2020. Ooof. Crazy fuckin year huh? I would say it was quite the apocalyptic year. Not apocalyptic in the commonly used biblically associated present sense, but in it’s original Greek sense, apokálypsis, meaning “uncovering, disclosure, revelation.” In 2020, we were treated to a radical uncovering, disclosure and revelation of the veritable galaxy sized oceans of bullshit we’ve been treading water in for some time now, personally and as a species. Much of the artifice of “normal” life we wise apes had fashioned for ourselves here on “Spaceship Earth” fell away. Many died. Many became gravely ill. Many of the jobs and activities that consumed our lives and commanded our attention went bye bye. Many relationships ended. Pachamana in Her infinite wisdom had found a way to compel us to slow the fuck down, be present with what is, and really take a good whiff of the giant shit sandwich we’d all have to take a bite of. I’m not convinced it’s changed much however. As the invisible hand marketeers and billions of secondary sociopaths still incapacitated by terminal cases of wetiko (an Algonquin word for a cannibalistic spirit that is driven by greed, excess, and selfish consumption, in Ojibwa it is windigo, wintiko in Powhatan. It deludes its host into believing that cannibalizing the life-force of others; others in the broad sense, including animals and other forms of Gaian life is a logical and morally upright way to live.) seem to have used the calamity of this global pandemic, to usher in a “Great Reset” and a “4th Industrial Revolution“. SMDH… The folly and hubris of humanity continues unabated, as Great Mother burns around us. Many of us were forced to reexamine our lives on a fundamental level. To notice all the maladaptive patterns and ways of being that have gone largely unnoticed and/or medicated away in our lives moving at warp speed, inundated in blizzards of mostly meaningless content and consumer goods we don’t really need. Many noticed, shrugged and quickly reverted to those same patterns and ways of being as conditions allegedly improved. I would even argue that the rate at which we’ve cannibalized the life-force of others has exponentially increased via an ever expanding universe of digital disimagination machines, behaviour modification engines and panopticons that have efficiently, skillfully and quite profitably eroded our powers of discernment, critique and original thought. Soma abounds.
Greetings. My name is Jevon and I’m a spiritual narcissist.
2020 gave me the space to engage in a good deal of self-reflection and inner work. It’s clear to me that I’ve been far from the best version of myself during this traumatic and transformational time. Through this process I’ve uncovered some unpleasant truths about myself and my relationships with others, not the least of which my penchant for indulging in spiritual narcissism. I’ve used my consumption and assimilation of knowledge and various spiritual practices to avoid cognitive dissonance, confirm my personal biases and see myself as better than and more enlightened that others. I’ve used pithy philosophical quotes and excerpts of various texts to engage in performative wokeness, self-deception and as displays of my “intelligence”. I’ve been careless, thoughtless and disregarded the thoughts feelings, needs and perspectives of others to maintain my spiritually narcissistic, self-deceptive “good, equanamous, zen guy” self image. I say all that to say. It’s all bullshit. I’m full of shit. I don’t really know shit. And I’m over it. It is my intention to make every effort from this point forward to rid myself of as much bullshit as I can. I am committed to not being drawn into the quicksands of reactivity, listening deeply, heart opened, without judgement, and cultivating compassion, curiosity & connectedness with all I encounter. I will work to release making decisions from a place of fear of loss and being disliked by others. I will ruthlessly seek out and question egocentricity, inflexibility, self-doubt, self-deception, anxiety, disbelief in myself and honor and attend to my intuition. I will be present with my feelings and emotions and recognize that they come and go like waves on the ocean of consciousness. I accept that it is ok to hurt and feel pain, that pleasure and pain are one and the same, and I’ll be ok. I will eschew counterproductive and harmful toxic positivity. I vow to be nothing less than my complete, total, unvarnished and authentic self. If any of this resonates with you, I encourage you to join me and embark on your own journey to awareness and unconditional love. Ashe!
J.
“Revolution begins with the self, in the self…We’d better take the time to fashion revolutionary selves, revolutionary lives, revolutionary relationships.” – Toni Cade Bambara
Oldspeak: “For several groups of Native Americans, Thanksgiving is a day to mourn. Every Thanksgiving since 1970, the United American Indians of New England and their allies have gathered in Plymouth, Mass., to mark a National Day of Mourning. For them, Thanksgiving did not mark the birth of a new nation. It marked the crippling of an old nation.
Thanksgiving day is a reminder of the genocide of millions of Native people, the theft of Native lands, and the relentless assault on Native culture,” says a statement on the organization’s website. “Participants in National Day of Mourning honor Native ancestors and the struggles of Native peoples to survive today. It is a day of remembrance and spiritual connection as well as a protest of the racism and oppression which Native Americans continue to experience.” –Solomon Jones
“Amidst the latest state-sponsored orgy of hyper consumption, take a few moments to mourn for the victims and survivors of this imperialist colonial slave state. To mourn the loss of untold rich and ancient cultures based on living in balance with our Great Mother. And send a few prayers out for the Native Americans still here and still subjected to relentless state-sanctioned racism, oppression and violence. Ashe.” -Jevon
As a nation, we have much for which to be thankful, even as racial strife continues to rile our politics, our day-to-day lives, and our interactions with those who don’t look like us.
I’m thankful that even after this week’s mass shootings in Philadelphia, Chicago, Denver, and beyond, doctors have the good sense to stand against a gun lobby determined to downplay the danger of firearms. I’m thankful that after voter suppression reared its ugly head in the Georgia governor’s race, we’re still free to call out corruption for what it is. I’m thankful that as nepotism has enabled Ivanka Trump to mishandle government emails, we’re freely able to contemplate whether “Lock her up!” is an appropriate response.
I’m thankful, most of all, that as Thanksgiving arrives in the midst of the most bizarre atmosphere I’ve ever experienced as an American, we’re free to view the holiday through the lens of our various racial and ethnic backgrounds. And then, after experiencing the holiday through our own cultural lenses, we can do the much harder thing. We can see it through the eyes of others.
If Thanksgiving is the holiday we’ve been told about, it is a shared meal symbolizing an alliance between good-hearted Pilgrims who braved the horrific journey to the New World, and Native Americans who generously helped them to survive their first brutal winter on these shores.
Flip the lens, however, and view it from the perspective of Native Americans, and we see a holiday that is celebrated by some, and despised by others. In fact, for several groups of Native Americans, Thanksgiving is a day to mourn.
Every Thanksgiving since 1970, the United American Indians of New England and their allies have gathered in Plymouth, Mass., to mark a National Day of Mourning. For them, Thanksgiving did not mark the birth of a new nation. It marked the crippling of an old nation.
“Thanksgiving day is a reminder of the genocide of millions of Native people, the theft of Native lands, and the relentless assault on Native culture,” says a statement on the organization’s website. “Participants in National Day of Mourning honor Native ancestors and the struggles of Native peoples to survive today. It is a day of remembrance and spiritual connection as well as a protest of the racism and oppression which Native Americans continue to experience.”
For those who claim that Native Americans are overstating their case in calling out continued racism and oppression, I invite you to examine the Dakota Access pipeline protests. In 2016, thousands demonstrated against the oil pipeline, which flows through the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North Dakota.
The protests centered on the Native American argument that the pipeline would threaten their water supply, violate treaties, and soil sacred lands. But after construction on the pipeline was halted under the Obama administration, Donald Trump, in one of his first acts as president, signed an executive order that resumed the project.
The oppression doesn’t stop there. Native Americans were targeted in a North Dakota voter suppression scheme that required Voter ID for the recent midterm elections. Voters were required to present IDs that include a physical address rather than a P.O. box. That requirement effectively disenfranchised Native Americans who lived on reservations, because on many reservations, there are no physical addresses — only P.O. boxes.
That kind of ongoing discrimination mirrors the racism that African Americans and Latinos experience. Yet when race is discussed in America, Native Americans are often excluded from the conversation. In essence, the group that was here before all of us is often rendered invisible.
Perhaps this Thanksgiving, as we gather around tables to celebrate, we can go beyond giving thanks for all the things that make America. Maybe we can also give thanks for all the people who make America.
Doing so would require acknowledging the humanity of Native Americans. It would require seeing them as people who not only cry and mourn, but also as people who laugh and rejoice. It would require looking beyond caricatures.
Because in truth, there are some in the Native American community who will join hands this Thanksgiving and acknowledge that they’ve survived despite persecution. Some will raise their voices to give thanks for their success in spite of racism.
Maybe this Thanksgiving, after so many years of telling a one-sided version of the Thanksgiving tale, America should recognize the people on the other side of the table, and give thanks that they are still here.
Solomon Jones is the author of 10 books. Listen to him weekdays from 10 a.m. to noon on Praise 107.9 FM. sj@solomonjones.com. @solomonjones1
Glacier Peak in the central Cascade Mountains, seen from the East. The rapid retreat of the glaciers on this 10,541-foot mountain is starkly apparent in this photo of the fourth-highest mountain in Washington State.
I have come to accept the bittersweet nature of my mountain trips. I venture into the heights for solace from the political, social and ecological demise that is raging across the planet. While camping at 7,000 feet in the central Cascade Mountains, I take in the view of the grand east face of Glacier Peak from atop Fortress Mountain. I gulp in the thick stars above. I find solace in the fact that those who are wrecking the planet will never be able to desecrate the stars.
However, while marveling at the glaciers glowing in the morning sun on Glacier Peak, their rapid retreat is starkly highlighted by the barren Earth below, where they once resided.
My last trip was on October 20, and from the summit, a 360-degree view revealed no less than four wildfires still burning. It was well into the fall in the Pacific Northwest, yet smoke still covered vast swaths of the state and was rapidly filling in the valleys below me.
While hiking out later, the after effects were inescapable. Portions of the forest I hiked through bore the scars of previous wildfires, and served as a warning of more to come.
The biggest news in the corporate media regarding climate change since my last dispatch has been the UN report stating that we have 12 years left to limit a full-on climate change catastrophe. To avoid this fate, we would need to spend those 12 years curbing global emissions dramatically. Essentially, there would need to be a government-mandated plan across the globe that would enable us to limit warming to 1.5 degrees centigrade (1.5°C) rather than the 2°C goal of the 2015 Paris climate talks. Eliminating that extra .5 of warming would save tens of millions of people from sea level rise inundation, and hundreds of millions from water scarcity and a myriad of other catastrophic impacts. Limiting warming to 1.5°C would, scientists have said, require a radical rethinking of virtually every facet of modern society, including an abandonment of our entire fossil-fuel based economy. However, currently, we are headed for at least a 3°C increase by 2100, with no mass government mobilization in sight.
Meanwhile, the warnings that the catastrophe is already upon us continue.
A recent study in a paper published August 31 in the journal Science warned that for each degree of rise in global temperature, insect-driven losses to the staple crops of rice, wheat and corn increase by 10-25 percent. Given we are already at 1.1°C warming, we are already seeing these losses, which are sure to increase. “In 2016, the United Nations estimated that at least 815 million people worldwide don’t get enough to eat,” the University of Washington Press wrote of the study. “Corn, rice and wheat are staple crops for about 4 billion people, and account for about two-thirds of the food energy intake, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.”
At the same time, scientists are deeply concerned about the fact that non-pest insect numbers are declining rapidly. Bees, moths, butterflies, ladybugs and other insects are far less abundant, and scientists around the world warn that these insects are crucial to as much as 80 percent of all the food we eat. “You have total ecosystem collapse if you lose your insects,” University of Delaware entomologist Doug Tallamy told the AP. “How much worse can it get than that?”
Meanwhile, in the realm of sea level rise, things are irreversibly catastrophic. A recent study of Antarctic ice sheets shows them to be far more sensitive to temperature increases than previously believed. The study showed that when global temperatures were only slightly warmer than they are currently, sea levels were 20-30 feet higher than they are right now. “It doesn’t need to be a very big warming, as long as it stays 2 degrees warmer for a sufficient time, this is the end game,” David Wilson, a geologist at Imperial College London and one of the authors of the new research told The Washington Post.
Equally disturbingly, lakes in the Arctic are literally bubbling and hissing: They are releasing methane in large quantities as the ground underneath them thaws. Methane is a greenhouse gas 100 times more potent than carbon dioxide on a 10-year timescale, and the widespread release of methane was a key driver of the Permian Mass Extinction event which annihilated more than 90 percent of life on Earth.
Meanwhile, the Arctic sea ice is melting rapidly. Ice extent reached its annual minimum recently, which is normally when the ice would begin reforming rapidly, particularly right in the middle of the Arctic Ocean. Instead, the ice continued to decline.
