The First Step to Behavioral Change

 

Overlook on Whiteface Veterans Memorial Highway

What is the first step to behavioral change? The first step is seeing and admitting that there is an issue that needs to be addressed - acceptance. Prior to acceptance, denial, anger, depression, and bargaining are the stages of grief that one goes through upon realizing that something has been lost. The items that most people frequently associate with grief and loss are addiction and death. So, it shouldn't be very surprising when one understands that our addiction to technology use (see this and this) is just as deadly as any other addiction.

The one thing that most people do rather than reach acceptance is to continue going back and forth through the stages of grief and/or occasionally plateau on the bargaining stage for an extended period of time. Once it becomes obvious that this won't accomplish anything and when it becomes too painful for the person to continue the stages of grief, only then will they come to acceptance in order to move forward. Establishing new behavioral patterns can be rather difficult, which is why many people often experience relapse. Understanding that external change can only come from internal change is key. 

It is now a given that the systems surrounding us have reached tipping points and are now in the process of changing how they function. Some of the systems supply our energy and resources to us and some of them use those resources along with renewable resources to provide our food and necessary ecosystem services. It's beyond late to try to address the predicaments we face but there are still many people who think we can somehow avoid the worst. Of course, from my perspective, we're already here at the peak of civilization and it's only going to get worse from here on out. I just don't see an ability to avoid the inevitable outcome of collapse and die-off, and I see potential survival after a potential bottleneck as something very few souls will embrace once they truly comprehend what that actually entails.

Understanding why addiction is so prevalent within the confines of civilization is important. Many talk about "gateway drugs" for instance. I don't think there is such a thing - I think that we have gateway conditions that lead to drug use which then often turn into drug abuse. This then leads to dependence, either psychological or physical, known as addiction. These gateway conditions are actually a part of civilization known as trauma. Some people do not have a full set of coping skills in their tool box to deal with this trauma, so drugs and/or other addictions become their way of coping with life's ups and downs. 

How long does it take for someone to become addicted? Some drugs are so addictive that one time is all it takes. But we must face the fact that drugs are only one type of addiction. Substance abuse is widespread and not limited to drugs. Technology use, on the other hand, is a whole different matter. Nobody can see it for what it is because everyone within civilization is using it and we are utterly dependent upon it. However, it wasn't always this way as Tom Murphy points out here that I originally included in my last article. What this means as we fall down the Seneca Cliff is that we are in for a very nasty withdrawal from said technology use.

Withdrawal symptoms in a physical sense can be anywhere from mild to deadly. Most people rarely if ever think about what will happen when they lose electrical power. Get the power inverter fired up or the generator started and go buy some gasoline. Of course, if this is just a small, local outage, then getting gas somewhere outside of the neighborhood is no big deal. But nowadays, small, local outages are becoming more rare as larger local and/or regional outages become more common. This means that not only gas will be in short supply if one can even buy it, but also most other supplies, including food and water and possibly even toilets that work. 

Now, for those who are completely off-grid, this may not apply to you at your property. But right there is where it ends - the rest of civilization utterly depends on the grid, meaning that everything you routinely purchase and/or utilize outside of your property will either be unavailable now or in short order. Remember the COVID-19 pandemic, where the supply chains all broke down and items you were used to purchasing were no longer available, many for weeks, months, and even years afterwards. Some items never came back because the businesses or companies which manufactured or wholesaled them went out of business or otherwise quit selling certain products. 

In a new article from Dave Pollard (part of a series he is working on about the signs of collapse), he explains how increasing security is attempting to protect frontline workers from citizen outrage caused by collapse. Perhaps today's society is finally beginning to realize that civilization doesn't really serve most people any longer the way the convenient cultural narratives claim. In this article from Justin McAffee, he explains precisely what happened with Cahokia, the Mississippian Mound Builders. He shows how they opted out of the system that no longer served them. This is also what will happen as time moves forward now with what we know as modernity (our current civilization). Art Berman takes this a step further in this article by demonstrating how it is our very thinking that got us into this mess, as I have explained many times. However, another important item that Art explains is one where Justin misunderstands the scenario. In Justin's article, he describes how agriculture doesn't require civilization. Art shows us how that was how it was in the past, but now no longer will be possible, quote: 

"A rarely acknowledged threat is the breakdown of the stable climate that made agriculture — and civilization — possible. Hunter-gatherers in the late Pleistocene began experimenting with planting seeds and managing wild plants as early as 23,000 years ago, but the unstable climate made this early cultivation unreliable. Agriculture only became viable with the onset of the Holocene, which provided 12,000 years of relatively stable, predictable weather (see Figure 4). That stability is now breaking down. Weather has become more chaotic, extremes more frequent, and the foundations of our food systems — rainfall, soil fertility, and growing seasons — are unraveling.

Reductionist models that focus solely on emissions or temperature targets overlook the deeper crisis: the destabilization of the Earth systems that made civilization possible. Those who claim rising CO2 will boost crop yields ignore this reality. Without a stable climate, there will be no reliable crops — fertilizer won’t change that."

Notice the constant use of certain narratives that tend to make the predicaments we face sound more optimistic than they really are. In this sense, I shall provide yet another article pointing to this phenomenon, this time with the "abundance" narrative. Ultimately, all these narratives are really nothing more than denial of reality. They may sound great and people ignorant of the actual reality might buy into them, but they are nothing more than illusions - popular narratives which don't hold up under scrutiny. Speaking of which, Eliot Jacobson has a new article out addressing this very issue.

One last issue that I want to point out before wrapping things up for today. People need to understand that we are not in control here, and that nature is. The mass extinction unfolding all around us is speeding out of control, and it will take us with it. Take a look at the parallels and speed of the current mass extinction versus the largest-known one in history. 

The bottom line here is that the first step to behavioral change is to admit the reality to ourselves - acceptance is required. Once that has been achieved, the denial, anger, depression, blaming, and bargaining can be seen exactly for what they are - non-acceptance - which doesn't change any of the facts surrounding these predicaments. One can get mad or sad about gravity, deny the existence of gravity, blame someone or something else for it, or even try to negotiate with it. But the fact that gravity exists will continue unfazed by any of that, making those items an exercise in futility. See this article about bargaining for the unmasking of the truth.

On a more positive note, there are things to look forward to. Here two entries which allude to this, the Blue Ridge Discovery Center and Mount Airy! Enjoy!