We need a new normal: our collective myopia will be our undoing. How can we avoid sleepwalking into the apocalypse?

Everyone knows we’re sleepwalking into disaster. The fact this century feels like one drawn out Armageddon is because it is.* We are in the middle of a mass extinction, with millions of species expiring in quick succession-  nearly half OF ALL SPECIES disappearing from the planet over the last 35 years. Watching “The Men Who Made Us Spend” last night, about the commercialisation of childhood made me deeply uncomfortable. The concentration of the world’s resources into plastic Star Wars figurines, to be played with for a few hours, then discarded only to reappear on eBay years later worth something only to a few nerdy collectors or to gather dust seems to me to be foolishness at its most sophisticated. Human population has grown to unsustainable levels while biodiversity is at an all time low. I don’t want to scare anyone, but we’re probably definitely fucked.

So what do we do? Do we speed up the inevitable, with our collective greed and mass stupidity lubricating the process to its logical conclusion in our great need to consume ourselves out of existence? Or can we admit we turned a wrong corner in our quest for knowledge and power and find ways to slow the process, accepting the need to live more simply, breed less, use less stuff, eat better, for all it may be a bitter pill for society to swallow? The odds are stacked against us. Capitalism and conservation are at complete odds. Perhaps when the machines take over they will be able to build strong enough algorithms to predict the future: to be able to see what we can not- that we can not continue along this path and survive with any acceptable way of life, that sweeping changes are necessary to prevent disaster. Rational logic may be the only answer to our blinkered pursuit of misery. But by the time we get the message, it may already be too late.

I don’t think bleakness is misplaced, yet it can be hard to live with. Sometimes it feels like I’m alone, except for a few doomsday cult cases to live with a presiding fear that the end may be nigh. The rest of the world seems to be more interested in Game of Thrones and whether Kate Middleton’s got a grey hair on display. But perhaps that’s just displacement activity.

Having watched the twin towers disintegrate on telly aged 21, it was not a giant leap to suppose the same could happen here, when later, pregnant with Jonah on the day, 7/7 when all the tubes started exploding on, it’s hardly surprising I that had a complete freak out, insisting Tom, sat, back then in his office at the base of 1 Canada Sqare, Canary Wharf, came home to the safety of our flat on “murder mile” , Hackney. My end of days mentality manifests in an irrational fear of loud bangs. A thunder crack last week had me diving for cover, thinking it was either an asteroid or they’d nuked us (the dark hooded enemy, whoever it may currently be – Ukrainians? The enemy shifts so frequently, I no longer know who it is nor can find my way clear to care. (See George Orwell’s 1894. His dystopian vision has all but come true). World War 3 seems an ever present threat and terrorism has worked, in that all of us are running scared, buying things to subdue the fear and make the ever present nightmare of reality momentarily more palatable.

My paranoia may have a logical root cause however. I’ve barely touched weed since I was at uni, and it has almost always had the same effect on me – I think a bit too hard, before drifting off to sleep. But once or twice it has had a disturbing effect – after eating spacecakes in Nimbin, Australia; taking an ill advised hit from a bong aged 17; pulling a whitey at uni; an outer body experience on a beach in Goa, there have been times when I’ve overdone it in a series of beautiful cliches. An eternal quiet falls, and space and time break down just a little. I’ve never liked it.

But in the grip of adult insomnia, I’ve sometimes kept a little around for medicinal use – to put me back to sleep in the dead of night when it is too late to take a tablet. I have shit to do in the daytime, and sleeplessness will send you mad quicker than narcotics. Last night, however,  I misjudged it and ended up having what felt like a near death experience.

In retrospect, it was funny – although I still feel a bit disturbed. Waking up at 4 after a few wines with friends, I know I wouldn’t be sleeping again anytime soon. I headed down for a chamomile tea and a small one-paper job. It was heavy, sticky stuff, and as I smoked it, I could hear the whine of white noise begin to fill my ears.

