What's On My Mind: August 2022
"Remember to be gentle with yourself and others. We are all children of chance, and none can say why some fields will blossom while others lay brown beneath the August sun." — Kent Nerburn
After last year’s flop of a Hot Girl Summer, I kept my expectations for summer 2022 minimal and malleable. Last month marked a series of personal milestones:
Starting my new role in building cultures of belonging
Getting scuba certified
Taking my first work-related trip since February 2020
Finally closing a chapter on struggles not of my choosing
So I’ve entered August eager for a fresh start even as the summer season winds itself toward autumn. Of course, in the Age of Omnicrisis, the lazy, hazy days of summer are filled with headline grabbing, core shaking headlines of crisis after, on top of, and embedded in other crises: two pandemics, mass shootings, ongoing threats to democracy, war, increasing unaffordability and suffering, and institutional failure to adequately respond to crises at hand.
As I’ve researched belonging futures over the last two plus years, the constraints and impacts of trauma have only grown in scale. One of the features of trauma is its capacity for severing and impeding relationships by attuning our senses and attention to fear, cultivating and reinforcing a scarcity mindset among those affected. This mindset leaves us feeling unsafe and disquiet, mistrustful of others, and lost and confused by the senselessness and chaos — the opposite of belonging.
In the movie Groundhog Day, Bill Murray lives through the same day repeatedly. Every day, he makes logical attempts that soon turn to desperation to escape from being stuck in the loop. The societal response to the Age of Omnicrisis appears to follow a similar trajectory of reverting to desperation after an initial period of rational problem solving.
The cryptomania of the last two years has shifted into a market meltdown, depriving thousands of well-intentioned, misinformed working people of their life savings as companies like Celsius go belly up, with none of the regulatory protections from FDIC or social and cultural mechanisms to recoup the losses. In a similar vein, lotteries have nearly doubled in size over the last 20 years as people try to earn money in any way they can. Recent research has demonstrated that state lotteries are regressive, moving the already small amounts of wealth in vulnerable communities to public coffers.
Some data seem to indicate that people are leaving the workforce because it is too expensive to work, given inflation and the high costs of services like child care and tattered social safety net.
A lot of economists and policymakers treat this as a paradox, but it's simple: if you combine a low minimum wage with expensive childcare / disability care / transportation / housing, you will create a lot of situations in which it isn't feasible for low income people to work.In not great news, @GoldmanSachs' research team proclaims the labor force participation recovery has ended, noting that low-wage workers have actually faded from the workforce since enhanced UI benefits ended and demographic trends will exert a strong drag going forward. https://t.co/avylec8osn
Lydia DePillis @lydiadepillisDespite an absolute rise in crimes like murder, overall crimes are either holding steady or declining. However, media coverage and the visibility of poverty and systemic violence such growing encampments of people without homes drive the growing false equivalence of poverty and crime and the support for ensuing criminalization of poverty with “tough on crime” measures. Rather than advocacy for systemic transformation and valid criticism of institutional moral failures, visible poverty has energized demands for more rather than less violence. CBS News recently reported on the growth of homelessness for senior citizens and the New Yorker explored how resource-constrained seniors are the fastest growing group of student loan debtors.
White male supremacy and toxic masculinity continue to wreak havoc across a range of social issues including but certainly not limited to reproductive rights and gun control.
The book, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much, describes tunneling as one component of the scarcity mindset created by poverty, desperation, and deprivation. Essentially, tunneling describes the human condition of feeling and being under material and emotional distress that compels decisions that favor acquiring short term gains and avoiding immediate risks, even if different actions might incur a short-term cost for long-term, more durable benefits. Tunneling compels us to draw and see lines and limitations where they may or may not exist, structuring decisions as win/lose binaries rather than synthesis. This compulsion toward simplification and urgency gets us caught within traps that leave us stuck within a scarcity mindset and fighting immense crises alone rather than coming together.
Although desperation certainly prompts increases in risks as well as seeding future risks, we can fend off tunneling and find our way back to trust and connection with ongoing efforts to take action when securing any win, craving out time and space for decision making, and relying on others who you trust to hold you accountable for reality checks.
