Gonna open this one up to everyone from the get-go (most of these monthly open threads are paying subscriber only for the first few days). As always, this is a place to talk about whatever is moving, bothering, inspiring you. You can ask me stuff, ask the community, or just pontificate like a pope.
Here’s a question to get it rolling: Do you think we live in a uniquely precarious time, or has everyone felt that way? I saw a headline today that read: “You Are Not Sufficiently Alarmed!” Is that true?
I just wanted to recommend the newest Hunger Games movie. One of the main characters, Lucy Gray, has a life philosophy similar to yours. The idea I first heard from you: "nobody can steal money you've already spent" is something she lives by. Check out the song and the lyrics, if you want to!
After reading all the comments to this thread I am struck by a few thoughts. First, I think it important to put my personal view into a bit of perspective. The last five years (2018 - 2023) have been the most challenging of my 56 years on this rock. 2018 - My father passed away and all evidence points to the likelihood that my mother either assisted him with ending his own life via an opium overdose or did the deed herself out of frustration with having to care for him in hospice. 2019 - My mother passed 13 months after my father under similarly questionable circumstances. She had a “heart attack” one week after pondering what her friends would do if she was no longer around. There was evidence that she may have saved some of my father’s morphine for herself. 2020 - COVID, enough said. 2021 & 2022 - most of this period was spent drinking too much, sleeping too little and getting by solely thanks to the grace and support of my loving wife. 2023 - In April our home flooded during a “one in a thousand year” storm that dropped over 20” of rain directly into our neighborhood over the course of 8 hours. We have just returned to our home after 7 months of living out of an Air BNB while paying both an exorbitant rent and or mortgage simultaneously and battling insurance, FEMA and contractors in an effort to restore our home. We were lucky as many of our neighbors had no insurance, once of which committed suicide a few days after the storm out of desperation and fear of what the future would hold. Through all of this, I have found myself cultivating optimism and gratitude at every step. Some days the darkness would take over, but most presented opportunities to be thankful for what I still had, friends, family, my wife, my career, my connection to the ocean that has sustained life and career for most of my existence. I even got the opportunity to meet Chris in person. Doing so reinforced my understanding of how we can have an effect on a local level, despite the anxiety national and world politics can create. Anyway, not sure what my point is outside of the hard earned knowledge that anxiety and alarm come easy. It’s the peace, tranquility and optimism that are hard fought and viciously earned through daily practice. Life Is Good in south Florida because I choose to make it so. Be well.
To someone with decades in foreign policy, this is likely an alarm bell. To someone with zero personal skin in the game, it's likely a historical artifact of confusion.
Alarm is in the eye of the beholder. It depends on your perspective about what warrants alarm. I had lunch with a colleague a few years ago in San Francisco, a young former Army Captain that had also attended an ivy league business school. He was in the process of moving out of legal tech sales and into a the defense industry with a top-secret drone development contractor. His reasoning was as clear as the US American Flag belt he wore on his perfectly pressed khakis with the ubiquitous white collar shirt and Patagucci vest uniform of all good finance bros: "If we don't want to have to learn Mandarin in the next twenty years, this is what I have to do."
He was alarmed. But his alarm came from his deep knowledge and very high clearance level of what was actually happening in the broader scope of geopolitics.
Conversely, the scientist studying the antarctic ice shelf may be considering the alarm of an other impending doom, that very few people can even begin to wrap their minds around.
The social worker in Chicago may be alarmed at the failure of the system to provide an adequate environment for minority children and their development.
To the statesman working at the capital in California, the economic policy of carbon credits and how it affects their business owner constituents can be alarmed as well.
It's all relative. We are bombarded with alarm bells. I think one of the best things we can do, often, is just to look locally on what causes concern for our community, and do what we can, there. That means your next-door neighbor, much like Chris has described in his "firewood" analogy. We are not evolved to think on a global scale, we are evolved to think on a close tribal scale. We can get lost in all of the alarm bells shouting at us on TikTok, Fox News, or whatever our media drug of choice is. But, if we start with our neighbors, whatever we can do to quell the "alarms" there, I believe it reverberates, because it becomes an example. Anything else we can do on a broader scale, positively, starts locally.
We can scream into the void all we want on X, Instagram, etc, but if a tree falls in the forest and there is no one around to hear it, does it make a sound?
Once I got a taste of pseudo freedom when hiking the PCT for 5 months, I came back and everything felt extremely dystopian. I’ve pretty much all but given up on trying to raise the alarm bells because people are more concerned with the Kardashians, bills, and making ends meet. There is smoke in the skies every year, we’re moving through the 6th mass extinction of the planet, and the warming of the planet will surely cause massive migration and with it, conflict. We should be concerned but the powers that be keep us from spending time being concerned with things like ecological integrity. It’s an exhausting fight and I’m only 26😂
Alarm is an insufficient and ineffective response. If we are in a period of uncertainty, or a personal/collective crisis, seems like engaging in deliberative and/or spontaneous methods of identity shifts/brain or thinking changes (psychedelic experiences, nondual practices) might create capacity to meet the moment. Also, I don't find it necessary to compare eras for destructive capacities, depends on whose perspective, precarious for whom? — unless that's to create a more empathic, resilient human. Chris, I'm curious what your experience is regarding personal or collective ways that create adaptations to perceived precariousness? I know there are likely many, just wondering what you're imagining these days?
