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.

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.

Six Months Out

In the roughly six months since I completed the last major phase of my research into population and consumption, and its implications for the future, I have been focused on two things: surviving, and writing books that will hopefully be ready for the Christmas buying season. This has resulted in a drop in blog posts and other writing, though I have occasionally released new music.

I recently reviewed blog posts from 2011, around the time I completed the previous phase of research, and found that many of the issues that concerned me then are still in play. Of course, now there is more evidence that the world is undergoing a human-caused mass extinction event; and that catastrophic methane release from permafrost is imminent, if not already in progress, which could push global temperatures above habitability in the not-too-distant future. The causes of the existential threats that I explored then remain extremely relevant now, such as the global domination imperative built into our culture and our economics. My current projects deal with much of that, using new material and old material, in both non-fiction and fiction.

A non-fiction book, to be titled "Confessions of a Reluctant Planet-killer," is entirely new and autobiographical. It begins with how my views have evolved, from exaltation of unchecked growth and open-ended innovation with an outward focus; through discovery (in my own unique way) of fundamental relationships between population, consumption, and happiness; to an awareness of the need for what I call "global responsibility" to offset the negative consequences of "personal responsibility." A pivotal part of the book, reflected in its title and many of my earlier blog posts, deals with how I've failed (and continue to fail) in exercising global responsibility to the extent needed by all of us if humanity is to have any future worth living in, thus contributing to the horrible alternative. This effort is meant as a "coming out" about something few people would even consider bad, an example that hopefully others may be inspired to follow, and together try to remedy.

Another book, tentatively titled "Creations of a Reluctant Planet-killer" is a mix of old and new creative writing, including short stories, poetry, and essays. While much of this work involves themes familiar to readers of my novel and blog posts (including some of those posts), it has a mix of entries that have a broader appeal. I continue to work on "Visitors," the sequel to my novel "Lights Out," which, like its predecessor, is an outgrowth of my research, and has gone through several major revisions as my research has evolved.

With a lot of discipline and some luck, I expect to roll out these books, and perhaps some related music, over the coming months. In the meantime, I will try to be more diligent in writing for my various blogs and Web sites, and perhaps add a few more "Universe X" posts along the way.

Options For A Reluctant Planet-killer

After losing my job at the end of last year, I focused on my writing and research about global population and consumption, in large part out of hope that I could discern a future that didn't involve the rapid extinction of all species including ours. As my blog posts over that period attest, the results have been mixed.

I found that if we try to continue increasing our life expectancy following historical trends, we will quickly eliminate the resource base that keeps us alive. If we try to increase our population with a standard of living like what we have now, or better, we will soon suffer extreme casualties and then enter a prolonged period of painful instability. Hanging over our heads in any case is catastrophic global warming that appears to be practically inevitable as self-sustaining feedback mechanisms continue to kick in as the result of pollution we already put into the atmosphere and oceans.

Thinking long and hard about potential solutions, I came up with the following set of actions that, if taken immediately, could deal with the multiple threats I saw:

• Reduce consumption of ecological resources (our ecological footprint) by half and safely shut down the technologies that depend on what we will no longer use
• Safely remove all pollution, including waste from disabled technologies, from the natural environment (e.g., air, water, and soil) and neutralize its hazardous effects
• Develop and maintain a capability to deflect potentially hazardous asteroids and comets, preferably from bases in space that do not depend on Earth for resources and which can be used for settling other planets

Basically, like children whose living space is overcome with the trash they've created, we need to stop and clean up our mess. Those who resist ­- or actively impede this effort ­- need to be taught not to, or disciplined, or isolated by any adults who might still remain in our spoiled world.

I was recently forced by conditions to return to work for other people, despite my hope that I could turn my creative efforts into a paying job. I still hold on to that hope, and am trying to make it a reality, albeit at a much slower pace. My job search has been painful, as I knew it would be when I realized that the focus of our civilization, the very core orientation of our economy, is toward using everything that's left to make artificial environments for more of us that will meet most of our needs and wants, with disastrous consequences for most of us. I continue to struggle with the inherent conflict between personal responsibility as defined by that civilization which sustains me and the people who depend on me, and global responsibility, which demands that I give back much of what I – until now – have unwittingly taken to meet that personal responsibility.

