Living in Discontinuity
Only by accepting that our world and society are in unprecedented disarray will we be able to individually and collectively best adapt and change.
What I listened to: “Letting Go of Everything We Expected” by Alex Steffen. Posted February 3, 2025.
Every so often you stumble on something that makes you mentally stop in your tracks and think to yourself, “I never thought of it quite like that, but this makes so much sense.” When I listened to Alex Steffen’s short 12-minute podcast, that was my reaction.
For many years I’ve realized that our society and the planet are in disarray. I’ve never heard it described before as discontinuity as Steffen does, but that seems like an apt description.
lack of continuity or cohesion
I’m well versed in climate change science and realities. It’s an understatement to say I’m a political animal and fully aware of the national and international challenges we are facing. I know that the relatively unfettered capitalism we function under is a problem. Rampant wealth inequality is one of the negatives that underpin much of what’s wrong with our society. Cultural conflicts stoked by all the preceding are something we’re all dealing with right now.
All of this is within my open-eyed awareness. and I’ve written about these things before. Yet, I never quite added them all up to a sum of perhaps me needing to shift my baseline expectations of what I consider a normal life and normal social functioning.
As Steffen points out, when life is in massive disarray, we tend to want to fall back on things that are comfortable. Using the primary example Steffen uses, when facing climate change, we typically tend to embrace one of two perspectives. We believe we can arrive at collective solutions that return it back to normal or perhaps create a new normal. Or we believe that addressing climate change is a lost cause entirely that will inevitably result in total collapse, an apocalypse of sorts.
Steffen contends that the problem with those two stances is that they avoid acceptance of the situation we’re actually in which Steffen describes as one of “profound discontinuity.”
It's one in which we are going through changes that are not only large, but unprecedented, and not only unprecedented, but which are producing states that we haven't yet experienced in the past. And so, what we're experiencing is this reality of our previous experience, expectations, education, comfort, comfortable understandings of things, breaking down in the face of this situation which is not only not normal or a new normal, but which is hard to even understand, and still changing.
Steffen suggests that the problem with this reality of discontinuity that we now all live in is it sets us up with a mental mindset that can’t adequately fathom what we need to do until we accept that life is indeed discontinuous now.
We’re all acculturated to look at the world in certain ways and perhaps those ways no longer serve us well today. The first step in arriving at what we individually and collectively need to do to improve our lives and the world situation is embrace discontinuity.
However, embracing the reality of climate, political, and societal disarray means the bedrocks of our personal perspectives are shaken. Despite the comfort our former ways of thinking and being in the world bring us, we must let go of that comfort. We must accept that much of the world is changing and may never return to the baselines we experienced in the past.
The world in which we live is shifting quickly and that pace is increasing daily. Apart from the aforementioned challenges, added on top of them are the rapid technological changes we’re experiencing and only beginning to wrestle with when it comes to disruptions resulting from artificial intelligence, automation, and robotics.
For me, the most important part of Steffen’s podcast was the stance that we must still work hard to address the social and world ills facing us today.
A discontinuity doesn't mean that all is chaos and nothing can be done.
Quite the opposite. It means that we have to learn how to do new things, and we may have to learn to do them at speeds that we're uncomfortable with.
Steffen goes on to say that we’re losing the resources, the capacity, to act more quickly than we are acting, and the cost of acting is increasing daily.
Let’s look specifically at climate change again. While some changes are taking place to address fossil fuel consumption and environmental damage, those efforts aren’t nearly enough to make much of a dent in the problem. That’s because the losses we’re experiencing are outpacing our efforts. So, the resulting state is one in which we might indeed be worse off than we were previously even though attempts are being made to address the problems.
If we hold on to how things unfolded before, resist change, and fall back into our old patterns of thinking because that’s how things have worked in the past, that’s when the losses get big. It’s by not properly weighing our expectations of how life should be against how it actually is that we experience profound loss.
