Mired in Apathy and Nihilism (or not)

 

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“There’s so much I should say, so many things I should tell him, but in the end, I tell him nothing.
I cut a line and my losses, and I light a cigarette.”
― Clint Catalyst, Cottonmouth Kisses

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Doomers are frequently accused of “giving up” being apathetic or becoming nihilistic. 

It’s rather curious because the people making those accusations very rarely have any insight into what doomers are or what doomers do.

It is primarily a function of what they are doing or feeling or believing and using those activities to define what not being apathetic or nihilistic is.

Let’s use what I do as an example.

I am learning to play the Maple Leaf Rag on the piano.
Is that apathetic or nihilistic?

I help out on an organic farm one day each week.
Is that apathetic or nihilistic?

I help out at a food bank each week.
Is that apathetic or nihilistic?

I take walks in a park near my house and appreciate the beauty of the wildflowers and the wildlife.
Is that apathetic or nihilistic?

I have a daughter that I love and I go to see her as much as I can.
Is that apathetic or nihilistic?

I enjoy the company of the friends that I have here in town.
Is that apathetic or nihilistic?

I write every day.
Is that apathetic or nihilistic?

I always walk rather than drive if I can.
Is that apathetic or nihilistic?

I exercise every day.
Is that apathetic or nihilistic?

I spend a fair amount of time reading and researching things that I find interesting.
Is that apathetic or nihilistic?

I’m getting my yard ready for a garden this year.
Is that apathetic or nihilistic?

I don’t go to protests, sign petitions, or push my beliefs on anyone.
Is that apathetic or nihilistic?

I don’t drive an electric car, believe in the flawed concept of “renewable energy” or embrace any particular diet.
Is that apathetic or nihilistic?

I don’t pretend to have answers or solutions.
Is that apathetic or nihilistic?

I don’t believe we have all that much time left.
Is that apathetic or nihilistic?

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It seems that the primary motivation behind attacking doomers is that you desperately want them to be wrong and your desperation manifests itself by attacking them. You have a vested interest in them being wrong.

I have never, even once, been asked by any of the people who are attacking how I feel about being a doomer. It has never occurred to these people that maybe doomers want to be wrong. Maybe doomers are like anyone else faced with an existential crisis. Maybe, and you’ll never hear this from them, the doomers are not that excited about the end of this set of living arrangements. 

The difference is, and always has been, that doomers do pay more attention to what is happening. Doomers read and study and research and then open their eyes to the reality of our predicament and come to the only logical conclusion. 

We disagree with people who have either a monetary or personal interest in maintaining the current status quo. Because those interests often interfere with seeing things as they are.

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Lashing out at people who don’t believe as you do is becoming a national pastime. So necessary is the need to have someone to attack or blame that it has poisoned the well for everyone.

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This doomer believes that you should do what you do for the benefit of the people and places you love.

This doomer believes that there is a lot of work to be done on acceptance.

This doomer believes that appreciating what you have right now in this moment is much more important than convincing yourself that some fantastical future may or may not happen.

This doomer believes that pie on the plate is valid and pie in the sky is not.

This doomer will play the hand he has been dealt and not waste valuable time hoping for a royal flush.

This doomer loves his daughter, dogs, tasty pastries, wildflowers, the sound of the water rushing over the rocks in a river after a rainstorm, an awe-inspiring display of nature’s magnificence, fresh-picked tomatoes, Scott Joplin, Chopin, Bach, Albert Ammons, the Cramps, James Lee Burke, poetry, X Files, Person of Interest, Fringe, and a comfortable well-lit place to read.

Is that apathetic or nihilistic?

What if Collapse Already Happened

 

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“He died and no one had the heart to tell him”
-unknown

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What if all the things we are afraid of are things we’re living through right now?

What if “the future is now?”

If you look around you can see it everywhere. There is no difference between the idea of a dystopian future and the reality of the present.

There’s going to be no resurrection. Dead is dead. 

