If my preceding post (and the others like it) is of any interest to you whatsoever, please go read “Waiting for the Big One” by Charles Eisenstein. I’ve just skimmed it and will be returning directly for a closer look, but I wanted to get this up.
[Reading more...] Oh, yes. If you read nothing else all day, read this essay. I wonder if I’ve been channelling the guy. Here’s a sample paragraph:
The foregoing doom-and-gloom scenario might seem familiar in tone if not in details, but consider that it may be not just The End but a Beginning as well, a birthing crisis that will propel us into a new age based on a different sense of self. This is not to say we can sit back and wait for the birthing to happen. Despite the inevitability of our gathering crisis, the seemingly futile efforts of generations of activists to avert it are extremely important. If you are such a person, facing down despair to tackle impossibly huge problems, take heart that your work is not in vain. While it is true that no effort at renewable energy, wastewater recycling, local currency, wetlands preservation, or reform of any aspect of society is going to avert catastrophe, these efforts are sowing seeds for the planetary renewal that can happen after the present regime collapses, after the addict has hit bottom upon the exhaustion of his very last technical fix.
Eisenstein is optimistic in the same way I am. Now I’ll have to go read his books.
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In the end, really, it comes down to living one’s own life in the best way possible. There have always been pessimists, there have always been optimists; there have always been millenarians, there have always been realists; there have always been thinkers of big thoughts and thinkers of little thoughts. At the level of human fundamentals (not technical gizmos) nothing in our age is very different from anything that came before us. The great problems have all been faced, over and over again, never solved. How could they be? But whatever you or I might call ourselves, or whatever thoughts we might think on any of these subjects, what matters is what we actually do with our lives. Of course there’s many good ways of living a life, and you can even do several such good things in the same lifetime. But, I say in thunder, Live! Life and more life is the sovereign cure. Live or Die (as Bellow said to Sexton), but don’t poison everything.