Rest vs. Stagnation

As I write this, I am at home during the coronavirus pandemic. Over this same pandemic, I have also been recovering from some mental health problems. I feel like this extended time spent mostly in the same place has been good. I probably would have chosen this if there hadn't been a pandemic. At the same time, though my situation is not really the most confined, I sometimes feel some kind of cabin fever. If I sit still, I rest. But I can also feel like I need to move, if I sit still long enough. And sometimes I am a slave to my sitting still, and find I can hardly will to move, though it occurs to me to try to will it.

If civilization lasts long enough, it will become sustainable. There are two endpoints: sustainability, or death. I think it is likely that a sustainable civilization will have to be mostly static. If things change too much, our ability to be physically sustainable to a sufficient degree could be threatened. And as time goes on, the possibilities of discovering new ideas for what a culture can be will be exhausted. I wonder if we have exhausted many or even most of them already, most rapidly in the last 200 or 300 years. So we may find ourselves settling on one final culture, having seen what there is to see, and there may not be much change or novelty left.

"Static" can imply both "restful" and "stagnant". So if this final culture is a restful one, that's one thing, and if it's stagnant, that's another. Ordinarily, rest is a positive thing. And stagnation is a negative thing. So we would want to seek rest, rather than stagnation.

--

There are only two endpoints, when we're talking about position, but when we're talking about rate of change, there is a third. In other words, there are three stable ways of life which can in principle be extended nearly to infinity: death, sustainability, and endless growth. Endless growth is one way to flee stagnation. It requires an endless supply of space to grow into. We could colonize an infinite universe, and never learn to rest.

Could there somehow be endless cultural growth? Perhaps if we're talking about cultural artifacts, such as movies or books, we could be engineered to have new senses and new emotions, so that we could still have new things. If people can be modified without boundary, we may be able to have all kinds of new experiences. (Modifying people without boundary is dangerous, as well.) But would society be different? Or would we all have settled into a pattern where everything was arranged optimally and we lived in experience machines, or their equivalents? A planet could spread its "optimal plus experience machine" culture to some other planet -- maybe they have to adjust to the atmosphere on the new planet, which is different than the ones they've had to deal with before. But most people on the home world will just be keeping things going. Will there be faster than light travel or communication? If not, then each planet will be isolated from the others. There will be a pull toward stasis on each planet, even if space colonization gives some reason for a minority to do something somewhat novel.

But as we get better at colonizing planets, the risk and therefore the novelty will be sanded away. We may get into patterns of "Yet another planet. Might as well stay home and plug into the experience machine instead." And much of the process could be automated, once we get good at it. So society and its people could be faced with the question: stagnation, or rest? A sure and steady and effective program of endless growth is its own kind of stasis. It's a formula. Some people will realize this, if enough of us aren't completely immersed in the experience machine.

--

Can we find rest in an experience machine? Perhaps. A crude kind of experience machine (watching YouTube or Netflix, reading novel after novel) tends to produce stagnation. But we can imagine that a really good experience machine wouldn't. At least, we could provide the experience of rest in an experience machine. But perhaps rest vs. stagnation is not just about experience, but also about objective reality. So if I am lying on the couch all the time, it doesn't matter what my virtual reality headset has going, I'm not moving. If I am not risking something or trusting something as a person, then every action or romance "holodeck program" I experience adds up to zero -- it doesn't cost me anything, doesn't make me confront anything. Everything it accomplishes it erases with the resolution of the plot; or the return to the experience machine to choose another experience is its own final plot point -- "it was all a dream".

Isn't rest vulnerable to the same criticism as stagnation? When you rest, don't you lie down on the couch just as much? What are the dangers of stagnation? One is that you don't grow enough. Another is that you are not open enough. You can never be receptive to the best if you aren't open to it. So you will be unable to experience the best if you are stagnant. If you are stagnant and satisfied with stagnation, that is the worst. "The best" could be some kind of superlative. "Greater bliss, that no man has ever known" is the goal of some. But "the best" could be "getting to live, at all". Depth and reality sand away the fakeness in all who will consent to be sanded, and thus it is possible for them to be really real, and thus continue to exist forever. So we could say that stagnation leads to death, but rest is eternal life. So, many of us have not experienced true rest, and are either satisfied with stagnation or are attempting to run away from it.