I think that we are not alarmed at all and we can't be alarmed enough because humans as conscious beings are flawed. If something is threatening us we face it if the danger is right in front of our faces. Otherwise, we'll ignore it. Some humans around the planet have already realized that we are in danger as a species, but the great majority are just too worried about their daily stuff, work, family and the economy. As a species, we are not aware we belong to earth and that if anything happens to air, water or wildlife we'll suffer the same destiny. All life on Earth is entangled, we are all on the same journey. There's nothing we can do anyway; there are too many of us. We humans believe we are the special ones but we are just a step in the long evolution process of consciousness, if humans go extinct something better will come after. Nature never forgets what it learned. Maybe a smarter, stronger and more loving being who will be everything we were and more will replace us. We are just an experiment of mother nature as many species were before us, likely, we won't be able to adapt and do the only thing nature wants from us, help life grow and spring all over. I am just living my life and already let the idea of humanity go.
I genuinely agree with your points overall, but find myself being wary of the binary thinking regarding humanity as a whole being either "doomed" or "saveable". We are heading towards multiple different collapses, I think. A lot of people are already living in a post-apocalypse - many Indigenous people come to mind, such as here in Australia for whom colonisation (Western Civilisation) has been disastrous. Similarly, many countries are already facing the very real consequences of climate change, whilst people in some locations never will (or the climate in their area may even become more pleasant). Undoubtedly, collapse will come first to those with the least resources and freedom of movement (the poor), even though it was generated largely by those with the most resources and freedom of movement (the rich).
I agree that there is simply too much momentum to successfully make any kind of real aversion from catastrophe as a collective society. Chris has liked this before to something like us all being in car which is speeding towards destruction while we all argue about who should sit in the driver seat. The question of being "sufficiently alarmed" seems to be fraught, because those who have the means to do something about it will be the last to be affected, and those without will (or already have been) confronted by collapse.
I am sufficiently alarmed and at times overwhelmed at the impending collapse of civilisation.
However the majority of people you speak to are not and if anything it’s a faux pas to bring it up as the narrative of perpetual progress is deeply wed into our consciousness in this civilisation just like the others that collapsed.
Eventually the vast majority will be sufficiently alarmed but it will be too late.
Your ability to thrive in life, in general whatever the context depends on the strength of your community so being intentional about that is something I think of often.
I feel like I’m grieving because there’s alot of anger at the sense of injustice. Still, I’m moving towards the acceptance stage.
Day to day am employing as much auto-pilot as I can because this robotic approach is needed to survive in this context.
It is sad it seems we don’t even have the complete autonomy, but rather the perception of freedom. If you see through that veil, it is almost robot like to make it through every week. When all I want to do is sit around camp fires, write poetry, have conversation and drink coffee with friends and family. I want to just be alive and be able to live how I’d like to.
Chris you were talking about the Happy people: A year in the Taiga movie, and I was confused when you said that it wasn't narrated by Werner Herzog, because I recently saw the movie and it was narrated by him (it's hard to not recognize his unique narrating style :)) so now I wonder whether there are two versions of it? On IMDB it also says that it's narrated by him. Another thing, in recent episode (might be the same Roma, idk) you were making the point of something being a need by comparing it to the need of a human body for fiber. Just wanted to let you know that that is actally highly debatable, so not the best comparison :) Thanks for keeping me company and giving me great insights!
Hi. I meant to say it wasn't directed by Herzog. You're right that he narrates it. As for fiber, we disagree on that. As far as I know, fiber is important for various digestive functions, especially the health of one's microbiome. Most foraging people eat a lot more fiber than we do and have much more diverse microbiomes.
Herzog co-directed it. There are also indigenous people that eat only fat and meat, and are equally healthy (although maybe nobody tested their feces as with the Hadza). I wasn't planning to debate on fiber with you, I'm just stating the fact that the topic is highly debatable, because there are equally strong arguments on both sides (I guess any nutrition fact in the history of nutrition "facts" has been turned several times!), therefore not a good comparison as to what a human needs. Maybe stick with the water :D :D
Yes, I see the confusion. The article says Vasyukov directed it, but at other places, it seems they both did. My understanding is that Herzog mainly helped to get it distributed, but it was directed by Vasyukov, but I don't know anything other than what I've read. In the New York Times, this is how it's explained: "Mr. Herzog created “Happy People” by culling from a TV documentary series by the Russian director Dmitry Vasyukov." So maybe Herzog recut film made by Vasyukov?
Thank you. I wasn't planning on splitting hair with you on this matter, I was simply pointing out what it says, don't care much about being right or wrong on the internet 😊 And sure hope this is not the last reply I will ever get from you! 🤓
Hi, Dora! I'm curious, which groups are you referring to as "only eating fat and meat". I'm working from memory here as I'm traveling and don't have the book with me, but I remember reading in "People, Plants, and Culture" that there are only 3 observed groups who have been found to have diets that are almost entirely carnivorous. I believe the groups are the Inuit, the San in Namibia, and the Comanche. I don't believe that book gives any detail about the digestive health of those tribes, but I would be interested to read the literature if you can direct me towards more information. I know there are other cases of indigenous groups in East Africa who eat very low fiber diets, but they have teas made of tree barks that help break down cholesterol and increase metabolism.
