Exploring the Value of Life After Growth
… in a world valuing growth over life.
This article is an invitation to join me on a journey into my own world. In the midst of the gloom of our days, I‘ve recently found myself being a bit withdrawn from the world. But with everything that’s happening and expected to happen, it might be a good idea to visit my own world more often. It’s not an escape from reality, but a call to the muse of utopia. Because, just like this world in ruins, there’s a reason we created utopia, too.
For about 10 days last September, I found myself in the enchanting landscapes of the Tzoumerka Mountains in Greece, designing a four-day summer school with some of my favorite people. It was titled “Life after growth” and welcomed students from all corners of the world. The only real inconvenience I faced was the inexplicable security alerts for the extreme weather events taking place some dozens of kilometers southeast.
It all started a few months ago when we sent out a brief invitation that, long story short, said, “Here’s our existential despair. We’ve forgotten how to live like humans. Join us in the Greek mountains to try and remember it together.” To our great surprise, the response was overwhelming. About 15 lovely souls from all corners of the Earth arrived in Kalentzi, a small village in the municipality of Northern Tzoumerka. Having been stuffed with (over)education in the academic market, they were seeking a place where they could belong.
The weary souls who embarked on the journey to rediscover life after growth in the Tzoumerka Mountains had done a fair bit of measuring themselves. To reach their destination, they counted countless kilometers. Their hardship spoke through their faces and bodies. Epirus is a land blessed with waters and forests, mountains and seas, fertile soil, and active people; it’s a place of beauty, scents, and music that lifts your spirits. But it also consistently ranks among the poorest regions in Europe, lacking in basic infrastructure and connectivity. Access to the village wasn’t easy. The weather was terrible. My welcome was lukewarm and gloomy. But they didn’t lose heart. They didn’t opt for the easy choice of cynicism. They chose to explore, to learn, to reflect, to become vulnerable, and to seek hope.
You see, Epirus, alongside industrial scale wind turbines and mining activities, is also home to various local initiatives, collectives, and communities daring to be different. All of the above, along with the lively vibe of Tzoumerka, the food, nature, and companionship, inspired a small community of people to envision a new world and, for a few days, attempt to live in it. It was a rich and greatly rewarding experience, which I’ll try to squeeze into the following lines.
Pursuing value, needs, and time outside growth
Life, as we experience it, is in the numbers. We count days, hours, weeks. We count income, expenses, sales, returns, complaints. We count followers, likes, shares, ‘influence,’ content. We even count our bodies, we count dead bodies, lost souls, we count down to the end of our lives or the world. What gets measured, gets managed. Hence we count because we must count, as the only acceptable way to manage what we hold dear, what we need to live and prosper, and the precise time we have to deliver our existence.
To break outside of the conceptual grid that confines our existence we had to re-politicize things that we often take for granted, such as value, needs, and time. None of these concepts is neutral or given. They are all instituted by our collective imagination. The world we live in is as much dependent on us for its reproduction, as we are on it for ours. We often feel trapped in this endless rat-race where our lives and livelihood are pitted against each other’s but, still, we are able to think, act, and dream in ways that offer a glimpse of the outside, of another life.
We are able to value things that are beyond measure, make ‘irrational’ choices about things we need, and through these we can experience time differently, in a non-linear, un-chunkable, de-compartmentalized fashion. We can be in the here and now with our bodies left exposed to feel and embrace our connection to other living beings, we can imagine and move in unforeseen ways but still manage to interact with each other, to follow each other’s footsteps, to dance together even when no one sets the rhythm.
Through this beautiful embodied experience, combined with deep and insightful discussions, we tried to ground ourselves in reality. Our perception and imagination can — and should — run wild, but we also need to partake in the reality through which our lives are reproduced. For this, we are grateful to have real, live initiatives such as the Tzoumakers community makerspace, where farmers and craftspeople create tools suitable for local small-scale agriculture; the energy community, CommonEn, which supports about 60 households and a few small businesses in meeting their energy needs without relying on the aggressively volatile energy market; the wandering workshop, Boulouki, which revitalizes traditional building techniques; The High Mountains social cooperative, which strives for the rehabilitation of mountainous areas; the intercultural workshop, Habibi.Works, a creative space where refugees and locals can seek a better way of coexisting through collaboration, sharing, and mutual aid; and the international network, Wind Empowerment, where a community of experts and non-experts share designs and know-how for building, operating, and maintaining open-source small-scale wind turbines.
