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.
