It’s no surprise to most people who know me that I am in love with smart phone technology.

If you’ve seen a headline in the last five years, you also know that people are prone to hang-wringing about possible “addiction” to our devices.

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Here’s one headline: Giving up technology is as ‘stressful as getting married’ from The Daily Mail.

Citing software firm FrontRange, it contains such frightful tidbits as:

If the very thought of being without your smartphone brings you out in a cold sweat you could be suffering from a form of technology addiction.

New research has found that more than half of gadget owners (53 per cent) worldwide admit to suffering anxiety when they can’t use their phones and added having a tech detox was ‘as stressful as a trip to the dentist or even their own wedding day.’

and then this:

Almost half said they use their phone at least once every hour and two thirds claimed they couldn’t go without their smartphones for a day.

‘When people feel an uncomfortable sense of withdrawal when not online, we know that the relationship with technology is not being managed properly,’ said Dr Graham from the Capio Nightingale Hospital…

Well, that sure sounds dire.

It’s popular to raise this alarm these days. Take Conrad Gessner, a Swiss scientist who wrote an entire book about how the modern world overhwhelms people with data, which he calls “confusing and harmful” to the mind. Better put down my cell phone. Too bad Gessner lived in the 1500s and was talking about the printing press. Oops.

The truth is that smart phones are easy and useful to integrate into your regular, daily, habitual life. They are incredibly valuable. As such, it’s not really any surprise that they then become stressful to do without.

Try plugging in some other ultra-useful technology into these dire little warnings and you can see how stupid they sound.

Study finds half of people feel anxious when they can’t use their car.

Well, yes. My car is kind of necessary for my day to day life. Being a little anxious when it’s in the shop is perfectly understandable.

Your car makes a really great analogy, since cars are really integrated into modern life. For many people cars are second in material importance only to homes.

But my favorite technology for this thought experiment is electric indoor lighting. Not all electricity, mind you. JUST indoor lighting.

• Half of people feel anxious when they can’t turn on their lights.

• 45 percent said they use indoor lighting at least once and hour

• Two thirds admitted they couldn’t go a day without turning on the lights

• When people feel an uncomfortable sense of withdrawal when the lights aren’t on, we know that the relationship with technology is not being managed properly.

Joshua pointed out that a lot of people experience a serious discomfort when their electricity goes out. It’s unusual. It’s confusing. The sensations are strange. All of a sudden you have to figure out how to do things differently. Annoyingly differently.

It would clearly be absurd to say those people have a technology addiction or an unhealthy relationship with their light switches.

The same is true for smart phones. Oh no! A tool is really useful and so people use it a lot! Let’s panic! It’s simply a fear of technology, an attachment to the past, and we will get over it just as we got over our fear of the printing press.

I’ve been ignoring LoveLiveGrow for awhile now. I’m not sure whether I’m going to get back into writing or not. It’s hard to say at this point. Once I was too depressed to write so I wrote about being too depressed to write, and that had the positive result of me writing more about depression. Do you think that’ll work for not-blogging? I’ll write about not-blogging and then somehow not-blogging will become a rich source of content? Probably not.

I’m not in a depression and haven’t been for awhile. I’m experiencing another kind of state which, frankly, is probably most like a mid-life crisis. I just feel a general apathy and low-level confusion about big swaths of my life. I’m stressed out about money. I don’t want to do housework or errands. I’m a little bit angry all the time. I’m not sure what I want to do with my life. I kind of want to run away.

Mixed in with that I’m having a fairly good time. We went to Euphoria, Georgia’s summer burn, and I had a great time. I got a big stock tank to use as a backyard pool, and playing in it with Dylan is a wonderful, peaceful fun. I’ve read a bunch of books. I’ve learned to play Texas Hold’em. I started smoking again awhile back, and I’m loving that. I got some new chicks, and they are growing up adorably.

Life is good. It’s just kind of mentally… lethargic. Maybe it’s summer. Maybe it’s nothing.

By Joshua Bardwell, originally posted at Jack-Booted Liberal.

In honor of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, I’d like to share with you some tips for saving the environment that I found in a magazine.

Yay! Everything is going to be okay now!

But of course it’s not. No matter how many of your electronic devices you unplug, mountains in West Virginia are still going to be strip-mined for coal to put the electricity on the wires. No matter how often you turn off your car instead of idling it, there have already been thousands of spills in the Niger Delta (just to name one place). All of these tips might be meaningful ways to conserve a resource that was being obtained in an environmentally sound way, but when environmental damage is built into the system, focusing on conservation is cold comfort.

Environmental damage is not occurring because you and every other American left your car idling; it’s occurring because we’ve built a society in which nearly everyone must have a car in order to survive above the poverty line.

