Creative play with widely different planning scenarios

Reconsider both your short and long term plans and try out various life planning scenarios (widely different ‘what if’ situations, their consequences and demands and your potential preparation for, or responses to them).

Flex your imagination; at the same time, remember that you will not be able to foresee how a bunch of external circumstances are going to change, or even how exactly your own wishes and preferences will change. Play with various scenarios, chew on them, then commit to actions that seem appropriate today, … so that later you can change them at will, if you choose so. Think over and calculate the consequences of retiring at various times, or gradually, e.g. How about the potential of changing residence or occupation, … out of either choice or necessity? Can you afford to financially help the education of someone you care for? What if you’d go back to school for some time? Would playing golf or organizing a community group give you more satisfaction in retirement? In what sense and ways can you be, and want to be, more self-reliant? Questions like these have many connections to other things, and the total impact is hard to follow and calculate, especially for the long term.

The software I use to enhance this exercise and quantification is called VisionWorks.

While one of my main messages is to urge facing reality, however harsh it may be, and getting prepared as well as possible for even extremely unfortunate futures, it’s also important to emphasize that predictions are not facts, and our imperfect foresight works both ways, … that is there is always some chance for pleasant surprises as well. Who is not ready for opportunities and serendipity can easily fail to take advantage of them. Also, what is seen first as a negative can sometimes be turned into positives with an open and creative mind, … or at least the negative aspects can be mitigated. Because of these considerations, I’d like to offer next some ideas and references from which one can gain some ammunition for being more hopeful, active, imaginative, and energetic.

Read a Toronto Star article, Contemplating life without growth about York U. Prof Peter Victor’s new book, Managing Without Growth – Slower by Design, not Disaster, or watch his presentation here.

Paul Hawken, author of Blessed Unrest and several previous excellent books, founder of the Natural Capital Institute and its WiserEarth project, gave a short inspiring speech at the bioneers conference in 2007. Watch it here, or go to the original source.

As Hawken emphasized, there are countless organizations and individuals trying to find better ways into the future. Here is an example for a community, a city-based ecovillage that does something remarkable.

Next, an unusual speech, in four parts, that is very relevant to life planning, by the late Donella Meadows, who was both a scientist and co-author of the watershed book, Limits to Growth (1972), and active member of an ecovillage in Ithaca, N.Y. I emphasize this duality because it appears to be a model for that rather rare ability of, as Charlie Rose put it in a recent interview on Barack Obama, being “of the moment and above the moment” at the same time, …or what his conversation partner, David Axelrod put as “participating in the moment, … but also observing the moment and taking it all in”.

Sources of the four parts are here, … here, … here, … … and here .

This above mentioned quality of being able and willing to both articulate visions and elaborate and execute implementations, being ‘of the moment and above the moment’ is important because we live in a complex world full of paradoxes. We have to juggle and balance many things synchronously. While it ostensibly addresses business people’s planning challenges, I think the following slideshow, originally from here, illuminates important aspects of individual life planning as well.

The overwhelming complexity of modern life that continuously drains life out of us, however, is not completely unavoidable. What lifestyle we lead is to a large extent of our choice. We don’t have to turn away from civilization and technology to escape many of the frills that actually cost us, and others, simply too much. In fact, while being more selective with what we embrace is very important, rejection of science and technology altogether would be not just out of our comfort zone, but it would be a big mistake as well. On the one hand, I encourage you to consider and espouse whatever you like in the so-called voluntary simplicity lifestyle (google the term if you’re not familiar with it, … or perhaps read this interview first). On the other hand, I do believe that science and technology have huge potential for improving life, and perhaps even in solving some of the humanity-threatening global environmental crises as well.

Being knowledgeable about how the world works, and being willing to critically evaluate our circumstances (things, ideas, choices, expectations, etc) is a good base for coming up with creative ideas and visions. The Story of Stuff and the Good Stuff guide and A Consumption Manifesto from here are sources that can feed both your knowledge base and imagination. Some convenient truths, here, is also a good entry point into this topic.

Here is an interesting talk about ecological footprint (original source here).

