It is hard to predict what will happen in the future as things are changing so fast. But you can kind of see where it is all going.
I read a comment on a blog summing up what conditions in so many places look like now:
"It's a Shakespearean-tragic-comedy-horror-dystopian-Pavlovian-B.F. Skinner-Huxleyian-Madison Street-CULLING reality show".
The commenter also figured that the whole mess would be:
"best viewed from an Epicurean-Walden 2.0 existence, in the remaining days of the civilization project".
What might a Walden 2.0 look like?
Isolation, while not for everyone, does help. Thoreau found it "wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time."
Being close to nature would be another requirement.
"We can never have enough nature," Thoreau said. "Live each season as it passes, breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth."
Another recommendation would be to have few things. It is a great skill "to want but little."
Self-reliance would be another essential for living in the woods, or anywhere else.
The good news is that a more self-reliant Walden 2.0 life can be done wherever we are at.
In such a life we can
- cook and eat more at home
- unplug our devices more often (a sane-cation as one of our readers calls it)
- spend more time outdoors
- grow as much of our own food as we are able
- practice refuse, rethink, reassess and repair when it comes to material possessions
- purchase the things we need locally
Thinking differently may be difficult and dangerous, but it is the way to much needed changes.
"I see nothing permanent in the society around me," Thoreau wisely observed,"and am not quite committed to any of its ways."
Nothing is permanent, and how much of what governments are forcing on us are we actually committed to?
We can change it all if we so choose because we are the power.
In the course of doing so, you may not save the planet, or civilization, but you might just save yourself and those you love.
While "democratic" governments don't ask us what we want any more, we should be asking ourselves.
What kind of future do we envision for ourselves and our communities?
