What if we never make it to utopia?
Also, the 9-5 obsession was never meant to work. This is what we could do instead.
EVENT ANNOUNCEMENT: Last Brussels Climate Drinks of 2023!
Last Brussels climate drinks for the year! Same drill: no agenda, no compulsory networking, just drinks with people who care about the climate.
(But on the lowdown - we’re looking at organising these in more cities in collaboration with local climate movements so if you’d be up for coorganising something - email us at wearethegreenfix@gmail.com.)
She told us Close your eyes and imagine what you want the world to look like in 2040.
I closed my eyes. Then I opened one just to check that everyone else had closed theirs too.
Of course they had. This is a conference about degrowth, not a school playground.
Come on Cass, try to focus.
But look, the thing is that my jeans had ripped. I spent 8 straight hours on a train from Munich to Ljubljana trying not to bend my knee too enthusiastically.
(I wonder how hard it is to make a pair of shorts with kitchen scissors?).
Shit, I’ve lost focus again. God, I’m so stuck in the present moment. Close your eyes, leave your body. Be in 2040.
Maybe I found the question too hard. I didn’t study enough for the future.
I don’t know how to imagine a utopian 2040. I don’t know how to imagine utopia at all in the sense that Merriam Webster describes it - a place of ideal perfection.
Can imperfect people build a perfect world? Because those girl power songs I listened to when I was 14 told me my imperfections made me perfect. *Paradox intensifies*.
I guess in a perfect world I wouldn’t have crashed that rental bike last week. We wouldn’t CC the wrong person in an email about them and I wouldn’t have accidentally liked my own message in the group chat. And nobody would listen to music on speakerphone on the bus.
Sounds kind of boring. Sounds like we’d have to stop being ourselves entirely. I don’t think I’d be allowed in.
My utopia is kind of mundane. In my utopia, we’ll still send the wrong message and miss our train connections and forget to bring our bag to the supermarket. I would go to sleep overthinking something, but without this backdrop of modern-day dread, this Great Somethingness that keeps us depressed and self-medicating through phone notification dopamine hits.
My utopia is being 26 fully, not 26 with a constant eye on the climate clock and five NGO colleagues on burnout leave. I won’t devote hours of the day to mitigating the decisions of the people in power. My utopia is worrying about fixing my jeans without counting each euro because climate activists live on a tight budget.
Are there even activists in utopia?
The workshop facilitator said we should use this vision to trace the steps to get to that future. But I was still stuck on fixing my jeans.
But no, not stuck - I went into town and found a secondhand pair.
We are not stuck in the present moment. Look, it has already passed. The only thing stuck is our minds. Our need for an agreed utopia to know where to go. As if it was a location on the map we settle on. But how can we describe a place we’ve never seen? How do you arrive at a place that isn’t a place at all?
I do think the closest I’ve ever felt to utopia was in a secondhand shop changing room. And again queueing to register for a degrowth conference, and once when my cheap Flixbus got held up in the Pyrenees.
We will probably never reach utopia in all its imperfections. My jeans are fixed, now my shoes are breaking - but am I fixing them under the belief that one day none of my clothes will break again?
Utopia, for me, is the journey, it is the process of escaping the current moment into one that is better. It lies in the belief that there is a point to fixing my jeans so I can come back tomorrow, and to fixing whatever problem comes next. The journey is the destination. Don’t stop now.
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What’s Going On?
Montana youth sued their government over climate change and won. It’s a big deal.
Related: UN rights body calls for children’s voices to be heard on climate crisis.Meat & dairy farmers in the EU are received 1200 times more funding than greener alternatives.
Related: In Brazil, right-wing think tanks are working with big agribusiness to regain political power.Ecuador votes to prevent oil drilling in the biodiverse Yasuní National Park (but the government plans to go ahead anyway).
Related: Here’s how indigenous people are restoring the Amazon in Brazil.European climate activists face ‘tide of repression.’
Related: How the media plays a role in criminalising protest.Government subsidies of fossil fuels reached a record 7 trillion USD last year.
Related: EU imports of Russian liquified gas leap by 40% since Ukraine invasion.
Focus On: Why the 9-5 is sexist (and how we could live instead)
Guest writer Isabelle Drury on how the outdated 9-5 work system is a reflection of a system built for men, by men - and how adapting to natural cycles would be a pretty anticapitalist thing to do.
Women are caught in the crosshairs of a society and economy based on masculinity and constant productivity. But not only are patriarchal and capitalist ideas destroying the planet, they discard and waste the useful knowledge that comes with understanding and working with the cycles of nature.
We live in a society living in pursuit of the fairytale of continuous economic growth and increasing productivity. We’re sold a story that the economy must perpetually expand, and businesses must increase their profits by selling more and more.
And just as we ignore planetary needs, we are taught from an early age to ignore our body's needs: to go to school, get a job, work hard, and always, always keep productivity levels at 100%–whatever may be happening internally.
This one-size-fits-all approach is what happens when economies are built with the ‘male-as-default’ fallacy. The idea of a 9-5 office job emerged in an era when office culture was male-dominated and women were relegated to housekeeping and childcare responsibilities.
Now in capitalism’s strange take on gender equality, everyone can work 9-5: but women will still be doing most of the childcare, housekeeping, work more, and earn less. The power woman accepts these tasks without complaint, right?
Let’s get into a bit of biology. On average, those equipped with a pair of ovaries have a 28-day menstrual cycle – though everyone’s cycle is different – with four phases: menstruation, the follicular phase, ovulation, and the luteal phase.
