Rabbit Holes 🕳️ #78

From unpatterning to return on energy & downshifting, new creative beginnings, why don't we worship play, and learning from (not about) nature

Hi all,

I’ve got a bit of an announcement coming up next week, so if you enjoy receiving this newsletter, please share it with your friends and colleagues or on social media and help me spread the word ahead of the announcement. I’ve also got an interesting deep-dive article coming up this Friday that may be quite shareable. 😉

Thank you! And now on to today’s rabbit holes:

THIS WEEK → 👩‍🎨 New Creative Beginnings 🧩 Unpatterning ⬇️ Return On Energy & Downshifting ➕ Why Don’t We Worship Play? 🚿 From Learning About to Learning From Nature

Rabbit Holes 🕳️

How can we build a better world? As always, here are three perspective-shifting ideas to rewild your mind and help you create a better world, plus some extras below. Enjoy!

#1 👩‍🎨 New Creative Beginnings

There is a shift emerging within the creator space, and maybe the wider internet and even society at large. This piece by Yancey Strickler (co-founder of Kickstarter) links to some extent to my thoughts on Community Economies: Reframing Wealth Building, to some of the ideas in this excellent piece by Tara McMullin …

“The creator economy isn't peer-to-peer. It's peer-to-machine-to-peer”

…as well as to another thing I’ve recently read in the ZINE newsletter:

“Over the last few years, I’ve seen a lot of creators, myself included, begin to challenge the prevailing wisdom that the best thing that could happen to you was that millions of people would know you and that you wouldn’t know them.”

“The creative world asks to be remade. Tells us it must be remade. It’s waiting for one of us — all of us — to push against the economic wall that blocks artists from enjoying the full fruits of their labor. A system where even the best artists only get royalties between 10-20% of the revenue (where does the rest go???) and contracts are designed to confuse and obfuscate into corporate servitude.

The power of the old world came from us being isolated individuals (we were told) who had to look out for number one (we were also told). But behind this was a secret: the corporate owners actually did act together through the power of contracts, copyright, and market forces they negotiated and set. Big picture, the owners were united. It was only the artist who was isolated.

The system banked on us competing against each other so fiercely we’d never look up. It worked for a long time because the channels were so tightly controlled. But once the internet broke them open, it was only a matter of time. […]

To date, the internet’s powers have been used mainly to recreate a mirror of the old model — the star system where everyone aims for their own channel, following, and competes for attention. That system has been enormously powerful, but it’s based on a limited vision of what’s possible with the internet. It’s trapped in the broadcasting model that defined the last century but not this one. […]

Our new beginning begins with us learning the power of banding into small, flexible groups of creative people aligned around the ideals, beliefs, and dreams we have in common. It begins with us coming together as individuals to become creatively, economically, and spiritually aligned around visions and goals we share. […]

In this model, artists and creative people take back their agency to organize and align with each other. Rather than play games to win the blessing of fickle external institutions, we create our own groups to legitimize each other. We advance each other. We sign each other. We split with each other. We design systems of economics, abundance, scarcity, sharing, and care based on whatever we wish.”

» The Ideaspace | We're already in creative groups, they're just not yet self-aware by Yancey Strickler

#2 🧩 Unpatterning

I agree with Alex Steffen’s thoughts below that the discontinuity we will face in the years and decades to come is not a problem we can solve but the context in which we will solve problems. Alex’s words are a sobering reminder of the mindset we need for an increasingly post-conventional future.

“Our thinking is changing far less quickly than our circumstances.

We live amidst discontinuities — unprecedented situations for which our past expertise and experience offer us poor guidance — yet we cling desperately to the mental habits of continuity. Even when we discuss vast transformations, we map them to our understanding of how the world used to work. […]

That’s because climate chaos and ecological collapse do not change the world around us in linear, simple ways. The weather doesn’t just get a little warmer, or a little wetter, or a little more hospitable to a different group of migratory songbirds. It gets weirder, too. It gets unstable. It gets dangerous. […]

I see repeated efforts to shoehorn discontinuous change into the framework of continuity. […] That’s because we are conditioned to believe the myth of a return to normal, of an altered but sustained continuity (or, failing that, of an all-encompassing apocalypse), and that myth renders us blind to the reality around us. As I wrote before:

We have all been raised to expect that when things change from a pattern we’re used to, they eventually settle in to a new pattern we can learn to live with, a new normal. This expectation has largely been true in the past: things change, baselines shift, the young grow up used to it, eventually no one notices. No longer.

