Why the Green Future We Want Can’t Happen

Short answer: physics.

Long answer…

I watched a movie the other day called Snowpiercer. It’s a joint Korean-American dystopian film based on an 80’s French graphic novel, and tells the story of life aboard a massive high-speed train after a botched attempt to fix climate change ushers in a sudden and catastrophic ice age. The train itself is powered by some kind of perpetual motion/zero point energy engine that hurls it in it’s desolate, 365-day journey around the Earth. It’s an entirely closed ecosystem: death by exposure for those who attempt to leave is swiftly guaranteed.

The people who live aboard the train are highly stratified. Those in the rear cars live in cramped, squalid conditions, while the people living near the front of the train are permitted to enjoy all manner of hedonistic luxuries and roomy accommodations. In the middle, separating them, is the prison and barracks for security.

The movie tells the story of an attempted uprising of the lower classes as they make their way towards the front so that demands (I’m not sure of what sort, to be honest) can be made of the mythical architect and steward of the sacred engine, who is in charge of maintaining perfect homeostasis aboard. Spoiler alert: We discover that the train, now 17 years old, requires small children to do the work of parts that have failed, explaining the abductions we see earlier in the film. And in a twist reminiscent to Animal Farm, the leader of the rebellion is told he had been chosen to succeed the aging engine-keeper in his role at the front, but it’s all a wash anyways as the train gets derailed at the last minute, killing everyone on board except for a pair of kids we’re supposed to accept has a chance at surviving the frozen wasteland simply because they happened to see a polar bear.

The train, as you have already gathered, is a metaphor for the entirety of the (industrialized) planet and its inhabitants a literal encapsulation of the (industrialized) human race. It’s where we are now: a conglomeration of the most highly stratified societies that human history has ever seen, powered by the miracle of the sacred engine we call fossil fuels.

The villains of the film give us explanation after explanation on the importance of strict hierarchy and its role in maintaining the rigid balance that keeps humanity alive aboard the confines of the train. We begin the story with the implicit understanding that the uprising is good and just, but by the end, we’re not so sure. The children we see at work under the floorboards of the engine-keeper’s sparse suite, or going willfully into the belly of the engine itself to maintain humanity’s life support, make the audience hesitate. Do the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few? Of course, then, the whole thing is blown wide open, quite literally, and the laws governing the precarity of life aboard the train-as-ark cease to exist as everything is destroyed and the wild world opens up to humanity for the first time in 17 years.

Of course, those two surviving children never make it to Adam and Eve-hood: it’s pretty clear that they would die of exposure as soon as the sun went down because they had never, up until that point, even set foot on solid ground let alone possessed wilderness survival skills that would permit them to find food and shelter in a landscape closely resembling winter in the high Himalayas.

Snowpiercer is an interesting commentary on the closed ecosystem of “starship Earth”. But just as telling, to me, is the unintended meta commentary that the structure of the story itself provides. Namely that, to the progressive mind, a broken society is always a thought problem rather than a physics problem.

And this here is how I see most of us approaching our current predicament. Which is why we are largely doomed to failure.

Unlike physics, crises of thought and ideas are serviceable. They can be fixed. They can be argued into prominence or irrelevance. Loopholes can always be found, and ways around or through or to the top of them inevitably present themselves in time. While usually a final, desperate bid, the train can always be derailed.

Crises of physics don’t work this way. And for (hopefully) obvious reasons.

What we can do when presented with a physics problem, especially those on such a massive scale as climate change and resource overshoot, is pretend that it’s actually a crisis of ideas. In this way we can continue to not change much of anything about ourselves, while justifying endless talk and speculation about what we might do.

But at the end of the day, the train, and everyone in it, is subject to the laws of physics.

The Snowpiercer is, as I said, a two-fold metaphor: for both the limits that society artificially places on us as individuals, and the very real limits that the planet itself maintains without fail. The green progress movement believes that humanity can build and live aboard the proverbial train, suspended above and away from the earth on its track, continuously moving towards an ever-brighter future.

The problems with this are many. Like the train, our society is currently overbuilt given the raw materials, available labor, money, and oil that is available to maintain it, let alone replace any of it. This is why the Snowpiercer begins to rely on child labor to keep running – people are the only real “renewable resource” that can actually be made on-board with a net positive (though very low) EROEI. We might compare the perpetual motion engine to real-life technology like solar panels, wind turbines, and other devices touted as being renewable. If the engine cannot renew itself, if it cannot be used to make more parts to service it with, then it requires energy inputs outside of the system to maintain and is not truly perpetual. This is the nature of entropy, one of those pesky in-built limits to physics. The green progressive would simply suggest that we built a new, better train every time entropy catches up. The realist will eventually be forced to counter, with what?

The devil is most certainly in the details, and the laws of thermodynamics is one of those little details that makes plans for a renewable energy future full of the same kind of economic prosperity, technological progress, and modern comfort that we have now impossible. The fact is that what we have built cannot be powered by any other means than oil. Food, travel, entertainment, medicine, business, manufacturing – these sectors will shrink along with our carbon footprints, and the current technological momentum we have that might have potentially given us something more efficient than solar panels or ethanol is halting faster than we can imagine. The sacred engine is slowing.

Nothing is capable of self-renewal a la the mythological phoenix, rising from its ashes. All energy transactions result in loss: if a man is to carry a gallon of water to the top of a mountain, it’s costs more than that initial gallon of water to slake his thirst along the way. Nothing is in and of itself, nothing exists apart from its externalities. Organic cotton may be more sustainable than Tencel only because organic cotton can be grown, produced, spun, and woven with manual labor alone. Tencel on the other hand, while held to high environmental standards in a single snapshot of today, cannot sustain itself indefinitely. Eventually, the toxic solvents used to tease out the cellulose need to be replenished. The waste water can only be recycled so much (and recycling takes energy) before the remaining caustic sludge needs somewhere to go. The high-tech machines used in those processes will eventually break down and need to be repaired or replaced. Are the factories where those parts are manufactured also sustainable? When their machines break down, are the factories that built their parts sustainable? The entire system relies on inputs from externalized energy.

The myth of green progress is predicated on the hope that there is something else out there, some vast wilderness full of promise we might go when we blow up the train. The days of massive civic works projects are long behind us, or didn’t you know? US infrastructure has a D+ from the American Society of Civil Engineers. 80 years ago we built an interstate highway system that was only designed to last 60 years, and now local governments struggle to divert funds to repair even a single bridge. Money and labor is stretched thin, while our expectations remain higher than ever before. We have come to rely on stone soup, even as we use up the last stones. This is what happens when a physics problem gets treated like a thought problem.

Of course, this is only a problem for us. Even in Snowpiercer, life for the planet continued on while humans were busy waging their tiny wars aboard a high-speed train. Something survived somewhere, even if it were just those niche creatures that eke out their lives far away from the sun. The derailed train, burnt and broken, would lay there on the mountainside for some time, oozing its inorganic toxins, but eventually it would all be reclaimed by the earth. The track itself would eventually cease to be. The artificial ice age would pass, the mountains would shift and grumble, and all record of man would be nothing but a memory of a memory. Life would go on.

Actually, life itself is a physics problem. Or to go a bit deeper, physics is a physics problem. Everything in the universe is faced with the choice to grow or die, where growth is just the scenic route to death anyways.

