What are we telling ourselves with our stories?

I was listening to a mini-seminar by MarketingForFashionistas this afternoon, and she was talking in part of it about our 'money stories'--how the way we talk to ourselves about our finances and how we feel about what we say determined whether we see the opportunities we have. Whether we see deficit or abundance. It got me thinking in broader terms about how any story we tell will define the possibilities we see. Which got me thinking about how I stopped watching the news years ago. See, it was giving me panic attacks--even the ones that were supposedly more balanced than the scaremongering ones were all about exactly what is going wrong and what exact details that wrongness has, and none of them spent more than a few seconds, at the very end, sometimes, on things that were good and uplifting.

If even.

Then, of course, I started drifting on that line of thought and I came to connect these ideas:

• All we hear is about how corrupt and useless every government is
• All we hear about is how badly we're damaging the environment and how it's all going to collapse any second
• All we hear about is how badly people are treating people for really stupid things like religion and skin color
• We never hear about how there are people trying to fix, trying to help, trying to make things better

It paints a pretty dire picture of loss, violence, threat, fear, and perpetual hopelessness.

And then I was listening to my usual gothy mix as I packed up orders, and I thought--this is a better story, because in this world, there's beauty and mystery and something to learn even in loss.

See, as I writer, I've trained myself and been trained to look for the story in everything. And I've read a lot about how the human brain is wired for story--how if you can find a narrative, it'll sink into people's minds and define their worlds. It's how marketing works.* It's how history works.** It's also how fearmongering assholes work, because there's a loophole in this, that people remember badness a lot more sharply than goodness, that people are basically going to choose themselves and their loved ones over strangers, and that if you only have one worldview presented, it's really hard to even find another, let alone adopt it.

Well, I call bullshit on all that mess.

Because we're telling ourselves this really awful story about how there's no options other than taking over other people's stuff because there's not enough, even though we live in a stupidly rich country. We're telling ourselves that all this violence is justified when we're causing it and terrorism when others do, and that there's no other way to handle disputes. We're telling ourselves that grinding away at things is the only way to live, and that people who don't do the job-house-kids-giant car-huge debt thing are weirdos that you can't take seriously. We're telling ourselves that it's the end times, so we're telling very few stories about any sort of future--so we're not even trying to avoid the collapse.

And it's causing the same things we're afraid of.

Which is stupid, because we can tell ourselves other stories.

We could tell stories about how we can get through this rough patch in history with smarter spending, better diplomacy, a shift away from damaging practices across the board, and toward sustainability not just for the environment, but cultural and emotional sustainability. We could be telling stories about how every problem has a solution, and those solutions could come from anywhere and should be looked at seriously and celebrated. We could be telling ourselves stories about how we can own more of our own lives, get our hands dirty, take care of our own neighbors better so that there aren't opportunities for mistreatment and famine and violence and really vicious lies--because we have better stories to combat them.

Worldview is a story we tell ourselves about how the world works and what our role is. Isn't it better to find a better world, to make a better one, than to just sit there and accept a crappy one, passively?

I'm done accepting.

NOTES:

*Even though marketing is supporting unhealthy ideas about masculinity and femininity, and social expectations that are ridiculous, but that's a rant for a different day.

**And that's why history taught in schools leaves out all the divergent and interesting stuff--really strange and alarming details make it hard to impose a narrative, even if they make for a more accurate view.

Hey, look, I've got a publication!

Back before I was making this blog a thing, I wrote an article about being a good citizen--something that would be here, now-a-days, and it's been reprinted in the first issue of Community Orange Magazine! It's a great first issue and I'm super-glad to be part of it, so go see!

How to be a Good Citizen - Community Orange Magazine #1

How would you build a new society?

I've been thinking about that new show FOX has coming up, Utopia. I have reservations about the gameshow part of it where people can be voted off--because I feel like an actual new society would literally require everyone to get along, and there'd be no out. If you didn't get along, you'd all die, and voting off people will basically negate that realism. On the other hand, it looks like the society is the point, so the people voted off will be replaced by other people, and that might make it less competitive and more actual...

I don't know.

