The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - 10 Things That Bring Me Joy | Frankly #35

Episode Date: June 30, 2023

On this very personal Frankly, Nate speaks from the heart about ten things which bring him joy and, despite the accelerating polycrisis, will likely still be available to us even without abundant cheap energy. This message - really - is at the heart of the Great Simplification story.  Distinct from intermittent and shallow hits of dopamine from social media "Likes" or shopping or stock investing - joy is a deep, soul-enriching emotion.  Can we shift from wearing an economic lens which fears financial loss to opening our hearts and minds to what truly brings us joy? Can we learn - today - to appreciate the joy from the natural world around us, communing with other humans and animals, discovering beauty or sharing knowledge, as we travel through the Great Simplification?     For Show Notes and More: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/frankly-original/35-the-10-things-that-bring-me-joy   Watch on Youtube: https://youtu.be/GjpL1OoSi6o

Greetings. Today I would like to talk about joy. Not something we always talk about in the Metacrisis, polycrisis space. Last week I tweeted a picture which has been going around of the anomaly in the ocean temperatures, which is like blowing away the range of the last 20 years, quite ominous, even though it's probably mostly due to El Nino. And my tweet said, this does not bring me joy. On a bike ride earlier today, as is always the case, the neurons and reflections are going on in silence when I'm up on the road in the woods by the forest, by the river for two hours. are reflected on what does bring me joy.

There's something called Anhadonia, which is the inability to feel joy or feel pleasure. And Daniel Schmacher and I, on a recent podcast on artificial intelligence, belabored the fact that our society doesn't use wide enough boundaries in our economic system and in what we care about. And so the narrow boundary focus of profits and money ends up being the focus. But I think also if you constantly use wide boundary analysis to view the world, you over time develop the inability to feel joy. Joy is a narrow boundary experience where you don't think about the rest of the world. you experience something joyful in the moment. So I'm going to list 10 things, if I remember them all, that bring me joy. And joy is different than novelty or unexpected reward or lust or happiness or motivation, you know, those things.

Joy is like the antithesis of tragedy and melancholy. It's the opening up of the human spirit to what is possible and it like feels right with the world. Everything's beautiful and possible and right. I'm sure there's a dictionary definition of joy. In any case, for me, Nate, in the year 2023, knowing what I know, doing what I do, here are the things that bring me joy. First of all, games with other people. Now, there's puzzles like Quirtle and Whartle that you can get unexpected reward and problem-solving things.

But when you get together with four, five, six, seven humans that you care about and you play a game for a couple hours, it is this expansive shutting down of the rest of the world. And you have both the oxytocin and serotonin and dopamine all at once with people you care about playing the newly wet game. or playing Dungeons and Dragons, which I did when I was a teenager, where it is probably the best, most energy, material-efficient game ever developed by humans where you and a bunch of other people imagine another world. And with some dice and some books, you construct an entirely different reality. Doing that is joyful.

I was kind of the leader of a trip. contests where for 50 hours we collaborated with 20, 30 other people to answer silly trivia questions in someone's basement. That was among the most joyful time of my life. It was this little tribe collaborating towards a puzzle and the prize was irrelevant. It was just an intense, joyful bonding thing. So games is something that bring me joy. Trees bring me joy.

Trees and forest. verdant, many shade greens in the late spring in Wisconsin and Minnesota. The old growth forests of the world that I've been fortunate to see, the Joyce Kilmer forest in North Carolina, the giant Beobob trees in Africa, the Tongass Forest in Alaska, hiking with my golden retriever in Bella Kula and all the different pine and deciduous trees in northern British Columbia. Of course, there were grizzly bears, but the trees brought me joy, this like deep, dank, earthy smell of the soil and life and the mist and the little salamanders and the moss and the slugs and everything that is alive in an old growth forest.

the many different old growth sentinel trees that are in the Olympic Peninsula of Washington. The Redwoods and the Jedediah Smith close to where I grew up in Ashland, Oregon. The mere woods north of San Francisco, these giant old century trees that just give the feeling of life and continuity. That brings me joy. Music is something that you can be working on something very intense and analytical and worrying because it's about the metacrisis. And you can turn on opera or progressive rock, which I happen to like Porcupine Tree and Merillian are my favorite bands. They each have like 20 albums. And progressive rock with a kind of sharp, flat harmony.

like the song Half-Life by Porcupine Tree, never ceases to bring me joy. Music can be transcendent for a human, for whatever the reason. Humor. Humans can be damn funny, despite all of our other flaws and ecological overshoot. Humor brings me joy, both with my friends, with my little inside jokes in my family, with the list serves I have with Twitter. Oh my God, people can be damn funny. And out of the blue, even in a tragic, dark situation, humor brings me joy. For those that know me and have followed my ruminations for the last decade or so, you know that I deeply care about and resonate with dogs. I have four dogs right now.

and they bring me unadulterated joy every single day. Just hanging out with them. I mean, I named this podcast, frankly, because Frank is on my lap half the time. Just seeing them living in the moment, jumping in the weeds, chasing a squirrel, swimming, playing with toys, chasing each other around the yard to get a toy, especially the things that they do that's particularly to their own breed. Murphy, Michael, Retriever, you know, chases things. Kai is a cattle dog.

He likes to nip at the other dogs and jump like a pogo stick, like bouncy, bouncy, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun in the woods. It never ceases to bring a smile, especially when they interact with other species like the, the chickens or the cats, dogs really bring me joy. I can really be myself with dogs, especially strange dogs or in addition, strange dogs. When I'm on a bike ride or a hike in another city, I end up greeting the dog and rarely the person.