As much as possible, I've limited my most active job search to "environmental" organizations, which tend to be either profit-making ventures that try to mitigate the effects of our lifestyles by regulation-inspired cleanup and substitution of more efficient products into our economic pipeline, or low to non-profit advocacy groups that try to educate people about the problems facing us and what they can do to help solve them (including manipulation of political systems to enact stronger regulations and reduce waste and corruption that gets in the way of solutions). I see their net effect as neutral, at best, in dealing with our crisis, mainly because they nibble away at the symptoms and some of the effects of the problem – our fundamental motivation – and depend on the tools and assumptions of the socio-economic system that serves that motivation and enforces the "personal responsibility" of the people embedded in it (to help others meet their needs and wants within that system).

Neutral impact is of course preferable to active destruction, which is what I see resulting from most of the other options. Those options have a spectrum, with fossil fuel and other extractive industries at the damaging end, and local organic farmers at the healthy end. The debt which forces me (through personal responsibility) to use my most marketable skills, which are resource-intensive, is held by a financial industry that largely enables the worst damage due to a fundamental flaw in our economy that encourages people to use more than they would naturally need or want by taking it from others. If I were willing to totally abandon my new-found sense of global responsibility (and my self respect), I would focus entirely on selling my skills to the highest bidders, who are likely on the damaging end of the spectrum. Instead, I tend to gravitate toward the middle of the spectrum while also considering how to get toward the healthier end.

In my ongoing battle between hope and despair, I've at least learned some more details about the alternative futures that those feeling represent, and how those futures could unfold. Having indulged the despair and nearly been crushed by it, I've chosen to understand and promote the hope, even if the conditions it hinges on are highly improbable. I am a reluctant planet-killer, trying imperfectly, though trying nonetheless, to eventually have nothing to do with killing anything or anyone, as an accomplice and certainly not otherwise. I will continue to share what I learn in order to help others do the same, even as I take detours along the way.

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.

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.

Month of Pain

The back spasms that followed my presentation on population and consumption ended up being a sign of something more serious than stress: a herniated disc was pushing on nerves in one of the most critical parts of my spine. For a month I experienced chronic pain in my back and right arm, which even with medication was keeping me from getting enough sleep and doing more than the most basic activities. Luckily I was able to work at home with frequent breaks, since driving my normally long commute would have been excruciating, if at all possible. I know several people who have experienced far worse (and in a few cases, still are), and I appreciate them much more now.

The worst appears to be over, thanks largely to a treatment called “dry needles,” which is part of a physical treatment plan I started a week after my symptoms appeared (when I realized that I couldn't treat it on my own). With some medication and a bunch of exercises, including home traction, I am now nearly pain-free for hours at a time, and I'm getting much more sleep. My thinking has cleared too, and I can now write without distraction by pain, though I'll be stuck with taking frequent breaks for the rest of my life – the lack of which likely caused the problem in the first place.

I only peripherally tracked the news during that time, enough to see that the situations I cared most about weren't getting any better. Government remains broken, with one party blatantly terrorizing everyone else so they can gain total control and destroy whatever semblance of social cohesiveness our country has left, and the other party negotiating on the assumption that they have more honorable intentions. Climate scientists are being openly threatened by climate change deniers, which is disturbing on many levels. The evolving scandal involving Rupert Murdoch is showing what happens when people are able to gain unchecked power (the old adage still holds: “Absolute power corrupts absolutely”); it remains to be seen if the lesson sticks.

Instead of writing, I caught up on some reading I had been putting off. For example, I'm almost finished with “A Concise History of World Population” by Massimo Livi-Bacci, which is teaching me what expert demographers have to say about the issues I've explored on my own. As a result, I can now add “demographer” to my list of possible new careers.

I'll be writing more as my condition improves, and looking for ways to address my interests without burning the candle at both ends. To keep stress below a healthy threshold, I'm going to try being more constructive and positive, and to have some fun along the way. My father lived his life as a constant adventure, and saw each turn of events as a step toward a future that, if it wasn't what he wanted, could be just as good; that's an attitude well worth emulating.