But it has me thinking about how I would do it. I'm pretty sure I'm not good for the show--too many health issues, not enough early-social-set-up skills--but I still think about things like that, in a sort of just-in-case* sort of way, and as a writer, I'm basically building societies that try to make sense all the time. So how would I apply that?

I think I'd build in layers.

Layer One: Basic Survival - Food, Water, Shelter
Because you die if you don't have those things. Nothing else can happen if you don't have water, food, and a way to be protected from weather, cold or heat, and predators. I'd also include here, at the very bottom of the list, at the foundation, a strong emphasis on foraging and on sustainable gathering and hunting, which also includes preserving the ecosystems of the things you're gathering and hunting.

Also, building things like bathrooms, compost heaps, the infirmary. And scouting the lands so that we know, as a group, exactly where to find everything we need. And when we build basic passive defenses--ways to keep out predators of ourselves and our food sources, ways to keep people who aren't willing to play along at a safe distance, but not to attack them or antagonize them, and to leave the way open for them to join if they agree to the basic ideas of the community.

Layer Two: Buffering against the future
This is where the food storage and preservation stuff comes in, where water reserves would be built--I'm thinking dams and cisterns and wells. I'm thinking granaries and smoke houses and root cellars. I'm thinking home gardens for vegetables, one per house rather than huge fields of them, and a few small fields of grains or staples.

I think this might also be the level where more cultural future-stuff is built in: some way to record the history and the knowledge of the tribe you're building and the people in it, a way to teach kids basic information** for the future, maybe a simple sort of religious or spiritual practice or artistic expression to keep the community together--something along the lines of nighttime storytelling, seasonal celebrations, building family totem poles or painting family flags or something, or dancing and singing. Nothing all that codified--something that is defined by the group so it can grow organically.

This is also when the basic rules of the community, and the consequences for breaking the rules would be laid down, probably by vote and extensive discussion, and with an eye toward scalability as the community grows, non-violence, rehabilitation rather than punishment, community togetherness and strength, and preservation of community functioning.

In these early stages, people can't be selfish or disruptive, or nothing will work.

Could start building the basic foundations of:

• A stuff-library where people can go to find the cookware, tools, storage, or household items they don't really need to own themselves.
• A community food storage place, where if the winter is hard, or the summer kills the crops, there's always backup food for everyone.

This is also where we can look back a bit and recreate the best parts of the cultures we all came from, and the knowledge bases we all had before--cherrypicking the most useful tools and ideas from our collective pasts to help the future, which leads into...

Layer Three: Additional culture and innovation
Here's where you'd bring in trades and specialization, but with an eye to improving the lives of the community, not to making one person a lot of wealth off the others--I think that idea is a basic problem with the society we already have, and we're not rebuilding the mother culture, we're inventing a better one.

I'd send people into the woods (or whatever wilds there are) to tend them and make sure they stay healthy and support the populations of plants and animals we need. I'd encourage really creative people to start inventing new tools, new ideas, new works of art. I'd send a few people off to domesticate and start breeding useful animals--hunting dogs, milk creatures, chickens and other egg-creatures, meat-creatures or a replacement for them, fish for the rivers or lakes or dam-lakes or whatever.

This is where people can start exploring their own interests, so long as the work to support the community is done--and everyone will have to do community-support work of some sort, because I'm pretty sure that another trap our current culture fell into is putting more and more of the infrastructure on less and less of the people, leaving everyone else with unfulfilling busywork, and a few with way too much time and money on their hands.

Layer Four: Refining of the culture
Here's where things really get laid down--the seasonal and cultural traditions, the art styles, the methods of food prep and the sorts of meals the community will make. The ways the foods are preserved, and which foods, exactly, will be grown and how. Which animals are used for what, and which breeds are preferred. Which seeds are saved. How people are expected to behave, and their relationship to the world, history, the future, and each other. Any sort of religious or spiritual traditions.

This is also when independent shops can be set up for non-required things, like art pieces and books. This is when a town museum could be built to preserve the history that has been chronicled this whole time. This is when theatre or some other kind of mass entertainment could be a full-time thing for some people. Restaurants could start to exist.

