How to do nothing
I’ve been spending the past couple of weeks protecting my field. This has involved removing something like 9/10 of the contacts from my phone, going whitelist-only on communication, paring back software tools that don’t facilitate right relationship to the practice, pausing new social engagements, removing accounts from two platforms that won’t serve the collective going forward, and firewalling a lot of domain names.
Most of the consumer internet no longer works for me, so I’ve just been reading books, drawing, and focusing on my local people. I wait for my close people to text me, which they do, eventually. I gather in person exclusively. I do the work to fix up my community, as best I can. The closest thing to “gathering” I’ve done since November 05 involved me doing a community trash cleanup, because our institutions have failed us. A day later, I walked the route that we cleaned up to see it covered in trash again.
In the meantime I have found myself wondering how to create meaning for myself, for the coming years, now that I have a surfeit of free time & attention. Meaning is the core of existence; one must have a thing to live for. I recently released a book, am between projects, and have been casting about for what to do. Normally this is not hard for me, but these days it requires conscious attention.
I recalled, vaguely, one person’s work around this topic. I went to their website and discovered that they had pivoted into an AI startup to discover what meaning is for all of us now. I remain undeterred by this person’s obvious psychospiritual impoverishment; mostly, I pity them and grieve the loss of their work’s ongoing relevance. This is because meaning-making is a spiritual practice, and it must exist outside of the direct influence of technology. (Whether or not tech has failed us in this way is a question I leave to the reader.)
And so I have spent a lot of time in stillness, away from screens, thinking & pushing new ideas around. I’ve spent years stating, calmly & plainly, without ambiguity, that we exist within apocalypse. At last, that idea is settling into the collective on a soul level. We have learned that we are unable & unwilling to take care of one another; there is no clear path forward. If a path exists, then, it must be immediately in front of us, in this reality, offline as hell. And it’s probably not going to reveal itself if we don’t give ourselves the psychic spaciousness to think. Nobody will give this to us. We must take it.
This doesn’t mean that there won’t be text, or a need to engage with the online world. It is instead a call to presence. By being deeply intentional about what we put in front of us, we can make sure we’re leveraging the best of ourselves to make our own worlds better.
And so I am left focusing on the people who are physically around me and able to show the absolute hell up. I will probably view the rest of my personal life as noise for the foreseeable. Some future text will touch on these ideas; at the very least, there is quite a bit of ferment for living, which always seems to generate more text. And perhaps we will make more meaning without using a large language model to do it. The meaning, after all, has not yet been created.