a summer of discontent, life after growth and soul loss

The dog days of summer drag on, we had the rioting in a minor way last month. Strangely muted compare to the summer of discontent ten years ago, Blackberry Messenger was a more effective spreader of sedition compared with TikTok, or perhaps we just got lucky this time. The greens of some of the leaves are turning brown, but this septic isle seems not to be a happy place, despite the sunlit uplands promised a few years ago and a late summer of, er, summery weather.

Compared with the mendacious clown and the mad cow dear Rish! seems to try hard, but I’ll leave it to the irascible Dominic Cummings to summarise the result – cascading clusterfucks. The air traffic control screw-up, apparently a failure to sanitise user input, the concrete lumps falling off public buildings which has been known about for decades, the inability to stop small boats while claiming the plan is working – in the words of Our Dom government is broken because the people aren’t up to it. I think he means the people in government, Dom’s not always charitable to the masses, despite his shtick.

Dom’s a nutter, but the Tory Lord Aschroft’s latest State of the union address says the same thing in a different way

After 13 years of Conservative government, things were not supposed to look like this. Strikes, inflation, record NHS waiting lists, a sluggish Economy…

Let’s hear it from another Tory minister, from when we saw this movie last time, hello Norman ‘green shoots’ Lamont in his valedictory transmission on the 9th June 1993

There is something wrong with the way in which we make our decisions. […] We give the impression of being in office but not in power. Far too many important decisions are made for 36 hours’ publicity. Yes, we are politicians as well as policy-makers ; but we are also the trustees of the nation. I believe that in politics one should decide what is right and then decide the presentation, not the other way round. Unless this approach is changed, the Government will not survive, and will not deserve to survive.

Ouch. That was thirty years ago, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose

This is how Tory governments die, strangled by self-serving and internal inconsistencies. It’s really hard to conceive of one of the current crew saying

we are also the trustees of the nation

because populism destroys character. We should, however, fear the strength of character that follows, as the force is harnessed by those more competent who watched and learned from the failures of the first generation of populists. Perhaps there’s just something about the thirties of a century and bad moons rising. Something is rotten in the Kingdom.

Life After Growth

It looks much like Tim Morgan’s Project Armageddon: Life after Growth. I’m sure Bozza would say that was written by doomsters and gloomsters, but let’s face it: Tim Morgan’s predictions from nearly 10 years ago seems to be a lot more on the money than anything spewed from Bozza’s mendacious trap. Tim the Doomster quoth thusly

This person is most of us, and his or her life is already being affected profoundly by the processes described in this book. Over the last decade, his pay has increased, and may even have risen by more than the official amount of inflation, but he does not feel better off. The prices of many things that he has to buy (such as electricity, gas, food and petrol) have gone up by a lot more than his wage packet. It is a fair bet, too, that the various departments of government, no less than utilities, are taking a far bigger bite out of his income than used to be the case.

If his employer provides a pension scheme, its real value has probably fallen. If he has saved for retirement, the income that he can expect to enjoy is far less than seemed likely until a few years ago. If he expects to rely on a state pension, he wonders whether it will really keep pace with the soaring cost of essentials.

Despite the squeeze on his disposable income, he is subjected to seemingly continuous commercial pressure to spend. If he has children, it is likely that peer pressure is fuelling ever greater demands for new gadgets. If he is a young person (between, say, 16 and 30), he faces the additional problems of scarce, costly accommodation and a lack of well-paid jobs. Whoever he is, he quite probably has far more debt (including mortgages and credit) than he had ten years ago.

My younger self optimistically thought this didn’t ring true in some places, but a look at recent headlines on the cost of living crisis is all with our Tim. The one thing that’s a miss for me is

the various departments of government, no less than utilities, are taking a far bigger bite out of his income than used to be the case.

but that’s largely because my income has fallen compared to my employed self, and I have favoured capital. There’s disaffection in the dog days, all the way from the ennui of the lastminute.com parents travelling on the busiest day of the year, through to what looks to me like quite serious destitution in some quarters. Hoovervilles are on the rise, somewhere a young Steinbeck is perhaps writing the first lines of a 21st century Grapes of Wrath.