Goals:
Because this is meant to be a better culture, I'd have everyone who joins define what they think went wrong with the old one, and we'd set up goals and traditions and social rules early on to avoid those things--personally, I'd set as goals:

• Sustainability in all aspects of the culture and how it interacts with the environs
• Seriously. No waste, no destruction, only guidance and maintenance.
• Togetherness of the community--ways to get to know each other, ways to bond as a group, ways to avoid and resolve conflict
• I'd include a lot of celebration right from as early as I could. Celebration brings people together--just think of that great rush you get at a concert when everyone is singing the same song because they love it!
• A way to capture the skills and knowledge of the people coming in so that they can use the best of it to enrich and improve the community as a whole, and to get rid of the stuff that feeds into the old culture's vices
• Everyone will bring in stuff we can use--education, skills, beliefs, experience, hobbies, information. We need to preserve that stuff and pass it on. Culture is made of stories, facts, games, songs, art, and artifacts.
• Healthiness of the people, the mental state, and the land before anything else
• Every new thing should support the health of the community and the people in it; if it doesn't, it's not for us.
• Ways to combat the corruption of damaging ideas that might filter in from outside, but not to block them from getting in
• If the community is successful, people will travel out of it and come back, or people will come from outside and try to settle; there has to be a way to teach people to leave behind their prejudices and selfishness and damaging behavior. Not something smothering, but something that offers better options and protects the wholeness of the society we're building.
• Flexibility
• Everything will be in flux. Some early ideas won't work, and there has to be a built-in looseness that allows new and better ideas based on circumstance and experience to replace them. The original shape of the society's idea will stay the same, but the particulars will change as the situation does and as the practicality of ideals are tested.
• Democracy
• Everyone is educated about every aspect. Everyone knows how the rules work and when people are breaking them. Everyone has a say, even when the majority vote outweighs them, and even dissenting opinions are recorded and added to the available knowledge base. Everyone knows what we're aiming for, and can spot when something goes off the rails or someone goes rogue.
• Stories
• The stories of where the founding members came from and why are going to be important later. The stories of how the ways of the community were chosen and why are always going to be important. Also, the basic cultural ideals, the myths we form, the hey-remember-when stories, the pop cultural tales we bring in and the new ones we make up--all of those, and knowing all of those, are what tie communities together.
• Basic encouragement of curiosity
• Societies that crush curiosity are the ones that have things to hide or vested interests in ignorance. We're not doing that. So ask questions, seek answers, try new things, invent new recipes and medicines and tools and music and ways to know the area.
• A basic outlook that sees a good, strong, better future, so that there's something to work toward, and to combat the roughness and struggle of the daily lives at the beginning, and any fear or jadedness brought in early on.
• A mindset toward sharing stuff early on, so that later on, there's less doubling up of stuff, and therefore less consumerism built in. Animals belong to the community. Tools and farming implements do, too. Food storage beyond the needs of your household go to the community backup stores. And so on.
• A love of useful technology, but a healthy skepticism of things that disrupt or damage the ideals of the society, or distract from work, or don't help things go easier, smoother, or prettier.

How would you do it? What would you include early on?

NOTES:
*I don't count myself as a prepper, because I don't really thing that everything will come down in a huge scary disaster. But I do think that things are getting untenable as they are, and I'd rather be in the solution pile than the problem pile, and there's always ways we can learn to be gentler, healtheir, more sustainable, and better for everyone and everything involved.
**Not necessarily schools, unless they're going to be super-comprehensive--but comprehensive schooling takes kids out of the workforce, and at this early stage, they'll be needed for helping around the house, delivering stuff, and learning basic survival and trades. So maybe an apprenticeship system? Or a hybrid of three-R schooling and apprenticeship?

The Home of the Future

I don't remember how I started getting The Red Bullitin, Red Bull's extreme lifestyle magazine (Klout? Some promo thing?), and I certainly don't have an extreme lifestyle unless you count, like, making things myself and trying to not eat junk, but sometimes there's a neat article in it*. This month's issue had an article about the home of 2030, as they see it, and it has some really neat ideas.

