Projects and Responsibility

I am currently working on several projects while attempting to live a healthy life and support it through employment in an economy that is rapidly destroying life on a global scale. Those projects primarily serve my personal needs for self-expression, discovery, and serving my values, among which is the long-term survival and health of the world’s inhabitants that my lifestyle is helping to eradicate. 

Until very recently, I had some hope that my net impact on the world would be a positive one. Now I am practically certain that the impact will be deeply negative, no matter what I do before I die. The best I can do is make it less negative; that includes nurturing relationships with other people, especially those of family and friends, and is the most compelling reason I have to continue living.

My projects consist of writing fiction; sharing insights on social media; and exploring through research and simulation how actions and values influence each other in order to develop strategies that serve my values. The projects are interdependent, with shifting priorities based on what feels like the best way to spend the limited time I have for them. That feeling varies with what is in the news (mostly involving existential threats), connections my mind makes between threads of experience and knowledge, and general motivation due to a variety of other factors. 

When I’m feeling especially depressed about the future, I “help out” the denizens of my fictional Simulated News blog who are working together to deal with their own extinction crisis using a strategy derived from my research. If the stress is manageable and I feel okay indulging in pure fiction, I continue writing my second novel, BIOME. My newest book under development is an attempt to share what it’s like to live a life of accidental exploration, through the fictional experiences of someone who thinks – and learns from getting lost – like me. 

My non-fiction blog posts like this one are both personal and speculative, grounded in years of living and study as well as occasional reactions to current events and insights from my mathematical modeling of history and the future. Introspection and conflict between values and commitments to one’s culture provide a powerful motivation to write, as I’m doing here and have elsewhere. 

Weakness and strength are two sides of what I perceive as normal existence, where changing situations determine which is dominantly observed both internally and externally. In this case, weakness and its consequences are most on my mind as the world seems to be collapsing around me and I am inclined to reflect on my responsibility for it.

Responsible Survival

It has been 20 months since I quit my job to complete the project that has dominated my thoughts and creativity for more than 20 years and nearly crippled me with stress and bouts of despair based on what it revealed: that humanity is overwhelmingly responsible for a mass extinction of the life on which we depend that could culminate in our own extinction within my lifetime.

I restarted the project several times over that 20 years, each with a fresh look, new data, and broader scope, in service of my goal to identify a means of assessing actions as right or wrong based on a mix of core values centering on life: its quantity, quality, and longevity (time until death for individuals, time until extinction for humanity). Much of the effort involved exploring theoretically and historically the interactions and relationships between the three. 

The set of variables I studied expanded from population size (people and other species) and resources (mass, energy, and ecological) to include happiness (life satisfaction through personalizing of one's environment), economics (Gross World Product, wealth, and inflation), median age, children, birth rate, and death rate. "Actions" included changing the amounts and types of available resources (by consumption, acquisition, destruction, and degradation) and changing the amount and types of people (procreation, killing, merging groups).

I also derived how the variables changed (and could change) over time. The results were the basis of projections into the past and future of civilization. Sets of assumptions formed different projections, each a "simulated world" whose history could be interpreted in experiential terms and compared to actual events as a test of relevance to the real world. They were also used to suggest options for making our own future better based on preferred combinations of values, which typically favored longevity and quantity of life since the projected futures based on history were unanimously showing imminent and catastrophic drops in both. Close monitoring of news reports along with personal experience convinced me that reality was tracking with the worst of my projections, and increased the urgency I felt to advance the project as far as I could on my own. 

Complicating the matter on a personal level was a need for money and a need for sanity. An obvious solution to both was the expansion of my side business as a creative writer and music creator, which helped my mental health by increasing happiness (creating the experience of an imaginary environment) in a way that could be shared with others in return for money. I pursued that solution while working on the project, sharing my research and insights about the news online, and advertising both aspects of my efforts in a fictional blog about one of the simulated worlds that is pursuing options to fight extinction based on my own. Meanwhile, my wife and I lived off her income and money saved up from my previous conventional work.

Now the project is effectively done, the accomplishment I am most proud of; but I am under no illusion that it is more than a small tool that can be applied to providing guidance for creation of a better world. I have already used it to identify a basic set of prescriptions that address the greatest crisis of our time, and am encouraged that they line up with recommendations of others who I deeply respect and know far more than me. 

The logical next step is to work on implementing those prescriptions to the extent possible, even if the probability of success is as vanishingly low as it appears. In the world of my fictional blog, that involves stopping population growth and using no more than 30% of the world's ecological resources within 20 years (I project that we currently use an average of 63%) by reducing what we consume and stopping the negative responses of natural systems that threaten to radically reduce how much we have left (what I've called "external impacts"). If humanity is successful and lucky, a sustainable population will inhabit the new world it creates.

