A Year of Development

To most of my relatives and acquaintances, I have been focused for the last three months and much of my spare time over the past year on trying to get my writing business up and running. The others, and readers of my blogs, know different: the writing business is, as it always has been, a potentially sustainable means for sharing my personal perspective, knowledge, and skills; but developing those things has been my true focus. Much of that development is currently embodied in my research into a simple, unified way to understand history so that I and others can intelligently contribute to a better future as defined by select values.

I don't mean to imply that the time wasn't productive from a business perspective. A year ago I was completing my book Death Stoppers Anthology; and this year I conceived and published in parts the beginning of a new novel, BIOME, which is a prequel to my first novel (Lights Out). I also worked on instrumental music, a purely artistic form I enjoy on a visceral level, releasing a soundtrack album for Death Stoppers Anthology and starting one for BIOME. As I did with Lights Out, I've incorporated life lessons and results from my research into its prequel, in some ways running the research in parallel with the fiction as my creative energy spilled into both.

The many months I spent hunting for a job that could meet my family's financial expectations were just as depressing as the news and outcomes of research that reinforced my expectation of a catastrophic future unfolding soon. Always trying to define and understand the problems I seem to have a penchant for sensing, I developed a framework for assessing the financial, practical, and ethical aspects of potential work, which benefited from understanding and improving on one of the most interesting predictions of my main research. As a result, I achieved a level of confidence I have been seeking for most of my life, which sadly has risen inversely with confidence in the judgment of others in business and government who I had respected as a default condition.

I learned how to get rich, and why I probably won't. Getting rich involves enabling the customization of environments (the essence of what my research defines as happiness), with minimal effort by the customer, and with mostly invisible costs at the point of sale. Implicit in that process is hope: the promise of more, for as long as anyone wants it, which is the essence of perpetual growth. Success depends on deceit, because each aspect of its realization is based on a lie, or at best a special case that is treated as a generalization. Customization requires increasing amounts of resources, which has costs that may be hidden but are not inconsequential. Limits to resources are real and we are attempting to exceed them, turning the appearance of perpetual growth into a reality of rapid decline. Knowing what I know, I can't lie – to myself or others – and I can't live with myself and encourage unhealthy and ultimately lethal behavior.

Since my preferred contribution to making the world better is the sharing of insights about how it works, and doesn't, along with ideas about what might be changed based on values and experience, this personal account is presented as both background and overview so that you, the reader, can derive some context for what I've shared and intend to share. It also serves as a reference point in the body of work I'm most proud of – my writing, which is available on my blogs and Web sites.

Finally in this last blog post of 2015, I would like to acknowledge the love and support of my wife Debbie. Over the dozen years we've been together we have helped each other through many challenges and grown closer through those and the good times; finding home always where we were, rather than where our stuff was. Our relationship has been a daily reminder of how much good remains in the world: what – and who – must be cherished, not as an abstraction but as the essence of life worth lasting for as long as possible.

Final Solace

I recently completed the last chapter of a short story called "Final Solace," based on music that I created during and after the illness that took my mother-in-law's life nearly two years ago. It was also the final chapter in over a quarter-century of grieving that began with the death of my own mother and included the sudden death of my father.

To date the music hasn't earned a dime, though I'll be happy if it earns much more than that. But money was never the point; it was – then and now – a means to promote and help support my continuing creation of artificial experiences that convey what are (to me) meaningful ideas, observations, and feelings that others might benefit from. "Final Solace," in all its incarnations, is among the most meaningful of those creations.

My mother-in-law, Alice Sampson, was perhaps the greatest fan of my art, which was a great compliment coming from one of the greatest people I've ever known. I say that in all honesty, not just because of our relationship, but objectively because of the way she lived her life and the impact she had on all around her. The first half of the first track of the album, "Getting By," was created before her condition took its tragic turn, as I thought of the long days she spent reading and watching T.V. It was her strongly positive reaction to it that convinced me to create related music as events unfolded.

While the music tracks honor the last year I knew Alice, they also resonate with similar memories of my own parents, which I drew on while composing them. Creating music for me has almost always been a channeling directly from my subconscious to an instrument such as a computer, followed by some more thoughtful editing. I felt those experiences, and the music flowed. The result, as with almost all of what I create, is snippets of a soundtrack, like what I've payed in my head, and often hummed, since I was very young.

