The Middle Way for Modern Times

Or, out of the unsustainable sustainability trap

I am committed both to living a balanced life personally and to helping to make the major changes that are needed to create a more sustainable way of life for all of us (in terms of energy, land use, etc.). On the surface, these things seem like the are closely aligned, and they are.

But on another level, they seem to require very different types of energy which to reconcile require a new kind of balance.

At the personal level, living in balance would involve: spending time with friends and family, which requires not working excessive hours, nurturing myself as a whole person including hobbies and side interests, learning to grow some of my own food, biking rather than driving when possible, taking time for reflection and rejuvenation, living in a small town rather than a large city, stopping to smell the roses and admire the sunsets, getting enough exercise, etc.

But the paradox is that trying to promote sustainability at the societal level seems to require abandoning most of these things so that there is more time to work intensively on specific, focused initiatives that will attract broad attention and adoption. If we look at the "start up" business model, we find people working obsessively working long hours to perfect a product, please the necessary investors, and beat competitors to market. To create something new in a world where getting the necessary attention from a distracted and ADD public and media requires superhuman effort, how can personal balance be preserved?

On the other hand, working unsustainably at a personal level to promote societal sustainability must surely be bound to fail. All that unsustainable work requires an unsustainable use of resources. (Think many and frequent plane flights, lots of fast food meals with wasteful packaging, miles of driving, reams of paper, electricity hogging computer use.) And this does not even include the way working unsustainably drives others to also work unsustainably (your competitors, all of the service industry folks you rely on, consultants, etc.). When you factor that in, you end up with exponential contributions to unsustainability in the name of sustainability.

One could possibly imagine getting everyone working in this field to join a "Slow Work" movement similar to the Slow Food movement. It might have some impact and promote a kind of detente that might be helpful, but there would be a contrary motivation even still. To create real solutions that begin to move us towards sustainability will also have to be financially sustainable and generate its own capital towards development. This means they are likely to be businesses or social enterprises. This usually means competition, and in a competitive arena agreements to go slow are certainly bound to be broken.

But there are other problems as well. One relates to the short attention I mentioned earlier. All efforts in this age of overstimulation need to be extremely engaging to hold the attention necessary to get work done, and to be more engaging than other distractions takes a great deal of effort. I am not sure I see a way around this problem until our culture also begins to voluntarily slow down. As society slows down, people will remember that they have a free will and can choose to pay attention to things they value. As they slow down, people begin to have their own sense of what they value in contrast to what they are being force fed by the media. Like the factory farmed meat creatures most of us eat, we are being force fed, in our case we are fed a steady diet of manufactured needs and distraction. The result of this is a loss of choice and will at the individual level and a society careening down a dead end road that no one really would want to be on if they had a little space to stop and think about it. 

Another problem is that our culture is attracted to those who bite too much off, who live on the edge and sometimes fall off. For example, we are dazzled by the rockstar or entrepreneur burning the candle at both ends in service of their vision. Or consider the wall street traders doing billions of dollars of deals, trying to make just a little more than the next guy. We want them to push themselves to the edge of exhaustion, of reasonability, of prudence and beyond. Pushing the limits is sexy. But of course there are major downsides for the individual, their patrons and investors, their spouses, their family and friends, etc. But like a person in an abusive relationship we are dazzled by their boldness and apparent power and stick with them despite their repeated abuses as individuals and as a type. This is something we can also purge our culture of over time.

So we can see that there are many barriers to being able to promote sustainability both effectively and sustainably, which is ironic.

But I do think there may be a way out, and it involves collaboration. Especially in our age of improved 2-way communication tools (cell phones, internet, etc), it is becoming increasingly possible for a group of people to work effectively and powerfully together. No longer do we need the the ONE BIG MAN to make it happen: we can envision and bring to life powerful new realities together. And when you can have many people working together, there is no need for any individual to work unsustainably. Thank god. "Many hands make light work." 

This is what we must strive for: a deeply shared, rich vision of the desired future and powerfully coordinated collective efforts that move us towards sustainability in such a way that each individual can also live their lives sustainably. That will be real progress.