But it’s what we do with death that the thought problems really get exciting.

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Kings of the Hills; or, A Weekend at the Lake

A little thought piece I wrote for my religious blog. I feel it would fit here too.

Nobody can say that I don’t like to hear stories and perspectives from folks of all walks of life, that I don’t manage to get something out of being with varied company. I’ve shared table with island-owning millionaires and the once homeless, with Woodstock-era crystal healers and cattle ranchers, with Elon Muskian techno-optimists and flat earthers. I’ve broken bread with murderers, pacifists, philanthropists, misanthropists, poets, contractors, foodies, farmers, and the guy who played the punk on the bus in Star Trek: The Voyage Home. (Kirk Thatcher makes for one hell of a dinner guest!)

I understand people. I don’t always like what I understand about them, and rarely do in fact, but I still go out of my way to understand. It helps me put pieces together in the endless puzzle of Where We Find Ourselves Now, and as I fit more things of that one into place, the more pieces are revealed to me about Where We’ve Tread and Where We Might Go. In this way I am able to turn over new stones in my practice, and, perhaps, catch fleeting glimpses of how my ancestors might have seen both the world and each other.

–

I spent the weekend at a lake in the Shuswap region, at a very small and very exclusive RV resort. My husband’s uncle maintains the grounds and helps the owners with handyman work in exchange for a free spot, and so we went with him as we were planning on visiting Kamloops for an errand anyways.

It was lovely. No, it was decidedly better than lovely. The lake was pristine, and harder to get to than its more-frequented neighbor: 45 minutes on an active logging road is quite the deterrent for casual tourists looking for a bit of water to make a mess of with beer in hand and boat deck underfoot.

I quickly noticed a few things about the other vacationers present, however, and none of them surprising. They generally fell into two types: those with so much recreational gadgetry that they spent their entire weekend maintaining it all, and those with such stunted creativity that they dedicated their waking hours to being shit-faced drunk, their feet hardly leaving their RV deck.

My husband and I went on several walks back up the road. We listened to the creek, marveled at the moss and the fungi and the flowers. We took off our shoes and smiled at the springiness of the woodland floor beneath our feet. As our path turned from the burbling water, the pressing silence of the forest turned our skin to gooseflesh and we spoke in hushed, excited voices of our awe of such a place. I collected birch bark for making a certain sort of pen the Nick Neddo way, stones for hopefully grinding into paint pigment, a piece of cedar that should make a nice bullroarer. I pried a massive fungus off a fallen pine tree to bring home in the hopes that it was medicinal. (I’ll check my foraging books tomorrow once I identify the species of tree it was munching on.) We returned, cracked open a few beers, and took refuge as a thundering squall rolled in and hammered us with rain. Praise be to the Old Man and his mountain-splitting Axe – I don’t get to witness him at his holy task along the inlet at home.

During one of our walks, I noticed a capped mushroom growing off the side of the road and paused to get a good look at it, and that’s when husband noticed a single golden Christmas ornament hanging from the tree just a few feet further in. It struck him as an uncanny coincidence, at which I smiled and said that there are few coincidences in the forest. The trees have a way of suggesting things.

Later, I took off in his uncle’s quad to do a little ripping around, but mostly I was hunting for roadkill, the fur I wanted for making more paintbrushes. What I thought had been a small carcass the day before was nowhere to be found, but turning on a small trail led me to a clearing some yards away that was all but carpeted in tufts of fur. I said words of thanks and picked up several neat hanks of hair, held together by moisture from the earlier rains. I wondered about the fur, so neatly pulled as it was from some hide, but without any sign of bones or blood or struggle. Some of it formed a trail, even, but it led me nowhere. The image of white and gray tufts of fur scattered on the ground like flower petals or breadcrumbs through a thick, mossy forest is a potent one, though. I went back out the next morning to leave one final gift in thanks for the spirits’ sheer generosity.

–

Coming back from the walks was disappointing. We’d round the bend, cross the cattle-guard, and be greeted by the fleet of glossy plastic RV trailers. The sound of someone leaf-blowing the dust from their deck furniture looking so fresh from the Pottery Barn catalog that you could still smell the Chinese plastic off-gassing into the storm-washed air – and then going back inside. Our host insisted that we help ourselves to another can of Kokanee and whatever else he had in the trailer, most of which turned out to be pepperoni sticks and bags of Walmart chips. My stomach needed a probiotic after all the bleached bread and gum-stabilized salad dressing on top of all that. Not that there was salad to be had; the only vegetables in the place was the relish tray. Eventually I could no longer handle the reconstituted consistency of the Kraft bacon ranch and I chose instead to eat the raw broccoli florets by themselves. Crunch crunch. Later, more beer and Walmart lasagna.

The uncle was a good host in every way he knew how to be, and I can respect that. But the man, like most men of his type, are rather quite incomplete human beings. And incomplete things turned out into the world usually cause damage.

The trip out and back cost 8 gallons of gasoline and the lives of 3 birds. The uncle insisted on burning most of the trash we made, including the plastic, and my husband, not keen on getting cancer again, quietly began diverting our plastic waste from the fire pit to our cooler so that we could dispose of it later.

Wonder was not a language the uncle knew. Emotions weren’t, either, and I learned that he was a man of few questions. As far as I could tell, he already knew everything he could want or need to know, and all that there was left to do in life was to be coldly competent at as many things as possible while avoiding at all costs that irritating period between hazarding and mastery. Before we left his wife joked about his intolerance for playing even card games. Poker is stupid, but drunkenly destroying your snowmobile out on the trail isn’t.

I’ve encountered his type before, a sort of king of the hill: confident only when he already has the upper hand, strong only when he’s safe within a fortress of possessions, and wise provided that no one ever asks him for advice.

Is this really the legacy of our North American cowboy masculinity? The driving need to hold everything in disdain, clinging to that habituated (and mindless) imperative of “freedom”, even if it means nothing more than being able to cut a tree down in your suburban front yard with the shriek of your finest Husqvarna as if to say I am man, hear my engine roar?

–

This special sort of stunted humanity could only have happened in a post-Industrial revolution, post-Enlightenment, and post-European exodus world. The pieces came neatly enough together: conceit and domination replaced awe and humility, labor performed by hydrocarbon fuel became confused with human labor even as it was being replaced by it, and the animal panic of living in overcrowded Londons and Munichs and Amsterdams, passed down from generation to generation, was eased by the New World’s false promise of unadulterated, unregulated space.

Never has a people prided themselves on being so ahistorical and placeless, following nothing more than their whims and ideologies of social aesthetic. It doesn’t matter where I come from, I have a boat and an RV and Razor and a truck to haul it all. I can come and go as I please. Who needs to be from anywhere, when you can go anywhere? What does place matter if the cut tree falls just the same in California as it does in Alberta? If the rock breaks just the same? If the road goes and the people bleed?

–

I’ve thought several times over the past few weeks about how I am an immigrant, a religious practitioner, an artist, both colonial and colonized, and part of a diaspora… not just once, but many times removed. My blood once came from Germany, from the islands of the North Sea, from deep in the deserts of Mexico. I carry with me the genes of family who saw the rise of revolutions and the heaving of borders. I am at least one-eighth Indigenous, though likely closer to one-quarter, and not all in one place. I make sure to stick my roots down into whatever soil I find myself standing on, strive to be vernacular wherever I am. I go out and introduce myself to the spirits.

