there is too much negativity in our world. although i have stopped reading daily newspapers many years ago. it is difficult to seal oneself off. climate change and social disruption are problems which permeate all levels of society and one needs to be blind to not see their effects without following news outlets.

we are in a deep consciousness crisis. there is no doubt about this. but we need to find a positive narrative to get out of this dead end. it has to be a personal narrative which connects to a larger collective narrative, in which nationality, religion, ethnicity, gender, etc. don't matter anymore; one in which we simply are children of one large family which lives in a single home. this is a narrative in which the original meaning of economy and ecology make again sense: the law of the house and the teachings of how to organize that house.

i have started yesterday a new 21 day experiment on changing (mental) habits and call it the rainbow board. Every evening i reflect on the past day and write down 3 good moments. As a proficient trello user who puts down & executes every day 3 MIT (most important tasks), i use trello also for this exercise. the inspiriation came from from a review of two books on positive thinking (see references).

I am usually not much in favor of life coaching because it tends to overlook the systemic realities which are the root cause for the maladies which we experience in our world. About 5 years ago I embarked a third time on a PhD project looking into the causes for growing mental illness around the globe. One of the sources I looked into was Learned Optimism by the father of positive psychology, Martin Seligman. He promotes cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) to pessimistic and depressed people.

I already then came to the conclusion that Seligman has certainly a point in shifting one’s mind towards a positive outlook on life; but its essentially a perspective and therapy which only works for members of the affluent West. An Indian farmer who is part of a nationally and globally oppressive agricultural system cannot make use of CBT. He needs a miracle or commits, like it is the sad reality in far too many cases, suicide.

However, being an individual part of the system at large, I need to start with myself and concentrate good vibes in my hands. There is only this much I can do; and I need to start in my immediate environment. Our social reality tends to direct our focus in regard to both problems and solutions to the far away corners of the world. Everything is better in New Zealand than back home and war in Ukraine turns into a tragedy which happens right before our own house. The truth is though that our media supported focus on these far away conditions undermines our mindful awareness of what we could improve in the here and now – and what we ought to be grateful for.

the rainbow board is my new magic wand to initiate a shift in perception.

Further reading/watching:

• On Procratination and the Enlightened Playground
• Wie wir die Welt sehen
  
• Lo and Behold
  

The future of work was the most discussed topic in Anglo-Saxon media in 2017. Rightly so, because that year people had become increasingly aware of the consequences of artificial intelligence on human work, and not only thought leaders began to ask questions whose answers are not yet, or not easily, forthcoming. What is the future of work? When will it occur? How do you prepare your children for it? What education does the future of work require? This article attempts to summarize observations of the last decade and provides answers.
 
“The farther back you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.” [Winston Churchill]

Much has been written about Covid-19 and little I read was of value. The nearsightedness of politicians and the tunnel vision of scientists is deprived of interdisciplinary systems awareness and what Buddhists call the connection between phenomena and noumena: the reflection of moral problems in the material world.

There is however one outstanding quote by Indian novelist Arundhati Roy, which hits the bull's eye: "Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew." The 2nd bubonic plague triggered the end of the dark ages and the emergence of Renaissance. Recurrences of the 2nd bubonic plague gave way to the enlightenment movement and the 3rd bubonic plague to the 19th century revolutions which led to the decline of Empires and Aristocracy.

Some day soon a book will be written like the one above right which will not be titled "The Black Death and the End of the Dark Ages" but "Covid-19 and the End of Modernity". Humanity is at the brink of another major transformation which might rejuvenate a decaying democracy through technological decision making and extend spheres of justice from a few wealthy nations to a united mankind. It might also produce an enlightened absolutism in which Xi Jinping continues the tradition of enlightenment kings like the Prussian Frederick the Great (1740-1772). Who can say for sure? The only thing that is certain about the future is that it will be different.

The wide spread admiration for authoritarian and thus industrial solutions to Covid-19 in the outbreak country China reflects however that large parts of the population support an industrial solution to a multi-layered problem which connects nature with culture. The crisis we experience is at the root one in consciousness of everything being interconnected, one which shows us that the exploitation of people and planet is not any longer sustainable.

Regulations on compulsory vaccinations like the one introduced in Austria on Feb 1 are the product of societies which are not ready to embrace diversity and tolerance. They are fascist in nature and repeat a cultural phenomenon which has materialized in our cultures over the course of history in various forms: the inquisition of the catholic church, the final solution in regard to European Jews, the genocides committed by Tutsis and Hutus, the recurring wars between Israelis and Lebanese, etc.

Courageous Chinese netizens shared at the beginning of the Covid-19 outbreak a clip from Victor Hugo's Les Miserables on wechat and pointed at the  nontransparent top-down approach of the government. Courageous Austrian citizens demonstrate these days in many cities against a regulation which ignores human integrity for the sake of keeping industrial working and schooling conditions in place.

Covid-19 has laid bare an essential characteristic of our contemporary societies and has shown that democratic nations converge under the pressure of systemic challenges like this pandemic episode with authoritarian regimes which have not yet gone through enlightenment movements and bourgeois revolutions. They reveal power structures and power interests which are in contraction with what Fritz Schumacher postulated in Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered.

The future might not be known, but in the words of Peter F. Drucker, the only thing that we know about the future is that it will be different. The best way to predict the future is however to create it.

Occasionally I would just wish I could forget the frame conditions under which we live, engross myself in Chinese New Year celebrations or be amused by US blockbuster movies. But we can’t truly change how our minds operate. It is as if they have been built as special purpose machines with a mission to accomplish. Darwin wrote about himself in a similar manner in his autobiography. Like him I would love to be able to enjoy music, but my mind is on a mission to unravel a problem which we sooner or later all need to face.
 