Thus begun a three hour journey into the unconscious that, naturally, felt like it was going to go on for ever. Rationally I knew I wasn’t going to die, but I felt if I forgot to breathe, I would just slip away. My consciousness receded, but I remained, stubbornly, horribly awake: I could see my meaty eyelids and my awareness that I was nothing but a fragile collection of chemical processes and atoms held together in a fleshy sock felt terrifyingly revelatory. I could see and feel too much: the precariousness, the senselessness, the idiocy of our everyday lives. Tom tried to calm me down, the best way he knew how – the traditional way for treating female hysteria – which may or may not have been taking advantage given the state of me, but at the time, it felt better than lying there freaking out, so I’ll let it slide. But afterwards, my body went into hiccups of convulsive shaking. I didn’t slip back into sleep until 7am, and spent the day feeling like I was, in the illustrious words of Will from The Inbetweeners, “in a bubble but everything is flat.”

Just say no, kids.

But I was left with a sense of futility; inevitability. That we’re all engaged in this pursuit of survival and yet somehow, we’re all going about it the wrong way. I know I sound like I’m still space caked here, but I promise you I’m not.  My daily life revolves around the business of coming up with ways of making people buy things to people that they don’t really need, a pursuit many are involve in in London. It is an occupation of relative privilege, the top half of a food chain in a long process of resourcing, making, selling and marketing. This is what keeps me and my family afloat, but I don’t miss the irony that this short term endeavor has long term consequences that will affect them for the worse. My – all of our – efforts would be better spent ensuring kids have strong enough self esteem to resist the need to buy pointless shit they don’t need. But who’s got time for that?

As a mother, I know that the only way to get the behaviour I want out to my kids is to reward the good stuff and ignore the bad. But capitalism is fucking all of us up because it rewards businesses for tempting people into buying stuff they don’t need whilst plundering the world’s resources to give it to them and then blaming the people for lacking the self control to resist it, all the while creaming off the profits into offshore tax havens to avoid having to fund anything that might in any way attempt to solve the problem. No one seems to be invested in the future in the short term obsession with next quarter’s figures. Yet if big business and global agencies don’t start seriously addressing the problems – of inequality, of conservation, of future sustainability over short term growth, then all that will be left to sell will be an escape from the misery of existence. Sometimes it feels like we’ve already reached that point. But by the time the air is so poisoned we need to ship in fresh air, the people right at the top of the food chain will have all fucked off to Mars.

As a I’ve always found that blaming kids for their own behaviour tends to compound the problem. If only the government applied the same logic to the general population, then maybe everything would be ok… rather than penalising the victims of a system that’s stacked against them by reasoning that that the average person actually has a choice (rather than being pushed and puleld by the myriad pressures upon them). Surely the businesses that create the problems should pay for the solutions, rather than reaping the capital gains while the little person drowns in debt… But then, how many mothers do you see in the cabinet?

Look, I’m not some kind of campaigning eco warrior, I’ve never protested against anything in a big way (my bad – I was probably too stoned at uni) and I love H & M as much as the next girl. But as a mother, I do worry (seriously, a lot) about what I am leaving for my kids and as it is, it looks like the world’s in an unholy mess. And I’m nothing if not tidy.

For myself,  I think I do a fairly god job of waste not, want not – London mortgage property has been great for curtailing our spending and ensuring we use, reuse and recycle. But even so, I drive a diesel car (rarely – my parking is terrible) my kids have a bunch of plastic crap they hardly play with, and even though they don’t have the latest console, or tablet, they do have more than one gaming device, and at the moment, my priority is for them to feel normal rather than single-handedly trying to save the world. But it’s not enough. Normal is going to have to readjust for all of us, if we want to have a hope in hell of leaving anything left for our children’s children.

I don’t know how to do it, short of changing our reward system (and that probably means waving bye bye to capitalism – but that would mean no more designer  handbags, sadface). But if we also want stuff like butterflies and stick insects and bluebell woods, then it sure as hell needs to be done. And I’m a total hypocrite, planning to spend the afternoon at to Westfield Stratford (surely the seventh circle of hell) to buy holiday clothes for the kids and take them to the cinema. But it’s human nature for parents to want the world for their kids. And the men that sell it to us know that. So instead of fighting the system, we need a different game plan before there’s no world left to sell and our grandchildren are left with actual hell on earth, rather than merely its retail version.

 

*Thanks, Twitter, for supplying me with that line