“Are you from Quebec? Because Canadians outside of Quebec don’t speak French.” The French waiter remarked to me with a dismissive, all-knowing tone. I was on vacation with my partner in Guadeloupe, a beautiful Caribbean island that is also an overseas territory of France. I suppose I could have spoken up, but in that moment I was shocked, so instead I dove into my burger. His comment showed me just how little the world knows about French Canada beyond la belle province du Québec.

My maternal grandmother from Cape Breton would have been greatly offended if she had been sitting at that table. Her maiden name was LeBlanc and she wore her Acadian identity with pride. And she was only one member of a small but thriving French culture from our east coast to our west coast.

Yesterday, I read in the news that part of the reason Canada rejected Trump’s new trade deal was because they wanted us to do away with French-language requirements on products (for readers outside of Canada: all packaging nationwide must be bilingual in English and French, including imported products). Much of this negotiation point is because the packaging and translation costs companies more money, but it also exposes a deep and willful ignorance of Canadian culture by the Trump administration.

While the majority of Canadians are English-speakers, French culture and language has been interwoven in every province from coast to coast. Even if most Canadians living in Anglophone areas never learn more French than what is taught in schools, we still know that it is part of what makes us Canada.

So, and this post is especially for readers from other countries, here is a glimpse at what French Canada looks like across our giant modern sovereign nation.

The Acadian Heartland (L’Acadie)

Before there was Quebec, there was Acadia. Founded in 1604 in what would become Nova Scotia, Acadian settlers arrived in Port-Royal in search of farming land. Promised a better life from their government by establishing a new colony, most of this predominantly peasant French population came from the southwestern region of France.

In the span of the following decades, l’Acadie spread across what would become Nova Scotia, into New Brunswick (today’s Acadian heartland), Prince Edward Island, and even Newfoundland.

Not long after the Acadians arrived, English colonies set up in Nova Scotia as well. A century of battles would ensue for control of the territory.

In 1755, after the British gained control of the region, they began the horrifying events that would come to be known as the Great Expulsion. British troops went town by town, rounding up every Acadian they could find, put them on boats, and sailed them down to the area known today as Louisiana. Most people don’t realize that Cajun is slang for Acadian, and that this French-speaking population are the descendants of the victims of the Great Expulsion.

The Acadian population that remained were largely those that were hidden by the local indigenous Mi’kmaq communities during the raids. The relationship between Acadians and the local indigenous populations, though still colonial in many ways, was more cooperative and involved more intermarriage. Over time this created a distinct cultural community called the Métis (“mixed”) who fused both their Mi’kmaq and French culture, a pattern we see across Canada.

Franco-Ontarians (Franco-Ontarien(ne) or Ontarois)

Today, there are over 650,000 Franco-Ontarians in the province of Ontario. Despite the predominance of English, they make up a significant and proud minority who still live in French-speaking communities with French schools, hospitals, and other services. They are the largest French-speaking Canadian demographic outside of Quebec.

Moving west of Quebec down the Saint Lawrence River, early French populations began to arrive in southern Ontario along the shores of Lake Ontario in the 17th century. Though a smaller population, they have always maintained a strong presence in the region. The majority reside in Eastern Ontario, though communities can be found as far west as Thunder Bay (geographically close to Manitoba), where my step-mom’s Francophone family hails from.

In the 1960s, Quebec was in the midst of a fierce separatist movement to secede from Canada (which was eventually given a public vote, with the narrow winning margin of only 51% of Quebecers voting to remain in Canada). During this time, Franco-Ontarians began to separate their identity more from the Quebecois, as they had always seen themselves as French-Canadian first.

It was in part because of the separatist movement, that Canada’s government was pressed to recognize French as an official Canadian language. In 1969 Canada created the Bilingualism Act, which conferred that both French and English were the official languages, and all citizens have a right to receive services in their preferred language.

Manitoba Metis and French Winnipeg

I spent a few months living in Manitoba when I was 18. I was there as part of a Canadian volunteer program called Katimavik, where young adults aged 17–21 spent nine months living in groups and doing volunteer service across the country. This program was developed to promote multiculturalism and bilingualism by Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau after Quebec’s era of violent separatist clashes (which included bombings and a Canadian Member of Parliament being kidnapped by the Front de Liberation du Quebec, who was then killed and found in the trunk of car).

In Katimavik, our groups were half-English, half-French, and would serve three months in a French community, and six months in English communities. While we were put in the English-speaking Manitoban community of Stonewall, there were many other groups who were living in French-speaking Manitoba. On weekends we would head down to Saint Boniface, the French side of the city of Winnipeg. Crossing the bridge over the river that divided the city, signs turned French and even the architecture took on more of a French style.

