Exploring Deeper Acceptance

 

Wolf Creek Dam, Kentucky

"Our supercultures are disembodied narratives that long ago departed any semblance of mutuality, intelligence, and the capacity to be corrected in the ways we have been taught to expect or desire. Today, we live in mini-worlds where non-people (i.e. Nonhuman Corporate Collectives, Corporations, Governments, and so on) regularly make decisions based upon criteria that have nothing to do with nature, our lives, our needs, or our humanity. The ‘bodies’ that make the decisions we will be subject to are completely disconnected from our actual context (nature), our lives... and the standing possibilities of intelligence." ~ Darin Stephenson

Last time, I really wanted to include a post I came across, but due to the Rhyd Wildermuth piece, I didn't feel that I had more room for this piece. What Darin Stephenson is pointing out above is our lack of agency. While I don't mind reading long posts, I realize that most people don't have time to read lengthy posts which is why the TL;DR abbreviation became so popular. As a result, I generally try to keep my articles to a reasonable length (which is admittedly quite subjective). Some of my more recent entries have been a tad bit on the long side, so this one I shall try to keep a bit shorter. Here's another post I want to highlight which comes to us courtesy of Erik Lindberg (of Resilience.org fame):

Money For Nothing and Your Dopamine For Free

"A day or two ago, I wondered what it would be like to journal openly on Facebook about personal troubles and my attempt to address them. When this idea popped into my head, I felt the first genuine excitement that I’ve had in a while. Great, let’s get going, right?

Well, I’m not going to. But I do want to take some time to explain why, using some non-personal reflections on addiction. I mean they are personal in that they come from or through my head, but they won’t reference my life directly.

Addiction is a tricky concept and there truly is no single agreed-upon definition, though there are plenty that seem pretty close, give or take and exclusion or inclusion and some other points that may or may not be minor. What I can say with confidence is that everyone feels awful sometimes. For reasons having to do with things like circumstance, background, or brain chemistry, some people feel awful a lot, and some people feel awful more infrequently.

In either case, we look for ways to relieve the awful feelings. It turns out that many of the substances and activities that provide immediate and intense relief, have an equally powerful dark-side. The relief is temporary and the feelings may be even more awful after the relief wears off. Many of these substances and activities are quite harmful and difficult to stop using or doing for a cluster of reasons.

We can all name off a bunch of these substances and activities without much thought, because they are truly harmful and they create more problems than relief, often even in the short term. But the quest for immediate relief runs through our culture in a way that is more prevalent, cheap, and intense than, perhaps, any culture in history. Or if any other civilizations rival the power and energy “we” put into quick and easy relief, they didn’t last for a long time.

It's not just the internet, but the internet and its many offshoots are highly representative of this quest for immediate relief and highly involved in its dissemination. A couple of years ago, IBM had an ad campaign promising to build a “smart planet.” At the time, I thought we should consider a distinction between smart and wise. The extremely smart whiz kids (for there is something childish at play) of Silicon Valley have built an entire world view and a powerful infrastructure around the values of immediacy, never enough, and never too much and they have set out to make everything bigger, faster, quicker, brighter, more vivid, easier, more convenient, and easier to access. Smart stuff, no doubt.

Step away from all this wizardry which bombards us day and night and it isn’t hard to see the foolishness in this arms race mentality which, ironically, also ignores the law of “supply and demand.” If it is everywhere, it isn’t worth much. Thus the rather desperate arms race to keep creating “value” constantly lost in the excess. Thus also lost on these child-geniuses who entice many of our “best and brightest” to join their smarty-pants project are the values of delayed gratification, of waiting with growing anticipation, of just wondering without an immediate answer, of enjoying and appreciating what you have (very bad for business), of awe, even of being bored and inventing a game or just looking at things slowly.

In the internet and digital age’s self-advertisements, of which there are many, the belief that one should never have to suffer a moment of pain, discomfort, or even boredom are almost always there, at the center. One of my favorite examples of this mentality was a cover story emblazoned on Time Magazine about 15 years ago: “Can Google Solve Death?” I hope not.

What has generally passed as wisdom, in contrast, is a skepticism towards the new, big, fast, and shiny, and an appreciation of the simple, small, and slow, along side an acceptance that it is the finite nature of life that gives it so much poignant value (supply and demand, again). Talk to teachers, therapists, and employers, and you will see true fear about what our culture of micro-addiction (not to mention the big, deadly whoppers) and what it is doing to our children.

One of the few places that this sort of wisdom does set the agenda, it seems to me, is an AA meeting or something similar, as well as a number of (but not all) spiritual practices. Those who have mastered sober living, often after a dangerous foray into the opposite, live according to this kind of wisdom. To return to the theme of feeling awful, the cure, which we might equally refer to as sober living and wise living, seems to involve figuring out something quite difficult, especially for digital people: that the best ways not to feel awful over a long period of time generally doesn’t involve quick, easy, and immediate relief. Equally important, and a good segue to my own decision, is that relief generally comes from within while external gratification and validation is undependable, at best, which is not to deny the equally important value of social connection.

The reason why I felt excited by journaling on Facebook, I have to admit if I am to be honest with myself and anyone still reading, is that I would get the instant gratification of “likes” and “comments,” as well as lots of external validation. I appreciate all the people who referred to my openness as brave. Some very nice things that did help me push through an otherwise hard day were said by people who were showing true human care and I am very grateful for that. I have nothing but appreciation for the support. But to be honest, it wasn’t really brave, because, for whatever reason, being open and vulnerable isn’t really all that hard for me (while some things, in contrast, scare me nearly to death). I don’t know if this is genetic, learned, or maybe work-arounds that I discovered in the face of social anxiety. They are qualities that I appreciate about myself, but true bravery involves doing something that feels scary and is difficult.

