The end of the road?

Rosie Spinks on care, community, and what it means to live here.

‘Sometimes you are born into the ending of a world’.

Federico Campagna

I was met by the view above as I jogged along the south west coast a few months back. It’s a fitting image for the conversation I had with the writer

Rosie Spinks

. Not because we ran out of things to say, nor ended on a cliff hanger. Nothing quite so figurative. It’s the fact that the path I was running along had collapsed, and following it would clearly end in disaster. The grim parallel here is to the ways of living we’ve been taught to pursue in the West, many of which feel as if they’re collapsing, and may not be able to take us very much further. Rosie’s question is pertinent to this -

What Do We Do Now That We're Here?

(It’s also the title of her excellent Substack series). Click here for the podcast, or on the youtube link below.

It’s a conversation that I loved, in part because it resonated so keenly with my own thinking - and indeed the point of much of the writing and podcasting I do. The essence of The Examined Life project is to explore what it means to live well and wisely at such a time as this. The title of this Substack is a play on Jiddu Krishnamurti’s quote: ‘it is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a sick society’. (Others have made similar remarks; the psychologist Erich Fromm for example, wrote ‘to be sane in an insane society, is in itself a marker of insanity.’) Rosie’s inquiry fits perfectly into this niche, as she explores what to do when the assumptions we were weaned on, no longer feel plausible or even desirable. How should we live when the stories and aspirations that lived in us are now breathing their last?

Here and There

In our conversation Rosie referenced a shift in her ‘structure of feeling’, as she burned out from a luminous career in journalism, moved from London, and became a mother. The phrase ‘structure of feeling’ was coined by the Welsh literary theorist Raymond Williams, to describe the ways people feel, think, and relate to the world, before these elements become fully formed or consciously articulated.

For Rosie, there and here have different structures of feeling, as Rosie explained in this piece:

There is where I earn a living, and it’s where I have a mortgage, and order groceries for pickup. It’s where growth is uniformly seen as good, and we’re told that social problems have to be ameliorated while still upholding shareholder value. It’s the place where convenience is king, friction is bad, and our imperative as citizens, parents, and employees is to work very hard so we can prepare our offspring to go to good schools and do exactly the same thing. It’s a place where most of us are very burned out, in a manner that mirrors the exhaustion of the earth.

Here is where I’ve internally accepted that infinite progress and wealth are not inevitable. It’s where I expect that the material conditions of my child’s life (and likely my own) will be worse than I’ve known up until this point: more violent, less secure, less prosperous. Where life is less concerned with status, and more with sustenance. It’s a place where the entire economy is not based on getting consumers exactly what they want, where cheap flights and next-day delivery are not available. Where extreme weather events and adverse conditions are less newsworthy, and more commonplace. Where we adjust our lives accordingly, and rely on one another by necessity, rather than forging ahead pretending that everything is fine.

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While adapting to living here might sound pessimistic and resigned, I found talking about it deeply up-lifting. This is partly the subtle therapy of acknowledging the truths that hide in plain sight, though also because despite the insecurity that living here entails; it’s an altogether more humane place to inhabit. It’s where we recognise our interdependence with each other and the planet, and where we realise that we’re hardwired for care more than competition. It’s where parched and lonely souls find more satisfaction and solace than they ever did there.

The vast majority of us must, of course, live with a foot in both worlds¹. This is a manageable and necessary dissonance. To explore the question what living here means, is to begin the work of reorientation and regeneration - which is ultimately going to mean following a different path.

Recurring themes

There are a number of previous podcasts you can listen to that complement this conversation, here are three that come to mind:

1. My conversation

   Dougald Hine
   last season ruminates on similar themes, as we explored his question: ‘how do we make good ruins?’ He quotes the haunting words of the Italian philosopher Federico Campagna (quoted above) ‘Sometimes you are born at the ending of a world…you will know it’s the ending of a world because the story you’ve been told no longer makes sense anymore’.

2. In season one I spoke to Helena Norberg-Hodge, the founder and director of the organisation Local Futures. She is a pioneer of the localisation movement, and points out what’s gone so wrong in West as we unpacked her question: ‘why is life getting harder and faster?’

3. My conversation with

   Ruth Taylor
   from two weeks ago was focused on values, deep narratives, and how we create the cultural conditions for change. There’s a lot in it that echoes this conversation in helpful and illuminating ways.

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Next episode will be a deep dive into the evergreen area of how we should think about technology and AI, and what stories have to do with that. It’s with the brilliant writer and philosopher

Tom Chatfield

If you’re finding value in these conversations, then I’d love to hear about it via email, comments, or shares. If you’d like to support the making of the podcast, then consider becoming a paid patron to this Substack, where all money currently goes towards paying for podcast production. Thank you to anyone who has done so - I am always surprised and moved by any support I receive.

A few things I enjoyed this week…

There is an overwhelming amount of excellent writing on Substack, here are a few picks from last week:

Elizabeth Oldfield

- Why I’m AI Sober

Will Storr

- How Art Makes us Human

Freya India

- The Mass Trauma of Porn

1. Apart from my friend Carson who sometimes reads this, I don’t think he has ever really lived there