Every day, we sat together with members and instigators from such initiatives to listen and understand how they get by, what moves and powers them, to map their values and needs and co-design a new society, in which they will be the norm rather than the exception. Small groups were formed to learn together through whatever everyone brought to the table, inspired by the themes and discussions of the theoretical sessions.
For the organizing team this was a great opportunity to learn how to lose control and let learning happen — to understand how we can be part of the learning process and build our collective capacities. Having ourselves being socialized in a professional academic system we have been trained to value ‘learning outcomes’, performance and attribution to the detriment of creativity, experimentation, and genuine connection. To our great pleasure, none of the participants were interested in any of the former. Understanding that so much rich knowledge and practice is already living ‘out there’ initiated a self-reflective process to seek knowledge beyond excellence, through interfaces with the material and affective world — and also make friends and have a good time in the process!
Words and actions are inseparable
If I had one euro for every time I’ve heard someone say “Words are nice but we need action!”, I would never need to count money again. The division between theory and practice is as foolish as the separation between the mind and the body. We may distinguish them to understand how each functions, but in essence, they are one and the same. Just as there is no (alive and healthy) body without a mind, there is no action without ideas, and vice versa.
However, there are different ways in which ideas are born and propagated. The conventional way is to simply utter words like “freedom,” “patriotism,” “democracy,” and arbitrarily define what they mean and how they are realized. A different approach is to discover values and ideas within human relationships. Freedom, patriotism, and democracy do not exist in a vacuum. They are born and reproduced through our actions, relationships, and interactions. Likewise, the practices of a new world are seeds already sown in the here and now.
In the quagmire (both literally and figuratively) that this place has become, we need these practices to grasp hold of, to stop sinking. That’s why we must recognize them, understand them, and experience them. We need to support them, believe in them, make them our own, while also questioning them, discussing them, and improving them — because these practices are our means to interface with the world, to give meaning to our words, ideas, and values. To compose a new reality, based on which we will reevaluate, strengthen, and start all over again. A community of inquiry and practice is what we tried to create here, through those actions and human relationships that give meaning to our ideas and values.
Ideas and values are world-making acts. They light up the path that may reinstate hope for a world worth living in and passing on to the next generations. A world that doesn’t need to constantly grow, ignoring the consequences. A world where small and beautiful things have value, and our needs can be met without someone’s suffering. A world with limits, set by us, not to restrict but to embrace us, to be there to stop the counting before we lose count. A world where we move beyond the insatiability of a society that strives to be limitless instead of happy. A society that matters without measurement. That puts life before, after, over, and beyond growth. A life more sustainable but also more liveable.
I will conclude by paraphrasing the lyrics of my beloved Phoebus Delivorias, thanking all who shared this beautiful world with me, hoping our story will inspire others to move forward. Because if we dreamt of this world together, then maybe it wasn’t just a dream, but a vision:
Tonight a train leaves the station,
For a strange, beautiful nation,
Yet for the first time, you can feel
That everything takes place here and now.
Jesus is born within a month,
And what you wish, you now may start.
Everything will remain dark,
but underneath a fire burns.
And then tomorrow, we’ll be back,
Oh, but finally, you will see,
It is with you I only want to get the blues.
Images courtesy (in alphabetical order): Jovis Lane, Suzanne Maas, Eirini Priavolou, Leo Stillinger.
Inspired? Here’s some ideas of things you can do next:
- Life After Growth is aspiring to gro… ehm, flourish as a community of practice. For now, we only have a temporary mailing list but plan to have a proper one soon, among other communication channels and follow-up activities. We are working in the spirit of self-organization and commoning, so every contribution matters. To stay in touch, please, send a blank message with the subject “Join Life After Growth” to alex.pazaitis@gmail.com
- You can learn more about the work underpinning this initiative at cosmolocalism.eu and p2plab.gr.
