Nothing Ever Ends

Sometimes it’s hard to talk to each other these days. It’s just never long until we all get to the fear or the loathing or both, like the whole world’s problems tag along to every coffee, every glance at a face to see if it’s familiar. These days abstract doom floats around like the Holy Spirit, visiting large enough conversations to remind us all that we are living in some kind of ignoble end times, where we have drawn ourselves into so much cynical corruption that the Devil himself has given up and gone home.

I have noticed that there’s a dark thing hanging over me, corroding my sense of hope like an acid in the air. You probably know it, you probably have your own name for it. We all joke about living in the end times these days, but it’s a joke wrapped around the pain of existing in this world we regret building for ourselves. We want to talk about it but don’t know how to step out of the protective coat of cynicism.

A friend wished me a Happy New Years saying, “Unsure how much sense it makes to say happy if we already know it’s gonna suck.” I read this and sighed. I hate where we are right now. I’ve battled with depression all my life, and sometimes it feels like it leaked out of me and poisoned the whole world.

I feel like a flawed vessel. I have so much to do, so much to say, even things that might help, but it all flows out from the cracks in my self and is lost. I end up paralyzed, angry, and most of all, disappointed. In my work I’m disappointed, in my species, in our little flawed orb, wobbling along its course around the sun. Disappointment holds the stars up in our skies, too far away to be reached. As I get older the endless media doom and my own intractable problems don’t excite the same fear and despair they once did; they have ossified with age, quieter, but harder.

The internet was supposed to fix a lot of these things, let us do better and more than we’d ever done before. But it turned out we also could finally see each other, and we lost our damn minds. The internet did amplify our ideas, but a lot of them weren’t very good ideas.

My daughter, who featured prominently in the first two versions of this essay, has gone off into this world now, to deal with problems of her own. I see her struggling as I’ve struggled, white knuckling her way through university with the the gray slate determination required by the modern world — all while wondering if there’s any future at all. When we talk, I see my worries in her worries; school is hard, the systems she’s dealing with are broken. She’s trying to learn, but often the process gets in the way of the education itself. She’s frustrated, I’m frustrated, everyone seems to be. She’s trying to concentrate, but everything is broken.

Our technology has turned a vague online omniscience into a constant sense of futile hopelessness. We all know what’s happening, but our knowledge is useless. I know children are dying, children I would love if they were near me, and like an pathetic lesser god I can only watch it happen, defeated by my omni-impotence.

This age, or perhaps end of an age, comes with a deep malaise which I suspect is increasingly universal. It binds me to my enemies and the people who have learned to hate me without knowing me, as I have been taught to hate them. We lack a civil inattention for each other, and pay each other either no care at all, or horrifically uncivil attention.

We’re all trapped in a broken world, breaking it more because we can’t stand working together long enough to fix it. It all feels too much for mere humans to fix, and I feel so mere.

But when it gets too scary, too much, too depressing, I have a trick. I learned it on airplanes, which are uncomfortable and luxurious, boring and terrifying, all at once. When everything is just overwhelming, and I’m scared and cramped and feel like I can’t do this anymore, I look out the closest little portal to the sky and whisper to myself:

I have seen the tops of clouds.

Because I have. I have gone so high that I looked down and saw so many clouds that the whole world was hidden below them. I have looked down on the place where we once presumed Heaven dwelled with angels and God and saw it break apart and reveal cities that stretched out to the edge –the very edge!– of my perception. I have seen the curved Earth fall away from me. Glaciers have bloomed from the sea below the edge of my little window. I have even the trails of air currents dancing along titanium wingtips.

What we can see now, what we can know!

I have seen the surface of our moon, mountains on Mars, and close ups of the rings of Saturn. I sat with my species as we waited with refreshing browsers, and saw the unexpected heart on Pluto. I have watched, holding my breath, a robot child of humanity touch the outer edges of the sun. Just because we wanted to, just because we could learn something more about our collective home that way.

I have seen people brought back from the brink of death by medicine that comes from our desire to know, to help, and to defy fate. And then, I was brought back from the brink of death, too. I habitually run my hands along my neck, where they cut me open, changed me, and gave me another chance at this all-too-complex life.