Because of the major fluctuations throughout a hormonal cycle, physical symptoms can vary wildly throughout the cycle.
During the ovulation phase, oestrogen and testosterone are at their peak, often sparking increased energy and motivation during this point.
In the luteal and menstruation phase, levels of oestrogen and progesterone dip significantly, which often leads to lower energy and a host of other physical symptoms, including migraines, anxiety, and cramps.
(Note from Cass: This is around the time that some random dudebro will helpfully chime as you suffer to tell you that he ‘doesn’t want to hear about that gross stuff.’)
For people with male biology, it’s a bit different. A biological man's testosterone levels peak at about age 17, and remain high for the next two to three decades, before slightly dipping in his later years. On a smaller scale, instead of a 28-ish day hormone cycle, men go through an entire hormone cycle every 24 hours, with testosterone at its height in the morning and lowest in the evening.
Our current patriarchal work culture assumes male biology, with hormones that follow a 24-hour cycle without significant fluctuations. It erases and stigmatises the various complex biological cycles and processes that have a profound impact on our day-to-day lives.
But the reality of a monthly hormonal cycle does not fit into this simplistic capitalist way of living, where we’re expected to act at the highest level of productivity at all times despite high fluctuations, moulding ourselves, and even trying to suppress our biological cycles, to maintain this forced continuous productivity and lifestyle.
This isn’t a women’s only issue either (and indeed, the assumption that only one gender experiences these cycles is yet another part of the binary mentality of patriarchal capitalism that favours fixed categories over complexity).
In past agricultural societies, and in present-day farming, seasonal cycles are pivotal to our lives and to the crops. Not only were the most labour-intensive months in line with when certain crops were in season and ready to be harvested, but nature’s clock dictated the pace and output. Fruits ripen in summer. In winter, crops and plants rest.
The majority of hard labour was completed in the spring and summer months–‘growing season’– with autumn being focused on preparing for winter, where most of our time was spent indoors, recuperating.
But just as we have now come to expect berries available in the supermarket all year round, despite only being in season for the summer, we expect our own productivity levels to stay the same throughout the year. It’s no wonder we’re exhausted when capitalism expects us to live in perpetual summer.
Cyclical hormonal fluctuations, whether consciously recognised or not, create internal cycles of growth and degrowth, calling for a need for stillness as well as productivity within our bodies and minds. Have you ever noticed how in the summer you can go for a run, work a full day, and spend time with friends in the evening without a dip in your energy, but in the winter you can barely make it through an entire workday? We are not built as constantly productive impervious work machines.
To accept a more cyclical life would be directly antithetical to our current extractive way of life. It would enable us to adapt to the necessary slower way of life that we need to stay within the planetary boundaries, how to deal with natural fluctuations, and build resilience for upcoming challenging times.
By beginning to listen to our bodies more closely for a more aligned and cyclical way of living, we can disrupt the worn-out, dead-end paradigm of patriarchy, neo-colonialism and capitalism we find ourselves in. Noticing and accepting the greater biological cycles within our bodies and in the seasons is one more step away from the continuous growth idea that is so damaging to our world, to a way of living that works with us, not despite us.
Isabelle Drury runs her own amazing Substack newsletter ‘Finding Sanity’ here.
So Now What Do I Do?
LEARN MORE
Read: What is collective feminist leadership? Unlearning the me, me, me.
Sign up for The Polycrisis via email or Twitter for a series of essays and panels exploring the intersections of politics and the climate crisis.
Do you need more podcasts on nature? Well here’s 16 of them.
TRY SOMETHING NEW
What happens if you give free money to strangers? Join in Free Money Day on 15 September for a super cool social experiment on our relationship to money.
Imagine 2200: Join this webinar by Grist on the role of climate fiction in climate justice and building new futures. 27 September.
#SecondHandSeptember is here! Find out how to take part.
CHANGE THE SYSTEM
Register for the Green European Academy happening in November in Poland by the 17th September! Some funding available for travel & accommodation.
The Mountaintop Fellowship is looking for people working on impact projects in their low-income or underrepresented home communities. Apply by 30 September.
The Post-Growth Institute has launched a jobs board online! Check it out.
By the way…
The Green Fix is now offering low-cost sponsored slots on the newsletter. Book your slot by emailing wearethegreenfix@gmail.com.
Stay in the loop
You can follow the Green Fix on Twitter @TheGreenFix, Instagram @thegreenfix_ and LinkedIn. You can also connect with Cass Hebron (Editor) on Instagram @coffee_and_casstaways, Twitter @casstaways and LinkedIn Cass J Hebron.
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I'm so invested in knowing what you did with your slacks. Visible mending? As a mother of two farm kids - one of our first homeschool lessons during lockdown was 'how to patch pants using Japanese sashiko' aka let's tackle Mum's mending pile.
To your questions about Utopia I offer you this quote from the epigraph of Huxley's Brave New World as food for thought :
"Utopias appear to be a good deal more realizable than was previously thought. And today we are faced with an alarming question of a different nature: How to avoid their complete realization? Utopias are realizable. Life moves towards utopias. And perhaps a new century is beginning, a century when intellectuals and the cultured class will dream of ways of avoiding utopias and of returning to a non-utopic society, less "perfect" and more "free." Nicholas Berdiaeff
Thanks for a great read! This: “devote hours of the day to mitigating the decisions of the people in power” is the NGO experience in a nutshell. 😱