"I do believe in the possibility of creating a new social model. The only thing is that we now have to begin afresh. The unions, the labour halls, decentralization, the federative system—are all gone. The perverse use that has been made of them has destroyed them. The matter is all the more urgent because all our political forms are exhausted and practically nonexistent. Our parliamentary and electoral system and our political parties are just as futile as dictatorships are intolerable. Nothing is left. And this nothing is increasingly aggressive, totalitarian, and omnipresent. Our experience today is the strange one of empty political institutions in which no one has any confidence any more, of a system of government which functions only in the interests of a political class, and at the same time of the almost infinite growth of power, authority, and social control which makes any one of our democracies a more authoritarian mechanism than the Napoleonic state."

From Anarchy and Christianity, Jacques Ellul.

I've been reading Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini (1984) recently out of an interest to dig a bit more into UX and to better understand why people make decisions. It's a borderline classic at this point—a year older than me—but the concepts in it are fairly timeless.

Like obligation.

This is the first "weapon of influence" that Cialdini explores (he refers to it as 'reciprocation'). Obligation is the social web of indebtedness, giving and expecting an equal measure of return in some way. He notes that human society is somewhat built on this assurance. It is designed (and exploited) to shame people into keeping the balance in socially acceptable ways.

Take, for example, the mutually binding experience of helping someone move. There is an unspoken agreement that helping someone move locks you into a form of social debt, only escapable by returning the favour. Until the debt is repaid, the relationship is imbalanced—even if only subtly. The obliged might feel compelled to try and repay their gratitude in other ways: dinner, beer, a thank you gift; but the scale is only truly made right again with a favour of equal size.

These sorts of social transactions are common, even if we don't like to think of them that way. Watering a friend's plants while they're out of town, donating to a coworker's charity run, taking the cheque at a family dinner. It can even exist in things like potlucks or gift exchanges. When we give of our time or resources, there is an underlying assumption that the recipient should be willing to 'repay' if and when the opportunity presents itself.

Now, what interests me the most here is what this might say about human selflessness. This is something I like to spend my time thinking about: how and when someone acts against their self-interest for the sake of someone or something else. If we take this concept of obligation seriously, we might consider that nobody ever truly acts in a selfless way. We all give with some sort of expectation that the recipient, the community, or even the universe will pay us back in equal measure at some point in the future. Even if we want to be charitable and say that these future returns are merely an incentive to give, I still find it an interesting thought experiment to consider how people would act without them. Would wealthy people be as philanthropic without tax benefits? Would religious people engage in charity without a promise of eternal reward? Would you be willing to help a friend move if you knew that when it was your time to move, your friend would be out of town?

Maybe for some the answer would still be yes, and I like to hope that that is true. But I can't help but feel that if we lost the web of obligation, a lot of "selfless" behaviour would stop. And I wonder what the cumulative impact of that would be. Cialdini notes,

"The obligation to reciprocate a concession encourages the creation of socially desirable arrangements by ensuring that anyone seeking to start such an arrangement will not be exploited. After all, if there were no social obligation to reciprocate a concession, who would want to make the first sacrifice? To do so would be to risk giving up something and getting nothing back."

My observation is that society is becoming increasingly more self-centred. I believe this is because empathy is in decline (for a number of reasons that I'm not going to explore here) but as I read this section of Cialdini's book, I am wondering whether obligation isn't also disappearing. Or at least evolving into something else. This isn't to say that the intricate balance of equal repayment for services given is gone, but I think what has happened is that many of the things we once did for one another as community favours are increasingly becoming normalized as paid services. Dog walking, moving help, tool rental, snow shovelling, even providing for the elderly—all of these can now be purchased. An easy and instant transaction with no promise of future repayment.

This feels like a loss.

I guess what I'm concerned about is that we are falling out of habit of asking for and giving favours, of helping those around us with our extra time and skills. We're setting a new standard where asking for something that can be paid for is considered a bit of a faux pas, an inconvenience upon those who are asked. That's to say nothing of simply stepping up and helping out without being asked, just because you are able. Just because you see a need. As Cialdini put it, who wants to risk giving something up and getting nothing back in return?

The problem is that human society was built upon this sort of mutual exchange. If not selflessness, at least a fundamental trust in the community around us. If I help you, you'll be there to help me when I need it. Obligation is not a bad thing. It's not a debt to be rid of. It's a sense of moral duty and concern for the world we live in. It's a contract that binds us into living together, as a diverse group of people sharing space and resources. It's a necessary foundation for cooperation.

Something I personally think we could use a lot more of these days.

"Progressives really got to figure out how to deal with this buzzkill problem." (Marc Maron, 2025)

It's a hard thing, I think, to figure out how to balance the deep anxiety and uncertainty many of us feel towards the state of the world with finding joy and appreciation in the present moment. The desperation and despair of it all often finds us turning the simplest conversations with friends and family into soap-box like diatribes, screaming about the injustices and dangers perpetuated by one's choice of hand soap. As Maron continues in his latest special, "no one can ruin a bbq quicker than a liberal."

He's not wrong.

