Theories of Relevant Relativity

The last ten years has been a particularly interesting time for those of us who study human behavior. We've had a lot of unusual material to work with. Or what I would have thought would be interesting material. Interesting enough to maybe provoke some new and create and different ways of living. Alarm after alarm has been thrown. It has come from virtually every sector of life; financial, environmental, health, education, civil rights, democracy and politics, artificial intelligence. It's almost as if someone or something has thrown out all the stops at once in a sort of grand finale of effort to see if humans truly are as ignorant or arrogant as it would seem.

If this was a test or more generously a final opportunity, we failed. If you are just joining the conversation on collapse theory, welcome. And I'm sorry. It's a hard one.

If you are opting out of this particular conversation, okay. And I wish you the best of luck. Truly. There's no right way to do this. Maybe there is a wrong way though. It's maybe a little easier for me to talk about this because I've never been unable or unwilling to engage with the unimaginable. The incomprehensible. The unthinkable. It's just how I'm wired. I'm also that annoying person who can't just enjoy a show for entertainment without picking apart every plot or character fault. I think I'm a realist now but once I may have leaned more into the catastrophic. Or maybe it's just that now those two have become close enough together as to be difficult to differentiate. Either way, I feel oddly at peace with the idea that the world as we know it may end or human life could become eradicated from it. I'm not happy about it mind you. I'm deeply heartbroken but I'm also not surprised and therefor not trapped in that awful clutch of denial, resistance and avoidance. I feel somehow relieved in the knowing that I don't have to fight anymore. That what energy was being poorly utilized into fighting can now be redirected to the appreciation, protection and preservation of what matters most. That may sound like fighting still but it feels a whole lot different to me. It's a bit like protest but without the anger. And it does not escape my awareness that the time in which I am finally really able to take it all in; all the beauty and glory of this world, the time that I have felt most whole, most myself, most joyful and most aware of the pain that we have all had to endure as a species to come this far, is the time in which it may very well all be lost.

Perhaps part of what has saved me in this is that I never really had much hope. As I've written about before, I study people and patterns and that makes me pretty good at predicting what is going to happen next. And in some ways I am surprised that we have lasted as long as we have. While it is entirely possible, even likely or at least I used to think this was the case, that there are more good people in the world than truly bad, it doesn't matter. That is a statistic that may make life better but it's not one that in my mind holds particular relevance when it comes to longevity and sustainability. The bad; the greedy, shortsighted, dishonest, and arrogant don't play by the same rules and because of that, it's not a level field or a fair game. We know that. The very rich buy the elections, making them not accurately representational of all people the way they were intended. The politicians they got in set the policies that favor their businesses. The businesses drive the markets. The markets create employment, services, medicine, food options and availability. In the land of seemingly endless choices, the truth is, we have very little. At least not the choices that actually matter.

Western civilizations are always upwardly moving and advancing and in their vanity and ignorance they assume that progress means more. New construction, new technology. Things that people (a small group of people) can profit from. Developers buy up acres and pave over wetland and install fences through wildlife corridors feeling totally justified in their actions. Because humans need more houses. Big houses. Multiple houses. And landlords need enough money to buy more houses and charge higher rent so that people have to choose between a roof over their head or health or a decent quality of life. And technology! We have to get there first. The ever moving target of there. Because if we don't get there first someone else will. And they will what? Win? Make a different choice with whatever they have achieved? Who knows. What they do know is that there's no money in the old ways. The ways of the first peoples who understood and worked with the land, the weather, the animals to understand them instead of tame or conquer them. Indigenous knowledge was far from simple. It held a wisdom, an awareness and a responsibility that colonizers have long since abandoned, if they ever possessed it at all. At the foundation of indigenous knowledge was sustainability. Yes, we could work with and take from the land and its animals but in order for future generations to do the same, we also had to give to it and to not take more than we needed. The goal was not to dominate. Domination leads destruction and devaluation; actions that hold no place in a world in which there is more than enough to go around. It's also remarkably vulgar and grandiose in the hubris department to believe that we are somehow better than every other living thing.

And yet, here we are. Every climate scientist will tell you that we have passed the threshold, the tipping point. We can't stop only slow and prepare for collapse. So when the news came out that there may be a better than 10 percent chance humans will be killed in the next 3 years, suddenly it was news. Relevant news. News that effects every living being on earth. And yet, here we are again. The place in which maybe a few more people are now on board with the idea that maybe we should be doing something different and the majority are not paying attention or can't think about it or ... and this is the part that makes me the saddest... won't. And I'm guessing, the point at which once again what briefly felt huge, shocking, devastating, infuriating, eventually becomes the background noise we so skillfully drown out.

So what is it that makes it so hard for humans to spend some time wrestling with these and previously announced uncomfortable truths? Here's where my training and my observation of people over the past twenty years comes in handy! I have a few ideas. There's desensitization, obviously. Then there is that change is hard. Even seemingly small, easy change. Everyone knows Bezos is a monster and that Amazon is one of the leading companies destroying the planet but most people still use it. Same with Zuckerberg and Meta (guilty on that one). We still use Roundup and other pesticides even thought it's killing all the pollinators and causing cancer. We still use chat gpt even though data centers are utilizing so much water the world will be uninhabitable if we don't stop building them. So if we can't make even those small changes, the ones each and every one of us does actually have choice and control over, do we really expect people to do the really hard ones? If we now loop back in the fact that those with the most money got their money by making mostly selfish, greedy and irresponsible choices and the vast majority of said millionaires and billionaires want to keep making more money, not less, we have the problem we find ourselves in now. The point at which the earth can longer support human life.

