Category: Daily updates

Generally musings of the day, usually accompanied by a photograph

Fiction, versus reality’s lack of resolution

In all the time while I have been concerned, and later terrified, about climate change and the future of life on Earth, I still had the narrative convention of fiction influencing my expectations: the emergence of a big problem will imperil and inspire a group of people to find solutions and eventually the people threatened by the problem will accept if not embrace the solutions. A tolerable norm is disrupted and then restored because people have the ability to perceive and reason, and the willingness and virtue to act appropriately when they see what’s wrong.

Now, I feel acutely confronted by what a bad model for human reactions this is. It seems to me now that we almost never want to understand problems or their real causes; we almost always prefer an easy answer and somebody to blame. The narrative arc of ‘problem emerges, people understand problem, people solve problem’ has a real-world equivalent more like ‘problems emerge but people usually miss or misunderstand them, and where they do perceive problems to exist they interpret them using stories where the most important purpose is to justify and protect the powerful’.

If the history happening around us were a movie, it might be one that I’d want to walk out of, between the unsatisfying plot and the unsympathetic actors. Somehow the future has come to feel more like a sentence than a promise: something which will need to be endured, watching everything good that humankind has achieved getting eroded and destroyed, and in which having the ability to understand and name what is happening just leads to those around you punishing and rejecting you by reflex.

Catastrophes and mental collapse

Psychologically and emotionally, I have really been doing badly lately.

I have spent all of my adult life studying environmental politics and trying to fight climate change, and now we are at a juncture where the world’s leaders have effectively given up. They won’t acknowledge fossil fuels as the root of the crisis, and they are far too controlled by the fossil fuel industry to accept phasing them out as a solution. They see every new potential oil, gas, and coal project as a vehicle for wealth and self-advancement. Meanwhile, environmentalists are distracted by social issues as the long-term crisis keeps deepening, and people generally are too frightened to even perceive the truth of their situation. Perhaps scariest of all, young people don’t have a coherent and politically-activated sense of what is happening. They can’t see that their leaders are destroying their futures, and they are being drawn into the same sorts of non-solutions which are driving the rise of charlatans and authoritarians to power.

The path forward is totally unclear, and I don’t know how — psychologically or morally — to cope with a world where we have identified that the processes of collapse are accelerating but where we don’t have the honesty or the courage to work through what that means or work toward any remedy.

These are dark, dark days.

Victoria

Though crazily tired from the daylight savings shift, plus a workweek, plus two straight days awake due to travel, it was heartening to get to Victoria, see my brother Sasha, and explore a few parks and scenic sights with him, my brother Mica, his wife Leigh, and their daughter Mila:

I’m too tired to process any photos from today before sleeping.

Tomorrow is Sasha’s benefit concert.

Sasha’s brain

My youngest brother, Sasha, had a bleed in his brain and is scheduled for surgery in Victoria, BC on March 20th.

My whole family is going to Victoria to support him, including me on Friday.

Remarkably, his friends there have organized a benefit concert for March 15th, to raise money for the physio and speech therapy which he is likely to need after surgery.

He also recently appeared today on a video podcast celebrating Vancouver Island music:

Sasha is a remarkable, caring person who has done a great deal for his students and communities. As frightening as his condition is, it has been impressive and heartening to see his friends bringing such exceptional support.

Re-Trumped

As someone who has spent their adult life fighting for a safe and stable environment, this is a sad and frightening day. America’s disastrous choice shows how limited our ability to learn and to make self-protective choices is. As the fundamental biophysical basis of our society is undermined, it seems we only become more short-termist, self-centred, and easily fooled

Little good ever comes from discussing climate change or nuclear weapons socially

Our social world is ruled by the affect heuristic: what feels good seems true, and what feels bad we distance ourselves from and reject. We judge what’s true or false based on it if makes us feel good or bad.

I think I’m going to stop talking to people socially about nuclear weapons and climate change.

Almost always, what the other person really wants is reassurance that their future will be OK and that the choices they are making are OK.

The conversation tends to become a cross-examination where they look for a way to dismiss me in order to protect their hopefulness and view of themself as a good person. It’s a bit like how people feel compelled to tell me how particularly important or moral (or not enjoyed) their air travel plans are, as though I am a religious authority who can forgive them. “Confess and be forgiven” is a cheerful motto for those who refuse to change their behaviour.

These conversations tend to be miserable for both sides: for them because they are presented with evidence for why they really should be fearful, when they fervently want the opposite, and for me because it just leads to more alienation to see how utterly unwilling people are to even face the problem, much less take any commensurate action. If I am convincing and give good evidence, it makes things worse for both: for them because they are getting anxious instead of reassured and for me because it reinforces how little relationship there is between evidence and human decision-making.

It is also a fundamental error to think that if a person believes that a problem is serious and that you are working on it, they will support you. You might think the chain of logic would be “the person seems to be working on a problem which I consider real and important, so I will support them at least conversationally if not materially” when it is much more often “this person is talking about something that makes me feel bad, so I will find a way to believe that they are wrong or what they are saying is irrelevant”. The desire to feel good about ourselves and the world quickly and reliably trumps whatever desire we may have to believe true things or act in a manner consistent with out beliefs.

