You don’t have to care about working with other people to build/contribute to the pockets of successor cultures that will arise out of the ruins of the current consumerist hegemony to get value out of these books. But I do, and for the sake of narrative coherence I’m going to assume you do too.
If you don’t care about working towards a specific vision of a better future, that’s all right. Worst case scenario you get a lot freer, your household becomes more resilient, your consumption of resources decreases and perhaps even reaches a roughly equitable level, and you build a lifestyle rugged enough for dream chasing, and that’s all you want. That’s entirely fine. In fact I think it’s correct that that’s all most people want and ask for. I don’t think it’s a moral imperative that everyone ought to hustle to build the infrastructure of a better world. (In fact, I strongly condemn that universal ought-to imperative as a dangerous ideology.)
If you do care about working towards a specific vision of a better future, that’s awesome. That’s what I want too. I think the path I’m going to sketch out in these volumes is a method (not the method, a method) to bring your life in alignment with that Work.
If you care deeply about the world at large and your vision for the future, working at the scale of your own life can feel like narcissistic self-obsession. If it’s cringe enough to you, you will be tempted to skip it.
Like I did.
I do not recommend skipping the path of internalizing a post-consumer lifestyle. Trying to build a non- or post-consumer future world in your professional or extra-curricular life while still running consumer software in your head is not a recipe for success. Ask me how I know.
And reading a few Naomi Klein books and maybe skimming Derick Jensen does not make you a post-consumer radical. It’s one thing to be able to regurgitate a scathing critique of the rapaciousness and myopia of industrial consumer capitalism. It’s quite another to cultivate and operate an organization or entity that functions along post-consumer rather than consumerist logic, even if that entity is as humble as your own household.
There is a point that I feel I must repeat until the day I die: a bunch of individuals changing their households will not change the world. I am not arguing that if everyone just become post-consumers we would save the world. I am not proposing a method for saving the world. I’m proposing a method for responding to unfolding collapse and dissolution of a hegemonic paradigm that is eating everything beautiful in the world even as it thrashes through the volatile phases of descent and implosion.
Do you want to fold your hands and go along with the lifestyles and approved thoughts we’ve been spoonfed by the emergent dominant global hegemon? Do you want to just sigh and hope things don’t get too bad before you die and distract yourself with the glowing teat of vertical-format synthetically-curated slop? Do you want to enclose yourself in ideological echo chambers and adopt cosmetic lifestyle changes in order to feel less bad about your functional compliance and dependence on the current arrangement?
Or do you want to do something, anything, that makes you feel like an agentic human again? Do you want to embody your dignity and integrity as a peculiar product of evolution (or the mind of god, or whatever) on this earth, claim and inhabit your role in the web of life on this planet with all of the responsibility that our sentience implies?
You should know that the practical advice in these volumes is not a codex of eco-spiritual purity. It is not a method for completely divorcing yourself from and cleansing yourself of the current arrangement. The whole thing is messy and slow, full of compromises and deals with the devil in order to carve out a slice of freedom and hope, a foothold, a beachhead, for ourselves. If you haven’t the stomach for this kind of impure messiness then this text isn’t for you.
I have no ultimate solution to the enforced hypocrisy of caring about life while being a subject of a fundamentally anti-life death cult with no outside, no wilderness to seek refuge in.
We care. We’re complicit. We’re not guilty but we’re non-consensually involved. We weep for the life we burn with our exhalations. Our moment is metal AF and there’s no escape.
I tried to skip steps because I was trying to escape. I was seeking an ‘outside’ — I was seeking some kind of ideologically or ethically pure refuge based in the efforts of my work to save the world. I couldn’t then accept the implications and paradoxes of living in this world, and so I built an idea in my head that I could absolve myself of the current regime if I threw myself into building the next. In retrospect I was frantically trying to justify my own existence.
This was denial wrapped in fantasy and it didn’t help anybody, least of all me. It led to delusional thinking and, ironically, justification of and blindness to the effects of my own actions. It was dangerous.
I don’t know how the next decades and centuries will unfold. But I do know that skipping steps and living in delusion is not a recipe for the future any of us want. Sometimes you have to slow down to speed up. Sometimes you have to admit that you don’t know before you can see what’s really there. Sometimes you have to break before you can build. Starting over can feel like going backwards, but it’s better to admit you walked through the wrong door than spend the rest of your life in the wrong room.
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