I find it useful to contemplate (I know, not such a huge calorie burner) your observation that we (humans) burn the energy of other bodies instead of our own. (In the global north at least). As someone in the USA, I certainly observe the paradox that relatively affluent people pay for gym memberships to burn calories and I pedal hard daily on an exercise bike in my room because I don’t burn calories planting and harvesting food, or walking miles to fetch and carry water, or engaging in energy production to meet the needs of daily life. I’ve often thought if I generated energy I could use to power lights or a fan, I would realize how much energy my cushy life requires. When I burn my 600 calories a day pedaling, I can measure that against the calories I consume eating. And I think about the huge expenditure of energy required by my fellow humans in the global south mostly to harvest the food I consume in a few minutes. Plant beings surrender their bodies and humans labor for hours so that I get to eat fresh fruits and vegetables without breaking a sweat. That equation is painfully indicative that the balance of energy expended is off.
Wow, this deeply resonates and explains why my mental health is always saved by 6 hours of manual labor in the garden. Thank you for the most excellent insight. I feel so sad that we’ve conflated “leisure” with “inactivity.” The two are very much not the same.
This short musing on black masked weaver-style "intentional wastefulness" in humans — from potlatches to cathedrals to sand mandalas — agrees that it's only the fossil fueled societies that forgot its importance:
Ironically, the culture that has at its disposal the greatest energy surplus ever seen is the one that has become obsessed with efficiency and storing up ever greater surplus — what Bataille apparently called "the accursed share"; the share that inevitably leads to crash.
Instead, yes, let us choose labour-intensive, inefficient methods that bring back beauty, craft, sweat, exhilaration and satisfaction! There's a manifesto I can get behind, and the reason I don't have time for social media :)
I think labour is literally what allows us to grow as beings. To love is also to labour, if we are doing it right, I think. To be present is to labour. A life that doesn’t allow us to toil as our animal selves in a way that is aligned with our physical capacities cannot be a life of ‘privilege’ and seeking it cannot be a healthy goal
Nah, not with you on this one. It's perfectly healthy to live lives with more leisure. The problem is that under capitalism advanced understandings of psychology and biochemistry have been weaponised to capture us and make us consume far more than is healthy or natural. Unnaturally addictive combinations of sugars, salts, and fats in food, and dopamine gaming click bait ads on our phones, all while keeping us in a state of moderate but never ending stress through mostly unnecessary work under threat of destitution if we lose our jobs, because we've been separated by individualism from the security of community support.
I totally agree with this. It's more complex than just being tired. On the flip side, Veritasium also supports the idea of spending more energy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xS68sl2D70
Just think of the benefits of public transportation combined with real pedestrian Thoroughfares reclaimed from cars. Ubiquitous from rural to urban.Designed And Managed with the intent of actually making it a desirable.
It might actually instill a certain pride of place and appreciation of the whole Earth.
Thank you Rachel. This really resonated. I believe also that this separation between consumption and expenditure could also be written into a separation of the energy (money) as it leaves a transaction and enters a new three phase transactional system. The entire creation of money bit would not be related to borrowing as it is now, but to relational money creation, dependant on real connection with people (staying under one roof, providing shelter, taking 4 hours digging potatoes etc…, doing a morning in education):
1) a new reserve for a new common currency(similar to VAT)
2) the value added bit (like the surplus energy feeding the reserves to mean that the reserve value ALWAYS rises)
3) the exchange of labour or Basic Income in cash.
Anyway, your writing is good. This one is really good. Grateful for your insight today.
To add even more nuance to this, our kids have been increasingly infected with various strains of Covid-19 since global governments decided that we are no longer in a pandemic (even though in actuality we are), we merely passed the emergency phase. Still we have no clean air in classrooms, or proper mitigations in place in public spaces and hospitals.
Doing more leisurely activities and working more are not mutually exclusive. I am at a stage in my life where I seek new activities to learn and many activities I enjoy take a significant amount of energy.
You are probably onto something, but maybe just scratching the surface.
