How slowing down can make you happier and help you survive the apocalypse
Adam Jezard's tongue-in-cheek guide to deceleration, degrowth, lying flat, resigning greatly and how Sci-Fi might hold the key to humanity's survival after all
Where do Sci-Fi, philosophy, history, economics and futurology meet? I suspect very soon, if Donald ‘why don’t we use nukes if we have them?’ Trump has his way.
In the meantime, I’ve been looking at how we might ride out the orange-apocalypse. Just this week, while reading Sci-Fi and listening to filmmakers and critics speaking about old genre films, I’ve come across three intersecting views of how we can lead less stressful lives in the now that equally may have application in the post-apocalyptic world the orange-one and his tech-accelerationist pals are working their way towards.
Alternatively if, as one hopes, the apocalypse is at least averted for a while, perhaps they might lead us to a less stressful, more ecologically, environmentally and economically sustainable world.
In any event, it seems to me that some serious consideration could be given to these ideas by governments and, if not them, by the swathes of the population who don’t want to die through overwork as 21st century serfs, summed up by the lovely Japanese word koroshi, which means death caused by overwork. (I speak with some empathy here as, because I was a chronic ‘over-worker’, I ended my career suffering from a series of what I now deem to be industrial injuries).
‘Quiet quitting’ has been around for some time. This is basically doing your job as specified in your contract, not working unpaid or unrecompensed overtime, not taking work-related phone calls, texts or messages outside of office hours and so on. This is, I believe, both commendable and something everyone should do (or pay the consequences physically, emotionally and mentally) and every employer should support (or be legally liable), and I wish had been a concept when I was working.
But the following concepts, though allied perhaps in the desire of younger generations not to be the wage slaves their parents and grandparents were, are more linked to creating a sustainable lifestyle for the planet and for individuals. They tie in with the desires of modern young people for flexible lifestyles and work and a sustainable world. As ‘artificial intelligence’ is, and will remain, drastically overrated, humans will still need to work, so it should be incumbent on companies and policy-makers to consider them rather than trying to bully and cajole yet another generation into the ‘slave-worker’ mode of previous generations.
1. Lying flat
Described as a ‘passive-aggressive’ response to the crushing 996-hour schedules of many Chinese and foreign brands (9am-9pm, six days a week) in order to have a westernised high-consumption life-style that drives China’s economic growth, this basically involves younger people choosing not to lead such high-stressed lives as demanded by some companies, particularly those producing or developing hi-tech products.
I like the Chinese phrase for lying flat (in full ‘lie down flat and get over the beatings’) is ‘tang ping’, and that the authoritarian government of Xi is unhappy because this threatens its plan for economic growth. What nationalists forget, be they left or right-wing, about people flogging themselves to death to achieve national greatness, is they’re telling someone else to do it. Once upon a time, in the days of pulling the wool over people’s eyes that Farage can only dream of, we’re told that people were willing to go to Stakhanovite deaths for a place on a memorial or to get their rewards in the afterlife.
This won’t wash today. Lying flat has provoked criticism from within and without China. You see and hear its like being repeated on chat forums and in Daily Mail columns, ‘no one wants to work anymore’, but I suspect these voices are either foreign paid troll-bots or the owners of sweatshops who can’t find enough willing victims for their low-paid, drudgery-like tasks. From which the owners will reap far richer rewards, better health and longer lives, the opposite of what their serfs will get.
The movement in China coincided with ‘the great resignation’, an apparent movement across the western world that is attributed to the COVID-19 outbreak at the turn of the 2020s and workers’ dissatisfaction with poor-paid, low-grade, dull and mentally and physically harmful work, a seminal moment when many – especially younger – people began to take stock of their lives and looked to live more simply. An almost apocalypse was the start of a great rethinking. Perhaps it hasn’t gone far enough.
