Rabbit Holes 🕳️ #93

From greenhindering to patriotic climate action, business as a hammock, awkardness, delusional fantasy, the rewear chair, and downgrading

THIS WEEK ↓
🕳️ Rabbit Holes: Greenhindering // Patriotic Climate Action // Business As A Hammock
🤯 Reframings: Awkwardness // Taste Worlds // Delusional Fantasy
🎨 Creations: Downgrading // The Rewear Chair // Communal Dinners

Rabbit Holes 🕳️

As always, 3 perspective-shifting reframings to rewild your mind:

#1💄 Greenhindering > Greenwashing

Greendhindering is the sustainability-related equivalent of sexy and cool actors smoking cigarettes on camera or handsome, athletic construction workers drinking coke. It’s a great reframe of something we mostly brush aside as “normal” or insignificant when it’s actually super important to point out: the normalization (and sometimes even glorification) of unsustainable practices as a crucial obstacle to building a more sustainable world. [related older rabbit hole: brain pollution]

“Earlier this month, the New York Times published an article about the growing trend of “ultra-personalized beverages filled with syrups, powders, fruit chunks, boba and plenty of caffeine” served in coffee shops. The article appeared on the cover of the newspaper’s food section, accompanied by a large image of a customer holding two drinks from Dutch Bros.

What immediately stood out to me was that the drinks were served in large, single-use plastic cups, with the customer holding a disposable plastic straw next to each one (see picture above). The image — and others throughout the article — seemed to ‘scream’ coolness, highlighting how trendy these personalized drinks have become. By extension, it unintentionally made the disposable cups and straws seem cool as well. In doing so, the Times not only made the use of such disposable items seem more normal but also glorified them as part of a highly desirable practice, especially among young people.

I call what the Times did in this case greenhindering, which refers to the glorification and normalization of unsustainable behaviors or practices, whether intentional or unintentional, by agents of socialization, which make those behaviors and practices much more difficult to eliminate. […]

These agents — including media organizations, social media influencers, and companies via their advertising and marketing campaigns — play a key role in shaping people’s values, behaviors, and lifestyles. As Genner and Suss point out: “Agents of socialization shape our norms and values regarding appropriate behavior and how we interact with others and highly influence our views and perspective on our community, our country, and the world at large.” This is especially true for consumer socialization, which “provides a framework for analyzing the influences on/sources of how people learn to enact their roles as consumers in society,” according to Chinchanachokchai and Gregorio.”

» Why Greenhindering is the New Greenwashing by Raz Godelnik

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#2 🇺🇸 Patriotic Climate Action

I like a lot of the storytelling and framing that Kamala Harris is using in her campaign. It’s refreshing and joyful, and most importantly, her campaign takes on risks by trying new things. And the honest truth is that we’ve sucked so far at promoting climate action, so it’s about time to reframe the narratives.

“Researchers at New York University found that framing climate action as patriotic and as necessary to preserve the American “way of life” can increase support for climate action among people across the political spectrum in the United States. […]

The framing has taken shape under President Joe Biden’s administration, which has pushed for policies to manufacture electric vehicles and chargers domestically “so that the great American road trip can be electrified.” Harris underscored this approach to climate and energy in Tuesday’s presidential debate with Trump, emphasizing efforts to craft “American-made” EVs and turning a question about fracking into a call for less reliance on “foreign oil.” […]

For decades, environmental advocates have called on people to make sacrifices for the greater good — to bike instead of drive, eat more vegetables instead of meat, and turn down the thermostat in the winter. Asking people to give up things can lead to backlash, said Emma Frances Bloomfield, a communication professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The framing in the study flips that on its head, she said. “It’s not asking people to sacrifice or make radical changes, but in fact, doing things for the environment will prevent the radical change of the environmental catastrophe.”

» The Grist | Kamala Harris is making climate action patriotic. It just might work. by Kate Yoder

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#3 🦥 My Business Is A Hammock

Kening Zhu, who I shared here before, always surprises me with interesting framing and analogies. I particularly like these business-focused reframings because the business world is full of so many destructive and pain-driven narratives while lacking constructive and joyful ones. So here is one:

“a business is not about hustling hard, chasing work, or proving my worthiness in exchange for money.

a business is a soft hammock I weave by hand — of my creative practices, and to hold my creative practices. it is the vessel and tapestry which connects, flows, and carry those practices — to have presence in the world.

my business is a place where I can lay down and rest. stargaze and dream, and imagine new things. it’s designed to be extremely energy efficient — woven to fit the contours of my (creative and energetic) body.

its whole purpose can be summarized as: energy-efficient imaginative processes.

it’s travel-friendly and mobile: I can take it to jungles, to the wide open sea, to outer space. it’s compact and yet infinitely elastic — it’s a web that can stretch and expand; which can catch and support others who wander into my world, seeking guidance.

when I hold this metaphor in my mind, my body feels a sense of deep relief. to create a business like a hammock is to give myself permission to rest. to let things come to me, without struggle.

my business is a place where I give myself permission to be effortless — and still feel supported, safe, and connected to my environment. this weaving of threads takes time, of course. but at the end of it, I find myself building a flexible, soft structure that allows me to be myself, and still be in motion with the world.”

» my business is a hammock I weave by hand by kening zhu

🤯 Reframings

A few short reframings that I’ve recently stumbled across:

“Awkwardness is a reminder that social infrastructure exists and that it is not equally accessible to everyone. […] To view awkwardness as shameful, or embarrassing, is therefore not just a philosophical mistake but a practical one: it is to miss out on an opportunity to repair the social infrastructure.” Alexandra Plakias in Make It Awkward!

“You recognize taste when you step into someone’s world and it feels like you’ve been transported. You may never know that person’s interior life but you see hints of it everywhere. The effort the person has made to surround themselves with things that they love, they really love, and find beautiful is so clear. The effect on the visitor should not be to replicate their exact sensibilities but for you to develop your own more deeply. Some may argue that I am pushing for consumption but taste is so obviously not only made up of objects. It comes from a reverence and curiosity for history, art, craftsmanship, literature, music, film! All that eventually filters through to the objects one surrounds yourself with if you care enough. People with taste are noticeable savants—experts at what they love.” Marlowe Granados in Having Taste

“Whether far-right or far-left or simply a Charli-obsessed teen, it seems the general function of social media these days is to take our quite bleak reality and, through the power of fantasy, turn it into something that feels better.

Another word for fantasy, though, might be delusion. And another might be denial.” P.E. Moskowitz in Brainwashing Ourselves

🎨 Creations

Some hand-picked, particularly thought-provoking innovations:

You Don’t Need A Smartphone (A Practical Guide To Downgrading) // The Rewear Chair // Fællesspisning (Communal) Dinners

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

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Thomas