Through the Prism: Suspect Everyone, Worry Constantly, Struggle On

In the informal bits of chronicling this pandemic experience that I've thrown into my posts since March, I've failed to yet mention that it's become common for people to refer to anything from before March as "the before times." As in, that's how we used to do things before we had to wear masks everywhere, avoid people, and try not to go anywhere unnecessary. When we didn't have to work and school from home and social distance. In the before times we went to the zoo once a month on average, but we don't feel it's a safe activity anymore. That kind of thing. It's catchy and helpful.

I wonder if we'll see this election as a similar turning point.

Recent headlines include Covid infection rates once again breaking records, including in my community. And some measure of resurgence in parts of the world that had been containing it. And it seems immunity doesn't last.

A couple months ago a Facebook friend asked us to comment with six-word memoirs about the pandemic. My response:

Suspect everyone. Worry constantly. Struggle on.

Others were more specific to personal experiences. It was prompted by a piece in The New York Times. While mine is vague and general, it gives a sense of daily life.

Today I should be doing work tasks and other things, but can't seem to muster the motivation. I've kept the election a distant thought until now so as not to be paralyzed by worry about it, but not today. Or, as I just put it on Facebook:

The world apparently assumes I should try to be productive today when all I can seem to manage is wallowing in election anxiety.

Earlier I took a look at my post Election Thoughts from four years ago that captured what I was thinking after the current president was elected. It feels entirely relevant and somewhat prescient. I hope I don't have to repeat the experience.

I've been generally doing a really good job lately keeping anxiety under control and engaging with life, when I had some troubles earlier in the year. Just not today.

One of the ways I stayed distracted from worry was a good Halloween Saturday. We ruled out trick-or-treating for the kids and thought it would be a bummer of a holiday, but we ended up having a good time--even with me working four hours in the middle of the day. We started with a trip to a pumpkin farm and ended with lots of jack-o-lantern carving. We managed some faux trick-or-treating at home with the live-in honorable uncle in the basement, plus cool decorations he provided. And my wife took the kids to our church's socially distanced trunk-or-treat while I was at work, where the older got to show off the King George III from Hamilton costume that she was in the middle of making for him.

Here he is with his younger brother, in kitty costume, hiding under his robe:

I captured this from our drive to the farm:

I can't remember what led to this, but in the car this morning [Older] shared, "God loves money at least a little bit along with loving people. Because we have cars and roads and buildings and all kinds of other things that cost a lot of money, and God made people able to make all those things. Otherwise we would just have covered wagons and things like that."

"Yeah, but when that was all we had, covered wagons cost a lot of money," rebutted [Younger]. "And they still had to be made in factories so there was money then too. So you have to think about that, [Older]." His tone made clear he was proud to have outwitted his older brother.

We discussed the price of covered wagons for a bit, along with horses and similar, and how the value of items changes over time and circumstances. Then we returned to [Older]'s original topic of God and money. I shared my view, that what's most important to God is that humanity shares our money and possessions so that everyone is taken care of, that God doesn't care about the money but about us taking care of each other. [Younger] quickly and enthusiastically agreed with me, so I assured him they are free to have their own thoughts and don't just have to believe what I do.

[Older] then said he thinks what matters most is nature, that if we don't learn to do a better job taking care of nature all the people will die because we won't have the resources we need. Plants and oxygen and pollinators were a big part of the discussion at that point. That led to me introducing them to the idea of sustainability, that we don't have to always chose one thing or the other so long as we can find sustainable ways of borrowing from nature. That led to a dive into ecology and how interacting with one part of the ecosystem impacts other parts of it, that we're all connected and part of one big web.

Then [Older] informed us that trees have their brains in their roots and how his mind was blown that they're basically upside down compared to us. He explored the idea of classifying life into three categories: underground, air, and water.

I don't remember what turn we took from there, but the boys and I always seem to have our best conversations in the car. They have such curious, philosophical minds that bounce from one deep thought to the next, and that environment lets them delve deeply without distractions.

