Gentle Decline 1/22: Assortment & Augury
Hello. This will be a sort of gathering of the bits issue, featuring some short things I've thought of, some news articles, some discussion of news articles and social media stuff, and some answers to questions that have come in. It's kind of impossible to talk about change in the world without referencing COVID-19, so if that's a problem for you, maybe read it in short bursts, or when you're feeling up to it. No pressure, like.
Miscellany
I've started transcribing entries from my Miscellany notebook, and putting them online at Aodh's Miscellany. These are just quotes from various places that are meaningful to me, and to be honest I think they're better in the handwritten notebook, but that's got a very low level of distribution. So the web page will do. It's in my currently preferred hand-rolled HTML, and also includes a hand-rolled RSS feed, because that appeals greatly to my sense of archaicism. And I note that I wrote about the Commonplace Book in Issue 20 of Ebb & Flow, but I don't seem to have written about the Miscellany itself anywhere much. I'd do that, except that the first five or six entries in the Miscellany explain it pretty well.
Learn To Cook
Something I missed in the small skills issue, because in some senses it's not a small skill, and otherwise because I'm standing too close to it: learn to cook. Seriously. It is the one thing that is applicable in almost every situation, and if you can't cook, it is very possible that there will be a day when you are standing in a room full of food, unable to eat any of it. If you can already cook, learn some new tricks - combinations of ingredients, techniques, full on recipes, whatever. This is probably a good point at which to flag up my new newsletter, Commonplace, which deals with food and cooking.
Somewhat relevant to this is the sudden worldwide obsession with making bread. And the Washington Post has an excellent article on the very basics of food gardening.
Small skills are all very well, but how do I aim for a kind of career/living that doesn't exist yet (and might never)?
That has to be a gradual process. And to some degree, you've got to learn it on the job. This is analogous to the thing where, in 1998, we were looking at ads for web developer positions with "5 years experience in HTML" on them, and reckoning that the six or eight people in Ireland who had that depth of experience didn't really want to give up the companies they owned in order to get web jobs. Thinking about it, I'm not entirely sure the term "web developer" was even a thing. My job title was "webmaster". In 1993, those five years before, very few people knew what a website was, and fewer still had any concept that they might ever make them for a living.
The key things are to be flexible, to grasp things when you see them, and to accept that starting out on these new things will be both rocky and underpaid at first. At some stage, you'll be like the six people who had 5 years of HTML experience in 1998. And each skill is acquired independently, too - there's no package. My "training" for my first job in web development was a one-hour tutorial, as part of the Maths curriculum in Trinity, in how to code web pages. There were ten people in the tutorial, so I reckon I got something less than six minutes of actual teaching. Some of the stuff that will be relevant in ten years' time is going to be of similar teaching duration for you, and after that it's a case of teaching yourself.
So in some sense, the first skill you need to acquire is acquiring new skills, and being aware of the possibility of acquiring new skills. This sounds like some kind of tautology, but it's true: you need to be able to take on new methods and tasks, and a lot of people don't do this much. My most recent skill acquisition was very small; how to concatenate PDFs into one file, and remove redundant pages. This is tiny, but it's not a thing I knew how to do last week. Likewise, the method of making lazy beds for potatoes as detailed in the last issue is not a thing I knew before, and do now. Do these have long-term value in a changing world? Maybe. But at least I still know how to pick up new things, and that's really the key capability.
You've written before about individual action not being enough, but a lot of what you're advising is just that. How does that work?
Beats me. This is one of the things I struggle with - the paradox that we can only act as individuals, but that individuals are in some meaningful way a minority in the world now. Political parties and corporate entities are the movers and shakers under the current forms of economy and government, and one of those alters course only in response to votes (which are only every few years) or at least beliefs about votes, and the other only in response to profit and loss, which no individual can reach.
So a lot of what I'm writing about concentrates on things you, as an individual, can do to make sure that in a world that is changing (and not necessarily for the better), you can keep your head above water. That's the first step in making (planned!) changes anywhere; making sure you continue to have the solid footing of food and shelter. And there's maybe an oddity in that - the vast majority of people reading this already have that, and many of us don't really believe that that's at risk. But, and here's the drum I'm really banging: it is.
The way the world is changing right now, and has changed since the beginning of the year, is an illustration of this. Loads of people whose jobs, livelihoods and even lives were perfectly secure then are finding out that that's not the case. A global pandemic is, as such things go, pretty fast-moving, and it challenges my firm belief that historical change only happens gradually. The response to the pandemic, though, has been slow and somewhat unwilling. The US administration really appeared to be only realising that it isn't a momentary blip in late March, and various other countries (UK, the Netherlands) were pursuing some distinctly dodgy strategies that were fairly evidently "let's not damage shareholder value" until they suddenly had to change.
