It is by embracing these falls – these failures – that we begin to see the limits of first-half-of-life thinking. We learn to live in tension, instead of searching for ways to avoid it. We learn to transition from conditional love based on compliance, into an unconditional love based on connection. Instead of repeating mistakes over and over again, we embrace our mistakes and learn to try new ways.
“We have a national mythology that limits are always bad. In fact, we have a national phobia of limits,” wryly observes John Michael Greer: author, historian, conservationist, and proprietor of the popular weblog The Archdruid Report. “We need to get past that.”—Includes podcast interview by Chris Martenson
The modern world depends on economic growth to function properly. And throughout the living memory of every human on earth today, technology has continually developed to extract more and more raw material from the environment to power that growth. This has produced a faithful belief among the public that has helped to blur the lines between human innovation and limited natural resources. Technology does not create resources, though it does embody our ability to access resources. When the two are operating smoothly in tandem, society mistakes one for the other. This has created a new and very modern problem — a misplaced trust in technology to consistently fulfill our economic needs. What happens once key resources become so dilute that technology, by itself, can no longer meet our growth needs?