cwicseolfor | Recent Entries

I really should have been in bed an hour ago, but I wanted a bike ride.

I'm also apparently impulsive about charity late at night. I realized I'd never donated/ paid toward the project, so I suppose I have a paid account for a bit. I hardly use it and have no use for premium services - I'd have simply donated directly had it been an option - but I suppose if I don't use the extras that's as good as a gift (else I'd have given to a random user; perhaps that, next time?)

Being quite out of the habit it's not clear what's about to bubble up. I've been, what, distracted? Unfocused, certainly. I forget what it's like to write entirely without a presumed audience; I'm very extroverted everywhere else.

The snow is melting but for now the heat stays on until I don't have to worry about the pipes. The irony of being warmest when it's coldest outside is about as good as spending the day winnowing my budget to bare bone only to turn around and donate, but the logic is the same; the resources are best used where most-needed, and I'm neither in need of heat on a regular day nor of the gift I just made at the moment, and the former enabled the latter.

The pipes are dripping and the sound is unfamiliar even after these days of it; I need to tighten the nuts on my bike where they've come loose; my head is a whirlwind of everything, so no wonder I couldn't sleep. Stripped of my slippers, accidentally sodden in chicken fat, I may put my cloak on.

I always underrate this thing for comfort.

The last few days have been shortbread and black tea, arroz con leche with a biscuity Honduras light roast that uplifts the cinnamon. I had to iron the former into the baking tray with a plate once it was hot and soft to get it to cohere, but even bad shortbread is superior to none and sufficient to exchange for a bowl of the latter. I've got a similarly sweet book underway, not my usual fare, but a gift given kindly, something to shelter one and amuse another. I've had my project to wrap up, the spider's scheme, the dragon's apple. Time feels like a loop of a quarter century, or a century entire, and it'd be funny if it weren't so sad.

The world is changed, and I can't tell if I have along with it.

A formerly local friend pinged me this morning about having seen an artist around online, someone who was a friend of mine in college.

I have suddenly gained free time like no time since then, and my next steps feel about as blank-slate-and-yawning-void as they did then, and I find myself verklempt over how different it feels, the grief in place of uncertainty.

Then was the first real flowering of collaborative art that high speed internet allowed for, and we were all in this community built online, doing amazing work, dreaming together, doing what humans do - making beautiful things and sharing them openly for the sake of shared joy, practicing our highest competencies as any animal plays. And then the recession hit and most of us had to get day jobs and give up a lot of that dreaming, myself included. I’ve barely done any art since 2008, but I can still feel the phantom limb of a pencil or a knife in hand after that amputation. Now, looking ahead, trying to figure out what sort of future there is left, how much more fragile all the world seems, and it really hammers home how diminished our collective hopes feel to know that so many of them signed off around when I did. Such genius consigned to digging trenches and filling them back in again - participants in an economy that does little more in the end than pulling useful materials from the earth, transforming them, and sending it all back as unwanted junk to landfill. A couple trillion tons of paperclips maximized.

And now that I find myself with a window of time, long enough to start to feel anything, to uncoil from tool-shape into animal-shape I feel overwhelmed, obligated to so much more than the human scale aims of wellbeing and communal joy we so excelled at bringing to life back then because human scale building is what we are meant to do. Looking on what we can build from what we have now, and what can be saved, and what can’t, and grieving because none of us were supposed to have to be heroic or sacrificial to make good on life. I do believe we still need vocational dreamers, and a few of us, my friend included, “made it,” but gods, we need so much hard work done if we’re going to make it out of this alive let alone save what we cherish, and it takes dreamers’ hands to do it, when no one else believes.

But the doing takes us away again from what we were born for, and lesser or greater talents, we were all of us born for dreaming.

Sometimes it feels like charge building up with no safe way to ground.

Thinking again on the way I'd spent every evening for months, loosing and re-threading the tongues of buckles, opening and dismantling sacks and filling them up again and packing them differently this time, settling and resettling my stocks and stores to assure myself that they were there, they were travel-ready, that I'd provisioned enough for holding out through storms, that I'd warded from cold, trying again and again to be advised of unconsidered risk from the same tangible reminders.

It's no more than perseveration. But.

The timing feels strange.

The storm is rolling in - perhaps not here, but somewhere - and I feel utterly compelled to make ready and just as unsure of the measures needed.

Looks like I got interrupted drafting this sometime early this year.

I think I've found a new way of framing my concern about my sufficiency: it's really about me as a person. Not what I have built for myself, but what I am. I suspect I'm so accustomed to the externally-imposed narrative that I am all-capable that this will take some mental rearrangement.

I am so accustomed to hypervigilance as a survival skill that I will endlessly substitute in some new terror du jour to explain those feelings: rationalizing the now-irrational. I am always persuaded I have missed something, left the proverbial oven on. The longer I live, the more surely I have made some fatal error along the road.

I'd written the above back in what, February? Then took months away. But I've centered in on the idea since, the sense of impending punishment. I've begun to excavate around and underneath the mass of it, see where it's assigning events to preexisting emotions. I was always the scapegoat, and the best defense was to be impeccable, so I never, ever stopped scanning for errors, for the liability left unchecked.

And now I am allowed.

I want to. I can. I feel like it.

I've been in the same place for what feels like a lifetime, now. It felt like a stop on a path at first, but then the progress slowed to a crawl and I've been smothered of not-quite-my-own-volition ever since. I saw three years ago that remaining here would not allow me to breathe, but I also couldn't bear the thought of making this fatal mistake, of leaving the certainty of suffocation for the unknown threats of the unknown path. It was a sort of familiar stifling, sort of home.

Stay on the path, ever on the path, though the path leads to a dead end, and the wolves walk it all the same. I think, now, perhaps it's merely easier to assign a meaning and a lesson to those who fall on it than out of sight or elsewhere. An orderly sort of demise, no need for reflection.

Better counsel was drowned out by the unchanging guidance of ghosts.

Though, I had made the decision to leave, quietly, underneath. I had made the preparations. I finally had voiced it. On some level - there was an attempt to keep me, persuade me to remain, pose alternatives - I just didn't see it as final. I could still change my mind.

But now the village is burning. The lords lit the thatch to burn us out like rats; the smoulder left behind will be fit only for salamanders, though others will let themselves be scorched to not be cold.

The village is burning, and though the way ahead is dark and twists quickly out of sight and there is no known path to follow, there is also nothing to stay for. So I'm uncertain how to understand this interim pause. Is it that I'm refastening what's already loaded on the wagon? Watching to see who will flee and who will perish and who will make my same mistake of doomed valor, trying to fight the flames, as if the existence of even a terrible thing makes it worth saving?

What can you do as the fields burn but glean what is left as you skirt the embers?

It's catastrophe, damnable and needless, though in one sense it profits me. I have the satisfaction of looking back on self-determination - the decision was not made for me before I made it. But the decision is also taken from me before I could wrack myself over it. No matter what, from here, everything is going to change.