This uncomfortable near future we are living in is multifarious. People will survive cancer, deaths from tuberculosis will fall, guinea worm is almost gone. Hunger will cause useless stupid deaths for so many infinitely complex conscious humans, but vaccines and building codes and phones will not only save countless more, but give them lives full of wonders their ancestors could never have imagined. Many of them will struggle every day, and many of them will invent new worlds for the rest of us, and some of them will do both.

We will be buffeted with wonders in these years, and distracted from them by the pain of others, as well we should be. This has already begun, and we struggle with it, as we should. We will get bored of pictures of the deep universe. We will forget about them, then rediscover them and their beauty and depth will catch in our throats. This will happen thousands of times, but never be counted.

People will be born, people who never had a chance to be before we learned how to take care of each other this much. We will fight to keep nature alive, and sometimes we will win. Other times, nature in its endless creativity will adapt and surprise us, reminding humanity that we are not alone, but surrounded by the most tenacious of life. It is life that will go on with or without us, in riotous color and sound and chemistry.

We are in terrible trouble, but we’re in that trouble because we dug up the grave of the Carboniferous trees and used their bodies to build cities and fill the skies and seas and land with ourselves and our strange inventions. We built a civilization and tamed rivers and eventually left the earth, and when we looked back, we fell in love with it like no creature ever had before us.

We used the Carboniferous to feed and shelter each other, and all over the world we broke down the barriers of time and space and mixed and danced and fought and loved each other.

We built rockets, and instead of just endlessly killing each other with them, we learned to turn them towards the stars and shoot telescopes in the endless black. We found the baby picture of the whole damn universe in the cosmic background radiation, and we still didn’t stop looking for more things to understand about our endless home. My partner and I watched the James Webb launch, and I cried. We looked out at other worlds and saw their weather, and made pictures that felt like you could reach out and poke their clouds.

We don’t know how to control what we’ve done with our energy, we don’t know if we did right, we’re nervous and scared and fighting amongst ourselves because we have a whole world to manage and no one to teach us how. We are all venal and loving and confused and not sure what we’re supposed to make of this endless universe pressing in on our little planet from every direction. It feels hard to be human, because it is hard to be human.

In every age we build a new civilization and new ways of being us, and we’re always winging it. We’re always trying, hoping, and longing to be something more than we were yesterday. Fighting and loving and screaming and falling silent, but never so silent as the universe around us. We are such creatures, hyperactively changing everything we touch. And always looking for more things to touch.

We are so radio noisy we can light up a solar system at night. We are life, a conscious tip of the universe gazing in awe (and confusion) at itself. We left our oceanic womb, climbed the trees, and kept going so high that we saw the tops of clouds, and we’re not done climbing yet.

Every week, when she’s done with her work, or it’s done with her, my daughter gets into a video call with old friends who are thousand of miles away. In the monitor light they talk and laugh and roll dice playing D&D, reconnected through cables humans laid past continents and oceans. They dream in unison, no longer so distant. When I see her laughing, when she tells me stories from her adventure, I’m glad for what we built, and how much we use it to have fun, and laugh, and love each other. We take care of each other over distances our ancestors couldn’t have contemplated.

None of this made us perfect, nothing we’ve done made it any easier to be human on this wonderfully strange little rock flying through the galaxy in solar spirals. But it’s good that we’re here, that we care, that we look, that we try to learn to live with each other.

We have seen the tops of clouds on other worlds.

It is Halloween. My daughter is laying out the flowers and the pictures of her dead ancestors and loved ones on our family altar: a cacophony of colors, candles and skulls, flowers and mementos of death and love. Above it hangs a ornament shaped like bejeweled woman’s skull, a long blue scarf flowing from behind her down to encompass it all — more than a century of lives that end with us, with my small family.

Tomorrow is the beginning of Dia de los Muertos, and we will be adding nourishment for our beloved dead, some of their favorites in life. Glasses of wine and fruits, chocolate, and the bread of the dead. Little bits of their favorites, as best we can give them. We will light copal and candles, and talk about them and their lives, and telling stories and jokes to each other about and with our dead loved ones.