Environmental damage is not occurring because you left your cell phone charger plugged in; it’s occurring because we build houses with no thought towards natural heating or cooling, and then the only option is to run 3000 watt air conditioning units every day of the year to keep the temperature at 68-72 degrees.

Environmental damage is not occurring because you eat too much cow and not enough fish; it’s occurring because we expect to have strawberries in December and mango and pineapple in Detroit, and so airliners deliver them from Hawaii and Chile every fucking morning.

These are the things that would have to change in order to “save” the environment. You cannot “save” the environment by doing the things on that list, because those things are not what is harming the environment.

When I see lists like this, I wonder whether their real effect is to distract me. If I think that I’m doing something meaningful by turning off my engine when I get out of the car, I will be derailed from thinking about actually meaningful actions that I might perform.

Just to be clear, I still think there are good reasons to conserve, I just don’t think that “saving the environment” is one of them. For one thing, conservation may make you less personally dependent on the energy that is being derived in a harmful way. This makes you more open to actions that reduce the availability of that energy, which many non-harmful options do.

For your enjoyment, here is a funny video from Derrick Jensen, talking about meaningful environmental actions.

By Joshua Bardwell, originally posted in June 2010 at Jack-Booted Liberal.

In a previous post, I gave a particular definition of “culture,” described the expansionist drive that is one of our cultural myths, and concluded that:

The correct place to direct your outrage, therefore, is not just at the individual actors who created this particular situation, but at your culture, itself, for lying to you and everyone else about the value and necessity of expansion. Without a cultural shift away from this message, we will continue to manufacture these disasters until we have done so much damage to our landbase and extracted so many resources that continued expansion is simply impossible. And, as horrific as these disasters are, you should save your outrage for truly aberrant situations. In this culture, horrific environmental damage is an accepted and inevitable outcome of extracting resources from the earth so as to sustain “progress,” growth, and expansion.

If culture is, “The things we tell ourselves about ourselves,” then when I talk about a cultural shift, what I mean is that we change the things we tell ourselves about ourselves. For example, we could replace the cultural myth of, “growth is progress; stasis or contraction is death,” with, “living in balance with one’s environment is life; over- or under-consuming and over- or under-populating is death.”

This is not an easy task. Our culture is incredibly resistant to fundamental changes. Your first thought may be to disagree with that claim. After all, the world has been through some drastic changes in just the last few hundred years. Surely some of them count as a fundamental cultural shift? No. I’m talking about really fundamental cultural myths: the ones that are buried so deep that you usually can’t even see them.

By way of example, the expansionist drive seems like one of these fundamental myths to me. For as long as our culture has existed, we have striven for: growth of our population; increased land-base under our control; increased consumption of resources; and increased technological complexity. No matter what other cultural changes you can point to over the 10,000 years or so that the dominant culture of the world has been developing, this one has remained steadfast. At different times and in different locations, the expression of the expansionist drive has waxed and waned, but it has never wavered.

I think of the ways that culture resists the changing of its myths as cultural defense mechanisms. One of those is the myth of ideological consistency. It goes like this: “Total ideological consistency is morally superior to ideological inconsistency. People whose ideals are in any way inconsistent are at best hypocrites, and at worst liars. Either way, their ideas are dismissable.”

Let’s say that I believe that the petroleum economy is fundamentally immoral and that the world would be better off if petroleum use was dramatically curtailed or even eliminated. But I also drive a car. “A ha!” the myth of ideological consistency shouts at me. “You don’t really believe that crap! If you really believed that crap, you wouldn’t drive your car! You’re a hypocrite! You’re a fake!” Now I’m faced with three choices:

1. Stop driving my car.
2. Maintain my belief and keep driving my car. Live in a state of constant cognitive dissonance.
3. Ignore or abandon my belief about petroleum being immoral.

Option one amounts to martyrdom. Remember that culture defines how we meet our basic human needs. If “driving a car” is a fundamental aspect of my culture, and “not driving a car” represents a meaningful challenge to that culture, then “not driving a car” means threatening my access to food, shelter, sex, social interaction, and so forth. Even if I take the step of not driving a car, my ideas are still open to challenge under the myth of ideological consistency. Do I have electricity at my house? Does it come from petroleum in some way? Do I eat food that was harvested and transported using tractors and trucks? If I have a belief that is inconsistent with my culture’s myths, I have to totally excise myself from my own culture in order for my actions to be totally consistent with that belief.

Option two is very difficult for most people. Not only is cognitive dissonance psychologically painful, but others may quickly dismiss your ideas due to your “hypocrisy.” Additionally, because you have been programmed with the myth of ideological consistency, you view yourself as morally inferior to those whose actions appear to be consistent with their beliefs (cultural myths).