“Imagine if you were living a life where you were just waiting for the next year to be worse than the current one, and the next one even worse. Imagine if there was a Collapse. But wait a minute…”

…isn’t there?

We’re living on borrowed time and the bill is coming due.

All of our hopes, all of our dreams, and all of our bargaining have come to naught.

If you look at just one page of Climate and Economy News you can see things for what they are. You can see that the horror of what we thought was coming has come.

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I find myself wondering whether it is worth it to try and impress upon people the gravity of our situation. I’m not talking about just random people on the street but about people who continue to harp on “saving” the world. A world that is long past being saved.

My intent in writing this is to counteract, what will be, the disastrous psychological damage of continuing to try to convince others that we can be saved.

I’m not sure exactly how delusional you would have to be to think that one thousand or ten thousand or one hundred thousand people are going to change anything when it’s a documented fact that we have irrevocably passed tipping points.

The futuristic fabrications that will come to be known as “Utopian Fantasy” are being written today in the efforts of everyone who maintains that we will make it through this.

I used to think that if you honestly believed there was some hope it was okay. Wrong but okay.

But it’s not.

Because if you honestly believe that there is going to be a reprieve then you are quite simply insane.

Something like going to a restaurant and being told there is no ice cream but refusing to believe that and insisting that there is always ice cream and that the restaurant must be lying to you.

The restaurant isn’t lying to you. You’re lying to yourself and your children, and to everyone who listens to you, and sooner or later they will all look at you the same way people look at the madman in the restaurant screaming, “There’s always ice cream!” 

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I understand that admitting to faulty reasoning is not something that comes easily to people. It’s incredibly difficult to look critically at your beliefs. You have to examine and explore the deepest recesses of your mind. You have to have the strength to root out what you hold so dearly.

It's a lifelong process but something that I believe is so much more important now than it has ever been in the past.

The only thing that will save you is seeing clearly unless you're already dead and no one has had the heart to tell you.

Who Then Shall I Become?

"What lies behind you and what lies in front of you,
pales in comparison to what lies inside you."
- Emerson

Years ago when I was training for a triathlon a friend of mine, who did not like to train, asked;  "What are you going to do with all that fitness?" I didn't really have an answer.

Now that I am settled in the mountains north of Santa Cruz I have begun to prepare for what I am calling The Great In-Between, the interim period that will occur before we all perish. This morning I was thinking back to that encounter with my friend and I started to wonder; what am I going to do with all this preparation?

There are only two people in the world that I love; my daughter and my ex-wife. The preparation is for them but they are both far away and do not think the situation is dire. So if I am preparing to protect people and places I love I will have to do something to convince them and to move them closer. I love where I am living now surrounded by forest and animals and the sounds of nature so I will do what I can to protect this place but that leaves the people I love out in the cold.

I have noticed that once I got out of Los Angeles I started to morph into a different person, a person who feels more deeply connected with the natural world and a person who loves more intensely. It is that which inspired becoming, perhaps, more the person I was meant to be rather than the person who I wanted other people to think I was.

Emerson said that, "To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment." I have found that it is not the world that is trying to make me someone else, it is me.

I can watch on a daily basis the deterioration of the environment and our lives. I see evidence of the collapse all around me; the dying trees, the decimated animal populations and the gradual but inexorable failure of that, upon which we place the most value, our precious infrastructure. It amazes me that of all the things to be concerned about the least important of them is where all the attention is focused but that is us or, in the very near future, that was us.

So here I sit, wondering who I shall become in the face of the horrors that will face us and I have no idea. All of us will be forced at some point to become someone else, hopefully someone better, when everything we know and do is ripped out from beneath us. The tearing of the fabric that constitutes our reality is getting closer and closer to home and it will not be long before we are required to make a choice.

I would only say choose wisely as the choices you make now will most likely have a finality that no other choice you have made up until now has had.