Alice's last days had a lot in common with what I experienced with my mother, which was the most stressful few weeks of my life. Diagnosed with cancer when it was too late to treat, my mother chose to die at home with my brother and me, aided by Hospice, an organization I can't praise enough. My father died suddenly of a heart attack after working years without a break; the track "Memories" best matches how I remember that time, and my struggle to pick up the pieces of a life that totally depended on his guidance.

A few months ago, after publishing the individual "Final Solace" tracks for wider distribution than the album, I decided that context was needed for the people who might listen to them. In the mean time, having listened often to the music, I had been thinking of it as more of a soundtrack for how anyone's final days might unfold. It made sense on that basis to write a short story, told from the first person. With a better understanding of how the world might look when I'm elderly, I had my main character inhabit such a future, and created a family that I'll never have. Personal details are intentionally vague, including the protagonist's gender, but the main elements that I want to convey are, I hope, crystal clear.

Five Roles

For several years I've tried to occupy five roles simultaneously, with mixed results. Priorities have shifted, along with the effort required to maintain them and the dynamics of synergies and conflicts between them. Recently I crossed a major threshold in juggling my roles, which in retrospect was inevitable, and may also be inevitable for like-minded people who have chosen similar ones.

The first role I've occupied is as a husband and supportive member of a small community that includes my family and friends. In my second role, I've been a citizen of the United States, working to make a decent living as defined by my culture, with the hope of eventually retiring comfortably. In the third role, I've been an aspiring artist, creating artificial experiences that might inspire, entertain, and educate others as they did for me. My fourth role has been as a curious researcher, exploring and sharing how and why the future might unfold for our species over the near and distant future. Finally, in the fifth role, I've tried to become a more responsible citizen of Earth.

The selection of these roles is understandable, given my personality. Using the Big Five model, I am an introvert, explaining why I'm comfortable with very few people and why I'm drawn to the art and professions that involve mostly solitary activity. High agreeableness explains why I typically stick to my culture's dominant script, which corresponds in general to the expectations of the people around me. Strong conscientiousness and openness underlie my search for meaning and understanding of how the world works so that, when a goal is set, the supporting actions can be derived and followed. I also have high neuroticism, which motivates me to find and solve problems, and minimize harm resulting from anything I do (or anyone else does) through acceptance of responsibility and a pursuit of knowledge that can improve the chances of success.

I've shared in much of my writing how I've found the fifth role of responsible Earth citizen problematic, especially in light of the results of my research into variables affecting our future. In a nutshell, it almost directly opposes my second role as a citizen of my culture and the goals it prescribes. As evidence has mounted that we may all be doomed no matter what we do, the advantages of following my culture's lead have become harder and harder to see. This made my third role as an artist a lot more attractive as a replacement, even though it almost certainly meant much less short-term income.

Until today, the most recent real-world manifestation of my second role was a job as (effectively) a test engineer, which coincidentally benefited from the other aspects of my personality – at least for a while. My discomfort with the potential for hidden problems, when indulged, is both an advantage and a curse. The advantage is that my heightened sensitivity leads me to problems others wouldn't think of finding. The curse is that I start finding those problems everywhere. Each of us seems to have a limit to how much of that kind of knowledge we can handle, or choose to handle, likely related to the openness personality dimension. My tolerance seems to be higher than most, which sometimes gets me into trouble if I'm not judicious about how I share the "excess," either literally or as a result of being too obvious in my pursuit of it (which in a perverse way can be perceived as "waste"). As I approached my own limit over the course of the last few months, with the fate of the world revealed in news and research overshadowing and adding to my direct experience, it became virtually impossible to do anything but double down and deal with it, all of it. I realized that for the world to become healthier, many of the assumptions behind our physical and social infrastructure would need to change radically, and very soon, making almost all of the things we focused on, in my work and around the world, necessarily obsolete. As a result I became less careful with maintaining perception, to say the least. The consequences were predictable.

