#world-making

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Mistaking The World We’ve Made For The Real World

George Saunders

The instant we wake the story begins: “Here I am. In my bed. Hard worker, good dad, decent husband, a guy who always tries his best. Jeez, my back hurts. Probably from the stupid gym.”

And just like that, with our thoughts, the world gets made.

Or, anyway, a world gets made.

This world-making via thinking is natural, sane, Darwinian: we do it to survive. Is there harm in it? Well, yes, because we think in the same way that we hear or see: within a narrow, survival-enhancing range. We don’t see or hear all that might be seen or heard but only that which is helpful for us to see and hear. Our thoughts are similarly restricted and have a similarly narrow purpose: to help the thinker thrive.

All of this limited thinking has an unfortunate by-product: ego. Who is trying to survive? “I” am. The mind takes a vast unitary wholeness (the universe), selects one tiny segment of it (me), and starts narrating from that point of view. Just like that, that entity (George!) becomes real, and he is (surprise, surprise) located at the exact center of the universe, and everything is happening in his movie, so to speak; it is all, somehow, both for and about him. In this way, moral judgment arises: what is good for George is… good. What is bad for him is bad. (The bear is neither good nor bad until, looking hungry, it starts walking toward George.)

So, in every instant, a delusional gulf gets created between things as we think they are and things as they actually are. Off we go, mistaking the world we’ve made with our thoughts for the real world. Evil and dysfunction (or at least obnoxiousness) occur in proportion to how solidly a person believes that (their) projections are correct and energetically acts upon them.

[Thanks Ian Sanders]

[world-making-visions]

Our future takes time but we'll get there

In our future, the streets are busy with people who walk out of buildings as if they'd been imprisoned there for decades. And maybe they have.

In our future, that abandoned brick building now houses a busy free clothing store, diligently organized by size but not much else. There are more important things to do than insist on who should use what clothing or how.

In our future, there are pop up tens and small groups of people gathered together trying to solve this or that problem. If you stand and watch long enough, you'll see one of the group look up and notice someone they know, then call them over to ask for their opinion.

In our future, the retail workers have climbed up to the top of the buildings to tear down the symbols of their corporate overlords. Now there are colorful painted signs that simply tell you what you'll find there. Food. Tools. Household Tools. Farm Tools. Clothing. etc.

In our future, the light rail passes by three times as frequently as it used to. Some of the bus routes are maintained but several others are re-routed every few weeks as transit workers and community leaders try to find the best ways to serve communities that have been transformed.

In our future, empty lots have become vibrant neighborhoods for those who haven't quite decided where they want their permanent homes to be. It's a challenge to find a way to stay with the friends they've made but many people are looking to move to places that suit their needs better and they'll figure it out eventually. In the meantime, these are the coolest, driest, and most comfortable tent communities you've ever seen. There's a group of teenagers in a circle brainstorming how to use this space when the people here have settled elsewhere. Sometimes a community center doesn't have to be a building.

In our future, most homes have pop up tents set up in their front yard because staying inside makes people worry they'll miss out on something. There are often signs and letterboxes set up as people learn to offer and request things from each other. Someone started one of those chain email things via letterbox last week. The youngest people don't really get the joke. It's fine.

[world-making-visions]

A Simple Life

I want to be in a cabin in the woods, I want the weather to be slightly cool so I have to wear a hoodie and can sit by a fire but not so cold that I'm uncomfortable, I want delicious food and beverages, I want the sky so full of stars that you can still kind of see when you look around in the dark, and I want it to be quiet so there is a pretty echo when I sing. That's all I want today.

[world-making-visions]

Do you remember how loud the silence was?

Don't judge me too harshly for the cliche, but the sound of children laughing and playing in the middle of the street is what makes this place feel like home.

It's loud these days in a way it never was before, but it doesn't bother me the way loud sounds used to. The sound of sirens and tires screeching would pierce the silence painfully. Now there is hardly ever any silence to pierce.

The afternoons are filled with children playing. The mornings with adults standing outside chatting. The evenings with neighbors setting up dinner -- often on their porches or driveways, sometimes in the street as an open invitation.

It's never quiet anymore. But I hardly remember what it was like to be anxious. I've never slept better.

[world-making-visions]

the world feels smaller in a way that is freeing instead of limiting

Living in a residential neighborhood with lines and lines of houses in all directions used to feel like floating in the middle of a wide open sea with only the occasional sounds of life to remind you there was anything out there.

These days I swear to you I can feel my neighbors moving about in their house. I am aware of their presence all the time, and it's both comforting and annoying. Privacy feels out of reach but we leave our doors unlocked willingly.

I think in a few more years we'll retreat back into our homes a little more, but for now it's a relief to feel each other living.

[insurrectionaryam]

Yet the modern human conceit is not the only plan for making worlds: we are surrounded by many world-making projects, human and not human. World-making projects emerge from practical activities of making lives; in the process these projects alter our planet.

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins

[thomasbernhard]

We enter a world which precedes us but is not made for us, and we have to cope with this world…but if we survive…we must take care to turn this world, which was a given world but not made for us or ready for us, a world which is all set in any case, because it was made by our predecessors, to attack us and ruin us and finally destroy us, nothing else, we must turn it into a world to suit our own ideas, acting first behind the scenes, inconspicuously, but then with all our might and quite openly, so that we can say after a while that we're living in our own world, not in some previous world, one that is always bound to be of no concern to us and intent upon ruining and destroying us...

--Thomas Bernhard, Correction