Ratchet it Back

First, thank you for reading this. My goal is to inform and to spur to action. If I can do that for even one person with every post, that’s success.

Next, I just read what might be the most important thing I’ve read this year. It’s a post called “We Were Never Supposed to Know This Much,” by Hana Lee Goldin on her Substack, Card Catalog. There’s so much to it, and I find it so profound, I’ll have to read it again. I’m still processing, but it resonates so deeply with my current state that it feels like affirmation.

In this piece, Goldin explains the stress, guilt, anxiety, responsibility, and exhaustion that so many of us feel from the over-abundance of news today. She explains the science behind it – that we have a brain that is sized and designed for a social world the size of a village, with a comparable information base and communication capacity. The world we knew was one we could respond to and see the results of our actions.

Now we live in a world where we can be constantly made aware of issues, problems, and crises everywhere. We have been provided with devices that not only put that information at our fingertips, but also feeds it to us continually, based on what we show interest in. We respond emotionally to what we see and read. But at some point, our compassion doesn’t scale to the scale of the suffering – our brains are not built for that. The gap that is created is filled with “cycling between brief floods of distress and a hollow numbness that passes for being informed.”

This perfectly describes my experience of working in sustainability for the past five years. I was in a role that required learning about all of the negative human impacts on the environment by the construction industry – waste, air pollution, water pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, embodied carbon, habitat destruction, and supply chain impacts. My job was to process and share all of this information with hundreds of employees and work to change their behavior, and track and analyze results, without any dedicated staff and minimal support from above. Over the long run, I could see some impact from my efforts, but on a day to day or week to week basis, that impact was invisible. I knew I needed to find a way to stay engaged in environmental protection in a more focused way.

Goldin’s article includes a section entitled, “What to do with a village brain in a global feed” – I encourage you to read it. I know I’ll be reading it again and again. For now, my biggest takeaway is, “We were built for a village, and the world we’ve inherited is something else entirely. The suffering in it is real, and some of it demands our attention and action. Working within our limits is how we stay capable of giving either.” I think this dovetails nicely withAyanna Elizabeth Johnson’s encouragement to find not only what needs doing, but where that overlaps with what brings us jo and what we’re good at. That will show us where to take action within our limits and provide the needed satisfaction of seeing our impact.

Remember, we’re all in this together. You can’t do it all, so find your piece and focus on it.