My daughter doesn’t remember a time without Dia de los Muertos. It is her favorite season of holidays, Halloween, followed by this day for building an altar to our loved ones and ancestors. For me it came later, though growing up in Los Angeles it was never far away. We gringos invaded and took Alta Mexico, but it never entirely stopped being Alta Mexico. Political boundaries can only tell people what to do with themselves so much. In California the rulers have changed completely, the people somewhat, but the names have remained the same.

The dead are dead, but they are never entirely gone.

El Dia de los Meurtos is no one thing. Its syncretism spans continents and millennia, colonialism, genocide, and the internal imperialisms of Europe, which eventually became the external imperialisms of Europe. It is also an inevitable holiday for humans, creatures of memory that we have evolved to be. The reaching out to touch those who are lost, and the lost reaching back from behing the veil to touch those they’ve left is the most natural urge for a memory-stricken species. But this holiday and its ceremony has the kind of exuberant color and joy that is mainly allowed to peasants. The Day of the Dead is a holiday for the lower classes, the poor without the proper education (or proper church manners) to know that they’re suppose to stay quietly respectful of the dead instead of partying with them.

Religions and their holidays always deal in mysteries of separation. For the Aztecs of meso-America, there were several such festivals around the separation between life and death, which they probably picked up from the Maya. The Maya, who still live across the Americas today, had their own pre-aztec empire for more than a thousand years, and elaborate customs interfacing between the living and the dead. We mostly guess at them from the art their empire left behind, and what bits of their literary traditions survived the library-burning habits of the Spanish Conquistadors.

But the sacred is hard to kill, and in times of burning it is often hidden in the homes and hearts of peasants. Which is not to say kings and churches don’t try, politics has many ways of co-opting both love and death. But their power rarely extend to the periphery of their empires, and that’s where the raucous and plentiful love of the dead flowered in Mexico. One of the peripheries of Mexico is the southwestern states of the US, where poor Mexicans came looking for work in the fields and houses of the whites, and they brought Dia de los Muertos with them. This is why San Francisco had a Day of the Dead parade 30 years before Mexico City did. In fact, Mexico City only started honoring this macabre peasant party after an ersatz version appeared in the James Bond franchise film Spectre in 2015.

The day itself emerges from a collision of faiths and traditions. It is a perfect post colonial/post genocide holiday, blending the history of several cultures and continents, created by, but living outside, the purview of historical powers. It is syncretic, bloody, tragic, and breathtakingly beautiful.

The first part of the story probably belongs in Ireland. Since the prehistoric, the celtic holiday of Samhain was a bridge between the two parts of the year, going from light and life and birth of the spring Beltane to darkness, death, and decay of the winter. Samhain was also one of the days when the barriers between worlds was thin. The dead, the fey and the gods were close by, so close you might see them, touch them. Visit them at a burial mound, perhaps even share food with them.

In the 9th century the Catholic Church moved the Feast of All Saints to coincide with Samhain at the direction of Pope Gregory IV, fixing the holiday that comes down to us now. Reasonable scholars debate whether All Souls’ and All Saints’ Day was meant to distract the barely Christianized Northerners from the pagan celebration of Samhain, but it would not be out of character. Samhain did blend with All Saint’s, but didn’t really go away. It not only stayed alive in peasant traditions through much of the history of British and Irish practices, it morphed into Halloween, which conquered the world, largely though American media depictions. Americans love Halloween.

It’s in our blood, wherever our blood may come from.

By the 14th century, the mixing of Catholic and maybe a little pagan saw the Spanish feeding bread to their dead and lighting candles to guide them them home as part of All Saints and All Souls Days in Spain, November 1 & 2. The Aztecs, the founders of Tenochtitlan, which came to be called Mexico City, had days which honored the dead, in ways that made them feel present to their living families. Half a world away, the not-yet American people gave corn to their dead in blissfully not-yet America, where it was not a peasant holiday at all, but a kingly one, and it was not in November, which also did not exist for them yet. Feasting with the dead happened several times a year.

