Domesticated humanity

Lots of interconnected thoughts, wonder how I can best express them simply, mostly just a question, a questioning of what we're doing and who we're doing it for.

500-150 years ago people came to the Americas from Europe looking for new lands to tame and exploit. Farmers, gold-rushers, bankers, artisans, etc, everyone came to the new world looking for opportunity.

It's hard to imagine my own ancestors, all around 1850, emmigrating from Norway and Sweden, whole families picked up all their possessions and left the only home they knew. That seems pretty brave. Myself, I'm a 4th generation American I guess, great-grandparents were not born here. My paternal grandparents were small-scale farmers in Iowa, and my dad took a quick exit from that life into the city. My mom's parents also grew up outside of the big city but moved here to raise a large family. She died of cancer in her 60's and is now buried in a city cemetary probably just a few miles from where she was born, along with her parents and grandparents. That's pretty settled!

Since my parents divorced, my siblings and I inherited our 60's house in a post-WWII suburban development, now an inner ring suburb, a good location by distance to the center city, although missing the comfortable sidewalks of true city dwellers. Our house was paid for by cash from my parents savings and grandparents help. Now I'm left alone, buying out my sibling's share, and almost done paying off that partial mortgage.

My parents had a paid for house in their early thirties, while I took to my late 30's, but still feel incredibly lucky, as they were too. Of course I'm single, and they wanted to raise a family, so they needed a 3-bedroom house. I've got a friend as a renter this year, perhaps will last, hope so, but content to believe I'm being helpful to allow a low-rent option for a friend, and I can afford to live alone again if I need to.

It is amazing, to look the old city phone books from the 1950-70's - they listed the names of kids, so many kids, while now not so many, and houses aren't exactly huge. I have a childless couple two houses down, a widow next door, and a single professional on the other side, a couple with two teen girls across the street, but a pretty quiet neighborhood. My city's population dropped perhaps by 40% since its peak, more houses now than ever, but smaller household sizes - helped by my technically single-person household.

I guess my vision was imagining both our collective consumption, and our collective work that has totally transformed a landscape from wildness, hills and swaps, into streets and neighborhoods. It's been a vast undertaking, costing a lot of time and money. Growth is a transitory state. Future peoples won't have a wilderness to tame for their homes, but a decaying urban landscapes to restore, I mean imagining how easy it is to be carried by past efforts, but homes DO decay very fast really - paint, shingles. Water doing its work, freeze thaw repeat.

If I didn't inherit a home, I'd probably as well rent a small apartment or even up/downstairs bedroom somewhere. Space is nice, stuff is nice, but it all takes time and energy to maintain.

Imagining older cities like in Europe, I can imagine it would be very frustrating, to try to make good use of all the oldness, sometimes good sturdy buildings of old wood and stone, but as much crumbling and seeping and just plain old. Americans with our vast resources have built cheap and tear things down cheap, with our wealth. I don't know if this will be consider a good decision in 100 years when oil is history and whomever is living here will have to retrofit what we've left into something that can be maintained without the levels of energy input we've had so far.

The main reason I like owning a home over renting is control over land, like for gardening, but really there's plenty of underused land which might be "borrowed" and better used. The main problem in my yard is the backyard trees have grown enough to block out too much sun for a really good garden. I do like trees.

Living in a cold climate I wonder how people will heat their homes in 100 years, knowing the Natural gas we burn will be gone too. My mom talks about coal furnaces in the 1930's - definitely horrible air pollution, but I suppose cheaper than wood, and perhaps someday we'll return to coal furnaces?

There's such a wonder, at trying to sort of one's place in the order of things, like an ecosystem, knowing how circumstances chance and knowing the transitions and then we could better work within a natural system rather than just fighting the diminishing returns of the old.

I'm sure a time must come where individual wealth becomes greatly reduced, whether a decade long depression, or something longer. I would prefer to plan how to survive these transitions rather than just expecting I'll always have surplus income available to throw at survival.

I can think as well of the first farmers, the back-breaking work of clearing out the old tree stumps, and glacial boulders. They did it for themselves, but it made the next generation of farming much easier, so now only 1% of the population participated in farming. Now we sprawl ourselves around cities and assume the resources will always be flowing to keep our lives going as we've know them.

When I think of again soon being a debt-free homeowner, not to mention being without children, plenty of time available that my parents didn't have, time to think, time to garden, time to read, time to imagine my place in a larger world. For the moment, I'm playing a relatively high-income professional to keep the cash flowing, and I won't throw away that easy-street yet, but hopefully not depend on it. And there's still plenty of time - to blog like now!

I think collectively we're in big trouble, that things must turn darker sooner or later, just too much debt and senseless consumption to be sustained, but when you have a world to trash, it does take time, so could be another couple decades of confusion before the decline really becomes apparent. My thoughts are much sooner, but who knows?

I think humanity has a lot of resources now doing stuff that isn't very valuable, so in a darker time, I think proper collective mobilization can do a lot to reduce the unavoidable misery of a poorer future. I think joblessness is a blessing IF you are able, and willing to see all the unmet needs that now surround us. I think as mass-produced materialism fails us, that human effort can only increase in value, and there'll never be a time when there's no good work to be done. Much is hidden now merely because we have so much opportunity that seems more exciting.

I try to not be afraid about the future, but I am. I accept change comes and we can either fight it or flow with it. I hope I'll put my energy to flow with change. Of course there's so much wonder we have now that we must surrender. Nothing's easy and worse, I realize that so much of what we become is habit, is having a framework to see our life and focus attention where it matters most. We're all limited in time and passion. Modern life raises our expectations of what can be managed, raise our choices. Dealing with this coming loss will be hard.

I've lived without a car now for approaching 3 years, works pretty well, mostly a choice to save money, secondly to save the grief of maintenance - having to throw away thousands of dollars and trusting experts to fix them. I like my bike!

I guess I've said nothing, and taken a lot of words to say it!

I just wonder about the future. I like that I benefit from my parent's work. I like that I have a chance to think and learn. I like to have hope that a better way exists, where we can someday consume less every year rather than more every year. I wish it could be voluntary, rather than forced.

I feel bad to think how much work has been done in our time of affluence that may be wasted in the future - like having outer suburbs that are too isolated to be sustained when energy supplies dwindle. I wish more were scared like me, and devoted time to see how they can reduce their risks in an uncertain future, and prepare one that will go with the flow of life rather than always fighting it.