Anyone familiar with the work of Georges Bataille, a French 20th C. thinker, friend of the Surrealists, the existentialists and many modern artists? He developed an economic theory around the idea that organisms have an excess of energy available to them. Mainstream economics is based on ideas of scarcity as baseline. Bataille was not convinced. He posited that this surplus energy, more than was necessary to maintain life, was the source of behaviors like those of the bird building and destroying multiple nests. In human beings it led to expenditure on useless luxury, building on a monumental scale, and wastage of lives and treasure in warfare. He also argued that this excess could be put to positive uses if we only had a mind to do it. This is a very short summary of a body of ideas Bataille worked out in 3 volumes he entitled The Accursed Share. Accursed because the surplus almost always was used to our detriment--he was French, he was Catholic (likely lapsed, but still...), so guilt and angst go with the territory. An interesting attempt to rethink the Dismal Science nonetheless.
Certainly WW1 would not have looked like it was if industrial scale production hadnt been possible... ie energy sources to melt steel and build millions and millions of shells. Steel afterall is one fundamental building block of our society. Previous wars like Napoleon era were relatively smaller (100thousand men army is magnitude smaller than 3million or more in nazi germany at peak time or way over that combined in allied side).
Now we have had multiple cycles since 1960s in west everywhere same construction boom bust cycle... money flowing to building creates building boom. Then money runs out and lot of unfinished/unsold, not in use buildings stand empty. This reminds of that bird next example. It has been known over 100 years now this is how economy works. Nobody seems to have gotten wiser in this respect. The more "efficient" economy we get, the bigger problem this becomes. People are supposed to buy every year luxury handbag and new iphone or economy supposedly dies and that is bad.
Classical Chinese Medicine and taiji have a lot to offer here for practices and approaches to Qi/Energy and how it relates to planetary and human health. You are spot on through this lense. Western ways create stagnation of energy which directly cause dis-ease and disease.
And if anything to do with Covid has had an effect on kid's concentrations, it's not the few months they had to spend doing classes via zoom, it's the repeated infections by a virus that can cause long-term brain fog. I used to be an avid reader and now I'm damn near functionally illiterate most of the time due to long covid fatigue severely limiting my concentration capacity.
I find it useful to contemplate (I know, not such a huge calorie burner) your observation that we (humans) burn the energy of other bodies instead of our own. (In the global north at least). As someone in the USA, I certainly observe the paradox that relatively affluent people pay for gym memberships to burn calories and I pedal hard daily on an exercise bike in my room because I don’t burn calories planting and harvesting food, or walking miles to fetch and carry water, or engaging in energy production to meet the needs of daily life. I’ve often thought if I generated energy I could use to power lights or a fan, I would realize how much energy my cushy life requires. When I burn my 600 calories a day pedaling, I can measure that against the calories I consume eating. And I think about the huge expenditure of energy required by my fellow humans in the global south mostly to harvest the food I consume in a few minutes. Plant beings surrender their bodies and humans labor for hours so that I get to eat fresh fruits and vegetables without breaking a sweat. That equation is painfully indicative that the balance of energy expended is off.
Wow, this deeply resonates and explains why my mental health is always saved by 6 hours of manual labor in the garden. Thank you for the most excellent insight. I feel so sad that we’ve conflated “leisure” with “inactivity.” The two are very much not the same.
This short musing on black masked weaver-style "intentional wastefulness" in humans — from potlatches to cathedrals to sand mandalas — agrees that it's only the fossil fueled societies that forgot its importance:
https://leanlogic.online/intentional-waste/
Ironically, the culture that has at its disposal the greatest energy surplus ever seen is the one that has become obsessed with efficiency and storing up ever greater surplus — what Bataille apparently called "the accursed share"; the share that inevitably leads to crash.
Instead, yes, let us choose labour-intensive, inefficient methods that bring back beauty, craft, sweat, exhilaration and satisfaction! There's a manifesto I can get behind, and the reason I don't have time for social media :)
I think labour is literally what allows us to grow as beings. To love is also to labour, if we are doing it right, I think. To be present is to labour. A life that doesn’t allow us to toil as our animal selves in a way that is aligned with our physical capacities cannot be a life of ‘privilege’ and seeking it cannot be a healthy goal
Nah, not with you on this one. It's perfectly healthy to live lives with more leisure. The problem is that under capitalism advanced understandings of psychology and biochemistry have been weaponised to capture us and make us consume far more than is healthy or natural. Unnaturally addictive combinations of sugars, salts, and fats in food, and dopamine gaming click bait ads on our phones, all while keeping us in a state of moderate but never ending stress through mostly unnecessary work under threat of destitution if we lose our jobs, because we've been separated by individualism from the security of community support.
