Better Strangers

I talk a lot about the difference between hope and optimism on Better Strangers, and a big part of embracing hope is committing to making things change for the better yourself. This is opposed to the optimistic stance, which puts its faith in something outside the self.

There’s a really lovely Mr. Rogers quote that goes around whenever anything bad happens:

“When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’ To this day, especially in times of ‘disaster,’ I remember my mother’s words, and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers — so many caring people in this world.”

That’s really nice! But it also is something he was saying to kids, who are powerless and who need comforting by adults. You, the adult, have the responsibility to be one of those helpers he was talking about. If you’re optimistic, you are looking for the helpers. If you are hopeful, you are the helper yourself.

If you want to make the move towards taking more action and becoming one of those helpers, here are some books on slightly different themes that will help move you in that direction.

America Beyond Capitalism by Gar Alperovitz

I’ve mentioned Alperovitz quite a bit on here in the past — he is a great place to start just because of the sheer number of ideas he has for fixing things in our communities right now. America Beyond Capitalism and his shorter book What Then Must We Do? are manuals for starting to build a sustainable, equitable economy underneath the ruins of global capitalism. Alperovitz has some street cred here: he was part of building out worker coop movements in the Midwest in the 70s and 80s when factories were laying off everyone in the Rust Belt and outsourcing their work abroad.

One inspiring thing about choosing hope is that once you engage in this work, you’ll realize how many people are already doing it. Alperovitz will give you about 200 places to start looking.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver

One of the best ways to immediately improve your ecological footprint (not to mention better connect to your local environment) is to examine where your food comes from.

Acclaimed author Barbara Kingsolver spent a year with her family attempting to only eat food that was either from their neighborhood or which they themselves had grown. The idea was that they no longer wanted to take part in the industrial food system, with its environmental abuses and its cruelty towards animals.

The resulting book is an interesting examination of the struggles of being self-sufficient, while also being a treasure trove of ideas for how you can start to shift your food habits towards something more sustainable.

Lisa Jervis’ Cook Food is a slimmer guide to making wiser food choices, it is also absolutely worth checking out.

Beautiful Trouble

If you’re interested in activism, specifically of the protest-y, direct action sort, I highly recommend Beautiful Trouble. It calls itself a “toolbox for revolution” and basically gives tips, tactics, theories, and stories about how to force change in a world that doesn’t want to. While originally a book, it has since been adapted to a website that basically contains everything in the book and more.

How to Survive a Plague by David France

If you want a story of how activists turned a truly hopeless situation into real and lasting change, you’ll want to read David France’s account of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, How to Survive a Plague. While part of it is France’s personal experience, the main topic of the story is the work of ACT UP, the radical, direct action network of activists that forced an uncaring government to actually do something to help save the stigmatized LGBTQ+ community. Without their work, we likely would never have reached a point where someone could say they are “living with HIV.”

It is also not an exaggeration to suggest that their work led to much of the progress we now enjoy (even though it is, once again, predictably, under attack). This is required reading for anyone who wants to engage in activism that works both against and with the government to achieve its ends.

If you do not have time for the book, it was also adapted into a documentary that was nominated for an Academy Award.

Friends of PM Press subscription

I also highly recommend becoming a Friend of PM Press. PM Press is a radical book publisher, and a lot of the books I’ve read that gave me hope came from the year or so I paid them $30 a month and in exchange, got a box of books on my doorstep (not to mention 50% off in their shop). I unfortunately had to cancel when money got tighter, but I will be re-upping my subscription once I work through the piles of books they already sent me. If you don’t know where to start, let someone else choose for you! You can just get a bundle of random books — including comics, novels, histories, and insurgency guides — from the Publisher and read what you want and give away the rest.

Also, for the record, I am taking precisely zero pay to write this. Support your radical presses if you want to keep getting new ideas instead of recycled, failed, old ones.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit betterstrangers.substack.com

Earlier this week, I published a TikTok that was a riff on my articles “How a different understanding of time can help you cope” and “Against Forgiveness.”

It’s got us a few new followers, so I figured it would make a good theme for this week’s Jimble-Jamble. Here are some cool books, movies, and shows to check out if you wanna go down the mind-bendy rabbit hole of thinking about what time is and how it works.

The Science: Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time and John Higgs’ Stranger Than We Can Imagine.

First, we should start with one of the single best introductions to how time works, and that’s The Order of Time by the Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli. In spite of his profession, Rovelli is a poetic and lucid writer who manages to make complex topics like relativity and entropy understandable. He is not does not linger over mathematical equations, nor does he get too bogged down in scientific jargon.

The Order of Time is the place to start if you want an up-to-date understanding of what scientists are studying in this bizarre field.

If you want to understand relativity specifically, I have something much shorter for you! John Higgs amazing book Stranger Than We Can Imagine has a chapter on relativity in which he explains the concept so clearly that I finished it wondering why no one had ever even tried to explain it to me like that.