I switched off Everything Everywhere All At Once after 10 minutes because I got bored, it seemed to resonate with many people’s experience of life. I initially thought this article was written by AI because it had that sort of intro, but changed my mind about that as I got halfway down. Not enough to try and watch the movie again, but it speaks to a certain anomie that is increasingly widespread.

of Soul loss

There are ebbs and flows in any human life, but the sense of detachment trending towards anomie seems to be amplified with the whole late-stage capitalism thing. The cynicism of the Tinder ad

Realising you’re not dead inside

seems to be reflected in this 30-something Guardianista’s wistful reflection on the problem of finding a relationship, I am assuming she’s in London, because everyone that matters is 😉 Anthropologist Anna Machin tells us

“They [dating apps] promised ease in relationships but in many cases they have made things harder and more complicated. They handicap our brain, which has not evolved to select a partner at a distance. We are supposed to be in the room [with people].”

I’m not clever enough to know if that’s the case. Once upon a time they said the human body would fall apart at the high speeds of trains above 30mph, but we all sort of got used to it without too many ill-effects.

The real wisdom, bizarrely, comes from Susan Miller, Juliana’s astrologer, who shows a remarkable grasp of her clients’ human condition

Younger people who graduated college after the financial crash and 11 years later experienced the pandemic think that the world is a terribly dangerous place.

Women in particular. It’s not as dangerous as they think it is, but when someone believes they are in an uncontrollable environment, they want more control, and that includes securing the perfect husband or the perfect partner

I was tickled to read this story of a behaviourist’s detestation of that dealer in metaphor Carl Jung; as time has passed I have concluded that Jung’s approach has a greater resonance for those who draw power from the inner worlds and less so for the extroverts of the world. Since it is the latter that make all the running it is surprising he’s still known about. In the summary of This Jungian Life podcast:

For Jung, the soul carries creativity and grants meaning; it links us to the divine and represents all we could be if wholeness were possible.

Oddly enough one of the things made harder by the trend of consumerist materialism towards ‘because you’re worth it’ solipsism was probably retirement, in the time since I left work I have seen an increasing number of my peer group retire, and it would seem that more than half have a dislocation/disorientation with the loss of meaning due to ceasing work. That work is one of the remaining things outside ourselves that is imbued with ‘meaning’ is an odd critique of how the other things that used to give people meaning have been run out of town or devalued.

Jung’s description of shamanic practitioners calling this soul loss seems to be borne out by the big G, though there’s much weird shit too. In the end only you can find your way back to your true self, if you’re paying for it¹, particularly over t’internet, you’re doing it wrong IMO.

There is commonality in some of the descriptions of the symptoms between the shamanistic reports of soul loss and what often now falls under the catch-all ‘mental health problems’. A feeling of dissociation, due to difficulty in adapting or dealing with situations outside your control that affect your life. Depression, addictions and substance abuse, often in an attempt to outrun the negative feelings. I drank too much in the three years of saving to get out too. Losing touch with the feeling centres to get things done is a form of dissociation. It’s tough doing it over years rather than hours.

I struggle a bit with lonerwolf’s article, largely on the sales pitch, individuation ² is something you have to do yourself, the clue is in the name, but the taxonomy is good, and indeed the psychology isn’t a bad summary. At a high level, it’s the problem of the human condition referred to in  Yeats’ poem; the falcon can no longer hear the falconer³, and the personality may shatter into multiple conflicting elements. A lot of human life is the delicate balance between opposites, and if any of these are repressed, then the unexpressed elements will find a way out. If someone looks back at a display of uncharacteristic behaviour they may say “I don’t know what possessed me”.  It’s often one of the repudiated aspects finding its way out.