They didn’t know it, but the cultures were on a collision course that would destroy both and reshape the whole world. It would also give the humanity many more dead to mourn, so it is no surprise that that people in the new world secretly kept their loving practices towards their dead over centuries. They kept their corn gifts and meso-american skulls, but made them out of slave’s sugar. They added wheat bread to their corn tortillas and pork to their offered meals. They evolved far away from the gaze of the Mexican state, behind the opaque vail of poverty that hides the real life of the ordinary people from the scions of the powerful. Dia de Los Muertos is not the same holiday it was when the Aztecs ruled, or when the Spanish did. It retreated into the valleys and the villages. As the years flowed by it picked up bright dyes from around the world, new foods, candles, and intoxicants from everywhere. It became terribly beautiful.

And then, when the time was right, it came back down from the hills and out of the valleys and conquered the world back. Dia de los Muertos doesn’t feel centuries old. It is a new holiday, but also it is the inevitable consequence of our old colonial histories combined with the human love for the lost. It isn’t a celebration of kings or gods, but of the modest beings that exist everywhere, who are the whole world to each other.

Back in this my family’s part of the world a day has passed. It’s November 1st, and it’s time. We will light the candles and incense soon, sit before our altar and wrap up in some blankets. The night has gone cold and there’s a storm coming in. But we will not be alone. We will be sharing a meal with our family and our lost friends and lovers. We will keep each other warm and the smoke and candles will guide the dead back to our light and love.

This is the draft of what was meant to be my first post with a publication that I ended up not working for. I didn’t get a chance to send it to my editor before I was let go, but I have decided to publish it and other pieces that never saw the light of day. This is the first of these publications.

The internet makes us telepathic, angry, and weird. To cope with this we need to learn the math behind how it does that, and we can start with the view count of a few music videos on YouTube.

In 2011 Katy Perry released Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.). Last Friday night was a successful pop song with a video that paid homage to John Hughes movies and teenage life. Last Friday Night was a global success and it has been viewed over a billion times on YouTube. In 2012, a parody of Last Friday night was created by fans of the open world-style video game Minecraft. Called Don’t Mine at Night, the song’s video featured 3D-animated Minecraft characters singing and dancing about the in-game danger of being killed by a monster if you mine during the night. A year later in 2013, fans of Minecraft and the Hasbro animated show My Little Pony (Which has a surprisingly large adult fanbase) created another parody of the last parody also called Don’t Mine at Night, turning the admonition in the Mincraft song into a sweet love song from one fan-created character to a regular character from the show. All that is a typical internet rabbit hole, but here’s the important part: as of this writing, Don’t Mine at Night (Pony Parody) has been viewed 54 million times. (2023) That’s more watches than there are people in Spain. It’s catchy, and well animated, but the amount of insider knowledge required to understand this video should be too much. One might reasonably ask how millions of people could be enthusiastic fans of a simplistically rendered open world game, an animated pony show intended for pre-teen girls, and Katy Perry. The story of that song is amusing enough, but the wider phenomenon that Don’t Mine at Night (Pony Parody) reflects has crept largely unnoticed into global politics and culture. You see it in the rise of European fascism, and the American Alt-Right. It’s there in the #metoo movement and the Tunisian Arab Spring. It’s part of statistical mathematics, where it has a name: The Law of Truly Large Numbers.

In statistics, the Law of Large numbers tells us the outliers tend to revert to the mean. In plain language, this means that over time, things average out. Large numbers is why you’re probably never going to win the lottery — generally we all live at the mean the majority of the time, by definition. But when those numbers get large enough, Truly Large, you will be able to find just about any possible outlier, which is why a woman named Joan Ginther won million-dollar amounts in lotteries four times. There isn’t really a secret or mysterious force here. The math says that most people who play in lotteries will lose, and sometimes an outlier will win multiple times. That’s just the natures of Large Numbers, versus Truly Large Numbers.

Most internet-fueled popular movements, be they good or bad, arose from the same effect of large numbers: in 7.6 billion people, (8 billion in 2023) more people agree with you than you can possibly know in your lifetime. According to the anthropologist Robin Dunbar, a person can only probably know about 150 people in their lifetime, in any emotionally or intellectually significant way. Some people think that number is a bit higher or lower, and it probably depends on the person, but no one who studies social network and human relationships argues about the order of magnitude on how many people a single person can really know. This is trivially true for anyone — you know very well that your 5,000 Facebook friends are not friends in any way that involves deep knowledge and investments of time and energy. There’s just not enough hours in the day, or days in a lifetime.

