A Post College Flowchart of Misery and Pain

Graphic from Shareable’s book Share or Die.

From “A Post College Flowchart of Misery and Pain” on Shareable.

The Problem With Perfection

image from http://www.jenkelchner.com

Without getting into an online public therapy session, I’ve also recently realized some things about myself by reading the Enneagram: A Christian Perspective by Richard Rohr. Apparently there are some great free resources online and videos on YouTube about the Enneagram.

I’m a one if that means anything to you. What it means for this conversation is that I’m never satisfied. Nothing is ever good enough. I’m impatient with the process, other people’s flaws and ultimately myself. In short I’m a perfectionist.

The Life and Times of My Heartburn

Come with me on a journey with acid reflux. I promise it won’t be as gross as it sounds. It’s also a journey with stress and pressures that lead to real physical symptoms. It’s also a journey to find balance between rest, play, family and meaningful work. This journey takes a lifetime I’m sure, but I feel like I’ve been in the thick of it the last three or four years.

The short version of those last few years is that our family of four left a nice suburban life to live at a farm in Waco, TX that teaches sustainable agriculture and international development. After that we moved to Bolivia to work on water and agriculture issues with Low German Mennonites and indigenous people. After just getting settled in and comfortable with our work and life, we were deported from Bolivia and found ourselves starting over again back in Waco, TX. I found a full-time job to pay the bills, but continued building a small social enterprise called Edible Lawns, not to mention we are part of an intentional Christian community which demands more of us than the average church. To top it all off we had our third child in January of 2013. All of this leads me to often ask the question, “What the hell am I doing?”

The Myth of Scarcity and Conclusion

The following is an excerpt (and rough draft) of a chapter I’m working on about sustainability. I have a limit of 2000-4000 words. As usual I’m trying to cram as much as possible into that limit. Much of this rehashes (and in some cases pillages) other writing I’ve done on the blog, but hopefully the synthesis brings out something new. I will be posting excerpts here for feedback and your reading pleasure as they are finished. My working title is “Why Recycling Doesn’t Matter”.

We have successfully segregated many disciplines and fields of study from each other. One of the most glaring cases of this is the division between environmentalism and economics. Politicians of various stripes can often be heard claiming that protecting the environment will cost jobs and hurt the economy. Those who argue for environmental regulation also buy into this myth by trying to argue that it will not hurt jobs, but potentially fuel a green technology revolution spurring economic growth. Both sides continue to base their arguments on the unquestioned belief in the necessity of economic growth. E.F. Schumacher explains this well,

“From an economic point of view, the central concept of wisdom is permanence… Nothing makes economic sense unless its continuance for a long time can be projected without running into absurdities. There can be ‘growth’ towards a limited objective, but there cannot be unlimited, generalised growth…The cultivation and expansion of needs is the antithesis of wisdom.”[1]

“The cultivation and expansion of needs” is at the very heart of our consumer economy. Advertisers and marketers are paid large sums of money in order to convince us that we “need” the products of the companies they represent. The problem of sustainability can be summed up as the modern confusion of the difference between “needs” and “wants.”

The Myth of Technological Salvation

The following is an excerpt (and rough draft) of a chapter I’m working on about sustainability. I have a limit of 2000-4000 words. As usual I’m trying to cram as much as possible into that limit. Much of this rehashes (and in some cases pillages) other writing I’ve done on the blog, but hopefully the synthesis brings out something new. I will be posting excerpts here for feedback and your reading pleasure as they are finished. My working title is “Why Recycling Doesn’t Matter”.

If agriculture had been the only discovery that attempted to “free” us from nature, we as a species would have quickly run into the same problem as any other species which overruns its ecosystem. We would have destroyed the very things upon which we depend. More likely, we would have been forced to find a balance between the agriculture required to support settled human populations and the needs of the ecosystem to maintain wild game, domesticated livestock, topsoil and fertility.

What made it possible to temporarily overcome the limitations of ecosystems once more was the discovery of abundant hydrocarbons in the form of fossil fuels. This discovery mad possible innovations which powered automobiles and factories. Today the fingerprints of oil are everywhere. If a product has plastic in it, it is dependent on oil. The electricity that power our light bulbs and devices as well as what drives our vehicles, transports our products and mows our lawn are dependent on oil. Oil permeates our modern life. The process to create petroleum takes millions of years, yet our consumption of fossil fuels continues at a rate well beyond any possibility for renewal. The use of fossil fuels as the primary source of energy which makes our current global civilization possible is the very definition of unsustainable.