The existential crisis of a 30-hour power outage
how then shall we live? (part 1)
Wild Letters is a newsletter about self-exploration and building a right-fit life.
Thank you for being here with me!
My dear reader.
Last winter we had a 30-hour power outage in my town, and when I tell you that this fucked me up oh my god did this fuck me up.
No lights. No space heater. No refrigeration. No electric blanket. No toaster. No internet.
“So my job is entirely imaginary,” I said to Gent after the first 10 hours. “Without the internet it just… doesn’t exist?? I can’t publish on Substack, can’t host groups or workshops on Zoom, can’t record podcast conversations, can’t access any of my financial accounts. What kind of job is that?!”
After 20 hours I started to feel genuinely panicked — not because my business can’t survive a few offline days (it can) but because of how vulnerable I felt in realizing the extent to which my entire way of being as a writer and tiny business owner instantly falls apart without the electrical grid. What if the power were to stay out for five days or ten days or three weeks or longer? “What then?” I asked myself. What then!
Hour 24, hour 26, hour 28.
Luckily I had enough battery left on my Kindle to finish the book I was reading, a memoir about a guy named Mark who chose to move into an off-grid cabin and build a life without industrialized technology. It was the follow-up to his first memoir, The Moneyless Man, which I had just finished, chronicling a year-long experiment in living without the use of money.
Both books fascinated me, and the experience of spending so many hours of a blackout reading about someone who found a way to first give up money and then modern tech while I sat there freaking out about my extreme reliance on both was an irony so sharp it could have sliced me right open.
The core thing I’ve been thinking about for the past few years is this:
How do we build the world we want from within the world we’ve got?
Because what we’ve got is imperialism and white supremacy and capitalism and ableism and heteronormative patriarchy. What we’ve got is ecocide and deadly pandemics and genocidal violence and mind-bending wealth inequality (and and and) — which are all heartbreaks of a magnitude that can make it tempting to look away (I have looked away so many times!), and yet I’ll also tell you that the most soothing thing I have begun to do for my nervous system is to just continually refuse to gaslight myself about the fact that we are indeed living in a time of polycrisis1 and collapse2.
Ignoring the reality of what is (on either a personal or collective level) only works until it doesn’t, which probably helps to explain why I have found such profound relief from the eyes-open practice of witnessing, and of naming what it is that I see. Because without this, without an acknowledgement of what’s really happening, how can we possibly imagine and build a new way?
Something I struggle with (a lot) is the question of how to right-size the role of the individual in building a more just world. What is my responsibility as one of over eight billion people?
I used to get really caught up in a feeling of hopelessness around this question, sort of like: well what’s the point of even trying when anything I do is just the teensiest tiniest drop of water in a seemingly endless flood?
But something that has shifted for me recently (along the lines of what I wrote about last week) is the extent to which I am focusing solely on the outcome of things. Do I honestly believe that by not shopping on Amazon (for example) I am going to diminish the power and impact of that corporation’s harms? No. Do I think that cutting back on how often I travel by airplane will fix the climate crisis? No. And yet, decades of my own lived experience does indeed prove to me that while my individual choices and behaviors might not matter much when it comes to shifting the larger needles of the world, those individual choices matter a great deal to me. It’s like Wendell Berry said:
“We don’t have a right to ask whether we’re going to succeed or not. The only question we have a right to ask is what’s the right thing to do? What does this earth require of us if we want to continue to live on it?”
Or, said another way:
Given the gap between the world as it is and the world that I dream of, how then shall I live?
What I’m about to say might feel like a strange detour, but stay with me.
There is a man at my gym who does not go there to work out, at least not in a way that uses any of the weights or machines that he pays to access with his membership. What he does instead is walk into the gym, put on his dark sunglasses and large over-the-ear headphones, and spend 30-60 minutes watching himself dance in front of the mirror.
Dear reader, I am obsessed with this man. His upbeat energy, his dance moves, the perpetual smile on his face. He looks so joyful! So at home in his body! And it is exquisitely clear that he gives not one single fuck about the fact that he uses the gym so differently from everyone else. He wants to dance, and so he dances — regardless of what the people around him are doing.
This, I always think when I see him. This is the vibe I want to hold onto in every small attempt to build the world I want from within the world I’ve got. This energy, this passion, this ability to self-satisfy, this this this.
One of my current growing edges in the exploration of “how then shall I live?” is trying to reduce my own consumptive impulses, which arise from the part of me that was socialized to want more and more and more and more.
This is the same part of me that does not want to take responsibility for the full life cycle of the items I purchase, instead preferring to ignore the fact that when I throw something away, “away” is not a real place.
This part of me is impatient and selfish, oriented only toward my own convenience and comfort and instant gratification. Which I say not to shame myself but to simply name what feels true as a first step toward practicing a new way of being, because a new way of being is what I want. It’s what I’ve been experimenting with through my various spending bans, through planting my first herb and vegetable garden, through recently learning how to make homemade pasta. A slower way of living where if I want tomatoes I will grow tomatoes; a kind of voluntary simplification whereby I aim to find small, daily ways to withdraw my consent from capitalism’s current way of operating while simultaneously pointing my compass toward the vibrant and contagious joy of that guy who dances at my gym, because to not keep dancing, to not make art and love and pasta, that is not the revolution for me.
