This is great! I remember my dad talking about the Whole Earth Catalog a lot back in the 80s when I was a kid. And the Earth First! movement, Back to Basics, etc.

The difficult thing for me is that mostly nothing has changed today. Based on music/style/culture, this year feels like 1993 to me. We're still talking about the same environmental collapse, the same proxy wars, the same political corruption, the same wealth inequality, just on and on and on. I could count significant innovations on a hand or two: the arrival of the internet (~1995), affordable LCDs, flash drives, blue/white LEDs, ubiquitous GPS, smartphones (barely as evolutionary vs revolutionary tech), lithium-ion batteries, affordable solar panels, mRNA vaccines, ...? The big innovation seems to be that the poors can buy things today that were only available to the uber-rich from the 60s to the 90s. Is that progress? I guess.

Except that we learned where that stuff comes from: children in China and India working for pennies on the dollar to prop up our quality of life in the west. A late-stage capitalism in denial of how dependent it is on communism and stripping resources from developing nations. Now a generation of young people don't want to colonize anyone, and resent being wage slaves in the service industry under a self-colonized US, oppressed under the boot of billionaires who rigged the system through regulatory capture tactics like Buckley v. Valeo and Citizens United. It's not that young people don't want to work anymore, but that they don't want to exploit anyone anymore. And the traditional path to wealth in the US was exploitation.

I often wonder what our alternate timeline might look like if we didn't have trickle-down economics under Reagan, the unraveling of the social safety net under Clinton, the outsourcing of 100,000 factories under GW Bush as a backlash to late 90s tech dreams, the stonewalling of most progressive goals under Obama due to the rise of the alt-right, the sabotage of the judicial branch under Trump/MAGA, just on and on and on. Progress has proceeded despite these political machinations, not because of them.

Without those setbacks, we might have saved 20-40 years. That's why I view the 2000s and 2010s as mostly lost decades. But, a handful of people are starting to live that catalog today with the off-grid movement, vanlife, solarpunk, etc. And the post-pandemic spiritual awakening has revealed how time is an illusion, that we may as well be living in The Matrix. And the Boomers are sitting on $100 trillion of generational wealth that's going to transfer over the next 5-10 years. I expect that money to completely evaporate through nepotism and a doubling down on for-profit healthcare that along with the loss of the southern states to global warming will largely bankrupt the US. And potentially create a one-world order where everyone works to pay back debts to previous generations at interest, which of course never ends, by design.

It's strange to be unable to afford to embody any of the ideals of the catalog, when all excess income goes to rents and bills, when all leisure time is interrupted and divided into crumbs by the attention economy, when all opportunities seem to be already claimed and saturated into oblivion, when pulling the yoke under capitalism almost certainly leads to the demise of the natural world.

I remember when it wasn't like this, or more accurately, when these realities could still be denied. But I also remember my parents warning me from my earliest memories that this was all coming. Nobody listened to the radicals, so now we're all radicalized.