Stagnation is when something that needs to move isn't moving, and it becomes (or remains) fake, sick, or even deadly. Rest is when something doesn't need to move.

--

It looks like we're headed to some kind of stasis -- on our current trajectory, maybe toward total immersion in the experience machine, and if feasible, space colonization. Will that stasis be rest, or stagnation? Or perhaps a deletion of what it means to be human, a destruction of personhood through the end of meaningful choices, risks, and trustings? That's yet another possibility -- maybe conscious stagnation, for all its downside, has the upside of being a choice, which we could reject. But we could become apersonal, atrophying whatever it is that makes us who we are, so that we are experiencing machines, in symbiosis with the experience machine.

In order to really rest as a civilization and as individuals, we have to take care of all the outstanding issues. We need to have achieved perfection -- in other words, become actually good. What are the actual issues remaining?

--

Yet, you can feel rest as rest, when you're resting. It's like how you can see the meaning and validity in the objects you directly perceive. Rest really is restful. But if we stay in repose long enough, we find ourselves in a new moment, where if we are sensitive, we will realize that we are beginning to stagnate. Stagnation is really stagnant -- we experience that directly, and find ourselves either enslaved to it, or running away from it, working away from it.

A stagnant pond is not flowing. So if we are really restful, there will be some kind of motion within us, or flowing into us from an outside source, and flowing out of us, away from us. A pond can sit perfectly still, and yet not be stagnant, because the water moves. A pond is not at rest when the flow within it is turbulent, but when the flow is laminar, it can be.

Potential simplicity is the ability to store up the ability to simplify one's life (reduce consumption), in advance of needing to. Trustworthiness is proposed as a source of potential simplicity.

Trustworthiness is Potential Simplicity

Degrowth: intentionally shrinking the economy. Overall, everyone consumes less and works less.There are different reasons why we might want to make this happen. We can live simpler lives. We can have more time to think, walk, socialize, sleep, pray, listen to music, stare at the wall, meditate -- anything time-consuming but not resource-intensive. Also, we can impose less of a burden on Earth: less soil depletion, species extinction, fewer greenhouse gas emissions, and so on -- all of which affect how much we and our descendants have to suffer, and how likely we can survive as a civilization -- maybe even as a species.

How can we consume less as a society? To an extent, we can blame the rich. They do consume more than poorer people. But both rich and poor have to consume less. And we all have to consume less of the things that make our personal lives function. Everyone needs to eat, most everyone needs some kind of shelter sometimes, most everyone needs to get around, and there are a few other basic needs. We have to shift our basic needs from expensive versions of them, to inexpensive ones. The poor in the United States, for instance, make less than $12,480 a year (the official poverty line). $12,480 is a huge amount of money compared to what the poorest in some other countries make (closer to $500 a year). Poverty is expensive in the US.

So everyone in the US, on average, has to consume less, pay out of their food, housing, transportation. Somehow this is possible -- people in other parts of the world already do it.

It's possible to crash the economy by the average person consuming too little, too suddenly. So rather than suggest that everyone simplify their lives (no more restaurants, suburban houses, or minivans; everyone switch to peanut butter and white bread, SROs, and bus-riding), I think it safer for now to encourage everyone (as many as possible), to increase their potential to simplify.

How would this work? One way is to explore simpler lifestyles so that they seem less psychologically daunting. Take it one element at a time, and go back to full consumption whenever you want to try a different element. If society is comfortable with simplification, we will have more political will available if there's ever a time we can simplify all together, at once, in an economically safe way.

(If you really like a simpler lifestyle, you can spend what you save from simplicity on charities, such as those that alleviate poverty in developing countries. I am not an economist, but I think in our global economy, if the charity spends the money, or gives away the money, in some part of the world, global spending will remain the same as if you spend at home, and the global economy will have as much cash flowing through it as it's already balanced to function with.)