• Instead of having a separate living room, dining room, media room, workout room, tinkering room, etc, you'd have one space that is configurable for any need. And the really cool part is that it would configure itself, with a home-computer-controlled system of moving walls, self-moving furniture, customized lighting, etc.
• Most of a home's food needs would come from a mini-farm back garden for each house, tended by a tiny (by farming standards, anyway) automated gardener / farmer bot that would make sure everything grows the best it can and stays healthy.
• Including raising chickens, and having a built-in greenhouse that uses no energy from the grid but allows people to grow out-of-zone exotics and off-season basics.
• Everyone's work spaces would be customized to perfectly suit their work AND their own particular best ways of focusing, reaching that flow state everyone wants, and coming up with new ideas, innovations, and ways to be creative.
• And everyone will have access to video games that also keep them healthy and help them wind down heathily so they can sleep well and have lucid dreams that help them be stronger, faster, better, more accurate, and more creative.

Sounds like a pretty good life to me, and if you add, like, totally renewable power, souped-up recycling that integrates into the community so everyone is recycling and composting, and maybe walls that can be big computer or TV screens, it'd be a perfect close-future home!

NOTES:
*And always neat pictures--I use them for collaging all the time.

Why we need to change "you can't do that" to "you can do this"

Here's something I know about people:

A few will be the sort that can handle deprivation in the face of abundance, but most won't, and some will outright resist it.

That's why severe diets don't work permanently, why people eat more than they need even when they know that they've had enough, why most people always seem to want bigger houses, more room, longer vacations, bigger cars.

It starts down at the bottom, like where I am right now:

If I just had one more room in this apartment...

And continues through to enormous McMansions with rooms you forget you have and have to invent purposes for.

But here's the thing: it's not just our own choices and our own lives that are like this. It's the whole culture. That's why it's so hard for green industries to catch on, and for governing systems to get straightened out--no one wants to hear "you've got to stop" and "you need to give up" and "you can't have that anymore." And the more entrenched you are in how things are, the more money you're making off the broken systems, the more you'll resist the change.

Fact.

But resistance doesn't stop change, it just gives it something to push against. And change can be managed by making it less of an us-against-them, less of a "I'm taking that away from you", and more of a better exchange, a "here's something so much better."

More facts I know about people:

• Technology has taken off because there's always something better on the horizon
• Better, as an idea, is always changing
• Ads define a lot of public opinion on whether things are working or not

So...

Let's take control of our own zeitgeist. Let's define a radical Better that actually is better--greener, more sustainable, more fair.

Further, let's focus the better-making on the other side of the argument from where it's been-- if people want to take long hot showers, let's invest in all the researchers inventing low-energy water heaters and household water recycling and low-flow showerheads that have decent water pressure, especially the ones that are creating super-affordable products with their research. 

If people refuse to give up their hot cars, make the sustainable ones so well designed, so good looking, so affordable, and so mileage-efficient that they just out-compete the gas-guzzlers. Let's create an industry for self-driving cars and cars that burn your household waste without emissions, and cars that run on water or air or grass clippings or sunlight, or power that comes from the roads they run on.

If people want their meat, let's make it so that free-range, natural-raised, and organic are tastier and more affordable than battery farms and feed lots. Let's invent lab-grown meats that taste better than anything that was alive and killed, and that happen in ways that look cool so that they'll be in-demand. Let's pour opinion and funds and pressure-for-change into making alternative meats--fish, frogs, whatever--so delicious and so popular and so cheap and easy that they become the bulk of our meat-intake. Let's invent food replicators. Hell, let's replace meat all together with something else that doesn't kill anything to make it.

 We get to decide what we'll put up with. And if the majority of people won't put up with scarcity, deprivation and denial, instead of fighting against that, let's use it to boost the Better, to get everyone eating healthier, driving healthier, thinking better, living better, throwing the weight of public opinion into directions that improve the day-to-day reality not just of the rich who can afford it, but of everyone.

Let's not just take away the bad things. Let's replace them with things we haven't even thought of yet that are so much better that we can't imagine how we ever lived without them. I mean, how did we do anything without the internet, computers and cell-phones? Let's do that with whatever replaces junky things now-- how did we ever think 20 mi a gallon was decent, how did we ever think that force-feeding animals was the most efficient way to get meat, how did we ever live like that...