To underscore how governments are not doing enough to mitigate climate change impacts, Brazil, a major greenhouse gas emitting country, recently elected right-wing extremist Jair Bolsonaro as president. To say he is anti-environment (in addition to homophobic, racist and sexist) would be a gross understatement. Known as the Trump of the Tropics, his plans include disempowering federal environmental agencies, opening up Indigenous reserves in the Amazon to mining and farming, and building hydroelectric dams in the rainforest, where deforestation, already at crisis levels, is set to explode.
Earth
Impacts of human-caused climate disruption across the terrestrial plane are becoming increasingly stark.
A recently published study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences revealed that global insects are in a crisis, and the problem is even more widespread than previously realized. While previous studies had revealed a 45 percent decrease in invertebrates like bees and beetles in the last 35 years and another study showed a 76 percent decrease in flying insects in the last few decades in German nature preserves, the new study shows a startling loss of insects now extending into the Americas. The report cites climate change as the cause. “This is one of the most disturbing articles I have ever read,” David Wagner, an expert in invertebrate conservation at the University of Connecticut told The Washington Post of the study.
Another recent study, also in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showed that more than 300 species of mammals have been driven to extinction by human activities. The study showed that even if humans ceased destroying wilderness areas and ended poaching and pollution within 50 years, and extinction rates fell back to normal levels, 5-7 million years would be required for the natural world to recover from what we have done to it. “We are doing something that will last millions of years beyond us,” Matt Davis, a research leader at Aarhus University in Denmark, told The Guardian. “It shows the severity of what we are in right now. We’re entering what could be an extinction on the scale of what killed the dinosaurs. That is pretty scary. We are starting to cut down the whole tree [of life], including the branch we are sitting on right now.”
In the US West, a region iconic for its vast expanses and the freedom to roam in the wilderness that comes with them, some people refer to themselves as “prisoner[s] of the environment” (as reported in this piece in The Guardian) due to increasingly unhealthy air quality from wildfire smoke, water shortages and drought. Many residents are now wondering whether they should move.
Longer, hotter fire seasons, increasingly warm temperatures, less snowfall, changes in plants, and shorter winters are in the process of fundamentally changing Yellowstone National Park in the next few decades. “That conclusion is pretty much inescapable,” John Gross, ecologist with the National Park Service’s Climate Change response program, told USA Today. “It’s really more a question of the when and how it occurs than if.”
And it’s not just Yellowstone. The recently published study, “Disproportionate magnitude of climate change in United States national parks,” has shown that the parks have warmed twice as fast as the US average, and could well see the worst impacts of climate change. This is due to the fact that vast portions of national park areas are located at higher elevations, in the arid southwestern US, or in the Arctic. The iconic trees of Joshua Tree National Park may soon find their environment uninhabitable. Glacier National Park will eventually be free of glaciers. And many other national parks could be left virtually unrecognizable by climate change.
Meanwhile, as permafrost continues to thaw and water seeps deeper into mountain crags, increasingly severe storms (thanks to climate change) will destabilize mountains and increase the risk of landslides and rockfall.
Speaking of permafrost, a recent report showed that coastal erosion in the Arctic is intensifying climate change. As the coast there eroded during the end of the last glacial period (20,000 years ago), dramatic amounts of the frozen CO2 were released into the atmosphere. Now, this feedback loop — with climate change causing melting, melting causing CO2 release, and CO2 release exacerbating climate change — is beginning to occur again.
A recent study in Canada’s British Columbia showed that climate change is pushing alpine animals higher up mountains, as well as into extinction. The study showed that both plants and animals are shifting upslope 100 meters for every 1°C in temperature increase.
It’s not just plants and animals being forced to higher ground.
Some humans in the US are also moving to higher ground, as the era of mass climate migration has begun. The Great Migration in the US, a period during the 20th century when roughly 6 million black people fled the Jim Crow South for cities elsewhere, was the previous largest internal migration in the US. One study showed that by the end of this century, sea level rise alone could displace 13 million people, six million of those in Florida alone. That number doesn’t include people fleeing drought and wildfire-prone areas, nor those having to move for lack of water, or ensuing violence. Making matters worse, another leading climate scientist warned that 15-20 feet of sea level rise is possible within the next 70 years. That amount of sea level rise would mean the end of, literally, every major coastal city on Earth. The number of people displaced would be in the hundreds of millions, as New York City, Boston, Miami, Lagos, Jakarta, Shanghai, Mumbai, New Orleans, vast swaths of Boston, and Ho Chi Min City would all be underwater.
A recent report from Yale 360 argued that the current system of rating hurricanes needs to be scrapped, because it fails to account for how climate change-augmented hurricanes are now carrying far more powerful storm surges, often moving slower, and bringing flooding from rainfall that the current system cannot account for.
If all of this information makes you feel despair, you are not alone. Another recent study warned of “catastrophic” mental health changes that are tied to climate change, including high levels of stress, anxiety and depression.
Water
As usual, climate change-induced disruptions are glaringly apparent in the watery realms of Earth.
A massive iceberg is now poised to break off Antarctica’s Pine Island Glacier. The iceberg is notably larger than the one that broke off the same glacier a year ago, which was 4.5 times the size of Manhattan.
In the US, given how many millions of people live in coastal flooding zones, with more looking to move to the coast, no one is required to even tell you if your future home is likely to flood. According to a recent study by the Natural Resources Defense Council and Sabin Center for Climate Law, “[i]n 21 US states there are no statutory or regulatory requirements for a seller to disclose a property’s flood risks or past flood damages.” The other 29 states have varying degrees of requirements to disclose this information.
In the low-lying coastal nation of Bangladesh, an entire country already beset by regular flooding, there is now an ongoing rural exodus into cities that is literally reshaping the country. With 163 million people, Bangladesh is the world’s most populous delta. There, riverbank erosion alone displaces between 50,000-200,000 people annually, and the capital city of Dhaka is absorbing between 300,000-400,000 people — mostly climate migrants — each year.
On the other side of the spectrum of climate change-induced water disasters is drought.
In the US, a crisis at Lake Powell, between Utah and Arizona, is looming as the ongoing long-term drought impacts plaguing the Southwest are reaching farther and farther upstream. Water rationing has reached far upriver as places in Colorado have had to ration water due to diminishing snowpacks and the ongoing drought.
In New Mexico, water reservoirs are nearing bottom as they have been used to help people survive the record drought of 2018, but now they are nearly dry, prompting worries about how to deal with the future, for which only increasing widespread drought is predicted. For example, by late September, the largest reservoir in the state was at only 3 percent capacity.
Down in Australia, an ongoing drought is hotter and drier than anything people in the impacted areas have ever known, and it is getting worse. “It’s quite unusual to get over 40C here but this last summer and the last couple of summers have been so scorchingly hot,” a sheep farmer there told The Guardian. “You can see the water being sucked out of the dams, sucked out of the soil, sucked out of my life and you can’t plan for that.”
Fire
After another summer of rampant wildfires across the US West, several continue to burn well into the fall. Since my last dispatch, a Wyoming wildfire forced evacuations from hundreds of homes and forced the closure of a highway south of Jackson. By mid-September the wildfire had scorched at least 40,000 acres.
At the time of this writing, wildfires continued to burn in Oregon, Idaho, Washington, Colorado, Utah and Nevada.
A recent report discussed how wildfire tornadoes, record sizes and temperatures of wildfires, and other seeming anomalies will become phenomena we can expect regularly going into the future, thanks to climate change.
Air
Record-breaking warm temperatures beset Anchorage, Alaska, in September, along with unusually dry weather.
Of the record-breaking high temperatures there, climatologist Brian Brettschneider told the Anchorage Daily News, “we are absolutely smashing, obliterating, September records.” The average maximum daily temperature in September at the time of that report was 65.9 degrees Fahrenheit, more than 3 degrees warmer than the next closest September. On average, the typical average high temperature for the month of September there is 55°F.
High-temperature records were set across the state that month with Palmer, Kodiak, Seward, Kenai, Cordova and Valdez all setting records.
High-temperature records continue to be set around the world on a regular basis, yet in the US, the impacts are clear. Late October saw another record-breaking heat wave hit Southern California, with Los Angeles hitting 102°F.
Denial and Reality
In a recent interview, Donald Trump, who had called human-caused climate change “a Chinese hoax,” said it is real, “but I don’t know that it’s manmade.” He also said the climate will “change back again” — whatever that means.
Meanwhile, the ongoing denialism continues unabated in his administration. Climate change information was removed from an important planning document for a national park in New England, with the rationale that it was deemed a “sensitive” topic.
The North Carolina government did not like the science about sea level rise, so literally passed a law banning policies based on such forecasts. The state, of course, is still recovering from flooding from Hurricane Florence.
Meanwhile, Trump’s EPA has abandoned restrictions against hydrofluorocarbons, a chemical that has been linked to climate change. OPEC announced it is predicting a massive increase in oil production over the next five years — enough so that it will offset CO2 reductions from electric cars. On that note, it was recently exposed that the state of Texas, already the leading emitter of greenhouse gasses in the US, has approved 43 petrochemical projects along the Gulf Coast since 2012 — projects that add millions of tons more of greenhouse gas pollution.
Stunningly, despite the terrifying weather events and dire predictions of what’s to come, it has come to light that the Trump administration is aware of and accepts a projected 7-degree rise in global temperatures by just 2100. This came out in a draft statement issued by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which was written to justify Trump’s decision to freeze federal fuel-efficiency standards for cars and trucks built after 2020. “The amazing thing they’re saying is human activities are going to lead to this rise of carbon dioxide that is disastrous for the environment and society,” Michael MacCracken, who served as a senior scientist at the US Global Change Research Program from 1993 to 2002 told The Washington Post. “And then they’re saying they’re not going to do anything about it.”
The Trump administration’s stance on climate change is essentially that we’re doomed, so what’s the point in cutting greenhouse gas emissions?
With regard to the alarming UN climate report, the White House basically shrugged it off, claiming that emissions in the US have dropped since 2005. This is a true statement, but does not explain the reason for that, which is a historic shift away from coal-fired electricity and toward renewables and natural gas.
Fortunately, reality is striking back.
A group of 17 bipartisan state governors representing states that comprise half of the total US GDP has vowed to both fight climate change and fight Donald Trump on the issue. They recently pledged $1.4 billion to support electric cars and institute new policies geared toward reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
And of course, the language coming out of the UN is a sign that the international community is beginning to understand the full weight of climate change’s implication.
Alas, this realization has not yet been met with the policy response it deserves. The author of a key UN report on the dangers of breaching the 1.5°C global warming limit recently said that the world is “nowhere near on track” to keep warming below even that already arbitrary level.
Oldspeak: “The problem that is set for our time is that of freeing man from the curse of economic exploitation and political and social enslavement.” –Rudolph Rocker
“When the state becomes the guardian of power and privilege to the neglect of justice for the people who have neither power nor privilege, you can no longer claim to have a representative democracy.” –Bill Moyers
“The question is not how do you get good people to rule, that is the wrong question. Most people attracted to power are at best mediocre at worst venal. The question is how do you make the elites frightened of you?” –Carl Popper
“If voting was that effective, it would be illegal.” –Father Phil Berrigan
“If this sounds like I’m discouraging people from voting, then good. Fuck voting in this system designed to oppress. As the saying goes, if voting changed something they’d make it illegal. What should be common questions routinely go unanswered around the voting system, like why are we still dealing with the same issues generation after generation; e.g., homelessness. After a couple hundred years of voting it seems like we could have solved this issue as it’s rather easy to work out when there are enough structures to house everyone.
And why would we construct a system at all that awards so much power to so few, and a system that is so corrupted that people ascertain by not voting it leads to tyranny. The system itself should never allow for such a thing, but it’s innately authoritarian in premise, and continuing to vote and pretending like it makes a difference is false hope. It’s like tugging on the controls on an arcade machine without inserting a quarter, where it kinda looks like you’re making something happen on the screen, but everything is on rails. Your input makes zero difference in this undemocratic system which is designed to ignore you.
