• Gardening. I’ve had no gardening land until yesterday so I have filled my terrace with pots and bags of soil. Very proud of my (admittedly shitty) beans and tomatoes. I’ve made raised beds out of rubble in my backyard. A friend has offered me to use some of her land, so that will be next to plant.

• Cat. I was really awfully depressed so I adopted a sickly kitten to have someone else to care for. It helps. The cat doesn’t give a shit about world politics. It’s now growing more healthy and becoming too powerful for my furniture. When I wallow in bad moods it will let me know without delay. It’s currently sitting on my lap making sure I don’t get too much screen time.

• Community. The local community is poor, rural and divided into (very conservative) locals and foreigners (who come here to live in more natural settings than where they come from). Since I’ve turn woefully old I feel like I am now the adult in the room, so I try to work on bringing people together, and a few others are doing the same. That’s how we fight the fascists and xenophobes who seem to be everywhere these days. There was a small group of at least four different nationalities banging pots for Gaza in our tiny town yesterday. When it feels that there is not enough community I will come up with some way to create it through common activities. Two or three people meeting and doing something together is a success!

• Bread. I bake sourdough bread because the local bread sucks. Some people buy it from me and enjoy it very much, and that makes me happy.

That said I am often nearly succumbing to all the doom out there. There have been days in the last few months when I was really not wanting to live anymore. I then return to one of the points above and carry on, and the doom passes. I’ll keep doing that, sometimes out of spite, till I’m booted out of this place or this life.

All of the points I wrote down connect with caring for human and non-human life (even the sourdough is a friend!). One more point I should add is ceremony/prayer, which sounds stupid to the average anarchist/atheist, but it has become important to me and connects me to ancestors and landscape. The land is alive and my work is to participate in caring for the land and its inhabitants - a lot of that philosophy is borrowed from native and indigenous people. I’m not caring for others because some god tells me to, but because being a good neighbor to people, plants and animals makes everyone involved more happy.

All I do is purposefully small. No big ambitions that would eat me (been there, done that). Just my tiny self doing my best. Plans and ideas don’t have to be - shouldn’t be - big and sparkling.

Mumbo jumbo sounds very defensive to me. It’s strange how people get quite angry or at least really dismissive when you mention anything that is beyond the commonly accepted mainstream science - even when there’s no direct harm done to them by people talking about it. It’s also strange when you find out how many actual scientists are animists or carry some sort of spiritual belief.

When you get deeper into indigenous philosophies (branded since the times of enlightenment as superstitious mumbo jumbo) you often find belief systems that are incredibly pragmatic and would solve many of the social and environmental problems our rationalist thoughtscape has brought about, but our Western supremacist education makes it difficult for us to accept how much we could gain by opening up to it.

I became an animist after reading about the concept of Wendigo, and then applying the scientific method to indigenous belief systems by just acting as if they were true and finding out what happens in my life. For a brief period after the landscape and my ancestors were starting to speak to me I wasn’t sure whether I was descending into psychosis, but ultimately the results of listening to these voices and taking their guidance were more sound than continuing to follow the un-guidance of Western rationalist culture. At the same time I met quite a few people who were going through the same changes of mind. There seems to be an interesting process going on that brings more and more people back into a connection and relation with non-human life (animals, plants, rivers, mountains, ancestors …) and those who open up to it are usually those who I consider working for positive improvements (social justice, environmental issues), so I consider them my family.

The very first opening up, even before reading about Wendigo, was by me being a pet owner and having some experiences with my horse that showed a depth of soul I could not continue to dismiss - so maybe you want to ask your dog about what they think about the mumbo jumbo? ;-)

As an animist I recognize and respect the sacredness of all that is, as a former skeptic this notion would have made me deeply defensive a few years ago, and even now I still find myself resisting to anything I perceive as prescribed group practice. My own experience makes me wonder how others who haven’t reconnected to landscape yet would perceive such an idea.

we should not do it

Because at this point, some people are suffering damage by the use of AI. I might not be hired as a translator in the future, my income is gone. Others have had their artworks, texts, creative output stolen (plus their work isn’t needed anymore). We have delegated creative work, which should be humans’ pride and joy, to a machine. Why on earth would anyone in their right mind do such thing?

So we as humans have to have a discussion about the responsible use of AI (I think nobody who screams ‘down with AI’ has any illusions that it will ever disappear again). As with any new tech product, the discussion should have been had before it was unleashed onto the public, then again you can’t talk about it if you don’t use it. It’s also time for the researchers to pick up on that sentiment and explore the ethical uses of the great power they have created.

If those now losing work as text and image workers were retrained as IT security people or AI prompt inventors before such tech was introduced, brilliant! If the numbers about ecological sustainability and advantages for society add up, I’m on board. But I want this to be a slow process and a public discussions (maybe with time some media learn to tone down the techbro/luddite extremes), before we drown in AI-generated shite nobody ever asked for.

I really felt like that at first, but also I think that using the language of the oppressor to join native forces and maintain and spread traditional knowledge is pretty cool. There is something positive growing out of the horrors of the past, I hope, some new understanding.