This entire book is worth reading — he also goes into chaos theory, growth, quantum mechanics, nihilism, etc. — but that chapter alone (and I believe it’s the first chapter?) will help you with your understanding of time. Higgs is one of my favorite living writers, you can expect to see him mentioned a lot more in this newsletter.

The fiction: Aliens, aliens, coral gardens, and more aliens. Also sex bandits.

The most famous time-traveler in science-fiction is undoubtedly the great Doctor Who. I have to admit, I never got super into this show, and I wish the reason was something less snobby than I couldn’t get over the fact that the main villains looked like trash-bins with bubbles taped to them. But there is one excellent standalone episode called “Blink” where the Doctor gives his most famous description of time, which you can watch below.

I’d be happy to get more recommendations in the comments, but these are my favorite books that deal with time.

Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five

Vonnegut’s magnum opus contains a race of aliens called the Trafalmadorians who can see time “much as the way we’d view a range of the Rocky Mountains.” Vonnegut grapples with the nature of a time as a way of processing his survival of the firebombing of Dresden while he was a prisoner of war, and the final result is a magnificent anti-war book.

Alan Moore’s Jerusalem

My all-time (ha!) favorite time book is Alan Moore’s Jerusalem. When Moore’s brother was 2, he choked on a cough drop and was legally dead for 10 minutes before he was revived. This book imagines those ten minutes as a time when his brother escaped from the confines of time and traveled with a band of ghost kids across the playground of time to try and restore him back to life.

There’s also a section written from the perspective of a young Charlie Chaplin and a monologue delivered by a hallucinating angel.

This is an astounding book, but it’s a huge 1300 page undertaking. It is 100% worth it, IMO, but you can also get a sense of what Moore thinks about time through some of his other works like Watchmen or Promethea.

Ted Chiang’s “Story of your Life” (or the movie Arrival)

If you’re in a book store and you see either of Ted Chiang’s short story collections, Stories of Your Life & Others or Exhalation, buy them immediately. His most famous work is the short story “Story of Your Life,” which was adapted into the Amy Adams-starring alien invasion movie Arrival, which is an unusually excellent adaptation by the great filmmaker Denis Villenueve (Dune, Blade Runner: 2049, Sicario).

I don’t really want to say anything about it in case you haven’t seen it. But it’s on-theme and you’ll like it.

Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky’s Sex Criminals

This is the most playful book of the bunch — Sex Criminals is a comic series that featured two protagonists who have the power to stop time with their orgasms. They decide to use this power to rob banks and save their local library, but this puts them in the crosshairs of the sex police. It’s like, the best elevator pitch for a plot I’ve ever heard.

What’s most surprising about this series is how it takes what is very silly material and transforms it into an in-depth and nuanced discussion of sex positivity and the very nature of time.

Honorable mentions

* Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar is a fairly accurate scientific depiction of the effects of relativity on massive, outer-space level scales. It also has a great soundtrack to work to.

* Most people’s introduction to the bending of spacetime comes from one of two places: Madeleine L’Engle’s classic children’s book A Wrinkle in Time, or the all-time classic original Planet of the Apes.

* On the science side, the most prominent book about the topic is Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. I have to admit I had trouble with this one, though it’s possible I was too young when I read it. Big Think did an article on other good science books to check out.

* Most movies about time travel are incoherent scientifically, but I weep like a goddamn baby every time I watch About Time. I know it’s cheesy! I know Richard Curtis is problematic! I know that it has absolutely gaping plot holes! I don’t care! I want a hug from Bill Nighy!

* I would love to get other cool time books in the comments! I specifically avoided multiverse stuff in here because that’s a whole different bag of worms, but Kate Atkinson’s books Life After Life and A God in Ruins played with time in really cool ways, too.

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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit betterstrangers.substack.com

I occasionally like to irritate people on the internet by arguing that unsolicited dick pics disprove the Golden Rule. The argument goes like this: The Golden Rule says “Do unto others as you would have done unto you.”

People who send unsolicited dick pics are, theoretically at least, saying, “Hey, I’d like to see naked pictures of you. So here’s a naked picture of me.”

It is not a popular opinion, and for pretty good reason. There are all sorts of other reasons people send unsolicited dick pics — as a creepy sort of power move, as a form of indecent exposure, as an act of sexual compulsion, etc. — and the “Golden Rule” application is, I admit, theoretical, as I have never sent an unsolicited dick pic, and don’t bring the topic up much among my guy friends.

But I like it as a way of illustrating the point that living one’s life by moral laws is tricky, as it pushes you into all sorts of weird corners. The Golden Rule is the closest thing we have to a universal moral law, as it’s appeared in most major cultures in some form or another over time. The most famous other universal law (in philosophy, at least) is Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative, which is less clearly worded:

“Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”

In short — if something is right, it must be right for everyone always. Kant argued that one should never lie, for example. Which sounds nice in theory, but is psychotic in practice. It would require you to snitch on friends to cops, it would require you to tell axe murderers where your family is hidden, it would require you to tell grocery story checkout clerks, when they ask “Got anything fun planned this weekend?” that you planned on sitting in the dark and jacking it to rough porn.