And in response to the hordes of people who will insist that not voting is irresponsible and support the age old lie that if we just can get the right people in power then, then, the system will turn around – Such naive assertions should be met with a dose of reality which is glaringly clear through a cursory look at history. Such people should have to explain at what point in time there has been a sea change in our system from where it started from genocidal slavers to benevolent rulers, because such a change is nonexistent, and all one need do to figure this out is pick up a copy of Howard Zinn’s book A People’s History of the United States. What’s been there from the get go to present is abuse, stemming from the very origins of western civilization and top down social hierarchy.” –Jason Holland
“In a system where since its inception, politicians, literally, choose their voters ; where it is generally understood by anyone who bothers to see, that democracy never really was a thing here. That in fact, we’re living in a hyper-violent, sociopathic, crypto-fascist oligarchical collectivist kleptocracy. Why continue to participate in this anti-democratic illusion of participation that passes for voting? Why continue to pledge allegiance to a political duopoly that is of no use to anyone but donors who pay millions and billions to play? Why continue to pretend that this is a representative democracy? Why continue to pretend that plugging new and multi-colored and/or gendered circuits in to a foundationally corrupt and unjust system of governance is going some how, against all odds and hundreds of years of history to prove it, is going to some how bring about “real change” and not much more than cosmetic change? Sigh. Survival sickness abounds. Meanwhile, As Vanegiem said “Thus in our universe of expanding technology and comfort we see people turning in upon themselves, shrivelling up, living trivial lives and dying for details. It is a nightmare where we are promised absolute freedom but granted a miserable square inch of individual autonomy -a square inch, moreover, that is strictly policed by our neighbours. A space-time of pettiness and mean thoughts.” He wrote that nearly 70 years ago. That is Precient. Seriously tho, enough with the “This is the most important election ever” propaganda. It’s just more unnecessary environmental pollution at this point.” –Jevon
The US midterm elections are almost upon us, but this is a needless bit of inconsequential trivia. It really doesn’t matter. All the Republicans can win or all the Democrats. Either way it means about as much as a fart in a category 5 hurricane. The net result of actions taken, legislature composed, or honesty with the populace will be inconsequential.
The primary difference between the two parties, who are merely playing a game of good cop/bad cop, is only if you’d prefer to see a rapid more authoritarian style ecological collapse or if you’d prefer one with a soothing dulcet voice reassuring you everything will be fine at two minutes to midnight. Neither have a workable plan on the table to get the US in a sustainable ecological state before it all comes crashing down, nor do they have any notion of creating such a plan.
The best the Democrats offer are conciliatory gestures in policy shifts, but they have not the wisdom, fortitude, or honest intent to stop the devilish system at the heart of the matter. During Obama’s presidency there was a time when the Democrats controlled the senate and the house and they showed their true motivations. They did nothing to pass policies to assuage the damage being done and stop the plunder of Earth for profit, or to end the wars, or to quell mass incarceration system. Even with total control we know what the Democrats offer amounts to platitudes.
And keep in mind, even if the entirety of congress, SCOTUS, and POTUS were controlled by Democrats we still would not find ourselves in a sustainable society, as again, no workable sustainability assessment and plan of transition has ever been done by the party, nor do they care to do something which might lead to such blunt truths. Because those truths would mean decentralization of power and reduction of economic influence for the neoliberal class. Monied elites know the game, and their egos immediately nix any solution set that doesn’t focus the onus of power and attention directly on them.
So what are we doing here in this system? We don’t have a pragmatic solution on the table to avoid ecological collapse, which is accelerating much faster than most think. Meanwhile the people are simultaneously being told by proponents of faux democracy that by not voting for one of the major political parties one is wasting a vote, and not voting at all is akin to a crime by their measures.
What such people either don’t know or won’t admit to is that we are stuck in a system where a financial gun is held at the head of the people at all times. This communicates to the people that if you change, the elites will pull their money out of markets and go Galt. The powers that be will make sure you suffer for your insolence to stand against them. They’ll make finding a livable wage impossible and thus threaten the plebs housing, supply of food, and ability to get healthcare for no other reason than a puerile egotistical insistence that they get their way. They simply don’t care what happens to the people or mother Gaia. Their self interests are why they sought out power to begin with and they’ve devoted their lives to it, and they aren’t surrendering anytime soon.
As it stands, this finger trap of a system will forever spin in place and only create varying levels of profit for capitalist interests. What the system won’t do is solve any of the real problems it has created because it’s been designed to operate to do exactly what it’s doing now, which is drive profits and power directly to the 1%. Democrats only push back enough with pretty sounding words to win your vote over the other guy they are running against, but they’re going to sell out just like their opponent because they themselves are part of the problem.
If this sounds like I’m discouraging people from voting, then good. Fuck voting in this system designed to oppress. As the saying goes, if voting changed something they’d make it illegal. What should be common questions routinely go unanswered around the voting system, like why are we still dealing with the same issues generation after generation; e.g., homelessness. After a couple hundred years of voting it seems like we could have solved this issue as it’s rather easy to work out when there are enough structures to house everyone.
And why would we construct a system at all that awards so much power to so few, and a system that is so corrupted that people ascertain by not voting it leads to tyranny. The system itself should never allow for such a thing, but it’s innately authoritarian in premise, and continuing to vote and pretending like it makes a difference is false hope. It’s like tugging on the controls on an arcade machine without inserting a quarter, where it kinda looks like you’re making something happen on the screen, but everything is on rails. Your input makes zero difference in this undemocratic system which is designed to ignore you.
And in response to the hordes of people who will insist that not voting is irresponsible and support the age old lie that if we just can get the right people in power then, then, the system will turn around – Such naive assertions should be met with a dose of reality which is glaringly clear through a cursory look at history. Such people should have to explain at what point in time there has been a sea change in our system from where it started from genocidal slavers to benevolent rulers, because such a change is nonexistent, and all one need do to figure this out is pick up a copy of Howard Zinn’s book A People’s History of the United States. What’s been there from the get go to present is abuse, stemming from the very origins of western civilization and top down social hierarchy.
When the people claim they achieved a victory what they have really achieved amounts to a gesture that shuts them up. It’s analogous to a hungry child crying that has just irritated their abusive parent enough they finally concede to give them an extra morsel of food. The child then celebrates like they won a battle; however, the child is still in the abusive state but now thinks their wails do something. What they don’t realize is if they get annoying enough what they will be met with is not another conciliatory gesture but a beating.
Thus I call on the people to grow a spine and stand up to our abusers. Stop choosing between which pro-mass-murder psychopath in a suit you want ruling over you and start fighting for something worth having.
Should we not at least try to come up with some kind of plan as a people to organize a real solution that could potentially shake monied elites from their elevated perches? If we are to change, then a real stand has to be made against this archaic and draconian system of social hierarchy presently installed because the powerful aren’t going away and they cannot be reasoned with. They have no plans of surrendering their ill gotten gains accumulated over several centuries of abusive behavior.
Many of our problems are very solvable, as they are merely the result of childish power grabs and a desire to control the labor of others. By not subscribing to this system it doesn’t mean giving up, it means shifting focus. It means incorporating real pragmatism to stop the nose dive into dystopian apocalypse and take a swing at a sustainable egalitarian borderless global society where humanity finally rids itself of the parasites who continue to insist they are more crucial to the world than the hosts they feed from.
If we rid ourselves of those arrogant parasites and their system of abuse, we will find freedom again. A freedom like Native Americans and Aboriginals knew for thousands of years before the bloodsuckers latched upon us. Many will find this vantage point to be highly impractical, but I find naive half-assed solutions, endless extreme unnecessary suffering, and a trajectory leading directly to societal collapse to be far more impractical
Revolt!
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
— Dylan Thomas
Oldspeak: “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands but seeing with new eyes.” –Marcel Proust
“YESSSS this is where the practice meets the pavement. Where all those hours on the mat and the cushion find their full expression. Where the inner work becomes outer work. In everyday life, living, breathing and moving through life mindfully. With openheartedness, awareness, fearlessness, compassion, loving kindness. Choosing to see and hear deeply. Being present with the world as it is. Seeing all living beings as part of yourself. Choosing to respond to that bump on the street or train, that step on the toe, that cutoff in traffic with equanimity and compassion rather than anger and annoyance. This subtle shift in awareness is profound. I know speaking from personal experience, choosing to see and interact with homeless people, smiling at strangers, holding doors, offering seats, carrying things for and making eye contact with people, does indeed cultivate a feeling of being interconnected with All. Markedly reduced feelings of fear, anxiety, loneliness and alienation. But man, the deprogramming and unlearning that has been required; whew. A lot. But choosing to see with new eyes, with heart opened, has done wonders for my mental health and general well-being. Grateful for the experience. How many opportunities can you find to practice loving kindness today? ” –Jevon
Written By Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche @ Lion’s Roar:
With noisy neighbors and the homeless camped on street corners, city life offers many opportunities to practice kindness. Dzigar Kongtrül Rinpoche on how urban living can open our hearts.
Spiritual practitioners often aspire to live alone in the mountains among wildlife, yet a city can be an equally or an even more supportive environment for practice. Unlike the wilderness, cities don’t have many trees, aside from those in parks, but they do have lots of people and—if you think about it—people are natural too! Because cities are filled with so many people, there are many more opportunities to practice kindness, compassion, joy in others’ happiness, and equal care for all.
In the city, even if we hole up in our apartment, we can’t escape the fact that others surround us. There is the old woman next door, a transient who sometimes sleeps on the stoop, and there is the drummer upstairs. If we try to isolate ourselves too much, we won’t be able to practice loving-kindness. If, on the other hand, we cultivate a sense of being interconnected—of being a part of our city in the same way that we are a part of our family—then we will develop loving care and kindness for all of our city’s people and we will have a lot of opportunity to practice.
Living in the city, we brush up against so many people each day. Sometimes just smiling at someone or opening a door can be the practice of loving-kindness. On the bus we can give an elderly person our seat. If we take a taxi or pick up our laundry, there is always a way to extend warmth in some way. There are many homeless people living on the street. Sometimes they sit with a cup or a hat in front of them, asking for money. Sometimes they hold signs that say, “I’m hungry, can you help me?” Sometimes they are friendly and sometimes they look depressed or cold. They often have plastic bags full of belongings. It seems to mean a lot to them when someone takes the time even to notice they are there.
When we have a family, we never get our monthly paycheck and think, “I’m going to just blow this!” We always think of our family—the rent, the groceries, and our children’s education. Knowing that our family depends on us, it is rewarding to see how our support benefits their lives. We never feel that our family members owe us something and we never question why we are giving them our support. A sense of responsibility sustains us, so that we feel motivated to continue.
Now, I am not suggesting opening our doors and inviting everyone in. Maybe that is not so realistic. People are complicated; it’s not always so easy to help. Yet there are small ways that we can extend warmth—small gestures that bring a lot of meaning to our lives and to the lives of others. Through participating in this way we help shape our city, our state, our world. If we adopt all the people of our city as our family, anything we can do for them brings fulfillment.
Mothers and fathers find so much pleasure in doing things for their children. They don’t really separate themselves from them. If their children feel happiness, it is their happiness too—pure joy. It can be the same with our adopted city-family. In a family every individual may not have the same needs. There are always some members who need more help, who may have an illness or run into difficult situations, and then there are always those who have an easier time supporting themselves or better luck with what they want to do. We try to do what we can to support everyone, to hold equal care for all.
Of course, when we approach homeless people on the street, we never know what to expect. Some may appreciate it when we try to offer them something, and they may even like to give us something back in return—an apple or directions—as this can give them a sense of integrity and an opportunity to be generous too. But because homeless people live on the fringe, they often don’t express themselves in ways that we feel comfortable with. Some of them look angry and unapproachable. Some of them curl up in a corner covered with blankets. Others might give us the finger and tell us to get lost. That’s their way of surviving, so we need to respect it. Whatever their actions, we can always extend kindness to them by genuinely wishing them well, hoping that they are able to stay warm and find enough food. This powerful method of extending care to all works to chip away at our own indifference and partiality.
Usually our principles guide us in a positive direction, but some principles can limit us. For instance, we may feel that people should go and get a job rather than beg. We may worry that if we offer money to someone who asks for it, they may buy alcohol or drugs. We may feel that offering money to those in need is condescending or we may feel that it’s a petty, superficial solution to a much deeper social problem—one that needs to be addressed in a larger way. Sometimes we may feel so overwhelmed by the suffering around us that we decide it is futile to try to do anything at all. Or, we may feel it is too much of a hassle to reach into our purse and search for some change—that it will attract too much attention.
But when someone literally asks us for our help, how can we ignore their request if we have the means? Addicts have to eat. If we feel concerned about offering them money, we can offer them food or blankets instead. They have a body and feel the hotness of the sun and the dampness of rain on their skin. We should appreciate any opportunity to respond, because it is so much better than walking around thinking about ourselves all day long.
It is most important that the heart responds when there is an opportunity—that we are moved to care for others rather than getting so stuck in our own head. If we can’t recognize opportunities to help people in need, mostly it’s our own loss. Small gestures of kindness transform us; they show us the best part of our mind and connect us to others in the best possible way.
What does it really mean to change the world? If we look around, there is always something we can do.