I also heard on a podcast recently that hunter gather groups who do have largely carnivorous diets are able to go multiple days without food. And they won't suffer a loss of energy or discomfort, because their bodies are in a perpetual state of ketosis. But sadly, the host didn't list any references. Has anyone heard this before?
Hi Broderick! I was referring to some Inuit tribes, yes. I find that exception from the rule fascinating, how a human can evolve and thrive in these kinds of extremes. I don't think any indigenous peoples would choose to refuse any source of nutrition if available though. That's what makes us humans I guess, we're omnivores. :)
I would be cautious about extrapolating from Inuit diets, in that they are far outside the norm for our species, and they have had many generations of adaptation to get where they are.
It's like extrapolating from people who have lived at 10,000 feet in the Andes or Himalaya ranges and have lung capacity 20% or more greater than the rest of us. You can't just move to Nepal and live as they do without that adaptation. Same with gut microbiome and other digestive and metabolic adaptations.
Totally agree Chris! Like I wrote, I find human ability to evolve to be able to thrive in these kinds of extremes fascinating. To some extent it goes, yes, with all of a sudden taking five times more fiber than a westerner's impoverished gut microbiome is capable of handling. You will also probably agree that the richness of one's microbiome doesn't solely depend on the fiber intake, but on the overall environment a human lives in. Indigenous people are immersed in their local microbiota all of the time, whether they're eating, drinking, birthing, breasfteeding, preparing food, playing, hunting or sleeping. The microbiotic biodiversity is unimaginable for us, self-imprisoned in a "clean" environment, with our safe food-like substances devoid of essence, and no amount of fiber will help us with that. I guess that is why I cringed when I heard you saying we need fiber, because no amount of fiber will help us, or fat, or protein, as long as we think and act in a non-holistic way regarding our food or health or lives. "more fiber" translated to the language of western food market is invent, sell, buy, consume a "Super Fiber" product. More fiber from a holistic perspective means more real local biodiverse, regeneratively produced/foraged plant food, where fiber is not the only thing you gain, where fiber is the least important subject. Supporting our (gut) microbiome doesnt mean eat fibrous substances and drink lactobacilli, it means re-immerse yourself in your local environment, lay in the grass, eat unwashed apple from the tree, drink water from the stream, sleep in the open, breathe fresh air, garden, enhance/increase biodiversity in your immediate surroundings, hug people, grow chickens. Interact with as many species as you can in any given moment in time. It means support life and live life. Fiber is just a tiny tiny part of it all, and wouldn't even be a topic of conversation if our food system and lifestyles aren't as far from the human baseline as they are.
quite agree with tjariz, there are more examples of progress in civilisation since then, I admit middle ages is not the best example. we have overcome many once death- sentence diseases through vaccinations and medicinal progress. We do have the Nuclear weapons and WMD hanging over our heads which is "recent" in historical terms and of course, we don't take care of our planet, especially there is talk and demonstrations with little leadership actually doing anything that makes a difference. like a washing the floor with a dirty mop, looks cleaner but the dirt is just re distributed. My concern was the overload of information that most of humanity has no idea how to deal with in order to find a true account and not also be subject to confirmation bias. too much complaining, information overload that is de-sensitising us to actually caring, and de-sensitising us to behave more violently towards each other. its not about 'me' its about 'us' solutions not whining, facts not rumours. I am sure someone more erudite could explain this much better.
Chris!!! Listen to Peter Gabriel’s new album I/O! I loved him for decades, and his now album is amazing! (Sorry, I know this is unrelated to the post!)
I would appreciate someone explaining how increased alarm is useful. I spent the 80s alarmed by nukes, the 90s alarmed by climate change, the 00s alarmed by corporate government, the teens alarmed by a collapsed, false hope for yes we can 'change'... Now I feel cynical, weary, wary and circumspect and, ultimately, certainly stupid. Growing vegetables, now.
For my BSc Thesis I wrote about risk perception of cruise tourism stakeholders in Norway and I was reading some stuff about Beck's theory of the risk society, which is basically about how modern society has created so many risks with its techological development but that at the same time we are more and more preoccupied with these risks and the future. This kind of makes sense to me and so I would say that yes we live in a uniquely precarious time. But on the other hand I am young and stupid and everyone always believes their time to be special which in hind sight turns out to be the same as all others. So the answer as usual is I don't know haha
From a taoist / tai-chi-chaun midset, being 'alarmed' is never a state we want to be in as it inhibits a 'natural' response. We aim to meet adversity with equiminity and openess and so swim up-river without being thrown on the rocks by forces we didn't intuit.
Yes, not alarmed, but sad just the same. The kind of looking forward to a human future, mine, my loved one’s, and society’s, that I used to do, and the concomitant belief in human progress, seems preposterously naive. On the other hand, whatever may be the vague destroyed or subsisting condition we picture when we say the words “collapse”, “end times”, etc. just might not happen. I am content that I do not know enough to make that call. On the third hand, maybe it will happen and won’t be so bad, whether we emerge from it as a species more or less recognizable to our present selves or in some other form. The important thing is that evolution continue in a positive qualitative direction. That could or but does not have to include humans, although I doubt that such evolutionary progress could dispense with humans or some enhanced version thereof altogether. Why is it important that evolution continue positively? Read Lila, by Robert Pirsig, for one persuasive answer.