I also owe genuine thanks to a number of people who pointed out that my exciting project risked providing external validation when recovery, sober or wise living, requires that I develop a much stronger capacity for internal validation. So, I may share an occasional word of wisdom that I learn along the way, but I’m not going to play a character on Facebook who bravely lays himself bare however difficult and painful he makes it seem. That’s the kind of activity I need expressly to avoid.

This leads to a final thought on addiction. The problem with quick-acting, often harmful substances and activities isn’t just the harm they provide and the cycle of self-destruction they lead to. The problem, even in milder forms, is that they have a tendency to keep us from the more important lessons of wise living. You can, after all, live a well-managed life of complete “normalcy” based on constant novelty, instant gratification, and same-day delivery from ominously named Amazon “Fulfillment Centers.” Speaking for myself, at least, even though I have never been big on the particularly pronounced abundances of capitalism and “tech,” I also don’t think I have had much success in learning the lessons of wise living.

So I am going to sign off from this project, work on inner validation, and try to get my human connection in ways that may help foster this wise-living project that I want to figure out. I hope I am able to see and encounter along my path many of the generous and kind people who have reached out to me at a difficult moment."

This post addresses so many topics in such a short amount of time that I found it quite poignant. It brings about a reminder of our addiction to technology use that I've brought up many times (here and here and here and here and here and here) before and also tackles how change starts from within. Many people today have little realization as to just how addicted they are to technology and energy use (amongst other things). In fact, not only are many people unaware of how addicted to technology use they are, most are also unaware of how this is affecting their attention span as well.

What I want to get to here is deeper acceptance of the predicaments we face. Yes, there are many different responses one can make in the face of these predicaments, but what I am focusing on is the fact that none of those responses in isolation will solve any of the predicaments. I've pointed out how global unity is not a possibility, so a unified approach is also not forthcoming. This is what makes reaching acceptance so important, due to the fact that these are not problems with solutions. As long as we (collectively as a society) continue to ignore these predicaments by believing in fairy tales like electrification or other technological ideas (MEER, Solar Radiation Management, BECCS, DAC, Artificial Intelligence, etc.) which don't actually reduce overshoot but increase it instead, the existing predicaments will only worsen. As a side note, I have written about SRM, BECCS (BioEnergy with Carbon Capture and Storage), and DAC (Direct Air Capture) in previous articles which can be found by using the search feature at the top right of the page.

Some people think that technology such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) will provide ways to mitigate these predicaments. This actually demonstrates an appalling lack of logic, since more technology use cannot reduce overshoot (our technology use is the cause of overshoot). Art Berman once again explains why technology and innovation are the source of our issues, not the salvation of them. If anything, the only thing AI will be able to do is worsen conditions for life on this planet. Many of the same issues Art brings up are repeated by Gail Tverberg in this article which brings up our lack of agency (again) by pointing out how dissipative structures operate as I have repeatedly pointed out in this space myself many times.

Before I close out this article, keeping in mind my promise to keep it shorter than last week's entry, I want to bring a topic up which I haven't touched on yet. It's called Mysterianism, and it basically brings forth the possibility that we may never completely comprehend nature's mysteries, quote:

"The simplest and best argument for mysterianism is founded on evolutionary evidence. When we examine any other living creature, we understand immediately that its intellect is limited. Even the brightest, most curious dog is not going to master arithmetic. Even the wisest of owls knows nothing of the anatomy of the field mouse it devours. If all the minds that evolution has produced have bounded comprehension, then it’s only logical that our own minds, also products of evolution, would have limits as well. As Pinker has observed, “The brain is a product of evolution, and just as animal brains have their limitations, we have ours.” To assume that there are no limits to human understanding is to believe in a level of human exceptionalism that seems miraculous, if not mystical.

Mysterianism, it’s important to emphasize, is not inconsistent with materialism. The mysterians don’t suggest that what’s unknowable must be spiritual. They posit that matter itself has complexities that lie beyond our ken. Like every other animal on earth, we humans are just not smart enough to understand all of nature’s laws and workings."

It goes on to explain that it teaches us humility, one of the hallmarks of acceptance. What one will notice is that mysterianism brings back the concept of hyperobjects - something so large and/or complex that people find it extremely difficult or impossible to understand. Listening to and/or reading this article, A Conversation With Ross Anderson, will shed some further light on hyperobjects.

The one thing that is true about acceptance is that it makes life easier to cope with by helping to identify triggers which tend to lead us into traps. Acceptance allows us to devise proper coping skills to deal with those traps and how to ignore or otherwise disable the triggers. For instance, how often do you pop onto social media to share a picture of something with your friends or commiserate over a bad experience one of your friends had or just to simply bitch about life in general? Is there a way to cope with life without social media? Sure there is. Think back to before social media existed. This same "rewiring" of your mind will occur if you give up your cellphone or smartphone for a while. At first you will experience anxiety at not having that phone to rely on, but after a while you will realize that you never truly needed it in order to survive in the first place. The same thing will happen regardless of what the technology might be. The same thing will happen with other types of addictions as well, since what you are probably really searching for is a hit of dopamine. Your mind will adapt to the new reality and you will quit spending so much time doing things that weren't really necessary to begin with. Acceptance also makes life easier by having more realistic expectations of what the future will hold for us. When one is still in the bargaining stage, he or she will hope (hopium) for non-existent "solutions" to save the day when in reality, no such thing is forthcoming. Many people spend eons of time, money, and energy looking for "an easier way" to reach acceptance. Once one gives up the illusion of an easier way, gives up the hopium, and quits spending time in the bargaining stage (nature doesn't negotiate), acceptance can be reached and wisdom found. This is where the magic happens, because this is where you truly begin to Live Now!