A few years ago, I wrote a thing for an environmental coalition on how not to ruin parties by taking a more hopeful posture in these conversations rather than a doom-centric one. I might go further if I were to rewrite that today. I think the thing that Maron is addressing in this new special is that talk isn't actually making any difference. If anything, it might be making things worse. This seems to be—at least in part—why he is ending his long running podcast this year. But if talking is no longer helpful, what does that mean and what can be done?

I wonder if part of the problem is that we're all just having one-sided conversations. Now, this isn't me saying that I think we need to get better at listening—though I do. It's also not me saying that I think we need break down our silos and learn to build community across differences—though I also do. Rather, what I'm getting at here is the way we have all become pseudo-experts at sharing ourselves and our ideas as content. We've spent years now honing our ability to take a thought, craft it to compete in the attention economy, and make it connect with people based on likes and reshares. Curated personalities and opinions. It's not conversation, it's marketing.

I'm not sure if Maron would say that's what he's been doing, but he does make some pointed comments about his fans and the specific type of people who would be at one of his shows. The audience laughs. He knows who he's talking to. Which is exactly the point. Good marketing is about reaching the right audience. The ones who already want what you're selling. What it rarely does is make any meaningful change.

So much of everything right now feels like this. As though it's been made just for content. Even conversations with people can come across as either a testing ground for content or a repeating of content, like if this hasn't already been posted, it will be. But content is not designed for real conversation. It's meant to be consumed.

And the attention economy has an unyielding appetite.

I'm struggling to define what I think is needed as an alternative or resistance to this. It's not to say that no conversation can ever be helpful. But I think part of it is that we need to embrace embodiment. To inhabit our values and ideals in such a way that they are evident in how we live our lives. To practice them instead of preaching them. There's an old wisdom here that I think we have forgotten because of how disembodied our culture has become. I believe we need to reclaim the truth of it. That actions do speak louder than words.

Another part of embodiment to me is simply being more present in the world. It's about turning off and tuning out the unending deluge of content that competes for our attention and reconnecting with the natural world. Again, an ancient wisdom that is getting forgotten. Our minds and bodies need the slowness that comes with being unplugged and just experiencing the world as it is around us.

Now, will any of this make progressives more fun to be around? Probably not, but it might help us deal with some of our own anxieties about everything and move us closer to a healthier place.

"If you want storehouses, you have them in the stomachs of the poor."

St Basil on saving your money.

A while back, I was reading a book by Hannah Arendt for a course that I’m doing and she had a comment on happiness that really wormed its way into my brain. It’s in a section she is writing on labour, a realm of human action that she describes as being distinct from work and related to the cyclical nature of our survival. She writes,

“There is no lasting happiness outside the prescribed cycle of painful exhaustion and pleasurable regeneration, and whatever throws this cycle out of balance — poverty and misery where exhaustion is followed by wretchedness instead of regeneration, or great riches and an entirely effortless life where boredom takes the place of exhaustion and where the mills of necessity, of consumption and digestion, grind an impotent human body mercilessly and barrenly to death — ruins the elemental happiness that comes from being alive.”

Read it a few times.

Arendt describes real, lasting happiness as being rooted in this cyclical aspect of labour; a pattern she refers to as painful exhaustion and then pleasurable regeneration. At first read, I had a hard time with that. How does exhaustion have anything to do with happiness? The pleasurable part of it made sense to me, but not pain. However, the more I (re)read and reflected, I think I started to get it. She’s talking about a fundamental balance in human behaviour. Look at how she describes the things that throw that cycle off: poverty and misery on one side and great riches and effortlessness on the other. Arendt suggests we need the balance of both to feel truly alive.

I had a prof who used to say ‘you can’t understand what it means to feast unless you understand what it means to fast.’

What’s fascinating to me is the relationship between happiness and sustainability. As capitalism has promised us a better life through the endless pursuit of more, our planet has struggled to keep up with our consumption rates. What’s even worse is that current studies suggest that beyond the meeting of essential needs there is no actual correlation between increased income and a country’s wellbeing rising together. The point is, current research is confirming what the wisest amongst us have been saying throughout human history: that the satisfaction of our desires is not the way to lasting happiness.

The world itself is dependant on that same cycle of exhaustion and regeneration. Resources are not infinite and need time to replenish. Capitalism’s insistence that there is always more to be taken has stripped the earth of what it has left to give, breaking the balance of the cycle, and threatening our very survival.

Are we happy yet?

There is a way forward for us. Arendt’s definition of happiness echoes the very patterns needed for a sustainable future. It’s a cycle that invites us to resist the myth of endless growth and embrace the wisdom of limitations and moderation, patterns that are found all over the natural world. It’s a path connected to the core experience of simply being alive on this planet: painful exhaustion and pleasurable regeneration.

I believe in the possibility of change rippling out as people show others a different way. As I once heard in a podcast, “everything large is made up of small parts.” We can affect the big picture by creating new patterns in the smaller areas within our reach. Maybe by changing the way we think about and pursue happiness in our own lives, our families, our friend groups and neighbours, our workplaces, schools, and communities, we might begin to challenge the hold that capitalism has on our culture.

Note, this is a piece I wrote for an environmental activism newsletter a couple years ago that I thought was a fitting reflection on Earth Day today.