Human beings have the same problems and repeat the same mistakes and perpetrate the same vanities as they always have, but the technology we have makes today way more dangerous than yesterday. This is obvious with nuclear weapons and climate change. There are also psychic inputs we receive from some of this technology that can make some things seem worse but there is no question that they are worse if only because of the scale at which evil (yes, it exists, or pick another word) can range at which it couldn’t range before. There is also an undeniable anxious effect of having every atom of the world shoved constantly in your face without surcease that, like language, can make a thing more palpably real than before it was named - which in turn, I would argue, enhances its reality.
I'm 71. I lived through Jim Crow in the south, 60s riots that make everything since look tame, Vietnam, Watergate, and on. Never in my life have I been as alarmed as I am now. The number of civilization ending technologies are proliferating at an accelerating pace. Nuclear is just one. AI is all over the news but is a wild card or maybe a threat multiplier. How about CRSPR "at home" as the experts claim possible? Cameras everywhere that will ultimately track every movement we make. Democracy itself is in peril with an uncertain outcome. Once lost, it's not coming back any time soon. That is my biggest concern.
Since the advent of nuclear weapons and other high-tech weapon systems (oh sorry, “defense systems”), I think humanity has objectively been in a uniquely precarious time.
What differentiates this level of alarm from the naysaying ‘oh every generation always feels this way’ is that the technologies of warfare and particularly the unknown unknowns as it pertains to AI (whether generalized or not) place us closer than ever to the possibility of extinction.
Also whether the climate change is manmade or part of a natural cycle (doubtful) is irrelevant - the refugee displacement is going to be catastrophic if we even survive that long. Indonesia alone - you’re looking at a bil plus on the move to escape!
Whether we off ourselves or not - gaia will still be here and will survive our shenanigans and a new cycle of life will begin anew.
1st, everyone has felt that way, just USA: indigenous wars; revolutionary war; civil war; great depression; Cuban missile crises, etc... But it is all relative. Most of us give no fucks and can have no empathy for any times before we are adult enough aware.
Those too young for being aware during the Cold War, or hell 9/11, feel ALL IS LOST. But study history, or live long enough... same shit different day
As if Ukraine weren't enough, we've got the Gaza hellscape (and the potential for it to become to Biden what the I̶r̶a̶q̶i̶ Iranian hostage crisis was to Carter) and Trump's persistent popularity despite all evidence of his criminal venality. I'm pretty fucking alarmed.
If you regard the looming collapse of our civilization (we're talking a civilization made up of 8 billion people, 8 billion individual fates) as Precarity, then yes, things are more precarious (precarious on a far more massive scale) than ever.
Homo sapiens has had a few close calls in the distant past, but didn't even perceive them as close calls since no awareness of the situation beyond the local group.
As for being sufficiently alarmed, I was somewhat alarmed 20-30 years ago, back when I hallucinated that something could be done. Now that I realize the folly of such thinking, I figure what's the point of alarm? And what reason do we have to be concerned about the fate of homo sapiens as a whole?
As the saying goes: Relax, everything's out of control.
Before I address your question, let me use this open thread for a language peeve: If I never see the word "iconic" again it'll be too soon. This word has been tested to destruction & beyond in recent years. It's even worse than "amazing" & "awesome".
Yes, Vladimir Putin has been thoroughly "hitlerized" (John Mearsheimer's term) by Western media. This process is needed to quell dissent, to intimidate people afflicted by wrongthink who might have doubts about the murderous & ruinous Ukraine war & believe the US should at least talk with the guy.
Seems to me Putin has acted with great restraint & could even be accused of having been far too trusting about US motives & intentions.
Erdogan is a crafty old reactionary fox & I always doubt his motives, but a major war just across the Black Sea is not in Turkey's interests so it was quite right of him to organize the negotiations.
The fact that Washington sabotaged them ought to tell us everything we need to know about who Really wanted this war at all costs. It wasn't Russia.
Just a question: I realize you live in Turkish & might find it natural to write "Türkiye". But English has always spelled it Turkey (just as it says Leghorn not Livorno, Munich not München). Erdogan asked the world to write Türkiye just as the Ivory Coast asked the whole world a few decades ago to write Côte d'Ivoire. In a diplomatic note fine, but it still looks weird to me.
Exactly. We are overloaded with vast amounts of information about places and events often far away and out of our control, added to misinformation i feel we are often pushed into panic mode. If one looks at history, including climate and disease, we are better off than say the middle ages, we could do with news on progress made in our present and recent times. Right now its all bad news and complaining. To me, focus on your local community, get that right first.
Hey Chris,
I just wanted to recommend the newest Hunger Games movie. One of the main characters, Lucy Gray, has a life philosophy similar to yours. The idea I first heard from you: "nobody can steal money you've already spent" is something she lives by. Check out the song and the lyrics, if you want to!
