Feb. 20, 2022: Sunshine and Roses?

No, it’s not all sunshine and roses around here. Not all the time. As Alan says, sometimes we scare ourselves with our own audacity. What the heck are we doing? We’re too old for this s*#t! Especially at 3 in the morning when the demons of doubt come out to play with our amygdala. Negativity bias is alive and well here at 4Fords. Will the road collapse with a mud slide and leave us trapped in the canyon for weeks? Will we get the well working? Will we stay healthy long enough to enjoy this beautiful place?

Amazingly, the angst doesn’t last long. By morning, I am excited by a sense that I am taking my personal freedom in hand: a wonderful, fragile, and sacred privilege here in the first world. And that freedom can be as frightening as it is exhilarating. Too often our choices move toward security and safety, unreliable values that, while fine in and of themselves, are in no way guaranteed, no matter how much we work, save, or eat healthy, and which seem to breed their own unique brand of worries.

I do not want to live within that sphere of anxiety. I’d rather take my comfort in reflections in the water or in the funny rocks that lie all over our land. In watching Clair meditate with us in the mornings. To hell with security.

To change the subject, do you know Mark Boyle, The Moneyless Man? He’s a writer, who first wrote a bestseller about living without money: The Moneyless Man: A Year of Freeconomic Living (2010).  Recently, he published a book about living without technology: The Way Home: Tales from a life without technology (2019). It’s a wonderful examination of living in Ireland without electricity and running water. (How do you write a book without a computer in this day and age? With a pencil!) He’s an inspiration and I recommend the book if you like that kind of thing. I personally love much of technology…I say this as I am listening to my Eufy vacuuming the upstairs. (It runs even when there’s no power!) Not to mention my Kindles or laptop!

But I don’t believe new tech, no matter how cool and innovative, can magically solve all our human-made problems: instead, it tends to solve one thing by creating an even bigger problem that will have to be solved sometime in the future. Witness the reversal of the Chicago River or the barely functioning New Orleans levees, the silting of dams, the centralizing of the electrical grid, and climate change, to mention a few. Another great book that tackles this issue is Under the White Sky (2021) by Elizabeth Kolbert. I think technological advances need to be considered for their future costs, too.

Then there is the “Jevon’s Paradox“: we think that having a new thing like an LED lightbulb will save us all on electricity, but, instead it just makes us put up more lights! The more efficient a tech, the more we use it! An “inefficient efficiency”(Ministry for the Future, Kim Stanley Robinson, 2020).

As Doc Brown said in Back to the Future: “The future isn’t written!” So let’s enjoy it now.