I admit that I grew up in an unusual age where boomers like me inherited a financial situation that allowed most of us to thrive economically through a stable work environment, and to expect a period of security during retirement. Totally unusual because for most of history, for whatever reasons, you worked until you couldn’t. Life expectancy was shorter and retirement was something only the wealthy elites could even entertain. As Dylan sang, ‘Times they are a changing.’ Generations born after the boomers do not have those expectations anymore and the relatively short period assumptions (last 60 years) tied to work and retirement are dissolving.
My genration also created the awful global messes in governments, economies, and environmental problems that we now find ourselves suffering through. The genrations since mine are seeing the reaities play out, and many people today aged 20-55 are recognizing that the assumptions of the boomer generation are no longer valid. And they are changing their lifestyles to match new realities. Those that aren’t, and still live with the asusmptions of the ‘good life,’ are finding reality getting disconcertingly stranger for them. As Blogger, Pete Williams says in a recent article, The Myth That Made Everything Feel Safe. It worked for 60 years — now, it’s starting to break. “Because the idea that you can reach a point where everything is secure — where the system carries you indefinitely, where the work is done and the risk disappears — was never a permanent feature of reality. Clocking out at 60 or 65 and coasting for 25–30 years was a short-lived anomaly, and it’s coming to an end. {For genrations after the Boomers], there is no rest. There is only adjustment.”
The greatest enemy we fight at the moment is quite simple – it’s DESPAIR. The belief that nothing will change. And that the hierarchies of wealth and power that drive global systems, especially the media, will just take us through the gates of hell regardless of what is happening just to maintain profits and control. I’ve been ready to rise above all the distracting noise for a while. It’s a reason I began this blog. It’s the reason I don’t dwell on technological change alone for a sustianable future. The global anthropogenic systems are so broken for our needs, there is no fixing them. I think people everywhere see this and that what leads to this despair. It’s also why I have been ‘preaching’ for literally years now that the solution is a compltely new system that is in OUR hands to create. And that comes down to values we choose to champion that promote our, and the planets, ability to thrive.
Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme, in their book The Universe Story (1992), issued a simple prhase that brings our boomer assumpotions home too disquitetingly, “The earth is a one-time endowment.” In a nutshell, it explains how our ‘Raid on Resouces’ that began in earnest withs steam technology during the early 1800s continued unabted to the present day. The assumption that we could use natural resources without consequence for ever. Earth created those natural resources through billions of years of continuous geo-ecological processes. We have managed within just 200 years to reach limits to that mindset. Yes, there is still a lot left, but exponential function couped with our human population and increased consumption is becoming all too real, even if we ignore it (see link for more on exponential limits). In general, the boomers focssed on financial security as the source of life security and by linked asumption, happiness.
The boomers were part of the largest middle class in recorded human history. Taking away the fears and stress of dire poverty made them feel safer as their standard of living rose. But at what cost? They stopped asking the hard questions about quality of life and how integrated community (that they let slide) gave them immeasurable benefits. Sadly, having ‘enough money in the bank’ provides a safety net of sorts in this economic climate, has served only to isolate people, commodify everything, and create increases in cunsumptive habits that are completley unsustainable.
As blogger Steve Owens, writes, “Economic growth, at the bottom of it, is growth in consumption. Someone has to actually use the output for the number to mean anything real. Follow the chain far enough and it lands on a hard stop: finite bodies, finite population, finite resources, therefore finite consumption, therefore finite growth. Not eventually finite in some distant theoretical sense. Finite now, in principle, the same way a container has a maximum volume regardless of how convinced you are that you can keep pouring… [The boomer age was] one long stretch of high sustained growth in the historical record, the mid-twentieth-century boom everyone now treats as normal, was produced by two world wars and the reconstruction that followed. Not the rule. The anomaly. When real growth cannot keep pace with the returns the system demands, the economy does not slow down and admit the wall is there. It generates numbers anyway. Asset values climb, GDP climbs, valuations climb, while less and less of that climbing tracks any actual increase in consumption by actual bodies. That is the untethering. The economy keeps producing the appearance of growth by decoupling its measurements from the physical constraint underneath them.”
We have come so far in this material-consumption worldview, we seem unable to fathom a good life without conspicuous consumption. In my five items list (if you are new to this blog, start at this link) I address how we can move past this to a new sustainable worldview. item number one: Mindfulness. Item number two: New Economics. Item number three: New Metrics: Redefine what sustainable success means. Item number four: Food resiliency. Item number five: Energy resiliency. While I say that all five are crucial, number one is critical for our transformation. It involves all the factors we don’t measure with our economy – quality of life, and hence the quality inherent in the other four items that give us a sustainable future.
Blogger Mona Lazar talks “… about this multi-decade study from Harvard concerning human happiness. They tracked hundreds of people for their entire lives, looking at everything from blood pressure to wealth. And the conclusion was almost absurdly simple: the strongest predictor of long-term health and genuine human fulfillment is the quality of our relationships. I bet you already knew that. Especially when you don’t have those good soul-connected people in your life, right? You feel that even deeper – how much it means to just have someone who gets you and someone who cares. Preferably in the same person, but it’s not a must. They were the ones who had a why. A reason to keep going – whether it was a loved one they hoped to see again, a book they needed to finish writing, or a deep spiritual purpose, or whatever they made up in their imagination as being of vital importance to them.”
So it is back to this idea of connectivity, but a barrier is what we understand as connectivity. This idea has been so warped within the last 70 years, especially in Western Societies, it can be hard to comprehend how to build a real community. I know that here in Colorado, within my ‘middle-class’ neighborhoods, it may take an ‘existential-crisis’ to get people out of their comfortable complacency apathy and kick the butts of the ‘logical idealists’ into action to support the rest of us wanting to create the changes needed.
To Be Continued ………………
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