Being there

The dharma reading in Sangha this evening started us talking about what would be important in our lives if we learned we were going to die soon. I didn't have anything profound to add, but it put me in mind of the time when Wife and I were still trying to hash out a Parenting Plan for the boys, as part of our legal separation.

Part of the Parenting Plan was an agreement about how much time the boys would spend with me each year, and how much time with her. In the end, we agreed that I got 50% +1 day, and she got 50% -1 day, so that I could claim them on my taxes. (Her income was small enough that the deduction would have made no difference.) But my initial proposal was that I should get a much larger fraction of time, because her mental health and parenting skills were both so poor. Naturally she disputed this. But during one of our discussions she said something very interesting.

Waiting for the end of the world 7, summary

So why did I title this series "Waiting for the end of the world"? When I stumble up out of my chair after doomscrolling through Twitter for days at a time, what is it that I think I see coming?

Well, if I list them grouped according to which entry in the series I used to discuss each one, I find myself fretting over the following:

1. The dollar is at risk of collapse, under the weight of decades of deficit spending. If it collapses, it will pull the American economy down with it.
2. Political conversation in this country has become toxic, so I can't discuss this stuff except here where I am anonymous.
3. Society encourages lunatic opinions and penalizes people for saying things that are obviously simple facts. (Example: "A man cannot become a woman.")
4. We have forgotten how to conduct normal politics. We have started weaponizing the justice system against political opponents. This is how we slide from a Republic into a Principate.
5. Our Presidential politics are dominated by a senile and obstructionist gerontocracy. This means we have no real chance to change course. Again, this is how we slide from a Republic into a Principate.
6. Our irresponsible support of Ukraine means that we are actively provoking World War Three, which we will lose badly. Even without Ukraine, it's pretty likely anyway because of troubles in other parts of the world

Is that enough to deserve the title "Waiting for the end of the world"? 

Maybe I should add that I don't expect a sudden, apocalyptic end. World War III will be bad, but the odds are that someone will survive. Or we might come to our senses and avoid it somehow. Avoiding a Principate will be harder. (In fact there are good reasons to think we may already be there.) But it any event, my point is not that we should expect the country to look like Lear's blasted heath a week from next Tuesday. 

What I really expect is a long slow decline, what John Michael Greer calls The Long Descent. Life will get harder and things will get more expensive. Tools will break down and we won't be able to fix them. Government agencies will get more troublesome and less useful, until one by one they are shuttered "temporarily" out of "budgetary concerns." We will still have some kinds of technology, but we will gradually stop using others. (No, I don't know which will be which.)

Greer talks about this in a lot of places. You might check out this essay here (from back in 2004), or his archived blog The Archdruid Report, or his current blog Ecosophia. He has widened his topics over the years, but The Long Descent is never far from his thoughts.

In any event, I need to get off Twitter and stick my head outdoors once in a while.

P.S.: This same month, I've been writing a couple of posts over on the Patio, also about the end of the world. You can find the first one here. I expect to write the next installment soon.

  

          

Waiting for the end of the world 6, war

I've talked about what depresses me when I look at the news about home: the risk of economic collapse, the toxicity of political discussion, the sad and venal leadership of our major parties. It doesn't get better when I look abroad.

What's happening abroad?

Waiting for the end of the world 5, elections

If none of those topics was depressing enough, the election is coming up next year! That means that primary season has already kicked into gear. We could talk about the candidates.

If the current opinion polls are to be believed, there's a good chance that the leading candidates in 2024 will be President Biden and President Trump, just as in 2020. If that turns out true, it will be very hard for me to want to vote. In the first place, as I just finished describing, the two candidates are trying to destroy each other in the courtrooms. (Or rather, strictly speaking, their parties and partisans are doing the work. But everyone knows it has to be with the approval of the candidates themselves.) So this means we may end up with two candidates facing each other who have each been terminally discredited by the legal process but who are still determined to run against each other for office. 

Waiting for the end of the world 4, crime in high places

This one is a little longer.

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Then there is the proliferation of indictments against ex-President Trump, and the blossoming of financial scandals around President Biden. These are wearying. What's more, it seems like everyone else in the country is convinced that this batch of stories is absolutely true, while that batch is absolutely false, and it all goes to show that The Other Party are a bunch of criminal lying scoundrels. Me, I have no idea which stories are true. I have no idea who is guilty of what. But I can speak to how the stories sound from the outside.