It's Going To Get Bad Before It Gets Worse

"People sleep peaceably in their beds at night

only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf"

attributed to George Orwell

A couple of years ago when the town of Oroville, California was shut off from the rest of the world due to flooding a friend of mine, who lives there, said it went wild west real quick. People were carrying guns, he and his wife both had guns in their cars, getting in fights at gas stations, stripping the shelves at grocery stores of supplies and this took place over only a couple of days.

If you have been following the events that are occurring in the aftermath of hurricane Dorian in the Bahamas you will have some idea of what we are going to be faced with. Hurricane Imelda has just dropped what is being called unprecedented amount of rain in southeast Texas.

Weather like this is only going to become more commonplace as we hurtle towards oblivion. With the extremes will come more and more desperation as people try to find food, water and shelter and to protect their families and if you think that, somehow, it won't happen in your neighborhood you are sorely mistaken.

Between the collapse and the end there is going to be an interim period where you will have to either defend what you care about or die. There will be no in between. There will be no happy, peaceful people singing and holding hands on the beach while they wait for the destruction that is sure to come. There will be desperate, panicked, fearful people unsure of what to do or where to go.

If you do not want to be crushed beneath the feet of a stampeding herd of humans you had better start taking steps, right now, to prepare yourself. I am not talking about long term preparation because we all know that there is no long term. What I am talking about is preparing to hold on for as long as you can and defend those you love.

In his book, The Gift of Fear, Gavin De Becker said, "Though we live in space-age times, we still have stone age minds. We are competitive and territorial and violent, just like our simian ancestors. There are people who insist this isn't so, who insist that they could never kill anyone, but they invariably add a telling caveat: "Unless, of course, a person tried to harm someone I love." So the resource of violence is in everyone; all that changes is our view of the justification."

This being the case, it is my contention that everyone should take steps to prepare for, what will be, a very violent, unsettling time that will challenge every one of the views you currently hold of your peaceful, higher nature. Non-violence will not be an option.

"George Hebert (27 April 1875 - 2 August 1957) was a pioneering physical educator in the French military who developed a system of physical education and training known as "la methode naturelle" (The Natural Method) which combined the training of a wide variety of physical capacities with the training of courage and morality."
He stated that, "The final goal of physical education is to make strong beings. In the purely physical sense, the Natural Method promotes the qualities of organic resistance, muscularity and speed, towards being able to walk, run, jump, move on all fours, to climb, to keep balance, to throw, lift, defend yourself and to swim."

It is now time to begin your training. Violence and unrest will come your way and you had better be prepared.  It will not wait for you to be ready. I was chased down a mountain road by a psycho in a big car just the other night for driving too slow. He was not going to ask if I was ready he was just going to attack me. He did not care if I was old or young, tall or short, peaceful or equally as violent. He just wanted to hurt me for interfering with his desire to go fast. Imagine what it would have been like if he needed food or water or wanted money or had a family that he was providing for. It would have resulted in either him or me getting hurt or possibly killed.

So in opposition to everything I have always believed I am now getting ready. I have signed up for a close quarters combat class (Krav Maga), I am going to C.E.R.T.(community emergency response team) meetings to learn emergency medical techniques. C.E.R.T is nationwide and there is most likely a group near you, and I am going to buy a gun and learn how to use it.

I do not view myself as a particularly violent person but I am also practical enough to know that I will have to defend people and places that I love in the not too distant future...or, I could just die.

(P.S. I am not an Amazon affiliate and provide links only to give you an easy way to purchase the listed books.)

If Not Now, When?

"Come gather 'round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone
If you're time to you is worth savin'
And you'd better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'"
Bob Dylan

I have been talking to a lot of people about our predicament lately and it seems as if some of them, at least, have intellectually accepted the idea of NTHE. They agree that things are bad and that there is no hope for the survival of the species but they don't do anything to change how they are living.