I like talk in a falsetto voice, hey, nice to meet your little doggy. And they just, they don't know me. I mean, unless it's a Rottweiler or some dog that was trained to be defensive, you can become instant friends with another dog. And I love doing that. It's one of the things in the world that brings me joy. Working on these issues with long, known, trusted colleagues that you know their heart and their spirit. and they know that they deeply care about changing the default of our trajectory away from the path that we're on.

That brings me a form of joy. When you're sitting in a meeting and it's serious and we're talking about deep stuff, there's a feeling of rightness about that, that these humans are collaborating towards the greater good. and I don't know if it's joy or something like it, but it makes me feel really good. Rain and all the things coupled with the weather systems bring me joy. I've always liked rain since I was a little kid. My fondest memories that when my therapist or meditator

asked me to go to a happy place, it's imagining the still water, of a bay on a Canadian lake where it's misting in this tiny pitter-patter of rain sounds like glass hitting the water and then you see these swirls in the in the shallows by the lily pads and it's a pike and it's just the most peaceful joyous vision with the dark green water and this soft rain. I love natural weather systems and storms when it's supposed to rain. I mean. It's supposed to rain. I look at the radar, I go sit on the back porch and watch the clouds come in. It just feels like probably my ancestors felt a connection to the natural world.

Related to that, I also now feel joyous when there's unexpected cold. I don't really like cold, actually. But knowing what I do about climate change, it's probably an emotional, non-rational reaction. But when you work on looking at the biosphere and the risks of the downside of the metabolism of the carbon pulse on the oceans and the natural world, cold feels refreshing and like the world isn't on some runaway path towards warmer and warmer temperatures. Granted, some of the cold we feel in the winter and other times is because the polar vortex. is weakening and we're here in Wisconsin feeling what normally would be on the North Pole. But it's a deep respect for Earth systems when you have a 40 degree night in June or an unexpected cold streak.

Intimacy with another human being, in my case in the opposite sex. It's different than lust or sex, but when you're in an intimate moment with your eyes closed, kissing another person. It's like the world stops and you're in this little bubble of warmth and joy and rolling bliss where everything else doesn't matter. And it's this sensual vortex that you're surrounded by. I don't know how to describe that. But that's something that brings me joy.

Of course, Frank, who's the fun police, says, Ra, rah, rah, rah, that's enough of that. Of course, then it is also joy in a different sort of way, but then something else we have to stop because Frank says, not allowed. Tending things that are growing, creatures and plants brings me joy. I've had chickens for the last 15 years. They're my friends. I don't eat them.

I eat the eggs and I have them called by names. And I give them watermelon rinds and little mealworm treats and I call them and they come running to me. And they're my friends, these ancient dinosaurs. I just this week bought ducklings for the first time in my life. Just this afternoon gave them a little bath in my bathtub and kind of went in with them. Though I'm not going to show the landlord that video. They're three days old. They're so cute.

And they're a lot of fun. And I like to every day, every month, every year, see how the creatures that I'm responsible for live their lives and just get little updates. And I feel responsible for them. And when you get a daily reminder of their growth and their experiences and their individual personalities, that brings me joy. But not only creatures, but plants. I have a Canadian hemlock that's five years old now that I planted on the burial site of my last golden retriever, Murphy, Quinter. And it's been really dry here, so I have to bring a bucket of five-gallon pail and tended. And I thought it wasn't going to make it, but now there's green shoots on the underside of it.

and, you know, barring some climate or nuclear catastrophe, that tree could live to be 800 years old, a Canadian hemlock. So to tend the garden and to watch things grow and mature and be somewhat responsible for them, that brings me joy. Last but not least, in this era where extinctions are happening, a lot faster than the background rate when the populations of natural species are declining globally, though less so in the United States, because we have energy privilege. When I encounter other animals in the natural world, this brings me deep joy. Last week, I was biking and a fox, a red fox ran across the road, stopped and looked at me. And for like three seconds, just looked at me and then scampered off.

Like I almost got goosebumps. It's so amazing to me. This morning I was on a bike ride and there was this really cool, greenish small caterpillar. I was going fast and I almost crashed to verge around it. It just brought me joy that these things that are alive, sharing the planet with us, at the same time it makes me feel tragic that what's happening with the world, you see a fawn that was hit by a car and animals that are just going around their daily motions are encountering the human squid of the superorganism.

But life abounds and even in my own small corner of the world here in West Central, Wisconsin, I see fisher cats and bears and coyotes and badgers on my wildlife camera. A couple months ago, I saw a V of swans and geese in the same V going over the house. That brings me intense joy to see unexpected things in the natural world. So other than sharing this with you and hoping that you each who are watching this, who are aware of the coming great simplification, can find your own portfolio of things that bring you joy and to each his own.

But I think it's important to have a bookend or an antidote to the tragedy and sense of loss and sense of foreboding that we feel paying attention to the events of the world. But the main reason that I have this really, reflection on joy is all of the things that I just shared with you. All of them will be available to us during and after the Great Simplification. None of the things mentioned require a small fire somewhere on the planet to be experienced. As long as we don't wreck the biosphere or the social contract, these things will be available to humans.

in the near, in the intermediate, and the long-term future to some extent. And earlier this week, Kate Rayworth talked about the care economy. So many things that are a function of how we enjoy and experience our lives are not included in GDP. And so I think we have to kind of have a wake-up call and understand and acknowledge and appreciate all these things that bring us happiness and joy that are not connected to the material throughput of our economies. I hope you find some joy in the upcoming week.

And back to regularly scheduled content. Talk to you soon. Thanks.