My husband’s uncle is a dying breed, and his generation is perhaps the last of a long line of broken men bravely leading their broken families on into the comfort and complacency of a plastic-padded life, even as the foundering walls of this sick society close in around them. He’s worked damn hard in his career, of that I’ve no doubt, but the subtle, spiteful hedonism underpinning the entire structure of his life is no just and earned reward for 22 years of service to his industry. And while the role that the million-year-old liquid sunlight has played in making his boat and Husqvarna and heated steering wheel possible will never be apparent to him, future generations will be able to piece his wyrd together (out of necessity) and see where it all went wrong.

If the luxury RV park isn’t eventually ruined in a forest fire due to the steady onward march of arid climes, then it will surely be abandoned to squatters in a few more decades’ time once the cost of fuel becomes even too much for the lawyer and the trust fund children to bear. The kings of the hills will be caught with their pants thoroughly down, surrounded by their Midas’ gold. In 30 years, people will wonder where their parents were when BC was burning – it will be my generation, old and bitter, who will have to shrug and say, “They went up to the lake.”

–

One of the other site owners at the resort introduced himself to my husband and I before we packed up. He was young, maybe late 30s, and trained air traffic controllers at Vancouver International for a living. The awkward small talk seemed to simply be there to provide a safe buffer for what he’d really intended to say to us as outsiders to their little community of rural wealth: “Don’t tell anyone about this place.”

We laughed politely, but after he was gone our thoughts turned as deep and wide as the water before us. I already knew I had a lot to say about Adams Lake. If only he knew what those words would be.

Spring

It’s been a while, and it’s been a fuck of a ride. The ride’s not actually over yet, though there’s a very, very good chance that it will be soon. Keep your fingers crossed for us.

This post doesn’t really have a thesis, but I just thought I’d share a few wandering thoughts.

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Spring is here and I’m so glad to have finally gotten some pots and planters for our very generous west-facing balcony to grow things in. At current, I actually have more containers than dirt, and more seeds than either of those combined. The barrenness and uncertainty of this past fall and winter hit me hard, and I found myself longing pretty strongly for the cool deserts of home, the thunderstorms and rain squalls and greenery of an arid clime come alive without the sun to beat it back into the dry earth. I put sprouting seeds in jars every few weeks and set them in the window to trick me into thinking that things weren’t as cold and dark as it seemed.

But I have the stirrings of a garden now. It’s not much yet, but it’s mine, and I provided the conditions for green, magical things to come up out of bare soil. The quiet, patient alchemy of plants has never ceased to fill me with wonder, and I might venture to say that after all this, the Mystery of rebirth is all the more meaningful to me.

I have lettuces coming along nicely, which should be ready to start cutting as baby greens in a few more weeks. Alongside them are beets, which I also plan to harvest well before the roots become too formidable a vegetable on their own – I cherish the greens quite a bit more. I have stevia, indigo, and rosemary coming slowly, carefully along (easy now, keep them warm), which I’m excited for as both a burgeoning natural dyer and sugar-free cook. Cucumbers, nasturtiums, onions, and strawberries are also in varying stages of germination or growing, though the strawberries were a clearance item and have been looking pretty ragged for a few months now. I don’t expect them to make it. That’s alright, there’s always next year.

The rest of the house is slowly filling up with plants, bit by bit, as often as our tight wallets can spare a few dollars. A cactus here, a rubber tree sapling there, a pothos that keeps on generously donating cuttings to other corners of the apartment, an aloe, a mystery succulent.

The only one that doesn’t seem happy is our 3-year old fig sapling, which hasn’t come out of dormancy yet. I hope he does, he was the first plant my husband and I bought together. We even named him! (Or wait… was it the avocado tree who was “Frank”?)

He’s still green, though, if you scrape away the tiniest bit of bark. Maybe it’s not warm enough for him, or maybe he doesn’t want to wake up until my husband is in remission and things go back to the way they were before everything went to pot. I know I wouldn’t want to either.

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I work in a small co-op grocery store now. Very small, about a dozen employees. We’re unionized. It’s relatively easy work (except when it’s exhausting), but I finally understand why people hate unions.

They protect us, sure, but like any other protection racket, it comes at a steep cost. The rigidity is stifling, change is feared, innovation is punished, and merit has no meaning. John Michael Greer is quite fond of saying that the opposite of one bad idea is usually another bad idea, and I have to agree with him in our case. What unions do better than anything else, though, is reward the stubborn. Avoid getting fired for long enough, and you will inevitably find yourself at the top of the pecking order. It’s a socialist version of the Peter Principle. If this is the best workers can come up with in the fight against runaway capitalism, then capitalism deserves to win.

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Today I learned a trick to get me to eat when nothing sounds appetizing: serve myself on my nicest, prettiest dish. Food in magazines always look like the most delicious things in the world, even though half of it probably tastes no better than Lean Cuisine. If they can fool me into salivating over Lean Cuisine, I can too.

Getting Settled in Unsettling Times

Things for us are hard.

The cancer patient I referred to a few months ago is actually my husband. At the time, I was getting pretty sick of explaining what had happened all over the place online, so I kept that blog entry short and sweet because things were still so raw for me. When I started writing this post on the 16th, he came home from his 4th inpatient treatment (5 solid days at the hospital every 3rd week), and I expected that he’d be sick as a dog because they’ve upped his concentration of drugs for the second time and it’s already hitting him harder. (ETA: He was, though it doesn’t last for more than 48 hours.) It’s funny – I wrote that DIY ensure ‘recipe’ because I was expecting him to be like all the other cancer patients I’ve known and heard about and all but lose his appetite, but through this whole thing his hunger stayed the same. The one thing I’ve learned is that cancer is an extremely personal, individual disease. No two patients are alike, nor their side-effects, nor their treatment. He hasn’t even lost all his hair, though this time around I suspect his nausea and appetite will be more typical.

Two weeks ago we met with his oncologist and were shown a pair of CT images: one from before he started treatment, and the other at the halfway point, and the difference was flabbergasting. The first image, taken from an angle that we hadn’t seen before, showed a tumor that was bigger than a grapefruit, growing from sternum to spine, winding its way around his windpipe and heart, and collapsing his right lung. For all intents and purposes, he should be dead. It should have given him a stroke, cardiac event, something. But it didn’t. I’m a deeply spiritual person and have my theories – I think he’s starting to form some theories of his own. The amazing doctors at the BC Cancer Agency may cure him, but they’ll never be able to give an answer for why a tumor that big and caused by a lymphoma that rare and poorly understood didn’t take his life.

But life goes on. I got my confirmation of permanent residence while he was in the hospital for his first round of treatment. I imported my car and half of my belongings while he was in for his second. We made trips to IKEA to buy furniture, usually the hallmark of a happy new life for most couples, while we were in the midst of accepting the ever-present possibility that his condition might take an unexpected turn for the worse. For the better part of 3 months we’ve straddled the line between joy and despair, never quite belonging to either. Never quite having the energy or wherewithal to tip over to one side or the other.