Option three, of course, is the easiest out. Forget the challenging belief and go with the flow. Who can blame a person for doing the only thing they know how to do in order to get access to food, shelter, sex, social interaction, and so forth? And this is how the myth of ideological consistency helps to preserve the existing cultural myths.

As long as you buy into the myth of ideological consistency, you cannot fully participate in changing cultural myths that you disagree with. The cultural myths that you wish to promote do not yet exist within your society, so you cannot practice them within your society. If you choose to act in a way that is totally consistent with your beliefs, you must excise yourself from your own culture. I think that there is a very valid question as to whether this is even possible. First, to do so would very likely deprive you of all of the mechanisms that allow you to meet your basic survival needs. Second, the pervasiveness of our culture means that there may, literally, not be anywhere on earth you could go to escape it.

There is a fourth option: abandon the myth of ideological consistency. This doesn’t mean that you stop evaluating whether a person’s (or your own) actions are consistent with their stated values, just that you understand that people (and yourself) can be in a position where they (you) hold values that are in conflict with each other and where they (you) care about all of the values too much to abandon any of them.

Derrick Jensen laments the salmon populations that have been destroyed by dams that block access to their spawning grounds. He knows where the dams are, and he hasn’t blown any of them up. Does that make him a hypocrite? Or does it just mean that he values not-being-in-prison and not-being-dead as much or more than he values removing the dams? Who can blame him? Prison has been constructed to be as awful as possible specifically for that reason!

Would I like to live in a world where I could eat food that was raised totally without chemical pesticides and fertilizers? Absolutely. Am I willing to stop eating anything except that food, today? No. Does that make me a hypocrite? Or does it just mean that I value access to food as highly or more highly than I value pesticide- and fertilizer-free food. Read that sentence again: “I value access to food.” Well, shit. Who doesn’t, when you put it that way?

The myth of ideological consistency is a sham, and you should work to excise it from your reasoning as thoroughly as possible.

Several people have expressed interest in me writing more about polyamory. I’d like to write more about it. But it’s complicated. I want to say, “You’re late! Seven years too late!”

Seven years ago, I would have been happy to tell you anything and everything about polyamory. I could explain how my polyamory was so awesome and how yours was probably fucked up. But, never fear, I could help fix it for you! Except you probably wouldn’t listen, and I would just shake my head because I’d seen it a gazillion times before.

Things are a little different these days.

For one thing, I’m not as sure about everything as I used to be. Sometimes that feels like a difference between being in my 20s and being in my 30s. Realistically, I’m probably completely sure about different things, and it just feels strange to look back on old topics.

For another thing, I don’t hang out with as many poly people as I used to. My friend group gradually shifted, and then I moved states and I haven’t met any new poly friends. I don’t get as much practice seeing, pondering, and talking about poly situations these days.

But most relevant to my ability to generate polyamorous writing is that I’m not in a relationship with anyone but Joshua and I haven’t been for years. I had one brief, brilliant love affair a couple of years ago, but by brief I mean brief. Mostly, I’ve been uninterested in other romantic or sexual relationships since about 2006.

2006 is when Joshua and I first started trying to conceive, and it seemed natural that I might not be interested in other people for awhile. I was pretty intensely focused on Joshua. That doesn’t really ring true anymore. I’m just… not thinking that way.

Polyamory has been central to my identity for over two decades. For the vast majority of that time I had more than one partner, once as many as four. Now, as my sex drive and my relationship drive shift into a new pattern, the question arises whether I’m still polyamorous.

I’ve heard mythical tales of successful mono-poly relationships, where one partner is polyamorous and the other is happily monogamous but doesn’t mind the poly-ness of the other partner. I don’t know if I’ve ever met people I knew to be in a relationship like this, but I suppose they could exist.

For me, though, I conclude that I am still polyamorous.

Polyamory is about more than my current relationships; it’s a political identity and a core value that supersedes daily practice.

In the introduction to my Twenty Years of Polyamory series, I said:

Through it all, polyamory has never been far from the center of my identity. The last time I tried to have a monogamous relationship, I was 16. Polyamory is part of me – a non-negotiable part – and I wouldn’t dream of going without it… My ideals about poly seep into my decisions about seemingly unrelated topics. Poly permeates my life.

This is true, and it remains true regardless of how many people I’m fucking. My views on polyamory even inform my parenting.

In that introduction post, I also laid out my definition of polyamory:

Polyamory for me is an openness to letting each individual one-on-one relationship develop however the two participants want it to. This means that if you’re open to the possibility yet never actually do fall in love with or fall into bed with another person, it may still be poly. It also means that people in closed relationships that contain more than two people are not what I think of as poly.

The most important words to me in that definition are openness and possibility. Whether or not I’m currently involved with multiple people and whether or not I ever am again, I remain open to the possibility of love, romance, and sex with more than one person. That makes me polyamorous.