Here, in the biggest city of Manitoba, lives a thriving Francophone community of both French settler descendants, and Manitoban Métis whose Indigenous heritage may include Anishinaabeg, Ininwak, Anisininewuk, Dakota, and/or Dene. Both French and Métis cultures are prominent, especially in and around Winnipeg, where the majority live.

If you ask a Canadian about French Manitoba, most will remember learning about the most famous Métis leader Louis Riel in school. Riel, a proud Métis, was the most vocal opponent to the rule of the government of Canada. Riel formed the Red River Resistance in 1869, which fought against joining Canada. Eventually, he led the negotiations that would create Manitoba’s terms for joining Canadian confederacy. But during this time he also had a pro-Canadian executed, which would force him to flee to Montana. Anti-Canadian resistance leaders of Saskatchewan called upon Riel to lead their rebellion, and when that failed Riel was captured and hanged for treason by the Canadian government.

Though Riel’s multiple attempts at resistance ultimately failed, he is regarded as a hero among French and Métis communities for his fierce determination to protect their people. Louis Riel underscores the centuries-long struggles of Franco-Canadians to maintain and celebrate their language and culture, amidst dominance by England and then the Anglophone-dominance of Canada.

Saskatchewan’s Fransaskois

Making their way west for the fur trade, the first French settlers to what would become Saskatchewan arrived in the early 18th century. Many French people intermarried with local Indigenous populations (mainly Cree, Dakota, Dene, and Nakota). As noted above, Louis Riel assisted the regional French and Métis populations in a failed rebellion against the growing nation of Canada.

In the early 20th century, several thousand Francophone Quebecers and immigrants from France and Belgium took the long train to Saskatchewan to settle new towns and farms. The French population grew from around 2,500 to 25,000 within a decade, then doubling to 50,000 in the next two decades.

During this time, the Canadian government attempted to Anglicize these populations through assimilation and sending children to English schools. This created the La Sociéte du Parler Français de la Saskatchewan (The Society of French-Speaking Saskatchewan), which would push for French language rights until 1982, when the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guaranteed the right to receive education in French across the nation.

Alberta’s Bilingual Municipalities

Over 85,000 Albertans declared French as their mother-tongue in the 2016 Canadian census. The French were actually the first Europeans to settle into the region, chasing the fur trade ever further west in the 18th century. Their story follows a similar trajectory to Francosaskois, with struggles for French-language rights dominating the 20th century.

Today, there are several thriving French communities, especially near Alberta’s largest cities of Calgary and Edmonton. There are also several municipalities in these regions that are designated as officially bilingual between English and French. Here, too, we see a vibrant Métis culture which may include Cree, Blackfoot, Chipewyan, and Dene, who have organized themselves for recognition through the Métis Association of Alberta.

Franco-Columbian

And finally we reach the western frontier of North America, where Canada gives way to the Pacific Ocean and the splendid, culturally rich lands that are home to indigenous peoples including the Haida, Coast Salish, Kwakwaka’wakw, Gitxsan, Tsimshian, and Nisga’a. The last stop of the fur trade and European colonization, French explorers made their way through the rugged Rocky Mountains to the coast, a lengthy and dangerous journey.

For many years, the colonial language and culture was French, until the gold rush tipped the demographics towards the English. Today over 70,000 British Columbians list French as their mother-tongue, and many of them live in French communities in southwestern BC.

A final note on Canada’s languages: there are around 70 distinct Indigenous languages still spoken today across the country. Due to colonization of these unceded lands by both the English and French, most of these languages are severely endangered. In the Twentieth Century, the Canadian government established the Indian Residential School system, which forcibly removed Indigenous children from their homes and into boarding schools. They were beaten if they spoke their own language, and the schools ran on the motto “kill the Indian, save the child.” The last residential school only closed in 1996.

When we talk about our bilingual pride, I think it also important to bring attention to the languages that were here for millennia before the rest of us arrived. Some schools and post-secondary institutions are beginning to teach courses in these languages, and there have been some small efforts by governments and researchers to revive or record them, but this is not enough.

Indigenous languages are geographical and cultural encyclopedias, and when we speak of society and climate change, I believe their protection is essential to our survival as a species. I wrote about that here.

Thank you for reading / Merci d’avoir pris le temps de lire ceci.

