Daily updates – Page 10 – a sibilant intake of breath

What Vancouver means to me now

In many discussions over the years about the ethics of travel and climate change, I have pushed back against the idea that people need to travel with the counter-claim that they have structured their lives to create that apparent necessity. If you think you need routine visits with someone on the other side of the world, it is because you have both structured your lives with the assumption that rapid travel across the planet will and should be available.

Preparing for my trip to Vancouver in August and September for my brother Mica’s wedding (which is taking the place of the post-PhD trip I had been planning to settle my affairs and move everything out of my parents’ house) I am being reminded of how structuring your life to not include long-distance travel gradually erodes your connection to any distant communities that you had a link to. I had a nightmare a year or more ago about being in Vancouver with my laptop and address book, and realizing that I had nobody left to visit there. Aside from my parents, that’s now not massively far from the truth. I haven’t spent any significant amount of time in the city since I finished at UBC in 2005 and — even though I try to make a special effort to keep friendships going despite time and distance — it’s quite understandable that occasional Christmas and birthday emails haven’t sustained much of a connection with people who I knew from my undergraduate days and before. Back in my undergrad days, I would try to host a couple of big parties each year to help friends from different communities meet each other. If I tried to arrange a party now, I doubt whether anyone would come, if I could even put together a list of people in the city to invite.

Of course I don’t need a party of my own, and Mica and Leigh’s wedding should provide all the celebration anyone should need. Still, the feeling that I have hardly anyone to see in Vancouver reinforces my idea about the original purpose of this trip: to settle affairs in Vancouver such that nothing which I need to get done will necessitate another trip to the city. While the sense behind the sentiment is clear enough, I can’t help feeling somewhat sad and alienated to think of how the city’s role has transformed for me, from a home town which I felt I had explored extensively and knew well into a strange and changed place where I cannot see a place for myself economically, socially, or professionally. The fact that Toronto’s housing hell makes it hard to see a place for myself here too only adds to the sense of loss and alienation.

Now on to mobilizing structures

I sent my chapter as promised and then drifted off late watching videos about the Tournamet climb in the Tour de France.

I’ll give myself a day to rest from the intense coffee and writing lifestyle of the last couple of weeks, then print off the version 6 chapter to compare against the new agreed structure and latest comments.

I also need to finish my presentation for the School of the Environment research day, which will complete the requirements for my Collaborative Specialization in Environmental Studies.

The struggle for focus and productivity

Due to an overwhelmingly stressful family situation, which kept me up all night Friday and Saturday with racing intrusive thoughts, I have deleted my WhatsApp account and disabled the phone and messaging features on my cell phone.

I gave my committee a commitment that I would have a complete political opportunities chapter done this weekend for version 7 of the dissertation. Working during the great majority of my waking time, I am getting close, though there are still some gaps to fill and the whole thing to review.

Communications anxiety

Defeated

I am reminded anew of the general pointlessness of trying to persuade people to do the right thing on the basis of empathy, ethics, reason — and even their own long-term self-interest. Such are our politeness-based codes of social behaviour that you usually get more condemnation for bringing up the transgression than the person making it gets for their misconduct.

And this is not even mentioning Ukraine…

The news nowadays is awfully hard to handle. Tolerance and democracy are at risk in the United States, which poses a grave threat to Canada. The global population is revealing how little it is willing to compromise on basic precautions to protect the vulnerable from COVID and keep the pandemic as managed as possible. In addition, we’re basically doing everything wrong on climate change: allowing increased fossil fuel production in rich states with high per capita pollution and poor states alike, while a horrifying rate of deforestation makes an absolute mockery of our PR-driven efforts to lessen the problem by planting trees. Our political systems keep responding to stress with deepening pathology.

Based on the degree of empathy, prudence, and self-protection humanity is demonstrating, the future will be a horrifying place to live.

Another round on political opportunities

Some time ago, I wrote a new introductory chapter because my previous issue context and literature context chapters were too long. My committee said they aren’t happy with it and it needs changes, but first I should go through and revise my four core chapters.

I have nearly finished that now, with two revised chapters sent and two just needing a couple of passes to be done in the same way.

Now I have been told that the first of those revised chapters needs substantial work, and to be rewritten again into a new structure.

The only way forward is to do what they want, but it’s hard to express how exhausting the process of editing something into a ready to submit state before substantially revising it and then editing again has been.

There’s still a new conclusion to write too, so not one word of the dissertation is now finalized.