If you hold a one-in-a-million opinion, there’s 7,600 people who are right there with you. In a species capable of maybe a couple hundred meaningful relationships, 7,600 might as well be 76 thousand, or 76 million. It’s like standing in the middle of a crowd of 1,000 or 100,000 – it feels the same from when you’re there, surrounded by the press of bodies on all side.

None of this is new, it’s been part of the human condition since we left small tribes behind for civilization. What is new is the network effects of discoverability, recruitment, and community, built around subcultures and minority opinion which you could have never found before the internet came around. Understanding this not only explains the breakdown of consensus reality, but helps you choose and check your realities more reliably.

Directories, search engines, social media algorithms, and indexes are mechanisms for defeating the Law of Large Numbers, which says in a huge internet you will never find the thing that’s relevant to you — the thing you want. But they manage it by thrusting you into the realm of Truly Large Numbers, where you can be, and often are, surrounded entirely by outliers. A google search results chooses from billions of options to ten on the first page, hiding the enormous world of variations, counter-factuals, and the diversity of thought that didn’t make that first page cut. Google’s job is to make sure you win the information lottery on every search, and never know how unlikely it was.

If you’ve been told all your life that the Earth was a globe, but it just has never felt round to you, that thought was not likely to go anywhere before the Information Age. Talking about it in your local community was likely to lead to social isolation, and without support from a friend, there’s not much in the world to confirm it. These ideas come up in people’s minds all the time, but without reinforcement, they tend to fade away in favor of social consensus. That changed with the internet, for both good and ill. In the age of global forums and search engines and social media, a quiet inquiry from your own home, with no risk of getting ridiculed by friends or family, could put you in touch with more people who feel like you do than you could imagine meeting in dozen lifetimes. Not only is that feeling reinforced, but it’s celebrated in new friendships. Suddenly you’ve gone from someone with a few doubts about the roundness of our collective home to someone who is invested. You will lose friends and community if you start to suspect the data points to the Earth being round after all. You may come to think that the revolution that will bring NASA down could begin any day, because there are so many people like you. You may even find others and recruit them to the cause, now more emotional than practical for you. And all this can happen without anyone involved realizing that the way large numbers work, so unintuitive to the human mind, means everyone you know or could ever know are no more than drops, drowned in a sea of people.

You can take that same concept, and apply all its parts to sexual assault against women in the workplace instead of science denial. Add a hashtag — #metoo — and maybe you discover that enough of the drops in the sea of people are with you that you can expose a world of hidden abuse. With that exposure, just maybe the tides of culture start to shift, even if just a little. But from any particular point on a network of billions, it’s impossible to predict with any precision how far and how fast ideas will go, or sometimes even if a community people are being drawn to is righteous or not. For most people, being accepted is more important than the righteousness anyway. We want to be friends, not saints.

The network discoverability that traps us in strange idea bubbles, due to the effects of Truly Large Numbers, is something we’re going to need to educate against, consider with policy, and perhaps even address within our networks. There is no one answer, because the network itself sorts without knowing what is weird. Flat earthers or lizard people conspiracists don’t look any different to computer-mediated discovery systems trying to match people with communities than bone cancer researchers or urban hydrologists. They’re all niche, and that’s the main thing the network “knows” about them. The infrastructure doesn’t editorialize, and we don’t want it to.

We remain social creatures who evolved and developed culture without an internet messing with our mathematical and social intuitions. But we have an internet now, and we need to develop new intuitions through mathematical and internet literacy education. The internet is made of people and their ideas, and it doesn’t get better until those ideas get better.

It’s January, and we’re building our baseline for our four tonne year. That means we’re looking at behaviors, what resources we’re using or planning to use, how we’ll modify our lifestyle, or mitigate our impact. It’s great to start with numbers, and for most people looking at their ecological footprint that means using carbon calculators. There are a lot of carbon calculators.

You can spend a lot of time looking at carbon calculators, and if you do, they start to look a little suspicious.