I assume you’re familiar with the basic concept of ecological footprint. You can find a personalized footprint calculator here. Also, there is another concept that is probably less familiar but equally easy to capture (even though obviously not very easy to calculate): the Earth Overshoot Day. Here you can see that while up until 1986 the resource use of humanity was not more than what Earth can generate, since that year the resource use vs. replenishment balance has been deteriorating dramatically. Currently, we use 40% more resources of all kinds than the Earth can generate, making September 23, 2008 the day after which humanity lived beyond our means for the rest of 2008. This is the sense in which I interpret the current upheaval as potentially beneficial, even if it is painful: it can be a factor in bringing us back within our means, which is a law of nature on the global scale, as inevitable as the spin of the earth around on its axis, therefore to be respected the sooner the better.

Probably many people still take my views as extreme, unwarranted, and fear-mongering, … but I guess their number is lower today than it was a few years ago. Right now, there is some much-needed tide in hopefulness around the whole world perhaps, … some kind of Obamania. I cross my fingers for it to last and - more importantly - to lead to real and permanent improvements. Nevertheless, I found Dmiry Orlov’s recent piece quite interesting. While there are many who’ve pinpointed the enormity of difficulties facing Obama and us all, and the relative inadequacies of the measures promised or revealed so far that are to bring about significant and lasting improvements, an important new idea for me in Orlov’s article was when he compared Obama not to Lincoln, FDR, or other of his presidential predecessors, but to Gorbachev. The last Soviet leader also enjoyed the sympathy of most of the world, still he couldn’t do what he intended: to reform and save a crumbling empire. What if Orlov’s analogy is right? To broaden your horizon, I suggest your read his by now ‘classic’ article from Dec 2006, Closing the ‘Collapse Gap’: the USSR was better prepared for collapse than the US. He also published a post in last November, Poverty an asset; assets a burden, from someone who moved recently from Australia to the Philippines about that person’s experiences and assessment. The summary of his latest lecture is here with further links to the full text, or audio and video versions. If you’re willing to give some thought to the possibility that these people may be right or at least partially and potentially right, then the question becomes: is there anything that you can conclude from it regarding your own visions, plans, and self-assigned tasks?

Renowned British historian Eric Hobsbawm doesn’t project a very promising picture of the future either. In his recent book, On Empire: America, War, and Global Supramacy, he sketches the centuries of various empires, and analyzes and compares sevaral related global processes to try to understand where we are and what may come. At the very end of the book (consisting of four chapters based on lectures in the 2001-2005 period), after comparing the US with the earlier British Empire, and finding that “Britain …, because its economic position did not depend on imperial power but on trade, it adjusted more easily to its loss politically, as it had, after all, adjusted to the most dramatic setback in its earlier history, namely the loss of the American colonies.

“Will the United States learn this lesson? Or will it be tempted to maintain an eroding global position by relying on politico-military force, and in so doing promote not global order but disorder, not global peace but conflict, not the advance of civilization but of barbarism? That, as Hamlet said, is the question. Only the future will show. Since historians are, fortunately, not prophets, I am not professionally obliged to give you an answer.”

The whole little book is quite fascinating. Let me quote just one more paragraph, the opening one from Chapter III, titled War, Peace, and Hegemony at the Beginning of the Twenty-first Century:

“It is impossible to talk about the political future of the world unless we bear in mind that we are living through a period when history - that is to say, the process of change in human life and society and the human impact on the global environment - has been accelerating at a dizzying pace. It is now proceeding at a speed which puts the future of both the human race and the natural environment at risk. In the middle of the last century, we suddenly entered a new phase in world history which has brought to an end history as we have known it in the past ten thousand years, that is to say since the invention of sedentary agriculture. We do not know where we are going.”

In case you need even more ideas about how to implement, in very practical and personal terms, the actions and strategies you may principally agree with, for this explorative journey, there are many sources to rely on. A good one is this, via which I’d suggest you download the Our Defining Moment: A Call to Create the Future We Truly Want document, e.g.

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After weeks of brooding, post was finally published on March 8, 2009