What about “it?”
Just how far from the rhythms and importance of the natural world we’ve become.
Let me know if this sounds familiar…
That classic iPhone alarm sound jarring you awake. You hit snooze. 9 minutes later you hit snooze again. Tired, you think. Could have gone to bed an hour earlier if you didn’t get sucked into another Tik Tok/Instagram/YouTube rabbit hole. Man, time flys when you’re scrolling you think to yourself.
Before getting up, a quick glance at iMessages, Mail, Insta, Tik Tok, you’re calendar, Slack, ESPN, you name it.
The bed is warm. The house is cozy. The shower water hits your body and it’s warm — it’s always warm.
Time to get the kids to school.
Time to let the dog out.
Time to get to work.
Maybe a hurried breakfast, maybe a stop at the local coffee shop or a Starbucks drive through.
Hop in the car. There’s gas in the tank.
Rush to catch the train.
Zoom to school.
Zoom to work.
Zoom to school then work.
Kids have their backpacks and shoes and warm jackets and water bottles and stickers and wipes and on and on it goes.
You’ve got your Airpods, your iPhone, your laptop, your laptop charger, your mouse, your notebook, your nice bag/laptop bag/backpack.
Park, hustle into school/the office/hustle into school to then hustle into the office. Check a few more Apple Watch/iPhone notifications. Look up. Realize you don’t even remember walk/driving those last few blocks.
Heck, maybe you even work remotely! And your morning commute consists of this:
Sit. Begin work.
The lights are on, the office is cozy — not too hot, not too cold. There’s clean water and hot coffee.
Ok Maybe some more coffee. Tired. Freaking Tik Tok sucked me in again… you think to yourself.
But definitely screens.
Your work is indoors, comfortable, relaxed, allows you to sit. Not sweat it out in the heat lifting heavy equipment.
The coworkers talk about the latest Netflix show. “Have you seen it? Omg yes. Love it.” Or The Sports Games from the weekend. “Could you believe they pulled it off? How much did you bet on it?”
More screens. More alerts.
A quick bite to eat.
Notifications from school, social media, email, work, friends, family, the nanny, the home camera picked up something in the backyard that’s not normally there at this time its probably definitely that intruder you’ve been worried about.
Shit, you text your partner we forgot ____ (enter kids name) water bottle. They’ll be ok… we think. 5 hours without a giant stainless steel water bottle is treacherous for these western kids these days.
Some more screens. A lot of beeps and pings.
For sure some Zooming (different kind of Zoom) and Google Meeting. And if you’re really lucky, in person meetings!
Maybe your work is really earth saving / important stuff! Perhaps, like most, it is not… despite what your company HR team tells you.
Time to zoom to school pick up or to beat/sit/miss traffic on the way home.
Home. Tired.
Eat, get kids ready/get self ready for bed.
Climb in bed. Turn lights off (of course they turned off). Of course the bed is warm, nice and cozy.
Get on phone. Check things.
Fall asleep 1–2 hours later than anticipated. Damnit tik tok you got me again!
That classic iPhone alarm sound jarring you awake. You hit snooze. 9 minutes later you hit snooze again….
Rinse and Repeat
It’s not your fault.
It’s the world / systems / tools / way of life we’ve made for ourselves, stacked brick by brick, generation by generation, one little thing at a time, one major “breakthrough” after the next. You don’t feel the interconnectedness of it all, but there it is.
But there is a very subtle (becoming not so subtle) loss in all of this.
The loss of our connection to the natural world, the earth, the very thing that sustains us all.
A lack of understanding, of appreciation, of empathy, of guilt, of sorrow.
Now I’m not advocating you go live in a yurt and spend 4 hours doing zen garden goat yoga before doing anything.
BUT, in that all-too-real example of the day to day, what gets lost?
Our appreciation for the natural world. Bit by bit, moment by moment, screen by screen, notification by notification, we further distance ourselves from the natural world.
When you never see how the sauce is made, you not only take the sauce for granted, you eventually just expect the sauce to be there… and in the process are undermining the very systems that make the sauce until one day the sauce is no longer on the shelf and you’re too goddamn late… or something like that.
We further take clean air, the trees, clean water, more and more for granted (in particular those of us in the west for sure).
We forget someone had to harvest the soil, water the food, cultivate it, grow it, package it, ship it, shelve it, sell it.
We take for granted the energy used to heat our homes, warm our water, and fill up our cars. If your a bit aware, maybe you even know what kind of energy all this takes…. odds are, probably not.
Perhaps your morning routine looks a bit different or is a bit calmer. Maybe it’s even worse than I described.
But the reality is this is the world we have created for ourselves.
The problem is, the world has changed. Mother Nature is angry. We are only beginning to feel the effects of climate change, but the disruption to our daily state of being is coming.
It doesn’t matter you tell yourself. “I’ll be long dead before any of this matters” or “its just hysteria” you comfort yourself with.
But I’m not even the messenger. Having been in the sustainability / climate space for the last 15 years, something very recently has in fact changed: the experts, the climate scientists are sounding every alarm bell they have. Not me, them.
And until we find a way to peel ourselves away from hyper-connected disconnected world we all live in, and slow down enough to not only appreciate mother nature and all she’s given to us but to dedicate ourselves to working to fix this mess, I’m afraid we may be in for a world of hurt.
The good news for now is, you’re not alone. https://www.getclimb.org
Zach