Another approach is to amass any kind of non-economic wealth that can help out economically. One example is given here, which I will call "potential simplicity". An object in motion can run into things and cause a scene, and can have a lot of kinetic energy. An object at rest, doing nothing visible may, depending on its position, can have a lot of potential energy. The economy is a somewhat delicate system that can't handle too many wild or sudden energies. But potential economic energy, in the form of potential simplicity, for instance, shouldn't be a problem, and can be built up with gusto. Here's an example of potential simplicity related to housing:

When you pay $800 for a room in a house, what are you paying for? Some of that money goes to maintain the house itself. But a lot of it goes to some property owner, and they spend it on food, housing, cars, etc, and who knows what else. Well, what are they doing for you, the renter? You can maintain the house itself without paying them.

Who builds houses in the first place? People with money. So they would only do this act if they thought they could get their money back through rent. So built into the housing market is the cost of building new houses. If an area is easy to build in, housing prices are lower. If people want to live somewhere badly enough, developers will find some expensive way to accommodate that desire.

In my neighborhood, there are some apartment buildings, and some tract houses, built long ago when the area was the edge of town. Because rent in San Diego is going up (or perhaps partly for other reasons), gradually these tract houses are being converted to rental properties.

The rental properties (I would guess) use each of their available bedrooms, or close to that level of occupancy. But the tract houses can easily have fewer than one person per bedroom. San Diego has high rent due to lack of supply relative to demand, but could accommodate its current demand at a lower price, and build fewer new units (use less energy, fewer material resources) if tract house occupants used all of their rooms.

Why would anyone buy a house and not use all its bedrooms? Sometimes people use bedrooms for purposes other than living quarters. A home office or gym, for instance. Can these uses be converted to housing people? If the value of a room is $800 a month (about what it can be in my city), then it might be worth finding a way to make alternative uses of the space. Being a regular at a coffeeshop ($150 a month) (or just working in a different part of your own home) could replace a home office, and a gym membership could be less than $100 a month.

Another reason is that people bought a house when their children were young, and the children have "left the nest" and now they don't want to move. In this case, they do not rent for different reasons, some of them being that they haven't thought of it, and also, importantly, that people aren't always trustworthy and wouldn't make good tenants. It's not worth saving some money if you go crazy or get taken advantage of.

"Trustworthiness" can be reckoned different ways. (Consider the hierarchy of betrayal). If you have to live with someone day in and day out for years, you might not be able to bear issues that you could pass over for a week or two.

As people age, they tend to get isolated. So what if, as you are in your twenties, thirties, and forties, you invest in relationships with people with whom you could share your house when you are in your retirement years? This would be a way to store up potential simplicity.

So far I've only talked about the gains that could come from using all bedrooms as single bedrooms, rather than for other uses. But some people share bedrooms, usually cohabiting couples or spouses, or siblings, but in principle, any two sufficiently compatible people could share a room. The potential gains in space from this cultural innovation (or re-discovery) would enable San Diego to house something less than twice as many people without building any new units. Judging from my bedroom, two people like me (I don't have too much stuff) could share a ~11x13-foot space with a certain amount of inconvenience / adjustment. One adjustment would be to coordinate sleep schedules and times to have the room to oneself. This would be workable, if the other person were trustworthy.

There are two angles to this problem of finding trustworthy people: finding people who work for you, and making yourself someone who works for more other people. There are parallels with dating. Fortunately, the two pursuits overlap a lot, so that energy spent in one area has a return in the other. One would pursue friendships, learning what kind of people work and what kind don't, turning away from the aspects in you that do not respect other people, learning to forgive, accepting back people who can be trusted and moving on from people who can't, learning to not be addicted to people but instead being in some sense emotionally independent.

Some attention needs to be paid to the art of living with other people, and developing attitudes of the heart specifically optimal for living with other people, overcoming bad habits that don't come up when you have more space. Not as much as in a marriage, because these rooming or housing partnerships don't have to be as long-term or as personally involved, but comparable.

A group house of four or eight people has different dynamics than a studio apartment shared by two people. So it is good for some people to learn how to spend time together and manage common resources as a group.

In order to pursue friendships, one would seek groups of people from which to find friends. One might also develop the life path of being quiet and not needing as much human connection, to share a house or a room with someone like that. Trustworthiness varies -- as far as humans are concerned, only consists of not betraying some other person and society at large.

Trustworthiness is both a trueness of heart, inner strength, and a learned skill. People call some people "real, deep, legit" -- such is good material for trustworthiness.