Oldspeak: “While i have some issues with some of the problematic definitions of poly terms like Solo Poly, (Solo Poly = broadly speaking, one approach to engaging in (or being open to having) ethically nonexclusive relationships involving sex, romance, or deep emotional intimacy. People who identify as solo poly emphasize autonomy, the freedom to choose their own relationships without seeking permission from others, and flexibility in the form their relationships take.What distinguishes solo poly people is that we generally do not have intimate relationships which involve (or are heading toward) primary-style merging of life infrastructure or identity along the lines of the traditional social relationship escalator. For instance, we generally don’t share a home or finances with any intimate partners. Similarly, solo poly people generally don’t identify very strongly as part of a couple (or triad etc.); we prefer to operate and present ourselves as individuals.) and describing polyamory (Polyamory = (Literally, poly many + amor love) The state or practice of maintaining multiple sexual and/or romantic relationships simultaneously, with the full knowledge and consent of all the people involved. Polyamorous: of or related to the practice of polyamory, as in polyamorous relationship: a relationship involving more than two people, or open to involvement by more than two people; polyamorous person: a person who prefers or is open to romantic relationships with more than one partner simultaneously.) for laypeople as “ you “cheat” on your partner, but they are aware and do not mind, and do the same to you” (WRONG); This is a generally positive and informative piece about poly love.” –Jevon
Alex Sanson is nervous. She is hosting a dinner party this Friday, and wants it to go well, because her lovers are coming – all of them. “Cooking for one person you fancy is hard enough, but three of them is even more stressful!” says Sanson, who has brown hair, an open, friendly face and a bookish air..
Sanson is polyamorous, meaning that she has multiple romantic and sexual partners, all of whom are aware of the others’ existence. Currently, the 28-year-old is in a “polycule” with three other people: William, Mike and Laura, all of whom are also dating the other members of the polycule.
Dinner-party jitters aside, things are going swimmingly for Sanson, who works in marketing. “There’s so much joy in being poly,” she says. “It’s lovely not to burden one person with all your stuff. You just spread it all out.”
Polyamory, also known as consensual non-monogamy, seems to be growing in popularity among young people, though with no definitive figures it’s hard to know how much of this is a matter of increased visibility. It comes in many shapes and forms, from open relationships (where in layperson’s terms you “cheat” on your partner, but they are aware and do not mind, and do the same to you), to solo polyamory, where you identify as polyamorous, but are not currently in multiple relationships. But all those involved reject monogamy as stifling, or oppressive, or simply not to their taste.
“It’s not as complicated as people make it sound,” Sanson insists. If you are unsure whether polyamory might suit you, try this simple thought experiment: does the thought of your partner in the first flushes of romantic ardour with another person fill you with contentment, lust, indifference, or murderous rage? If it’s the last one, best to swerve polyamory. (There’s a term for the warm feeling polyamorous people experience when seeing their partners with someone else: compersion.)
“I’ve had people saying to me, ‘You just want to fuck about!’” says 29-year-old Calum James, who identifies as a heteroflexible pansexual solo polyamorous relationship anarchist. What this basically means is that James, who is mostly straight, is not currently in a polyamorous relationship with a person or persons. If he were, he would regard it as no more important than non-intimate friendships, because relationship anarchists treat romantic and non-romantic relationships the same.
“I had one woman have a go at me, saying, ‘It’s an awful way to treat women,’” James says. “But people don’t understand it’s not just about meeting women and having sex with them. I want to build deep connections with people and see them regularly. I just don’t want those connections to follow the same rules as traditional relationships.”
James tried monogamy, but found it “suffocating”. “I never understood monogamy, even when I was a kid. I’d think, ‘I fancy three people in my class.’”
“The thing I’ve always disliked about monogamy and marriage,” Sanson adds, “is the idea of owning another person and them being your other half or somehow completing you, like you weren’t complete before you met them. What I love about polyamory is that I’m my own person and no one owns me. I don’t own any of you, either. We’re all free.”
Polyamory is having a cultural moment right now, with celebrities such as Will Smith and Jada Pinkett-Smith speaking about being non-monogamous, and the BBC drama Wanderlust depicting a middle-class couple as they open up their relationship. As anyone who lived through the 1960s, or who is from the LGBT community will tell you, polyamory is not new: free love or non-monogamy has been practised for years. But polyamory is now being adopted by people who might have been monogamous five or 10 years ago, not least because the internet makes it easier than ever for poly-curious people to educate themselves about polyamory, and connect with like-minded individuals.
“Things are changing rapidly,” says Janet Hardy, the co-author of the polyamory handbook The Ethical Slut. “More people are getting the idea that it’s possible to be happy and healthy without being monogamous. What I’m seeing among young people is that they don’t have the same need to self-define by what they like to do in bed, or in relationships, like my generation did. Everything’s out on a big buffet, and they try a little of everything.”
Polyamorous people reject the end game of romantic monogamy, and disdain so-called “relationship escalators”: society’s expectation that couples will cycle through #putaringonit selfies, marriage and kids. Instead, they let their relationships flow whither the current takes them, relinquishing themselves to the whorls and eddies that change all romantic partnerships over time. In our increasingly precarious times, it makes sense that polyamory is popular. “Growing up, you’re bombarded by all this messaging about what the perfect relationship set-up is,” Sanson says. “You’re going to have a family and buy a house and do this and that. But a lot of that isn’t relevant to my generation.”
Still, being polyamorous isn’t just a carefree romp. It requires you to unpick the messy yarn of human emotion, and that most familiar knot of all: jealousy. Perhaps the biggest myth of all about polyamorous people is that they don’t feel jealousy. “Jealousy is a part of human nature,” says 27-year-old William Jeffrey, a member of Sanson’s polycule. “You still feel it. But I’ve found with every jealousy I’ve ever had while being polyamorous, I’ve been able to trace the jealousy back to an insecurity about myself. When I figure out what the insecurity is, I can overcome it.”
A responsible polyamorous partner accepts the other person’s jealousy. “When I started dating someone else, my partner Laura expressed that she was feeling jealous,” says Mike Scoins, 28, also in the polycule. “So I told her: ‘I acknowledge your feelings. Can we unpack the fear that is underlying your jealousy?’ In this instance, it was something along the lines of: ‘Do you still care about me?’ When you provide reassurance that, yes, absolutely, I do still care, the jealousy dissipates.”
Is jealousy only ever the result of insecurity? “I’d say that’s too simplistic a view,” says Hardy. “I don’t think there’s one emotion you can call jealousy. I think jealousy is an umbrella we put over all of the emotions we find difficult that we want to quell by changing someone else’s behaviour.” In her introduction-to-polyamory workshops, Hardy asks participants to write a thank-you note to their jealousy. “It exists for a reason. Jealousy tries to protect you from something.”
Can you really vanquish the green-eyed monster with introspection and communication alone? “Some people are more prone to jealousy, and some people are less prone to it,” Hardy says. “If polyamory sounds unpleasant, don’t do it! There are no merit badges here.”
“I don’t really experience sexual jealousy,” Scoins muses. “My one experience of jealousy was when my then partner had two tickets for a ball and didn’t give me one.”
There’s a joke about polyamory: it didn’t take off until Google Calendar was invented. The polyamorous people I interview effortlessly manage packed schedules. Jeffrey, for instance, will meet once a week to play a Buffy the Vampire Slayer role-playing game with Scoins and the fourth member of their polycule, Laura Nevo. He also has a weekly date night with his live-in partner, as well as seeing Sanson and Nevo once a week.
While shows such as Wanderlust depict polyamory as a tumescent bonk-fest, in reality polyamorous people spend most of their time doing the deeply unsexy business of talking about their feelings. Sanson credits polyamory with giving her more emotional self-awareness. “Polyamory has allowed me to be more introspective, think about the motives behind what I’m doing, identify emotions more accurately and be explicit about how I’m feeling about things.”
Polyamory tends to unnerve people, affronting expectations of traditional romantic monogamy. It’s harder for polyamorous people to date: apps such as Tinder or Bumble don’t have options for non-monogamous people, for instance. When James writes in his Tinder bio that he is non-monogamous, he experiences a “significant dip in matches”. And when he tells prospective romantic partners he is polyamorous, it rarely goes down well. “One date told me, ‘I was really interested in you until you told me that.’”
Last New Year’s Eve, James went to a party in Sheffield, where he lives. When he walked in, heads swivelled. “They all went: ‘Is that the polyamorous one?’” James is weary of having to defend his way of life, and rightly so: consenting adults shouldn’t have to justify their sex lives to judgmental strangers. “Some people don’t recognise that what’s not right for them isn’t not right for other people,” he says. “I try to point out that it’s not harming anybody if it’s all open and honest.”
And monogamous people can learn from polyamory. Twenty-three-year-old Aliyah, who uses they/them pronouns, was polyamorous, but is currently in a monogamous relationship. They credit polyamory with giving them a healthier outlook on monogamy. “The way I was taught monogamy wasn’t healthy,” Aliyah says. “I’d have this constant paranoia of being cheated on.”
Polyamory made them better at monogamy. “I learned that monogamy doesn’t have to be as strict as we conceptualise it growing up,” they explain. “Before I felt that deep love should only be reserved for romantic connections. But being polyamorous taught me I have so much love for my friends, and that doesn’t have to be explored in a sexual context.”
As polyamory becomes more visible, it won’t be seen as such a tear in our social fabric, but as an ordinary and unremarkable thing. This will be down to the efforts of a new generation who are normalising their freedom to live and love how they want, without nose-wrinkling or head-shaking.
“My dad said to me to me the other day, ‘I’m worried about your emotional wellbeing, because you’re building relationships with these people,’” Sanson laughs. “And I was like, ‘I know! That’s the whole point.”
‘I always struggled with monogamy’: the insiders’ view of polyamory
Chiara Giovanni, 24, is in a relationship with two people. Her partner Aditya Sharad, 23, is monogamous.
Chiara: I always struggled with monogamy and found it quite restrictive. Even though I was super-happy in my relationships, I wasn’t able to be monogamous and faithful. I decided to take a different tack. When I met Aditya I thought, I love this person and want to make them happy, and I need to do this differently. So I was open from the start.
Ninety per cent of polyamory is talking. Sometimes I think, I want to watch a movie! I don’t want to talk about our relationship again. But it’s important to be able to express your fears, rather than waiting for the worst thing to happen.
I definitely think more people would be polyamorous if they knew what polyamory was, and that it wasn’t just a phase, but valid and long-term and serious. Right now, I’m setting up a time for Aditya to meet my other partner, who is based in the US. They are both super-nervous and really want the other person to like them. It’s really cute.
Aditya: At first, when a partner says, “I don’t think conventional relationship settings are working for me,” it’s hard to hear. While Chiari and I decided it would be a polyamorous relationship, I’m not a hugely social person, so it didn’t make a lot of sense for me to have multiple relationships. At the same time, I have a wonderful relationship with Chiara, who I really love. So I thought, let’s give this a try.
Jealousy is never the main feeling. Something may trigger the jealousy, but it’s not a primary feeling. You’ll be feeling insecure about something, and that’s what the jealousy is about. You have to communicate about your feelings, and accept you’re not going to be given all the time and attention in your relationship.
I do feel fulfilled. I wouldn’t have chosen to be poly myself, but I value Chiara. We have a joyous and uplifting relationship. So it’s not like her being polyamorous is a necessary evil. I’m just invested in what allows us to lead a life together, and what is important to her, and makes her happy.
If you’d told me about polyamory eight years ago I’d have been like, “What, really, that works?” But it does. You need to be intentional about it, but it can work.
Laura Nevo, 30, is part of a four-person polycule, along with William Jeffrey, Alex Sanson, and Mike Scoins.
I started polyamory as an experiment. I had been in monogamous relationships all my life, and when I met my partner Mike he was honest with me. He said: “I like you, but I’m going to carry on dating other people.” I thought, fair enough. I did some research into polyamory and began to date multiple people. In previous monogamous relationships, I’d cheat on my partners and feel guilty about it. I didn’t want that to happen again.
I’ve been dating Mike for two years and William for one year. I also hang out a lot with Alex, and there are other people I may have sex with. It gives me a lot of happiness to see my partners together, like William and Mike for example. It’s nice to be able to be happy for someone else, without having to be a part of their happiness.
Recently, I had a challenge because one of my partners became involved with someone I really didn’t connect with. I’m trying to work through that and not bottle things up. I used to suffer from anxiety and low self-esteem, but I’ve found that polyamory helps me a lot, as I have to really figure things out.
When someone new comes into our polycule, I’m extra careful of things. I think, how can we deal with this new person? How can we make them comfortable? Because it’s not nice to feel left out.
Being polyamorous has felt freeing for me. It has allowed me to meet people I wouldn’t have considered as partners before. I’ve been playing more on the gender spectrum. If I were to go back to monogamy one day, I think the experience of being polyamorous would make me more accepting of people and different types of relationships.
Andrea, 30, believes in ‘free and independent agency’
Coming out as non-monogamous is a very slow process, because it’s so hard to bring yourself to a point where you know that the other person might terminate the relationship. Some choose to cheat, but I wanted to be open to the person I loved.
