Category: Daily updates

Generally musings of the day, usually accompanied by a photograph

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.

Yellowknife to Vancouver drive, day 1

Sasha and I woke early at our B&B in Yellowknife and after a simple breakfast began our drive south. Tragically, we were never invited to meet the proprietors’ 24-year-old parrot Cosmo (possibly “Gosmo”) McBeaky, which I heard when booking from Toronto and had been psyched to meet north of 60°.

In Yellowknife and during the NWT and northernmost Alberta parts of the trip, the air quality was at 11 in the Apple weather app, whereas I never saw worse than 7 in Toronto. We drove past Sasha and Mica’s former school in Edzo, and then down toward the route through High Level which we had chosen to avoid wildfires near the Liard highway.

For most of the drive, we swapped between our respective Spotify libraries (mine only in the minority of spots with cell coverage, because there is no space on my phone for downloads) and sang along to the many songs we both know. We also listened to Serkis’ reading of The Hobbit from the battle against Smaug in Esgaroth to the very cusp of the eucatastrophe in the Battle of Five armies before pausing in High Table to share a large Mediterranean pizza.

We added another 300 km to our earlier 700 and got to Grimshaw as a severe thunderstorm was starting. We opted not to camp due to the expected bad weather and checked into the last available room in a hotel full of fire-fighting teams and lost power ten minutes later when Sasha was in the pool and I was doing an intense 25 minutes on the elliptical machine (my first time since the U of T gyms closed for COVID). I feel like I’m fitter than I remember being then, but part of it was surely desire to move my legs after a bus and three flights followed by the three hour Oppenheimer screening we attended last night, plus today’s driving.

I saw more ravens in a day than I think I ever have, and we got a close look at twenty or so bison of all sizes standing around and atop the road. They have truly impressive bulk and presence, and seemed utterly unperturbed by us, though willing to slowly shift off the road while we watched them and took some photos.

We are monitoring wildfire locations and road closures, but presently planning to drive into BC via Jasper and to camp tomorrow night if we can find a good spot and decent weather. To leave space in the Mazda for Sasha’s move I packed as light as possible, omitting a fly for my tent and all my rainy weather clothes (indeed, I brought just three shirts, my two intact-ish pairs of cargo trousers, and fresh daily socks for a five day trip).

I am hugely grateful to my parents and especially my mother for making the trip possible by helping me secure an apartment as guarantors. The chance to spend one-on-one time with Sasha is a true blessing, and the trip will doubtless be a source of memories and stories between us for life.

Still Robarts-ing

After defending my dissertation in December and collecting my diploma in March, I have been watching my U of T benefits gets deactivated one by one. They cut off my dental insurance between when I defended and when I graduated. My campus wifi access was withdrawn several months ago. As of July, my T-card no longer provided access to Robarts or Gerstein libraries.

I feel it would be a shame to live in a city with a library system like U of T’s and be unable to access it. Luckily, as an alumnus I can get a borrower card for $70 per year. It comes with the very annoying restrictions of no campus wifi use, and no off-campus access to electronic databases — but it does provide access to all U of T libraries, allows you to withdraw fifty (50!) books, and allows access to services like research consultations. I now officially have permission to use U of T’s vast library resources to research anything of personal interest or importance. It’s also a great place to hide from summer heat if you don’t have AC at home.

Rocking a 3M N95 outdoors and in

Right now, I have three reasons to wear a mask:

First, getting COVID would be a nightmare while I am desperately seeking housing, and while I am in a place with no kitchen or bathroom to myself if I need to isolate. I would rapidly go crazy if fully confined to my hot, muggy, awkward temporary bedroom.

Second, the wildfire smoke ebbs between visibly hazy and not very perceptible, but the PM2.5 and other components are awful for your lungs whether you can perceive them or not.

Third, I have vulnerable relatives with pre-existing conditions which could make COVID very serious for them.