I turned 60 recently and don't expect to survive another 20 years in even the most optimistic trajectory of the world's future (in the least optimistic, it will be less than ten). Facing that, my new goal is a no-brainer that will be a recurring New Year's resolution: "responsible survival." Now that I have a means for determining what's "responsible," such a goal is defensible and possible. Unlike the past 20 years, I will focus less on what everyone must do while following the lead of others until it feels wrong. I will focus more on leading while seeking what's right, and living so it feels that way. The result may not be the best; but I'll be damned if it isn't as good as I can make it.

Transitions

As the citizens of my fictional simulated world "Hikeyay" begin their transition to a healthier life based on the best recommendations of my multi-year effort to model humanity's past and future, I am attempting a transition of my own in a world that is headed in a very different direction.

For more than twenty-five years I have sporadically attempted to identify my own values, related goals, and means for realizing them after mostly disappointing results from studying and trying others. As I near my sixtieth birthday, that attempt is mostly complete, and I don't have much time left to act on the result – the equivalent of Hikeyay's execution of a global strategy to delay extinction as long as possible.

The competing responsibilities I've grappled with for more than a decade and wrote about in Death Stoppers Anthology are still in play. Global responsibility, anchored in humanity's survival and defined by our relationship with the rest of the biosphere, is – I know now – best served by helping other species survive and thrive by decreasing ecological impact, which reverses the drivers of extinction (habitat loss, invasive species, pollution, population, and over-harvesting). Personal responsibility, tied to maximizing individual happiness and longevity, is served by increasing personal ecological impact up to a point (the happiness peak); and is served by decreasing ecological impact if beyond that point. 

My simulations show that a globally significant number of people began passing the happiness peak after 2001, meaning that human pain and death became a consequence of not serving global responsibility. Now two-thirds of the world's population is past the peak, and the rest could be past the peak by 2030 under worst-case (and what I currently consider most likely) conditions if action isn't taken. Even if aggressive action like that contemplated in Hikeyay is taken, any delay would add more casualties and risk that consequences could multiply far beyond what even the most optimistic technologies might be able to manage.

Based on measurable variables like age and wealth, I estimate that I am at least as close to the happiness peak as the world total (a "phase" of 5.7 in the graph below). That matches my subjective experience in the realm of personal responsibility. I have always felt global responsibility, but it has grown exponentially with knowledge of my role in the future and the waning of confidence in the judgment of leaders who claim they know how to make that future better. 

The future is the result of a collaborative effort. Until now, I have chosen to mostly develop and share my own insights with others, look for ways to contribute to a comparable reality, and do what appears right until and unless it shows signs of being the opposite. With the equivalent of a better roadmap for identifying appropriate action, my new transition involves interpreting that map and trying what it suggests. 

Money and Responsibility

It is likely a truism that you can't make money by trying to convince people to scale back on the consumption that feeds their happiness, at least the kind of happiness that depends on dominating Nature. Increasing that happiness is the purpose of our economy, evidenced by the fact that its size (Gross World Product) is proportional to the square of the average happiness of the world's population.

This is evident at the personal level, especially for those us who accept that we are consuming so much that we are critically degrading our planet's ability to remain habitable for species like us. Scaling back is our only rational option, but it is also the hardest option for the vast majority of us, especially since we continue believing that our economic system can still increase our happiness, and because that system has dominated so much of the world that our survival is intricately tied up with it – by making money.

I've described my own personal struggle with this in much of my writing. It is a key theme in Death Stoppers Anthology, the end of which publicly committed me to decisively following my own advice, no matter what the consequences. That advice involves scaling back on consumption and motivating others to do the same, which I am having some success with, but not enough, and not in a way that is obviously sustainable.

Like many families, my wife and I have used debt to maintain our standard of living while income has fluctuated; and since debt is a promise fundamentally based on the expectation of economic growth to pay it off (due to interest, which accrues no matter what), making more money is a personal imperative just to break even. Through the financial system, that money helps fuel growth in other parts of the economy, which ultimately makes our collective demise more likely in the near future.

Cutting back on expenses and living on a smaller income tends to put a brake on that growth; but it has a lot of negative side effects, not the least of which is the stress of feeling trapped with a huge threat hanging over your head, not only of debt but of a future when we can no longer work. While I tend to be most sensitive to the stress associated with not meeting my global responsibility, it is more normal to intensely feel this stress associated with not meeting personal responsibility. As I've written in many ways: under current circumstances, relieving one will make the other worse unless we can be desensitized to it (typically in an unhealthy way), but this will only work until we are all forced to deal with the underlying problem that is making it impossible to escape both.

