Category: Daily updates

Generally musings of the day, usually accompanied by a photograph

Hard to envision I guess

Produced with DiffussionBee and the prompt: “In summary, the twelve-year-old student wrote in their school essay, the horrors and anxieties which so paralyzed the politics and culture of the 2020s (or “poopy 2020s” as they came to be remembered in popular history) were largely resolved by improved mental health treatments, political and economic reorganizations favouring resource redistribution and quality universal public services, and the realization by new generations around the world that nationalism and militarism are irrelevant and only a shared commitment to planetary stewardship can be the basis for a thriving and enduring human civilization. This essay was largely dictated by her grandfather as the student sat, interested, writing with a ballpoint pen on lined paper.”

173 days after my thesis defence

Emotionally, this feels like one of the darkest times I can remember.

I feel like finishing the PhD has done me no good and left me at a blank place with no routes out.

I am overwhelmed by anger, grief, and fear to be moving from one precarious housing situation to another, with no prospect of getting to somewhere I will feel safe.

At the same time, it feels like the political problems in our societies and globally have become irresolvable pathologies, wherein all our responses become selfish, anger-driven, and self-defeating.

Rounding it out, I feel like my entire extended network of friends and family are also in crisis and in need of help themselves.

I feel like growing up in a prosperous suburb in the optimistic 1990s left me with a bunch of expectations and that the experience of life now is a clanging repudiation of the idea that if you educate and apply yourself you will have a desirable or at least a decent future.

Likewise, I feel like the idea that honesty and integrity are desirable traits was a misunderstanding of how humans relate to each other. They don’t want honesty and impartial standards that also apply to them — they want comforting and appealing lies, and then lies about those lies being lies. Institutions don’t want employees or members who apply high standards to them impartially — they want people who interpret loyalty as openly pretending to have high standards, while actually not applying them to the institutions which they are embedded in.

The last makes me feel like my whole identity is eroding. I have always been stubborn, forthright, and willing to assert my own views, sustained in part by the hope that broadly speaking and in the long term those would be good things for me. Now it is starting to feel like the only way to survive in the world is as a sycophant too captured and afraid to object to the failings and misconduct of the people and organizations that control us, that we endure only by their dispensation, and that — even though we all feel that the system has entered an accelerating phase of shaking itself apart into broken fragments — we will nonetheless continue to punish critics of the system rather than implement effective repairs.

Contrast with:

Back to the Claireville conservation area

We had to cancel a planned long weekend camping trip near Temagami because everyone is in crisis, but at least today I got a hike with three friends in the Claireville conservation area, a half hour bus ride west of Vaughan Metro Centre.

I appreciated the forested areas around shallow creeks, the frogs croaking in the marshes, and the bright weather which was neither unpleasantly hot nor oppressively humid. Strangely enough, the one unlocked bathroom we found was even air conditioned.

Back with Bagehot

Because it is a frequent and respected source of information about things and places I likely would not hear about from free news sources — and because it routinely goes into usefully greater depth on complex topics — I renewed my print and digital subscription to The Economist.

I certainly don’t always agree with them, but I always find their position worth reading. Furthermore, however one might want to characterize my unusual educational and career path, the magazine has been an important part of the process.

Economist subscription expired

I have been subscribing to The Economist since their coverage of the Bush-Gore election in 2000, renewing it in three year batches and taking advantage of a student rate when possible.

My subscription expired yesterday and I will not be renewing if for now, just because life is too strained. That feels a bit like giving up on myself — since the value of staying informed lies in being better able to think and make decisions in the future — but it also feels like a suitable part of a post-PhD rethink. I am working through making sense of the implications of my time in government, academia, and activism and contemplating what I ought to do in the future.

What that future may be is very hard to say. For their varied reasons, governments and environmental NGOs don’t actually want to solve climate change, or at least it is much less of a priority than other contradictory things their leaders want to do. Perhaps the best hope is to get into the non-fossil energy / grid interlinkage / energy storage space in the private sector. At least they are building solutions.

30 days left on Marlee

Today begins my final month on Marlee Avenue. My landlords at Old Orchard Properties unlawfully refuse to assign anyone new to the lease, or to recognize me as a tenant even though they have been collecting rent from me faultlessly for two years.

I have not low income for years and the job hunt is proving difficult. Finding somewhere to live is more urgent and fundamental though. If I can find an OK room with good people for $800–$1000, I should subsequently be able to find an OK way to pay the rent.

Site design

For a long time I have been using the Thesis WordPress theme for this site, but as far as I can tell it is now so old that it causes the site to crash when my hosting provider applies a now-mandatory update to the PHP programming language.

I will eventually work out how to re-customize the design. If you need something which you can’t find anymore, the last Wayback Machine snapshot still has the old theme.

(As an aside to anyone interested, I mean the original Thesis theme which was actually user friendly, not the supposedly improved later version which I couldn’t use at all as a non-programmer.)

Awarded my dictionary

As distant and improbable as it seemed at times, at tonight’s Convocation High Table I was given the dictionary traditionally awarded by Massey College to PhD graduates:

Photo by Chantal Phillips

This was a much more meaningful graduation for me than attending a U of T ceremony would be, and hearing the biographies of all the graduating Junior Fellows was a reminder of how many critical fights humanity is engaged in right now, and how it will take the best from all of us to fight our way to a successful, liveable, humane future for the world.

Early tomorrow I am off for back-to-back-to-back trips: first to visit our dear friends in Ottawa; then for a couple of days of quiet and reading at a dairy farm in Cambridge, Ontario; and then straight out on my first camping trip in many years.

After that, my full-time job will become finding a new affordable place to live in Toronto. Finding inexpensive accommodation is actually more urgent and important than finding an OK job. Per George Monbiot’s tough but invaluable career advice, financial security really comes from minimizing your expenses, not maximizing your income. The cheaper you can live, the freer you are to work on what is important and bring everything you can to the fight.

Zonked

I am back to being kept up all night by:

  1. Housing and lawless landlords
  2. The state of local, national, US, and world politics
  3. Our heedless plunge into climate turmoil, accompanied by widespread incomprehension and motivated reasoning about what is happening
  4. Friends in difficulty
  5. My own job / future prospects

It feels like being back in the sleepless days of the early pandemic.