Action Time

I have learned a lot since I finished writing Death Stoppers Anthology last year, much of which has added justification and detail to the conclusions I reached then. In many ways, I experienced a microcosm of my life before, attempting to reconcile the need to conform to the expectations of the majority around me, for both survival and sanity, with an accelerating lack of trust in both the logic and morality of those expectations. This time, though, I had the perspective of decades of living and thinking to help make sense of it, and the experience in turn tested and refined that perspective. The net result is that I finally know enough to take specific action, and I have the conviction to go ahead with it.

Unfortunately, timing is critical, which I discussed in the latest Idea Explorer blog post, "Impacts." By any measure of practicality, my prescription for significantly extending humanity's longevity and avoiding major casualties is impossible; yet, as the self-evaluation using a set of proposed universal goals revealed, I am compelled to do whatever I can. With my particular set of skills, that means effectively writing to convince a lot of people to keep from having more than the replacement number of children and capping or reducing their consumption of ecological resources to a healthy level ("the message"). It also means more actively developing the tools I've long known are the key to short-circuiting the corrupting influences that threaten people's survival and core happiness.

So far, my creative effort has been focused on material that I personally like, and it naturally includes many themes related to the issues I care about. For example, the novel Lights Out is based on early research into limits to global population and consumption, and is in the genre of science fiction, which has been my favorite from the time I learned to read. Death Stoppers Anthology is a collection of my best writing, and includes both the most artistic and most meaningful aspects of my experience (some of which have been extracted from blogs).

Judging from sales and blog hits, I have a small but significant audience for my work, which I greatly appreciate, but it needs to grow a lot if I'm going to have an impact anywhere near what I'd like. This means that I will be vigorously marketing all of my work, and becoming more public with my views, all with the ultimate focus of promoting the message and its rationale as much and as long as is necessary.

Other people and other groups are sharing their own variants of the message for their own (and often similar) reasons, many over several decades as our world's natural limits became clearer. I am merely adding my own voice after becoming convinced on my own terms; and I urge you, my readers, to find your own terms based on your own priorities, and to do as much as you can as a result of your conclusions.

Self Evaluation

In the Idea Explorer post "Groups, Goals, and Actions" I discussed a framework for making decisions based their impacts on affected groups. Here I'll share a little about how I've begun to use this framework in an attempt to better orient my decisions toward creating a healthier, more ethical world.

I recently used the analytic hierarchy process (AHP), which compares the various elements of the framework and prioritizes them relative to each other. I chose a simple set of actions (what AHP calls "alternatives") that could be ranked to determine which was the best to pursue: serving self, serving family, serving others, and serving other species. Each action was evaluated according to a set of criteria, which were all of what I called "goals" in my framework (maximizing happiness, population, and longevity for each group – self, family, others, and other species).

For groups, I gave family the highest priority, followed by others, self, and other species. For actions, serving family ranked first, then serving others, serving other species, and serving self.

I then tried using my own method to rank each of the goals relative to each other without any concern for actions. This resulted in the longevity of others being ranked first, followed by a tie between family longevity and family happiness for second-place. Third-place was tied between population of others, population of other species, and longevity of other species. Fourth place was tied between family population and the happiness of others. Fifth place was a tie between self happiness and self longevity (lifespan). The happiness of other species was in sixth place, and self population (desire to have more people like me) was in seventh and last place. Comparing goal types, longevity was in first place, and both happiness and population tied for second. Comparing groups, others were first (mainly due to longevity and population), family was second, other species were third, and self was last.

The latter results felt more accurate and meaningful to me than the AHP results, given my obsession with the longevity of the human species (how long until we're extinct) as the ultimate endpoint for the lives of everyone who's part of it. My feelings of very low importance relative to everyone and everything else were better reflected in this evaluation, which were likely more a consequence of forced objectivity than subjective depression. At any rate, I'm willing to consider this a baseline for future comparisons.