https://youtu.be/ADwM-OOspvA?si=scUh5s5S59fOe0hf
After reading all the comments to this thread I am struck by a few thoughts. First, I think it important to put my personal view into a bit of perspective. The last five years (2018 - 2023) have been the most challenging of my 56 years on this rock. 2018 - My father passed away and all evidence points to the likelihood that my mother either assisted him with ending his own life via an opium overdose or did the deed herself out of frustration with having to care for him in hospice. 2019 - My mother passed 13 months after my father under similarly questionable circumstances. She had a “heart attack” one week after pondering what her friends would do if she was no longer around. There was evidence that she may have saved some of my father’s morphine for herself. 2020 - COVID, enough said. 2021 & 2022 - most of this period was spent drinking too much, sleeping too little and getting by solely thanks to the grace and support of my loving wife. 2023 - In April our home flooded during a “one in a thousand year” storm that dropped over 20” of rain directly into our neighborhood over the course of 8 hours. We have just returned to our home after 7 months of living out of an Air BNB while paying both an exorbitant rent and or mortgage simultaneously and battling insurance, FEMA and contractors in an effort to restore our home. We were lucky as many of our neighbors had no insurance, once of which committed suicide a few days after the storm out of desperation and fear of what the future would hold. Through all of this, I have found myself cultivating optimism and gratitude at every step. Some days the darkness would take over, but most presented opportunities to be thankful for what I still had, friends, family, my wife, my career, my connection to the ocean that has sustained life and career for most of my existence. I even got the opportunity to meet Chris in person. Doing so reinforced my understanding of how we can have an effect on a local level, despite the anxiety national and world politics can create. Anyway, not sure what my point is outside of the hard earned knowledge that anxiety and alarm come easy. It’s the peace, tranquility and optimism that are hard fought and viciously earned through daily practice. Life Is Good in south Florida because I choose to make it so. Be well.
Here is an article with a point of view that provides context to the question, describing Wilsonian foreign policy, with the reasoning being a fairly broad stroke of the US' insistence on exporting democracy since the cold war: https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2023/12/02/time_to_end_wilsonian_foreign_policy_996370.html
To someone with decades in foreign policy, this is likely an alarm bell. To someone with zero personal skin in the game, it's likely a historical artifact of confusion.
Alarm is in the eye of the beholder. It depends on your perspective about what warrants alarm. I had lunch with a colleague a few years ago in San Francisco, a young former Army Captain that had also attended an ivy league business school. He was in the process of moving out of legal tech sales and into a the defense industry with a top-secret drone development contractor. His reasoning was as clear as the US American Flag belt he wore on his perfectly pressed khakis with the ubiquitous white collar shirt and Patagucci vest uniform of all good finance bros: "If we don't want to have to learn Mandarin in the next twenty years, this is what I have to do."
He was alarmed. But his alarm came from his deep knowledge and very high clearance level of what was actually happening in the broader scope of geopolitics.
Conversely, the scientist studying the antarctic ice shelf may be considering the alarm of an other impending doom, that very few people can even begin to wrap their minds around.
The social worker in Chicago may be alarmed at the failure of the system to provide an adequate environment for minority children and their development.
To the statesman working at the capital in California, the economic policy of carbon credits and how it affects their business owner constituents can be alarmed as well.
It's all relative. We are bombarded with alarm bells. I think one of the best things we can do, often, is just to look locally on what causes concern for our community, and do what we can, there. That means your next-door neighbor, much like Chris has described in his "firewood" analogy. We are not evolved to think on a global scale, we are evolved to think on a close tribal scale. We can get lost in all of the alarm bells shouting at us on TikTok, Fox News, or whatever our media drug of choice is. But, if we start with our neighbors, whatever we can do to quell the "alarms" there, I believe it reverberates, because it becomes an example. Anything else we can do on a broader scale, positively, starts locally.
We can scream into the void all we want on X, Instagram, etc, but if a tree falls in the forest and there is no one around to hear it, does it make a sound?
Once I got a taste of pseudo freedom when hiking the PCT for 5 months, I came back and everything felt extremely dystopian. I’ve pretty much all but given up on trying to raise the alarm bells because people are more concerned with the Kardashians, bills, and making ends meet. There is smoke in the skies every year, we’re moving through the 6th mass extinction of the planet, and the warming of the planet will surely cause massive migration and with it, conflict. We should be concerned but the powers that be keep us from spending time being concerned with things like ecological integrity. It’s an exhausting fight and I’m only 26😂
Alarm is an insufficient and ineffective response. If we are in a period of uncertainty, or a personal/collective crisis, seems like engaging in deliberative and/or spontaneous methods of identity shifts/brain or thinking changes (psychedelic experiences, nondual practices) might create capacity to meet the moment. Also, I don't find it necessary to compare eras for destructive capacities, depends on whose perspective, precarious for whom? — unless that's to create a more empathic, resilient human. Chris, I'm curious what your experience is regarding personal or collective ways that create adaptations to perceived precariousness? I know there are likely many, just wondering what you're imagining these days?
I think that we are not alarmed at all and we can't be alarmed enough because humans as conscious beings are flawed. If something is threatening us we face it if the danger is right in front of our faces. Otherwise, we'll ignore it. Some humans around the planet have already realized that we are in danger as a species, but the great majority are just too worried about their daily stuff, work, family and the economy. As a species, we are not aware we belong to earth and that if anything happens to air, water or wildlife we'll suffer the same destiny. All life on Earth is entangled, we are all on the same journey. There's nothing we can do anyway; there are too many of us. We humans believe we are the special ones but we are just a step in the long evolution process of consciousness, if humans go extinct something better will come after. Nature never forgets what it learned. Maybe a smarter, stronger and more loving being who will be everything we were and more will replace us. We are just an experiment of mother nature as many species were before us, likely, we won't be able to adapt and do the only thing nature wants from us, help life grow and spring all over. I am just living my life and already let the idea of humanity go.
