Desert the Rat Race!

It was roughly two years ago when I started this project to give myself the space to write longer format essays away from the character limit on Instagram. I am 131 essays deep into this project here on substack. As I have said before, I like to have my say. I carve out this little speck of time to tell the stories I want to tell and explore the theories that light up my life. This space that we all inhabit here each Sunday is what keeps me going. It keeps me engaged in the day-to-day work of learning an sharing. Its a place where I can process, recoup, and chart courses toward new horizons. I think everyone needs that space due to the barriers we face trying to make a living.

My professional life doesn’t have that space. I am told what to research, what the work product will look like, and what questions need answering. I know that seems like a downer, but its preferable to being an academic who has to “produce” in order to get tenure. No, I am not interested in being an intellectual entrepreneur. Sure, I sell subscriptions to this project, but I don’t think I am trying to sell you anything. I am just playing around with figuring out what my weirdo storytelling is “worth” in a market economy. I would much rather just deliver on what’s needed in a world, like a proverbial intellectual plumber, to make money to survive than being caught in an endless loop of having to create scientific “advances” in order to survive the academic rat race.

However, with my two year anniversary here, I wish I could say that I am as motivated as ever. I am really not. I am exhausted by the world and by trying to be seen in this work. The antidote to those troubles, a hat tip to Hannah’s divination for this week, is to continue to divest from any action that doesn’t feel like it value-aligned for me. This largely means spending more time away from social media, which seems to be at an all-time-worst as a storytelling vehicle. It could be an all time best if your storytelling is video though. Alas, I am not super interested in video editing as a storytelling vehicle, so I am more prone to think its the worst.

I think Bifo Berardi’s new book, “Quit Everything: Interpreting Depression,” is quite germane to my struggles and probably yours as well. In the text, his summary of the difficulty of the moment is perfect. We all face an array of difficulties, pandemic, climate change, fascism, neocolonialism, that are all difficult to handle with the socially-prescribed goals of “progress, growth, and accumulation of capital.” that are forced down our throat as key aims from a young age. We cannot consume our way out of climate change or the pandemic. No, as Berardi notes, the age we are entering now is increasingly incompatible with growth and progress, signaling the collapse of the goals that are inscribed on us from that early age.

This has tremendously large implications not just for society, but also for our individual lives. For people who tell stories on social media, we have been hoodwinked into providing free labor as storytellers on these applications. We speak of our most intimate moments in these spaces, offering a moment of authenticity while people are sold all manner of useless shit they don’t need. Consequently, we storytellers have also scraped the bottom of the barrel, just as our society has by passing the moment of peak oil. Berardi says that what we need to do is resign from the rat race of our lives. We need to exit the manic quest to make our selves into somebody that is “seen” or is the hero of the story. In Berardi’s words: “Let’s reset social energy and abandon work and consumption. Mass defeatism, desertion, and sabotage — Let these be our weapons in the time to come.”1 In short, Berardi believes that if we truly give into the depression we experience that we will find the exact tool kit (resignation, defeatism, desertion) that we need to solve all these problems. We don’t need to keep fighting and consuming. No, we can just pull all efforts used to prop up the system out of it by depressing out actions (i.e., stopping).

Yes, now is the time to hitch our wagon behind ongoing efforts to bring the concrete back to our lives. A week or so ago, I noted when talking about this weaving, “Enter The Portal” that we need to come back to simple handcrafts like weaving as portals to a future where we no longer are complicit in trying to grow or progress. In Berardi’s thought, the concrete is something, embodied in the pandemic; war; and depression, that has broken the functioning of the current global capitalist system that was operating on autopilot. Yes, it awoke us to consider how we can live different ways. Consequently, I think that return to the concrete in the form of hand crafts is a way forward through an uncertain future where our global capitalist system no longer works in the ways that it once did. There are few things that are more concrete than learning how to build and make something with your hands. That is precisely what we need to hitch us more meaningfully upon to the everyday life that is still churning on right beneath our noses while we are staring at our phones. Let’s put down our phones, take the door into the secret garden, and find ways that we can continual to live our our own lives free from the fiction of growth and progress.

I tried to sell this weaving via a pay what you propose model on Instagram and received 0 bids lmao. That’s to be expected, because I didn’t do a good job of explaining anything related to how the bidding would work. However, it’s a cool handmade piece that might look good on someone’s wall as a reminder of all these little tidbits of theory. Does anyone want it? I don’t even know if you necessarily need to pay me anything. Exchanging money exhausts me. Like genuinely, I get tired thinking about economic exchange. hahaha. If this piece interests you, just let me know and we can work something out, like a trade, a hearty handshake, or even an economic exchange if you want.

Photo Essay

In my quest to make the concrete an enduring and everyday part of my life, my bike quests have been full of visiting ducks, turtle, and riding on pretty empty gravel trails. I am not trying to be anybody by riding far. I am just trying to enmesh myself into the world around me within a couple mile radius. I am taking photos and using them to tell stories. I still believe that the world needs less influencers and businesses and more storytellers. Let my little stories be like a mushroom that is shedding thousands of spores that find fertile ground and spawn more storytellers. I don’t hold out any illusions that I will find success or failure. No, this is just my spell work that the conditions are perfect for more storytellers to surface. There is easy access to information, photography, and writing. All we need are more people to be willing to tell their stories.

For me, I was able to replace my trashed crust lightning bolt, which I crashed on, and my rivendell atlantis, which has cracks in it, with this crust romanceur. I can glide over gravel again and just be by myself in the middle of the city. It’s one of my great joys to go on these simple little rides and enjoy myself heartily. Please enjoy this selection of photos from my recent rides.

The ride soundtrack was particularly wonderful. May I suggest “Dawn” from The Mahavishnu Orchestra’s “Inner Mountain Flame?”

It’s the perfect accompaniment to reading, drinking a cup of joe or tea, or just sitting and enjoying the concrete reality of the weather to creep into your awareness.

I hope you are well, dear reader. I appreciate you being here and caring about my wee little stories.

Until Next Week,

James