I was fortunate enough to dodge the end of work soul loss. Maybe it was made easier for me because FI was escape from an increasingly bad situation and I had three years of acclimatising while saving enough to get out, or perhaps I am just odd that way. I’ve known people who shared the view that the world is full of interesting nooks and crannies that you can poke an inquisitive snout into, but prefer structure to their inquiry. I am more with Peter Thiel here, insulting his hosts at Yale

Most people who really care about learning are autodidacts.

Retirement is an opportunity to do this. Bigtime.

Some retire into vicariously living through their children/grandchildren. It’s great that this works for them, but 10 minutes is enough for bystanders hearing about the grandkids, unless these kids are really doing something groundbreaking, or your conversation partner elicits more 😉

Ten years ago I took the line that retirement may be easier for introverts. It is possible I underestimated how far down that line you have to be. Even six years ago I missed the trick. The change to retirement is harder than I thought it was, on reflection, even if it wasn’t that hard for me.

The loss of soul applies to the West in general, it’s not really that sure what it stands for or finds meaningful. There is less of a shared narrative now about what constitutes the legitimate use of power, which does make collective action more difficult. We should be careful what we wish for here, Genghis Khan and Kim Jong knew what they stood for and found meaningful 😉 Dominic Cummings knows what he wants, and co-opted useful idiots to his vision. Still, doomsters and gloomsters be damned, eh, here’s some good news

Humanity is on the brink of major scientific breakthroughs, but nobody seems to care

This ode to a lost world of a great future that awaits us forged in the white heat of technology is remarkable for being current, rather than Harold Wilson’s rhetoric just as Britain gave up spaceflight in the 1960s

Why the indifference, we wonder? The author is of the view that scientists aren’t selling their ideas/discoveries/stuff to the rest of us with enough vigour. Excuse me – you notice a world-changing discovery because it changes the world 😉 Was a time when people used big pieces of paper to navigate the world around them, now they use their iPhones, occasionally missing the lamppost or your good self in front of them and getting stuck up mountains when the battery/signal fails them in their hour of need, but most of the time it Just Works. The world was changed by the smartphone. It was changed more by electricity, and by the motor car. What are these major breakthroughs you speak of then?

These include artificial intelligence, room-temperature superconductors, and nuclear fusion.

Hmm. I was reading about the last two of those when I was a kid. It’s still true that the easiest way to use nuclear fusion is to stick up a solar panel, though growing a tree or field of wheat or pasture for cows works tolerably well. The big problem with nuclear fusion on Earth is keeping the rest of the world out of the action, because it has to be very very hot for the action to happen, and heat always wants to get out, with a vim proportional to the temperature difference. While it’s possible that the reaction might scale, after all there’s a Universe full of prior art, maintaining a large volume of controlled temperature difference on earth is always going to be a tough engineering challenge that doesn’t scale easily. This is a second-order effect, it’s a little bit like the reason flying cars aren’t as commonplace as they thought they would be in the 1950s.

“We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.”

Peter Thiel

Peter Thiel missed the point: it’s a lot easier to scale 140 characters. This is a general problem tech bros have with the real world, they can’t get why it’s doesn’t act like software. People have made flying cars, but the engineering requirements of making a good car don’t make a great aeroplane, and vice versa. The economics are crap as a result. Your flying car will be a gas guzzler making a Hummer look like Greta Thunberg’s dream ride, a bear to park in a tight space and its fuel economy as a plane will suck bigly.

Reports of room temperature superconductors always fall into Pauli’s ‘not even wrong‘ category. Since you can tell a superconductor by floating it on top of a magnet due to the Meissner effect the standard of university labwork has clearly deteriorated from what it was, as the room temperature demonstration of that effect with media rolling tape or whatever they do now would be a wowser of a press conference⁴.