In an ideal world, humanity would collectively make it impossible for any of us to take the means of survival from any others, including members of other species (reinforcing the concept of the "commons"), and make us all responsible for maintaining it. Whatever was left could be distributed by any means deemed socially acceptable, if there was anything left, which I would argue there isn't (thus, our underlying problem). This would follow a restart of global civilization with a common set of basic values and understanding of reality, along with common standards for developing each. This model would be reproduced wherever else we settled, such as other planets, with rewards for risks incurred in expanding habitable territory provided as part of the distribution of excess resources and lasting no more than a lifetime for those receiving them.

I've read about people (and know a few) who have gotten a head start on creating this ideal world for themselves and a few people closest to them. From what I can tell, they tend to be members of a small proportion of the population who come close to their limit of happiness with fewer resources than most of us, and are content to stay there. Put another way: natural environments require little modification to be suited to their wants and needs. As a result, global and personal responsibilities are largely in alignment, so stress is not an issue. Because their success is mostly a function of who they are than what they've learned (except about who they are), I don't believe it is generally transferrable to most of the population. The rest of us can still learn valuable lessons from them, though, such as the practical, physical constraints of living in a healthier world; but because we'll have less happiness by actually living that way, it won't be as popular as our alternatives without some forcing mechanism (such as reduced social acceptance and opportunities) that makes those alternatives less attractive.

Since finishing my book, the stress of personal responsibility has been growing, in large part because my wife is currently carrying the burden of paying our bills. The lessons I learned when our roles were reversed are still with me, and I have hope that my writing business can (at least temporarily) help turn my "death stopper" role into a means of reducing that stress along with the other stress it has largely alleviated. However, once again time is my enemy; making more money at another job is the quickest way to deal with the immediate problem; and the economy, like most of us, still doesn't value doing what is now the right thing, which increases the risk that I'll be compromising my way back into pain and a crisis of self respect. In the immediate future, I plan to do as much as possible to find a middle ground, balancing the two stresses and buying time to find ways of being more aggressive in doing that "right thing": helping to set the stage for the ideal world.

Responsibility and Control

How do you cope with a looming disaster that is virtually unavoidable? Someone recently asked me an equivalent question, and my first response was, "I try to make sure that if it happens, I'm not responsible." He thought I was just going to blame someone else. "It's not about blame," I corrected him, "it's about control: controlling what you can, and not accepting responsibility for what you can't."

I've addressed this issue in my writing, especially around the growing demolition of our planet's biosphere, and my role in it. In general, I come down on the side of accepting responsibility for whatever I may have done, as well as its direct and indirect consequences. As a result, I try to be very cautious and conscious, though – I'm the first to admit – not enough so.

Because I also value commitment, I've applied a lot of that caution to choosing who and what I will closely associate with. It takes a lot to break those bonds, even when I discover that I've chosen poorly. If there's any hope of keeping disaster at bay, I'll fight to do so ("Never give up!" is one of my favorite sayings). There is, however, one major exception: when it becomes clear that fighting will only make things worse. I'm not so narcissistic as to think that I'm the best person to solve every problem – or even most of them. As with everyone else, there's a limit to what I know and what I can do, contributing to the risk of causing more problems for every one I try to solve.

Sometimes it seems like the best I can say is that at least I care. The people I least respect are those who don't care about the impact of their actions, rationalizing the consequences away as the price of pursuing the equivalent of "virtuous self-interest" (one of the most horrific oxymorons I can think of). When pressed, they point to competition, appeasing their consciences with the notion that if everyone tries to serve themselves, then the "winner" deserves what he or she gets – and, conversely, the "losers," pretty much everyone else, deserve what little they get.

Many disasters caused (or not averted) by people are, in my opinion, due to an unwillingness to take responsibility for the negative consequences of actions or inaction. Responsibility, which tends to manifest personally as a modification of our self-image based on what we have caused to happen, is a motivation for exerting as much control as we are able, without causing conditions to get worse.

It is possible to take too much responsibility, assuming that our impact is greater than it is. This is a sure path to either depression (for the bad things) or unjustified euphoria (for the good things). Therefore it must be tempered by honesty, with ourselves and with others, and a healthy dose of testing with experience to see what our impacts really are. This approach has helped me personally to back away from extreme stress caused by my growing awareness of the damage done by my lifestyle, acknowledging what I can't (and couldn't) control, while looking for ways to use what knowledge and power I have to make things better.