We moved to France six months ago, so we’re working with about that much data in our new house. (Plus records of what we’ve eaten and bought for much longer, because we’re weird that way) We don’t buy much normally, but we had to get new things for the new house: washer, dishwasher, a bed to replace what was our old landlord’s futon, things like that.. but we’re booking it against our budget where the calculators track consumer purchases. My hope and expectation is that we’re done with move-in big purchases, but you never know. For instance, our water heater is currently broken. But we’re also renters, so we not only won’t be paying for the repair or replacement, we have no say in what kind we have. Should I book that against us or my landlord? Split it? I have no idea. This kind of process is always a bit messy, and we need to be ok with that.

The calculators, though — oh my. I knew this was an inexact science, but not how inexact. The wide variety of calculators from reputable sources are hilariously inconsistent.

Here’s a few of the most reliable ones, and how they scored our emissions. Of course, we don’t see the assumptions these models make, and that’s valid. Though as I went through these (and more I decided wouldn’t make the cut for posting) I had the sense that the ones who finished with a call to pay for carbon offsets tended to score higher than the ones which didn’t.

Marketing and humans.

EPA
house alone, adapted for France: 3,330 lbs or ~ 1500 kilos, 1.5 tonnes of CO2 (I will use metric tons here unless otherwise noted)
https://www3.epa.gov/carbon-footprint-calculator

USC
House and lifestyle 1.6 tonnes of CO2
https://sustainability.usc.edu/take-action/carbon-calculator/
also https://www.carbonfootprint.com/calculator.aspx and many others, as for as I can tell. This calculator gets loaded in as widget on the lot of sites, but my impression is that it’s one of the best.

WWF UK
House and lifestyle 7.2 tonnes (UK avg 9.5/world 6.3)
https://footprint.wwf.org.uk

United Nations
House and lifestyle, 7.22 tonnes
https://offset.climateneutralnow.org

Nature Conservancy
House and lifestyle 10 tons (83% better than average)
https://www.nature.org/en-us/get-involved/how-to-help/carbon-footprint-calculator

For the wide range of numbers, all these calculators had us consistently below comparable houses/lifestyles, and a bit above global average. I don’t know how they decide on tonnages and why that’s so variable, but they seemed to mostly land on the same percentiles.

Perhaps unsurprisingly for someone living in France, the French government’s calculator just blew everything else away. It captured more details and could correctly take into account the energy mix for our region and the cost of our infrastructure. (One of the things I’m hoping to do soon is tour a few of the facilities for recycling/waste disposal and fill in more details, because that’s my idea of a good time.)

Nos Gestes Climat (French government calculator)
House, lifestyle, and infrastructure, 3.9 tonnes
https://nosgestesclimat.fr/

Let me talk about how great this calculator is, and why other governments should do this. Here is our breakdown:

This calculator is detailed. It goes through more lifestyle factors than any other one I saw, including our alcohol consumption, tres French. You see that dark blue bit, the largest single part of our carbon emissions? Those carbon emissions comes from being alive in France. That is the environmental cost of our infrastructure, governance, political and economic systems. If our goal is actually two tonnes, then we have almost about failed just by being alive. And there’s some truth to that, though I don’t take it personally and suggest you don’t either. In any sustainable future worth having, infrastructure will cost energy and materials. But maybe not these current energy sources and materials.

Let’s look a little closer at the Nos Gestes Climat breakdown.

Each tile color conveys a category. Orange tiles are food, includes wine and food waste, because France. Housing is teal and electricity, gas heating, and structure. Blue is consumables, electronics clothes etc.. Public transit in red comes next, then France’s infrastructure in dark blue and waaay off in the corner, three tiles devoted to banking. Damn, good job guys — hell of a calculator you built there.

Practically, out of the gate we have no wiggle room if we want to stay under four tonnes. And even this very good and complete calculator has to make assumptions and work without our particular data. It also knows our energy mix based on our address and can factor that in without us having to lift a finger! It’s great. It has to trust us about what we buy and eat and how much we drink and travel, which means we have to track that. We do that, because we’ve been doing that for years, but it’s not an overnight habit and it’s not that easy to acquire. Still, the French seemed pleased with us:

How reliable is any of this data? We don’t have deep insight into any of these calculators, and while we try to track our own movement and spending, we aren’t always going to be perfect at it. We’re always going to be some level of wrong and always going to be working on it. But we are always trying improve, a process we’ll document throughout the year — to a point.