I totally agree with this. It's more complex than just being tired. On the flip side, Veritasium also supports the idea of spending more energy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xS68sl2D70
♾️🌏♾️
Elegant.
Just think of the benefits of public transportation combined with real pedestrian Thoroughfares reclaimed from cars. Ubiquitous from rural to urban.Designed And Managed with the intent of actually making it a desirable.
It might actually instill a certain pride of place and appreciation of the whole Earth.
There’s labor, there’s work, and there’s action. You may enjoy this artistic/philosophical reflection, with knods to Arendt: https://open.substack.com/pub/contentcarrier/p/dig-2012
Rachel, I think you're on to something! Thanks for this interesting angle.
Thank you Rachel. This really resonated. I believe also that this separation between consumption and expenditure could also be written into a separation of the energy (money) as it leaves a transaction and enters a new three phase transactional system. The entire creation of money bit would not be related to borrowing as it is now, but to relational money creation, dependant on real connection with people (staying under one roof, providing shelter, taking 4 hours digging potatoes etc…, doing a morning in education):
1) a new reserve for a new common currency(similar to VAT)
2) the value added bit (like the surplus energy feeding the reserves to mean that the reserve value ALWAYS rises)
3) the exchange of labour or Basic Income in cash.
Anyway, your writing is good. This one is really good. Grateful for your insight today.
To add even more nuance to this, our kids have been increasingly infected with various strains of Covid-19 since global governments decided that we are no longer in a pandemic (even though in actuality we are), we merely passed the emergency phase. Still we have no clean air in classrooms, or proper mitigations in place in public spaces and hospitals.
Doing more leisurely activities and working more are not mutually exclusive. I am at a stage in my life where I seek new activities to learn and many activities I enjoy take a significant amount of energy.
You are probably onto something, but maybe just scratching the surface.
I'll keep scratching!
@J. Thomas Dunn Do you follow Rachel?
Yes I'm subscribed. 👍
Anyone familiar with the work of Georges Bataille, a French 20th C. thinker, friend of the Surrealists, the existentialists and many modern artists? He developed an economic theory around the idea that organisms have an excess of energy available to them. Mainstream economics is based on ideas of scarcity as baseline. Bataille was not convinced. He posited that this surplus energy, more than was necessary to maintain life, was the source of behaviors like those of the bird building and destroying multiple nests. In human beings it led to expenditure on useless luxury, building on a monumental scale, and wastage of lives and treasure in warfare. He also argued that this excess could be put to positive uses if we only had a mind to do it. This is a very short summary of a body of ideas Bataille worked out in 3 volumes he entitled The Accursed Share. Accursed because the surplus almost always was used to our detriment--he was French, he was Catholic (likely lapsed, but still...), so guilt and angst go with the territory. An interesting attempt to rethink the Dismal Science nonetheless.
Certainly WW1 would not have looked like it was if industrial scale production hadnt been possible... ie energy sources to melt steel and build millions and millions of shells. Steel afterall is one fundamental building block of our society. Previous wars like Napoleon era were relatively smaller (100thousand men army is magnitude smaller than 3million or more in nazi germany at peak time or way over that combined in allied side).
Now we have had multiple cycles since 1960s in west everywhere same construction boom bust cycle... money flowing to building creates building boom. Then money runs out and lot of unfinished/unsold, not in use buildings stand empty. This reminds of that bird next example. It has been known over 100 years now this is how economy works. Nobody seems to have gotten wiser in this respect. The more "efficient" economy we get, the bigger problem this becomes. People are supposed to buy every year luxury handbag and new iphone or economy supposedly dies and that is bad.
Classical Chinese Medicine and taiji have a lot to offer here for practices and approaches to Qi/Energy and how it relates to planetary and human health. You are spot on through this lense. Western ways create stagnation of energy which directly cause dis-ease and disease.
And if anything to do with Covid has had an effect on kid's concentrations, it's not the few months they had to spend doing classes via zoom, it's the repeated infections by a virus that can cause long-term brain fog. I used to be an avid reader and now I'm damn near functionally illiterate most of the time due to long covid fatigue severely limiting my concentration capacity.