Universal moral laws are impossible to formulate, because they require that you think of every possible scenario in which they could be applied.

The impossibility of Human Rights

I say this with some authority — my master’s degree is in Human Rights. And the thing that you learn when you study human rights is that human rights as a concept are really nice and noble but are absolutely impossible to apply.

This was a bummer to hear after I’d taken out $70,000 in student loans to get the degree. It was also a contributor to my post-Catholic depression. When I left the church in my teen years, I thought, “Okay, so all of that bullshit was wrong, time to find the ideology that’s right.”

What human rights taught me was that philosophers have grappled with moral laws for all of human existence, and while some people declare that a certain rule is universal — and attempt to apply it through the force of the state — no one has ever agreed on a universal law. In the capitalist west, for example, we tend to focus on “Freedoms from.” So freedom of speech is, for example a protection from the government interfering with what you say.

In communist or socialist countries, there’s more emphasis on “Freedoms to.” So the freedom to access affordable healthcare would be more of a priority.

Regardless of what you think about either type of rights, the truth is this: humans can’t agree on them. And unless you want to say, “Well, one type of human (American) is right, the other type of human (Chinese) is wrong,” and commit to an eternal power struggle with that other type of human, possibly ending in the destruction of all people, then you have to abandon the concept of universal laws, and accept that different societies have different priorities on what morality is, and that morality should be something that evolves based on context and experience, and which societies always have under discussion.

(I wrote more on the origins of morality in the article below:)

Moral relativism vs. Moral absolutism

There’s a problem with this view, too, though: it’s called moral relativism. Religious people in particular hate it, and any philosophical conversation about it will eventually return to the words of Fyodor Dostoevsky, who wrote in his epic work The Brothers Karamazov:

“But what will become of men then? …without God and immortal life? All things are permitted then, they can do what they like?”

This is a common refrain when you’re becoming an atheist and are getting into arguments with the religious: God — whom the religious see as the entity that chooses the universal laws — is what protects us from chaos by giving us incentives to do good (heaven) and punishments (hell) for doing evil.

Otherwise, humanity would just fall to pieces. We’d murder people left and right, pedophilia would be rampant because there would be no one to say it’s wrong, and the world would turn to chaos.

This argument is really convincing if you put no further thought into it, but the reason it’s wrong should be obvious: moral relativism’s opposite, moral absolutism, has killed significantly more people than moral relativism. The moral absolutist Catholic Church committed (is still committing) countless acts of pedophilia under the cover and moral authority of the church. All of the religious wars in history have killed more people than every depressed nihilist who’s insisted that nothing really matters. Stalin and Mao — who are often used as an example of Godless mass murderers — were also moral absolutists, though their religions were a particularly dogmatic brand of Marxist-Leninism.

The problem with moral absolutism is that it takes the moral authority from within us and it puts it out there. Nominally, the believers say, into God’s court — or whomever your moral authority may be, the Founding Fathers, Marx’s historical materialism, the “science” of Social Darwinism, etc. — but in practice, into the court of God’s representatives here on earth. Which means they can (and often will) do whatever they want and say it’s God’s will.

To commit to moral absolutism is to delegate your own ability to think and decide what’s right to someone or something else.

Taking responsibility for yourself and your society

If you reject that, then you have to admit that the ability to decide what’s right and what’s wrong is inside you, and inside your community. It means you have to talk to the people you live with and come to a consensus on how to behave.

Likely, some of the first rules you’ll agree on are “no murder” and “no pedophilia,” as any society that values personal autonomy would recognize those two things as being wild violations of autonomy.

But you would also have to prepare yourself for morality to evolve. Something that seemed like a no-brainer when you were a young Boomer in the ‘60s, like the Second Amendment, would now seem entirely unreasonable in the face of multiple daily mass shootings and widespread ownership of AR-15s.

As someone who is responsible for their own moral judgments, you would be morally obligated to pay attention to changing contexts, and adjust your opinion to new information as it arises.

Here’s the rough part: You’d also need to be okay with other communities making different decisions than yours. This does not mean you’d need to condone openly repugnant behavior. Say your next door neighbor outlaws abortion. You could subvert that by offering sanctuary and abortions and aid to anyone from their community who makes their way to yours. You still get to choose which people and which positions you show solidarity towards, which people you trust.

But your true responsibility is to yourself and your community. And you can’t take that responsibility if you hand off your authority to someone else, out there in the ether.

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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit betterstrangers.substack.com

If you pay attention to environmental activist groups like the Sunrise Movement or the Extinction Rebellion these days, you’re likely to hear a lot of talk about “growth” and “degrowth.”

This comes from the environmentalist diagnosis that climate change — as well as a dozen other ecological problems like ocean acidification, ocean plastification, air pollution, water scarcity, and so on — is caused by the modern capitalist economy’s reliance on growth to function. As writer Edward Abbey put it:

“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”

I’ve discussed the reasoning behind this a bit more in my discussion of the 1972 book The Limits to Growth (see article below), but once we’ve diagnosed the problem, it’s time to talk about the solutions! Which is why, today, we’re discussing E.F. Schumacher’s classic Small is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered.