2. Decelerationism, degrowth and accelerationism
I was watching the 1974 John Boorman scripted and directed film Zardoz after reading John Brunner’s Hugo Award-winning 1968 novel Stand On Zanzibar, both post-hippie looks at how the world might cope with an automated, overpopulated and authoritarian set of societies, when I noticed how they overlapped not just with each other but with similar Sci-Fi films and books of the 1960s and 1970s: The Planet of the Apes, Soylent Green, The Omega Man, Logan’s Run, Silent Running, The Ultimate Warrior and Blade Runner among them (that’s not an exhaustive list).
What these films and novels had in common was the notion of an exhausted world, running out of resources and in which people had to survive in small, almost rural communities, or instead exist at a basic level in some kind of overcrowded urbanite living hell. (What I had not realised until last week was how much all of the film versions owed to Brunner’s Zanzibar, no matter their claimed literary source novels.)
i. accelerationism
A little digging into the background of Zardoz revealed that all these movements grew out of a series of 1960s’ concerns about overpopulation rooted in Marxist theory.
So, as I know you all have read your Das Capital, I will just quickly go over some theory: Marx stated that alienation was caused by lower-classes not having enough of the goods that gave people ‘the good life’ (define as you will) because producers of said goods wanted to get a premium price for them by producing low volumes at high prices while not paying workers enough to be able to afford them. Hence accelerationism is just the old Marxist trope of mass production of goods so everyone can ‘enjoy the wealth’.
The intriguing problem with this is that it’s largely been abandoned by all but hard-bitten Marxists because of the environmental damage of constantly making new things to replace old ones that everyone must have. In a world of finite resources we can’t keep going for the same old consumerist, economic growth model. Instead, however, the ‘dark enlightenment’ tech-bros like Musk, Thiel, Zuckerberg, Bostrom, Bazos and Yarvin have taken this to heart, those you might think were anything but Marxists. They plan to accelerate tech development to give the most benefit to the most people, ie, those yet to be born (my emphasis but their philosophy); they want to scrap regulation and oversight and go beyond the development of products such as computers and games into the control of societies.
Their plans, as I’ve written elsewhere, include eugenics-based societies of perfect people who will all be linked to computers (cf Musk and others) and transmogrified into superbeings who can live on Mars. Or some such balderdash.
To achieve this, however, the tech-bro lobby wants to ignore societal problems like climate and demographic change, historic injustices in the accumulation of wealth from developing nations and any physical and ecological damage they may wrought. They are men like gods and anything or anyone who gets in their way is detritus. That, by the way, is most of humanity.
Already, in their plans to defund health insurance, social care, global support for poorer nations, while focusing on cutting budgets to give the extremely wealthy tax breaks to buy more islands and lands so you can’t have access to them when the apocalypse comes, their plans are well under way. In doing so they aim to wipe out most of humanity, be that conscious or unconscious on their behalf (I believe the former). It’s also disappointing to note that UK under a supposedly left-wing government is doing much the same thing.
Most importantly, they don’t want to give you the potential voter time to think about it. They bury you in Netflix, Amazon Prime, culture wars against ‘the woke’ and seek to undermine belief in organisations set up to protect and serve you, flawed though those institutions are, such as the EU, NATO, WTO and now the OECD. Next time you fly into a rage against ‘the woke’ or ‘high taxes’ stop and think about who’s distracting you from engaging with what.
ii. Deceleration and degrowth
These are not necessarily the same thing but they’re linked. Deceleration is calling for a rethink of what growth means, a limit put on the pace of technological developments so we and policymakers have time to think about them. It is less a scrapping of the old consumerist model as I see it but more a chance to reframe our existence so we become participative players in our societies rather than political pawns in a grotesque election-cycle grand guignol in which voters are the zombie puppets dancing to the strings of those who use our intersectionality to divide us from those we should be siding with (if you post against trans but are working class you’ve been radicalised by intersectional identitarianism rather than politicking along trad social class grounds. Who’s that serving?) There’s more make-do-and-mend and less fast consumerism but questions of sustainability remain.