The ultimatum would be satisfied even if I were not ready.

Someone wrote that the distinction between depression and exhaustion could be found by asking, were one to wake feeling well tomorrow, what would one want to do. The exhausted overflow with unmet longings. The depressed have none to call on. I vary by the day; today it was a blank slate, but that blank feels welcome, the emptiness of open air.

I burned my old diaries for the year's turning, as the balance tipped from day to night. It rained the day before and seemed worth the risk to curl the pages into a hollowed can as a makeshift chimney. That was an interesting way to inaugurate the firepit.

It felt like a sacrifice and an effigy at once. I reread them first, cross-legged folded onto my elbows on the carpet with the friendly ghost of the sled dog in my nose and the sun warming my hair, just taken aback at the volumes of pain. The things I wanted to say to the shades of my childhood selves, and then to my teenage self, in the latter entries, witnessing as an outsider the fracturing of self-awareness, the way I buried my teeth and claws into my own belly rather than in my own defense, after years of being trained to see myself as a threat. Ripping myself to pieces to spare anyone else the work.

I watched it all coil up into smoke and I think that's the first time I've really felt the reality of that chapter closing.

I've been working on resolving the current one in a way that paves the way into the next. Reading today I began to wonder if the part of myself that I have to suppress to become work-shaped is simply dopamine - in work I get all my motivation extrinsically, everything pushed along on cortisol and epinephrine. When I leave work, I crash. And I attributed this to exhaustion, to a raised baseline for cortisol that essentially leaves me underwater without superstimulus, but what if it's really - or in part - dopamine suppression? If I'd managed to press myself that direction, it would explain the dull dreams, the art-brain on mute, the inability to wrench myself up to imagination, the way that it always takes days to squash myself back in the box if I relax and open up. There's executive dysfunction in my inability to get things done outside work, but the sensation has changed in the last years, the ambivalence is muffled. And reduced dopamine activity would explain that change. There's research that biofeedback might be sufficient to train such a capacity and I certainly had the motive (ironically.)

That actually gives me more hope that I'll be able to expand back into myself, however, as it implies that it's simpler than atrophy. If it's an active inhibition it explains some of my exhaustion - it would be continuously costly to impose. I always just thought it a form of discipline, but restraining the lunging dog of my attention dysregulation is work. Constant background self-monitoring, a tonic drip of "stay. stay. stay" is a very different thing from letting a sleeping dog lie. It takes weeks for Parkinson's meds to take effect. Of course I can't switch it on and off.

If I'm right, it's no wonder I've proceeded from logout to faceplant for the last half-decade. Like a lot of survival skills, it's a nasty tradeoff, a form of coping that does much more harm than good once the circumstances change. Which they have.

--

I've been trying to open up new paths lately, experiment without judgement. I absolutely never thought I'd be the sort of person to own a bread machine - why automate pleasurable labor? - but when the choice is between that and golf accessories or impersonal mass-market jewelry, I figure if I'm sick of it I can give it away. I did not expect to lose seven pounds by reintroducing bread to my diet. I scored the nonstick off of one of the mixer blades last week cutting a loaf while distracted and to my delight Zojirushi will sell them individually off their site for free shipping at half the price the retailers do, so they have my loyalty even if I don't keep the machine. Their marketing & documentation is clearly out of the late nineties or early aughts right down to Papyrus font in the instructional DVD, which - though the chief value of the latter is entertainment - I still respect, as nothing about automated breadmaking has changed since.

I took my birthday to stay up into the wee hours, bingeing Dragon Age: Inquisition, drinking an excess of tea, and nibbling tiny bowls of cheddar goldfish. The parallels to a dozen years (!) prior did not go unmarked. Even if I had to go without a social gathering this time thanks to the Unending Panini... it was a stark improvement.

The most common commentary I've seen on the turning of the year (or secondmost, aside from diverse expressions of the desire to pin it to the ground and stare it in the eye until it agrees there's no call for funny business) is that we seem to have leapt from the end of 2019, eager for 2020, directly to the start of 2022 with no sense of passed in between, only alarm at the wreckage of our lives and bodies.

I took a photograph the other morning from the living room of my cat, the fireplace beyond, the Christmas tree, thinking that had I been able to send it to my January self she wouldn't have been able to believe it even though it went into motion just days later. The size of the room; the fireplace; the brilliant natural light; the little purring beast. But the Christmas tree is unmistakable and would have told immediately of the rest of the year.

The enormity of the change and the sense that no time passed, either. Everyone coming out older and scarred and not-quite-amnestic but sure there's a hole in your memory. If the last few years felt for me like contemplating coming out of a mine, the long slow hours of labor and sun glimpsed only indirectly through long airshafts, this collective sense of lost time to a fugue state or long fever-sleep leaves me more worried about the choices I've made, not less.

And yet I've had my own mounting pressures to face; liabilities taken on and discovered, loss of connections and the resilience of social networks. Increasing threats both general and specific. The profound sense that nothing is safe, that no one is safe.

I marvel at friends who trust so much to the future that they announce a child. I wonder if it is privilege or determination or shortsightedness or a combination of these things.

--

The temperature is ranging from 72° to 27° overnight and I had to bring in the aloes, harvest tomatoes, cover faucets. The sensation of the temperature plunging over those twenty minutes was remarkable.

I feel like I've been asleep for a long time and I'm still groggy.

I'd been meaning to lean into some stocking up - I learned I could order my prized teas directly from Foojoy, and need to get that done. I reordered soaps and certain scarcer groceries. I miss making bread but I'm too tired to even consider it most the time. The next real rest is late this month and I'm long past ready for a protracted sleep.

Today I had almost no experiences but work from when I woke up to when I was supposed to go to bed.

It's tax day for most the country, so this shouldn't have surprised me. But I had no real memorable experiences at all, no chance to learn much of anything. The deepest impression today left on me was that I had an apple and some gouda for lunch and the apple was bland. (The last, a fuji from the same on-sale batch, was floral and sweet and so good I split it and insisted my SO take the other half.)

It's been like this most days I work for weeks on end. After my time off in October last year, I've been effectively blank for months. I burned the end of my PTO in January in desperation, took until day nine to even start to have any energy; had a stint of frenzied activity as I scrambled to negotiate housing through February; found myself ready to crash in March with not a single weekend able to be set aside to rest until May. The hours are long, the work is grueling, and now I'm down to a hotplate and electric pressure cooker as a source of meals, without much room for creativity.

I did steal a few scant hours in March, laying in the grass on a beach towel, not-quite-shivering in the stifled breeze and the heat of the sun. I did inhale two books. I did sleep instead of reading, hat pulled awkwardly back over my neck to avoid sunburn in my long sleeves and socks under ghilles, skin unaccustomed after a year of pandemic isolation indoors and even less able than usual to adapt. But all my stolen hours now are past ten, candlelight and muffled keystrokes. I lose mornings, but I never sleep well straight off work.