Small is Beautiful

E.F. Schumacher was a German-born British economist who, while working in Burma, developed what he called “Buddhist Economics.” His system was also heavily inspired by the anarchist economic ideas of Mahatma Gandhi, and the environmental concerns that began to arise during the 60’s and 70’s. Small is Beautiful was the synthesis of his ideas.

His core argument was simple: the modern economy was unsustainable, because it was treating finite resources as if they were infinite, and if we wanted to reach a point of sustainability, we would have to build smaller, less consumption-based, decentralized economies that valued people over profits.

When I was arguing for anarchism on social media at one point, a friend of mine asked, “But I’ve never understood: how does anarchism scale?”

The answer, this book suggests, is that it doesn’t! Rather than trying to build out a giant, globalized, one-world-government style economy, we should be focusing on our grassroots and tending to our own communities.

The book also offers real world examples of ways companies and communities could organize themselves to be more democratic and decentralized, and the entire thing is worth reading, but if you don’t have time for the full book, you can get a taste by reading his essay “Buddhist Economics” (which is one of the chapters in the book) here.

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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit betterstrangers.substack.com

Happy Friday, everyone! Here’s some stuff to send you into your weekend.

The Power Dynamics of Food

My dear friend Kae Lani Palmisano has launched a new podcast, Power Dining , which covers the interplays between power and food. Kae Lani is one of my favorite people to work with, so when she asked if I would discuss the power dynamics of culinary travel — which I covered back in my days as a travel writer — I said yes. My episode’s not out yet, I’ll post it when it is, but here’s a trailer for her series — give her a follow! The first podcast came out this morning.

Did you know about the New Jersey explosion that symbolically killed the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island?

I’ve started paywalling some of my content, though it pains me to do so — my kids gotta eat, folks. This week I published a paid-only article on the Black Tom explosion, a 1916 act of sabotage that damaged the torch on the Statue of Liberty and was used as a prime justification for the 1940’s internment of Japanese citizens. If you wanna read it and aren’t sure you want to pay, I’ve got 7-day free trials enabled!

Upgrade your subscription here:

New Jersey’s Republicans want to save the whales by fighting wind energy

If you aren’t in my neck of the woods, you may have missed this story, but this year, Republicans have become very concerned about New Jersey’s whale populations. They say that whales are dying in New Jersey because of… wait for it… wind turbines. Emily Atkin of the popular HEATED newsletter wrote about the issue earlier this week (the article is partially paywalled, but Heated is worth subscribing to).

I wrote a bit last summer about how I went swimming one morning and looked up to see a WHALE RIGHT FUCKING THERE, so this story has been particularly infuriating for me to follow, and has been divisive here on the Shore.

Partially, what’s happening is that there has been an increase in whales along the Jersey Shore. This is great news, and it has been a tourist draw for our towns, and my experience last summer literally made my month — here’s a picture of me like, a half hour after it happened:

But New Jersey is also a high boat traffic area — our coast leads directly into the mouth of New York harbor and all of the ports along it — and with the rise of whales, there is inevitably going to be more bad encounters between whales and humans.

We know, for example, that 40% of whale deaths since 2016 have been caused by fishing net entanglements or boat strikes. But Republicans have decided that the uptick in whale beachings must be the result of the noise made by wind turbines. Which New Jersey hasn’t built yet. The noise supposedly confuses the whales, causing the beachings. We do know that human activity, especially loud noises in the ocean, messes with whales ability to communicate and navigate, but the noises produced by oil and gas companies are way louder than wind. And that’s not to mention the noises made by container ships.

Unfortunately, one of our local environmental nonprofits has apparently decided to cash in on all of the sudden right-wing concern for the environment, and is fueling the disinformation by allying itself with Republican lawmakers. It is a shame because the nonprofit, Clean Ocean Action, has been one of the leaders for previous decades in cleaning up our local waterways.

I think we can expect to see more of this type of nonsense from the right as climate change becomes less and less deniable — a shift towards hypocritically attacking clean energy, and also co-opting previously respectable environmentalist groups who are willing to play ball in exchange for access to Republican donors.

The Grand Illusion of Time

Following my post on Wednesday about taking a different perspective on time, I wanted to share this excellent article from Lapham’s Quarterly on the idea of the Block Universe and what Einstein called the “Grand Illusion” of time.

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I am not often jealous of the religious, but I do wish I could believe that bad people like Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin would burn in hell for all eternity. From a purely moral and philosophical standpoint, I find the concept of heaven and hell to be repugnant, but, but, it is a neat little trick for bypassing fury at all of the injustices of the world. Someone’s a dick? Fine. They’ll get theirs. Not your problem anymore.

I have no such luxury. I think Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin will probably end their days with immense wealth and power, which they will use to shield themselves from the consequences of their actions. And then when they’re dead, they’ll just decay in the earth, while we deal with the fallout.