In many ways, I feel like our interest in collapse theory, and narrative themes of such, has prepared us to handle this better than a lot of people. The staff at the agency talk about us, we’ve been told – how he’s the youngest patient they have, how I’m an even younger spouse and caregiver, how little we seem to be affected. I think they’re expecting us to snap one of these days, break down at the enormity of what this has done to our lives. What they don’t know is that we see the struggle against cancer as a uniquely modern manifestation of the human condition, a kind of fight against ourselves. Even though his grayzone lymphoma is largely a misfortune of genetics, our understanding of most cancers is that they are environmental in origin – we largely have our greed and carelessness to blame.

Case in point: a UK study predicts that 1 in 2 adults will get a cancer diagnosis in their lifetime, in spite of the billions of dollars we pump into research and treatment. The mortality rate in developed nations is falling, but the rate of diagnoses is going up. It seems, in spite of our best efforts, that more people are developing the disease, while we dump ever more money and resources into finding a “cure”. Cancer is a disease of progress in the most fundamental sense: unstoppable growth. I’m skeptical that technological progress will ever provide us with anything more than palliative care and life support for a population increasingly suffering from chronic misery. In his book Why Things Bite Back, Edward Tenner talks about this shift from acute conditions, which humanity endured for most of its existence, to chronic conditions, when it made the Faustian bargain to try and rid itself of acute mortality. The former can be dramatic and shocking, but the latter requires a vast industrial infrastructure to provide life support for millions of people suffering from slow deterioration into mental and physical debility. It’s hard not to be reminded of stories about mortal man seeking out immortality, and how there’s always a catch to achieving it. Always.

We had a conversation about how it felt to be fighting cancer in a world like the one we live in, one ravaged by overpopulation, one hopelessly addicted to unsustainable and toxic forms of energy, one being emptied of its wild biodiversity and filled with things made by humans that exist now as ends unto themselves. We talked about how, if we want any sort of a world to be left for our grandchildren to inherit, then letting the earth sit fallow, to be left alone, is the only way it can happen, and the only way to do that quick enough is death. But here we are, clinging stubbornly to life – hypocrites. What we decided to do was to respect cancer. Deeply and utterly, for fulfilling its purpose on this earth so well. My husband realized that he could still fight his enemy, and do it with honor. Cancer versus human, evenly matched.

What we have that cancer does not, though, is community. And it is this community, these relationships, that will ultimately save my husband’s life so that he can go on to face another foe some other day, and fully enjoy what precious moments there are in between.

Nesting zero waste and minimalist-style has helped to save my sanity countless times over the course of this fight. It’s been really easy to get overwhelmed by even the most rudimentary household chores, and sometimes things get neglected because neither of us has the energy to tackle it. Having systems in place and relatively few possessions has been a great help. Little things, like twist ties for corralling stray cords, or having the disinfecting wipes in the right spot, helps me avoid feeling suffocated by clutter and chaos. My dislike of chaotic surroundings has increased practically tenfold since this started, and making sure that everything has its place goes a long way to making me feel relaxed.

There’s a concept in modern polytheist and some pagan religions (Hi polytheist followers from my other blog!) that has helped me a great deal in dealing with my environment and relationships called miasma. It’s a Greek word, and it refers to spiritual pollution- a state of being that prevents you from properly communing with the divine, to put it succinctly. Lots of mundane things can make you spiritually unclean: deaths, births, exposing yourself to certain ideas or people or media. It’s not a bad thing so long as it’s dealt with, but like neglecting to wash your hands after taking a crap, it becomes a problem if you don’t.

Cancer, and the chaos that ensues from living in the limbo it creates, is definitely a state of mental and emotional pollution. And unless you take conscious, pointed steps to keep that muddying at bay, it will have the effect of making your life something like hell. So keep clean.

His last round of chemo ends on December 28th, and Christmas will be spent in the hospital. He will be a completely different man by January 1st, which is only a few weeks shy of his 40th birthday, and he will definitely be stronger than he was at his 39th. I’m proud to be married to him, and I’m in awe of his resilience.

“It would be the death of you to come with me, Sam,” said Frodo, “and I could not have borne that.”

“Not as certain as being left behind,” said Sam.

“But I am going to Mordor.”

“I know that well enough, Mr. Frodo. Of course you are. And I’m coming with you.”

Going Analog: Zen and the Art of Getting Lost Without a Phone

This past week I had myself a little adventure. A lot of moving pieces in my life were coming together that required me to cross the border back into the States so I could get a number of Very Important Things done at customs and immigration on my way back into Canada… but I had to stay out of the country for at least 72 hours before returning.

My mom had recently moved near Seattle for work – and to be closer to me and my husband – so I decided to spend the 72 hours at her new place, help her unpack and organize some things, and spend some time with her. So armed with an address, I drew a basic map of how to get to her new place and set off on the 3 hour drive alone.

Little did I know, though, that the Canadian phone plan that I have wouldn’t let me do anything once I got to the south side of the border – I couldn’t even send out a text with all the associated roaming fees. Nothing. And of course I found this out the hard way… when I started second-guessing myself in a completely unfamiliar neighborhood and reached for my phone to ask for a clue.

I think most people in my situation nowadays would panic. I was driving around a suburb in a county I was completely unfamiliar with, trying to find a place I’d never been to before, and I was without any way to contact the only person that could help me. Had she given me the right address? Was I even on the right street? I weighed my options – there was a police and fire station a ways back up the road who might’ve let me use the phone, or I could avoid backtracking and pull into the first business I saw and ask for directions. I did the latter, and wound up learning something else that I hadn’t even considered before.

I pulled into the leasing office for a large apartment complex, and proceeded to tell them that I was trying to find another complex just like theirs that was somewhere along their same road. The two secretaries I spoke to were young, about my age or a couple years younger, and were willing to help me. The problem was, I quickly realized, is that they really didn’t know how to. 

They didn’t know how to gauge a location’s approximate distance by comparing address numbers, and they definitely didn’t seem to pay much attention to what else was on the street near where they worked (otherwise they would have known that the complex I was trying to find was only just another half mile down the road). They just pulled up some directions on their computer and printed me out step-by-step directions (which were MUCH more needlessly complex than necessary to get me a few blocks away), and the fact that they didn’t take a second glance at the ridiculous instructions that Google spat out before handing them off to me was another curious thing – though I don’t doubt for a second that part was just your average rudeness.

I eventually found where I was trying to get 10 minutes later, but the two millennials’ complete incompetence at trying to help someone locate a destination a few blocks down the street from where they worked stuck with me. But in hindsight, I guess it’s kind of obvious: if someone has let their navigational and spacial skills atrophy that much, of course they’re not going to be able to help anyone else in any meaningful way. And in North America, the vast majority of people are gladly letting their navigation skills wither away to nothing. A damn shame.

At any rate, I proceeded to spend the next 72 hours in a strange town without a phone. This is what I managed to get up to:

• Get myself from Mukilteo to the Everett train station/park-n-ride
• Meet up with friends somewhere in the parking lot there to carpool into Seattle for the afternoon
• Find my way to the train station in Seattle that evening, and locate the correct commuter train that would take me back to Everett
• Get myself back to Mukilteo
• Find the mall in the next town over, as well as a nearby Target
• Find a place to get an oil change (couldn’t call about availability, no phone!)
• Drive back to the border after the 72 hour waiting period was up, locate reasonably priced gas and coffee along the way
• Navigate the ridiculous labyrinth of customs and immigration offices and processing centers at the border to do all the things I needed to do once I finally got there

The part of me that’s a modern millennial looks back on all that and says “Wow, you’re a crazy son of a gun”, while the rest of me, the highly intelligent and fully capable human animal whose genetic material has spent billions of years on this planet, wants to say “Do that more often“. Your cognition needs to eat its greens too.

