I’m here for the future

If I was only thinking about now, it would be easy. I’d be in some spectacular natural spot, with friends — eat, dance, make love, celebrate life. Be purely in the moment without a thought for tomorrow.

But it’s more complicated than that. We’re here for an odd amount of time — too short to really stretch things out — meditate on a mountain top for 1000 years — but too long to just focus on today. There is a Chinese proverb that says “the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second best time is today”. We are going to be here in 20 years and what will our world look like, what will our lives look like, what trees will we have planted?

I’m here for the future. I don’t need a big community to celebrate today, that’s what friends are for. Living for today, I wouldn’t need to work through hard problems, difficult communications, collaboration, group decisions. But if we’re going to reclaim, grow, and sustain our collective joy, it’s going to take a community, and that’s why I’m in Kift.

We’re not going to stop the metaverse, AI, or other human advances, but if we’re going to turn around the tech-induced isolation — zoom life, attention economy, doom scrolling, eating alone with Netflix — and climate change — wildfires, hurricanes, extreme heat, rising coasts, and shrinking lakes — we will need to reconnect with nature, each other, and find pleasure and meaning in harmony with the planet, not at its expense.

This is more than solitary work. We need to work together, to support each other, dream together, listen to, and amplify each other. It’s taken 100+ years to get into this situation, and we can’t fix it in a day, but we can collectively start to chart a new course today.

We can prototype a new way to live, not by turning away from the world and technology, but by leaning into it, and using what we have been given to change the course of history, averting disaster by finding meaning, belonging, and happiness.

For the past 100 years, our communities, and how we live, has been based around offices and productivity benefiting faceless corporations. With the global internet, remote work, and the ability to interact with culture and information from anywhere, we can be part of the global discourse, but build our own community and live locally.

If we can step outside the flow of the transactional capitalism we take for granted today, we may find that we have everything we need to make each other happy. To start to make change, we can focus on what has the most impact on our mental health and the climate. Because when we solve one we will solve the other — the environmental disruption we’re seeing is a result of seeking meaning and pleasure in consumerism. We aren’t going to make our own laptops or satellites, but we can work on those things in our lives that most affect the climate and our well-being: Food Systems, Housing, Transportation and the services we consume.

We can use the global availability of the internet to stay connected and work in natural environments where we can grow food and manage waste in partnership with the land – food forests, gardens and composting are a vital part of our existence, not just disposable moments in our day.

We can build from local materials and have a hand in the design, funding, and construction of our homes and shared spaces — not based on subdivision, commuting, offices and retail driving cold productivity, but on multi-use, hyper-local environments and spaces that support warm, human interaction and connection with nature.

Filling a void so many of us have, we can find joy and meaning in sharing with our community what makes us happy — teaching/learning yoga, mindfulness, meditation, personal exploration, exercise, bodywork, cooking for each other, building together, making music, dancing, real conversation — we will discover that happiness doesn’t come from an app, or with expectations of a return, or transaction, but in sharing and receiving from a place of love and gratitude.

This is more than what a group of friends can do. The future is the work of a community. People of different backgrounds, different opinions, ages, economics, different gifts of emotional and intellectual intelligence all figuring how to work together, and what they want, together.

I’m here to support each other to grow individually and as a group. Because as each member of the group grows, the community gains velocity, as the community evolves it can support more people, and as the size of the group grows it collects mass, and combined, the force we share is what makes the change we hope for possible.

This isn’t going to be easy, we’re going to have to learn and unlearn and put in time and effort, the work is the journey, getting our hands dirty — literally and metaphorically. But I’m also looking forward to laying under a pear tree with you, gently picking its fruit, and watching the sun set over a buzzing village, and a green world learning to live a little bit better each day.