There is no script

Sustainability is the most incredible opportunity for humanity to tackle many of our psychological problems and reasons for unhappiness. It asks us the most fundamental questions of life. It asks us what life is really about and how we should live, how to make our life worthwhile, what goals to strive for, what to become as humanity, and what to evolve to.

I have yet to figure out how to live this life in the Anthropocene. I feel lucky that I feel forced, pushed, almost enslaved, to ask myself these questions every single day. Even if I don’t want to, there they are. I can’t stop asking: what would be “the right way” to act?

There is no script.

Damnit.

In “Fleaback,” Phoebe Waller-Bridge has a conversation with a priest, expressing her desire for someone to tell her how to live. During the conversation, she asks the priest, “Can you tell me what to do?” He responds by saying that he can’t. Fleabag explains, “I just want someone to tell me how to live my life because I think I’ve been doing it wrong.”

Many of us have been doing it wrong. Maybe not in a personal-experienced sense, but in a relational sense - when we cease to understand ourselves and our choices as separate and entangle us with all those freaky organisms and beings (alive and not). When we acknowledge, as Stacy Alaimo put it, that we are trans-corporeal subjects in which bodies extend into places, and places deeply affect bodies.

I certainly think I have been doing it wrong. And like Phoebe, I want someone to tell me what to eat for breakfast-lunch-dinner, which job to choose with the biggest impact on social and ecological injustice, which sports to do, where to go on vacation, and which jacket to buy.