I am also jealous of the religious who can bring themselves to believe that whatever happens to them is all “part of God’s plan.” Again — from a philosophical standpoint, I find this to be nonsense, and from a moral standpoint, God’s got a few things to answer for. But! This would take all of my anxiety about the future off of my plate. It would be out of my hands and in God’s.

Religion excels at providing all of these little workarounds — they are what linguists who study religion and cults call “thought-terminating cliches,” and they are enormously useful for reducing anxiety.

In my post-religious journey, one of the major problems has been having nothing particularly certain to grab onto. Because I have trouble committing to beliefs that may be bullshit, but which require faith to work, I’ve had to deal with a lot of anxiety, and I’ve now moved through a lot of different philosophies that have eventually collapsed under the weight of scrutiny or experience.

The closest thing I’ve found to comfort is a view of time that I first encountered in sci-fi books like Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut. It’s called Eternalism, and it is one of several possible views of time arising from Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.

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The Block Universe

Einstein’s main realization with the theory of relativity was that time existed much in the same way space does — hence his referring to our objective reality as “spacetime.” In Kurt Vonnegut’s classic sci-fi war novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, he explains this with an alien race that can see all moments in time at once, viewing time, as he puts it “as you might see a range of the Rocky Mountains.”

(I talked more about the fictional ideas of this and its implications for things like trauma and forgiveness in my “Against Forgiveness” article below.)

The idea was expanded on by comics writer Alan Moore, whose character Dr. Manhattan sees time much as Vonnegut’s aliens do. For him, with his superhuman powers, all events are happening simultaneously, and this puts him at a distance from human experience.

Moore doubled down on the idea with his epic novel Jerusalem, which has the idea of Eternalism at its core. He suggests that we can view time much in the way we view a book: we read it linearly, moving left to right, down the page, turning the page, etc. But when we turn the page, the words we read don’t cease to exist. They’re still there, we’re just only paying attention to the word we’re on. Moore suggests that what we do when we finish the book is we just go right back and read it again.

In this sense, every terrible moment of our lives is eternal — a literal hell. Every wonderful moment of our lives is also eternal — a literal heaven.

This concept of living destroys the notion of free will, of course — if we live in a block universe then our future is already written — but it also gives us a moral reason to truly live in the moment and enjoy our lives as much as possible, because our joy and our misery are eternal.

What’s most appealing to me about this idea, though, is that it takes the pressure off of us to have a long, full life. If we have a short life — say it’s cut short by a climate catastrophe, a nuclear apocalypse, or — that most banal of American deaths — by a mass shooting, then what matters is not so much the time we didn’t get, but the time we did. A short life, in this context, can still be a full one. Who cares if you get 36 years of eternity instead of 100? It’s still eternity. And the incentive becomes to have a life that’s as rich and fulfilling as possible, no matter what the length or the ultimate outcome of our actions. We are free from the tyranny of our legacy. Better yet, we are, in a sense, free of the loss of our loved ones. We still have to grieve them when we die, but that moment we sat on their knee as a toddler is real and always will be, somewhere back in the ether.

Thought-terminating cliches

It’s worth noting that, while many physicists and philosophers believe in Eternalism as a viable understanding of spacetime, many others don’t. For them, the only moment that’s real is the present, and this view is called “Presentism.” My guess is you could still get a pretty interesting and life-affirming philosophy out of that as well, but it’s captured the imagination of fewer of the sci-fi writers I like, so I’ll go with Eternalism for now. Also, the KLF already wrote a song about time being eternal, so I have my first hymn, I guess?

Eternalism as a philosophy is on more solid ground than “God has a plan,” for sure, but it is a philosophy based on ever-shifting science. Should physicists ever develop their “Theory of Everything,” which unites the seemingly contradictory worlds of relativity and quantum mechanics, there’s a good chance it would totally upend this view of the universe.

But until then, it serves for me as a semi-scientific philosophy that allows me that wonderful thing that is usually only available to the religious: the thought-terminating cliche, the article of faith.

Because now, at 36, I’ve realized that there are times in which I just need, for the sake of my mental health, to stop thinking about things and letting them go. Religious thought-terminating cliches like, “Let go, Let God,” sound creepy and insidious to my ears, and they can certainly be abused as a way to keep your followers ignorant and unquestioning. But the fact is, sometimes unanswerable questions just need to be let go of, at least for a time, until you can come back to them with fresher eyes.

That’s the paradox of being a human — we require philosophies to function, but all of our philosophies are embarrassingly incomplete descriptions of reality. We have to, by necessity, put our faith in things that are possibly ridiculous, even wrong.

It is better that we think of our philosophies and ideologies as tools, items that are to be picked up to help us through a certain moment, and put down when that moment is over. Humans may require faith to function properly, but there’s nothing absurd or irrational in believing that the hammer will help you pound in the nail.

Better Strangers is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit betterstrangers.substack.com

Nearly every time I’ve told someone they are a pessimist, they’ve replied with something along the lines of “I’m not a pessimist, I’m a realist.”