Climate, which is my big interest, isn't directly linked to the pandemic. Rapidly spreading illnesses are a thing that happens regardless of economy and human impact on the world - we know of a whole raft of historical plagues, from Justinian's to the Black Death to the spread of illnesses among Native Americans post-Columbus to the "Spanish" flu. There was something way, way back before recorded history, about 75,000 years ago, which might have been a disease (or might have been a volcano) that caused a "bottleneck" in the human population of the era, and results in us all being much more genetically similar than the age of our species would otherwise indicate. But human activity does enable - causes, in reality - the spread of these illnesses, and we can change that activity when we really need to. This is evidenced by the current situation in Ireland where people are, by direct order of the government, not going more than 2km from their houses except for food and other essential functions, and similar situations worldwide.
So there's risk, and we can see that changing behaviour mitigates that risk. It's frustrating that people (and organisations, governments, companies) will turn on a dime to deal with an illness, but not for the longer-term probably-much-bigger issue of climate crisis.
Actual Climate Crisis Stuff
The Washington Post reports that waters in the Gulf of Mexico are warmer than usual, which could lead to more thunderstorms and a more active hurricane season. This is more of the same, really. Also, for those of us who read a lot of Atlantic trade history (just me, then...), the idea that the North-West Passage is usable year-round is a bit terrifying in and of itself, and it's been that way for more than a decade. Apparently there are now cruise ships that go that way. There's some kind of shifting baseline syndrome at work there, because plenty of people seem to think it's an ordinary thing, and I still think it's a huge change. It also turns out that some parts of that passage may only be 15m deep, which would limit the size of the ships that could pass through, but the moderately humongous Nordic Orion made it through with a load that would have made it sit too deep for the Panama Canal all the way back in 2013.
Ch-ch-changing Times
Venkatesh Rao (who might as well be the patron saint of this newsletter) has produced a brilliant thread on Twitter, outlining 100 "Secular Shifts" that could arise from the pandemic. A chap called Ben Kraal followed up with another 100. These are brilliant, and I want to look at a few of them in some detail. It's possible that previous exposure to Venkat's own particular terminology might be necessary to fully grok them. I'm deliberately picking out ones which also have applicability (positive or negative) to life in an ongoing climate crisis.
Dedensification: This one is of some concern, to be honest. Certainly the density of urban living, and the effect where people are channeled through particular places or spaces (public transport, shopping centres) are an issue in terms of virus transmission. But in terms of ongoing damage to the natural world, and in terms of minimising infrastructure, centralisation is better. From an ideal point of view, a situation where most people live in towns and cities and the countryside is left to crops and wilderness is probably the best.
Hero’s journey fiction sharp decline / Carrier bag fiction sharp rise: I'm greatly in favour of this. I've muttered and ranted elsewhere about the damage that narrative does to our thinking, but that applies to the hero's journey (thrown spear) form of narrative, and not the much more benign and thoughtful carrier bag. It's possibly worth noting that the carrier bag form correlates nicely with the Miscellany approach to writing and retaining writing, and also to my favoured social meal form of mezze or tapas-like spreads of many dishes.
Exotic and complex cuisines decline / High-peasant legible cuisines gain: This is a likely outcome of climate crisis anyway, assuming that infrastructure and global transport suffer (which isn't certain - it's possible that ports will find ways to adjust, and new sea passages being opened up will increase trade, but I can't see that in the short to medium term). It's not an attitude thing so much as a local availability thing, though, so some exotic cuisines, where the ingredients are available locally, will thrive and be absorbed even more into local foodways. The rise of peasant cuisines, on the other hand, has happened plenty of times before, and will certainly happen again.
End of large, dense mega conferences / Large events like Burning Man enter slow decline into irrelevance / Large-scale concerts decline: These are pretty much certain. Whatever about goods transport, the way in which individual people are able to belt hither and yon is going to reduce - not because it's impossible, per se, but because eco-friendly transport modes, or those available when the price of fossil fuels climbs, are slower. People won't want to travel far for single-evening or even weekend events, because they'll spend more time travelling than being there. And that's without considering the exposure to unknowing virus carriers attending the same events.
Telehealth for GP visits: (and various things about WFH, teleconferencing, last mile optimisation) This would be so good for both crisis mitigation and life in the ongoing/aftermath that it's hard to measure. It does rely on infrastructure still being there, but once we reduce reliance on place for business and consultation, it means that people can move inland to wherever they can, rather than having to move inland to where work is, or where particular services are. A rise in distance learning would go alongside this.
I'd love to be able to do this for climate crisis, but mostly the changes arising appear to be corporations finding increasingly efficient ways of greenwashing their activities, and governments ignoring everything because there's no money to be had from it, and the link between environmental damage and health isn't obvious enough to cause them to panic. I may try to bend my mind around it a bit more, though.
This issue brought to you by the Irish lockdown, a steady supply of good coffee and Coke Zero, and more home cooking than we've had in years. Next issue is in the realm of "answer hazy, try again later", although I might (no promises!) have a shot at listing changes I expect in that 100-things format.
If you feel that Gentle Decline would be useful to someone else in your life, please forward it on and/or show them the subscription link at https://tinyletter.com/gentledecline - and there's also an intermittently updated Twitter feed at @gentledecline. I'd love to have more people reading this and being, in some sense, better prepared for what's slowly coming.