"I Want to Go Live in the Woods but I'm Broke"
Before you bug out, consider building a rugged inner world with "psychotechnologies for survival"
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A New Tagline for the Newsletter
Here it is:
“Psychotechnologies for surviving whatever comes next”.
“Surviving whatever comes next”–sounds kinda doomer-y, doesn’t it?
I’ve already made my case that we’re in for a 10-to-20-year dark age, and proposed a solution(buy land with friends, grow your own food, wait it out).
Perhaps, you’ve read that piece, perhaps not.
After I published the piece, I had several conversations with both irl and url friends. It was nice to know that at least I wasn’t the only one who thinks things are bad, and are getting worse.
Whether to be a doomer about it is a choice, to be sure. Might as well be pragmatic about it though, no?
For a more compelling and complete version of the next 20-30 years, I will, once again, recommend Octavia Butler’s Earthseed series.
Basically, in here fictional exploration of the near future, the U.S. experiences a level of societal collapse, which entails that:
Cities are no longer safe to live in
Basic necessities are very expensive
Gainful employment is close to non-existent
Company towns re-emerge
A radical right-wing president is elected(the original “MAGA president”, whose slogan is “Make America Great Again”)
Radical right-wing extremists terrorize the country, enslaving using remote-controlled shock collars in concentration camps
Eventually, people get sick of this president, people find about about the abuses happening in the company towns, and the country comes back to it’s senses.
I realize the part about right-wingers enslaving people with remote-controlled shock collars sounds improbable. I’m not going to try to convince you that Butler’s vision of the future is inevitable or 100% accurate. I will say that, with the way things are going, her version of the future seems the most likely, to me.
I also realize that most of us can’t or won’t move to the country to live a rugged life of self-sufficiency and toil.
And it’s an even greater challenge to convince a small group of friends to buy land together to do this.
Some valid questions I’ve heard include:
Who has the disposable income?
How would the shared ownership of the land work?
Why would I take my kid(s) out of school to move to the sticks to eat potatoes and be surrounded by a bunch of scary Trumpers?
Trying to get your friends to move to the country with you is a tough sell. You’d either need to be a charismatic, pied-piper-type personality, or perhaps you could find a group of people already living out in the country(say, a group of young farmers), and go live with them.
Both of those are kind of ‘hail mary’-level lifestyle changes. Most people aren’t going to leave their jobs, friends, communities, to experiment with growing their own food and living in the woods.
You’ve got to start where you are. We can prepare for the realities of the future by beginning to develop the capacities we’ll need for survival now.
What are Psychotechnologies?
I’d argue that the hardest part of survival is the “inner game” of it.
For instance, the hardest part of tennis is not having a solid backswing. Rather, the hardest part of tennis is showing up day-after-day, and playing your best game under high-pressure circumstances.
I am choosing to use the term psychotechnologies for the strategies, concepts, and practices involved in surviving in a country experiencing various states and stages of societal breakdown.
In this instance, I’m using “psychotechnologies” to encapsulate “practical skills”, “relational skills”, and “decision-making” abilities.
I could’ve sworn I first read the term in some sci-fi book. The Foundation series by Isaac Asimov has a protagonist that studies “psychohistory” which is an applied science of the future that combines history + math + social studies + futurecasting.
I can, however, cite John Vervaeke’s work as the thing that hipped me to the term. Vervaeke is a philosopher, cognitive scientist, and professor teaching at the University of Toronto. I’ve mentioned his work in this newsletter here, namely his 50-lecture series on The Meaning Crisis in the West.
In short, Vervaeke talks about the use of psychotechnologies as aids for creating meaning, and a meaningful life, in a world where we have essentially lost a “sense of the sacred” i.e. the world of late-capitalism in the West.
Christians have known this for a while, but a sense of the sacred is not wholly the domain of organized religion.
Some examples he uses of psychotechnologies include:
Meditation
Psychedelics
Dia-logos (the core principle of Platonic Dialogue)
In a world where the social contract is more or less honored by the state–where housing, food, safety are more or less attainable and evenly distributed–meaning is the greatest deficit, at least when it comes to late-capitalist nations.
When those things are put into jeopardy (i.e. housing is no longer affordable, food prices are rising 9% in a month, crime is rising), the greatest crisis becomes one of survival.
So I’m taking Vervaeke’s use of the term and expanding it.
Present circumstances have bumped us down a level or two on Maslow’s hierarchy, lol.
It’s one thing to work an office job and come home to your shitty apartment and to drink yourself to sleep every other night, or to be trapped in a loveless marriage because you want to stay together for the kids.
It’s entirely another to be bankrupted by a hospital visit, or having to move into your car because you can’t afford food and rent.
In the next newsletter, I’ll break down the three categories of psychotechnologies for survival, and offer some thoughts on which may be most useful in the near future, and how best to acquire them.
To tease it a little bit more, I’ll talk about practical ways to develop the inner world you will need to survive what may be a 10-20 year dark age, beginning in the next 2-3 years. I’ll talk about adapting to chaos, mostly, and offer ways to use things like Boyd’s OODA loop, Octavia Butler’s Earthseed philosophy, and general sensemaking concepts and strategies.
I’ve got a clear outline in my head, maybe this will become a book, “Psychotechnologies for Surviving the Dark Age”(tentative title).
Thanks for reading. Stay tuned for part two!