What haunts me is the number of days that I have absolutely nothing to remember, nothing that adds to my life. I have lost easily 3/4 of the last decade - last I looked up I was in my early 20s, and I never got to do anything with them. I long for a disruption to break me out of this stagnation, but I fear I'd crumple without stability, and that I'm too tired to adapt myself.

All I want is a month of rest.

Strangeness comes on at unexpected hours. Tonight it was just after shift, in the strange green and pink light of the fading day through several layers of attempted weather. I'm not sure how much that owes to a sleepless night.

I started a book of books, a story about stories and reading stories and being stories and it felt right but then for no especial reason I couldn't read on. I had planned on a little cup of wine or maybe a cocktail out of the orange juice concentrate whose lid is lost and from the time that the world felt askew I knew that would be careless, but I'm disappointed at the loss of this tiny reward.

I'm so used to filling myself up on other people's words I keep finding myself distracted.

Over the weekend, starting during our gaming session, when my eye began to rasp and then to swell, when I had to spend the morning night-blind and used my too-detailed vision to amend my oilslick of a wristband and affix it fresh on my watch, I felt like I might turn a corner. I've been two whole weeks without overtime now and starting to feel - something? But still too tired to live it out. I want to write to so many people and have nothing in the end to say.

I have secured my basic material needs and don't know if I still have enough of me left to bother worrying about needs beyond those anymore. I'd been so tied up in survival I don't know how to come un-stuck.

We agreed at work that I'd start exploring new pathways; I'd like to find myself in a community that values what I do, and I'd like to experience more challenge but less pointless stress, and I hate admitting how very much I'd like to cut my hours. A four day week - especially when my partner's schooling is done and we can reclaim time together - would let us still have time apart. I realize as I catch myself struggling to write this that even conceiving of a preferable alternative to the now has become such a dangerous taboo I keep sliding off the idea; I trudged with my eyes on my shoes for a decade trusting that I'd be looking down the mountain's far side eventually, and of course I was correct, but now the habit to steer myself carefully away from eyeing the trees, any more comfortable alternative route, is ingrained. If I'd done it then I'd have given up. If I do it now, will I give up?

Maybe that's what I'm afraid would creep in if I weren't brimming full of others' thoughts.

Where is there to go and why?

I've spent the last five days effectively trying to work up the space just to contemplate my situation. I've slept, I've eaten, cooked. I made pho - without bean sprouts I decided shaved cabbage would add some welcome crunch, which had the effect of turning the broth and the rice noodles screamingly purple. (In hindsight I'm not sure why I did not foresee this.) I made tacos. My SO made spinach dip.

I read half a book, watched most of a cooking show, shopped largely idly for houses, watched the financial sphere flail in the wake of a novel virus. We have it here now; the church that was once my day care has at least one patient. I've been planning for a future that still feels intangible. I can picture a few glimpses of this or that, but not much, or well. This is an acute threat, something at hand in the short term. I'm going to be so angry if my employer keeps flying people back and forth between our locations, if the virus reaches even one of us - we work so close together and in an open plan. We're all expected to touch the same surfaces. We're all expected to head through the same entrances, breathe the same air. Do any of us truly need to be within that building? Isn't the job already a form of telecommuting?

I have a problem that I can't solve with any amount of laser focus, which runs counter to every fiber of my being. All I have ever done is to barrel through, defiant or doomed, and this is not that kind of situation. I am too tired to continue on, but I have predicated all my choices on holding to the course for at least a year. What would that cost me? I've been aware that most of the costs are hidden for some years; from about 2017 what I have been doing has been on a knife's edge for worthiness, even with the future benefits built in. That's a good long time to feel like you're wasting your life, to live aware of the anger you'd feel if that future did not materialize.

I do not like this contingent living.

I've read and heard and read again the perils of adding when what needs to happen is a subtraction. I know that adding lunches or vacations or, fittingly, a kitten, would not save me from a situation deriving from too much. I need to cut, but I find precious little available to cut.

I've adapted in ways - grown into shapes - that have made me capable of so much that so many others could not endure. I have developed a binary activation - if I'm not taking input, I am asleep. This is a perfectly sensible adaptation in which the majority of the time I am so activated I am running into an energy deficit as soon as my shift ends (and I do struggle to stay awake on the long, dark drives home, though I suppose that starting this week that might be a bit less difficult.) It is a survival adaptation for a lifestyle that would kill me otherwise, plainly. But it leaves me with no energy to recharge, care for myself, or engage in any of the activities that make a life meaningful outside work. I have to find a way to expend less of myself at work so that I become capable of operating on something other than reserves to make the situation even borderline-livable. To make it worthwhile? No idea if that can even be done.

Eat tainted food and live, or starve cleanly?

So much has transformed in the past year.

I just glanced back and was pleasantly surprised to see I did post in the summer - my SO pulled magic from thin air, or so it felt, because he spotted the failing PS3 drive as a problem he could solve, and ordered a hard drive and repaired the thing while I was at work one day as a surprise. When a full backup failed he had to manually archive all the save files, and turned out he got to it just in time; that was the last time it booted at all. I am still delighted. I played a great deal more of the game, and then tapered off as the workload increased at the office and my energy levels hit the dust.

I've continued my Norwegian lessons, nearing my 130th consecutive day (minus a streak freeze or two somewhere in there.) Thanks to a familiar root language and an alphabetical writing system I've got about two thousand words down, which has meant my reading comprehension's near where my Chinese was at its peak; I can comfortably stumble over recipes and news articles and interviews of musicians. It added a fun dimension to watching an Aurora concert to hear her speak her native tongue between sets. I think I've been at it for a year.

Work is hell, but when hasn't it been? And now it sounds that all my efforts to build up our project before burning out are coming to naught - we're in talks to be acquired; if it goes through, I'll either have a job closer to home but which I'm probably disposed to like much less, or a severance to cover some weeks, so it's more a stressor in the dimension that my punitively aggressive work feels purposeless and dead-end now. I was trying to build the company up; if we're sold, that will be dismantled. I did so much for so long, even when others wouldn't, wanting to create a legacy if just for myself - to leave things better than I found them - and while I made people happy along the way, while I'm approved of, it turns out that isn't really what motivates me. I wanted to wreak real change, make things better within the organization and for clients. This is, bluntly, not going to happen now; we would lack determination over our organizational structure, and we will almost certainly be totally disbanded and repurposed as a team.

So how to downshift in place? I can't request to return to four-day weeks at the present role and the probability of moving internally is not high given the present anticipatory stasis. I can't keep killing myself - I've just come off a bout of sinusitis that will hopefully remain in the past, as it never progressed past the viral stage, knock wood - and my ulcers and falling hair are back. Talking to the SO tonight one thing became clear - I'm not going to get to build anything that stays. At best, it's all sandcastles from here. And that metaphor gives me a narrative to try on; I'm going to do all I can, but within reason. I'm not going to kill myself over a sandcastle.