My writing had served as a way to deal with both my angst and urge to troubleshoot, before and during that period. Through music, I was also able to access some deep feelings, many – thankfully – positive, a revelation from my subconscious that I could share more than just soul-crushing problems, or numb my pain with the total fantasy painted by TV and movies. I grasped at the possibility that I could transition into a healthier set of roles, using this one to earn enough money to pay off debts and maintain a more basic standard of living as I plotted a course toward more responsible living that didn't sacrifice health and happiness. I did so knowing that my chances were slim, even if we weren't facing a high probability of death by radiation poisoning, climate change, or a horrific combination of both.

I'm still grasping that possibility, and committed now to testing it. Though I'm sure to take some detours along the way as necessity dictates, the future – as I used to say about relationships – is going to be as good as I can make it, and better than it might have been.

Finding Focus

I've held several careers in my life, but none has made me feel as fulfilled as creative writing and music, which pays barely enough for a few meals a year. No one else decides what I create, and I can explore any subject that interests me in the process. You know you've found your calling when you can work for many hours and not even feel tired. In contrast, after eight to ten hours a day at any of my "normal" careers, plus typically more than an hour commuting, it's been difficult to do more than mentally vegetate in front of a T.V. or computer while eating a quick dinner.

I share with millions the unfortunate necessity of "making a living." Because our dominant culture has deemed worthless anything that can't be traded for anything else using the universal medium of money, I must find a way to show equivalence of what I do with what a significant number of other people do. This inevitably results in pressure to reduce uniqueness, while increasing consumption of those things that appeal to the most people – along with whatever else that can be converted into those things.

There is of course an alternative, at least in principle: I can find a way to meet my basic needs with minimal economic interaction. For most of human history this was the norm for the majority of people, who could rely on their skills at hunting and gathering members of other species. Today, this is much more difficult, even with modern knowledge. Those who do, or try to, are at risk of being overrun, or having their resources taken from them, by rapacious organizations that are driven – and empowered – by our global culture of imperative growth. They are also hindered by the effects of civilization's sabotage of multiple natural systems that we and other species depend upon for survival.

Because I also want what I do with my life to have a net positive effect on the world, I've been looking at approaches such as permaculture, which are aimed at building healthy partnerships with other species to both enable self-sufficiency and heal natural systems. Essentially, they amount to large-scale gardening (or small-scale farming), which requires access to land, water, seeds, and animals, as well as security. Also required is a considerable amount of knowledge about local conditions, from both natural and societal perspectives, involving research few of us have ever done about where we live. I currently have none of these things, nor do I find anything but the research particularly attractive.

Economic interaction is unavoidable, for practical and legal reasons. My most developed skills, communication and finding critical knowledge gaps and failures, have so far been most economically applicable to technology (through technical writing and test engineering). Any jobs in technology are, by definition, dependent on the continued existence and growth of that technology and, most importantly, the infrastructure that supports it. That infrastructure, by its nature, uses critical resources and generates toxic pollution, and is vulnerable to the extreme weather amplified by climate change. Even creative writing depends on means of generating, reproducing, and distributing books and music (electronic and otherwise), which along with the rest of technology's infrastructure will become increasingly degraded. This degradation will occur either because: civilization unravels, as I expect; people come to their senses and create healthy alternatives that likely have less massive dissemination potential; or technology becomes so powerful that we dismantle it for our own survival.

One of the key features of civilizations that have avoided extinction is the ability to adapt, to radically change the way people interact with the world so that they can survive. Another is division into small groups that are supportable by their environments and able to experiment without jeopardizing other groups if those experiments yield dangerous results. There are at least two lessons here for me, as I consider what to do with the rest of my life. The first lesson is that I must be flexible in considering my options. The second lesson is that the path to having a net positive effect on the world may be as simple as finding ways to help activate the two extinction-avoidance features for as many people as possible.

In the movie "Up In the Air," the main character advocates, and later rethinks a philosophy that matches what I see as a fundamental adaptation strategy for the future: keep your life simple enough to carry in a backpack. In practical terms, it was the reality for our hunter-gatherer forebears, and will likely be a necessity for the survivors of the ecological apocalypse that we have unleashed. I would rephrase it slightly: Keep your life simple enough that you can most completely and sustainably accept responsibility for the direct and indirect consequences of your actions. Perhaps if we all tried to do this, in our careers and the other parts of our lives, many of the problems we face would begin to be solved. It could be the essence of the first feature of extinction-avoidance. Maybe it is what I should dedicate my future to promoting, in whatever media is available.