I will admit — this is a superb response. It is not correct, but it is condescending and infuriating, and it makes it very difficult to continue the conversation, which is presumably the point of the response.

The idea is that reality is bleak, and that anyone who doesn’t have a jaded, cynical view of the world must be a naive, delusional fool. And there’s a fair point hidden in there: optimism does suck. It frequently is naive and delusional, and optimists, in their expectation that everything will turn out fine, often are complacent and won’t take the appropriate action to fix a problem.

The issue is that pessimism also sucks, and can also cripple people into not acting. When what we need right now is an entire globe’s worth of people taking intentional actions to improve our collective future, the last thing we need is a pandemic of pessimism and despair, which is apparently what we’ve got.

To be clear — depression is a mental health issue, and it requires treatment and support, and no one should feel ashamed for being depressed. To a depressed brain, pessimism is less an intentional choice and more an involuntary reflex. To jolt oneself out of it requires therapy, exercise, social support, the ability to de-stress, and sometimes medication. It would also be helpful if global capitalism and its despair-inducing machinery finally collapsed.

But before that can happen, we need to envision a better future, and neither pessimism nor optimism alone will get us there. This is because optimism that ignores reality is pointless, and pessimism that ignores possibility is pointless.

What we need instead is hope.

Hope in the Dark

If you wish to truly, deeply understand the concept of hope, the book you need to read is Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark.

In it, the most succinct description of “hope” as a concept is given by the Czech dissident Vaclav Havel, which I’ve quoted on this newsletter before. Havel spent much of the 70s and 80s in jail as a political prisoner, and was in jail as late as 1986. When the communist state collapsed in 1989, he was elected President of the newly formed democracy of Czechoslovakia. On hope, he said:

“The kind of hope I often think about (especially in situations that are particularly hopeless, such as prison) I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us or we don’t; it is a dimension of the soul; it’s not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation. Hope is not a prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.”

It is this distinction that is most important for our purposes in differentiating between hope and optimism: optimism expects things to turn out well, whereas hope is a commitment to make things turn out well. Put another way, optimism sees the glass half full, hope is deciding to pick up the glass and put more water in it.

As practical guides to building a more hopeful mindset, I’d recommend a few books. I mentioned two of them in last week’s podcast on coping with chaos.

Parable of the Sower

Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower is an eerie, disturbing book about a dystopian future that is alarmingly similar to our present: it’s set in an L.A. with runaway climate change and a far-right President who ran on a platform of “Make America Great Again.”

The protagonist of the book, Lauren, is an 18-year-old black woman who has the ability to literally feel other people’s pain. She’s also a philosopher of sorts, and behind her Reverend father’s back, she designs her own religion, which she calls Earthseed. The core tenet of Earthseed is simple:

All that you touchYou Change.All that you ChangeChanges you.The only lasting truthis Change.Godis Change.”

The book is intense, but it’s worth reading specifically for the philosophy, which is basically a how-to guide for dealing with chaos and upheaval.

Emergent Strategy

Activist and organizer adrienne maree brown is obsessed with Butler’s books, and off of the philosophy of Earthseed (and Butler’s other writings), she developed something called “Emergent Strategy” as a way of thinking and acting in the chaos that still manages to move us towards a better world.

brown is particularly talented in articulating the ways in which we can, as Butler would put it, “shape change.” This shaping change doesn’t have to mean you go out and become an activist — it could be something as simple as reordering the way you look at yourself and your personal relationships. This, brown points out, is its own type of activism, because you must change yourself if you wish to change the world.

The Dispossessed

Finally, I have to suggest Ursula LeGuin’s The Dispossessed. It’s often cited as one of the primary examples of anarchist utopia in fiction. It tells the story of a scientist who lives in an anarchist society, but nonetheless finds himself stifled by his comrades dogmatic take on their philosophy.

He moves to a U.S. style democracy, and finds that he doesn’t fit in particularly well there, either, but he is nonetheless able to advance his scientific work and his work as a teacher. If you don’t get a chance to read this book, it is worth knowing at the very least this one quote from it:

You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.

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Hey everyone! I thought I’d share a common theme in some of the books I’ve been reading lately — how to cope with a chaotic world. I talked about a different aspect of this, coping with nihilism, in the Almost Awakened podcast earlier this week. Listen to that here:

The books I mentioned in today’s podcast are:

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There was a decade, probably between 1998 and 2008, where I didn’t walk into a public library a single time. This is, I think, probably a common American experience. At some point, you stop going there for Story Time and you can rely on your school library for books, and then you buy a Kindle which is useful for traveling, even if it is made by the worst corporation ever, and you just kinda forget that in nearly every town, there is one building that is just chock-full of free books.

You may yourself still be in this phase. You may not be a big reader, but instead are an audiobook and podcast listener, relying instead on platforms like Audible and Spotify and Stitcher. You may appreciate the convenience of services like Amazon or, slightly more ethically, BetterWorldBooks, Bookshop.org, Thriftbooks, and Indiebound.