Saturday night, I finish in a second attempt director Adam McKay’s film Don’t Look up. I felt compelled to turn off in a first attempt after only 30 minutes. Don’t Look up is Netflix’ second highest grossing production. It’s a cash cow. One which is described as dark comedy, a satire of government, political, and media indifference to the climate crisis. I couldn’t find the comedy aspects in it. The way it has been made reflects how sick our hedonistic societies are. And it made me literally sick.

The day after we consume this piece of cinematic art, the sun shines and I decide to take the family on a little trip into the outskirts of town. Temperatures are up 8˚C from -1 a day earlier to +7. A storm brushes the landscape and makes driving our van challenging to my wife. Our first stop is an approximately 200 year old tilia cordata, the only nature monument of this species in town. I exchange a few words with the owner,  and we measure the tree’s grith at an impressive 450 cm.
 
Our next stop is a same size tilia platyphyllus a few kilometers south from where we start a three hour hike. The wind makes it occasionally difficult to walk. The kids think its fun, I think it’s a manifestation of climate change since I can’t remember such frequent storms from my childhood. How the trees must suffer under such a storm. We cross under the A1, the country’s main highway, in a tunnel and encounter loads of trash on both sides. The signs of a closeby service area with restaurant and gas station where drivers discharge their waste on the parking lot.
 
A rolling landscape opens the view to the snow-covered northern Alps and after another half an hour we enter a forest which I identified on the satellite map as the main attraction on this route. I am however first disappointed then even horrified as we get deeper into the forest. The storm is ear deafening, making it hardly possible to talk to each other and the spruce monoculture has created an acidic soil which is poison to most understory plants.
 
Austria is considered to be a green country, one in which nature protection is a priority, but where once mixed broad leaf forests covered the surface, capitalist forestry has supplanted oaks, wild cherries and limes, with this ugly spruce monoculture with no tree older than thirty years. We follow a little creek and after another half an hour I notice a hidden fault line in the forest landscape which turns away from the forest trail which has been recently used by heavy machinery.
 
We walk north and discover a probably 150-year-old beech which nestles in a line with an approximately 200-year-old oak along this old path. East and west the spruce monoculture extends as far as the eye can see and looks not much different from the Malaysian palm oil plantations which I still have in my long time Asian memory. Why did film maker Werner Boote back in 2017 shoot The Green Lie in Malaysia, if there is so much more to discover back home?
 
Not far from the beech the forest has been partially cleared and about two dozen twenty-meter-high spruces have given way to the force of the storm. Like a game of Mikado they are scattered on the ground and lean against adjacent trees. A picture of disaster which reminds me of our 2020 visit to Japan were we saw a three dozen century old trees having been destroyed by a storm only a few days earlier. Can there be something like a graveyard for trees? Did the ditches in Srebrenica look any different?

Don't look up.

Isaac Asimov's bathroom metaphor is famous and as Aldous Huxley once said: A fact doesn't disappear by ignoring it. Western nation states however pretend that population growth does not impact the democratic model while it slowly declines right before our eyes.

Donald Trump's presidency and the attack on democratic institutions like the one on the US Capitol last year, a dictator-like regime in Austria from 2017-2021 under the youngest ever chancellor Sebastian Kurz and two successors since then seem like manifestations of what Ken Wilber once called aperspectival madness. In fact these events follow the laws of nature and show that we need a new form of governance.

The grand master of the exponential function, Al Bartlett, wrote a short and readable article about the connection between the democratic decline, techological advancement and population growth which quotes Asimov in lucid manner.

Bill Moyers: "What happens to the idea of the dignity of the human species
if this population growth continues at its present rate?"

Isaac Asimov: "It will be completely destroyed. I like to use what I call my bathroom metaphor: If two people live in an apartment, and there are two bathrooms, Then both have freedom of the bathroom. You can go to the bathroom anytime you want, Stay as long as you want, for whatever you need. And everyone believes in Freedom of the Bathroom; It should be right there in the Constitution.

But if you have twenty people in the apartment and two bathrooms, Then no matter how much every person Believes in Freedom of the Bathroom, there's no such thing. You have to set up times for each person, You have to bang on the door, 'Aren't you through yet?' And so on."

Asimov continues with what could be one of the most profound observations of the 20th Century: "In the same way, democracy cannot survive overpopulation; Human dignity cannot survive [overpopulation]; Convenience and decency cannot survive [overpopulation]; As you put more and more people into the world, The value of life not only declines, it disappears. It doesn't matter if someone dies,
The more people there are, the less one individual matters."

Read this and you will understand why the threat to democracy does not originate in authoritarian China, but in our elites' unwillingness to reform democratic decision making. China's own overpopulation problem can teach the democratic West that another form of governance - if not a totalitarian - is inevitable - no matter whether we praise China's absolutism or work on more humane alternatives.

Writing a blog on the future of work on education, I should mention that this condition extends to labor markets and education systems: the more people there are the more unequal and unfair the frame conditions will be.

We have two routes which we can take from here:

One leads to the decimation of population through war and disease and is in the interest of the small number of people who own the majority of wealth and assets on this planet.

The second route leads to a new form of sharing and education in which finite resources and the need to allocate them fairly are precondition for genuine growth and the true unfolding of human potential.

Peter Drucker forsaw already many years ago that "if the 21st century will show one thing, then it is the futility of politics." We have chosen route one already a few times. How about taking a different turn this time?