New Year’s Resolution: Change The Way I See The World — Teghan Acres
New Year’s Resolutions:
- Read more
- Wake up earlier
- Change the way I see the world
Which one of these is not like the other? Obviously, resolution three sticks out as a little more demanding than the previous two, but I’m serious about tackling it. I have come to realize that growing up in North America has spoon-fed me three main ideologies — capitalism, neoliberalism and individualism. These concepts are also the root causes of climate change and the majority of social issues. As I begin to learn about where these ideas came from and how they grew over time, I have also realized what a massive impact they have on the way I see the world, my place within it and how I might go about making some positive change. Rather than looking from the inside out, I am resolving to look from the outside in.
As a self-identified type A personality (did you see how I started the blog with a list?), I know that capitalism pushes my natural work ethic and drive me into unhealthy territory. I have had to work on not measuring my self worth by my productivity. The economic organization of our society leads us to believe that there is not enough to go around, so you must push yourself to the point of burnout if you want to succeed. We are taught a lack mindset. As the brilliant Robin Wall Kimmerer puts it in her recent piece The Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance, “ Capitalist market economies depend on the motive force of scarcity in order to regulate markets with supply and demand…What if scarcity is just a cultural construct, a fiction that fences us off from gift economies? The Indigenous philosophy of the gift economy, based in our responsibility to pass on those gifts, has no tolerance for creating artificial scarcity through hoarding. “
I am beginning to appreciate that much of what I have been taught about the economy as fact through university microeconomics and free-market aficionados is just one perspective. The way we live our lives is the product of a human-created system, not natural biological intuition and I’m ready to stop seeing it that way. I need to define for myself, what is success, what is fulfillment, and what constitutes a meaningful life outside of the money and career status we are told to use as a measuring stick.
It is uncomfortable, but also empowering, to realize where you have been wrong. When I first began my journey as an environmentalist, I thought individual change was king. It was all about going completely zero waste, ditching any animal products, not consuming anything unless absolutely necessary. I have now come to realize that I was putting all of my energy into living as a ghost, not as a climate advocate. I also now know that it wasn’t a personal fault of mine that those actions were my first instinct; It was neoliberalism at work. As Martin Lukacs puts it, “ neoliberalism’s celebration of competitive self-interest and hyper-individualism, its stigmatization of compassion and solidarity, has frayed our collective bonds. “
If you haven’t heard much about neoliberalism or don’t have a firm grasp on what it is, that’s intentional. Naomi Klein sums it up in her book This Changes Everything as “ privatization of the public sphere, deregulation of the corporate sector, and the lowering of income and corporate taxes, paid for with cuts to public spending.” Neoliberalism also comes along with the belief that we as individuals are solely responsible for our own success or failure and pushes us to be miserably unaware of the systemic factors at play for making the rich richer and the poor poorer. While I probably shouldn’t have been, I was truly shook when I realized that my instinct to solve problems individually rather than collectively is a common symptom of this predominant ideology.
I am fortunate enough to have spent time living and working in a collectivist culture when I interned in Kampala, Uganda. The pace of life was slower and our relationships with each other were the priority, not the speed at which we got our work done. This was unsettling at first and honestly made me pretty frustrated at times. As I settled in, I began to appreciate why productivity at work wasn’t the most important thing in my coworkers’ eyes. Collectivist cultures put a greater emphasis on community and collective wellbeing, rather than individual success. There is an understanding of our interdependence on one another that I rarely witness in North Americans.
As I begin to unpack and examine how these ideologies have shaped my outlook on life, I need to also address how I want to advocate for the planet and its citizens moving forward. One of the most beautiful things about 2020 was the growth of the intersectional environmentalism movement.
The systems of oppression, racism, sexism, colonialism, that are buoyed by capitalism and our conditioned instinct to address them through individual actions rather than collective, system change, are coming to the forefront of the climate movement. We are waking up to see how much more powerful we are together than apart. It is by design that our first instinct to “save the planet” is to bring a reusable bag and skip the burger. These are actions taken from our role as a consumer. It is time to think about creating change from our role as citizens on this planet — as creators and caregivers.
I am resolving to do this by expanding my idea of what it means to be a citizen of this planet. This is something that Indigenous cultures all around the world have understood for millennia and I will be taking in this wisdom through reading, watching talks and actively unlearning the colonial paradigm of my country. There is also extensive scholarship on the link between capitalism and the climate which I am beginning to unpack with the work of Naomi Klein. This is a task that won’t be completed overnight. It is rather a journey and one that must be taken if we are going to reimagine a world with a stable climate and just society.
Originally published at https://www.teghanacres.ca on January 3, 2021.