Believe me when I say I'm not a prepper. Nor am I conspiracy theorist. Like I said before, I am a realist. And I know that most people don't change until it's too late or really, really damn close. Or they see it before it's too late and they have some momentum so they make some changes and then things stabilize and they go back to their old behaviors. I see it in my office All The Time. And these are the people who can even acknowledge that there's a real problem. The people who are showing up, no matter how late, to the table or (the couch as it may be). So how about then everyone else? Those who are not booking appointments because either they don't think it's needed or (ignorance) or that they can figure it out themselves (arrogance). Let's talk first about the various manifestations of ignorance and its companions avoidance and denial.

This gets sticky for me because for a long time I tried to understand, wanted to believe that there was something okay about this choice. I certainly don't want people panicking over things that probably won't happen or worse, becoming so depressed or apathetic that they give up completely or become paralyzed. There is something unquestionably appealing about the "focusing on joy and gratitude" approach. And we need some of that, absolutely. But I myself was having a really hard time embracing that one. I honestly just couldn't do it but I also couldn't try to make myself do it because something about it didn't sit right with me. It felt like the same thing we have been doing just with a little more love and light. It may have been a perspective shift but it wasn't an actionable one. Was everyone really okay with us all going down and taking all the trees and plants and animals with us as long as when it happened we could say we that had had a good life? That even if others were suffering terribly while we were out seeking their bliss or finding ourselves or living in the moment they had made the right call? This may sound harsh and I do understand that plenty of these people were doing small acts of good along the way. But still, I just couldn't get behind it.

Then we move on to the arrogant. One trait that I think (don't quote me on this) might be unique to the human race is entitlement. They may be out there but I have not yet encountered a species that takes so much more than it needs. This doesn't mean they can't be brutal and violent about it but it's for survival. Humans are the only group that hoards resources that are not needed for their personal survival and indeed compromise the potential for other groups to survive. We call it rugged independence or pulling yourself up by the bootstraps or any number of other favorable terms that position the individual as deserving of more than others should have while giving nothing in return. They may give away some to their immediate families or to those who can protect their position but never enough to make their own lives a little less comfortable. These are the Musks of the world. I'd add that every Musk, Trump, and other wanna be rich and powerful man has many, many less rich and powerful men who want what they have badly enough to do their bidding, no matter how humiliating or wrong it may be, in the hopes that it pays off for them.

There's one more group that I almost forget to mention. And that is the group that simply cannot, for no fault of their own, wrap their minds around these ideas. They are too big, too complex, too outside the realm of everything we think we know or understand to entertain them. It's akin to the reality that we are all spinning on the surface of giant rock in a universe we have only discovered 5% of somehow glued to its surface by something someone told us was called gravity. And the fact that we know we are going to die some day but since we have absolutely no idea what death looks like. We are in fact as a group remarkably good at navigating life without having much understanding of what it all really means or what may come next. Let me be clear in saying this is not an intelligence issue. Plenty of very smart people don't wrestle with existential questions. And intelligence comes in many forms.

These, my dear friends, make up most people. That truth can coexist with the truth that there are also many, many wonderful, generous, remarkable, brilliant and determined people in the world who are doing good for and by the rest of us and are pushing their minds as far as they can go to to figure out solutions. I just don't think they are the majority. And I think they are becoming more and more the minority as capitalism has delivered distraction and convenience into every hand, stealing our attention and wasting our time and convincing us that we don't need those bulky and cumbersome critical thinking skills because here! The answer is right here on your little handheld computer!

So that's the why. Now to the what. I think that maybe most of us are a little too late to decide what we are going to do with this, our one wild and precious life. But we can think about how we want to spend the rest of it and who and what that will benefit and who and what could be hurt by it.

One thing I have learned with doing wildlife rescue work is that it's pretty tragic. I had dreams of nursing orphaned koalas back to health but instead most of what we see is blood, fear, hunger, cold, pain and a whole lot of poop. I've pulled a dead wallaby off the road after being hit by a car just days after his partner and their joey suffered the same fate. Most injured animals, if we can get them to the hospital in time, still end up being euthanized. It's heartbreaking work and 80% don't make it. But 20% do and those get the love, warmth, safety, nourishment and protection that they need before they are strong enough to go out into the world and try again. Knowing that most are going to die doesn't stop any of us from doing the work. In fact interacting with the precarious nature of life and the vulnerability of those that need our help makes me appreciate it so much more. It's something I can do. It is, I have learned, the uncomfortable and not the comfortable that makes us truly awake. It is not looking away but looking straight at the sorrow and the suffering that makes us fear it less. It is knowing with every cell in our bodies that there is no light without dark. It is understanding that we are going to die that makes us live.

At this point, you can ask just about anyone that studies human civilizations or climatology or ai and they will tell you that things changing in a very, very dramatic way is not an if but a when. It's now unavoidable. So whether we have 3 years or 30 it's time. Time to wake up and to show up. We can't stop it but we can slow it. We can't stop it but we can protect more of it. We can't go back or start over but we can treat tomorrow like a new opportunity to try harder. To stop centering ourselves as individuals or as a species. This was always the answer and it's just been waiting for us to remember. Our ancestors knew it. We are all in relationship with every living thing. Personally, when I go, I'd like to think that I treated all of those relationships with the respect they deserved. And I don't want to be afraid.