Category: Daily updates

Generally musings of the day, usually accompanied by a photograph

Reviewing an unreleased book and TV show

While it won’t help with my rent, I nonetheless have some very interesting work for the next few days.

I am doing a close read twice of Professor Peter Russell’s forthcoming memoirs, which has been a privelege because of the respect I have for him as a thinker and a person, and a joy because of their colour, humour, and personality.

I am also previewing a new series of James Burke’s TV show Connections, which previously ran in 1978, 1994, and 1997. I have seen those old shows many times, and I thought a lot about his book The Axemaker’s Gift back in high school. I have the chance to interview him from Monaco on Wednesday, so I am giving the new material a careful viewing and thinking through how to make the best use of the conversation. There is scarcely a person I can think of who has a more educated and wide-ranging understanding of the relationships between science, technology, and human society. Since human civilization is presently hurtling toward a brick wall which threatens to rather flatten us all, it may be invaluable to get Burke’s views on how a defensive strategy from here can be undertaken.

Related:

Post-Old Orchard Properties move finished

Yesterday I got my steel bedframe, futon, pillows, and bedding delivered by my cousin Oleksa and his partner. I had no space for them in my temporary student co-op digs, and my aunt offered to hang on to them until I had a new place.

That means that the move which began in March when I learned that I would be forced to leave my room on Marlee Street because the landlords illegally refused to add me to the lease has finally ended. It also means no more sleeping on the floor with a yellow foam sleeping bad, Thermarest collapsible pillow, and light-duty MEC sleeping bag.

The next job search push

Because the pay working as a food delivery cyclist is so dismal — and because ultimately I need a job with career advancement potential and the prospect of doing useful work on climate change — I am beginning another round of job research and applications tomorrow: job portals for all levels of government, universities, academic publishers, energy companies, environmental NGOs, and really anything plausible.

The search is a bit of a grim one largely because of the very specific experience requirements for nearly any position I look at. Employers mostly want to take on someone who has recently done a very similar job and can provide references to show their aptitude at it. When it comes to applicants without experience who have the potential to be good at the work, it would be risky and counter-intuitive to hire someone promising over someone proven. The kind of entry-level jobs where it is possible to get in without prior experience, and where it is also possible to advance, seem to be vanishingly rare.

The social dimensions and office politics of climate change work are also a confounding factor. Even people and organizations whose job it is to highlight the severity of the crisis don’t appreciate being reminded of that in person. The world is full of thousands of people working on one narrow aspect of the climate problem, but pulling back to consider the scale of the problem overall compared with the scale of our efforts to combat it is deeply upsetting and demoralizing: especially to the sort of mid-career professionals with young kids who occupy most of the professional positions related to climate change. Having kids makes it psychologically intolerable to recognize the depth of our catastrophe, and the natural response to someone bringing up such uncomfortable ideas is to wrap the worry-inducing person up in smooth layers like a pearl until they are silent and no longer an irritant to the normal course of business.

Uber Eats bike delivery — break-even time in downtown Toronto

I have not been able to find another job, I love cycling, and I know the city — so I have been trying out working as food delivery rider for uber.

The lesson from 19.5 hours in is that it pays far below miniumum wage, even before considering any expenses.

At JJ International Inc at 438 Spadina I bought a large two-shelf insulated backpack for food deliveries for $84.76.

Since my total revenues, revenues per hour, revenues per delivery, and revenues per kilometre were all dismal in the first few days, I took a Smart Serve course in order to be able to carry deliveries with alcohol. The course took about 3 hours and cost $44.95.

Just now, I had to take a break from a Saturday night shift to go home because all my external phone batteries are dead.

In sum, so far:

  • I have been online for 19 hours and 18 minutes.
  • I have ridden 153 km.
  • I have earned $150.04 ($116.55 in fares and $34.39 in tips).
  • That works out to about $7.69 per hour, which is a considerable over-statement because it doesn’t count the riding time required to get into the high density zones with many restaurants or to ride back home.
  • It took basically 17 hours of work to pay for the carrier bag and Smart Serve certificate.

All told, a person would be far better off working at the Ontario minumum wage of $16.55 than doing deliveries for uber eats by bike.

Languishing

Even compared to recent low feelings, I am now feeling emotionally and psychologically about as bad as I ever have.

All the way back to kindergarten or before, I either had school or work to occupy and engage me each fall, and to give structure and purpose to the time ahead.

Now I am feeling utterly alone — like the ‘nowhere to go’ feeling that haunted the PhD (from knowing that I was too radical on climate to work for government or mainstream NGOs but not radical enough to work for activist NGOs) has been realized. Somehow, despite spending all the time since 2007 working or studying, I have become drastically less employable than I was when I finished my undergrad in 2005. At the same time as my own prospects feel erorded, the global picture has darkened mercilessly.

I feel like I have been in a crisis at least since I learned that I was going to lose my housing on Markham Street in early 2018. I feel like I have lost my connections with or been pushed out of all the important organizations in my life, and that anywhere I can go now is a reminder of how isolated I am, how much has gone wrong, and how bad the projections for the future are. When I stay home, I can’t help feeling insecure because I don’t have income to cover the rent. When I go to U of T, it feels like a club I am no longer part of. Out and about in the city, I feel surrounded by a society that has been told for thirty years now that our habits will be the ruin of our planet, and which has decided to plow straight ahead regardless. Every car I see driving is a reminder to me of that choice, as is every grocery store groaning with fresh produce and luxury foods, given my knowledge about how we are denying such bounty to our successors, and that people in 100 years may be unwilling to believe that there was ever such easy plenty in the world. Visiting Vancouver was often an over-busy and stressful reminder that I don’t have a refuge there either.