–

I’ve picked up a regular zen meditation practice at a local zendo in the past month, and there is definitely something different about people who enjoy sitting in a room together, in complete silence, doing nothing for an hour without going nuts. In a way, that’s a lot what getting lost feels like, and how you react tells a lot about you. People who commit themselves to longer meditation sits – as opposed to the ‘5 minutes a day’ crowd, or the ‘doing something that’s not meditation is actually meditation’ people – seem to have a way about them that is more readily prepared to try taking each moment as it is, instead of wishing that it were something else, or being overcome with depression and anxiety that it’s not the moment you actually wanted, or not the moment you were promised, or not the moment that you worked so hard to make happen.

That’s not to say that people who meditate on the regular are emotionless automatons. We aren’t. We just try, using one particular technique, to better sit with our thoughts and feelings as they bubble up and recognize them for what they are, so then we might choose to feel them more fully, or choose to push them aside and make room for something else. That’s really what mindfulness is, it’s that simple. But doing it is very hard.

I always wonder what people mean when they say they hate getting lost. Is it that they hate the time they feel is being wasted? Is it some kind of base, animal fear of never being found again that they hate? Is it just a simple matter of losing face, of being wrong? It all seems to boil down to a loss of control. Knowing where you’re going and how to get there is power. Suddenly being faced with not knowing is facing your own powerlessness.

When I get lost I evaluate my options. I humble myself and ask for help, because I do not have the tools to be self-sufficient enough to avoid asking anything of anyone else I encounter. I choose to do things that way. I choose to rely on others. This bothers a lot of people – a lot of people – but I see it as an a way to stay connected to people, and to remind others that there is a whole damn world out there outside of the comforting glow of a screen. That there’s a different way to do things.

To those of you who read this and got uncomfortable, thinking about what you would have done if you were in my shoes, how badly you’d have wanted to reach for your smartphone or how stupid you think I am for not having one: what the heck are you afraid of? The worst that could have happened to me happened – I stopped and asked for directions. When my friends drove around looking for me in the parking lot of the park-n-ride, I sat tight while they circled around for 10 minutes until they found me. And if for some reason I missed them entirely, I would have driven back to my mom’s place and still had the rest of the day to do whatever I wanted, and not even done so empty-handed. I’d learned how to get to the train station. That’s something.

It makes me sad that so many people are choosing to sacrifice their natural aptitude so they can gain some false digital security. They are literally selling chunks of their brains to Google so they can be spared the inconvenience of learning things and interacting with other humans and – gasp – even being wrong sometimes.

Since when did we become so allergic to making even the smallest of mistakes?

Let me know when you find out – I’ll be over here staring out the window.

GU Oracle Update

It’s really happening! The Girls Underground Story Oracle has reached full funding on Kickstarter!

There’s still time to be part of this project! If you’re interested in a unique divination method, or perhaps thinking ahead to solstice gift-giving (the oracle is slated to ship out in time for the winter holidays), please join 100 other backers and pre-order the deck. The campaign ends on Sunday night.

My friend Dver has put out a REALLY neat oracle deck based on her work with the Girl Underground archetype, and I recommend those of you interested in unconventional divination methods definitely jump on the pre-order for this deck.

DIY Ensure for Chemo

An unexpected health crisis will soon have me taking care of someone as he undergoes chemotherapy for lymphoma. It’s turned my life upside-down and inside-out, but he’s going to be tackling this thing head on and I’ll be running interference for many months.

Even before his treatment’s even started, his appetite is beginning to go and his tolerance for different kinds of foods is going down. I expect that he won’t be interested or able to eat solid food very often going forward, so like most folks I looked into stocking up on the usual meal replacement drinks like Ensure. Unfortunately, a quick glance at the ingredients list had me balking.

The stuff is mostly soy byproduct, an ingredient cancer patients need to steer clear from, and the second ingredient is sugar, which is unacceptable as well. (There’s been no formal link established between cancer cell growth and sugar, but measuring the increased glucose metabolism of cancer cells is exactly how detection via PET scan literally fucking works, so… I’d really rather not risk throwing more fuel on the fire if at all possible.)

And that’s besides the fact that ready-to-drink meal replacement shakes are expensive as hell. So I thought… why couldn’t I make my own? It can’t be any harder than making a smoothie.

There are 4 primary components that go into these things:

• Macros: Protein, fat, and carbohydrates (and fiber, which isn’t technically a nutrient)
• Micros: Vitamins and minerals
• Taste and mouthfeel
• Ease of use

Plus my 5th consideration:

• Cost

Several of these are more easily included than others, or may compromise another part of the equation (like, say, needing to use a perishable ingredient would necessitate more steps, or using a certain brand of vitamin supplement that makes the price per serving go up). I knew going in that I wanted to wind up with a dry mix made from as many whole ingredients as possible, and where every component was shelf stable. Oh, and it had to be as cheap as possible.

After some thinking, here’s the base I came up with:

• 3 tbsp vanilla whey powder, sweetened with stevia
• 1 tbsp chia seeds
• 1 tbsp fine-ground flax meal
• 1 packet Ener-C

That I could then add one or more of four extra, shelf-stable ingredients based on their benefits and his mood:

• 1/2 tsp matcha powder (for antioxidants and energy, though apparently it’s most readily bioavailable when paired with citrus…)
• 2 tbsp peanut butter (for more macros)
• 2 tsp chocolate/cacao powder (for taste and antioxidants)
• A dash of cinnamon (for antioxidants, and a buttload of other stuff)

Finish with:

• 1/2 can of full-fat coconut milk
• 1 c water

Combine with immersion blender in a mason jar. No vitamix necessary.

All in all, I could ballpark a single serving of this at around $1.75 CAD for the base mix + coconut milk, depending on the brand of milk I use and whether or not I feel like buying organic. The single most expensive part of the dry mix is the Ener-C, which runs about .50c a packet at the drug store. The extras add a negligible amount to the overall cost in the end, and again depends on the quality/brand I decide to go with. Hershey’s baking cocoa is obviously going to be cheaper than raw, organic cacao powder for instance.

Preparing the drink should be easy. Combine several servings in a jar, mix thoroughly, and when ready to serve, count out 6 tbsp, and blend with the other ingredients. While adding fruits and vegetables would be ideal, it probably wouldn’t be appetizing, and I also wouldn’t be able to use an immersion blender (which is why I’m specifically leaving out frozen ingredients too), which makes cleanup something I can do in seconds. Using frozen fruit or veggies like a traditional smoothie would also mean that I couldn’t stick leftovers in the fridge and expect them to taste good later.

Shopping entirely at Costco, I could probably shave off another dime or two from the price, which is probably something I’ll look into when I run out of the ingredients I already have. Still, at less than a toonie per serving, this DIY meal shake costs just as much as a bottle of Ensure but is made with way better ingredients.

Coupled with some herbal supplements like curcumin, garlic, and ginger, well… I hope that it makes the projected 18 weeks of chemo just that much more bearable.