When I came out as non-monogamous to my girlfriend at the time, she basically said: “I didn’t sign up for this. Why can’t I have the person I met back?” That really hurt, because I never wanted to cause her pain. But I can’t help being myself. We tried to make it work, but eventually we parted ways, because she was monogamous and I wasn’t. Everything else in the relationship worked, so that was really painful.
It’s important to be open and communicate about anyone new coming into the scene. If I’m at a party and I meet someone I want to bring home, I text Anita, who I have a romantic and sexual relationship with, and let her know. And my secret tool is Google Calendar. If I’m on a date and Anita wants to hang out, she can just check my calendar for the next available slot.
Oldspeak: “The fun and adventure lies in the spontaneity, in the suspense, in the uncertainty. Of course it’s fun to have goals and aspirations, things that we envision ourselves doing and ways that we can offer our gifts and talents to the world, but in order to become more open to possibilities and opportunities that are awaiting us, ones that we never expected were possible, the most important thing we need to do is stop planning our futures so rigidly.
We must allow ourselves to relinquish the need to have absolute control over every single situation, small or big. We must let something else take over, something that knows way more than we do….
So much of our life is dependent upon things that we cannot control completely. The weather, traffic, how other people behave, whether or not we get the big promotion, who we meet and how we meet them, are all things that we cannot control 100% of the time…
We can look at life in two different ways, one is that things don’t go as planned and that’s a bad thing, or we can look at it as if we live in a universe that always conspires for our greater good, so when something goes “wrong” or unplanned, we trust that it was for our greater good, always, even if we never see exactly why. The first option leaves us in constant resistance, and angry, bitter and stressed out constantly… and the second one leaves us grateful, accepting, and excited everyday about what that day may bring.
-Nikki Sapp
“Ooof. Real talk here. How many of us are walking around all the time anxious, fearful, stressed out, mentally ill, exhausted and frustrated, over shit we literally have no control over? Constantly expending tremendous amounts of energy resisting the flow of life. Avoiding uncertainty and the unknown. Rejecting and refusing to be with experience that does not fit into our rigidly conceived notions of how things “should be”. Striving to control and predict what is not here and now. Think about how much destruction, chaos, mayhem and instability we modern humans have caused in our beautiful and perfect Great Mother, trying to control and “improve” so many aspects of our existence here? I often wonder, if we could actually control everything and predict the future, with no possibility of an outcome we weren’t expecting, life would be pretty fucking dull wouldn’t it? We’d do well to spend more time practicing appreciation of the uncertain and unknown. Cultivating, gratitude, radical acceptance of what is and being less concerned with life going exactly as we’ve planned. Get off the hamster wheel of standardized life. Embrace spontaneity!” -Jevon
“We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.” ~ Joseph Campbell
Be born, go to school, get a job, get married, have kids, have grandkids, get old, die. That’s the plan right? Well, so we think. Unfortunately so many get stuck in this cookie cutter idea of what life is supposed to look like, only to live in constant frustration and disappointment that their life looks nothing like the standardized version.
Life may drift them more and more off course, and they keep trying to control the helm by bringing it back to the life they think they should have, like the characters on TV.
Unfortunately much of their life is spent in the struggle trying to get back “on course”, or what they believe is “on course.” So much time is wasted in this struggle to no avail.
Only when a person just gives up, surrenders to the tides of their life are they able to see that their idea of how things were SUPPOSED to go was causing them a constant frustration because they were never actually enjoying anything about the present moment, or the way things WERE going.
Who says things have to go exactly like that? If things aren’t going exactly like the social norm does that means that things have gone “wrong”?
The fun and adventure lies in the spontaneity, in the suspense, in the uncertainty. Of course it’s fun to have goals and aspirations, things that we envision ourselves doing and ways that we can offer our gifts and talents to the world, but in order to become more open to possibilities and opportunities that are awaiting us, ones that we never expected were possible, the most important thing we need to do is stop planning our futures so rigidly.
We must allow ourselves to relinquish the need to have absolute control over every single situation, small or big. We must let something else take over, something that knows way more than we do….
“When I finally learned to let go of having to totally control everything around me and let my life unfold, I was stunned by the results. How could I have ever thought I could outsmart the Universe?” ~ Geri Larkin
The problem with trying to control how every situation will go is that we cannot always see the bigger picture in every situation. We have no idea why we didn’t get the job we applied for, or why our partner decided to leave us, or why the car wouldn’t start on our way to work.
All the ego knows is that this situation was “bad”, we experienced some sense of sadness or pain, and because it does not desire to feel uncertain, or pain, sadness or vulnerability ever again, it must plan. It must control how everything in the future will go, so as to never feel out of control or open to chance ever again.
However, so much of our life is dependent upon things that we cannot control completely. The weather, traffic, how other people behave, whether or not we get the big promotion, who we meet and how we meet them, are all things that we cannot control 100% of the time.
But the question is, why would we want to? Having total control over every single situation is not only an exhausting endeavor for us but is also a stifling experience for the people in our lives. The result of this fear of losing control is that we limit the universe in being able to direct us to paths that we may not have ever thought of on our own.
As soon as an opportunity or possibility is presented to us that doesn’t fit into our box, or rather our plan of what our life is supposed to look like, we turn away from it and label it “bad idea”… bad idea because it’s not what we think life is supposed to look like.
But if we look at our life from a broader view, from the big picture perspective, and openly accept the fact that we didn’t get the job, or we were dumped by our partner, or our car breaking down made us late for an appointment, we may in fact realize a better job opening was coming along, a new healthier relationship was just around the corner, or our car breaking down prevented us from being involved in a huge accident on the highway.
So just because a situation is not what we WANTED to happen, or what we planned on happening does not necessarily mean that it was bad.
We can look at life in two different ways, one is that things don’t go as planned and that’s a bad thing, or we can look at it as if we live in a universe that always conspires for our greater good, so when something goes “wrong” or unplanned, we trust that it was for our greater good, always, even if we never see exactly why. The first option leaves us in constant resistance, and angry, bitter and stressed out constantly… and the second one leaves us grateful, accepting, and excited everyday about what that day may bring.
“At times the world may seem an unfriendly and sinister place, but believe that there is much more good in it than bad. All you have to do is look hard enough. And what might seem to be a series of unfortunate events may in fact be the first steps of a journey” ~ Lemony Snicket
If we envision anything for our future selves it should be that we are the best version of ourselves possible. We are healthy, and happy and doing something that we love to do and surrounded by people that love us. If we make the main focus health and happiness we leave ourselves open to all the many paths and roads and trails that one might take to achieve these goals, instead of getting too attached to exactly how we think life should happen.
Think of the universe like the navigational system in the car, we know the end destination (us being the best version of ourselves), but the HOW we get there is always up in the air.
We may take a million left turns, take the scenic route or we may take the shortest route possible, only to find a happier more fulfilling destination mid-way through. The one thing that we can depend on though is that the universe never lets us get completely off course.
There is never too many “wrong turns” that the intelligence of the universe cannot re-route us back to being on track to our final destination. In fact, there is no “wrong” turns at all, there are only routes that allowed us to enjoy the view a little longer and take things a little slower, or routes that got us to our destination very quickly. Either way, we realize the fun was in the unexpectedness of the adventure.
Oldspeak: “We expend a lot of effort to improve the external conditions of our lives, but in the end it is always the mind that creates our experience of the world and translates this experience into either well-being or suffering…
If we transform our way of perceiving things, we transform the quality of our lives. It is this kind of transformation that is brought about by the form of mind training known as meditation…
Meditation is a practice that makes it possible to cultivate and develop certain basic positive human qualities in the same way as other forms of training make it possible to play a musical instrument or acquire any other skill….
The object of meditation is the mind. For the moment, it is simultaneously confused, agitated, rebellious, and subject to innumerable conditioned and automatic patterns. The goal of meditation is not to shut down the mind or anesthetize it, but to make it free, lucid, and balanced….
…training the mind is crucial if we want to refine and sharpen our attention; develop emotional balance, inner peace, and wisdom; and cultivate dedication to the welfare of others. We have within ourselves the potential to develop these qualities, but they will not develop by themselves or just because we want them to. They require training…
-Matthieu Ricard
Meditation is dealing with purpose itself. It is not that meditation is for something, but it is dealing with the aim. Generally we have a purpose for whatever we do: something is going to happen in the future, therefore what I am doing now is important – everything is related to that. But the whole idea of meditation is to develop an entirely different way of dealing with things, where you have no purpose at all. In fact, meditation is dealing with the question of whether or not there is such a thing as purpose. And when one learns a different way of dealing with the situation, one no longer has to have a purpose. One is not on the way to somewhere. Or rather, one is on the way and at the destination at the same time….
It is also very important to avoid becoming solemn and to avoid the feeling that one is taking part is some special ritual. One should feel quite natural and spontaneous and simply try to identify oneself with the breath. That is all there is to it, there are no ideas or analyzing involved. Whenever thoughts arise, just observe them as thoughts rather than as being a subject. What usually happens when we have thoughts is that we are not aware that they are thoughts at all. Supposing one is planning one’s next holiday trip: one is so engrossed in the thoughts that it is almost as though one was were already on the trip and one is not even aware that these are thoughts. Whereas, if one sees that this is merely thought creating such a picture, one begins to discover that it has a less real quality. One should not try to suppress thoughts in meditation, but one should just try to see the transitory nature, the translucent nature of thoughts. One should not become involved with them, nor reject them, but simply observe them and then come back to the awareness of breathing. The whole point is to cultivate the acceptance of everything. So one should not discriminate or become involved in any kind of struggle.”
–Chogyam Trunga, “Meditation In Action”
“We know the outer world of sensations and actions, but of our inner world of thoughts and feelings we know very little. The primary purpose of mediation is to become conscious of and familiar with our inner life. The ultimate purpose is to reach the source of life and consciousness.
Incidentally, practice of meditation affects deeply our character. We are slaves to what we do not know: of what we know we are masters. Whatever vice or weakness in ourselves we discover and understand its causes and its workings, we overcome it by the very knowing, the unconscious dissolves when brought into consciousness. The dissolution of the unconscious releases energy, the mind feels adequate and becomes quiet.
When the mind is quiet, we come to know ourselves as the pure witness. We withdraw from the experience and its experiencer and stand apart in pure awareness, which is between and beyond the two. The personality, based on self-identification, on imagining oneself to be something: “I am this, I am that”, continues, but only as a part of the objective world. Its identification with the witness snaps.”
–Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, “I Am That”
“Shift your perception. Learn to observe what is, as it actually is. Liberate, elucidate, cultivate your mind. Explore your inner space. Meditate! It’s great! ” -Jevon
Take an honest look at yourself. Where are you in your life? What have your priorities been up till now and what do you intend to do with the time you have left? We are a mixture of light and shadow, of good qualities and defects. Are we really the best we can be? Must we remain as we are now? If not, what can we do to improve ourselves? These are questions worth asking, particularly if we have come to the conclusion that change is both desirable and possible.
Every one of us has a mind and every one of us can work on it.
In our modern world, we are consumed from morning till night with endless activity. We do not have much time or energy left over to consider the basic causes of our happiness or suffering. We imagine, more or less consciously, that if we undertake more activities we will have more intense experiences and therefore our sense of dissatisfaction will fade away. But the truth is that many of us continue to feel let down and frustrated by our contemporary lifestyle.
The aim of meditation is to transform the mind. It does not have to be associated with any particular religion. Every one of us has a mind and every one of us can work on it.
Is change possible?
The real question is not whether change is desirable; it is whether it is possible to change. Some people might think they can’t change because their afflictive emotions are so intimately associated with their minds that it is impossible to get rid of them without destroying a part of themselves.
It is true that in general a person’s character doesn’t change very much over the course of their life. If we could study the same group of people every few years, we would rarely find that the angry people had become patient, that the disturbed people had found inner peace, or that the pretentious people had learned humility. But as rare as such changes might be, some people do change, which shows that change is possible. The point is that our negative character traits tend to persist if we do nothing at all to change the status quo. No change occurs if we just let our habitual tendencies and automatic patterns of thought perpetuate and even reinforce themselves, thought after thought, day after day, year after year. But those tendencies and patterns can be challenged.
No change can occur if we just let our habitual tendencies perpetuate and even reinforce themselves, thought after thought, day after day, year after year.
Aggression, greed, jealousy, and the other mental poisons are unquestionably part of us, but are they an intrinsic, inalienable part? Not necessarily. For example, a glass of water might contain cyanide that could kill us on the spot. But the same water could instead be mixed with healing medicine. In either case, H2O, the chemical formula of the water itself, remains unchanged; in itself, it was never either poisonous or medicinal. The different states of the water are temporary and dependent on changing circumstances. In a similar way, our emotions, moods, and bad character traits are just temporary and circumstantial elements of our nature.