How much misery have we endured in the name of creating something lasting? Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair indeed, for the loss of life in pursuit of eternity, or even of semi-permanence, seems vast.

As usual I struggle to disconnect. I have two speeds - off and on - and in a role where so many emotional demands are made I can't take a breath between them, stop to disengage from the need to rise to them. That's the difference between my compulsions and my goals right there - I don't personally aim to please from a standpoint of intellect and discipline; it's a self-defense reflex. I am always on the defensive in this role.

This year is a trip.

I finally got myself together and disregarded my own anxiety long enough to head out to California and see my grandmother and aunt.

It was overall a lovely trip, though I'd had concern for my aunt's health and was surrounded to an unnerving degree with mementos of my mother. My aunt passed unexpectedly a couple of months later and I've not known what to make of that loss. Within a week of this news I was promoted at work, so it's all crashing waves of change and I feel like I can't get settled.

Today was supposed to be a good day; I'd given myself license to just relax and get utterly nothing done. This was less than successful: I have started this draft twice now; I stared at a book without reading it, in keeping with the "head full of bees" inability to focus I have been living in lately; earlier, wanting a sweet potato for lunch, I discovered a huge infestation of various immature states of drosophila in a collapsed potato and had to clean that out, the squirming image seared permanently into my brain; I opened a packet of cookies only to scatter them facedown on the carpet; around eight I finally decided that if I was feeling powerless and unaccomplished, maybe a bit more Skyrim would act as a dopamine-drip distraction while I put my brain in a happier, more creative state, and instead I discovered my PS3 creaking along and unable to load my save file. My file system was corrupted, which it states it repaired successfully, but it's still no quicker to load. I tried attaching my extra hard drive so I could save a backup and learned that the exFAT formatting I used for it is incompatible with PS3, which requires FAT-32. That's a problem I can solve by reformatting yet another drive, but takes far too much energy, and still doesn't fix the primary issue of apparently needing a whole new hard drive in a legacy system before I'm likely to get to play my game again.

None of the other games I have available right now are emotionally accessible: either I'd have to set up an older console, which triggers every kind of executive dysfunction associated with digging it out and finding a position for it, or I'd not be able to handle the emotional load of well-written fictional people dying if I screw up, which is to say this is not a headspace from which playing Dragon Age would end well, and of the PS4 games I have available which are not my SO's Soulesborne titles or ~~Trauma Exposure Therapy~~ Hellblade, No Man's Sky is intriguing, but definitely doesn't relax me. Skyrim is just the right balance of 'having whatever experience you want to have by choosing where you want to go that day' to feel friendly, and now it's locked up.

This is not a "real" problem, but the depression-anxiety-executive-dysfunction combo definitely is. The new job may not involve being abused for six or so hours per day on average, as the last one did, but I'm back on a regular five-day rotation and my SO and I don't have any of the same days off. The pressure is very high and the sensation of job security much lower, since the department is new and proving itself, and there's no clear benchmark for what an individual's success will look like to check my performance against. I also have a supervisor I feel a debt of gratitude toward, which layers yet more weight on what I'm doing and the need to excel.

I don't know how to fix it. I feel ungrateful for the multitude of things going right for me - after all, I was in a position to choose to work less for my sanity, and now I have less pointless-stress from shouty men than even four days a week could get me (not that overall stress from Unpredictable Stressors is down), but with five days a week of pay. Since I do make enough in a day to cover an hour with a shrink, maybe that's where that extra income should go.

Today is a good day.

It’s glorious out, maybe 84° but breezy and dry and feels great, as it spattered fat drops earlier enough to wake the petrichor on the air but not enough to become a fug; my partner made coffee for me, a fancy local roast I bought as a treat, all berries and dairy cream and toast on the nose that I’m enjoying black. We went to my favorite place, a pleasant public building nearby; I wandered the shelves, picked out three books, being an anthology of short stories, a fantastic novella, and a nonfiction address on the implementation of a universal basic income - took them over to a kiosk, scanned my identification, laid them in the bed to be picked up by near field chip and associated with my account, then walked out: no payments made, no bargaining with myself over what I was allowed but for the consideration of my free time and mental appetite. And now I’m settling in on the balcony in my garden to read.

We could do everything this way.

We have the resources. We have the technology. We could provide everyone a good life, a safe home, a full belly, the time to put eyes on pages and hands in soil. It’s simply not that hard. If the elites don’t want to come along, they are few and we are many and they don’t own everything yet; if we move soon, they never will; we can do this without them. We are stronger and more numerous than they can imagine, and most of them are so sorely afraid and lonely and would be so glad to leave their misery behind if they got a taste of safe and happy and whole.

We can. We must.

Conserve what isn’t needed, enjoy to the utmost all that is, and use the surplus to aid others. Start small. Just get everyone started. Get everyone on a firm footing. Get everyone helping, together. We can do this so easily.

I've been dilatory this year in putting the tree away.

Now with the singular luxury of a spare bedroom to set out my art supplies, go through my parents' things and my own from childhood, and the rest, I've been anticipating some emotional turmoil as I force myself to weigh and consider my belongings. I've not been eager.

Somehow the tree always cheers me once it's up - and the process of decking it out is enough of a ritual to stay the emotional weight of the stories associated with each of the ornaments - but putting it away doesn't have the same happy ritual component and I end up remembering the ugly along with the lovely. The spun-glass reindeer, antlers gilt, with the broken-off back leg - my mother's doing, having literally piled all the ornaments, several of which were glass or even crystal, gifts of my father's patients over decades, entirely carelessly on the dining table and put a tremendously heavy ceramic twee monstrosity on top of its delicate frame in a drunken fit - is a matter of tenderness and resentment at once; it was my favorite ornament all through my tweens and teens and destroyed like so much else in the same miserable fashion as so much else in my childhood. There is something so irrevocable about the breaking of glass, and I've come to associate it quite closely with my mother's effect on the world.

I would like to find an appropriate sense of ritual for the letting-go of things, the packing-away of things. I've not had one before and I wonder if it would help.

Recently heard someone note that resentment reflects a lack of self-care. I think that's one I'll have to sit on for a while, as sometimes self-care is denied.

Reading aimlessly and without significant discrimination during my recent illness I ran into a retooling of Rowling's House system into a surprisingly functional division of personalities by ideals and behaviours.

I learned something remarkable I hadn't ever considered. I'm not just adept at spotting patterns; my self doesn't doesn't just grasp at data due to a wash of dopamine alone on the chemical level - in other words my artist's pareidolia and mythopoeic perceptual eye aren't working entirely in isolation from my desires. The interaction is there with serotonin. I seek patterns, or perhaps I should say I await them; I'm rather more skeptical inherently than I suspect many people to be, both innately and through the self-distrust which is the predictable hallmark of abuse, and so I don't accept such patterns without question, but I desire them, quietly, an animal's generalized curiosity about the environment and also an animal's directed appetite to discover something useful not already known.

