Rest In Peace, Planet Earth.
Every day, there are more accumulated stories about how messed up everything is. Inflation and economic anxiety, winter plague time, climate and extinction, possible World War III, catastrophe, and general “We’re all going to die” messages.
When bad news dominated the headlines, we are likely to get exhausted and tune it out. Or, we get anxious, and it affects us deleteriously.
It is painful, but necessary, to find a functioning way to process, and actually benefit from the hard truth.
The messages are coming fast and furious, but are we responding in a normal way? The problem is there is no “normal” way. We are at a unique crossroads in history that is truly unprecedented.
We have never had such a full global interconnection, yet alienation. We have never had eight billion people. We have never had a global-scale industrial revolution that warmed the planet until recently. We have never had an international food and health system so rigid, yet so fragile before. We have never had things like technologies that both enable us to connect, but can also divide us into tribes.
These tribes are profitable to some, but disastrous to the larger community.
Human beings live with change most of our lives
With all of this acknowledged, it is still important to remember that change is fundamental to existence. We are a flexible and resilient species. This reality can both favor us with some advantages, and, yet, trick us into complacency in other situations.
That is, we are complex but adaptable.
Although accelerated change is happening at break-neck speed, it also feels too big, slow, and unwieldy to comprehend at the scales with which we all live.
We are seeing rolling waves of events and their related consequences slowly moving in some places, and furiously eroding the surrounding social (and sometimes actual) landscape in other places.
There is no “right, or correct”, human psychological response we can all tap into. But we do have our social strengths if we gather them.
There are some social aspects of our species to learn from.
When human beings go through cataclysmic events, it is nothing like what is portrayed in Hollywood movies. People do not chaotically run screaming all over the place, nor do they grab a superhero and set them on the task of saving the day.
Our fantasy reading of that sort of behavior comes from wanting escapism, heroism, shared tribal mythology, and a social binary we need to learn to identify as holding us back.
Personal observations
Having been through earthquakes and volcanic eruptions myself, what I have observed is that people carry on. They do the mundane tasks of their lives. If they congregate in groups at all, it is not to say “We’re all going to die,” It is usually to say some variation of these four words: “How are you doing?”
The question is a connecting one. It displays that even in hard times, what people instinctively want, and offer, is a concern for each other.
Growing food is not just a matter of survival, it is a matter of social connection. When we turned to large industrial-scale food production dependent upon fossil fuels we lost much of this.
Today our best seeds of hope are in creative and innovative ways to grow more and waste less. Green and walkable cities that sequester carbon and retain water are one way.
We could do more. Let’s look at another piece of our trash: our trash.
Questioning leadership and authority is another huge step we all must take. When someone asks you to favor one leader over another, you have to try to comprehend their motivation. We have to learn to see past short-term gains in power and look at long-term gains for humanity and sustainability.
Equality and justice are also key to finding our balance. All of our above-listed woes are not “the sky is falling “ doom-saying. They are true opportunities to realize that exploitation, or abuse, of people or the planet, is a social condition we can now begin to outgrow.
Our human history on Earth precedes us, but the changes we must make are truly unprecedented.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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White Fragility: Talking to White People About Racism | Escape the “Act Like a Man” Box | The Lack of Gentle Platonic Touch in Men’s Lives is a Killer | What We Talk About When We Talk About Men |
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Photo credit: Sudan Ouyang on Unsplash