A fundamental aspect of consciousness
This temporary and circumstantial quality becomes clear to us when we realize that the primary quality of consciousness is simply knowing. Like the water in the above example, knowing or awareness is neither good nor bad in itself. If we look behind the turbulent stream of transient thoughts and emotions that pass through our minds day and night, this fundamental aspect of consciousness is always there. Awareness makes it possible for us to perceive phenomena of every kind. Buddhism describes this basic cognitive quality of the mind as luminous because it illuminates both the external world through perceptions and the inner world of sensation, emotion, reasoning, memory, hope, and fear.
Although this cognitive faculty underlies every mental event, it is not itself affected by any of these events. A ray of light may shine on a face disfigured by hatred or on a smiling face; it may shine on a jewel or on a garbage heap; but the light itself is neither mean nor loving, neither dirty nor clean. Understanding that the essential nature of consciousness is neutral shows us that it is possible to change our mental universe. We can transform the content of our thoughts and experiences. The neutral and luminous background of our consciousness provides us with the space we need to observe mental events rather than being at their mercy. We then also have the space we need to create the conditions necessary to transform these mental events.
Wishing is not enough
We have no choice about what we already are, but we can wish to change ourselves. Such an aspiration gives the mind a sense of direction. But just wishing is not enough. We have to find a way of putting that wish into action.
We don’t find anything strange about spending years learning to walk, read and write, or acquire professional skills. We spend hours doing physical exercises to get our bodies into shape. Sometimes we expend tremendous physical energy pedaling a stationary bike. To sustain such tasks requires a minimum of interest or enthusiasm. This interest comes from believing that these efforts are going to benefit us in the long run.
Working with the mind follows the same logic. How could it be subject to change without the least effort, just from wishing alone? That makes no more sense than expecting to learn to play a Mozart sonata by just occasionally doodling around on the piano.
If we transform our way of perceiving things, we transform the quality of our lives.
We expend a lot of effort to improve the external conditions of our lives, but in the end it is always the mind that creates our experience of the world and translates this experience into either well-being or suffering.
If we transform our way of perceiving things, we transform the quality of our lives. It is this kind of transformation that is brought about by the form of mind training known as meditation.
What is meditation?
Meditation is a practice that makes it possible to cultivate and develop certain basic positive human qualities in the same way as other forms of training make it possible to play a musical instrument or acquire any other skill.
Among several Asian words that translate as “meditation” in English are bhavana from Sanskrit, which means “to cultivate,” and its Tibetan equivalent, gom, meaning “to become familiar with.” Meditation helps us to familiarize ourselves with a clear and accurate way of seeing things and to cultivate wholesome qualities that remain dormant within us unless we make an effort to draw them out.
So let us begin by asking ourselves, “What do I really want out of life? Am I content to just keep improvising from day to day? Am I going to ignore the vague sense of discontent that I always feel deep down when, at the same time, I am longing for well-being and fulfillment?” We have become accustomed to thinking that our shortcomings are inevitable and that we have to put up with the setbacks they have brought us throughout our lives. We take the dysfunctional aspects of ourselves for granted, not realizing that it is possible to break out of the vicious cycle of exhausting behavior patterns.
From a Buddhist point of view, the traditional texts say every being has the potential for enlightenment just as surely as every sesame seed contains oil. Despite this, to use another traditional comparison, we wander about in confusion like a beggar who is simultaneously rich and poor because he does not know he has a treasure buried under the floor of his hut. The goal of the Buddhist path is to come into possession of this overlooked wealth of ours, which can imbue our lives with the most profound meaning.
Training the mind
The object of meditation is the mind. For the moment, it is simultaneously confused, agitated, rebellious, and subject to innumerable conditioned and automatic patterns. The goal of meditation is not to shut down the mind or anesthetize it, but to make it free, lucid, and balanced.
Training the mind is crucial if we want to refine and sharpen our attention; develop emotional balance, inner peace, and wisdom; and cultivate dedication to the welfare of others.
According to Buddhism, the mind is not an entity but rather a dynamic stream of experiences, a succession of moments of consciousness. These experiences are often marked by confusion and suffering, but we can also live them in a spacious state of clarity and inner freedom.
We all well know, as the contemporary Tibetan master Jigme Khyentse Rinpoche reminds us, that “we don’t need to train our minds to improve our ability to get upset or jealous. We don’t need an anger accelerator or a pride amplifier.” By contrast, training the mind is crucial if we want to refine and sharpen our attention; develop emotional balance, inner peace, and wisdom; and cultivate dedication to the welfare of others. We have within ourselves the potential to develop these qualities, but they will not develop by themselves or just because we want them to. They require training. And all training requires perseverance and enthusiasm, as I have already said. We won’t learn to ski by practicing one or two minutes a month.
Refining attention and mindfulness
Galileo discovered the rings of Saturn after devising a telescope that was sufficiently bright and powerful and setting it up on a stable support. His discovery would not have been possible if his instrument had been inadequate or if he had held it in a trembling hand. Similarly, if we want to observe the subtlest mechanisms of our mental functioning and have an effect on them, we absolutely must refine our powers of looking inward. In order to do that, our attention has to be highly sharpened so that it becomes stable and clear. We will then be able to observe how the mind functions and perceives the world, and we will be able to understand the way thoughts multiply by association. Finally, we will be able to continue to refine the mind’s perception until we reach the point where we are able to see the most fundamental state of our consciousness, a perfectly lucid and awakened state that is always present, even in the absence of the ordinary chain of thoughts.
What meditation is not
Sometimes practitioners of meditation are accused of being too focused on themselves, of wallowing in egocentric introspection and failing to be concerned with others. But we cannot regard as selfish a process whose goal is to root out the obsession with self and to cultivate altruism. This would be like blaming an aspiring doctor for spending years studying medicine before beginning to practice.
There are a fair number of clichés in circulation about meditation. Let me point out right away that meditation is not an attempt to create a blank mind by blocking out thoughts—which is impossible anyway. Nor is it engaging the mind in endless cogitation in an attempt to analyze the past or anticipate the future. Neither is it a simple process of relaxation in which inner conflicts are temporarily suspended in a vague, amorphous state of consciousness. There is not much point in resting in a state of inner bewilderment. There is indeed an element of relaxation in meditation, but it is connected with the relief that comes from letting go of hopes and fears, of attachments and the whims of the ego that never stop feeding our inner conflicts.
Mastery that sets us free
The way we deal with thoughts in meditation is not to block them or feed them indefinitely, but to let them arise and dissolve by themselves in the field of mindfulness. In this way, they do not take over our minds. Beyond that, meditation consists of cultivating a way of being that is not subject to the patterns of habitual thinking. It often begins with analysis and then continues with contemplation and inner transformation. To be free is to be the master of ourselves. It is not a matter of doing whatever comes into our heads, but rather of freeing ourselves from the constraints and afflictions that dominate and obscure our minds. It is a matter of taking our life into our own hands rather than abandoning it to the tendencies created by habit and mental confusion. Instead of letting go of the helm and just allowing the boat to drift wherever the wind blows, freedom means setting a course toward a chosen destination—the destination that we know to be the most desirable for ourselves and others.
The heart of reality
Meditation is not, as some people think, a means of escaping reality. On the contrary, its object is to make us see reality as it is, right in the midst of our experience, to unmask the deep causes of our suffering, and to dispel mental confusion. We develop a kind of understanding that comes from a clearer view of reality. To reach this understanding, we meditate, for example, on the interdependence of all phenomena, on their transitory character, and on the nonexistence of the ego perceived as a solid and independent entity.
There is indeed an element of relaxation in meditation, but it is connected with the relief that comes from letting go of hopes and fears, of attachments and the whims of the ego that never stop feeding our inner conflicts.
Meditations on these themes are based on the experience of generations of meditators who have devoted their lives to observing the automatic, mechanical patterns of thought and the nature of consciousness. They then taught empirical methods for developing mental clarity, alertness, inner freedom, altruistic love, and compassion. However, we cannot merely rely on their words to free ourselves from suffering. We must discover for ourselves the value of the methods these wise people taught and confirm for ourselves the conclusions they reached. This is not purely an intellectual process. Long study of our own experience is needed to rediscover their answers and integrate them into ourselves on a deep level. This process requires determination, enthusiasm, and perseverance. It requires what Shantideva calls “joy in virtuous ways.”
Thus we begin by observing and understanding how thoughts multiply by association with each other and create a whole world of emotions, of joy and suffering. Then we penetrate the screen of thoughts and glimpse the fundamental component of consciousness: the primal cognitive faculty from which all thoughts arise.
Liberating monkey mind
To accomplish this task, we must begin by calming our turbulent mind. Our mind behaves like a captive monkey who, in his agitation, becomes more and more entangled in his bonds.
Out of the vortex of our thoughts, first emotions arise, and then moods and behaviors, and finally habits and traits of character. What arises spontaneously does not necessarily produce good results, any more than throwing seeds into the wind produces good harvests. So we have to behave like good farmers who prepare their fields before sowing their seeds. For us, this means the most important task is to attain freedom through mastering our mind.
If we consider that the potential benefit of meditation is to give us a new experience of the world each moment of our lives, then it doesn’t seem excessive to spend at least twenty minutes a day getting to know our mind better and training it toward this kind of openness. The fruition of meditation could be described as an optimal way of being, or as genuine happiness. This true and lasting happiness is a profound sense of having realized to the utmost the potential we have within us for wisdom and accomplishment. Working toward this kind of fulfillment is an adventure worth embarking on.
Adapted from Why Meditate? Working with Thoughts and Emotions, by Matthieu Ricard, with permission from Hay House.
Polyamory — having more than one consensual sexual or emotional relationship at once — has in recent years emerged on television, mainstream dating sites like OkCupid and even in research. And experts who have studied these kinds of consensual non-monogomous relationships, say they have unique strengths that anyone can learn from.
Consensual non-monogamy can include polyamory, swinging and other forms of open relationships, according to Terri Conley, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Michigan who has studied consensual non-monogamy. While there aren’t comprehensive statistics about how many people in America have polyamorous relationships, a 2016 study published in the Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy found that one in five people in the U.S. engage in some form of consensual non-monogamy throughout their lives.
“Often they’re scared of losing their jobs, not getting a job, losing family or friends who won’t respect them anymore or scared that their children will be taken away,” says Carrie Jenkins, a professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia and the author of What Love Is: And What It Could Be.
But Jenkins, who participates in polyamorous relationships herself, cautions that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach to relationships. “One impression that I don’t want to give is that I think polyamorous relationships are better for everyone,” she says. “We’re all very different from one another.”
Still, experts who study relationships say polyamorous relationships can provide useful lessons for monogamous couples. Here are a few areas where, researchers say, polyamorous couples are particularly successful:
Communication
Successful monogamous relationships require communication about desires, needs and problems, says Joanne Davila, a professor of clinical psychology at Stony Brook University who studies monogamous relationships. And this is one area where polyamorous couples excel.
A May 2017 study published in PLOS One noted that people in consensual non-monogamous relationships communicate to “negotiate agreements, schedules, and boundaries, and to work through the kinds of problems that emerge when negotiating polyamory, amongst the typical relational problems that can emerge in any relationship.” The study found that polyamorous individuals tend to communicate better with their primary partner than secondary partners — because “greater communication may be necessary for primary relationships to endure while other relationships are pursued.”
This is one area particularly relevant to monogamous couples, according to Benjamin Karney, a professor of social psychology at UCLA who researches monogamous relationships. “I don’t see studying non-monogamous couples as studying a totally separate country with no relevance to monogamy at all,” he says. “Consensually non-monogamous couples might have a lot to teach everybody about negotiating desire and competing interests.”
Defining the relationship
Polyamorous partners often define boundaries and form agreements about what each relationship should look like, and Conley says these agreements can be beneficial to monogamous relationships, where partners might assume they’re on the same page about what monogamy means.
When deciding to enter a relationship, “there might be a conversation beyond that about what that means: does it mean we’re monogamous? What does it mean to be monogamous?” Conley says. “For some people, even mere thoughts of attraction to someone else can be defined as cheating. For other people, anything but intercourse is OK.”
Polyamorous relationships can take many different forms. Sometimes, partners will know each other and form a family-like network sometimes called “kitchen table polyamory“, according to Kate Kincaid, a psychologist at Tucson Counseling Associates who works with polyamorous couples. Another style, known as “parallel polyamory,” means that all of the partners are aware of each other, but have little to no contact, Kincaid explains.
Kincaid says that she works with couples to figure out which model is best for them — though she often recommends kitchen table polyamory because it’s often more efficient for all parties to communicate directly. She says that one of the biggest challenges she encounters with polyamorous couples is time management.
“Everyone jokes that love is not a finite resource, but time is,” Kincaid says. “You can have multiple partners you want to see a lot — you have to negotiate time and space to do that.”
