Live Now

 

"If you’re in your last 10 percent of time with someone you love, keep that fact in the front of your mind when you’re with them and treat that time as what it actually is: Precious." ~ Tim Urban

I am about to post the 1000th "Live Now" post in the Prepping for NTHE Group today. It is special for many reasons. Most importantly is how precious the time we all have left is. Another journey awaits me soon and I am poignantly aware of how important this time spent out in nature is, and I eagerly look forward to getting away from the city for awhile. My outlook is tempered by the fact that one never knows when the last trip will be, so it is imperative to treasure and cherish these days of leisure.

I have been feverishly adding new scientific peer-reviewed literature to these pages this week, with almost 300 new articles added. 55 articles were added to the Climate Change and Collapse file alone! My efforts to get the message out to Live Now [<<<link to Spirituality Resources file] have never been more important. So many people procrastinate the things they want to do, often putting nonsensical items in front of more important endeavors. You'll notice that I have also updated most of the articles I have written here with some of these new links with yet more incontrovertible evidence of our collective trajectory.

The ethos behind the concept of "Live Now" is to focus on doing things dear to a person's heart and soul rather than be chained to a desk, job, or other occupation inconsistent with a person's passions. An excellent example was my procrastination of a trip to Alaska I wanted to take. I had dreamt of going to Alaska and traveling along the Al-Can (Alaska) Highway for more than two decades before I finally decided I needed to quit putting it off and just make the commitment to go. I had thrown all kinds of obstacles and excuses in my way for so many years which appeared to make sense at the time but had kept me from my dream. In 2016 I realized that conditions were changing so rapidly that if I didn't go to see Alaska as it was, I would not get to see that particular version of it. Climate change, wildfires, tree decline, permafrost thaw, glacial melt, and many other predicaments are changing the very nature of what Alaska is today. Taking this trip was iconic and changed me as a person. So many people get worried about climate change or other predicaments that we really have little if any agency over, and people tend to develop attachments to certain outcomes or goals as a result. Many of these goals or results are unrealistic or impossible to attain, which can be seriously distressing. Understanding what IS and what IS NOT possible, feasible, and attainable is important and working on the ones that are attainable and that also make one happy and content is important.

My suggestions on what to do are not things which necessarily have an end goal of solving anything. As I have pointed out in this blog, we are suffering from predicaments. They don't have solutions; they have outcomes. Attempting to solve them is the counterintuitive mistake that many people make because it only wastes time, energy, and resources. What happens by doing so is kicking the can further down the road and never actually solving anything. In other words, what most people are attempting is nothing more than chasing an illusion which cannot be. My suggestions of things we can do are activities that people are passionate about doing. By focusing on impossible fantasies such as most "solutions" to predicaments that cannot be solved, all we are doing is making said predicaments WORSE. Focus instead on doing things you are passionate about and love to do. THOSE are the things we can and should do. Anything less than that can only produce unhappiness or unfulfillment. Since we suffer from denial of reality and lack agency in many of these predicaments to begin with, we tend to suffer from the "Grand Illusion" and optimism bias that we have abilities which in reality we do not have. For example, take a look at this post asking whether we can save species from extinction. Right now, in today's conditions with today's climate and with the power of fossil fuels and the resources available to us, it appears that maybe we can. But this is an illusion we have chosen to create in our minds that in reality does not exist. These are the challenges - we must come to accept who we are as both individuals and as a species - and who we are not. Here is yet another challenging post by Peter Russell which points out the reality. Are we human beings, or are we human doings? 

I answer some important questions which have been raised in the past regarding the Live Now ethos here in my article, Why Am I Still Writing? People often ask me what we can do in an effort to transition to a more sustainable lifestyle; to a different path for society. I answer this partly in this article here; and provide more in this three-part article here.

I also answer a question posed regarding how we can get society to realize precisely where we are as a species and that civilization is unsustainable in my article about how we lack agency (listed above as well); but also explain things we should want to hold onto. All we can really do is keep telling these stories to others and spreading facts rather than fiction (Fantasies, Myths, and Fairy Tales). One other important aspect is to NOT promote the very things destroying us discussed in this post here. Engineer John Doyle adds a rather poignant description of precisely where we are at and what we can and cannot do.

If this is the first article you've read here, I encourage you to read my first post on what this blog is all about to get acquainted with where we are as a species and the predicaments we face. You can also read the About Me post to find out more about who I am and why I am writing these articles.

I have also added a brand new file, Invasive Species, to allow for a new category of articles which is increasingly causing a myriad of issues and previously did not truly fit into any other category. I previously assigned many of these articles to the Agriculture & Food and Water Security file or the Species and Biodiversity Loss file.

Hopefully these updates find you well and in good spirits and that you are enjoying the beautiful spring here in the Northern Hemisphere or a colorful autumn if you are in the Southern Hemisphere.

If you've gotten this far, congratulations! I have added a new article in my page section, Why Should We "Live Now"? which goes into even more detail and provides more information about what we can do as collapse proceeds.