first, let’s acknowledge a certain level of desperation in your writing to an online newspaper columnist of no particular accomplishment for advice on this matter.
second, let’s acknowledge that you are not alone in these concerns, and that, for proper solutionizing, we should recognize that this is a structural problem, not a personal problem.
you are in a contextual pickle. the institutions of the western modern world are kaput, you don’t need an advanced degree to understand this, just look around. use any language that you like: they are obsolete, ineffective, remaindered. they are still standing, and like you, their participants still show up for work, tant pis.
you may recall the children’s story about the origins of the transformational horizon of modernity out of what habermas called the precipitating events of the renaissance, the reformation, and the circumnavigation of the globe. the renaissance gave us the scientific method, the reformation articulated a new relationship between the individual and his overarching institutions, the king and the church, and the circumnavigation made the world finite and available for material transformation in an unprecedented way.
over my generation, the human population of the globe doubled, and its patterns of consumption triggered a sixth great extinction. it would be unnatural not to be sad about that.
we are now living inside a transformational horizon into a postmodern world. the forward models of climate impacts generated by the IPCC are severely underspecified and consequently underestimated, their timeframes for accelerating impacts have no basis in reality. they have acknowledged this, in their own way, on page 26 of their most recent summary for policymakers:
Additional ecosystem responses to warming not yet fully included in climate models, such as CO2 and CH4 fluxes from wetlands, permafrost thaw and wildfires, would further increase concentrations of these gases in the atmosphere (high confidence).
if you were my daughter, i would suggest you start with a thought problem: what would a circular economy look like in the west, and how could it be accomplished?
the chinese have publicly articulated the goal of building a circular economy for several decades, and as a step towards that goal, have lifted upwards of 500 million people out of what the world bank used to call abject poverty.
the comprehensive institutional collapse in the west has put us, contextually, very close to what mussolini called corporate totalitarianism. absent a certain inventiveness in your generation, your kid has no future at all in the modern sense of the word.
our goose is warming up, but it’s not cooked yet. if you want to do something with your life other than run out the clock, you need to use social networks and distributed technologies in ways that your remaindered institutions, exactly like the king and church of the middle ages, can’t possibly imagine.
in ‘the age of revolution’ hobsbawm used a network analytic approach to describing the takeoff point of the industrial revolution in england. many small shop manufacturers entertained the same anticipatory worldview of manufacturing at scale without initially being connected at all. when they individually put their visions into practice, and saw others doing the same, they instantly formed mutual benefit associations and the rest, as they say, is history.
if you allow yourself to be distracted and depressed by the end of empire in the west, you have no chance to use the unprecedented networking and technological resources at your disposal. if you leave the solutionizing to your overlords, you are sealing your own fate, and the fate of the earth.
householder zen 