Tracking our Emissions, Waste, Energy Use, and… Privacy

With any experiment in public, there are always questions of reliability and accountability. Are we making it all up for the viral clicks I’m pretty sure will never happen? Are we doing it to impress people, get likes or dates or whatever? Is it all lies, and we really live on a coal-powered megayacht which we deliberately aim at endangered whales?

We don’t, but you’ll have to take my word for it.

Sorry to say, a lot of this is going to have to be based on trust with limited paths to public verification. I have been subject to violent threats and stalking throughout my career, and I have no intention of telling the internet where I live. France! I’m fine with everyone knowing I live in France. I rent a small place, two bedrooms and an office, that is relatively new construction by French standards. We are not in Paris. We’re in a medium-sized city with public transit, which describes all the cities in France but Paris. When I can post documentation that doesn’t reveal personal information that can be used to locate or harm me or my family, I will. But anything I post, like utility bills or grocery receipts, will most likely be altered to protect my family and myself from being doxxed and harassed.

If you don’t like that answer, blame the stalkers and internet assholes. I am too internet old to rehash this conversation. If this project gets enough attention for someone to want to create a chain of verification, that would be amazing. But I will not endanger myself or my family. That said, I will continuously be looking at all the things I can document, and what data I can expose safely. For instance, almost all of our trash is non-recyclable plastic waste, so I think there’s a good chance I can tell you how much plastic we use a year — I just weigh it before I throw it out.

I hope you can get a lot out of our project. I hope that it’s interesting and inspiring and makes you want to do some of the same things, and maybe even document them. I hope we create a community of people exploring how to live well, and good, on this planet. But I draw the line at exposing myself or my family to danger, and so I will be safeguarding our privacy and trying to make sure any data we post remains blinded.

Thanks for coming along on this journey with us.

If you have suggestions, or just want to chime in with your own calculator experiences, please leave a comment!

My partner and I have decided that for 2023 we’re going to try to live within a carbon dioxide budget of two tonnes each, or 2.2 tons US. Because we favor a more planetary boundaries framework to a pure CO2 view of the health of Earth’s ecosystem, we’ll also be looking at other factors of consumption, like what kind of farming practices are used in our food chain, our plastic waste, products associated with conflicts and environmental degradation, and so it. When we can. It will not be perfect. It will be an evolving effort throughout the year.

We aren’t viewing this as an austerity or virtue project, in fact quite the opposite. We’ll be exploring ways to live comfortable and fun lives that aren’t austere and puritanical — because suffering and self-denial aren’t sustainable. The idea is to live reasonably well, have fun, and do things in the manner that all people, of every continent, might get to join in on one day in the future.

We aren’t trying to make sudden, drastic change. We aren’t making huge shifts overnight, but we’ve been making them for the better part of 10 years, and so it might appear extreme in some ways if you’re new to this kind of living. While this is our first attempt at a four tonne year, I’ve been a climate vegetarian for 28 years. My partner is still a flexitarian; he will eat meat occasionally, usually with his family of origin at the holidays, or when there’s no other option. But he choose many years ago to be car-free. We’ve revamped our lives around public transit. We shop at farmers markets, anti-gaspi shops, some fancy bio shops, and Carrefour to round out what we can’t get elsewhere. We meal plan, have very little wasted useful food, and what we do have goes to a city compost. But we’ve both been making small changes over many years. Trying to do what we’re doing over night would not work for most people.

We know we’re going to spend too much money doing this. We know we’re going to fail at points. This isn’t a project about perfection or purity, it’s an exploration. The question we are exploring is this: how do we live well and happily on the Earth, and live well and happily within the Earth’s systems? Some things we’re committing to, like slow travel, might not currently be as climate friendly as they could be, but we’ll be looking at forms of travel that could be made sustainable more easily than air travel, rather than being sustainable right now. Taking a train or boat instead of a plane is a model of future activity, even if the particular mode of travel we use isn’t clean enough.. yet.

