The Death of Progress: Navigating Grief Over the Western Lifestyle Shift

As I've mentioned before, Western culture (which is now essentially a global hegemony) is dying.   The religious devotion to progress in the modern age is slowly waning, as well, and everyone - especially the working class - is slowly seeing the cracks through the viewfinder.    But while the inherent recognition that this culture is experiencing its death by a thousand cuts may be real, the acceptance and tolerance of it are more often than not outside our wheelhouse, and a great many of us are likely to experince very real grief over the course of this shift.   Before I step to far into this, though, I want to make sure my readers understand me when I talk about the death of western civilization, and understand what I mean when I refer to its death. 

There are a number of writers who deal quite cohesively with this topic: John Michael Greer, Tom Murphy, Tim Watkins, Javier Vinos, Ahnaf ibn Qais, Dimitry Orlov, and many more.   Their insights into the current experience are worth reading.  I won't rehearse it much here, though, other than to say this: when I refer to the fall of western civilization, or the death of progress, I am not referring to a single cohesive event.   Just as biomechanical death is a process and not an event, so too is the death of an empire - a series of setbacks and failures that all trend toward demise.    This isn't a doomsday blog - there is no single day of cataclysmic failure: it is a process that folds in on itself through time.    A good view of this, in my opinion, can be found by taking a look at Kunstler's book The Long Emgergency.  

Now that we know I'm not a doomsayer, let's get back to discussing grief over the death of progress.  

This will be our world one day.   Are we ready to make the necessary changes to adapt? 

Right now, in the US, there is quite a bit of upheaval.   To be perfectly honest - and remember that I'm writing this from inside the US - I'm surprised that we haven't yet seen any type of massive scale civil conflict.    We see pockets of it, of course, with events such as the Capitol attack back in 21, but we've not seen any wide-scale violence break out.  It is my sincerest hope that we avoid this, but historically speaking the odds are stacked against us.   For now, though, we're contending with social upheaval and economic instability - but it isn't really new.   We feel like it's new, because we're inundated with images and stories of it from all media outlets, but it has actually been happening for several decades now, arguably maybe even as early as the late 1960s (which was before I was even born).   So this downshift has been ongoing for a bit, we just have more news outlets now to disseminate the slow collapse than we did back then. 

Progress is our modern myth.   We have believed - erroneously - that what we call progress will continue ad infinitum into perpetuity, and we have corraled all of our resources into economic growth, because in Western culture growth is equivalent to progress.   Ergo, our banks and finance centers are our temples, and our currency is the totem to which we assign all our devotion.    Because of our devotion to the myth of progress, we are naturally experiencing grief over its demise.    We've taken the initiative to craft measures of support for grief over those who systems of religious or spiritual belief collapse, but we haven't corporately addressed what life is like for those of us who are grieving the death of the religious monuments of progress. 

That being said, this type of grief is very real, and without realizing it, we're all experiencing it now in one form or another.  So what we can do to navigate this dark place, without losing sight of hope for a navigable future?  

Here are a few things we can do to help ourselves through this transition. 

Understand the Timeline

The first thing we can do - and I've mentioned this in a different fashion here before - is to start to look at the world beyond the boundaries of our own lifetime. This is very challenging, especially for those of us here in the west, where it's so much easier to focus on our own narrow needs of consumption and daily rigor.  Death is a process, not an event, and we will experience this decline over the course of many lifetimes. In other words, our children's children will inherit this loss as well. We would do well to understand that, so we can begin to establish infrastructure that will lessen the burden on them.    Our neglect of legacy has brought us to this decline, and it is the reimagining of our legacy that will help us grieve it.  We must make an effort to understand the timeline we are facing, and by we I mean collectively - us all - as human beings.   This decline will extend far beyond my life, and well into the lives of all my descendants. 

Accept, Don't Resist

This probably sounds defeatist.   I can hear the loud proclamations now:  don't accept your fate!  Fight! Fight!   But now is not the time. This proverbial fight that we're encouraged to engage in keeps our souls railing against inevitability; the inevitability of the collision we're experiencing against the hard limit of our resources.  And yes, it really is inevitable.  As I mentioned above, this limit is not new - all other civilizations have met their limits as well.  The human race has survived and marched on.  It will do so again; learn to live in it.  There is harmony in accepting the cycles of the Earth; for too long we've lived outside them, assuming ourselves immune to their forces. We are not.  Our unhappiness stems from this separateness/resisteance.   In learning to embrace it, we will find our way once more. 

Seek and Offer Support

We fail each other miserably here in the West.   We engage in "othering" at every turn, seeking sacrificial scapegoats to blame for all the ways we have been wronged.   But this isn't something we're necessarily doomed to repeat. We can choose not to do this; we can consciously decide that instead of tearing one another down we're going to elevate one another, with the understanding that what we do for someone else we do also for ourselves.  We can - and should - commit to helping one another.  

Very recently, I had stopped at a petrol station to fill my car, and my 10 year old daughter was with me.  Beside us, there was a man who was seeking for a funnel - something related to what he was doing with his vehicle. She heard him, and watched him go inside the establishment and then return empty-handed.  She came back to where I was fueling and asked me if we had one available. I advised her that we did, and asked her why she wanted it.  She said she wanted to give it to the man who needed it more than we did, and pointed in his direction. I gave it to her and watched her go offer this man - whom we did not know personally in any way - this funnel, so he could get on with whatever project needed his attention there.   He graciously accepted it and thanked her profusely.  Of course, as mum, I beamed with pride.  We could learn a lot from our children.  

Small measures of support - even something as insignificant as a funnel - might really help someone. If we commit to this way of life, the rest won't matter. 

Redefine Affluence

Of course you've seen this before here. I've written an entire post about it some time ago.  The Western idea of affluence is luxury cars and high-end, spacious homes filled with expensive furniture and upscale decor.  The residents of this typical home vacation two to three times per year - always at ultra expensive resorts, and usually are in debt for a lot of their luxury lifestyle.  Affluence here is defined by the amount of money one has availabe at any given time to waste on meaningless stuff.   At the end of life, all that stuff gets divided up (more often than not through some type of conflict) between our heirs and beneficiaries, and we leave with nothing anyway.  

But real affluence might look very different.  Are all of your immediate needs met?  If you have a full belly, a roof over your head and offers you relative warm and comfort, and family and friends that fill your life with laughter and joy, you are the wealthiest of all.   In the future that we face, these things will matter far more than the Mercedes we went in debt for, or the beach vacations.   We would do well to learn to focus more on these measures instead of money. 

This is generally how affluence is defined in the West.  Is it affluence, or is it waste? 

These are all things we can do immediately that cost us nothing - except maybe a few moments of our time. But time is the greatest investment of all, isn't it?  Money comes and money goes - more is printed every day.  But time isn't returned to us - at least not in the way we understand it.  

When you offer your time to someone, whether your know it or not, you remove yourself from the cycle of grief; you prepare yourself for the reinvention of living though the long emergency we find ourselves facing. 

I encourage you, reader, to offer your time to those who need it.    See what harvest it brings you.  In doing this, we will navigate this grief together, and we will find ourselves better for having suffered it.