I rely heavily on intuition in regular function, but my intuition seeks patterns likewise. I take emotional comfort in flowing through the pattern myself, in other things flowing through the pattern, in knowing the flow: this strikes me as neurodivergent, perhaps. It's not just following a script, it's something more like a search for a priori truth.

Then, a few days ago, an interaction with a friend forced me to confront a few questions I didn't realize I hadn't resolved around my own value system.

The desire to abdicate power is one I rarely indulge and generally have a distaste for; it seems to me that in most instances power - am I saying privilege? - implies office and something of an obligation to exercise it judiciously and for the benefit of others - I'd been meaning to write on ba'al tashchit and mottainai for some while.

But the desire to abjure truth, for almost any cause, is abhorrent. I read it in part as cowardice, a meanness of spirit; in part as negligence which may lead to harm of others; in many instances, part as dereliction of a duty. To say "I do not wish to know" may function as a recusal which is appropriate at times - it is of course possible for business to be not one's own - but more often is a deliberate delineation of one's horizon, a redefinition of reality that does not map to the world which affects others. It is a statement from a standpoint of privilege, where I see often a noblesse oblige. Willful blindness is the mother of much agony.

In this are shades of hypocrisy, too: the choice to be willfully blind in order to permit the intolerable, routinely the morally intolerable. The cognitive dissonance should be excruciating, or so one would think. Routinely there is a declaration that one knows enough to know they wish to know no more - typically this implies a either a belief that one is in certain possession of the same knowledge which they refuse to acknowledge and countenance openly, or a position that doubt is tantamount to innocence of thole.

The great ghast of my childhood was apathy - and in a way, this choice of ignorance, or false simplicity, is apathy as an exit from ambivalence - acceptable only when the ambivalence stems from conditions affecting oneself only, and not others. As all things are connected, one's refusal to bear the weight of the truth most commonly offloads its burden onto the shoulders of another; because it specifically revolves around a refusal or redefinition of shared reality, it typically also functions to deprive another of informed consent in direction of their own life - another grave transgression - and for nothing more than comfort, or convenience, in one's own.

Having discovered the word in my study of Norwegian, I consider it a virtue to forestand.

To understand - to comprehend - is an act of desire by the intellect. It is a labor, but stands as its own reward, the truth being its object. Once attained, it is a stasis.

To forestand is to countenance: to stand before the truth as an agent upon you. It is an act of will, an ongoing choice; forestanding is never irrevocably attained, but must be chosen again and again. It never gets easier; rather, the will strengthens. Failure to forestand is a weakness of mind and spirit and will. Failure to forestand is failure to grow strong: that which does not grow, dies. Only in the honesty born of forestanding can consent be freely made: yours and others'.

The most common framing in our current culture of this same virtue paints an opposite image: one of yielding acceptance, rooted in a greater ideal of self-abnegation, an Eastern (or modern Indo-European?) idea which clashes rather sharply with my own moral aesthetic (which I suspect bears greater resemblance to older ideas from the proto-Indo-European period.) Rather than selfhood as a delusion, or supraordination, we once held our identity as a simple, and small, and fragile animal at home between earth and sea and sky. We see the world reflexively, through our own prism; we see ourselves as we see the world. Rather than something separable to be conquered, or mastered, or worked over into utility, as our relationship with the environment would one day become under agriculture, we beheld an integrated system, a pattern of selfhood, to which we were native, into which we grew quite naturally.

One does not kneel before the divine; that would be hierarchy. The holy is as oneself, an agent to be encountered, acknowledged, hailed - this a word with so many shades of meaning in its cousins: greeted, called, apprehended, altogether, healthy, whole.

One stands, and bows, and never takes one's eyes from the face of the sacred thou.

Recently I wrote about gratitude and grounding oneself in response to a statement from a stranger, realizing that they're dreaming of enhancing the life they aspired to attain only a year or two before.

I wrote - out into the ether of social media - that my response to that sense of fleeting time and elusive satisfaction was to journal, to reread later, to reflect on where I was, am, and plan to go. I was thinking specifically of the short-form diary I'd kept while tracking my objectives (to which, referring now in past tense, I realize I have not necessarily concluded - only now the days are counting forward and out, rather than down.) I look at where I stood then, and it's real.

In greatest immediacy, I can look at my prior entry and be profoundly grateful that I'm no longer collapsing into miserable, spasmodic coughing, and indeed, only coughing singly a few times a day. I can sleep again.

I can look at my entries from a year ago and be glad, if bemused, that I've achieved one of my long-ago goals.

I can look back three or five years and stand staggered at the transformation of my circumstances.

The alien topography of "now" is still enough to strike me dumb without tremendous effort. I haven't succeeded in writing nearly so often as I might have liked as a direct consequence; I don't know what to make of where I am because I hardly expected this sense of self to persist so long; I thought by now I'd be someone else. But then - why?

There are two ways to change; you can revise and reshape yourself, or you can be reshaped. The last time I changed into someone else, I was effectively dropped off a mountainside and let to batter for a year or three into every stone along the way. Strike here and spur there, strike there and cleave away an entire shoulder, until the entire structure is unrecognizable; I can see where the grain flows alike in the two but would never have forseen the shape as it was carved by wind and water and yet-harder stone.

I have rather little practice in reshaping with intent, or at least the process of trying to reshape myself has always been so in line with my identity at the time that it didn't seem like a change so much as an outgrowth. I've tried to push myself in healthy directions, worked will against my weaknesses, but that's never felt to be a change - rather a manifestation. This feels like something else: like the shape I've had to become, smaller and harder and specialized, is no longer suited to the task I would like to pursue.

Simply put, I'm not remotely optimized for my own happiness.

I put myself last, or if not dead last, anything I do for myself is from anxiety, not enjoyment. I can't recall my pleasures; I'm gripped with anxiety when I'm not working at a dead run (whether my progress in the situation be that over a slope or a scramble, the distinction is the full-tilt effort.) I imagine little and dream less; given the opportunity - for instance, I've had two excellent books in as many weeks - I bolt down the nourishment like the starving, hardly allowing for the more delicate colors brought on by savoring. I feel wasteful in attempting to enjoy things in this state, because I can consume endlessly and taste little to nothing.

Ironically the exception seems to be food (and sleep; notably, the two things I permitted myself enjoyment of throughout the years of discomfort, perhaps because they were biological obligations, and thus couldn't be cut out altogether. I know I used to relish cooking simply due to the utter lack of guilt associated with spending time on the necessary task of feeding myself.)

But this is a necessary task, now. I just need to determine the shape of it, and what constitutes meaningful work toward the objective.

Not quite a thousand days ago, I began a miniature journal, a private aside to my other broader reflections on the world and the self, and set it up as a countdown to a date which, admittedly, I selected rather arbitrarily for personal significance and (ap)proximity to what my calculations actually suggested.