Here are three practices that you can adopt to resist the entrenchment of a scarcity mindset
Gratitude and awe: Much research has chronicled the transformative impact of gratitude that I won’t repeat here. The Greater Good Science has made a case of leaning into both gratitude and awe because of their intertwined nature and self-reinforcing virtuous cycles fostering openness, empathy, and a sense of possibility.
Rest: Although hustle culture and the cult of productivity would have us believe that rest is negative, rest is necessary and, perhaps paradoxically, productive. Burnout also separates us from healthy connections and thriving. Keep in mind that sleep or physical rest is only one of many kinds of rest that can help to disrupt tunneling. Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith writes about seven different types of rest in her book, Sacred Rest: Recover Your Life, Renew Your Energy, Restore Your Sanity: physical, mental, creative, sensory, emotional, and spiritual rest. The Nap Ministry advocates for rest as a path toward liberation from oppressive cultures and systems.
Joy: Joy as resistance is a tried and true lever for social change in the face of seemingly insurmountable adversity and desperation. The Grist’s Fix Solution Lab recently curated their Joy issue to chronicle how the myriad of ways joy arises in the fight to address the climate emergency while adrienne maree brown dove deep into the transformational power of joy in her book, Pleasure Activism, synonymizing social transformation and pleasure rather than wallowing in the overwhelm of desperation.
Upcoming Events
In the spirit of countering desperation with joy, gratitude and awe, I’m experimenting with brief 30 minutes signals sessions to lean into hopeful futures for belonging. This is a 30 minute session analyzing one signal of change related to belonging, surfacing potential consequences if it were to normalize or mainstream, and then creating tweet-length forecasts of how we might cultivate belonging in those futures. The next session is Friday, August 12, 12 pm PT on Twitter Spaces (audio only).
If you’re interested in new modes of organizing that fend off scarcity mindsets and desperation in favor of liberatory models, check out Building Belonging’s upcoming event, Liberatory Governance: Building Belonging in Organizational Structures, on Sept. 13 at 3 pm PT.
I agree with all of this. Another critical practice that I think is spreading is mutual aid networks. Mutual aid is not only a source of community care during crises, but nurtures interdependence that can foster real joy and belonging. For myself, contributing to these groups is giving me hope and purpose in moments where the slow-grind of my policy work feels too infuriating.
While mutual aid is absolutely nothing new, I have seen new groups sprouting up in neighbourhoods where I live and they are growing. I think it will take time for many communities build back the muscle memory of organizing and care work, but it is happening - and it is one of the strongest and most important actions we can take in the face of the climate crisis, growing polarization, etc.
What is most interesting to me, is seeing these networks emerge in the same timeframe as the rebirth of the labour movement. Two and a half years into the pandemic, and it seems that people are remembering the strength we get when we organize and work together.
Also, on Gratitude and Awe, I highly recommend reading Rebecca Elson's A Responsibility to Awe: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1912586.A_Responsibility_to_Awe
This collection by the late astronomer and poet delves into her sense of belonging within the context of the universe. It's a gorgeous body of work, and I have found myself often reflecting on passages (or even just the title) during moments of hopelessness over the past few years. She wove deep gratitude for her life into so much of this book, even in the poems where she reflects on her impending death.
As always, thank you for this beautiful piece!
P.S. Congratulations on all of these big, beautiful milestones!
The (literal and metaphorical) costs of daycare can't be overstated. At one point, that was our largest expense, trumping even our mortgage- and we were making decent money, had one of the cheapest rates on this side of town, etc. It simply would not have been possible had we been working in lower paying fields. Every company bemoaning the labor shortage should give serious consideration to providing on-site daycare. My guess is the quantity of applications would jump overnight.
Separately, absent huge increases in wages, the labor pool in some fields will be diminished for years to come. I'm specifically thinking of the restaurant/retail sectors. Those were some of the first people to be laid off in the pandemic's early days. Many of them landed at places like Amazon warehouses, and they've never looked back. Fixed schedules, benefits on day 1, and (relatively) large raises. Why go back?