What the Fuck To Eat

Ever since my first terrifying encounter with GERD, food went from “things I eat that taste good and keep me full” to “things I eat to sustain me and my health”. Quite literally overnight. And ever since the gastroenterologist looked at the lab results of my poop sample and thought I would be happy with an Imodium prescription and a meaningless diagnosis of IBS, I’ve taken diet very seriously.

Nobody wants to start their journey to better eating habits like I did, but it was the kick in the ass I needed. Unfortunately, most of the landscape of dietary information out there consists of fad diets promoted by sketchy internet “doctors” and Amazon referral-powered blogs hoping to god that you buy that $60 tub of protein they claim to use every day. So I did what any reasonably neurotic person would do and started experimenting on myself.

The first thing I did was go vegetarian – almost vegan, actually, aside from the occasional piece of cheese a few times a month. It did a fine job of making me question the legitimacy of the Standard American Diet (SAD), and therefore the scores of doctors and nutritionists who upheld it as the gold standard of balanced eating. If my stomach couldn’t handle it, then clearly the problem was my stomach, and all I needed to do was take a magic pill to make it all go away. Nobody ever suggested that, hey, maybe the problem lay with my eating garbage. My GERD cleared up, though, now that I was no longer able to eat stuff like chili dogs, or buffalo wings, or Jack in the Box tacos. It wasn’t the meat that made the improvement, though. The culprit I’d eliminated was the sauces that are typically served with SAD-style meats, and the fatty ways they’re typically cooked.

No-no #1: Rich, greasy  preparations.

I did more exploring and decided to eat a low-fiber diet for a while to see what that did for my gut. By the end, I was mighty sick of eating nothing but tofu, eggs, rice, and mushy vegetables, but the results were pretty conclusive: my bowel movements were regular, I experienced no gas, and little bloating. Score.

No-no #2: Excess fiber.

Curing my GERD and mostly alleviating my IBS was good enough for a few years. I was happy, I didn’t feel like crap after eating, and I no longer dreaded going to the bathroom. But then I started having blood sugar problems: hypoglycemia, mainly, which is a symptom of metabolic inflexibility. My research told me that such symptoms were the beginning of the long road to insulin resistance, which scared the pants off me. The remedy for metabolic inflexibility? Metabolic exercise! I limited my intake of carbohydrates to a fraction of what they had been, “quitting” them cold-turkey. My blood sugar protested, but after just a few days of the low-carb flu, my hypoglycemia never reared its ugly head again.

No-no #3: Too many carbs… including sugar.

Unfortunately,  a side effect of going low-carb made me lose weight, which was never one of my goals. I dropped 10 pounds in a week, and started fielding questions from a number of folks about whether I was sick or not. I realized that, contrary to popular dietary wisdom, I needed to drastically increase the amount of fat in my diet, which returned me to my normal weight in short order. By this point my average daily carb intake was less than 60 grams, while my fat intake was nearing 100 grams. However, I still had to keep in mind no-no #1: no rich, greasy food. More research taught me the real differences between healthy and unhealthy fats, and the merits of saturated animal fats. The trick? No hydrogenated oils, no highly refined oils, and keep preparations simple – that is, no complicating the digestibility of lipids with things like acids (fruit, coffee), simple carbohydrates (white potatoes, beer), and too much spiciness. These are all things that IBS sufferers need to be keenly aware of anyways, though.

No-no #4: Too little healthy fats.

Those 4 rules have been my takeaway over the years I’ve been playing with diet, give or take a few quirks of my particular microbiome and genetic makeup: maize products, for instance, don’t bloat me nearly as much as bread does, and due to my long history of low blood pressure, I need a little more salt than the average bear. Unfortunately, some things that used to be OK to ingest are becoming increasingly intolerable to my gut as I shift away from old habits. Beer, for instance, is becoming more and more unpleasant to drink as time goes by. The heavy, malty stouts and porters I used to love so much are practically poison to me now: I can’t drink a glass of Rasputin or Victory At Sea without getting nauseous, and a pint and a half of the stuff will put me on the verge of throwing up. I can’t exactly say I’m not disappointed.

That all’s just the physical, biological relationships I have with various foods, though.

What about the ethical? The cultural? The economical?

As someone who still, for some reason, gives a damn about trying to live lightly, the rest is a veritable minefield. I could shop fair trade because I don’t want my food coming from slaves or sharecroppers or the otherwise economically destitute; I could shop local because I would prefer to keep my money circulating among producers in my bioregion, and because my food doesn’t have to travel very far to get to my plate; I could shop zero waste because I would prefer my food to not come in ridiculous amounts of plastic packaging; I could shop pastured or organic or biodynamic or whatever else, because I would prefer the producers of my food to not be actively destroying their local environment and reducing its biodiversity. Or I could shop cheaply and feed myself to my personal standards without breaking the bank.

And I have to choose wisely, because it’s a rare product that checks off more than one or two of these boxes. So what the fuck do I eat?

Price, obviously comes first. I’m no good to anyone if I’m starving and malnourished, if only to be able to say that I followed some lofty ethical ideal at the cost of my own health and personal finances. That’s a given.

The rest, as I’m sure many of you would agree with, are trade-offs. Personal negotiations. Triage. Where can I afford to do the least damage without compromising my health or sanity? This is something I’m still working out, but I feel myself getting close. Some unofficial “rules” that I’ve developed in figuring out which product should come from what source:

• Chocolate is fair trade.
• Meat is almost always local, as are vegetables when they’re in season.
• Staples like cauliflower I get for cheap – most stores in my Vancouver neighborhood have bargain shelves of food that’s going south where you can pick up entire bags of produce for a buck, and there’s usually a glut of cauliflower someplace. I keep most of my “impulse” produce shopping limited to these shelves as well. In a sense, saving this sort of food from the garbage is sort of like buying zero waste. And if you’re lucky, sometimes it’s even organic.
• Staples like vinegar, oil, and salt, I just pick one strategy based on my circumstances that day. Coconut oil must at least be organic; and as for animal fats, let’s just say we’ve got plenty of bacon grease in the fridge as well as a jar of homemade rendered fat from local product.
• If tea isn’t fair trade, it’s either local or zero waste and package free.

You get the picture.

Health and food is such a moving target that it’s easy to either get overzealous with your favorite conscious consumer strategy, or just give up altogether. What I’m here to urge you to do is don’t give up. And don’t get overzealous either, nobody likes those. What all of these different food strategies have in common, including just plain focusing on your dietary integrity, is that they undermine the Standard American Diet. They question the reasoning (or lack thereof) that goes into eating a pound of steak and a baked potato slathered in I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter! purchased from Walmart, and washing it down with a liter of Coke every day. Even if you still did that, but bought organic steak and an organic potato instead, you’ve got a small leg up. You done a good thing. 

I’m getting real sick of food aesthetics to the point where I’m this close to taking pictures of my crummy little galley kitchen with its white appliances and black, “granite”-veneered countertops that I can’t ever seem to get perfectly clean and posting them. I’d open up my kitchen cabinets so you can see my hodge-podge collection of mason jars and bags of shredded coconut, the mismatched boxes of salt and emergency cans of Campbell’s soup sitting beside a 3-year old box of half-eaten pasta. Like… fuck you, man, this is real.