I genuinely agree with your points overall, but find myself being wary of the binary thinking regarding humanity as a whole being either "doomed" or "saveable". We are heading towards multiple different collapses, I think. A lot of people are already living in a post-apocalypse - many Indigenous people come to mind, such as here in Australia for whom colonisation (Western Civilisation) has been disastrous. Similarly, many countries are already facing the very real consequences of climate change, whilst people in some locations never will (or the climate in their area may even become more pleasant). Undoubtedly, collapse will come first to those with the least resources and freedom of movement (the poor), even though it was generated largely by those with the most resources and freedom of movement (the rich).
I agree that there is simply too much momentum to successfully make any kind of real aversion from catastrophe as a collective society. Chris has liked this before to something like us all being in car which is speeding towards destruction while we all argue about who should sit in the driver seat. The question of being "sufficiently alarmed" seems to be fraught, because those who have the means to do something about it will be the last to be affected, and those without will (or already have been) confronted by collapse.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=acmb-rLmbYk&si=IIYu_UxArHFH8hDQ
I am sufficiently alarmed and at times overwhelmed at the impending collapse of civilisation.
However the majority of people you speak to are not and if anything it’s a faux pas to bring it up as the narrative of perpetual progress is deeply wed into our consciousness in this civilisation just like the others that collapsed.
Eventually the vast majority will be sufficiently alarmed but it will be too late.
Your ability to thrive in life, in general whatever the context depends on the strength of your community so being intentional about that is something I think of often.
I feel like I’m grieving because there’s alot of anger at the sense of injustice. Still, I’m moving towards the acceptance stage.
Day to day am employing as much auto-pilot as I can because this robotic approach is needed to survive in this context.
It is sad it seems we don’t even have the complete autonomy, but rather the perception of freedom. If you see through that veil, it is almost robot like to make it through every week. When all I want to do is sit around camp fires, write poetry, have conversation and drink coffee with friends and family. I want to just be alive and be able to live how I’d like to.
Chris you were talking about the Happy people: A year in the Taiga movie, and I was confused when you said that it wasn't narrated by Werner Herzog, because I recently saw the movie and it was narrated by him (it's hard to not recognize his unique narrating style :)) so now I wonder whether there are two versions of it? On IMDB it also says that it's narrated by him. Another thing, in recent episode (might be the same Roma, idk) you were making the point of something being a need by comparing it to the need of a human body for fiber. Just wanted to let you know that that is actally highly debatable, so not the best comparison :) Thanks for keeping me company and giving me great insights!
Hi. I meant to say it wasn't directed by Herzog. You're right that he narrates it. As for fiber, we disagree on that. As far as I know, fiber is important for various digestive functions, especially the health of one's microbiome. Most foraging people eat a lot more fiber than we do and have much more diverse microbiomes.
Herzog co-directed it. There are also indigenous people that eat only fat and meat, and are equally healthy (although maybe nobody tested their feces as with the Hadza). I wasn't planning to debate on fiber with you, I'm just stating the fact that the topic is highly debatable, because there are equally strong arguments on both sides (I guess any nutrition fact in the history of nutrition "facts" has been turned several times!), therefore not a good comparison as to what a human needs. Maybe stick with the water :D :D
No, it was directed by Dmitry Vasyukov. Herzog wrote and voiced the narration.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_People:_A_Year_in_the_Taiga
On the same link you provided below the photo says both of them directed it, the same info on IMDB.
Yes, I see the confusion. The article says Vasyukov directed it, but at other places, it seems they both did. My understanding is that Herzog mainly helped to get it distributed, but it was directed by Vasyukov, but I don't know anything other than what I've read. In the New York Times, this is how it's explained: "Mr. Herzog created “Happy People” by culling from a TV documentary series by the Russian director Dmitry Vasyukov." So maybe Herzog recut film made by Vasyukov?
Thank you. I wasn't planning on splitting hair with you on this matter, I was simply pointing out what it says, don't care much about being right or wrong on the internet 😊 And sure hope this is not the last reply I will ever get from you! 🤓
Hi, Dora! I'm curious, which groups are you referring to as "only eating fat and meat". I'm working from memory here as I'm traveling and don't have the book with me, but I remember reading in "People, Plants, and Culture" that there are only 3 observed groups who have been found to have diets that are almost entirely carnivorous. I believe the groups are the Inuit, the San in Namibia, and the Comanche. I don't believe that book gives any detail about the digestive health of those tribes, but I would be interested to read the literature if you can direct me towards more information. I know there are other cases of indigenous groups in East Africa who eat very low fiber diets, but they have teas made of tree barks that help break down cholesterol and increase metabolism.
I also heard on a podcast recently that hunter gather groups who do have largely carnivorous diets are able to go multiple days without food. And they won't suffer a loss of energy or discomfort, because their bodies are in a perpetual state of ketosis. But sadly, the host didn't list any references. Has anyone heard this before?
Hi Broderick! I was referring to some Inuit tribes, yes. I find that exception from the rule fascinating, how a human can evolve and thrive in these kinds of extremes. I don't think any indigenous peoples would choose to refuse any source of nutrition if available though. That's what makes us humans I guess, we're omnivores. :)
I would be cautious about extrapolating from Inuit diets, in that they are far outside the norm for our species, and they have had many generations of adaptation to get where they are.
It's like extrapolating from people who have lived at 10,000 feet in the Andes or Himalaya ranges and have lung capacity 20% or more greater than the rest of us. You can't just move to Nepal and live as they do without that adaptation. Same with gut microbiome and other digestive and metabolic adaptations.
