While I sincerely believe that we need to coordinate changes to infrastructure and social norms to make progress on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, I am not going to sit and wait for the coordination to magically happen on its own. That means actively experimenting with alternate lower-emissions routines.

My family is on a weekend trip at an AirBnB not far from our home, but distant and remote enough to act as a forcing function for being deliberate about what we bring and our activities.

By paying up-front, I’m using my sunk cost bias to my benefit by binding myself to focus on more important things.

Buckminster Fuller, it turns out, is not a great writer. I picked up a copy of Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth recently, because I am having a deep craving for optimistic visions (wonder why?); it definitely has some interesting bits and I am finding it worth my time, but I’m pretty frustrated with his pompous, convoluted phrasing and the ahistorical speculation used to argue his point. Still, I am trying to read it charitably, as a fable or some kind of foundation myth for switching from a scarcity to abundance mindset.

A confession: I enjoy reading self-help books. I know this isn’t cool. I certainly roll my eyes at plenty of stuff when I’m reading self-help, but they can also stimulate useful self-reflection. The key is to skim anything that is boring or too cringeworthy and to read sympathetically rather than as an adversary looking to find a fatal flaw and demolish the argument. Given that defensive preamble, here’s a quote I highlighted from Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project (which I finished yesterday):

Philosopher Nick Riggle explores the ethics of goofing around in his book On Being Awesome. He identifies the idea of “being awesome” with being skilled at creating situations for others to express their individuality. When we break out of our norm-governed roles by expressing ourselves, we can create what I call a social opening. A social opening occurs when an opportunity arises to step outside of or creatively expand upon these roles — in particular, when there is a chance to recognize each other’s individuality beyond whatever generic traits and skills are required to simply enact the social role or adhere to the social norms.

Cutting carbon emissions requires both household behavior change and government intervention. Neither alone will do the job. It seems obvious to me that this is not an either/or choice. When I get into debates with friends on the topic, it doesn’t take long for everyone to come around to “False dichotomies are false.” But still people are picking sides. This is dumb and we should stop. As Kris De Deckers says in “We Can’t Do It Ourselves”

In her Atlantic essay “Gratitude for Invisible Systems”, Debbie Chachra describes infrastructure as how “we take care of each other at scale”. Because these systems are only visible when they break, we tend to not appreciate them. Well, since I first started paying attention to COVID-19 and what it’s consequences might be in January, I sure as hell appreciate infrastructure now. Building up stocks of food so that we are ready to self-quarantine at any moment was easy enough, but what about clean water, electricity, and natural gas?

Francis Su’s lecture “The Lessons of Grace in Teaching” is in my core curriculum, the writings I reread several times a year. It reminds me that everyone deserves to be known as a person beyond what they can achieve. And everyone includes me. When I treat myself instrumentally, when I feel low because I worry about letting others down, worry that I’m not getting enough down, those are the times I’m most likely to only see other people in relation to tasks and goals, rather than other conscious beings with fundamental dignity.

David MacIver is the guy who gets people to start daily writing practices. Count me in. Today, I’m picking a passage from Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora that I adore. Spoilers ahead, although it probably won’t be a huge surprise if you have read his recent essays. Emphasis mine: The point is that we tried, we tried with everything we had, and we wanted it to work. We had a project on this trip back to the solar system, and that project was a labor of love.