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.

This week I was listening to a conversation with Chuck Klosterman on a Grateful Dead podcast/gameshow called Guess The Year.

To clarify, I have never gotten into the Grateful Dead and this is not a podcast I had ever listened to before. They are a complete blindspot in my musical tastes. I do, however, quite enjoy Klosterman's deep dives into various pop cultural niches. So I was excited to hear where this might go. As it turns out, Klosterman is also not much of a deadhead, something he admits to several times in the episode. He does spend some time making the case for why they are in his top five list of the greatest American bands. Where things do get interesting is when they shift into a conversation about whether you should be able to separate the art from the artist. It was a topic that they were sort of circling around throughout the whole thing, touching on the current way in which an artist's political views seem to matter so much to fans. Klosterman started to make the argument that it should be possible to be apolitical, suggesting that when he began doing music criticism, it was expected that you would be able to weigh the music on its own merit without letting who the artist is as a person influence your opinion.

Okay, I have some thoughts.

Nothing is ever truly neutral. We all act and create from a place that is deeply intertwined with our experiences and who we are as people. This includes our political or ideological beliefs.

Recently, I was reading a 2017 article on Death From Above 1979 that was responding to the (now old) controversy around their bass player, Jesse Keeler's, affiliation with Gavin McInnes, an alt-right figure. Fans (including myself) were frustrated and disappointed to learn about this. However, the author of this particular article notes that none of this should have been shocking and that this sort of men's rights politic has been a part of their brand since the beginning. Fans (especially male ones) had just been unwilling to notice it. But those political views becoming more public shines a backward light onto some of their more 'colourful' lyrical choices that may have just seemed silly at first listen ("where have all the virgins gone?") and even reframes the aggression within the music itself.

I guess my point is that context matters. You can't pretend like it's not there.

And this was always true. Critics have long loved to frame the way artists use their real-world trauma or suffering as a catalyst for their art. Regardless of whether that was the artist's intent. If a musician grew up in poverty or as a refugee or suffered abuse, we have no problem imprinting that onto their music. Maybe Klosterman is saying that pure criticism should avoid that, but I think it's naive to suggest that most criticism ever actually did or imply that this is a new problem as a result of some 21st century obsession with cancel culture or something (my words, not his).

Perhaps what is new is that the free pass that had been extended to primarily male and usually white (though not exclusively) artists has been somewhat revoked. And their art is being reevaluated retroactively in light of their beliefs, their affiliations, their actions, and yes, their politics. I'm not suggesting that we have this all figured out or that every criticism is entirely fair, but I do think it's reasonable to let criticism of the artist influence your criticism of the art.

The question that maybe we're asking here is, is it okay to stop listening to someone because I disagree with their politics or belief system? Or, can I continue to enjoy an artist even if it turns out they're a shitty person?

And I think that the answer to both of these is yes; but the choice is as subjective as the enjoyment of the art itself. While drawing some hard lines may seem more obvious than others, most of this falls into a murky grey area that might vary artist to artist. I can listen to the Smiths, even if it's become a lot harder to enjoy them after learning about Morrissey's anti-immigrant stance. Yet, I haven't picked up my Art Angels record ever since Grimes started dating Elon Musk. I do, however, still enjoy M.I.A., despite her increasingly polarizing opinions. Though admittedly I don't hold her quite as highly as I used to.

Complicated people can make great art. And sometimes the artists we admire turn out to be pretty terrible. Of course these things are going to colour our relationship to their work. I think what matters more than trying to hold to some unbiased judgment is an attempt to be fair. I think it's fair to consider who someone is when trying to interpret what they create. Nothing happens in a vacuum.

This is probably why they say don't meet your heroes.

My kids and I have a variation of the same conversation about once a week.

“Dad, how come you never drive us to school?” / “All our friends get driven.” / “Why do you always make us walk?” / “But it’s a blizzard/pouring rain/tornado/-35° out there!”

My answer is always the same:

“Walking is good for the planet and good for you.”

I know. I’m that parent.

But something interesting happened when my oldest kid started the conversation again last week; my youngest answered for me. She’s been learning about ways to care for the earth in her class and they were taking a tally on how many kids drive, roll, or walk to school. She was able to make a connection between a value we’re trying to live by and what her class was teaching.

She was also super excited to walk home in the pouring rain that week. It’s a small win but I’ll take it.