We buy what we need to buy and eat what we need to eat. Sometimes it’s fucking delicious. Sometimes it’s mediocre. Sometimes it’s just plain necessary and we stick it in a glass jar to make us feel a little bit better about having bought it in the first place. Sometimes we get lucky and that bottle of fair-trade, wind-powered, biodynamic, bulk olive oil didn’t cost half our life savings and that’s something to be happy about. We enjoy it and move on.

I’m getting ready to go to the store right now, actually. We need more meat for the cat, and unless I want to make a smoothie, there’s no protein to go with dinner. I would prefer to go to the co-op since all their meat is local and they pay their employees a living wage with benefits, but it’s a 20 minute walk uphill walk to get there and the only places that carry offal around here are the local Chinese markets anyways. I also have a customer loyalty card for a coffee shop nearby that’s full and I want to redeem it if I’m going that way, too.

So, choice made. I can do one good-ish thing today, and another good-ish thing some other time. C’est la vie.

Going Analog part 8: So you’ve got yourself an opinion. Now what?

This is a follow-up to my older post on dealing with belligerent incredulity, seeing as how I’ve run into more since then. This time it has been from online talking heads, so this has given me a better look at how the psychological machine works, what without the usual mediating influence of good social etiquette getting in the way. In other words, people feel safer running their mouths online than in person, and it’s easier to build a model about how the other side works when you have better access to their thoughts.

The first thing I noticed is that most of the vitriol came from people who were constructing very obvious strawmen – you know, the kind that results from projecting your own anxieties and prejudices on others, not unlike what gay-bashing politicians do before they’re discovered to be cheating on their wives with cute college boys – and then smugly tearing them apart.

The primary form this argument takes closely resembles Just World thinking: that, at the end of the day, all of my problems with technology, and all of my problems with people who have problems with my problems with technology, are self-inflicted due to some character flaw. Usually that flaw is that I have self-control issues and “need to work on those”, or am a “jerk” and therefore prompting others into being jerks to me, respectively. I mean, barring the fact that I haven’t had bread or sugar in 3 weeks (while working in a bakery where I can technically stuff my face full of delicious organic bread and cookies all I want), I don’t overdraw my bank account, and have been in a long-distance marriage for going on 6 years now, I clearly have self-control issues. Or, barring the fact that everyone at my job likes me, that I have friends who will bend over backwards for me because I have done the same for them, or that I’m an otherwise pretty chill, mostly selfless, and extremely private person, I clearly must be a jerk.

It’s a ridiculous assumption to make about somebody you’ve never actually interacted with. But that ridiculousness is the whole point: it’s impossible to disprove without over-arguing your point, and probably proving your accuser right in the meantime. Well, almost impossible. I gave it my best a few weeks ago on the blog here after getting quite tired of such cookie-cutter response (one of which was even posted to the blog’s comment section):

There are a lot of things wrong with this assumption, and frankly it serves as a very tidy little thoughtstopper.

A thoughtstopper, as defined by John Michael Greer, is:

…exactly what the term suggests: a word, phrase, or short sentence that keeps people from thinking. A good thoughtstopper is brief, crisp, memorable, and packed with strong emotion. It’s also either absurd, self-contradictory, or irrelevant to the subject to which it’s meant to apply, so that any attempt you might make to reason about it will land you in perplexity. The perplexity won’t do the trick by itself, and neither will the strong emotion; it’s the combination of the two that lets a thoughtstopper throw a monkey wrench in the works of the user’s mind.

What you are essentially asserting, even though you don’t know anything about who I am, who I know, and what my life experiences have been, is that because I am frustrated here, in this blog post written for a specific audience with a specific goal in mind, is that I must clearly convey frustration in all of my interactions with everyone I meet, and therefore deserve the hostility I’m recounting.

That’s an incredibly lazy leap of logic, and I’m sad that I have to actually explain to you why.

First off, you don’t have much of a leg to stand on unless you’ve never spoken disparagingly of anyone in your life. Have you ever vented frustration about someone when not in their company? You have, just like everyone else on the planet? OK, then you know that such conversations have their place, that they’re perfectly normal, and moreover, they help to keep us sane when direct confrontation with the individual isn’t possible or worth anyone’s while.

Secondly, policing tone on a blog post about dealing with the recurrent rudeness of others doesn’t really make any sense. Moreover, you’re taking this post, which is only the latest installment of a multi-post series, and extrapolating an entire (false) narrative about how I’ve thus far conducted myself with people who aren’t you. I mean, I could write you an entire memoir’s worth of stories about all the bizarrely hostile encounters I’ve had with folks who had absolutely no reason to be hostile, and I could list off the names of everyone I know who genuinely find me to be good company, but seeing as how you will not take me at face value here, I doubt that you will take those accounts at face value either, and will be altogether a waste of both of our time. So like any good conspiracy theorist, you’ve made an accusation that is almost impossible to disprove. Not sure what tone policing is as defined by somebody other than tumblr? Here you go, courtesy of the RationalWiki:

The tone argument (also tone policing) is a logical fallacy that occurs when an argument is dismissed or accepted on its presentation: typically perceived crassness, hysteria or anger. Tone arguments are generally used by tone trolls (esp. concern trolls) as a method of positioning oneself as a Very Serious Person.

The fallacy relies on style over substance. It is an ad hominem attack, and thus an informal fallacy. […]

At best, it may be a way to point out rhetorical dishonesty in a formal debate, but at worst it is simply awarding victory to whoever is affected the least by what is being discussed.

Thirdly, you haven’t criticized or accepted any concrete foundation of the argument I’ve made here (nor have I see any other defender of smartphone technology do similarly either, interestingly enough), which makes this comment especially meaningless. Surely you’ve encountered rude, belligerent, and unreasonably hostile people before, ever? If so, how have you dealt with them repeatedly attacking you for the same thing? If you have, I’m all ears as to your input. Unfortunately, your gripe, again, seems to be with nothing more than the presentation of my ultimate goal with this individual blog post: how to deal with others being unduly threatened by you doing you. Irregardless of your belief and your own experiences (which is what the entire fallacy of Personal Incredulity is about, and is partly what this entire blog post is meant to address; talk about meta) these things have happened to me, and they have happened to others.

Now, with that in mind, do you have anything useful to say, or will you continue to be offended that some shmuck on the internet hates smartphones?

As far as I’m concerned, that’s that.

The problem goes deeper, though, and to no one’s surprise. It goes back, even, to that pesky Just World Hypothesis and the associated frame of mind where we assign moral values to things that maybe shouldn’t have any. It’s very easy to blame people for their own problems, I should note. It protects you from having to deal with the repercussions of accepting that bad things happen to good people, and good things happen to bad people, among other tragic consequences of chance. That’s not to say that everyone is always powerless in the face of everything – this is hardly true either – but quite often we do not make our own lots in the grand scheme of things. Still, one person’s crippling debt may be a personal failure just as much as the next person’s was completely beyond their control.

In the current, progress-addicted world we live in, technology is Good. Good in the way that charity and humility and patience and honesty are Good. No decent human being would ever argue against values like those, and so it has followed that questioning the march of technology is just as appalling a notion as questioning the very idea of, say, peace on earth and good will toward men.