Practicing safe sex
A 2012 study published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine found that individuals in polyamorous relationships were more likely to practice safe sex than those who cheat in monogamous relationships. The study showed that monogamous individuals often consider monogamy a safe sex practice in and of itself, so “sexually unfaithful individuals may reject safer sex strategies because of the presence of a stable relationship.”
Kincaid says that she works with clients to fill out a questionnaire about what sexual acts they’d be comfortable with them doing with other partners to make sure they’re on the same page. Amy Moors, an assistant professor of psychology at Chapman University who conducted the 2012 study with Conley, says consensually non-monogamous couples often make explicit agreements with partners to use condoms and get information about STI history with each new partner.
“They have to navigate the sexual health of a bunch of people,” Moors says. “Implicit in that is that there’s very clear conversations about sexual health that are happening in consensual non-monogamous relationships that may not be happening in monogamous relationships.”
But in monogamous relationships, couples often “stop using condoms as a covert message of intimacy: now, we’re really dating,” Moors says. But if a monogamous individual decides to cheat on their partner, there’s no guarantee he or she will practice safe sex.
Managing jealousy
You might think that having multiple romantic partners would elicit more jealousy than being in a monogamous relationship. But according to a a 2017 study published in Perspectives on Psychological Science, that’s not necessarily the case.
The study, which surveyed 1,507 people in monogamous relationships and 617 people in consensual non-monogamous relationships, found that people in consensual non-monogamous relationships, including those who engaged in polyamory and swinging, scored lower on jealousy and higher on trust than those in monogamous relationships.
“People in monogamous relationships were really off the charts high on jealousy. They were more likely to check their partners’ phones, go through their emails, their handbags,” Moors says. “But people in consensual non-monogamous relationships were really low on this.”
Davila, who also works as a couples therapist, says that she’s observed monogamous couples avoid addressing jealousy altogether, whereas consensual non-monogamous couples might be more vocal with their feelings. “In consensual non-monogamous relationships, jealousy is expected,” Davila says. “But they see what feelings arise and actively work to navigate them in a proactive way.”
Maintaining a sense of independence
Another area where polyamorous couples tend to excel, according to Kincaid, is allowing their partners to maintain a sense of independence outside of their relationship. Conley and Moors found in their 2017 study that monogamous couples are more likely to sacrifice their own needs for the sake of their relationship, while polyamorous couples put their own personal fulfillment first.
“The biggest thing that I appreciate about poly people is that they focus on knowing what their needs are and get their needs met in creative ways — relying more on friends or multiple partners instead of putting it all on one person,” Kincaid says. “Once [monogamists] get into a relationship, they tend to value their romantic partner above everyone else.”
She suggests that doing the former allows your relationships to be deeper and can enable you to get a lot more support from your loved ones.
Karney says that he could also see how having your needs met by others might strengthen consensual non-monogamous relationships.
“If we’re a married monogamous couple, we have to figure out what to do about our problems. We’re either going to avoid them, resolve them or break up,” Karney says. “But if I’m in a non-monogamous relationship and I have the same problem, I might not have to resolve it if I’m not getting all my needs met from you.”
Oldspeak: The idea of being paid to do nothing is difficult to adjust to in a society that places a high value on work. Yet this idea has lately gained serious attention amid projections that the progress of globalization and technology will lead to a “jobless” future. The underlying worry goes something like this: If machines do the work for us, wage labor will disappear, so workers won’t have money to buy things. If people can’t or don’t buy things, no one will be able to sell things, either, which means less commerce, a withering private sector, and even fewer jobs. Our value system based on the sanctity of toil will be exposed as hollow; we won’t be able to speak about workers as a class at all, let alone discuss “the labor market” as we now know it. This will require not just economic adjustments but moral and political ones, too... How much activity on social media takes place during work hours? How many doctor’s appointments, errands, and online purchases occur between nine and five? In other words, how many of us could stand to work half as much as we currently do without any significant consequences? And yet we insist over and over that we are terribly, endlessly busy.” –Atossa Araxia Abrahamian
Imagine that. If we could do away with wage slavery and bullshit work. If we could realize that the perceived value and sanctity of needless toil is indeed hollow. If most of humanity had genuine choices about how they spent one third of their lives. If most of humanity wasn’t threatened with homelessness & poverty if they chose not to be a wage slave, being forced to subject themselves daily to a “profound form of psychological violence, a scourge that’s fueling resentment, anomie, depression, and apathy.” If most of humanity wasn’t making & selling each other shit they don’t need. How much energy and resources could we conserve? How much less toxic waste could we produce? How much less anthropogenic emissions and heat could we generate? If we could let go of this absurd cultural programming that is literally driving people to addiction, insanity, infirmity and premature death? What if we could be done with this conditioned obsession with the death cults of productivity and busyiness? I feel like we’d live in a much saner, cleaner, balanced, healthier and happier world. -Jevon
Raoul Vaneigem author of the 1967 situationist classic “The Revolution of Every Day Life” wrote some incisive and insightful words about work in the chapter titled “The Decline and Fall of Work”:
“In an industrial society that conflates work and productivity, the need to produce has always stood opposed to the desire to create. What spark of humanity, which is to say possible creativity, can remain alive being dragged from sleep at 6 every morning, jolted about in commuter trains, deafened by the racket of machinery, bleached and steamed by speed-up and meaningless gestures and production quotas and tossed out at the end of the day into great railway station halls – temples of arrival and departure for the hell of weekdays and the nugatory paradise of the weekend, where the masses commune in brutish wearyness? From adolescence to retirement age, relentlessly, every twenty-four-hour-cycle helps lengthen all the cracks – like those in a broken window pane – that work inflicts in the shape of mechanical repetition, time-that-is-money, submission to bosses, boredom, exhaustion, and so on. From that shattering of youthful vitality to the yawning chasm of old age, life splinters in every direction under the blows of forced labor. Never has a civilization achieved such a degree of contempt for life; never, though, has a generation, overwhelmed by revulsion, experienced such a wild urge to live. Those threatened by slow-motion murder in labor’s mechanized slaughterhouses are suddenly debating, singing, dancing, drinking, making love, taking to the streets, picking up weapons, and inventing a new poetry. Already the front against forced labor is forming; already it’s acts of refusal are shaping the consciousness of the future. Every call for productivity under the conditions imposed by capitalist and Soviet economies alike is a call to slavery.
The latin the word labor means ‘suffering”. We do well to bear in mind these origins of the words ‘travail’ and ‘labor’. It must be said for the nobles that they never forgot either their dignity or the lack thereof that characterized their bondservants: the aristocratic contempt for work reflected the masters’ contempt for the subject classes; work was the expiation to which serfs were condemned for all eternity by divine decree which, for impenetrable reasons, had willed their inferiority. Work had it’s place, among the sanctions of Providence, as the punishment for poverty, and because it determined future salvation such a punishment could paradoxically take on a joyful aspect. At bottom, though, work was less important than submission.
The bourgeoisie for its part does not dominate. It exploits. It does not subject people so much as wear them out. Why has nobody noticed that the principle of productivity was simply a replacement for the principle of feudal authority? Why has nobody wanted to understand this?
Work as organized at present transforms the face of continents not intentionally but as a spin off effect. Work to transform the world? What nonsense! The world is being transformed as a function of the existence of forced labor, not vice-versa which is why it is being transformed so badly.
So, what is the function of forced labor? They myth of power exercised jointly by the master and God drew it’s coercive force from the unity of the feudal system. Destroying the unitary myth, the fragmented power of the bourgeoisie, flying the flag of crisis, ushered in the reign of ideologies, which can never, separately or in combination, achieve a fraction of the effectiveness of myth. The dictatorship of productive work stepped into the breech. It’s mission is physically to weaken the majority of men, collectively to castrate and stupefy them in order to make them receptive to the least pregnant, least virile, most senile ideologies in the entire history of falsehood.
Most of the proletariat at the beginning of the nineteenth century had been physically enervated, systematically broken by the torture of the workshop. Revolts came from artisans, from privileged or unemployed groups, not from workers shattered by fifteen hours of labour. Isn’t it disturbing that the reduction of working time came just when the spectacular ideological miscellany produced by consumer society was beginning effectively to replace the feudal myths destroyed by the young bourgeoisie? (People really have worked for a refrigerator, a car, a television set. Many still do, ’invited’ as they are to consume the passivity and empty time that the ’necessity’ of production ’offers’ them.)
Statistics published in 1938 indicated that the use of the most modern technology then available would reduce necessary working time to three hours a day. Not only are we a long way off with our seven hours, but after wearing out generations of workers by promising them the happiness which is sold today on the installment plan, the bourgeoisie (and its Soviet equivalent) pursue man’s destruction outside the workshop. Tomorrow they will deck out their five hours of necessary wear and tear with a time of ’creativity’ which will grow just as fast as they can fill it with the impossibility of creating anything (the famous ’leisure explosion’).
…..Has anyone bothered to study the modes of work of primitive peoples, the importance of play and creativity, the incredible yield obtained by methods which the application of modern technology would make a hundred times more efficient? Obviously not. Every appeal for productivity comes from above. But only creativity is spontaneously rich. It is not from ’productivity’ that a full life is to be expected, it is not ’productivity’ that will produce an enthusiastic collective response to economic needs. But what can we say when we know how the cult of work is honoured from Cuba to China, and how well the virtuous pages of Guizot would sound in a May Day speech?
To the extent that automation and cybernetics foreshadow the massive replacement of workers by mechanical slaves, forced labour is revealed as belonging purely to the barbaric practices needed to maintain order. Thus power manufactures the dose of fatigue necessary for the passive assimilation of its televised diktats. What carrot is worth working for, after this? The game is up; there is nothing to lose anymore, not even an illusion. The organization of work and the organization of leisure are the blades of the castrating shears whose job is to improve the race of fawning dogs. One day, will we see strikers, demanding automation and a ten-hour week, choosing, instead of picketing, to make love in the factories, the offices and the culture centres? Only the planners, the managers, the union bosses and the sociologists would be surprised and worried. Not without reason; after all, their skin is at stake.”
Some years ago, I had a colleague who would frequently complain that he didn’t have enough to do. He’d mention how much free time he had to our team, ask for more tasks from our boss, and bring it up at after-work drinks. He was right, of course, about the situation: Although we were hardly idle, even the most productive among us couldn’t claim to be toiling for eight (or even five, sometimes three) full hours a day. My colleague, who’d come out of a difficult bout of unemployment, simply could not believe that this justified his salary. It took him a long time to start playing along: checking Twitter, posting on Facebook, reading the paper, and texting friends while fulfilling his professional obligations to the fullest of his abilities.
The idea of being paid to do nothing is difficult to adjust to in a society that places a high value on work. Yet this idea has lately gained serious attention amid projections that the progress of globalization and technology will lead to a “jobless” future. The underlying worry goes something like this: If machines do the work for us, wage labor will disappear, so workers won’t have money to buy things. If people can’t or don’t buy things, no one will be able to sell things, either, which means less commerce, a withering private sector, and even fewer jobs. Our value system based on the sanctity of toil will be exposed as hollow; we won’t be able to speak about workers as a class at all, let alone discuss “the labor market” as we now know it. This will require not just economic adjustments but moral and political ones, too.
One obvious solution would be to separate income from labor altogether, a possibility that two recent books tackle from radically different angles. Give People Money, by journalist Annie Lowrey, offers a measured, centrist endorsement of Universal Basic Income—the idea that governments should give everyone a certain amount of cash each month, no questions asked. The anthropologist David Graeber posits that the link between salaried positions and real work has long been tenuous in any case, since many highly paid jobs serve little purpose at all. In Bullshit Jobs, he tries to make sense of the peculiar yet all-too-common situations in which people are hired, after much fanfare, to do a job, then find themselves not doing much—or worse, performing a task so utterly pointless that they might as well not be doing it.
In the absence of a truly useful job, most people, Graeber considers, would be better off living on “free” money. Lowrey views UBI less as a way to eliminate useless work than a way to compensate invisible forms of labor, such as caring for a relative or doing housework, or to bolster underpaid workers. Cash transfers, she proposes, could also stimulate entrepreneurship and creativity. Either way, the idea of paying people just for being alive is now one that both a radical scholar and a reasonable Beltway journalist can take seriously—though neither author fully reckons with the social reordering that would arise from a world organized around love and leisure, not labor.
Graeber’s book expands on his viral 2013 essay “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs,” in which he took aim at “employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.” Eric, who worked as an “interface administrator” at a design firm, found himself in such a job. His responsibility was to make sure the company’s intranet system worked properly, which sounded useful enough. But, it turned out, he was set up to fail. None of the employees used the system because they were all convinced it was monitoring them. It had been designed with the worst, buggiest software. A confluence of office politics and poor management had led the company to hire Eric, who had no experience working with computers. He was to oversee a system that was never supposed to work in the first place.
