Author: benjamincrawford

As the country ground to a halt, and business panicked about everything to do with snow and travel, me and Jasper headed out onto the hill piste behind us to go for our first ever proper bit of sledging. Here’s the results:

I worry very deeply about separatism. I guess it’s in our DNA to want to commune with people like ourselves, and to form tribes. Our inherent distrust of things we don’t know is an in-built defense mechanism from times when civilisation wasn’t so… civilised.

But we’ve come a very long way since then. We walk upright, we cooperate, share ideas and understand concepts that look to serve bigger things than those of a single person. We work together collectively to solve problems and make enormous advances in every possible discipline that we humans touch, and some things we don’t. We put ourselves out of pocket financially or with other resources to help drive the things that matter for future generations. We finally seemed to be changing course on the Titanic reference to looking after our planet. But in 2017 we took a monumental step back.

I’m no hippy. However I do subscribe to some of the ideals they have, the differences individuals can make. Being diligent with recycling, conserving energy, not being part of the ridiculous consumerist culture and eating more sustainably sourced food. I am aware though there is a selfish motivation too – I want the world to be as pretty tomorrow as it is today, if not for me, for Jasper and his kids to come.

In 2017 the most developed nation on the planet appointed an insular, selfish, Neanderthal as its leader. Someone who casually discounts all the things our species has been doing for the good of mankind and the planet we call home. It makes me so incredibly angry that this horrid example of our species can lead the free world, but also that a fairly large wedge of society put him there. I’m also so angry that despite a constant stream of news that 10 years ago would have caused outrage in the prestigious corridors of the white house are now, fittingly, white washed into oblivion and that the morally blind continue to support this lesion of society.

However, in my last job working in stockbroking, a phrase that was thrown around quite a lot was the idea of a correction. Where advancement has taken place too quickly (in this example, with the price of an index or exchange) it would self correct – the price would fall to a price that more accurately represents the underlying value of the asset.

To turn that into an analogy, I wonder if Trump is our correction. Are we progressing too quickly along our path to moral enlightenment, so much so that our tiny minds can’t keep up? For four years we head backwards and then we can pick back up again. This gives me some hope, especially when you look at the corrections on the global markets, in this instance represented by the Dow.

To keep the analogy going, I wonder if these crashes are the financial versions of our species’ own lows, and we’re just in the latest one. I do hope so.

Being a consumer has for some time caused me some amount of angst, as I can’t help but feel complicit in someone else’s plan. I’m not the type to say the government or large corporations are controlling us into becoming drone-consumers, but I do think that’s where the collective conscious might be heading – most behaviours are rewarded by the acquisition of material things.

Perversely, I’ve been a marketeer, so I was one of the people whose job it was to prize money from the hands of consumers. Again, I’m not doing that to control people, but because the company I worked for had the ambition to be profitable (and you can kind of understand why) it was my job to think of ways to extract money from folks. Me doing my job well meant – you guessed it – reward!

This is all part of the ever so gradual shift in mindset amongst a gaggle of generations. It was this Christmas that got me thinking about all of this. I sat watching my house full of gifts and happy people, and I should have been very happy. I was to be honest, but because of the people. However the overriding feeling I had, and still have is one of guilt. In our house we’re successful as most definitions would have it. We want for nothing, and yet we still strive for the next thing or event. We can’t sit back and think “Yep, this is enough”. Everything has to be geared towards growth and acceleration.

I wonder if me fighting this mindset is fighting the very thing that made humans as they are today. If it’s the in-built desire for improvement that has borne our advancement. If that is the case, I wonder if it’s all part of a closed system, and that it will be our demise too. Like a virus we’ll consume every ounce of the planet and then perish ourselves.

I wonder then if the next really big development in how we evolve won’t be technologically or politically, but instead spiritually? I’m not about to start preaching to a magic sky man, I haven’t made my mind up about religion just yet, but instead I mean our ability to understand life itself. I certainly couldn’t answer the questions – “What’s the point of life?”. The capitalist culture we live in is doomed to fail – I have no doubt whatsoever about that. They say that share price should always reflect the value of the underlying asset so the constant drive for more will of course fail. The Earth is a closed system!

After the over indulgences of Christmas we all hopped in the van and fled for the basics. We camped in a couple of freezing fields with only a small fan heater, no Wi-Fi, technology or even an ECU on the van and I felt so happy and relaxed. It was this very excursion that made me want to write this piece in the first place. What’s funny though, as soon as we got home, dependency on technology and the desire to be a good consumer goes up and would you believe… stress goes up too. Funny that.