It seems smarter going forward just to say that I won’t discuss these subjects and whatever work I am doing on them is secret.

It’s crucial when setting such boundaries to refuse to debate or justify them. Let people through that crack, and it’s sure to become another affect-driven argument about how they prefer to imagine their future as stable, safe, and prosperous and their own conduct as wise and moral — with me cast as the meanie squashing their joys.

Related:

41

While global conditions and humanity’s prospects for the future are disastrous, my own life has become a lot more stable and emotionally tolerable over the course of this past year of employment. The PhD did immense psychological damage to me. After a lifetime in a competitive education system in which I had done exceptionally well, the PhD tended to reinforce the conclusion that everything I did was bad and wrong, and that I had no control over what would happen to my life. I had serious fears about ever finding stable employment after that long and demoralizing time away from the job market (though still always working, to limit the financial damage from those extra years in school). Being out and employed — and even seeing shadows of other possibilities in the future — gives me a sense materially, psychologically, and physiologically of being able to rebuild and endure.

As noted in my pre-US-election post, having a stable home and income makes the disasters around the world seem less like personal catastrophes, though the general population are behaving foolishly when they assume that the 2020–60 period will bear any resemblance to the ‘normality’ of, say, the 1980–2020 period. Of course, there has been no such thing as intergenerational stability or normality since the Industrial Revolution; after centuries where many lives remained broadly similar, the world is now transforming every generation or faster. In the 20th century, much of that change was about technological deployment. In the years ahead, ecological disruption will be a bigger part of the story — along with the technological, sociological, and political convulsions which will accompany the collapse of systems that have supported our civilization for eons.

My own answer to living through a time of catastrophe — in many ways, literally an apocalypse and the end of humanity, as we are all thrown into a post-human future where technology and biology fuse together — is to apply myself in doing my best in everything I undertake, whether that’s photographing a conference, making sandwiches for dinner, or advocating for climate stability and reduced nuclear weapon risks.

None of us can control the world. A huge dark comet could wipe us out tomorrow. A supervolcano or a coronal mass ejection from the sun could abruptly knock us into a nuclear-winter-like world or a world where all our technology gets broken simultaneously, stopping the farm-to-citizens conveyer belt that keeps us alive. There are frighteningly grounded descriptions of how a nuclear war could throw us all into the dark simultaneously, perhaps unable to resume long-distance contact with others for months or years.

It really could happen all of a sudden, with no opportunities for takesies-backsies or improving our resilience after the fact. We live in a world on a precipice, so all we can do is share our gratitude, appreciation, and esteem with those who have enriched our lives while it is possible to do so, while retaining our determination to keep fighting for a better world, despite our species’ manifest inabilities and pathologies.

Waiting for America’s decision

These past eleven months of working and slowly recovering from the PhD have altered my stress responses a great deal.

Literally for years, I was in a constant state of such anxiety that it interfered every day with both productivity and sleep. During the worst parts, all I could do was alternate between trying to focus on other things and jumping back to the news to see if there had been an act of mass violence.

Today’s US election is as stressful a thing as has ever happened in my life, perhaps more so because literally all of the predictions I have heard (from political experts to my brother Mica who is much better at handicapping elections than me) have been for a Trump win.

It’s staggering, distressing, and disturbing to me that this election could even be close, given Trump’s obvious incompetence and the danger he poses. The January 6th insurrection left me with a terrific fear that the forces tearing America apart are stronger than those holding it together. If America makes another sociopathic and self-destructive choice today, that breakdown will accelerate.

I fear that the dynamic which now dominates the democratic world is this: as our fossil fuel addiction keeps damaging the climate, more and more societal systems which were previously able to cope will begin to fail instead. As people notice this breakdown, they give up on conventional political candidates willing to do the slow incremental work of changing policy in favour of ideological blowhards who promise drastic changes for the benefit of the masses but who are really controlled by self-interested cadres of extremists and the ultra-wealthy. While all this is happening, there is too much drama and emotional turmoil to properly diagnose what is putting society under such strain, along with no willingness to act on abolishing fossil fuels. Our broken politics are breaking the world.

None of these worries are new, and I suppose what is striking me most right now is how subjectively OK I feel despite my extreme anxiety and terror. I think perhaps it’s the difference between confronting a potential tragedy after being awake 24 hours on a forced march versus on a day after decent sleep. The fear is just as intense, but with at least the stability of housing and employment it seems less like a constant personal catastrophe than it did during the PhD.

Good luck to us all tonight.

Sprained

Though the trip was excellent, a combination of having too much to pack in and pack out along with an unlucky trip over a root in the dark has left me with a sprained ankle and off my bicycle.

That will make this weekend’s photo gig in Montreal especially challenging, due to the long days and substantial amount of heavy gear to lug.

I hope I will be back to biking soon: both to catch the remaining group bike rides of the season, and to avoid the inconvenience, lost sleep, and cost of relying on public transit.