Switching on by switching off

In our rush to leap headlong into being entertained every waking minute by the wonders of technology, and our impatience to have our every want satisfied immediately, it seems to be that the hard learned lessons of past generations are being lost.

It isn’t looked on as a good thing to be thrifty, to wait for things that are worthwhile, to make long term decisions and invest in our future selves and our children and grandchildren. These are things that are looked down on whereas once were values worth maintaining. The majority of the population these days seems intent to spend all that they have as soon as they have it, disregard the old wisdom, and then bemoan their fate when things appear unattainable or out of reach.

If failing to plan is indeed planning to fail, then there are many members of society out there who have very little hope of success (in whatever field, or howsoever success is so defined by them).

Of course, planning takes time, and time seems to be what so many people claim to be short of these days. A claim made while wiling away the endless hours that are spent in front of screens of various sorts, televisions, computers, phones, where time slips by without notice, and minutes turn to hours, and reality is circumvented by the imagined. Where time could be spent for even a few moments planning for the future (even the near future of tomorrow or next week), the claim of boredom takes hold and the panacea of “entertainment”, being but a swipe or click away, is substituted instead. Never before has the ability to switch off by switching on been so readily in reach.

But what of switching on by switching off? Would the time poor be better served by consciously switching off and moving on from the endless cycle of screen time? I think so. It goes without saying.

I catch a bus to and from work most days. I am constantly bemused by the number of people with their heads down, headphones in, staring at little screens that are in turn pumping pointless bullshit into their brains.  Life passes them by outside the bus, they don’t notice. Reality for them is right there on the screen. It is surreal.

I sometimes wonder if that is partly the cause of the disconnect between people and the natural world that sustains us. Why think about what goes on ‘out there’ outside the scope of social media, infotainment and consumerism, when you are convinced all you need to know is there on your little screen. Focussing all their attention on that blocks reality. Food comes from a supermarket, power from a switch, water from a tap. Looking at a screen so intently, unconsciously searching for something specific to make meaning, simply means that they don’t actually see anything at all.

The world is an amazing place. Switch off, even for a moment, and switch yourself back on.

Energy is energy – let’s change the narrative

Energy is usually defined as the ability to do work. That’s it. It isn’t coal, or coal seam gas, or uranium, or oil. It is the ability to do work.

The debate as it stands currently seems to be that we should be using renewable and alternative sources of energy rather than fossil fuels. This isn’t helpful to the debate at all.

The sun is not a renewable resource, any more than coal is. It is just far more prolific. To use the term ‘alternative’ just scares the ultra-conservative types, as they associate it with radical greenies preaching a total alternative lifestyle of neo-socialism and kum bah yah sing-alongs, dread locks and anti-development.

Like the term ‘clean coal technology’ has conveniently dropped the final word ‘technology’, and morphed into the idea of simply ‘clean coal’ (in an obvious and little called out attempt to convince punters that burning coal can somehow be clean or that there is a different type of clean coal being mined out there somewhere), the term alternative energy seems to have dropped the concept of simply being an alternative source of energy other than fossil fuels. It is not ‘alternative’ in the radical green movement sense of the word. It is just an alternative. It is not truly renewable in any sense of the word, it will eventually run out (albeit in billions of years in the case of solar energy), but is a viable alternative to what we are relying on at the moment.

So, there is nothing to fear from developing new models of energy production. It makes sense. Fossil fuels are polluting the planet in ways that are having dire consequences, and there are other ways to produce the same power using alternative sources of energy, if there is a will and the funding to do so.

Not to do so smacks of a conscious decision to keep polluting and polluting, putting the world as we know it currently at risk of irreversible change. It smacks of a deliberate decision to run the risk of a future world that will be very different in a challenging and unpleasant way to the one we inhabit at the moment, and seems unbelievably arrogant and stupid. To consciously and deliberately refuse to invest on a global scale into less damaging ways to produce energy, and to frantically fund and prop up old polluting systems that are clearly known to be harmful to the way we currently live is almost criminal in its stupidity.

So let’s change the narrative here. When you are talking about renewables, refer to them as what they are – alternative sources of energy to run the systems that keep us all in beer and skittles. Not alternative in the sense of turning off the lights and living in a commune. Change the narrative, and maybe some of the conservative types out there might just start to understand the concept.

There are no alternatives. Just sources that are bad for us all in the medium and long term, and sources that might just make the world a better place to live than it is going to be in the very near future.

Energy is just energy.