I've had a handful of major, survival-level goals over the years - finding employment, exiting debt, achieving a measure of security. This marked the first goal that went beyond myself and my survival, my ability to contribute back without inspiring anxiety in myself, and I'm now in the process of breaking out how I wish to do so.

I'm also trying to reestablish health and a sense of self in the wake of so much time spent in fight-or-flight mode at work; I successfully negotiated a week's leave, but unfortunately find myself still ill. Before the new year I went to visit a friend and her children; on arrival I discovered they had a little respiratory infection but it didn't seem like much. By New Year's Eve I had a crippling head, neck, and backache, racing pulse even prone and resting, high fever, and find myself over two weeks sick. I returned to work for part of that time, but had to ask to work duties off the phone most of it, as the pharyngitis prohibited me from much in the way of speech. Apparently her brother'd had it bad too, so in greatest charity all I can assume is it didn't occur to her that children and adults sometimes present differently with illness, but I still resent spending my hard-won (and unpaid) leave coughing until I gag and unable to sleep through the night.

The other shift comes from a reshuffling of my schedule: I'll commute one fewer day each week. I don't yet know what effect that will have on my energy level, but I'm trying to assign the extra time to something regenerative. I've written and done a little bit of painting today; I plan to clean and exercise just a bit tomorrow. I've been keeping up with Duolingo. We decided to keep the apartment for one more term, which means light and space; I'll have a workroom to migrate much of the clutter into and sort it through, an extra closet, even the ostentation of a full extra bath, so that my tub might be kept clean enough to soak in. It's foolish - and yet, and yet. If I can find the physical and emotional space to pare down my father's things I might carry them more lightly - certainly it would be easier to downsize again. I've no intention to acquire anything beyond, perhaps, some sort of fixture on which to put the television (we'd heretofore been blessed with my roommate's massive inherited flatscreen and the stand he bought to accommodate it.)

Crossing the line in my expenses past a minimum-wage worker's after-tax income feels, for all that it's temporary, on some level a betrayal of principles. I know I could live on less and I feel acutely aware of the good I could do elsewhere with my own good fortune, having only comparatively recently ceased urgently needing every last cent of it just to get back up to zero. But all at once, I'm depleted; I've made such a habit of cutting that I don't even know how to relax anymore. Taking a week's sabbatical with endless hot, variously spiced, and sometimes honeyed or whiskeyed beverages - it's now Thursday of that week, and I started writing this Monday - has not gotten me back to health. I attribute most of that to my stress level leaving me immunocompromised; my friend's brother, who also had an acute reaction to the infection, was apparently better within about five days, whereas I'm now on day seventeen. I have become so accustomed to having no time that I don't know what to do with it, even less so in the absence of energy, and if that feeds perpetual illness I know it has to change; I've nothing much restorative left in my life and need to prioritize my wellbeing for long-term survival.

So I know I both have a need and the ability to afford to relax just a bit - I'm making a calculated expansion of my lifestyle relative to my income, and am excited and horrified in equal measure. Didn't I nearly kill myself to get where I am? Isn't that also the problem?? It feels anathema to everything I've done, and even knowing that what I've done has been strangling me by increments it's like leaving a starvation circumstance to find a store of ever-so-lightly-poisoned food. Questions over near-term viability don't leave room for quibbles about quality of life ten years down the line, so the concern is something of a novelty. I've no practice dealing with it.

Reading again on some decluttering ideas and contemplating (aka: in the midst of negotiating) a sabbatical at work to try and figure out what sort of shape my life has when it isn't just a couple scant hours poured into the margins around my paid employment, and stumped my metaphorical toe again on the matter of how much of my ownership of things ties into having absolutely zero clue what sort of life I want.

I know I'm preserving the tools of every sort of hobby because I can't fathom what future-me will want to do with her time, may she have much of it. One of the biggest and most distressing collections I feel responsible for is my father's - in pursuits which to me were always sort of an aside or support to a more important set of priorities. A wealth of stuff and space, and I've no idea what to make of it; I could never have had him know, but it is heavy, a burdensome responsibility to carry, because I feel as if I can't just discharge it of my own will as I (fancy I) might so easily do with my old projects (were I to feel ready.) I feel obligated.

That's a subject for a shrink: irrational, dysfunctional, in need of exorcise.

I have spent so much time burying my dreams - trying to keep focused on the path underfoot, until my eyes cross and I have to close them, until the endless trudge sends me numb - that I don't know how they're even shaped. I've had to put things off so long I'm not sure I'd enjoy them so much as I might have in the past - I had to inure myself to desires, and so desiring is dulled. I have spent so much of my adolescence and young-adulthood drifting from one horizon marker to another - typically, some creative project I looked forward to, mine or another's - my tags imported from Lj make clear of that. The great gap in my habitual writing is also written into (out from!) it - there's no mention of Hellblade, the almost singular bright spot I had from October 2015 through August 2017, and a constant living entity in my head ever since, thankfully as brilliant and visceral and true as I could ever have hoped.

But those aren't my dreams, are they? They're hopes for something good to come into the world, but not my own dreams - again, as I last wrote, they're the desire for something good in the world I didn't put there, for windfallen fruit. The active desire for (rather than coincidental delight in) windfalls implies itself a lack of the sense of agency or capacity to climb the tree. Exhaustion doesn't leave you room to imagine authoring your own sources of joy.

I know that in college, I was very much dreaming, in the sprawling way that sets realism to the side sometimes to explore value judgements. I considered a mask shop. I knew that it was unlikely to be, or unlikely to be for long, and that the farthest it'd likely go would be a temporary event - a booth at Faire, for instance. But I explored a wilder notion just to see what would come up, and I learned a great deal doing it - mostly how unfeasible such a thing would be, and that I wouldn't like to spend my time that way, and that's valuable.

The end of dreaming followed the recession, which is sensible enough. I didn't have a choice, for a while. I had to give up several of the anchors of my life. But I haven't found myself in such a place as to set new ones, (even though subjectively it's felt like I've stabilized my freefall, slowed the descent, paced the ground for a few bouncing strides and taken slowly off under my own power.)

I am still just young enough to be fundamentally versatile. I could learn to do nearly anything, I have the advantages of a mostly-healthy body in pre-middle-agehood. I am beginning to see that I'd almost been biding my time with work, waiting for my options to be few enough that the choice could be less distressing. I suppose I could've done worse, but I'm not where I want to be because I haven't worked at where I want now to be; I'm where my strapped recession-self wanted me to be, in the broadest sense. I'm safe, with the power to build a future. I just left the plans, at that time, for later.

I'm very reluctant to pull any plugs until I know why I'm doing it, though.

I'm beginning to wonder if I've figured something out about Americans.