Speaking of pollinators, another mark against the year 2020 in the public consciousness has been the arrival of "murder hornets" to the U.S. Experts recently located and removed the first identified nest of them, so we'll have to see where things go from here. A thought I've had: Imagine a future in which murder hornets kill all the bees, so we have to rely on the hornets to do all the pollinating to keep our crops and plants alive. So there's that.

I thought that conversation a parent moment worth remembering, then right as I was composing it I came across this excellent read that articulates some of my values from it wonderfully.

Economics for the People
Against the capitalist creeds of scarcity and self-interest, a plan for humanity’s shared flourishing is finally coming into view

A basic truth is once again trying to break through the agony of worldwide pandemic and the enduring inhumanity of racist oppression. Healthcare workers risking their lives for others, mutual aid networks empowering neighbourhoods, farmers delivering food to quarantined customers, mothers forming lines to protect youth from police violence: we’re in this life together. We – young and old, citizen and immigrant – do best when we collaborate. Indeed, our only way to survive is to have each other’s back while safeguarding the resilience and diversity of this planet we call home.

As an insight, it’s not new, or surprising. Anthropologists have long told us that, as a species neither particularly strong nor fast, humans survived because of our unique ability to create and cooperate. ‘All our thriving is mutual’ is how the Indigenous scholar Edgar Villanueva captured the age-old wisdom in his book Decolonizing Wealth (2018). What is new is the extent to which so many civic and corporate leaders – sometimes entire cultures – have lost sight of our most precious collective quality.

This loss is rooted, in large part, in the tragedy of the private – this notion that moved, in short order, from curious idea to ideology to global economic system. It claimed selfishness, greed and private property as the real seeds of progress. Indeed, the mistaken concept many readers have likely heard under the name ‘the tragedy of the commons’ has its origins in the sophomoric assumption that private interest is the naturally predominant guide for human action. The real tragedy, however, lies not in the commons, but in the private. It is the private that produces violence, destruction and exclusion. Standing on its head thousands of years of cultural wisdom, the idea of the private variously separates, exploits and exhausts those living under its cold operating logic. . . .

In the modern world, more is actually less. Indeed, the costs of economic growth have begun to outpace their benefits, visible in the plunder of the environment and escalating inequality. We no longer need more, but rather better and more fairly distributed, in order to provide prosperity for all. Collectively, we produce and grow enough for every child, woman and man to have a good and dignified life wherever they live. As a world community, we know more and create more than we know how to process. It’s a huge accomplishment. We should celebrate and enjoy it together, rather than remain on the deplorable path of pitting one against the other in the race for ever more, one dying of too much, the other of too little.

And yet, our dominant economic systems continue to follow colonial extraction and brutal exclusion, in the process creating two organically related, existential problems: the perpetuation (and in some cases intensification) of poverty, and the violation of the biophysical limits of our planet. What a tragic irony that, in the early 21st century, higher education’s economics departments worldwide still instruct some of our brightest minds in simplistic economic models about the efficient allocation of scarce resources, rather than in how to sustainably build the good life based on an abundance of knowledge and resources. . . .

I wonder if the real tragedy of the private lies in separating what can function only when together, in the process excluding, individualising, destroying, alienating and, in consequence, undermining the innate creativity and resilience of a necessarily complex system of interaction – between human and human, and between human and nature. . . .

We should ask, what do we really value? And how do we measure it? When authors write about economies for the common good, or for the wellbeing of all, they highlight a very different set of values than those, based on private property and private gain, that dominate modern economies today – not efficiency but health and resilience; not the bottom line but collective wellbeing. They are founded on the basic moral claim that, as the legal scholar Jedediah Purdy puts it in This Land Is Our Land (2019), ‘the world belongs in principle to all who are born into it’.

Most civilisational traditions agree that everyone brought into this world should have an equal claim to thrive. If we follow those traditions, we must conclude that cultures ‘already parcelled out’ into private property and wealth are morally bankrupt. They value the private over people. . . .

