On the bicycle this week, I listened to an interesting podcast with Kim Stanley Robinson as guest ^[Kim Stanley Robinson: “Climate, Fiction, and The Future” (The Great Simplification - Podcast, 2023)]. Asked about what he would do to get into a better connection with nature, he mentioned he had started to work outdoors almost everyday^[“So that’s about seven or eight books now I’ve written entirely outdoors. Now I’m in California, and in the winter I bundle up, in the summer I put a mister on. It can be cold, it can be hot. I have a tarp overhead, so the rain just falls around me when there is rain, and I work outdoors no matter what. Very stubbornly, because it turned my writing into a little outdoor adventure and it saved my brain. I was a burned-out case at that point, and now I’m very energized.”@], up to 5 hours in total, because this would change his (and everyones) mode of thinking:
If people would spend more time outdoors, it would reorient their sense of reality in fundamental ways that changes the view of everything. We spend too much time indoors. We live in boxes, looking at boxes.@
The phrase “We live in boxes, looking at boxes” stuck with me. Even though the original context touches the big existential questions of Ecosphere/Technosphere relationships, I also had to think about practical implications. I would actually like to work outdoors more often. But how feasible is this?
So much of average working life is happening indoors and interpolating from some recent developments, this will increase even more. With ever more workplaces becoming digitalized, work increasingly happens on screens, screens that want to be read indoors due to brightness and reflections. The climate crisis will yield temperature extremes that make working outdoors more difficult. The “Metaverse-for-work” vision seems to dream about VR-headset workflows that will probably require staying in the basement to avoid hurting or embarassing yourself.
Some other developments in the infrastructure of work might allow to be outside more often: mobile outdoor internet has become as fast as indoor WiFi in many places. AI copilots may be disrupting many workplaces soon, but at least they would be available from everywhere. Hybrid work settings, asynchronous communication and flexible working hours also allow to be outside with your work more often.
I am obviously referring to knowledge work here - there are many important and usually underpaid jobs that require being outdoors all the time, in which case working outside is a burden, not a perk. Nevertheless I think “being” instead of only “thinking” outside the boxes that we have build ourselves is a crucial thing to mediate some urgent problems.
On an individual level it is proven that being outside is good for an increasingly stressed mental health, even as good as having a therapist when combined with sports.^[psychische-gesundheit-psychotherapie-sport-praevention-bewegung]
Collectively, being outside more often might help to fix the bad modernist mindset of “Substitution Optimism” - a systematic underestimation of the value our ecosphere provides^[“In the twentieth century, our capacity to create substitutes grew immensely. Many synthetic products were invented to take the place of natural ones. Declining soil nutrients could be replaced with artificial fertilizer; aluminum could replace copper; plastic could replace just about everything — wood, stone, metal, glass. Nuclear power appeared poised to offer cheap, near-limitless energy supplies in place of fossil fuels extracted from the earth. These advances gave rise to a way of thinking that we might call “substitution optimism”: the belief that humans can find substitutes for anything that nature does.” @]. Ecomodernist attempts to rebuild our outside within an artificial inside have failed dramatically^[See the fate of biosphere 2 in the 1960’s: a-repair-manual-for-spaceship-earth]. Nevertheless the dream of building another box or sphere to hide within from self inflicted doom persists within many recent hypes: Virtual Reality, Mars expeditions, Blockchain Real Estate and Prepper Bunkers. To turn this around, getting outside more often might be a simple but effective solution.
🌊 %% 2023-05-01 #note/fleeting %%