To put it another way, we are hungry to be told that if recent patterns of life have unraveled, that they’ll be replaced by a new pattern, and that our job is just to wait for someone to explain to us how the new pattern works. […]

The truth, of course, is that what comes after the old patterns is something different altogether: an unpatterning.

An unpatterning involves somewhat stable interconnected systems, fraying apart in ways vast and small, sudden and slow, obvious and semi-undetectable; coming together in previously unseen arrangements; then unpredictably fraying again, assembling in new temporary conditions and unstable states, again and again. Not every change will be a huge catastrophe, but every change will be felt, and the aggregate effect of all this change will be to break our sense of how things work.

This impermanence unseats our sense of ecological balance and our deep ties to place. It renders our old ideas of sustainability and an orderly transition out of alignment with the actual world. It demands ruggedization against the fact of unrelenting change itself. The worse we let the crisis grow, the more ruinously expensive this tornado of unpatterning will get.

We can limit the magnitude of the crisis driving discontinuity. Once unleashed, though, discontinuity is not a problem we can solve. It is the context in which we solve problems.”

» The Snap Forward | Unpatterning by Alex Steffen

#3 ⬇️ Return On Energy & Downshifting

I like the term economism. It describes how economic thinking and practice have become ingrained into all sorts of aspects of our lives, even non-economic ones. In today’s world governed by economism, everything seems to need to be measured by economic logic: am I using my time efficiently?; Does this activity have an ROI?, etc. Concepts like the two below by David Spinks help us abandon or rather replace such economic metrics and thereby reframe common notions of success and progress.

“Return on Investment (ROI) is a fundamental rule of business. You need more money back than you put in. Violate this rule and your business will die.

Where we invest our time also has a Return on Energy (ROE). You need more energy back than you put in. It’s a fundamental rule of our minds, hearts, and bodies. Violate this rule and your passion will die.

Often, we force ourselves to stay committed to things that have been sucking us dry. We do it because it makes us feel safe (financially, emotionally, physically). We do it because of fear of change, of failure, or of the unknown. We do it because we made a commitment and we intend to see it through.

This is true in business and relationships. When we stay committed to the things that drain us we become empty. Alternatively, commit to actions and people with a positive ROE and there are no bounds to how much you can pour in without burning or hollowing out.”

» David Spinks' Newsletter | Return on Energy by David Spinks

“Downshifting is the process a high achiever goes through when stepping off the treadmill. It’s their journey into a new version of life where achievement is no longer their north star (at least not the version of achievement they’ve known).

We high achievers were never taught how to downshift. Our entire life has been a long thread of upshifting. Get to the next level. More knowledge, more experience, more reputation, more acumen, more success, more wealth, more growth… more, more, more… […]

It was important to me that nothing was waiting for me on the other side of my sabbatical. I didn’t know how long it would end up being. I sensed that there was a new shore waiting for me out there, and that I had to completely lose sight of the shore I was leaving if I was going to find it.”

» David Spinks' Newsletter | How to Downshift by David Spinks

➕ Extras

“Why don’t we worship play? Why, in so many ways, are we erasing play from the human experience? And what might we begin doing differently? […] We’re talking about a paradigm shift, which demands that all of us who believe in the value of play must stand up for it, loudly, whenever and wherever we can.”
🛝 Play as a portal to everything by that matters by Joel Stein

“You might laugh but something strange happens when you live with a composting toilet. Your perspective shifts from seeing your own produce as a disgusting waste stream to a valuable resource. You start to see the end of one meal as the beginnings of a future meal. This happens to such an extent that after a while, it becomes hard to use normal toilets in other places. […] I often say that if you really want to learn about circular economics, start by closing the loop on your own poop.”
💩 When will we face our own sh*t? by Tom Greenwood

“Project CETI’s scientists will need to observe the whales for years and achieve fundamental breakthroughs in AI. But if they’re successful, humans could be able to initiate a conversation with whales. […] Assume that we are able to communicate something of substance to the sperm whale civilization. What should we say?”
🐳 How First Contact With Whale Civilization Could Unfold by Ross Andersen

🚿 Shower Thoughts

credit: Biomimicry Institute

That’s it for this week’s Rabbit Holes issue!

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Thomas