Totally agree Chris! Like I wrote, I find human ability to evolve to be able to thrive in these kinds of extremes fascinating. To some extent it goes, yes, with all of a sudden taking five times more fiber than a westerner's impoverished gut microbiome is capable of handling. You will also probably agree that the richness of one's microbiome doesn't solely depend on the fiber intake, but on the overall environment a human lives in. Indigenous people are immersed in their local microbiota all of the time, whether they're eating, drinking, birthing, breasfteeding, preparing food, playing, hunting or sleeping. The microbiotic biodiversity is unimaginable for us, self-imprisoned in a "clean" environment, with our safe food-like substances devoid of essence, and no amount of fiber will help us with that. I guess that is why I cringed when I heard you saying we need fiber, because no amount of fiber will help us, or fat, or protein, as long as we think and act in a non-holistic way regarding our food or health or lives. "more fiber" translated to the language of western food market is invent, sell, buy, consume a "Super Fiber" product. More fiber from a holistic perspective means more real local biodiverse, regeneratively produced/foraged plant food, where fiber is not the only thing you gain, where fiber is the least important subject. Supporting our (gut) microbiome doesnt mean eat fibrous substances and drink lactobacilli, it means re-immerse yourself in your local environment, lay in the grass, eat unwashed apple from the tree, drink water from the stream, sleep in the open, breathe fresh air, garden, enhance/increase biodiversity in your immediate surroundings, hug people, grow chickens. Interact with as many species as you can in any given moment in time. It means support life and live life. Fiber is just a tiny tiny part of it all, and wouldn't even be a topic of conversation if our food system and lifestyles aren't as far from the human baseline as they are.
quite agree with tjariz, there are more examples of progress in civilisation since then, I admit middle ages is not the best example. we have overcome many once death- sentence diseases through vaccinations and medicinal progress. We do have the Nuclear weapons and WMD hanging over our heads which is "recent" in historical terms and of course, we don't take care of our planet, especially there is talk and demonstrations with little leadership actually doing anything that makes a difference. like a washing the floor with a dirty mop, looks cleaner but the dirt is just re distributed. My concern was the overload of information that most of humanity has no idea how to deal with in order to find a true account and not also be subject to confirmation bias. too much complaining, information overload that is de-sensitising us to actually caring, and de-sensitising us to behave more violently towards each other. its not about 'me' its about 'us' solutions not whining, facts not rumours. I am sure someone more erudite could explain this much better.
Joy and Sorrow (Poem):
***
***
nuclear waves
unrolling a girl’s
flesh,
bones of her
father
lost
in the debris of
mushroom unfolding
***
***
in a field,
sunlight opening
the petals of
yellow violets,
passing over
rows of bent
stems
***
***
a child
dragging herself
through the mud
streets,
lips scabbed
and open
in the napalm
rain
***
***
and blue birds
chirping in the
moist
rainforest
below a mist
of mountain
clouds
***
***
shuddering
before a gun,
robbed of
homeland, lost
in a feud
under blood
drones
and bombs
***
***
and sighing
on a mountain,
overlooking
endless endless
trees,
red leaves
yellow leaves
green leaves
Chris!!! Listen to Peter Gabriel’s new album I/O! I loved him for decades, and his now album is amazing! (Sorry, I know this is unrelated to the post!)
Will do. Thanks for the tip. Open thread. No need to be on topic.
I would appreciate someone explaining how increased alarm is useful. I spent the 80s alarmed by nukes, the 90s alarmed by climate change, the 00s alarmed by corporate government, the teens alarmed by a collapsed, false hope for yes we can 'change'... Now I feel cynical, weary, wary and circumspect and, ultimately, certainly stupid. Growing vegetables, now.
It would be useful if:
1) it were generally shared by all concerned;
2) the alarmed were in a position to change society;
3) that change were capable of solving the problem triggering the alarm.
Alas, none of these applies.
1) people Really don't want to know;
2) society is run by the rich & powerful, prisoners of their condition;
3) all the frightful things you list are beyond the ability of the citizenry to change.
Cynicism, weariness & wariness are all appropriate.
Growing vegetables seems like a sane, down-to-earth activity.
For my BSc Thesis I wrote about risk perception of cruise tourism stakeholders in Norway and I was reading some stuff about Beck's theory of the risk society, which is basically about how modern society has created so many risks with its techological development but that at the same time we are more and more preoccupied with these risks and the future. This kind of makes sense to me and so I would say that yes we live in a uniquely precarious time. But on the other hand I am young and stupid and everyone always believes their time to be special which in hind sight turns out to be the same as all others. So the answer as usual is I don't know haha
From a taoist / tai-chi-chaun midset, being 'alarmed' is never a state we want to be in as it inhibits a 'natural' response. We aim to meet adversity with equiminity and openess and so swim up-river without being thrown on the rocks by forces we didn't intuit.
Swim down river. Go with flow.
Nice idea, but then it seems you are being 'pushed' by the currents.
Not at all. Go in with currents and out with the flow. It’s the Tao of water.
Funnily enough, I feel you are both speaking of the same thing, but are each referring to it as the other's opposite. It's quite ironically pleasant.