They tell me that they have to keep doing what they are doing because they have no choice but at this late stage I would propose that they do have a choice. The choice between spending their final days, weeks, months or years living the pointless, mediocre existence that they have always lived or begin to do something meaningful with the time there is left.

To me the idea of just going on as I have been and then dying is the most horrible thing that could happen. I am in a somewhat privileged position in that I have sold my house and now have a little money to exist on. In addition to selling the house I have sold all the tools that I used in my former business. This is a decision that I did not take lightly as I now have no means to continue to make money. Money, however, is becoming much less important. What is important is talking to trees and listening to trees, building a tribe, taking care of the land and the people I love and doing that for as long as possible. Even if you are not in a position to drop everything I would like to suggest that you begin the process of divesting yourselves of unneeded baggage.

If you believe that we are in trouble than it is time to start internalizing that, start to really accept our collective fate instead of just reading articles about it. This is not to disparage the people who do read articles and try to raise awareness of the issue. There will come a time, though, in the not too distant future, when the articles will no longer be there to read, there will come a time, in the not too distant future, when there will be only the people you have surrounded yourself with. They will become the most important part of your life. The facebook friends will be gone, the bloggers will be gone, the you-tube channels will be gone and unless you take steps to surround yourself with real live people you will be alone.

If you think about that I hope that you will start this process. The real live people are going to be all you have. Nature, or what is left of it, is going to be all you have. You are going to have to make some hard decisions, decisions that will alienate a significant number of the friends and partners who are in your life. You can do this now or maybe wait and see. My vote is now.

I almost screamed at a friend of mine the other day who believes we are on the way out but continues to think that he needs to continue doing what he is doing. He could stop right now but he won't. He is kind of like someone who sort of believes in god. He may not buy it fully but he wants to hedge his bets so instead of embracing a life of meaning he just plods along thinking he can just get his taxes paid or his credit cards paid down or a little more money in the bank. I can not talk to him any more because his acceptance is still intellectual.

I am listening to Bob Dylan and I think on some level he knew, even way back then. Songs that had meaning in the 60's are starting to have a whole new meaning now. Our time is winding down and we get to move past petty arguments, we get to become the people we are meant to be. If you consider yourself a thoughtful, caring individual then perhaps it is a good point to start living that.   

To Stress or Not to Stress

A BLANKET DISCLAIMER: The realization that anything we do from here to the end point will be ultimately futile should not be used as an excuse to sit idly by.

"Oh, you gotta hold on, hold on

You gotta hold on

Take my hand, I'm standing right here, you gotta hold on."

Hold On by Tom Waits

I work as a fitness instructor. In this line of work I am often called upon to explain the nature of physical improvements. Physical improvement comes from stressing the system beyond its current capacity in order to stimulate change. For instance if you were to take a 10 minute walk every day that would force some adaptation, if however you never went beyond that 10 minute walk your body would adapt and then it would say okay, got that, what's next? Without continued and sufficient increase in the workload your body simply stops adapting.

Likewise in our society absent a sufficient amount of stress nothing will change. It is up to us to begin to force the change.

Paul Street said in his article In the Time of the Orange Pig  "Where are the millions who ought/need to be in the streets every single day fighting this Orange Pig regime and the hideous racist, sexist, and eco-cidal class-rule profits system that hatched it? Shocked, frightened, demobilized, depressed, divided, distracted, overworked, over-extended, indentured, consumerized, traumatized, sick, inverted, browbeaten, jaundiced, propagandized, addicted, smart-phoned, Facebooked, Twitterized, ex-urbanized, sedentarized, immobilized, fatalized, fantasized, incarcerated, felony-marked, branded, stigmatized, shamed, frightened, and, last but not least, electoralized."

Although there is truly nothing we can do in the long term it seems as though sitting back and just letting the coming disaster wash over us is a little irresponsible.

We are used to being in stasis, merely existing, but Sam Shepard said that he was "The eternal enemy of terminal stasis." We are now, unless we are out fighting, in terminal stasis.