We're very much trained to passivity. We are trained to expect to receive, we are wealthy such that we don't question spending, and we are accustomed to simply receiving whatever we are given in return without much thought for quality, as nearly every thing we reach out for is symbolic - we have everything we need, and a great many of us have most every thing we'd truly want if we just sat down and thought about it: there's not much beyond shelter, safe and healthy food and water, and medicine to be bought but experiences.

I'm not accustomed to spending money. This will be my first year to go crashing through a minimum wage income's worth of wealth in expenses outside of repayment of debts or their source, my college education expenses.

This year I expanded my living moderately - mostly in my grocery budget, a couple extra hundred in restaurant service. And then toward the end of the year, as my last pair of good jeans formed the beginning runner of a full split from crotch to hip across the back, I started to look around and assess some things that had been irking me for quite a time: my wardrobe mostly dates back to college or before.

As an American I essentially treat denim as part of a daily uniform. I've had new jeans in about three bursts in adult memory: first in early high school as I reached grown height, buying sizes that still left a bit of loose material across my hips that I quickly grew into, then in early college, then, finally, in 2012 just after I finally found work in a grocery, annoyed to see holes in inappropriate places developing in most of my older jeans, cut down to two pairs I could wear at work (both of which required careful positioning to disguise tears).

I'd been advised to try men's jeans to avoid the problem of flimsy material, but as I discovered then, and again this summer, if they are suited to my hips they will bag with a crotch at miniskirt height. I am not built in such a way as ever to pass for male. And again - my only remaining pair without a hole was about to develop one I could not disguise.

So out walking with friends in a big urban sprawl, I spotted a retailer closing down, applied for a credit card for an additional discount, and picked up eight pairs for quarter-price. "That's done for a decade," I seemed to be thinking.

But my tops for work - a collection from middle school through my frenzied acquisition to have clothing for a suit-requisite office job in 2012 - were also wearing through at elbows, holes in the front hems, bagging like sails around me as their elastic finally gave in, sometimes translucent from disintegration. So when I was offered a bonus that equated to a 67% discount on some tops, I took that too. And a dress, which fit so well I ordered another with the further rewards from that purchase. Because I haven't had these things - clothing that flattered me, clothing I felt good in - since early college.

I'd been planning for a year and change to buy a pair of wireless headphones, waiting for the right price. I also ended up succumbing to another electronic temptation I'd been flirting with for half a year. And then I got a call from a relative offering meat I couldn't have possibly afforded myself, without strings but for butchering it myself, and I went and bought a chest freezer, but had to do it at full price because apparently the sales for those are always in late summer - and then it was delivered damaged and potentially dangerous, so I've spent to buy it and spent to rent a truck to transport it and twanged my back getting it upstairs and it all has to go back anyway, and meanwhile time's still marching onward towards my need to pick up a small fortune in pastured cow.

All in all I've spent two extra months' discretionary budget on things on the last two months, which sounds - is - absurd, even if it's still three figures, even if much of the spending had to be done and the luxury was buying new instead of used, even if the spending was planned, even if I hardly ever splash out to begin with. I had a new computer this year, after all - granted, it was secondhand and I'd been a decade since the last one. A full tenth of my annual spend this year - the tenth that carried me over a minimum wage earner's spending power - was all stuff.

Some of that stuff has been wonderfully worthwhile: not worrying about bending over in my ripping jeans, for instance, or having a pretty dress to wear when I'm called on to go out, or the ability to put my audio device down and walk away rather than worry about ripping my audio off my head by the cord (let alone the magic of being a woman with muffs over her ears, as if to say, "no, I do not and will not hear you by default.")

All this, and I find myself contemplating even more aggressive trades of my life energy in a fairly miserable work environment for even more spending. I want to keep my current apartment, even as it very nearly prices me out. But now I'm doing it with the awareness that I am nearly desperate to find a way out of my job.

The discovery of this is in realizing what we think will change things, and what actually does, and what won't.

The electronic temptation aforementioned was, I knew, a talisman - I knew that having an activity tracker would not make me healthier, or more active, but might serve as a symbol to myself: I had already expended value and needed to make good on it. To a certain degree, what gets measured gets managed, and I'm data-hungry and work well when I conceive of my own behaviour in points. But I knew it was a band-aid solution to the wrong problem: I know I'm inactive and sedentary and both chronically and acutely stressed. Measuring my activity isn't what's needed. Changing my life structure is, which almost certainly means moving from my current, intensely stressful position to something else, bound to be less effective a scythe of means for my time but also less likely to acquaint me with the Reaper.

It's not something I let myself do often, this pretending that a thing will bring me any measure of peace. But that's what we're trained to do: snatch at one thing, and upon discovering it a pretty shell empty of our sought-after internal peace, seize on another and yet another and never find what we're hunting for, because it's not to be found where we're looking. Many of us even know this - I don't think I'm unusual to that degree, but simply I look more frankly at the matter; I've trained my inborn skepticism to examine it, whereas many people are happier in a measure of denial.

More to the point, what we then aren't doing is working at what we ARE hunting for; we expect that to come to us of its own, to stumble over our joy when we're working at some other end. We expect there to be good in the world, and meaning, that we didn't put there ourselves, gifted by some invisible hand for real or imagined excellence in some other capacity.

In this I am profoundly common. I have been waiting for a life to start I haven't been willing to build from the ground up - telling myself I was waiting to spot the right circumstances of a likely camp as I continued to float downstream, biding time, building power and capacity. I know it's very nearly time to use it, if I want to make anything like the most of it. Now comes facing the fear of profligacy and of trusting my own abilities, and I am only now coming to forestand it all.

I just had the consummate pleasure of discovering The Fifth World.

More to come.

I’ve been kicking some ideas around for a long while now on the solarpunk front, trying to understand why it was significant to me, what I like and dislike about the social space it inhabits.

I feel like I should first start with my own inclination toward it and the assumption I make that others may be like me and gravitate toward it for the same reasons. I really believe a society is only going to be as good as its dreams, and right now ours faces what I’m coming to think of as ‘the Bethesda quandary’, in reference to the apparent spec-fic binary of backward-looking, quasihistorical fantasy and dystopian, cyber- and diesel-punk science fiction. (I should say I adore Bethesda’s work, flawed though it is.)

Anyone who knows anything at all about me would be able to guess which side of this my tastes land on - on first glance from my hair to my boots or in discussion with my euro-pagan-adjacent moral and aesthetic sensibilities - and I’ve spent most of my time in secondary worlds chosen for their proximity to a past in which we based our lives around the natural world we inhabited. I was born in the tail end of the 1980s, and by the time I was there, science fiction had developed a wide range of visual, conceptual, and tonal themes, most of which I disliked. Retro-scifi was cute; I find the humor in Fallout frankly delightful and I’ve always adored Orwell’s arch commentary. The cyberpunk of The Matrix had its appeal, even if I glumly admit it took me three tries to get through Gibson’s Neuromancer. I wasn’t born too late to enjoy the masculinist power fantasy of the original Mad Max and I wasn’t born too early to revel, awestruck, in the vengeful female anger of Fury Road. But none of these worlds were places I wanted to stay very long. None of them were places I would want to live, even Star Wars with its space fantasy. Avatar would have been a far more enjoyable movie if we’d gotten to Pandora and just scrapped the whole human aspect of the plot. I don’t like Jaegers or cyborg bodies.