Interpersonal trustworthiness, directed toward shared housing, can be an economic and environmental asset. Fortunately, it's a value shared both by the left and the right. Also, it's a value that pays dividends to individuals even if society as a whole does not commit to the norm of shared housing. It can be extended piecemeal. The poverty of the materially rich is isolation and broken relationships, and the poverty of the materially poor can include these as well -- a message that can be profitably heard by people from all different socioeconomic groupings. As it is a potential for economic change and not a direct economic change, it may be able to pass under the radar of the forces that try to constrain individual spiritual lives to patterns which preserve the economic or political status quo (which is both oppressive and fragile and could fall apart).

I have focused on housing so far, but how does this affect transportation? Probably the "cleanest" solution to transportation problems is to find ways to locate people closer to their jobs or anything else they travel to regularly. People who know and trust more people have more choices of where to live with other people, allowing them to move closer to work. It would probably make sense to create "company town" type scenarios (cluster complementary workplaces in neighborhoods where their workers and support personnel live). This involves a certain amount of uprooting and rerooting of people, which is easier if people have strong relational ties with those they live with, overall emotional bases, and a greater ability to get along with strangers, and improved by working on trustworthiness.

What about food? The spread of vegetarianism and veganism is a low-hanging fruit, but we may still need to eat less per person. How can we deal with constant hunger? To some extent, we can adjust to it, get to where we don't need as many calories. But to a certain extent, it will never comfortable. How can we get through mass discomfort? The skills of patience (endurance and waiting) are improved by trustworthiness toward others, as well as having a good relationship with yourself. When you relate well to yourself, you can tell yourself "no" and believe yourself when you promise yourself that things will be better in the future, when you will get what you desire. (Much of what we seek from other people in relationships, and what we get from the process of increasing trustworthiness overall, is really about our relationships with ourselves.)

There are other basic needs, which should be considered in more detail elsewhere. In general, it is easier to consume less of a resource if you have some compensating factor, a rich relationship, a lack of abusiveness in your life.

When a certain number of people are ready to simplify, a regulatory body (probably a government) can put out advertisements encouraging people to cut back on their consumption, for instance by moving into their friends' houses to free up housing. We will all know what's going on and be able to plan for the decrease in housing construction as a society, or whatever other consequence comes from simplification.

This article has been mostly written with those on the left in mind, more secular people, or religious believers with some degree of sympathy with secular culture, or at least those accustomed to it. But the basics of this article are valid and obligatory for those on the Christian right as well. (My sympathies lie with them as well as with those on the left.) How so?

Perhaps what follows will seem like something out of left field to secular readers, but it's important to remember that the world we all share is large and contains many different points of view.

Sin is that which God finds unacceptable. God does not like it when we do not respect him, or other people. Much of what is considered sin falls under that category of disrespect. God does not want us to sin. So if we are in tune with God, we will sin less. Are we ready to be in the Kingdom? Or are we holding on to sin? I like the motto of this site: "Overcome Sin, for the Kingdom of Jesus Christ is Coming Soon". Maybe the end will come through climate change, or maybe not. People have thought the world was ending before and been wrong. Maybe the world is ending in a year. There's a lot we don't know, but the Kingdom is coming soon, and so, overcome sin.

It's the Christian's task to build up the Church, which often means, building up a particular local congregation. "They will know that we are Christians by our love" -- "Let love be genuine" -- so relationships within churches need to be strong and not abusive, characterized by respect. This is a good in itself, but can also connect to surviving on Earth in difficult times. Even if climate change is a left-wing hoax, building up trustworthiness is a good idea.

Simplicity is a Christian value. You can't serve both God and Mammon (possessions). You can have possessions without serving them in your heart, but if have more than you need and are unwilling to give them up to honor God, then you are serving them. Forget about degrowth. That's a secular agenda. Be simple for Christian reasons.

So, many different kinds of people can see the use of simplicity and trustworthiness which feeds into it. Therefore, potential simplicity (and then simplicity itself) could actually be adopted as a mass value and put into practice. In 50 years, or 20, (or sooner?), policymakers could use this resource to lower rents and cut greenhouse gas emissions. And Christians could be closer to God. And for more pessimistic minds, trustworthiness and relational wealth, and the ability to live with less, are a good thing for everyone to develop, in the event of societal collapse.