The Daily: 26 January 2024

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My sons tell me to ignore the comments when these essays get posted on other websites. Never, never read the comments. Never engage with the comments. Do not even look at the comments.

I read the comments…

In my defense, I was looking for an image credit. The picture adorning the top of the essay — a craggy mountaintop with something like three-leafed sumac and piñon pine overlooking an arid river valley — was so much like my image of home, it gave me vertiginous homesickness for a few seconds, my brain yelling “HOME! HOME! HOME! HOME! I WANT TO BE THERE!”. I had to go find where this picture originated.

Usually, image credits are down at the bottom of the page, right above the comments. But this time, no image credit…

There were, however, already four comments, which I thought odd enough to make me scroll down and see what was up. Turns out it was just one short conversation. I did not read the initial one at first, but my eyes caught on the response which was something like “why do you hate farming?”, on an article that was nothing about farming. So I glanced up at the first one. Unfortunately, I read very fast and in that glance I took in the whole thing — a diatribe against doing work for your own body and against admitting that we all live in interdependent community.

Clearly someone who should not be reading my writing.

My immediate reaction was to go Millennial and declare “sounds like a you-problem” and move on. But I’m not a Millennial. I chew on things. And by this morning even that label — “you-problem” — was irritating. There are no you-problems. This whole biophysical collapse is precisely because there are no you-problems in isolation. On a planet of interdependency, every you-problem is a problem for multitudes. You is not a thing.

An organism that depends upon many other beings for sustenance, for water, for air, for shelter, even for digestion, never acts in isolation. Every act is done in community, done to community. Every problem generated by a you-oriented organism — that is, a selfish and self-centered organism — is a problem for the whole community. This is why collapse of self-oriented societies always happens. Selfishness is maladaptive in the long term, sometimes even in the short term. Acting as if you are a self, with no recourse or responsibility to all the being-states that feed into you, is anti-ecological. It is an evolutionary dead end. It is a being dead end. And that ending takes down multitudes, spreading harm in radiating waves of misery.

Which was the whole point of the article I had written…

I suppose I might have left a response on the website that generated the comment. But first: “never read the comments”… However, more importantly, I don’t want to engage with strangers who have no clear grasp of this basic reality of a self-less world. That would just be an unproductive shouting match with what I feel is irrational opinion that is well behind where I am in thinking. I’m not going to have any positive influence on someone who can’t see that they are a community embedded in a wider community. I just don’t need that conversation in my life. (I do encourage that person to go read — extensively, on all topics, and largely books written from other than an elite white male perspective — and then objectively analyze just how each you-body’s needs are met.)

So I did not comment there and chose to comment here instead — because I’m spineless and prefer preaching to the choir. But also, I don’t want that completely unnecessary stress in my life. Does nobody any good. However, writing about it does do good for me. It’s a helpful release and allows me to analyze my own thoughts. And there were swirling thoughts…

The other part of that comment thread, the one that generated three of the four comments, was against farming — a common response to my writing, apparently even when I am not writing about farming. The core argument was that the first person did not want to farm, did not like farming, thought it was too much hard work in the heat of summer. All I can do when butting up against this level of myopic self-absorption is splutter.

“Who the hell do you think you are!” (With my grandmother’s accent coloring the words…)

If you are not producing your body’s needs, then some body is being forced to do your labor as well as trying — usually with less success — to meet their own needs. When you do not farm, someone else is forced to do that work in your stead. So again… who the hell do you think you are?

I’ve said this before, in response to exactly this sort of “I don’ wanna” whiny laziness: We are living in the failed results of millions of people deciding that they don’t want to do the work. This planet is no longer able to bear the weight of millions of human bodies forcing labor and resource extraction out of billions of human bodies along with an untold mass of non-human being states. Just because those enforcers don’t want to do the work that supports their own existence. This is the very essence of the you-problem that is bringing this planet to the brink of annihilation.

In a healthy ecological balance, you get to do the work that feeds and clothes and shelters your body. And just your body — so that your “needs” are only the needs of your body and your body is not taking more and more and more want from this planet. You get to produce your own food. You get to produce much of what you need for bodily protection. You get to interact with all the bodies around you, in a circle of reciprocity and inter-being, all of which is the labor of life. And you do NOT get to force other beings to spoon feed your lazy ass.

Yes, farming is hot and nasty work sometimes. Baling hay sucks… but much of the labor that we associate with farming is NOT done to feed or clothe anyone. It is done to extract profit. Much of the output of extractive farming does not even get beyond a grain silo. It rots where it is dumped while futures are traded — until that future harvest is succeeded by the present and the round of extractive labor begins again. This is not work done for bodies. Massive harvests are never work done for bodies. Bodies are small and do not need massive harvests. It is work done for money.

Farming for food and other needs is body-scaled and not terribly onerous. There are days when you have to plant seeds and pull weeds and process the whole thing. Some of those days are exhausting, hot and sweaty. Most days are fairly light and can be done in a matter of hours. This is the labor that most societies in the world put into taking care of their bodies. A few hours a day, only some of which are tedious and hard.

In most climates where farming is necessary — those that don’t organically produce food year-round — there are many months where there is no work at all. Oh, there will be cooking and dish washing, there may be tool sharpening and weaving. But there is no farming labor during the entire four to six months of the cold or dry season. Winter is for rest. And not just for human bodies. For all bodies in the short-day climates. Without that rest in the long nights of darkness, all bodies suffer. You are doing more work and more unnecessary work and more onerous and damaging work by not farming for your own needs. You are spreading your you-problems all over the globe, and putting your own body and billions of others under more stress and hard labor so you can avoid doing some of the work of tending to your own body. You are making yourself and everybody else work harder to accommodate your laziness. When you could just do the bloody dishes and be done with it in a matter of minutes!

How stupid can you be!

We’re very good at stupid in this culture.

OK, I know… don’t read the comments… this is exactly what happens… I know this…

So I will stop there. I never intended to write anything today, anyway. It’s my birthday, dammit… See what engaging with idiocy does… Well, at least I know my blood pressure medicine is working.

Cheers!

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©Elizabeth Anker 2024