Today’s Letter is the first in a multi-part series exploring how to live amidst the challenges of our time, which is a topic that I’ve put off writing about for many months now.
Part of that hesitation is how deep I’ve been in my own learning — about catabolic collapse, about alternative economies, about community care and mutual aid and the radical lived examples of those who have long embodied an ethos of “enoughness” and interdependent thriving over one of individualism, supremacy, and exponential growth at any cost.
Another aspect of my hesitation to talk about all of this is simply that I feel afraid — afraid that people will tell me I’m being dramatic or silly or paranoid when I use words like “collapse” or “polycrisis”, afraid of judgement, afraid to sound self-righteous or like I think I have all the answers when truthfully I don’t have any answers at all.
What I have instead are questions (so many questions!) plus a sincere yearning to discuss those questions with other people in an open and imaginative way. I’ve been finding myself with a fierce craving for more spaces where we can come together to discuss what we see in the world (in our own inner worlds, in the world of our neighborhoods and cities and countries and planet) and to then support each other in who we want to be and how we want to live in response. Not because I think there’s one “perfect” solution to arrive at, but because I know for sure that there’s not. And it’s this absence of singular perfection that is itself a kind of freedom, because if we free ourselves from the desperate attempt to find The Most Morally Pure Way Forward (impossible!) we can instead use all the creativity and skills and perspectives we’ve got to pull thousands of levers all at once and hopefully move closer and closer to liberation for all.
The second installment in this series, coming in two weeks, is an essay about money.
If you’ve been in my corner of the internet for a while you already know that I am totally obsessed with honest conversations about money. Not because money itself is anything special (it is actually… made up? just bits of paper or a series of numbers on a screen??) but because I think it’s imperative that we acknowledge all that money promises us under capitalism’s culture of relentless consumption: belonging, safety, respect, well-being, fulfillment, love.
And money can/does give us some of those things — in a world where housing requires ever-increasing amounts of money then of course a certain degree of safety is indeed tied to our financial resources. Same goes for food, clothing, clean water, healthcare, childcare, eldercare, education, everything. And if the purchasing power needed to access those fundamental things was distributed equitably — if, for example, the richest 806 individuals in the US didn’t control more wealth (a lot more) than half the population combined — then perhaps I wouldn’t be so devoted to talking about money, and about the delusions and oppressions of capitalism. But I just don’t see how we move toward greater liberation without a devotion to regular, shame-free financial honesty, especially when the people who claim that money is a taboo and off-limits topic are often the same ones who have never had to worry about it at all.
So that’s what I’ll be writing about in part two, which will also include a fully transparent breakdown of how/why I recently divested a big chunk of money from the stock market, and what I’m planning to do with that money instead.
I’m feeling eager to write to you about all of this, and to share ideas and resources with each other. I also feel such an intense gratitude for all the people and communities around the world that I’ve been learning from/about over the past few years, the ones who have been meeting at the intersection of imagination and action again and again, leading the way forward for us all.3
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More soon—
Nic
By “polycrisis,” what I mean is that the simultaneous convergence of our various large scale crises (inflation, war, climate catastrophe, species extinction, energy shortages, pandemic, rising authoritarianism, etc.) results in an impact that is much greater than the sum of its parts.
By “collapse” what I mean is that in order for a complex system (such as an industrialized society) to continue on, enough resources must be available to maintain it. But with a globalized world built on capitalist imperialism that is inherently reliant on ever-increasing amounts of nonrenewable resource extraction, such perpetual maintenance becomes impossible because we simply do not have the resources to do it — and so, over time, the systems we built begin to collapse. Not in some kind of flash-bang, all-at-once, dystopian Hollywood blockbuster kind of way (although covid showed us that a version of that is indeed possible), but more like how Carmen Spagnola describes it, where there is widespread “social, economic, and ecological decline into a deindustrialized future, meaning a less productive, less extractive, less coherent, less convenient, less secure world than we have now.”
There are so many people, organizations, initiatives, and communities that are making me feel hopeful right now! Here are a few: Local Futures, Living Energy Farm, The Ujima Timebank, Singapore Really Really Free Market, Resource Generation, Transition Towns, The Bower Reuse and Repair Center, Post Capitalist Philanthropy, The Zero Waste Shop (and so many others, of course!)
This is a brave piece of writing, Nic. You are brave to confront these issues head-on when the easier thing to do is to sigh and shake our head and feel overwhelmed and helpless. I too alternate between pledges and promises to be anti this, that and the other AND closing my eyes at the enormity of what it asks of me. I’m glad there are spaces such as these where we can ride the waves of helpless and hopeful together.
Just wait want to say: not melodramatic, absolutely on point, and very grateful for your writing and how it resonates with and inspires me. Thank you.