The whole thing got me thinking about what “sticks” when it comes to parenting and how we talk about things that really matter with our kids. It really is less about those one-off conversations that can feel really big and important; and instead is more about the regular and consistent conversations that add up over time. It’s also what we communicate through our actions and habits. What sticks is the aggregate.

The end of the world is a popular narrative archetype. Many movies, shows, books, and video games have capitalized on this. There’s a particular sub-genre though that seems to have a particular resonance; surviving an apocalyptic wasteland with a child in your care (see, The Last of Us). It’s easy to see why it connects with people; there’s an added layer of tension that comes with bringing a kid into a survival scenario. You care about their safety, but also their future. It’s not enough for them to make it through just one moment of danger, it’s about who they need to become to make it through them all. It’s about them picking up the skills and instincts necessary for them to survive. It’s about what sticks.

Parenting in the apocalypse is a rough gig.

This isn’t a thought piece on climate despair. As Rebecca Solnit says, “the emergency is not over. The outcome is not decided. We are deciding it now.” (Not Too Late) I am not saying that we need to teach our kids how to survive a nightmarish wasteland. Probably I'm not...

The thing about putting a parenting dynamic into the centre of these stories of societal collapse is that even though it increases tension in the present, it also raises the possibility of building a better world in the future. It’s not enough to teach kids how to survive if you can’t also teach them how to love and be loved. As the brilliant novel (and show) Station Eleven put it, “Survival is insufficient.”

Parenting kids in the age of the climate crisis is about holding all these tensions together. We need to help our kids adopt more sustainable ways of living than we likely had growing up. We also need to protect them in the present and make sure that they feel safe. And we need to teach them how to love and be loved, to notice and care for all living things, to see beyond their self-interest and to help us build a better world. I hope it all sticks.

Walking with my kids has become one of the main ways I get to try and build that aggregate. We get 20 min together before and after school to talk about our days, notice things in our neighbourhood that we wouldn’t see if we drove by them, learn how to prepare for the weather, and stop and play at the park on the way home.

Amazingly, at the park they no longer care how extreme the weather is. I sometimes do though… 🥶

† Note, this is a piece I wrote for an environmental activism newsletter a couple years ago.

Recently, Amazon announced that they would be making a policy change to Kindle that seems relatively minor on the surface; at least until you start to peel down through the layers of it. Let's obsess over this for a minute because we can all probably use a distraction right now. Here's the deal, as of February 26, Kindle users can no longer download their purchased books to their computer for backup or manual transfer purposes.

But most Kindle users now sync their purchases over wifi, so what's the big deal? (you might say)

The issue is that this further muddies the already murky waters of ownership in the digital age. Or perhaps, from another angle, it makes things clearer. The question of do-you-really-own-it when it comes to purchased digital media has already been a tricky one, with the answer mostly being, "Well, not really." When you buy a digital product like a movie or a song or a book, you never really own it. You just own a license to access it. In reality, this is the way it has always been—even with physical media. When you picked up your limited edition HD DVD Director's Cut of Good Burger from the 2 for $22 bin at Blockbuster, you didn't own the rights to the 1997 masterpiece; you simply had a license to access it via that disc whenever you liked. You weren't allowed to make copies of it or host ticketed screenings in your parent's basement. We all understood this. And while some people did make the odd copy for their cousin Steve, the FBI wasn't coming for them because it wasn't a form of piracy on a scale that mattered much. Also, it was nearly impossible to track down. Even when Steve started selling bootleg copies behind his gym.

Digital changed this. It changed the scale and ability to crack down on piracy, it changed how and where we bought and consumed our media, and it changed our relationship to that license of access entirely. That dynamic that we all understood became cracked wide open, and a whole new slippery and strange entity crawled out. We no longer had something physical to take hold of and move around between the method and location of consumption. Again, I want to highlight that even physical media always represented just a form of access, but the form changed so starkly that everything became up for grabs. Out of this, two clear forms of access emerged that I think are worth highlighting: piracy and walled gardens. One used the slipperiness of the digital form to make the free copying and sharing of that access easier than ever before. The other found a way to use that very form to confine people to a closed (and pricey) system in order to continue to access their purchases. Apple was an early pioneer in this with the way they began introducing not just the media but the tools required to play that media on. This went on to include both software and hardware.