In part because people have pulled back on socializing since COVID, I feel like I don’t have any friends left — nobody who I could drop in on, or meet for a coffee, or even telephone and expect an answer from. Life feels divided into two camps: (a) one of people who are actually doing well, but find it uncomfortable to recognize how badly the rest of us are in crisis and so mostly choose to ignore it to stay comfortable and (b) people too much in crisis themselves to provide any aid or uplift. Indeed, my feeling of lacking the material and psychological resources to provide such aid and uplift to friends and family in difficulty is a major contributor to overall feelings of uselessness, hopelessness, and dread about what is to come.

Today more than at any time I can recall recently, I wish I could just stop thinking. Thinking feels like it’s just a conduit for more pain and fear. When you are a fly on the kitchen counter — as the shadow of the fly-swatter has you framed, and the lethal web is swooshing forward — it is better not to be able to understand what is happening.

Low feelings

It is hard to say when it began, because the stress and loneliness of the PhD blended into my post-PhD feelings, but it’s quite fair to say that I have been feeling consistently low at least since I learned that I would have to leave my old home in North York in March.

One big contributor is surely the feeling of anticlimax after the dissertation was released. This wasn’t some obscure academic tract about an issue of specialist interest, but a very current-day analysis of humanity’s most pressing problem. I was expecting, or at least hoping for, debate and pushback from people in the activist and policy communities. So far, the most substantial response to what I wrote has been a half-hour discussion with my brother Mica and his wife Leigh when they were visiting Toronto. In the dissertation I express my worry that — even though their aspiration and plan is to change the world — activists get caught up in routine behaviours like marches which occupy their time and effort but do little to change minds or policy. The total non-response to my research so far is a minor bit of additional evidence that activists aren’t generally too compelled by external analyses of their efficacy.

Another dimension is no doubt simple isolation. The layers have been stacking for me in that area: it’s harder to make and keep friends as an adult, it’s harder when you’re no longer a student, and it has become harder as people have pulled their social attention inward to a small group during the pandemic. Getting anybody to attend any sort of event has become substantially harder, and as corollaries the events that do happen have less attendance and energy and there are fewer events.

Another item for this decidedly non-comprehensive list is my sense that most of the people who I know (or, at least, peers and younger people — the dynamics of the affluent and established are different) are not doing well. People seem stymied in achieving the sort of adult lives they want, and especially in finding any sort of work which is psychologically and materially rewarding. It feels like to a large extent our parents got rich and retired, but most of us have never been able to move up into the positions they held at our stage of life. As with housing, there is a feeling that the older and best-off parts of the population have grabbed everything and are keeping it for themselves. This feeling becomes especially embittering when paired with the knowledge that they are actively choosing to hand over a ruined planet to their descendants every time they keep electing leaders who keep the future-wrecking fossil fuel industry going.

It is hard to escape the feeling that I have spent the last 20+ years building up for what I thought would be an intense period of intellectual effort, civilizational re-consideration, and mass political re-organization… and have found myself instead in an epoch where smaller-scale but acute disruptions have monopolized public attention to the point where we seem to be paying even less attention to the big trends than we were 10-15 years ago. It’s very hard to feel optimistic about the future, and it is simultaneously profoundly alienating when society at large is choosing to ignore the existential seriousness of the crisis which we are in. Living among people who are likely to be remembered as history’s greatest wreckers (on the optimistic assumption that anyone will be around with luxuries like paper and literacy to write the history of the present) carries with it feelings of rage and hatred against everything around me: the cars pumping out their fumes in a million lines idling behind red lights, the kaleidoscopic variety in our supermarkets at the same time as we are smashing the Earth’s biodiversity and capacity to support us, the elections that still turn on trivialities even though the consequences of our choices are as serious as death…

Feeling that our civilization is such a disaster is utterly isolating, since our fellow human beings cannot help taking that personally as a criticism and rejection of their own lives and priorities. Meanwhile, it’s impossible to have any confidence in the future. Over the last 20+ years, humanity has shown that we are totally capable of knowing the consequences of our actions and the stakes being played for and still choosing to ruin the world which we inherited. As much as I sincerely delight in the possibilities and experiences of life, I don’t know how to avoid the feeling of being a witness during the time of humanity’s downfall.

Anticipating 40

A news story today discusses how life expectancy for BC men has fallen slightly to about 80.

Reading that felt like an acute reminder that my 40th birthday in November is a probable halfway point for my life, though of course the population statistic and any individual’s experience can be quite different.

Thinking ahead to the event makes me wish I still had a large and active group of friends to bring together, an ongoing history of recent parties, or a place suitable for such a function. As it is, with friends so spread out and largely dormant, it would probably be depressing to try for a large gathering and end up with a small one and a lot of ‘regret that I cannot attend’ messages.

I have been getting struck sometimes recently with the pain of knowing some memory is forever lost and unrecoverable. Seeing Vancouver and family albums there was a reminder that, even for those with privileged lives, the past and the kind of events that characterized it become inaccessible, both because relationships and the wide world change progressively and irreversibly.

I don’t know what I want to do for the event, but I am thinking with new seriousness about it now that it feels more like a moment to take stock, celebrate and mourn what has happened so far, and try to apply any wisdom learned for the future. I wonder if anyone has ever marked their 40th with a half funeral or installation 1 of 2 of their memorial service?

Holding a lease

The period since at least July 22nd has been so consistently busy that I haven’t had time to pause and think any of it through.

There are photos from the Yellowknife to Vancouver drive and from my time in Vancouver.

The one big Toronto achievement is that now, for the first time since I came to the city in 2011, I am on the lease for a place to live. It’s expensive (adding to the urgency of the job hunt) but I have protected long-term legal status there. After having to move probably 40 or more times during the PhD, it will be a comfort to have a place I can more fully rely upon.