This is not a project for purists. Any individual’s ecological footprint isn’t wholly within individual control, but nor is it completely determined by their situation and infrastructure. This project in particular isn’t interested in the question of who is responsible for climate change. It’s not focused on remediation or restitution, which are both important issues. Instead, we are interested in seeing how to live in a way that we might after we’ve mitigated climate change, and don’t want it to come back.

But that isn’t exactly the situation we’re in now. Sometimes we will be able to control entirely how much energy or pollutants or resources we use, at other times we’ll make choices that could be, and probably will be, made more ecologically sound in the future. They may not be as good as they could be right now. For instance, we’re renters, and our water is gas heated. Someday we’d like our water heater to be electric and entirely sourced from renewables in our perfectly sustainable house, but today we need to shower and don’t have a choice.

We live in a world of price distortions: things that should be expensive, like jet fuel and gasoline and electronics, are cheap, and things that should be cheap, like trains and ships and repairing electronics, are prohibitively expensive. We will be balancing between what we can afford and what we can do in a more sustainable manner.

We will be tracking and publishing resource usage in our lives. Some of it will be easy, like utility bills, tracking train trips, keeping track of groceries. Other bits, like documentation process itself, will be almost entirely opaque. How much e-waste and electricity will this website be responsible for? I haven’t the foggiest! I suspect much of it will be in between — educated guesses and information we’ll learn about along the way.

So what’s the value of this imperfect experiment?

Discourse on sustainability tends to be a bit all or nothing, hellfire and damnation, implacable forces driving us all into the abyss. But there’s many things plain folk can do right now that can deeply improve the planetary chances for everyone. The easiest are giving up things like red meat, dairy, and fast fashion. But even if you don’t give any of that up, making meat a special occasion food and shopping mostly in thrift does just almost the same thing! With planetary health, it’s not the purity — it’s never the purity of our behaviors — it’s the quantity. There are few things we have to give up completely to make our lives sustainable; easy and light upon the Earth. There are a lot of things we could cut down on, and others, like public transit, we must advocate for. We don’t have to be perfect to make things better. But also, our willingness to try, to actually change ourselves, sends a powerful political message. The world’s political institutions have made it clear they’re not going to do a damn thing to stop the world from plunging into chaos and mass death. The people will lead this effort, and that process is doomed to imperfection.

Then again, when did humans ever create a perfect thing?

I invite you to follow along with us, to give ideas, reflect on our ideas, swap little tips and join huge movements, as the moment calls for. I’m going to be weighing our plastics and cheese and trying to work out the logistics of how we might travel in the next 50 years, what we might eat and wear and who we might know and love.

In this experimental year, we are looking for a decent life: lived happy, healthy, and well.

Nothing Ever Ends is a project blog loosely based on a history of the internet beginning with Homer, performed by Quinn Norton (me), at various times over the last decade. It’s called Nothing Ever Ends because it’s true, nothing ever does. Every motion is added to the ledger of the universe and shapes every motion that comes after it. Sometimes that looks like billiard balls drifting around a table. For us it looks like new medias, social upheaval, the environment turning against us after centuries of abuse, war, famine, pandemics, and memes of Death stalking the earth.

We have the great misfortune to live at one of history’s inflection points, when everything changes, no one is ready, and people will look back one day and say, “Wouldn’t it have been fascinating to be alive then!” because they won’t know better. It is fascinating to be alive right now, though often in an existential terror kind of way. Some days it’s pretty bad, but some days it’s pretty fun, and most of us now have small glass and metal bars full of almost all the human knowledge that exists. It’s a weird time. We’re understandably upset and confused a lot of the time. We should probably give each other more of a break than we do.

While Nothing Ever Ends is an evolving project, I can say it will be focused on imagining futures that are calmer, safer, and kinder than the present. It is reaching for futures where the Earth and its people, plants, animals, etc., live in more harmonious and enduring systems than we have now. Some of them will be imagined in the far future, some of them will be imagined months out. All of them will be possible enough that we, humanity, could one day choose one.

The first project I’ll be talking about is called a Year in Four Tonnes.