I would like to argue that now is the time for you to return to your local library. Just this once! Just to familiarize yourself with what’s available to you. Because you’ve likely changed locations since you were a kid, and may not be familiar with your local library system, or the sheer amount of what’s available to you these days.

Here’s what to look for:

1. Expanded services in the internet era

The internet has replaced the library as the primary repository of knowledge for most people, and as a result, libraries have had to pivot to more than just being the place where one could access books and conduct research. It is still both of those things, but they’ve also expanded access to things that you might otherwise have to pay for. This includes:

* eBooks

* Audiobooks

* Streaming video

* Research databases

* Academic papers

* Magazines

* Newspapers (including online versions)

* Genealogy databases like Ancestry

* Language learning resources like Rosetta Stone

* Lifelong-learning courses

2. Community programming

Libraries also offer extensive community programming. Some of this is informational, lifelong-learning style stuff, while some of it is just fun stuff like parties, poetry readings, and small concerts. Much of the programming is kid-oriented, but adult programming is common as well.

The library I used to work at offered monthly conversations around topics like race, sustainability, nutrition, and local civic issues (i.e. pollution remediation, stormwater management, elections, etc.).

We also had a digital literacy lab which helped people (all for free) catch up with the generational and class digital divide. So think classes on how to use Gmail, Microsoft Word, how to submit your taxes online, etc. This lab also offered one-on-one tutoring.

Many libraries offer creator and coworking labs, where people can record podcasts or book private working spaces for work-from-home conference calls.

We had book clubs, weekly yoga/exercise classes, mahjong, and periodic town walking tours conducted by local historians.

Children’s rooms offer even more: regular story hours, arts and crafts, STEM activities, video game tournaments, and movie nights.

If your library does not have something you’d like to see — ask to speak to the person in charge of their programming! These programs are often community led, and most librarians are thrilled to let local people organize programs for them. Many libraries have small budgets for this stuff, so pay is iffy, but if you’re willing to do it for free, they’ll be happy to give you space as long as the program fits their policies.

3. Free books!

Aside from the books that are available to check out, many libraries offer free or cheap books.

Lots of people want to donate books to libraries, and libraries don’t always have the space on their shelves, or the books that have been donated are duplicates. As a result, many of them offer Book Sale rooms. These rooms typically offer incredibly cheap books (at ours, the most expensive book was $2) with the funds going to help with library programming.

Often, there are enough excess books that they can’t even sell all of them, so they’ll have a free cart.

Another thing that libraries regularly have to do is something called weeding. In short, libraries have finite shelf space and new books are coming out all the time. So books that don’t circulate all that much get “weeded” and are either offered up for sale or thrown out. Ask your library what they do with weeded books — they may be filling up a trash can in the back, which they’d be happy to let you pick through.

4. Alternative libraries

Libraries have also started to expand out what they offer for circulation. Aside from books, DVDs, music, and audiobooks, which have been in circulation for a while now, many libraries now offer one or more of the following:

* Seed libraries (literally just free seeds for your garden)

* Puzzle libraries (since these are often single-use)

* Tool libraries

* Cake-pan libraries

* Video game libraries

* Circulating laptops and/or wifi hotspots

5. Social Services

On top of offering just things and programs, libraries are increasingly becoming community centers. This is in some ways their de facto position: as one of the only remaining places in most towns where literally anyone can come and hang out for free, they often shelter the homeless, the vulnerable, and the marginalized.

That means that if it’s very cold, many people who don’t have anywhere else to go warm up at the library. Same if it’s very hot. This is why you should never judge a library for having homeless people in it. This is a good thing! You can go somewhere else! They may not!

Because of this spot at the center of your community, many libraries now help people in a wide variety of ways:

* Gaining access to social services like Medicare/Medicaid

* Helping people find housing

* Helping marginalized people find legal help

* Connecting homeless with warming centers and beds

* Helping people fill out their taxes

* Helping people find employment

* Helping people earn GEDs

* Offering free canned foods/diapers/toiletries

* Many librarians are trained in administering NARCAN and in conflict de-escalation.

Even if these are not services you personally need to avail yourself of, they are still worth knowing about in case you know of anyone who ever might.

Why you should visit your library now

Aside from everything listed above, this is a good time to get on board with your library because it’s the beginning of May, and in about a month, your library is likely to be targeted by cryptofascist goons and homophobes because of any pride month activities they choose to take part in.

Libraries as a whole are inclusive places, that seek to make anyone and everyone comfortable as long as they can do so without disrupting anyone else. They are actively engaged in connecting LGBTQ+ people (especially teens) with information that they may have a hard time accessing elsewhere.

Because of this, many libraries are under attack from the right, who see them as promoting a “woke” or gay agenda. The American Library Association’s List of the Most-Banned Books is largely made up of books focusing on sexuality and gender (with race and police brutality thrown in for good measure), and libraries in particular are being targeted by the far right for putting on Drag Queen Story Hours. You can read my account of our library’s DQSH last year (and the ensuing backlash) here:

But the TL;DR is that after our first hour was disrupted by right-wing morons, our community showed up in force for our next hour, and surrounded our building with a wall of rainbow love. This made both the librarians and the parents inside feel infinitely safer, and it is absolutely necessary for any library doing a similar event this year.

