engaging people's imaginations and reasoning through words and images that simulate what living might be like in alternative futures that are based on the exercise of different values. Making them believable depends upon another major requirement for a healthy world, common (and accurate) understanding that enables both quality communication and credibility. Working on such a shortcut is one of my main motivations for pursuing a writing business, which along with my research has only now set the stage for it. Since I have limited personal resources, and because I'm frankly worn out by dwelling on the problem of apocalyptic futures, I intend to focus on describing the consequences of success in enabling life, as well as the good in the here-and-now that I was luckily reminded of yesterday.

Breaking Addictions

A recent addition to my list of ways I want to live in the future (the "visioning exercise") is having and using the ability to perceive and avoid activities that are unhealthy for me, or through my action, others; especially those activities maintained by addiction.

One clearly unhealthy activity is eating foods that taste good but have little or no nutritive value and contain substances that make us ill. Basically, anything that is sold in a package that can last more than couple of weeks probably fits in that category. Complicating the food situation are allergies, which would affect us no matter how they were found; luckily I have none that I know about – yet. While on my recent diet, I found that tracking what I eat (energy, nutrition) and its consequences (weight, digestive cues) helped. After a few weeks I developed a sense of what was good and what wasn't, and learned to stop eating just as satiation was kicking in. When I ignored that sense, my body let me know almost immediately. The benefit for others from taking this approach was through my stopping financial support of the companies that make the unhealthy foods.

A somewhat less obviously unhealthy addiction is watching TV. I easily get trapped into watching shows that end each episode with a cliffhanger, the best example being "24," which is about to be reborn as a new series. On the surface, it appears that sitting on my couch for several hours at a time harms no one, but there is a kind of opportunity cost associated with it. I could be doing something else that feels better and is generally better for me and others (such as writing), but the need to complete a virtual experience can be too great to overcome – at least until it becomes uncomfortable to continue. The best way I've found to deal with such an activity is to avoid starting it in the first place.

Similar to the TV addiction is compulsively checking the news and social Internet sites. For me, this started in earnest following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and has become driven by an obsession with present and future threats to the survival of our species and others. This is a healthy addiction where it informs acting on what you find in proportion to everything else in your life. It's unhealthy if it takes so much time that it replaces taking such action or living your own life. Accepting these definitions, it is clearly unhealthy for me. The issues are simply too big; and with any action I take (and I do what I can) unlikely to make a sufficient difference to avoid the worst-case scenarios I naturally tend to focus on preventing, it's all to easy to be driven toward near-paralyzing depression.

After some reflection, I usually give myself the proverbial kick-in-the-pants and stop feeling sorry for myself, then get busy trying to find other ways to make a difference. Some new insights come out of each iteration (which I write about, if they might be useful to someone else), but for me there's the same net result. The simple way out of this unhealthy situation is to do what I've tried with TV: just avoid it. Unfortunately, the effects are too pervasive, and I've lost the ability to totally delude myself or to follow others without question so I can get sucked into accepting their delusions.

There is also the matter of responsibility: to the extent that I'm contributing the problems, I need to stop, otherwise I continue to be partly responsible for them. To the extent that any of my addictions cause bad things to happen, I have an obligation to end those addictions. If I am able to embrace denial, either through self-deception or adopting the perceptions of others, and my subsequent actions cause harm, then I am responsible for that harm just much as if I intended to cause it.

A strong sense of responsibility could be a valuable tool in the fight to stop unhealthy behavior, though evidence shows that it's not enough, even when accompanied by discomfort that comes from taking an addiction too far. It may however be a sufficient motivator to investigate the actual consequences of behaviors, like the tracking I did with my eating. With the knowledge that comes from the tracking, taking action to modify, limit, or eliminate behaviors with negative consequences has its own challenges, especially if you depend on people who don't believe the behavior is unhealthy, or if the behavior meets a set of needs that can't be met in healthier ways; but it can be done.

To summarize: in my experience, responsibility triggers the pursuit of knowledge, which helps identify what actions are healthy and what actions are unhealthy for both us and others. The sense of responsibility, coupled with discomfort associated with unhealthy behavior, improves the chances that we'll take more healthy than unhealthy actions. In my personal attempt to restructure my life by envisioning what I want my future to be like, making healthy behavior dominant is critical. My mental and physical survival depend on it; and if I'm to recover hope that the future world will be healthier instead of sicker, I'll need to work with many others to want the same thing.