This Christmas, get what you really want

Wham! Thinking about wealth

As I write this, I have this song in my head. I love Wham!

Unlimited energy… for what?

Big news last week, Lawrence Livermore National Labs announced they had created fusion, a nuclear reaction of fusing two elements into one (fire the laser!). The incredible thing about fusion is it generates more energy than you inputted, and what is produced is completely clean, i.e. no carbon emissions. It’s how the sun and the stars work We’re decades away from whamming at mass scale, i.e. won’t save us from climate change.¹ But wow.

Still, it gave me a question:

If we had a revolution in energy and we could produce unlimited amounts of whatever we wanted, would we work less?

Or would we continue working harder and harder, inventing and producing more and more stuff?²

Busyness is the most socially accepted and societally enforced addiction. Followed by consumption. We’re already at the point where we can basically produce unlimited stuff, just with carbon emissions.³ And as long as we can persuade people to want it (or as long as you can be persuaded to want it), we can keep producing more stuff.

Is that what you really desire?

I wrote a little bit about this last week, but we really need to distinguish between real desires and fake desires. A real desire is something universal and culture-independent, something we need no matter where and when we were born. Love, connection and meaning. A sense that you matter and that your choices matter. On the other hand, fake desires are culturally embedded.

Humans don’t need to be taught what to need what they truly desire. They naturally desire love, connection, and meaning. On the other hand, people have to be taught what to want. But log into your Amazon profile and see what you bought in the last year. Most of what you bought, you were probably taught to want that. Take a look at your kid’s Christmas list. Most of what they want, they were taught to want that.

Put another way, distinguish between your Needs and your Wants. Doing that will heal 80% of your relationship with money. If we all did that, we might prevent climate change.

99% of the stuff we mine, harvest, process, and send through the system is disposed of within 6 months. We are taking our life energy, which unlike fusion, is limited, and literally making garbage. And in America, we call it success. Especially if we can do more of it than others.

I don’t know if you can strategize for emergence, but you can create the conditions for emergence to happen. In order to change any system, you have to change the goals of the system. In order to allow whatever happens after capitalism to emerge, we need to change our goals from what modern capitalism offers us. We have to unlearn what capitalism has told us to want.

All mature spirituality in one sense or another is about letting go and unlearning. - Richard Rohr

What is Wealth?

In the very first lesson in FF1, I ask students: what is wealth? Here are a couple of answers:

• Having all one’s basic needs met without harming others (human and other-than-human) to enable the full practice of health, happiness, creativity, and mutual benefit.

• Wealth is joy. Wealth is fresh air, warm cuddles, overflowing creativity. Rain and deep green leaves and quiet. Desserts and hugs and cat purrs… Wealth is a sense of security. Wealth is intimate self awareness and a state of flow. Wealth is community- an abundance of people to remember their birthdays, sit with their wounds, and mirror back their beauty… Wealth is lusciousness and pleasure. Wealth is the ability to get 8+ hours of sleep every night, take breaks when you need it, and work less than 40 hours a week… Wealth is time. Time for naps, time for walks, time for cooking, time for laughing, time for stillness, time for nature.

Almost every student writes some version of this. Wealth isn’t things. And it’s a good reminder of what we value as we hit Christmas. What’s the goal here? Is it more stuff? Or is it more community, sleep, free time, still time, and nature?

In theory, it seems possible to have both: a materially abundant life and life of inner satisfaction. But in practice, doesn’t it sound like a lie? Doesn’t it seem like they at odds with each other? Or at the very least, we giving our life energy to things that don’t matter at the cost of things that really do.

"Why do we spend our lives striving to be something that we would never want to be, if only we knew what we wanted? Why do we waste our time doing things which, if we only stopped to think about them, are just the opposite of what we were made for?” - Thomas Merton

This Christmas, let go of your busyness. Let go of your consumerism. Let go of your perfectionism and your constant striving. Go for the things you really, truly desire. You probably already have it: love, connection, meaning. All you have to do is pay attention. The amount we receive of the things we truly desire is proportional to our attention and gratitude to them, because there are already there.

I swear to you: they’re better than the weak and dissatisfying shit society has taught you to want. And just to show you I’m not a Grinch, here’s Mariah and Bieber making the point (sort of, they're also schilling for Macy's haha).

Wishing you and your family a Merry Christmas! Hope you feel safe, loved, and content in this holiday season!

1. An aside: someone told me, “What scares me is not the world going up 2 degrees Celsius but what humans will do to each other when that happens.”

2. Years ago I asked my friend who worked in “sustainability” at Nike: what if Nike could completely close the loop on manufacturing? In other words, what if they were able to make new products from byproducts from old products? Would not contributing to climate change or environmental degradation mean making more and more things is OK? Or is the very logic of making more and more the real problem?

3. I can’t help but think that there’s an excess of male energy in us to keep on producing when we don’t really need more.