A Day Is An Unwritten Story of Endless Possibilities

Photo by Max Böhme on Unsplash

Our movement, The Saners, isn’t about fear or hope. It’s about imagination, about wonderful possibilities - and how to realize them today and beyond.

I’m finally over COVID and looking ahead. But I’m also looking around me, and where I am right now, at how to live sensibly today. That is the way I’ve been living for quite some time.

Life is short. Sometimes you can be overwhelmed by crises. But most times, we are living routines. The routines can feel empty, exhausting and tiresome. We all know that something isn’t right.

We are told what to think about, by the media, by leaders, by people who have grabbed the microphone. Sometimes, the loud people say something that resonates. Other times, their words are irksome.

We need to tune them out, and listen to ourselves. To get some quiet, to reflect on our actual experiences and feelings. We need to examine our hearts and consciences and not simply focus on what those other people tell us is important.

Those experts and authorities are clueless and when we listen to them, we lose touch with reality. We feel lost because they are leading us first into a wilderness, then a fantasyland and finally a hell on Earth.

OUR Stories and Experiences

We are all different yet we all share the same human experiences. We are born helpless and survive infancy only because some adults love and care for us - however imperfectly. We all try to make sense of the world. Nearly all of us adapt to the world as we found it. We learn to live as our civilization requires and the framework that underpins our society is generally unquestioned.

We sometimes challenge the rules and norms a bit, around the edges.

But we rarely challenge the core of our civilization, the fundamental flaws that underpin it. They are invisible to us. They are so universally accepted that to challenge the core rules of our civilization sounds crazy and impossible and even dangerous.

It is this lack of imagination, this inability or unwillingness to see and challenge the most basic evils of our society that empties our lives of joy and makes it impossible to embrace the best that life has to offer.

And although our movement, The Saners, is largely a climate movement - because the need to preserve a habitable Earth is our most immediate crisis - our movement is really about living meaningful and joyful lives.

This requires imagination and courage. This requires us to take charge of ourselves and ultimately overwhelm our absurd and often cruel civilization with a determined and principled orgy of kindness.

Love Is Strong and Present Everywhere

One of the core evils of our civilization is the pervasive lie about what a human being is and what life is about. It trivializes and sidelines the most profound and significant aspects of life and elevates a shallow and destructive fable of nonsense.

Instead of encouraging us to live fully as human beings, we are ordered to fulfill our roles as servants to an economy, as willing servants of a rat race-a system that wastes our lives on endless trivial labor, in pursuit of usually unreachable wealth. Even if we “succeed”-which for most of us is unlikely-our reward is a bunch of useless crap and those toys do not compensate for all the life that we wasted in pursuit of them.

So, our society wants us to waste our lives in pursuit of useless crap. No wonder we feel something is wrong.

The Unthinkable

The economy is a sham. It functions to keep us in servitude to various unworthy elites-dictators, plutocrats, a Communist Party, whatever. Our lives are empty because they are wasted, not lived.

The existing systems-economic and political-are the only options presented to us. We are given a choice-if we can move to another country-but all of the choices are poison. While countries and systems are in a competition, all agree that people need to serve the elites and obey the systems that keep them unfree.

We are unfree in large part because we are unwilling or unable to even imagine ourselves living fully as human beings. And even if we could imagine such things, we have no clue about how to make that happen.

Freedom, as long as we let our minds be dominated by the societies into which we were born, is unreachable and unthinkable.

The Real Choice

Our real choice isn’t even presented to us. It’s never proposed as an option-except perhaps by The Saners. Our choice is this:

Obey our cruel and insane civilization or obey our hearts and consciences.

To obey our hearts and consciences means to begin speaking the truth openly-that work is a sham and producing crap for someone elses profit is a waste of life and astoundingly stupid. We must say this out loud, often and with conviction.

We must also begin withdrawing our support for this fatally flawed civilization. We must quietly (for now) slow down at work. Call in sick more often. And, if we are in a particularly dangerous industry like fossil fuels, we should make more mistakes, forget to do things, or otherwise make those who are destroying the ecosphere less successful in their efforts.

Most of all, we must join forces and work together. In a society that is literally insane, the best way to preserve your sanity is to interact with and work with and communicate with other sane people. We can reinforce each other, and build our ability to resist the destructive forces around us.

Never forget that, as the people who care and do the work, WE are essential for evil to succeed. When we stop doing what evil demands of us, WE CAN NOT BE DEFEATED.