Denying reality makes it far more likely that we’re going to suffer from catastrophic losses. If we wait to act too long because we’re mired in our old expectations of normality, valuable time passes that could have been used to better address those problems in the first place. Climate change is an obvious example, but I contend this applies across the swath of human experience such as the potential rise of authoritarian rule in my own country.
If you're feeling right now like you are waking up to a level of transformation around us, upheaval, that you weren't prepared to face yet, probably what's happening is you're experiencing a snap forward. It's not that things have changed. It's that you are seeing them more clearly.
It’s the delays in acting because we don’t want to accept change that ends up making us less prepared to adapt in advance. Delays in addressing and adapting, personally and collectively, further reduce our resources and overall capacity to do so, which makes the resulting state far more challenging.
With every passing day, we need to do more, and we're losing more, and that is the situation that we want to avoid going too deeply into, certainly as a civilization, but also as individuals. Because it's when we refuse to acknowledge the need to change that that change starts really eroding away the quality of our lives.
I recommend you listen to the entire podcast and follow Steffen. He has a brilliant mind. I’ve listened to the podcast a few times because I was dumbstruck by how much sense it made. I wondered why I hadn’t seen this so clearly before, at least in these terms.
How am I applying this mindset when it comes to the practical components of my life?
Daily expectations: I no longer assume that the world I went to bed experiencing is going to be the world I wake up to experiencing. Accepting rapid change and even chaos better prepares me to do what needs to be done.
Where I live: I’ve assessed the best places to live to survive climate change and, for now, have chosen to remain in San Francisco. Might that change over time. Sure. But for now, it seems like a good location. I also live in San Francisco because I feel I’m better prepared to adapt to the current political turmoil igniting in our country, especially as a gay man with progressive leanings. I’ve also made the decision to drastically reduce the physical footprint of my life so I can more easily move quickly should that become necessary.
Money and income: I now plan my financial situation to the best of my ability assuming the entire world could go to hell quite suddenly. No such planning is perfect, but I don’t assume the economic landscape or the means by which I make my living today will necessarily sustain over time and not change. I also accept that I will likely have to continue self-educating and learning, perhaps at an escalating pace, if I’m going to be able to keep my knowledge and skills current.
Planning for the future: I don’t. Not really. I’ve abandoned long-term goals in favor of seeing the reality of the day and moving in the directions that seem best in the moment. Yes, I’ve done some basic future planning. I’m not naïve enough to believe a total lack of preparation is smart. But I do so assuming it could all experience a complete turnabout, and I need to be ready to quickly shift and perhaps start over entirely.
All of that is changing. And the longer it takes us to acknowledge that, the worse the position we will find ourselves in will be.
Then Steffen says this which seems like a good encapsulation of the entire podcast.
The first step toward thriving in discontinuity is changing how we think. It’s learning to think in ways that make sense given the new realities around us. And those who can take up that challenge will thrive or at least have better odds.
And those who can’t, either because they refuse to or they simply don’t have the same access to resources and expertise and so forth, are not in for a good time.
My personal belief is that the more that we encourage people in general to start thinking in these new ways, to start understanding the world as a landscape of change, the better off we’re all going to be. The biggest threat we all face is denial and predatory delay.
Phew. That’s a lot, huh? Sounds dire. Maybe even hopeless. But nothing is hopeless and that’s honestly the entire point of Steffen’s podcast.
I look at the tumultuous politics of America today and I fully accept it’s a horrific shitshow, but I also don’t assume I and others can’t do something about it to improve it.
I look at the nightmare of climate change we’re already experiencing and will continue to experience in worsening ways and accept that reality, but it doesn’t stop me from doing what I can to stop fossil fuel usage and mitigate future climate disasters.
Accept reality. Realize today’s reality is indeed in disarray. But that said, also realize you can do a lot to make yourself, your life, and the world a better place. So, let’s all do that.
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