Whatever we call it, we need an economy focused on shared flourishing, rather than on the chimera that more money will somehow, someday magically get us there. It’s a simple and hard-nosed recognition of reality.

I've even written before, in Connecting Seemingly Disparate Fields of Knowledge, I've often asked myself why experts consider the economy unhealthy unless there is new development and construction, why it's not possible to create something good and be happy to maintain. More from the essay:

Standard economic thinking both seeds and feeds the underlying fear by instructing that we’re all in a race to compete for limited resources. Most definitions of mainstream economics are based on some version of Lionel Robbin’s 1932 definition as the ‘efficient allocation of scarce resources’. The answer to scarcity coupled with people’s presumed desire for more is, of course: keep producing stuff. Not surprisingly, the guiding star for success, of both policymakers and economists around the world, is a crude, if convenient metric – GDP – that does nothing but indiscriminately count final output (more stuff), independent of whether it’s good or bad, whether it creates wellbeing or harm, and notwithstanding that its ongoing growth is unsustainable.

It’s circular logic: (1) scarcity makes people have endless needs, so the economy needs to grow; (2) for the economy to grow, people need to have ever more needs. Such thinking dominates the field of economics, and much of contemporary culture: Man (yes, those ideas overwhelmingly come from men) as the endless optimiser of self-interest; people reduced to producers and consumers; all aspects of life that go beyond the mere accumulation of stuff – morality, joy, care – confined to kindergarten, fiction and the occasional ethics course in high school or college. The result is what Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times calls a ‘moral myopia’ threatening to collapse under a mounting pile of stuff.

Also related is What's Your Scarcity?, my post about the book Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much. And there are related thoughts in Why Can't We All Just Get Along?

Switching topics, this recent read also resonates with me.

Resilience Is About How You Recharge, Not How You Endure

We often take a militaristic, “tough” approach to resilience and grit. We imagine a Marine slogging through the mud, a boxer going one more round, or a football player picking himself up off the turf for one more play. We believe that the longer we tough it out, the tougher we are, and therefore the more successful we will be. However, this entire conception is scientifically inaccurate.

The very lack of a recovery period is dramatically holding back our collective ability to be resilient and successful. Research has found that there is a direct correlation between lack of recovery and increased incidence of health and safety problems. And lack of recovery — whether by disrupting sleep with thoughts of work or having continuous cognitive arousal by watching our phones — is costing our companies $62 billion a year (that’s billion, not million) in lost productivity. . . .

The key to resilience is trying really hard, then stopping, recovering, and then trying again. This conclusion is based on biology. . . .

If you have too much time in the performance zone, you need more time in the recovery zone, otherwise you risk burnout. Mustering your resources to “try hard” requires burning energy in order to overcome your currently low arousal level. This is called upregulation. It also exacerbates exhaustion. Thus the more imbalanced we become due to overworking, the more value there is in activities that allow us to return to a state of balance. The value of a recovery period rises in proportion to the amount of work required of us. . . .

Surely everyone reading this has had times where you lie in bed for hours, unable to fall asleep because your brain is thinking about work. If you lie in bed for eight hours, you may have rested, but you can still feel exhausted the next day. That’s because rest and recovery are not the same thing. Stopping does not equal recovering.

That it resonates is why I don't totally freak out when I have days I can't be productive, because they ultimately seem to balance out with focused times of flow. Things cycle.

One of my early pandemic posts, Introspection and Contemplation, included a my review of In Praise of Wasting Time. From the book:

I suggest that we should think of the time spent in creative thought, in quiet reflection and contemplation, in mental replenishment, in consolidation of our identity and values in positive terms--not as what it is not, but what it is. It is time to restore our psychological well-being. It is time to promote growth as human beings. It is time to unleash our imaginations. It is time to protect our sanity. It is time to understand who we are and who we are becoming. "Wasting time" engaged in the activities I've described is far from immoral uselessness. It may be the most important occupation of our minds.

I think I'm going to find some productive ways to waste some time as this week progresses.