The antivax insurrection

For weeks or months last January, my ability to focus and be productive was sharply impaired by constant fear about what would happen in the United States.

Now it’s the less frightening but far more personal anguish about what will come of the ongoing alt right insurrection in Ottawa.

It’s painful because of what it implies about the future of Canadian politics, and because I know friends in Ottawa are being harmed. Even more, it demonstrates human beings’ deeply maladaptive tendency to amplify societal disruption through radicalization into conspiracy theories and sociopathic behaviour.

The only solution to our global challenges is to respond to disruption with cooperation while continually updating our understanding of the world on the basis of solid scientific knowledge. The path from here is there is not visible.

Framing chapter hand edit complete

Today I continued making progress with finishing the shortened and reorganized versions of my four core dissertation chapters. Specifically, I finished my hand edit of the framing chapter, chiefly intended to split out my own prescriptive normative conclusions from analysis of the divestment movement and scholarship about it.

This is a particularly challenging task because as initially written this chapter was meant to be the normative culmination of the text, with the conclusion largely given over to wrapping up and the niceties of academic writing such as identifying areas for further work.

While it has been labourious and often dispiriting to try to re-sequence the document at this stage, I am growing confident that in the end I will be able to do it in a way that not only meets the requirements set by my committee members but which actually lays things out in a clearer and more organized way for ordinary readers.

Tomorrow I will move on to making the edits to the Word version of the framing chapter, pulling out chunks that belong in the new prescriptive conclusions chapter. It will take another effort to sequence and connect the normative chunks that have been pulled from the political opportunities, mobilizing structures, repertoires, and framing chapters, but at least that can happen after I have sent the four core analytical chapters back to the committee for their re-examination.

The target was arbitrary, self-imposed and still fairly effective

I didn’t hit my self-imposed goal of producing 50 page versions of my four core chapters by the end of January, with all comments from two committee members taken into account.

Nonetheless, the idea of the deadline served its purpose. Two of the four chapters are now done (except for a last check-through of length and successful incorporation of all committee comments as the last step before sending it back to them). I have hand-annotated the third and need about half a day to incorporate those comments into the Word version. Then I just need to hand annotate the final chapter, incorporate those changes, and check over the whole set for flow, length, and full adherence to committee member comments.

Between major progress on 3/4 core chapters and the American Political Science Association publishing my counter-repertoires section as a pre-print, this has been a good week for dissertation completion.

Always tired

I don’t know exactly why, but the insomnia which has been my normal state of life for as long as I can remember has given over to what’s more like never-ending tiredness: going to bed tired, waking up tired, spending all day tired.

It may be from the loss of academic and social non-dissertation activities that give structure and variety to life, or just from the exhaustion of watching wave after pandemic wave crest and break while we collectively flounder. No doubt it comes partly from the rage of seeing the way in which we’re destroying our world, and yet our politics simply side-steps the issue as voters and lobbyists wedded to the status quo keep us cycling between political parties and leaders that match up their inadequate ambition with unserious implementation.

Maybe more than anything my own exhaustion reflects how everyone else seems to have been eroded and abraded: turning inward, turning silent. Maintaining any kind of social connection has jumped in difficulty, even though I suspect that most people could work to reduce their feelings of isolation and hopelessness by cultivating community in the ways which are possible without close physical presence.

I feel like I need something to lay down a boundary in time — or make one day or week seem different from another — to get back to a tempo of thesis work that will let me get the thing done before the university cuts me off irretrievably at the end of the year. And yet nothing of the sort is possible. I can’t reset the location, content, or cast of characters in my days, and so life feels like April 2020 made eternal.

I know it’s one of our worst human habits to develop the pattern of entitlement and resentment: growing to feel entitled to whatever good things we have happened to get, internalizing the notion that we have them as the result of merit or a just universe, and then cursing the injustice of losing it. The habit of mind we need to cultivate is that “nothing here is promised, not one day.” If we’ve ever had the good luck to experience something positive, we should see it as an unwarranted boon from a universe that is indifferent to all our notions of deserving or fairness, and if we should lose it we should hang on to the gratitude for having ever had it.

We’re all going to lose more than we can guess — maybe everything — as the full consequences of our fossil fuel civilization work their way through the planetary system. If our collective response to loss continues to be anger, resentment, and turning against each other, it’s hard to see how we will achieve the cooperation that has the sole prospect of saving us.