There will come a time when you are going to be asked to stand up for what is right. I get a little tired of the pacifists who continually preach non-violence when violence is rained on us daily from the moneyed elite. We appear to have accepted that top down violence is okay but if asked to step up and meet it and fight to defeat it we fall back on our non-violent mantra.

I was told by a client, who had been raped, that she did not believe in responding to violence with violence as that would make her like the person who raped her. This confused me as I could not see her becoming a violent rapist merely by the act of defending herself against a predator.

The word violence is, in most peace loving arenas, a bad word and I believe it is important to understand that, as an example, if someone broke into your house, threatened your family and destroyed your possessions you would feel justified in doing whatever it took to stop them. That is exactly what has happened; powerful people have broken into our house (the planet) threatened and even killed members of our family (all life on earth) and are destroying at an ever increasing rate those things we hold dear.

Roy Scranton, in his book Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, said, "the coal miners struggling for a democratic stake in production didn't just protest, share news stories, and post messages. They didn't just march. The African-American activists struggling for civil rights didn't just tweet hashtag campaigns. They didn't just hold meetings. They fought and bled and died for a world they believed in..."

I believe that, through the medium of the internet, we have become a nation of messagers and hashtagers and protest junkies and as necessary a part of the landscape as these things are they do not complete the picture. The picture will only be finished when we begin to physically take apart the system that is currently in place. If we want to build something new we first; have to know what we are going to build in its place and then we have to tear down the obstacles that are standing in our way.

The powerful depend on us being too occupied with the toys they gave us to ever pose a serious threat to their control. They are right in that we enjoy the toys and sincerely believe that the owners will allow us a voice in what is happening. That is somewhat true but mostly the toys just keep us busy while the rampant destruction continues apace.

Jason Hirthler, in his recent article Death of The Art House:Revolution: Can the Amercanized West Ever Stage a Real Rebellion, said, "You don't have to deconstruct why we are often satisfied to place our faith in entertaining fictive solutions rather than engage in the tedious 'years of struggle' repeatedly called for by the likes of Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, who understood the grim realities of political transformation. The lined faces of lifetime activists serve as testaments to the cut and thrust of battle against the depredations of faceless multinationals and their ever-growing databases of information, through which struggles are defused and disarmed. From mobile phones, from fiber lines, from five-eyed satellites, from wirelines, from surveillance cams innocuously hung from every string of traffic signals. But is it simply the scale of the job that that keeps us from banging pots in the streets like Argentines before they threw the parasitical IMF from their country, or like Venezuelans rallying behind an embattled administration because it represents a movement whose colors they proudly wear? Or, of course, like the emergency-clad French who turn out in the public square week after week despite increasing repression. Are we fatally distracted? Or is it our creature comforts that dissuade us?"

We, as a nation, have become soft and coddled. Our amusements and distractions are so ingrained that any type of active resistance is unthinkable. A protest here and there, signing a petition, supporting different groups is almost worse than doing nothing at all. I do not deny that the protests being staged are raising awareness of the problem we face but with the massive destruction that is being wreaked on the natural world perhaps it is time to start taking a more pro-active approach, at least trying to stop, if only for own redemption, what is happening. The fight must go on to the very end. Which will be, according to all the markers, the very near future. Until then make your power known. Force the people who would blithely continue to destroy our world to understand that, even though it will not ultimately help, we know who they are and we know they are wrong.

Make It What You Do.

"You are not anyone,

you are someone.

As someone, you are not just anyone. 

You are everyone."

                            -Chip Conrad

I was talking to a friend a few years back (before joining the doomer ranks) and I told him that I was having trouble attracting a client base. I asked him how he had developed his practice. He said it is a simple two step process. Step one is to pick a time that you want to train and step two is to tell anyone you meet that they can come and train too. He told me that this can have only two possible outcomes:
1) No one comes and you get to work out.
2) People come and you get to train them
Either way he came out on top.