Please show up for your library! They are here for you! You need to be here for them!

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Last week, on the recommendation of a friend (and a bunch of TikTok commenters) I read A Psalm for the Wild-Built, Becky Chambers single-sitting solarpunk novella. I’m gonna do a quick break here with a photo of the book, and use that gap to warn you that there are mild spoilers below. It shouldn’t ruin your reading of the book, as it’s not that kind of a book, but if you plan on reading it, maybe close out and come back to this article later.

The book is set in a future where humanity decided to radically change course after all of the robots in all of the factories decided to put down their tools and leave humanity behind, instead escaping into the wild. On the shock of this event, humanity transitioned from an industrialized society to a sustainable one, leaving half the earth for wilderness and nature, and adopting renewable energy and egalitarian politics to support this new society.

I do not particularly want to give much away about the book — it can be read in an afternoon, with plenty of time left for chores, except to say it’s a warm hug of a novella, which you feel the second you read the dedication:

For anybody who could use a break.

But there was something in the book that floored me, and I wanted to discuss it here. This quote, incidentally, is the closest it gets to a spoiler, though hopefully it’s deprived enough of context that it won’t give anything away:

Dex turned the mug over and over in their hands. “It doesn’t bother you?” Dex said. “The thought that your life might mean nothing in the end?”

“That’s true for all life I’ve observed. Why would it bother me?” Mosscap’s eyes glowed brightly. “Do you not find consciousness alone to be the most exhilarating thing? Here we are, in this incomprehensibly large universe… and in all the time this entire scenario has existed, every component has been recycled over and over and over again into infinitely incredible configurations, and sometimes, those configurations are special enough to be able to see the world around them. You and I — we’re just atoms that arranged themselves the right way, and we can understand that about ourselves. Is that not amazing?”

One lifelong existential crisis

When I left the Catholic Church in my teens, I entered a prolonged existential crisis which I have never fully emerged from. I was convinced that Catholicism was bad and wrong, but I didn’t really have anything to replace it with. So I cast about for other ideologies that I could operate off of, trying out Christopher Hitchens-style anti-theism, then nihilism, then Camus’ absurdism, then existentialism, and then a weird amalgamation of Taoism and paganism. I even spent 4 years in logotherapy, which is a form of psychotherapy that focuses on constructing some sort of meaning in life.

The whole thing has frankly sucked, and has been a core component in fueling my decade-long struggle with depression.

This desperate clawing for meaning has left me simultaneously exhausted and restless, and now, in my late 30’s, I’ve come to suspect that it’s all a trick anyway — that man’s search for meaning isn’t, in the end, all that important.

What has changed has been a few things. First: I’ve come to accept that, when it comes to career trajectories, I am congenitally aimless. I just don’t have a single thing I want to do. I like learning about all sorts of different things, and I flit from one to another reliably every few years.

This is unlike my wife, who has known she wanted to work in politics since she was 14, and has pursued that goal tenaciously and successfully ever since. I spent a good deal of time kicking myself for not having that sort of focus. I think now that this was something that I maybe internalized from society as a whole: capitalism likes specialists, not generalists, but a healthy society needs both.

The second thing that changed was psychedelic drugs. I’ve never been a pothead, but since my state legalized weed, I’ve taken an edible maybe once a month. It’s become one of the most reliably nice experiences I get to have, and not because I tune out the world, but because I actually get to feel like I’m in it for a while. Depression and anxiety for me are like a haze — my mind is always running through 17 different worries at the same time — and with edibles, I actually focus just on the music I’m listening to, the food I’m eating, or the feel of my body on the bed. For me, it is a monthly reminder to just be present.

Even on days I don’t take an edible, the memory of being in the moment is closer at hand, and I can, from time to time, just put down the idea that I need to be useful.

Meaning vs. Meaninglessness

There are still things that give my life meaning. I still have professional goals regarding my writing, I have goals in my relationships, I have goals as a parent and as a member of my community. But I’ve also been slowly coming to terms with meaninglessness, and how that concept, which once so terrified me, does not have to be terrifying. Because if, IF, at the end of all of this, none of it really mattered, if it’s an inevitability that some day I’ll be totally forgotten, then I am kind of… totally… free? I can just enjoy the feel of my feet on grass or the smell of my son’s hair or the taste of beer cheese on a sourdough pretzel?

This feels different to me than nihilism, which was a sense that nothing mattered. This feeling, to me, is that some things matter, but they might just matter to me and not be imbued with cosmic, universal meaning. And that’s fine. It means that nothing matters quite so much that, if I were to fail to achieve it, I could count my life as a failure.

And that gives me a little space to breathe, and just enjoy the smell of my son’s hair.

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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit betterstrangers.substack.com