Yes, not alarmed, but sad just the same. The kind of looking forward to a human future, mine, my loved one’s, and society’s, that I used to do, and the concomitant belief in human progress, seems preposterously naive. On the other hand, whatever may be the vague destroyed or subsisting condition we picture when we say the words “collapse”, “end times”, etc. just might not happen. I am content that I do not know enough to make that call. On the third hand, maybe it will happen and won’t be so bad, whether we emerge from it as a species more or less recognizable to our present selves or in some other form. The important thing is that evolution continue in a positive qualitative direction. That could or but does not have to include humans, although I doubt that such evolutionary progress could dispense with humans or some enhanced version thereof altogether. Why is it important that evolution continue positively? Read Lila, by Robert Pirsig, for one persuasive answer.
Human beings have the same problems and repeat the same mistakes and perpetrate the same vanities as they always have, but the technology we have makes today way more dangerous than yesterday. This is obvious with nuclear weapons and climate change. There are also psychic inputs we receive from some of this technology that can make some things seem worse but there is no question that they are worse if only because of the scale at which evil (yes, it exists, or pick another word) can range at which it couldn’t range before. There is also an undeniable anxious effect of having every atom of the world shoved constantly in your face without surcease that, like language, can make a thing more palpably real than before it was named - which in turn, I would argue, enhances its reality.
I'm 71. I lived through Jim Crow in the south, 60s riots that make everything since look tame, Vietnam, Watergate, and on. Never in my life have I been as alarmed as I am now. The number of civilization ending technologies are proliferating at an accelerating pace. Nuclear is just one. AI is all over the news but is a wild card or maybe a threat multiplier. How about CRSPR "at home" as the experts claim possible? Cameras everywhere that will ultimately track every movement we make. Democracy itself is in peril with an uncertain outcome. Once lost, it's not coming back any time soon. That is my biggest concern.
Since the advent of nuclear weapons and other high-tech weapon systems (oh sorry, “defense systems”), I think humanity has objectively been in a uniquely precarious time.
What differentiates this level of alarm from the naysaying ‘oh every generation always feels this way’ is that the technologies of warfare and particularly the unknown unknowns as it pertains to AI (whether generalized or not) place us closer than ever to the possibility of extinction.
Also whether the climate change is manmade or part of a natural cycle (doubtful) is irrelevant - the refugee displacement is going to be catastrophic if we even survive that long. Indonesia alone - you’re looking at a bil plus on the move to escape!
Whether we off ourselves or not - gaia will still be here and will survive our shenanigans and a new cycle of life will begin anew.
Meh!
1st, everyone has felt that way, just USA: indigenous wars; revolutionary war; civil war; great depression; Cuban missile crises, etc... But it is all relative. Most of us give no fucks and can have no empathy for any times before we are adult enough aware.
Those too young for being aware during the Cold War, or hell 9/11, feel ALL IS LOST. But study history, or live long enough... same shit different day
See also this (gift article): https://wapo.st/46D8wKD
As if Ukraine weren't enough, we've got the Gaza hellscape (and the potential for it to become to Biden what the I̶r̶a̶q̶i̶ Iranian hostage crisis was to Carter) and Trump's persistent popularity despite all evidence of his criminal venality. I'm pretty fucking alarmed.
If you regard the looming collapse of our civilization (we're talking a civilization made up of 8 billion people, 8 billion individual fates) as Precarity, then yes, things are more precarious (precarious on a far more massive scale) than ever.
Homo sapiens has had a few close calls in the distant past, but didn't even perceive them as close calls since no awareness of the situation beyond the local group.
As for being sufficiently alarmed, I was somewhat alarmed 20-30 years ago, back when I hallucinated that something could be done. Now that I realize the folly of such thinking, I figure what's the point of alarm? And what reason do we have to be concerned about the fate of homo sapiens as a whole?
As the saying goes: Relax, everything's out of control.
I agree with every point of this. The “relax” part is the part I’m struggling to do.
Before I address your question, let me use this open thread for a language peeve: If I never see the word "iconic" again it'll be too soon. This word has been tested to destruction & beyond in recent years. It's even worse than "amazing" & "awesome".
Legend
Yes, Vladimir Putin has been thoroughly "hitlerized" (John Mearsheimer's term) by Western media. This process is needed to quell dissent, to intimidate people afflicted by wrongthink who might have doubts about the murderous & ruinous Ukraine war & believe the US should at least talk with the guy.
Seems to me Putin has acted with great restraint & could even be accused of having been far too trusting about US motives & intentions.
Erdogan is a crafty old reactionary fox & I always doubt his motives, but a major war just across the Black Sea is not in Turkey's interests so it was quite right of him to organize the negotiations.
The fact that Washington sabotaged them ought to tell us everything we need to know about who Really wanted this war at all costs. It wasn't Russia.
Just a question: I realize you live in Turkish & might find it natural to write "Türkiye". But English has always spelled it Turkey (just as it says Leghorn not Livorno, Munich not München). Erdogan asked the world to write Türkiye just as the Ivory Coast asked the whole world a few decades ago to write Côte d'Ivoire. In a diplomatic note fine, but it still looks weird to me.
Exactly. We are overloaded with vast amounts of information about places and events often far away and out of our control, added to misinformation i feel we are often pushed into panic mode. If one looks at history, including climate and disease, we are better off than say the middle ages, we could do with news on progress made in our present and recent times. Right now its all bad news and complaining. To me, focus on your local community, get that right first.
The Middle Ages had the Black Death, so generally speaking most eras are better off than then.