Even the most hopeful among them - very probably Star Trek, which I never quite caught fully onto - comes with a history following a third world war and is almost entirely offworld. I never enjoyed much the implications - that people could go out beyond our fragile planet, great!! - but why is it everything happens out there? The “final frontier”ishness of it was offputting; frontiers are for conquest, and that’s never been much good for anyone from all I could see; the ugly echoes of a paternalistic manifest destiny made speciestic in an inhabited universe, and in an uninhabited one - why go at all? How lonely. That’s not what we were meant for.

Going away from home has rarely been done idly in human history. It’s usually a response to something, some need or precipitating event. The idea of leaving earth - perhaps this is just growing up during global warming denial - smacked of giving up, a catastrophic abandonment of our responsibility to the world that bore us. To leave is to deny what we are - the environments of science fiction were artificial; there were rarely any trees; we are only now putting science behind what I have always intuited, that a member of a social species such as H. sapiens put into a vacuum is not really the same creature at all anymore, and will evidence it with dysfunction. I’ve been saying all my life that humans are afraid to admit that they are animals, but I’m only in adulthood beginning to grasp what “being an animal” means; an individual animal is still connected with its physical and chemical senses to its environment; the idea that we can break sharply off a creature from from the natural world is a mistake. Distinctions of phylogeny aside, an animal is in essence a thing which responds to the stimuli of its environment. Raise it in a captivity it was never meant for, and it will be nevertheless ever-alert for stimuli it has never experienced. We absolutely were never intended for the deeply static environments in which we now live, and we carry the burdens as psychological and physiological dysfunction. Pushing our dreams further into an anthropocentric world designed for our comfort and ease rather than our wellbeing always rubbed me very much the wrong way. We make ourselves ever-weaker; we adapt quite readily to a lack of challenge; I think we have been (in the absence of other pressures) breeding ourselves toward a neotenous, pleasing, obedient reduction of what we call humanity.

I am, however, not a luddite. I believe in sparing meaningless labor, that sentient life exists for more than to endure hardship, that strength alone is a deficient virtue. I do not embrace scarcity, or punishment for weakness. Our history of hierarchy is that of humanitarian atrocity. This means that although the typical setting of a fantasy book or game may appeal to me aesthetically - look at the pretty green fields, the desolate mountains, the fascination of sirens or dragons, the mystery of magic, the majesty of medieval architecture - I don’t go in for the societies typically reflected. I’m allergic to asceticism, I believe all value in suffering is incidental, I’m an egalitarian who believes in pleasure and kindness and joy as first-order virtues, worth pursuing for their own purposes. I believe that we are animals and happier when we admit to it. If technology lets us enjoy physical and resource security, freedom of time, geographical independence, ease of communications, medicine, entertainment, art, let’s go. I’m for it. But like anything, it’s not the tool that determines the outcome of its use, but the user - in an aggressively hierarchical, antihumanistic, zero-sum capitalist ethos we get technology which divides us, which makes us desperate and isolated and unhealthy (and most of all eager consumers of purported panaceae to each of those ills.)

Enter solarpunk - a countercultural anarcho-humanism crossed with technological adoption to make supporting a healthy human population ecologically sustainable: a notional future which might actually be worth living in. A future human culture which can integrate itself with its natural environments unobtrusively, maintaining a high standard of living and relative wealth through recognition of the value of what we would currently call biological capital - everything from soil richness to air and water purity to biological diversity to human effort and time. Almost all the work we need or want done, which in the past was accomplished through expenditure of human time and labor, can now be done by machines, freeing up their users to apply their time and labor to creative endeavors that the computers can’t substitute in for.

The human appetite for more is actually bounded, contrary to our common wisdom - mostly bounded by novelty, by the seeking of differences. We have limited time and attention; it has been the great labor of our era to try to stretch that time and attention to incorporate as much consumption as possible. In a society in which consumption on part of one did not beget a marked change in the wealth of another, would we have any reason to attempt to push people’s consumptive habits?

Take, for instance, the current debate over the idea of “solarpunk fashion”, and whether there should even be such a thing - sustainability and anticonsumerism tend to be automatically linked. I would agree with proponents that, yes, an identifiable aesthetic does wonders for visibility and public support; making (solar)punk a visible identity is a really good way to un-sell people on the mainstream when the mainstream is damaging to humanity and the planet. Plus - who wants to live with ugly things? If we will take up the responsibility of designing a future, why settle for anything but what pleases? But is that “fashion”, or is it design? Fashion implies a shifting style destined for planned obsolescence, a disposability that opposes the sustainable ethos of the movement. Design is about intention, about care, and allows utility and enjoyment to coincide. I’d rather a solarpunk that re-adopts the unique, one-off or individually-modified item instead of fast-fashion.

This goes along with another countercultural objective I’d like to forward: authorship over audienceship, activity over passivity, creativity over consumption, and conscious choice in the consumptive actions we do take. In everything from our possessions to our culture we stand to benefit when we produce rather than receive. It is much harder to profit off of someone who is motivated, who is critical, who is engaged - so we have suppressed those tendencies for quite some time. Some things are certainly worth buying - a lot of us would rather buy than make a computer, let alone a car, and I suspect that we're very unlikely to go back to homespun fabrics either. But the machinery of making can be shared, and as things become more automated - picture the rapid prototyping of dwellings, vehicles, tools. Imagine printing a bike frame from downloaded open-source instructions. Now imagine that you can tweak that design at will before fabrication, not just to suit your size requirements but your design goals - maybe you need an extra cargo rack, or maybe you want the negative space filled in with a filigree grapevine pattern - if you have the skills you can make that happen. Upload that back to shared space and suddenly your design has caught on, because it offered value to others, too.

We need to share our ideas, ideals, dreams, if we want them to catch on. If we don't like what we've received - what our culture has handed us, watered-down mass-produced "tradition" - we need to be forwarding our own solutions. I'm glad that the Bethesdas of the world are out there producing entertainment, but those are not dreams from which we can build anything worth having, and it's time we took it into our own hands to find a future which could thrive.

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cwicseolfor

Cwicseolfor Masks

January 2026

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The Mirror and the Mask

attempting to honor a faceted truth

Recent Entries

Dawdling.

Turning to a blank page

Paths

Resources

Another wheeling year

Hardly the only one

Revenge bedtime procrastination

Other

Burnout

Sandcastles

Swing

Good living is like this

(no subject)

Values

Perspective

Three days

Polyvalent

Seeking

In reference to that last post:

Solarpunk