Eric ended up doing little. He kept irregular hours and explained to the odd employee how to upload a file or find an email address. He started drinking one, then two, beers at lunch; reading novels at his desk; learning French; and taking trips for nonexistent “business meetings.” If this sounds idyllic—a salary with no work and boozy lunches!—Eric didn’t experience it that way. Instead, he acutely felt “how profoundly upsetting it was to live in a state of utter purposelessness.” Graeber suggest two reasons for Eric’s despondency. One concerns social class: The first person in his family to go to college, Eric wasn’t expecting the white-collar world to be such, well, bullshit. Another reason is existential: When faced with it, “there was simply no way he could construe his job as serving any sort of purpose.”
By Graeber’s metric, my old gig wasn’t quite bullshit, mainly because I rather enjoyed it and found it meaningful. The term is subjective: If someone thinks a job is pointless, it probably is. There are also many repetitive, grueling, or boring jobs that do not qualify as bullshit because they meet an essential need: If a cleaner or bus driver doesn’t report for work, it hurts other people. (These Graeber terms “shit” jobs.) His method for identifying bullshit is, by his own account, unscientific. He draws from a pool of anecdotes to produce an anatomy of bullshit workers, who fall into five categories: “flunkies,” “goons,” “duct-tapers,” “box tickers,” and “taskmasters.”
“Flunkies” are the modern equivalent of feudal minions who make bosses feel big, important, and strong. Whereas they were once doormen and concierges, they now tend to be receptionists who do little besides answer cold calls and refill the candy bowl, or personal assistants who drop off their boss’s dry cleaning and smile when he walks through the door. “Goons” essentially bully people into buying things they don’t need: Marketing managers and PR specialists do this, as do telemarketers. “Duct-tapers” are employed to fix things that aren’t or shouldn’t be broken or do tasks that could easily be automated—data entry, copying and pasting, photocopying, and so on. “Box tickers” help companies comply with regulation (or offload responsibility for complying), and finally “taskmasters,” or middle managers, spread more BS by assigning it to others.
“The creation of a BS job,” one manager tells Graeber, “often involves creating a whole universe of BS narrative that documents the purpose and functions of the position as well as the qualifications required to successfully perform the job, while corresponding to the [prescribed] format and special bureaucratese.” She explains that her organization’s bureaucracy created odd incentives to retain employees whose work was inadequate. It was easier for her to hire someone in a new position than to fire and replace the incompetent employee. This, she notes, helped BS jobs proliferate.
Graeber attempts to quantify just how much—and after some back-of-the envelope calculations, he wagers that 37 to 40 percent of all office jobs are “bullshit.” He further contends that about 50 percent of the work done in a nonpointless workplace is also bullshit, since even useful jobs contain elements of nonsense: the pretending to be busy, the arbitrary hours, the not being able to leave before five. “Bullshitization” is even infecting the most nonbullshit professions, with teachers overloaded with administrative duties that didn’t use to exist and doctors forced to deal with paperwork and insurance firms that probably should be abolished.
There’s no sure way to verify Graeber’s estimates, but for white-collar workers, they seem basically right. Work backward: How much activity on social media takes place during work hours? How many doctor’s appointments, errands, and online purchases occur between nine and five? In other words, how many of us could stand to work half as much as we currently do without any significant consequences? And yet we insist over and over that we are terribly, endlessly busy.
This state of affairs seems to defy not just human reason, but also basic capitalist logic: Wouldn’t a profit-seeking organization tend to cull unnecessary compensated labor rather than encourage it? Graeber proposes that there is an explicitly irrational reason why such jobs exist—a system he calls “managerial feudalism,” wherein employers keep adding layers and layers of management so that everyone can feel their job is important or at least justified. (They’re “mentoring” young people. They’re helping others develop careers!) The bigger the staff, the more important the company and its leaders feel, regardless of purpose or productivity.
There might be something refreshing about the fact that capitalism has not yet gained full control over its means and ends, and that there are millions of people sitting around getting paid to do nothing all day. Graeber doesn’t buy it. On the contrary: He considers bullshit jobs to be a profound form of psychological violence, a scourge that’s fueling resentment, anomie, depression, and apathy. Patrick, an employee of a student union convenience store, mostly agrees with this judgment. He didn’t mind the work itself; what he resented was being assigned inane busywork, like rearranging things, after he’d finished his tasks six times over. “The very, very worst thing about the job was that it gave you so much time to think,” he tells Graeber in an email:
So I just thought so much about how bullshit my job was, how it could be done by a machine, how much I couldn’t wait for full communism, and just endlessly theorized the alternatives to a system where millions of human beings have to do that kind of work for their whole lives in order to survive.
Of course, some people can escape by focusing on creative pursuits during the hours they are idle. And it helps if everyone in said job acknowledges, if tacitly, that they serve no purpose by being there. But that’s hard, too, Graeber argues, because of the structure and nature of the modern workplace: the rules, the conventions, “the ritual of humiliation that allows the supervisor to show who’s boss in the most literal sense.”
The existence of bullshit jobs has, further, led to the devaluation of vital occupations. Workers in essential, nonbullshit jobs are constantly told by moralizing politicians that their work is noble and that they ought to be grateful for the often low pay they receive. Even though the middle managers and box tickers of the world can console themselves with the thought that they are “generating wealth” and “adding jobs” by virtue of their “economic output,” they secretly envy the real, human sense of purpose that useful workers—teachers, garbage collectors, care workers—share, Graeber writes, and end up vilifying them out of “moral envy.” This impulse plays out politically: Nurses, teachers, and bus drivers, for example, are constantly portrayed as “greedy” when they bargain for better union contracts, or they’re said to be “stealing” from the state when they make overtime wages. When voters in bullshit jobs hear these words over a campaign season, it can swing legislative bodies to the right.
Would it be better if those workers stuck in bullshit jobs could simply walk away? Graeber isn’t one for policy recommendations, but he does float UBI as a potential salve to our sad professional predicaments. A UBI would “unlatch work from livelihood entirely”: If, guaranteed enough money to live on, people could choose between bullshit or nothing, he wagers that they’d choose nothing and do something more useful and interesting with their time instead.
In Give People Money, Annie Lowrey is less concerned with dissatisfied professionals than with some of the world’s poorest (including those in the United States), who in addition to already being overworked and underpaid—if they are employed at all—will likely face the harshest economic consequences if or when menial tasks are automated. These workers are already up against weakened unions, corporations dead set on extracting maximum value from their workforces by scaling back benefits and slashing wages, the rising costs of education and health care, and other trends that wind up concentrating wealth at the very top. When the robots come, as Lowrey believes they will, there’s little that governments, companies, or other organizations can do to make them go away. The best shot for these people, she comes to believe, is unconditional money.
Lowrey makes a convincing moral argument for UBI, insisting that “every person is deserving of participation in the economy, freedom of choice, and a life without deprivation—and that our government can and should choose to provide these things.” She also points out to great effect the destructive moralizing that Americans, at least, attach to money. “We believe there is a moral difference between taking a home mortgage interest deduction and receiving a Section 8 voucher,” she writes, in a refreshing moment of indignation. “We judge, marginalize, and shame the poor for their poverty.” Gaining support for UBI would mean persuading people to reject those assumptions; convincing a majority to see, as Graeber and Lowrey both urge, that commanding a high salary doesn’t automatically make you a good person.
A further challenge for advocates of UBI today is the lack of definitive, long-term surveys “proving” the mechanism’s efficacy: There have been no truly universal cash transfers within one country for an extended period of time, and there are thus no narratives to follow or macroeconomic conclusions to draw. Thanks to increased interest in the phenomenon, though, there are more and more smaller-scale studies, and Lowrey visits one of them in Kenya with GiveDirectly, a charity that essentially hands out cash through mobile payments in poor places. There she meets a man named Fredrick Omondi Auma, who “had been in rough shape when GiveDirectly knocked on his door: impoverished, drinking, living in a mud hut with a thatched roof. His wife had left him,” she writes. “But with the manna-from-heaven money, he had patched up his life and, as an economist might put it, made the jump from labor to capital.”
More money, Lowrey reports, turns the villagers into good capitalists who invest their savings in education and supplies, start businesses, and help grow the local economy. Her observations recall the breathless and somewhat naïve boosterism that surrounded microcredit programs in the late 1990s and early 2000s. She even meets three sister-wives who plan to pool their funds and create a small bank to lend to women. In the United States, too, she finds clear-cut potential for success. In separate chapters, she illustrates the promise of cash transfers for the American poor with more clarity and purpose, visiting a family with disabled children and speaking to women whose jobs just don’t pay enough for them to get by. Simple cash could help teenagers finish school instead of working to support their families; it could adequately compensate women who stay home to care for sick loved ones; it could spare the elderly or disabled from the bureaucratic hell of waiting in line to plead for meager welfare benefits.
Ending poverty around the world ought to be a priority, and Lowrey makes a strong case that unconditional cash transfers can help do that. But in the wrong hands, a UBI can do more harm than good. It can serve as a pretext to further decimate social programs and put more blame still on the individual for any mishaps or shortcomings. As Lowrey notes, libertarians love the idea that UBI could replace the welfare state, shrinking big government—a move that could render the whole program ineffective, since it’s hard to imagine a UBI stretching to cover market-rate housing and exorbitant private health care. Meanwhile, cash payments can also reinforce social and racial divisions by throwing money at a problem without addressing its causes. Giving the individual residents of an over-policed neighborhood cash transfers won’t, for instance, make them any less susceptible to unreasonable searches or violence.
That’s why it matters who supports UBI and, more significantly, whose policies it gets attached to. Many of the people funding UBI research or advocating for cash transfers—Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes and Y Combinator’s Sam Altman, to name just two—are in fact among those who do best from the current distribution of wealth. A UBI would, after all, benefit corporations: For any company that depends on people having money to buy their products—whether groceries, prescription drugs, or driverless cars—the idea of a jobless, incomeless population presents a threat to its bottom line. Free money lets consumers stay consumers; it maintains the current system. And that’s without getting into the possibility that unemployment and poverty might add up to riots, class war, and mass unrest. In that situation, the CEOs would be the first to go.
Both Graeber and Lowrey struggle with the fact that—for all work’s miseries and for all the promise of UBI—work is deeply ingrained in American society. While many of us might hate our individual jobs, most of us love the idea of a job. Our world is constructed around the idea that a job is not just a paycheck: It’s a status symbol and a form of social inclusion. This, of course, supports the creation of bullshit jobs, which prop up the socioeconomic status quo. Now that a jobless (or less job-full) future may be within reach, the question is how to reimagine our relationship with work.
Lowrey appreciates the extent to which people identify with their work—even if it’s bullshit or shit (in her parlance, “crummy”) work. Having reported extensively on the psychological toll that unemployment can take, she insists that the culture (or is it cult?) of work is most likely here to stay. It might not be the healthiest approach—she dislikes moralizing around the virtue of work almost as much as Graeber does—but she realizes it’s something we have to build in to our short- and medium-term expectations because “the American faith in hard work and the American cult of self-reliance exist and persist, seen in our veneration of everyone from Franklin to Frederick Douglass to Oprah Winfrey.”
For his part, Graeber insists that there’s no value in working for the sake of just working. That often gives the impression that anyone who does want to work for work’s sake must be a bit of a sucker and that the compulsion to work is a manifestation of false consciousness or, worse, stupidity. He thus glosses over the strongly felt benefits, be they professional, social, or psychological, that many people get from their jobs. If Graeber’s unscientific assertions about bullshit jobs feel vital, urgent, and intuitively true, his dismissals of work’s inherent value—not moral, but social—feel incomplete.
With a compulsion to work so deep-rooted, UBI is a solution that will only go so far, even if implemented in a way that truly does alter lives for the better. Giving people money will not make us less moralistic about labor: People used to working will not necessarily know what to do with themselves or with their time. (I certainly wouldn’t.) Such measures represent only a fraction of the socioeconomic overhaul that will be needed to deal—if not now, then for future generations—with this twin utopia-dystopia: a world with less work and less money.
A solution that neither Lowrey nor Graeber spends much time dwelling on is perhaps the obvious: to split the difference. In a 1932 essay titled “In Praise of Idleness,” the philosopher Bertrand Russell noted that he had come to think of work not as something morally necessary, but as a means to enhance pleasures in the rest of life (after all, would you want to attend a dinner party you could never leave?). While acknowledging that he is a product of a Protestant work ethic and thus a compulsive worker, Russell suggests halving the workday to four hours, which would be enough for a person to secure “the necessities and elementary comforts of life,” leaving the rest of his time to do whatever he wanted.
“There will be happiness and joy of life, instead of frayed nerves, weariness, and dyspepsia,” Russell goes on. “The work exacted will be enough to make leisure delightful, but not enough to produce exhaustion.”