I have been trying, over the last several months, to follow that process with people who understand the nature of what we are threatened with and realize the importance of community. So far these attempts have been unsuccessful. I have called, e-mailed, and posted on face-o-gram groups all to no avail. It would appear that community is no longer a priority in our lives if it requires that we actually go out and talk to real people.

For all the, supposed, benefits of interacting online I am finding it to be a pale comparison to real life encounters. I find myself pining away for the time before the interwebz when people got together or called or went out or started clubs or just hung out. I am sure that there may be friendships formed in the digital arena but unless there is some actual face to face time it seems kind of hallow.
Chip Conrad said, in his book Are You Useful, that, "Awareness by any name is a dying art, since our virtual world is destroying all of it. The illiterates of the next century are those who cannot participate in real life. They can read words, but their comprehension of real life will straight up suck."

Awareness of your immediate surroundings is a vital part of any community. If you have ever looked up from your device or devices at Starbucks you will have noticed that the majority of people in there have no idea what is going on around them. Being aware of what is going on in your environment is a crucial part of a community. If you know what is happening in your neighborhood, if you are aware of changes in the natural world you will be much more likely to band together with others that are aware and work to improve or defend that neighborhood.

When the time comes and I don't believe, based on what just happened in Zimbabwe, that it is too far off the only thing you will have is your community. If I were to ask how many people you could gather together right now to work towards a common end what would you say. I am not talking about people you go to movies with but people that you could rely on to pull their weight and have your back and support each other. Can't say for sure but I am guessing that it would be a short list. You can prove this to yourself by letting it be known that you are moving and need help. I would think that a fair percentage of your friends would be out of town that weekend and you can bet that none of your facebook friends would be around.

The internet has limited our ability to interact with live humans. We have more de-contextualized information than ever before but our ability to utilize that information in a meaningful way has deteriorated. C.A. Bowers in his 2014 book The False Promises of the Digital Revolution said, "...(there are) many ways that digitally mediated (that is, primarily computer mediated) thought and communication reinforce a form of consciousness that is radically different from that found in cultures where the spoken word is the primary basis of thought and communication." As we drift more towards digital interaction and away from face to face encounters we lose the subtleties of an actual conversation; the body language, the facial expressions and what is created between two people when they sit down and talk.

Native populations had an oral culture. The food they ate, the shelters they built, the things that were important to the survival of the tribe were all passed on orally. This information had a, pretty much, 1 to 1 information/action ratio. The things you learned and internalized were things that would help you survive and flourish in your area.

Sebastian Junger said in Tribe, On Homecoming and Belonging that,"We have a strong instinct to belong to small groups defined by clear purpose and understanding - - Tribes.This tribal connection has been largely lost in modern society, but regaining it may be the key to our psychological survival." There is a lot of talk these days about tribes, groups separated by vast distances call themselves a tribe, the fitness community particularly the outdoor gurus call themselves a tribe but they are missing a crucial element in that they are not banded together in a single location and there is no clearly stated purpose or goal. A tribe is a group of people that act as one entity for the betterment of all. They function as a unit, they laugh and love and cry and fight together, there is no I only we and there is no possibility of this being recreated in a digital environment.

Digital groups may be banded together by a shared interest but there is not a shared purpose. Purpose is a baseline element. In order for a group to prosper the entire group must have a reason to exist. Absent this purpose you can have a bunch of people who are interested in the same thing but not really have a community.

The importance of having, around you, a group of people that you can rely on can not be overstated. To that end I am working on finding a venue where we can gather on a regular basis.
So...
Step 1) A time: 11 AM, a date: 1st and 3rd Sundays of each month, a place: Pasadena CA, venue TBA
Step 2) I will be there starting February 3rd.
Possible outcomes:
1) I get to enjoy a coffee and a pastry.
2) I get to enjoy a coffee, a pastry and the pleasure of your company.

The purpose will be to talk, commiserate, and plan for what we know is going to happen. I hope to see you there.