Adam Wier

I have an idea rattling around in my head. An embryo of an idea. A little intellectual itch nagging at me. A perpetual refrain when my mind idles and looks for the nearest thing to alight on. A notion I've been vaguely referring to as “new ways of being.”

The world is changing, and we are changing with it. Maybe now more than ever. As the contradictions of our current socioeconomic system sharpen, we have a choice: to fight and emerge into new ways of being or die in our collective cocoon. I want, in my small way, to help find these new ways of being. I want, as those who came before me, to live and die for those who will come after, that my being may enable the living and dying of others. Like waves rising and crashing back into the sea only to make new waves. I want to contribute to the evolution of us all, of finding a way to exist in this world we created, the world we dreamed up together, that we continue to dream up together.

Unfortunately, it has long been on a process of becoming less hospitable to humans. And I'm not just referring to the current climate disaster we are living through. Though, believe you me, that's part of it.

I often express things I can't wrap my mind around in spiritual and fantastical ways, a thing I think all mystics do, in some way or another. I know what I'm saying is a bit far-fetched or unreal, but how else could I explain something that is elusive to any kind of verbalization? Can you explain the nature of God in 30 words for less? The first time I tried to explain a feeling of something starting to go wrong in our collective unconsciousness, I drew upon one of the greatest myths of our generation: Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

In my defense, I was very drunk. A friend had told me he had read the season eight comics of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the season where she has to destroy something called the Seed of Wonder. It was known that the Seed of Wonder was the origin of magic in our world. It allowed witches to cast spells and for vampires to be sentient instead of crazed blood zombies. But what everyone did not anticipate is that it did exactly what was marked on the tin: It provided wonder to this world. Not just fancy magic stuff, but simple human wonder. Our ability to dream and imagine. The magic even the most mundane of us are capable of. When she destroyed it, art, in all its forms, just started to seem... bleh. People stopped dreaming. They just went though the motions. Music was produced, but it seemed hollow. Novels and plays were written, but they seemed soulless. Everything was dull and sapless. It had lost its spark. This caused people to loose hope and the suicide rate rose. Even rainbows lost their color.

I told him all of this. I said, I couldn't help but feel this was happening to us, but I'm not sure what he saw what I meant. Do you see what I mean?

That was about eight years ago. I wonder if he sees what I mean now. In that time, Trump got elected and bald-faced fascism suddenly was no longer off limits in US politics. Macron become president in France, my adoptive country, and attempted to create a “start up nation.” For my ears, that sounds dangerously American. (And by the transitive property, I'll let you figure out what that eventually leads to...) Then, COVID happened. And we all suffered a collective trauma. Whether from loved ones lost or the unnatural isolation for a species so naturally social, possibly even eusocial, if only we would give ourselves the proper chance. And let us not even get into current events. Though some hope is around the corner, is it enough to go around?

Faced with these trying times, I often feel a certain contradiction: On one hand, I fantasize about becoming a hermit in the woods. I want to have a little farm on a little plot of land, mostly self sufficient, farming pumpkins or something and making dinner from scratch for me and my two (very imaginary) husbands. And in all of this, I am isolated and separated from society and community. I speak to no one. Or very few people. Just the two husbands, who are, I remind you, very imaginary.

I think this desire is born from my exhaustion with the current state of affairs and the absurdity that is inevitable when we lose sight of the original problems we were trying to solve. For example, we have produced machines to do more work, but we keep working the same hours. Does that not seem crazy to anyone else? Am I the only one who would like a nap? The question we have been trying to answer up until now is how to do more work in the same amount of time. That had its place. We needed to set things up. We needed to free ourselves from scarcity. But now we're on a runaway train; we're producing ourselves to death. From our personal health, to industrial waste, to even too many shows in our damn Netflix queue that we will never have time for. So many choices that we spend our night trying to make a choice only to eventually settle on a rerun of a comforting show that we've already seen. Or even worse, we spend the whole night trying to decide only to watch nothing but previews and snippets! We have more than enough in our world, and it's killing us. We have replaced the oppression of scarcity with the oppression of the profit motive.

But then there's the other half of this contradiction. I want to live in a town, a city even, where there's people and community, with all the tangled webs of relationships that that entails but also the love and support that it brings. I firmly believe that our lives are made up of the connections we make with other people. You cannot know yourself in isolation. You need mirrors to see your reflection. And whether it be a fleeting but knowing smile you give to a stranger when you both notice something amusing, or staying up all night with an old friend, listening to each other's stories and sharing advice, these moments we share are what our lives are composed of. It is the only thing we can take with us wherever we go. And we cannot do without them.

I do not know the synthesis of these contradictions but it is my Ultimate Concern to figure it out. And I think the solution is in new ways of being.

I insist on saying new ways of being in the plural. Because my way of being and your way of being will, and almost definitely should, be different. And it is an unfortunate state of our society that we are deprived of this freedom. In one respect, I mean individual freedom to be who you are: To live and express your culture, to practice your religion, to love who you want, to live as your gender, and so on. But also on a societal level: that the arts be as valued as the sciences, that all forms of work be valued as necessary for the proper functioning of our society, that the time we spend not producing is as valuable as the time as we spend producing, perhaps even more.

One of the lasting effects COVID had on me is that I became an anarcho-communist. (Where are my Kropotkin girlies at?^[1]) And I think ideologically where I differ from my more Leninist comrades is in an almost spiritual belief in the power of the human spirit. I believe that the human spirit is indomitable if it has attached itself to a symbol of Ultimate Concern. I believe it is capable of nothing short of bona fide magic. It's this magic, our own little seeds of wonder, that are the most powerful tools we have. And we must to make use of them, because I can assure you, no one is coming to save us.

The revolution, a thing many leftists, especially young ones, talk about as if it were the impending rapture, is not coming today or tomorrow or anytime soon. In a video by Mexie that I saw years ago but has stuck with me ever since, she asked how can we live the revolution today? And for the sake of my sanity, I have been looking for the answer to that question ever since. The answer, of course, depends on what the revolution look like for you. Does it involve worker autonomy? Animal welfare? Degrowth^[2]? If this is the case, sometimes the actions are as small as phasing out animal products at a pace you can manage. (It's not easy to do it all at once!) Or sometimes it's bigger things like doing a little bit of volunteer work or activism. Maybe it's even just going to local meetups to exchange with like-minded people so you feel a little less crazy for dreaming of a better world. But one thing I believe is understated as a form of activism is living unabashedly and openly as who you are in a world that sees you, and your dream for a better way of life for us all, as hopeless. At the very least, it's proving them wrong in the moment. You're there, you're living, and you're happy. And when I think of new ways of being, this is what I think of. I think of how can my existence, living authentically, change those around me, change the environment around me, influence others who will go on to influence others. The more traditional forms of activism have their place. Do not think this is a substitute for putting institutional pressure on those in power in any way. But they must both be done. We much teach people to dream again.

We must make the revolution irresistible^[3]. And that is what I hope I can do in my small way writing to you here. A revolution of love and liberation. A revolution of cooperation. A world where we spend more time with our loved ones than we do making some asshole you've never even met richer. I sincerely believe we are here on this Earth to care for each other, to be kind to each other, to love each other. To share our dreams and ideas with each other. I would like to share mine with you here. I would like to incite you into testing new ways of being.

We dreamed this world up. We can dream up a new one.

I will be sharing further essays at a snail's pace on this vague idea I have been calling “new ways of being.” I hope you will join me.