Waiting for the end of the world 3, transgender arguments

This will be the shortest of the posts in this series. I say everything I care to say in one paragraph.

―――――

One issue that seems to be getting a lot of oxygen is the question of transgender rights. I said pretty much everything I have to say about this topic last year on the Patio: here, here, here, here, and here. I thought that on the whole my opinions were pretty easy-going. On the other hand I think it is incontrovertibly true that there are only two biological sexes (if you leave out a vanishingly small number of exceptions). That statement alone, to say nothing of my queasiness around surgery, seems to mark my opinions as troglodytic.

        

Waiting for the end of the world 2, politics

 I've written about how sedentary I've become, how more and more I seem to spend hours on Twitter rather than actually accomplish anything. Even when I do manage to get something done—a couple days ago I wrote the next installment for the weekly blog I maintain under my real name—I find it hard to give a shit. I still have weekly calls with Marie and with Debbie (not together, to be clear), but I never have any news. "Yeah, I spent the last week sitting around uselessly like a bump on a log. How about you?" All I really want to do is sleep. I'm pretty sure this is what depression looks like.

(It's true that I was able to rouse myself out of my torpor to call Marie a few weeks ago and make arrangements to go to Paris. So I guess I'm not irretrievably lost yet. But now that we've booked the flight and the hotel, I'm not exactly doing a lot more to prepare. I tell myself that I've got a couple of months.)

What I have also observed is that a lot of the stuff I doomscroll on Twitter is politics, and I don't discuss it with anyone. This is part of where I get my running title, "Waiting for the end of the world": it seems like the political problems I keep reading about are intractable and will ultimately pull us apart. Or what is actually more likely, I think, is not that we will pull apart into some kind of civil war, but just that we will slowly unwind—kind of like the old Soviet Union did in the 1980's. Every year things will get just a little bit less effective and a little bit less useful, until one day we are trying to do something routine in our statecraft and the handle will break off in our hand. 

Waiting for the end of the world 1, money

NOTE: I'm writing this about a week later than it's posted, but I'm back-dating it to the day it happened. It's only a week.

Today I had a phone call with the fellow that manages my retirement account, and it was … less than fully satisfactory. Normally we talk every few months. Usually he (or a financial advisor in his office—there is one specifically assigned to my account) explains to me what's going on in the economy, and then makes suggestions for how we should restructure my investments accordingly. I pay a flat fee regardless of buys or sells, so it's not to their advantage to encourage random trading for its own sake; and their contract specifically prohibits them from getting paid by the individual securities for promoting them. Also their fees are proportional to the value of my account, so they make more money when I do. All that is to say that I assume their advice is probably based on what they really think.

That's good to know, because whenever they start explaining the trends in the economy and how those trends suggest this or that redistribution of my account, they might as well be speaking Chinese, or ancient Babylonian. I never have any idea what they are talking about. I mean, yes, I understand when they say they think interest rates will go up (or down), and sometimes I can detect a causal connection to where they say that they think inflation will go down (or up). But how that translates to "We need to sell your shares in the Octopus Amalgamated ETF and buy up shares in Global Mammon ETF instead," … well, the logic behind that narrative transition always eludes me. But it sounds like they know what they are talking about, and I know they make more money only when I do; so I always trust their recommendation and approve it. 

Going to Paris

NOTE: This post was written three weeks in the future and back-dated to the day it happened.

This will be quick. Just a bookmark or a placeholder.

Marie and I have talked about places we want to travel in the future. Back before the pandemic we went to Greece and to New Zealand, for example. We've accumulated a number of places on the list, but one of them has always been Paris. It was always something we discussed in the manner of "someday it would be nice." We never made any definite plans. And after going to Scotland in the spring, I kind of thought it would be prudent to wait a year before traveling internationally again.

But recently I learned that in 2024 it is going to become more difficult for Americans to enter Europe. (See the link here, for details.) This was something I learned from doomscrolling Twitter, so I suppose it's not a complete loss that I waste so much time at it. Anyway, I contacted Marie right away and told her, in effect, "If you want to go to Paris, we'd better go this year."

Today we spent a few hours on the phone together, evaluating flights and hotels and ultimately reserving both. So in November we'll be going to Paris for two weeks. I don't know if I can promise the same kind of travelogue I brought home from Scotland, but I suppose maybe. We'll see.