Degrowth, as I understand, is basically a move towards more localised communal living and calls for a move away from the consumption model of planned redundancy of goods: computers, cars, etc should be repairable, public transport widely available but, to make it work, it needs to take place on a grand scale. The word for this used to be anarchy, which people now associate incorrectly with throwing supermarket trolleys through burger restaurant windows. It is often mischaracterised by its opponents as going back to living in caves but its central core is about asking people to repurpose their lives to spend more time working together in communities free from national government control to produce their food, protect the environment and create a sustainable world for future generations. Instead of a cave, think of the Co-operative movement on a grand scale, with interconnected communities producing and making goods they can trade with other communities as needs arise.
Conclusion
Now all this is a very brief summary. I do not necessarily advocate for one model over another, though of all of them it seems to be the accelerationist model (which as I’ve written elsewhere, depends on dividing humanity and exterminating large swathes of it, largely along lines that could only be considered genocidal and ethnic cleansing) is fast running out of road, not least because: a) the resources it needs to fuel it are finite and b) because whole loads of people in our mass-communication linked world might object to the risk of being exterminated by the techno-Dalek-zombies of San Francisco and do something to stop it.Of the others, I prefer the degrowth scenario but I confess it will be hard sell to a culture addicted to streaming and convenience foods and the skills we will need to rediscover or develop to make it work may take a generation or more to learn, while at the same time it would require a complete rethinking of the entire financial and capitalist system. I’m not against any of that personally but I don’t think the electoral timeframe would allow any part of this to take off. So as is, it’s an idea waiting its time. Which in the event of an orange-led apocalypse may be upon us sooner than we think (note to self: dig out that DVD of The Good Life.)
That leaves us with some version of decelerationism. The advantages of this, perhaps in a format its hard proponents may not like, is it would allow time to bed in institutional changes if a thoughtful government was to begin to implement changes gradually. It would allow a gradual drift to the green economy, clean energy, rebalancing capitalist society and sustainable transport, for example, while moving away from GDP or GNP as the main goal of government. Placing other metrics at its core – health, longevity, reduced fossil fuel use, wellbeing and human happiness – sounds utopian but then again, why not? We’ve been living in a capitalist-run dystopia for so long a little green dreaming might be a good idea.
There is one problem with all of these, however, and it’s at the same time the easiest to identify and the hardest to solve: us.
Human beings are not instinctively greedy, selfish and full of the desire to be Alpha… except that long-ago inherited atavistic instincts to be the first, be the best, be the strongest, have the most, and so in, has been so in-built into our corporate-led lives that unlearning it, even if it’s possible, may take a little time. And until that desire to help your neighbour survive as well as yourself kicks in then I’m afraid a utopian ideal this will remain; one for a novel, if I can be bothered to get around to it. Right now I’m too busy lying flat, quiet quitting, having resigned greatly, to really be bothered with too much. I keep trying to tell my friends that what’s coming won’t be good but after a few nods it’s back to the rat-race followed by online shopping and Netflix. And it’s hard to blame them too much. Most of us have to spending our lives running around like mice in a maze, too busy so consider the bods controlling us.
So, let’s wait till the apocalypse: I imagine a The Ultimate Warrior-type scenario, in which small groups struggle behind guarded gates to give life to long-dead plants and seeds in a decayed and collapsed urban environment while outside gangs rage to steal their secrets for the life-giving food they all lack.
If this seems grim, then it isn’t really. I think those of us who are able can use lying flat, quiet quitting, resigning greatly and living more considered, less consumerist lives, to make ourselves happier and reduce the amount of goods we consume.
And, in a post-orange apocalypse, hope will lie in humanity making something better from the ashes than existed before, but it needs to be here, on earth, working with people of every hue and belief and gender, rather than an unachievable transhumanist existence in outer-space.
Now that really would be grim. Especially if you had to share it with Elon Musk.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tang_ping
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Resignation
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/decelerationist