Okay, I wasn't really planning on a history lesson, but I can't avoid giving context to frame my thinking here as I reflect on these changes that Amazon has made. Kindle falls squarely into this messy space as one of the first major players in the digital book market. They sold both the e-books and the e-book readers required to consume them. And while there has always been a policy (and protections) to keep those e-books on Kindle, many savvy users have found ways around that, primarily through the ability to download your purchased files to your computer.

Alright, Amazon has a right to prevent people from exploiting their product. Again, what's the big deal? (You still might say)

The big deal, and this applies to all digital media, is the question of the ownership of that license to access. With physical media, it was easy to understand. As long as I have this physical thing—a tape, a VHS, a DVD, a book—I can access and enjoy this media that I have purchased. Even if the method of access breaks or needs to be replaced (think a Samsung DVD player), I can continue to use it on the replacement. On top of that, I am not forced to purchase another Samsung DVD player. If a Sony DVD player happens to be on sale, I can buy that, and my ability to watch my DVD remains unchanged. Digital media is increasingly locking your access into a closed systemYou are forced to read that book on Kindle. You will always be forced to read that book on Kindle.

But let's take this to a few other possibilities. Let's say Amazon decides to change the text of a book because they feel that a certain line no longer fits with their values as a company. Or, what if they decide to ban certain books outright? They can just delete those sentences or books right off your Kindle, and there's nothing you can do about it. Or, and this is something I think is a very high possibility, what happens when Amazon decides that recurring and predictable revenue is better for their profits and moves Kindle to a subscription-only model. What is to prevent them from cutting off access to your purchased books and locking them behind a monthly paywall? And if you think they can't do that, you need to be paying more attention to the shift to the subscription model that has been taking place across the digital landscape over the last 5+ years. If you're a new user, that might not seem like such a bad deal. But let's remember that Amazon was a pioneer in e-books, releasing Kindle way back in 2007. If you've been faithfully purchasing books from them since they began, that becomes a much bigger thing.

This is why it's important for us to remember that our consumption habits are nothing more than an opportunity for profit. Corporations keep finding ways to turn those habits against us in order to maximize those profits. Why settle for selling a book to a customer once when you can force them to pay a recurring membership fee to keep reading within your walled garden? Perhaps the most absurd part of this whole thing is that libraries still exist. We already have FREE access to books whenever we want them, and services like Overdrive have made that access possible in a digital way as well.

I've heard it said that no one would be able to sell the idea of a library today, and I think that is true. It's also why they matter so much. Public goods and services are the few remaining strongholds of resistance to capitalism we have left. We need them as much as they need us. We should be supporting them while they're still around.

** Aside: I left Kindle years ago when I realized they were tracking my reading data and using it to make more profit.

Something I’ve noticed over the last two years (gestures in global pandemic) is how guilty so many people feel all the time. Guilt that they’re not doing enough, guilt that they’re stretched too thin to perform well, guilt that they missed that deadline, guilt that they’re ruining their kids by giving them extra screen-time, guilt that they’re getting a booster shot when other countries haven’t even had access to first doses, guilt that they saw their extended family over the holidays even when public health advised them not to, etc…

Non. Stop. Guilt.

To them I say, you should stop.

You should stop because guilt is an unproductive feeling that an already broken system wants you to feel in order to avoid structural repair. As long as you feel guilty, the system never has to change. Its brokenness becomes your burden to carry.

Overworked employees, underfunded healthcare or education settings, unpaid and undervalued childcare, our most vulnerable populations abandoned by the system and the burden of their care falling on already burned out PCWs. These are the people (most often women) the system unloads its burden on.

Unhealthy, abusive systems thrive on guilt.

Guilt is the domain of governments who strip essential services bare in the name of fiscal responsibility. It’s the way of employers who cut costs by rewarding overwork rather than hiring more people to carry the load. It’s the weekly reminder from a church that tells you’re not giving enough, doing enough, or trying enough. It’s plastic straws as opposed to dealing with fossil fuels.

These broken systems want you to feel guilty because it keeps you looking at yourself.

If you’re looking for a more productive feeling, my suggestion is anger. Anger - directed at the broken system, on behalf of those who have been exploited and oppressed by it - is how we change things.

The system, and those who benefit from it, fears your anger because it gets you pointing fingers. And I know that many of us were raised in settings that taught us not to point fingers in blame. But have you ever noticed how often that is used to avoid critique? Also how those same settings had no problem with you blaming yourself?

The system fears your anger because it knows that if enough people get angry at its brokenness or abuses we might actually hold them accountable.

Imagine what we might build in its place.

Thanks for reading to the end.