“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change;

courage to change the things I can;

and wisdom to know the difference. “

second that part was just a lamenting of what i can gather from people around me. their common view is that the human brain gets set in it’s ways in the mid 20’s and it becomes very hard to change the person’s views afterwords. as for what other people think. it has great power over what you can and can’t do in the way things are today, everything from what job you can get to how well off you can be and this won’t change till it all ends in someway or another.

As a child, you learn things easily and quickly. As you get older, that ability deteroriates, but it’s never completely lost.

I must have really broken the mold when I learned C++, Java, and Python at 25….

for me there is the problem of purpose in general. i am not religious, so much so i consider most forms of it as a crutch used by people who are unable to wrap their minds around the world as a whole so they go into their little corners and account the rest to a deity of their choosing. after learning about stuff like this and peak oil the original purpose to at least be well off and successful has no meaning anymore. money and fame can’t give you anything but trouble once good times go bad, everyone near you including family and friends will look at you as a source of income while others will just look at you in envy. also on the other hand to live life just to live seems to lack a certain appeal to keep you getting up in the morning for me. also i am getting worried as i get older that i am seen as a old dog unable to learn, there is a perception of a belief from allot of people that once you reach your mid 20’s your considered unable to learn new things. personally i don’t really think it’s true but it matters what others think of it when it comes down to it..

Mario - In the book version of the Thirty Theses, that becomes thesis #30. Basically, my contention is that cultural materialism acts on memetic variety, so something like collapse simply changes the nature of the game. Memetic varieties that are adapated to a situation of perpetual growth and ever-greater complexity will find themselves suddenly unable to compete with other varieties, adapted to a sustainable, dynamic equilibrium with their local ecology. So what do we do? We begin creating memetic varieties adapted to the context of collapse. We create tribes.

Since finishing the Thirty Theses, I’ve been writing more articles on how to think like a “Leaver” (to use Quinn’s generally problematic term). “Writing, Language & Thought,” “Spirit of Place,” “The Trickster, the Devil, and an Ambiguous World,” and “A Pirate’s Life for Me,” as well as this article, all talk about various aspects of “Leaver” mentality, the things I’ve identified so far as crucial elements of a sustainable memetic variety.

For the simple, pragmatic measures we’re looking at, I wrote an article a little while back called, “The Escape Plan,” that gets into the nitty-gritty issues. Primitive skills are easy to learn, though difficult to master; fortunately for us, we only need to learn them soon, and we’ll have the rest of our lives to work on mastering them. We’re still learning new things, but we’re already to the “luxuries” phase—it took little more than a few months to learn the basics of mean survival. Everything from here on in is quality of life (mind you, that leaves a lot of room still—right now, our quality of life would be fairly abysmal, but it’s comforting at least to know that we’re no longer worrying about whether or not we’d survive, just whether or not we’d want to). In general, I haven’t made up my mind on Tamarack Song, but this particular quote speaks to me:

I’m going to give you all some straight talk, in hopes that it will help to steer you on to a track might get you somewhere. The reality of the situation is that I have not met, or heard of, a single person in the past 40 years who has used the approaches that we have been talking about, who has been able to return to primitive living. This includes the authors of the popular books. Yeah, they might talk a good talk, but look at what they’ve actually done—a month in the mountains, a solo year in the woods, some time in Alaska—is that really living the Old Way? Where is the clan? Where are the elders? The children? Where is the example and clan memories to learn from?

Why didn’t it work for them, and why won’t it work for you? Because they carried civilization with them into the wilderness, and you likely will as well. You can learn all the skills you want, and The Mother will spit you back out just about as fast as you went in. The more stubborn individuals will last a few months or maybe a year, but rest assured, they’ll be back.

Why? Because they didn’t do their work. We come from a technological society, so we naturally think that substituting primitive technology for civilized technology is our doorway. The only problem is that Native people are not into technology. They spend only a couple hours a day providing for their simple needs, and they mostly use simple means. Look at their tools—few and crude, and their craftwork—basic and utilitarian. What a Native person excels at is what I call qualitative skills—how to sit in a circle with your clan mates and speak your truth, how to find your special talent so that you can develop it to serve your people, how to use your intuition, the ways of honor and respect, how to live in balance with elders and women and children, how to speak in the language beyond words, how to befriend fear and live love. Without these skills, you will surely die. Or else you’ll go back to the life that shuns these skills.

I’m currently reading The Spell of the Sensuous, by David Abram. Just the abbreviated version of the first chapter, “The Ecology of Magic,” was enough to draw me in. I just finished the introduction last night, and already he’s drawn together the phenomenology I studied in college, with the orality vs. literacy argument I wrote about in the article I linked above, with shamanism, and synaesthesia—basically, tying together all the strands I’ve been pursuing for quite some time into a single whole. I’m only through the introduction, but I think this may well be the most important book I’ve read since Ishmael—and as far as the question, “What do I do about all this?” it may be a better answer than anything I’ve had to write so far.