To this unspoken ideology, the difficulty experienced by people who refuse to adopt the latest-and-greatest, or have chosen to downgrade after the novelty of such wore off, almost approaches a kind of moralistic karmic retribution: ‘you did it to yourself’, or ‘what’d you expect?’. (Note that karma in its un-Westernized form is simply another word for good ol’ Cause and Effect, not some cosmic force of punishment and reward.)

I remember my husband and I getting into a very unnecessarily antagonistic discussion about mattresses of all things at a family xmas party one year: cousins extolled on the wondrous virtues of memory foam, talking about how they couldn’t understand how anyone could possibly sleep on anything lesser. I shrugged and chuckled: “I actually like sleeping on my $100, 3 inch thick foam pad on the floor. I get the best sleep of my life.” I’d uttered something that made no sense to them. They balked, wondered if I’d ever even tried a memory foam bed, to which I replied “yes, and it was terrible”. This was unacceptable, and my husband and I looked on with fascination as they continued to escalate the discussion in such a way that made my opinion on the matter irrelevant. I made a passing evolutionary argument: that humans had been sleeping on hard or firm surfaces since we came down from the trees, and that you’d think millions of years of bad sleep would have wiped us out long ago. (You can’t exactly hunt mammoths with hundreds of accumulated hours of sleep debt, after all.) They responded with a hand-waved, Just World-type thoughtstopper: “Yeah, and cavemen had a life expectancy of 30.”

Ignore the fact that life expectancy figures often include infant mortality (which is the largest contributor to numbers like that) and average adult life-expectancy was considerably older; ignore the fact that such a rebuttal comes from a place of valuing quantity over quality (which is another tenet of this wide-spread, unspoken ideology); ignore the sheer irrelevance to the discussion in general and my comment in particular.

This is but one of many such experiences I’ve had, and they all have one thing in common: arguing from the implicit assumption that more and more complex is, like any storied triumph of Good over Evil, righteous and inevitable. If you walk away from that dichotomy, you simply become part of the temporary adversity that the believers will surely overcome in the end.

The problem with the Just World Hypothesis, though, is that it’s not true. Murderers get away with murder. Abusers die peacefully in their sleep, surrounded by loved ones. Wall Street kleptomaniacs get bailed out with public tax money. Children die. Wives get battered. Men, women, and children alike get cancer and slowly wither away as drugs and chemo fail to stop the spread of metastases.

Likewise, the Just World Hypothesis’ technological-determinist cousin is just as untrue. Social media use is just a likely to connect you to friends and family just as much as it’s linked to skyrocketing rates of loneliness among young people. Modern medicines are just as likely to manage your symptoms as they are to kill, cripple, or give you other complications that require further medicating. Firearms are just as likely to kill innocents as they are assailants or game.

It is, as philosopher and historian Paul Virilio had once said, that “the invention of the ship was also the invention of the shipwreck”.

What I discovered was that I had an opinion about the whole thing. People don’t like opinions, even though everyone is up to their eyeballs in them and have no qualms about throwing theirs all over the place. It’s your opinion they just don’t care for. But I discovered that I wasn’t doing this just for frugality’s sake, or just for minimalism’s sake, or just for my sanity’s sake. I was doing this thing because I felt a deep moral obligation to opt-out, in any way I could, of what ‘gifts’ the modern world was trying to force me into receiving. I do my best not to convey that in casual discussion, but I do got out of my way as often as possible to make space and answer questions and support people who want to do what I did. Which is also a no-no, because to have two sides means having a debate, not a lecture. So unless I have negative things to say, unless downgrading ruined my life and proves the techno-optimists right, my experience doesn’t matter. It’s a court of public opinion where the verdict is decided before the trial even begins.

There’s really no way to win, is the bottom line. If it were a mere matter of weighing the pros and the cons, or looking at the numbers, or getting the facts straight, then these reactions wouldn’t happen nearly as often. There’s such virulent hostility because it is a moral issue, because there are sides, because there is loyalty, and because existential crises and entire social structures of self-identity are at stake when we talk about smartphone and modern technology in general. The importance of having the internet at our fingertips, 24/7/365, has approached levels of saturation, zealotry, and emotional dependence that the world religions only wish they had.

All you can do is keep doing what’s right for you, and others will come into it or they won’t. If you’re thinking about it, don’t get the opinions of your peers – it would be about as useful as asking your Southern Baptist preacher their opinions on leaving the church to practice Shinto. Would they weigh the pros and the cons, look at the numbers, and get their facts straight in regards to your needs as a person of faith?

No, they’d tell you to have fun burning in hell.

Back in Vancouver!

Well I’m finally back in Van after 2 years away. And while I don’t have my papers just yet, they ought to be coming in a matter of weeks so I ain’t going anywhere.

It feels good to be back in my own space, my own apartment. I missed the things I left behind (including a cat and a husband), I missed the culture, I missed being able to walk or bike everywhere. Mostly, though, I missed having much more of a zen environment. I know exactly what comes into the house, and I know what goes out. This includes food, garbage, knick-knacks, everything. We toss out a gallon of trash a week between us – not including pet waste, unfortunately. I don’t have things foisted on me anymore – “Surprise! I got you this dietary nightmare!” – and my don’t have my time constantly vied for from being in close proximity to way too much family.

I started eating meat again as soon as I got here. Not the most environmentally-friendly thing to do, but we hope to buy as much local and pastured or grass-fed animal products as we can afford. My stomach, too, is growing less and less tolerant of carbohydrates the longer I go with my LFHC diet, so beans, starchy grains, and sugar are no longer viable food sources for me. The dark, malty beers I used to love to drink? A single pint is almost enough to make me nauseous now. And things that spike my blood sugar are right out.

But I also haven’t boarded a plane in 2 years, so that’s a lot more than most people can say. I don’t plan on making air travel an even occasional luxury anymore. The politics, plummeting quality of customer service, and security rigamarole have just not made it worth my while. The dreams I once had of visiting Japan, Taiwan, Scotland and Ireland? Not worth the cost, and not worth the headache. There’s plenty to see in British Columbia. If we can’t drive or take the train there, and unless it’s a family emergency and I need to hop on a plane ASAP, then we’re just not going.

We also don’t have kids, so that’s another carbon footprint win for the environment. Because if there’s one surefire way to undo all of the work you’ve done being green and environmentally-conscious, it’s making more humans who eat, crap, bathe, and inevitably grow up into good little consumers who may or may not share one iota of mommy and daddy’s values because, hey, since when has it ever been cool to obey your parents?

Another thing I’m doing a lot less of is drinking coffee. Environmentally-friendly tea is significantly cheaper than environmentally-friendly coffee, and besides, at least it’s a lot easier to drink the former without cream. (A cup of straight black tea made at home produces less than one-tenth the carbon than ordering a large latte at your cafe of choice.)

Grass-fed meat, in the end, isn’t even that bad. Pastureland encourages perennial plant growth, healthy soil, and results in a much stronger carbon sink than, say, a field of soybeans that are harvested to the bare ground every year. Also, since the livestock isn’t eating an unnatural diet of grain for the purposes of fattening them up, they’re not farting out all that methane.

And since I’m not eating a bunch of stuff my body doesn’t like, I’m not farting out all that methane either!

I just feel better all around, really. And I feel free to live my life my way, eat the way I want, do the things I want, without being goaded back into the status quo by peer pressure.

Mostly, though, it feels good to be home!