It’s not that surprising that people treat breathless PR flacks’ reports of amazing world-changing scientific discoveries with a meh – most of them are kites flown to get funding. If you believed everything trailed by the Independent’s tech news then you’ll be sorely disappointed and be flummoxed by the fact that we use more coal now than we ever used to, nearly twice as much as we did in the 1990s. That’s not to say renewables aren’t decarbonising electricity, they are.

Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Energy Data Explorer – Data Tools – IEA The top gree trace is electricity generation and the next trace down (blue) is the CO2 emitted in making that happen. All traces normalised to 2000=100. Select the power generation tab in the linked IEA page.

It’s just that more people are using more electricity, and that’s beating out the decarbonisation progress.

It’s OK for the unlucky in love’s Guardianistas to retreat into chopra-ism but less so for what passes as science. RetractionWatch really shouldn’t be as big as it is, but when you make publication people’s KPIs, then is it really such a surprise? It’s all part of capitalism’s Oscar Wilde problem – knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing. Still, there’s a silver bullet that can fix all this mess.

e/acc to the rescue

Marc Andreesen, he of Netscape Navigator⁵ fame is of the view that we ceased/outlawed technological innovation in non-virtual domains the 1970s, which is why growth has ceased outside the world of bits. I sort of see his point in the neophobia regarding nuclear power, though his neophilia for a world with 20 billion people is one I am glad I will never see. It is remarkable that tech bros seem to have a thing about rejecting real-world limits, calling it effective accerelationism which has its own acronym e/acc. It sounds like religion, indeed dare I say it, chopra-ism –

The universe wants us to be alive
The universe wants us to become more sophisticated
The universe wants us to replicate
The universe feeds us unlimited amounts of energy and raw materials with which to do that
Yes, we dump entropy out the other side, but we get structure and life to basically compensate for that.

The world according to Marc. The quote is from 48 mins in if your mobile borks the vid.

The incredible cornucopia of life as a tech bro, eh? Bet there are no food banks, rough sleepers or shit in the rivers⁶ in this utopia. Bless. And all so terrifically consequence-free and invulnerable to disproof. If you have a problem with that, then AI will fix it in post.

Indian Summer compensations

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells  With a sweet kernel

There are compensations for the turning of the year, it’s not quite the mists and mellow fruitfulness of Keats’ poem . Mrs Ermine scored these hazelnuts before the skwerls, it appears there are more nuts than can be turned into squirrelmeat. I have never seen cobnuts in Blighty before⁷, because the grey tree-rats have at ’em first. Researching further, they apparently are a thing in Kent, and while the skwerls are a problem, the big thing my younger self failed to realise is you are meant to pick ’em green, d’oh.

Pick ’em green, they say in Kent. I didn’t know that. No wonder the bloody skwerlz had at ’em before they got to the stage I think of as ripe.

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1. I haven’t got a down on therapy in general, particularly in a clinical setting. But there are an awful lot of untrained/unaccredited folk flogging services in this space, and I would say from the results that they fuck people up, sometimes projecting their own traumas onto their clients. I can see the attraction of the story of the wounded healer. Claire Dunne titled her biography of Jung Wounded Healer of the Soul ↩
2. to be fair to lonerwolf, they don’t call it individuation, I translated that into the Jungian term, but there’s much commonality in what they term the spiritual journey and individuation ↩
3. Yeats’s poem applied this at a societal level, his philosophy described in A Vision (1925)  applied the concept of cycles and gyres at the macro level as well as to the individual ↩
4. Note to press hacks – do check under the table for wires, as you can make an active Meissner effect with electromagnets and sensors. ↩
5. the first browser usable by ordinary people, rather than geeks ↩
6. Maybe the US doesn’t have shit in its rivers due to a strong EPA, though given Marc’s view on such things the Galt’s Gulch he’s proposing probably won’t have that sort of thing either. Gets in the way of progress/acceleration, y’know ↩
7. There are a hell of a lot more hazel trees along the rhynes in Somerset than there were hazels in Suffolk where I used to live, so there’s some element of sample bias here ↩