If you loved this post and would like to support my writing and research into nature, culture, spirituality and more you can become a paid subscriber or buy me a coffee!

There are over 100 billion disposable Bic pens sitting in garbage dumps around the world. Ever since their invention in the 1950s, they have participated in the creation and acceleration of our disposable object-laden society. Now we have a plastic-wrapped culture complete with environmentally tragic one-day-delivery of often unnecessary purchases. I would argue that not only do we have a world quickly being filled with disposable objects, but we have allowed disposability to creep into the non-material facets of our lives, to our own detriment.

From our relationships and dating apps, to our appearances which can be frequently changed through makeup trends and plastic surgery, and even the increasingly transient nature of jobs and visual aesthetics, we are living in a disposable worldview. We can now have everything and be anything, and yet we are increasingly devoid of the things and experiences that bring deep value and joy.

How did we get here? And how can we return to ourselves, each other, and our planet?

Disposable objects

I have a question I always ask when a new convenience object or technology appears: if this thing makes life more convenient for me, then who, or what, will suffer the consequences?

As I walk through the grocery store and see all of the pre-made meals that we can pick up so we do not have to cook after a long day, what we do not immediately see is the environmental impact. Extra production, plastics, ingredients to preserve freshness. As well, new reports are exposing the dark underbelly of mass food production, where thousands of prisoners in the United States are put to work to make many of our processed food items.

Disposable objects are intended (outwardly) make our lives easier, but they always have a cost. (Then there is what I call the “already trash object” category, where we purchase cheap, ridiculous items made in China purely as a joke, for silly decoration, or to entertain a child for ten minutes before it breaks and gets thrown away. The dollar stores could probably switch their name to “Affordable Pre-Trash!”)

One of my favourite Medium and Substack writers, Douglas Giles, wrote a Medium article a while back on the impact of disposable inventions:

“The Bic pen has not only littered the landscape and filled the landfills, it has helped cultivate the mindset of the disposable society. Corporations and consumers grew to see products as disposable rather than reusable.”

He continues to write about the invention of the television remote and its relationship to disposable culture. Now we don’t even have to get up and touch a knob to change the channel (for anyone under 30, they might not even know this was how things went). We don’t have to sit through commercials. We don’t even need to sit through a show we are not entirely enjoying (except if we do not even know we do not like it because we are on our phones).

Disposable objects have invariably created undo environmental stress, something that anybody who ever cared about the environment or studied basic resources would have, and did, see coming. Disposability, matched with affordability, has accelerated the destruction of our planet, but also our lives, and relationships to ourselves and others.

Digital tech and disposable culture

Dating apps are not actually designed for you to find your true love. They don’t make money if you find your person and delete the app forever. Even Hinge, with its slogan “designed to be deleted,” has a paid subscription plan that is more than happy to see you stay single forever. Getting ghosted? That’s great for business.

Social media celebrates disposable culture with its hashtags that embrace every new trend, aesthetic, identity, and social-justice-problem-of-the-day. Brands like Temu and Shein litter the advertising on these apps, encouraging us to buy more disposable objects to curate our lives and build our vapid social identity. Even news and world issues cycle through at rapid speed — the problems of today are forgotten for the troubles in a new part of the world tomorrow.

Our outrage is permanent, but our focus is disposable.

Television now has a term in called ‘the second screen.’ This term means that many production houses want to ensure that new scripts are so easy for the viewer to follow that they will not miss central plot points while they are scrolling their phones or doing other things at the same time. Forget witty dialogue and complex plots, your show is now so disposable that you do not even need to fully commit to watching it while you watch it.

As somebody who is slowly disengaging from social media in favour of more thoughtful online interactions via communities like Substack, I am seeing more clearly the way that technology has made even non-material culture disposable.

We listen to streaming music playlists where we often do not even learn the names of the songs or artists we are listening to. YouTube content must be pushed out frequently in order to stay relevant on the search options. Creators across the digital world talk often about burnout. This is because the quality of art in all of its forms has been jeopardized in favour of quantity. And this is a tragedy for every writer, musician, artist, and creative trying to build a career today.

While mentioning careers, stable 9-to-5 jobs and tenure-track academic positions are also declining as the gig economy speeds up. These jobs are transient in nature, disposable, really.

Side hustles could even be seen as disposable employment: need extra cash for a bit? Get a side hustle or a contract gig with Uber! Employers of these big ‘gig’ companies also see their employees as disposable, so much so that they are freelance contract workers with no benefits, no stability, and no chance of upward mobility. Amazon does not even hire their delivery drivers, this is outsourced to another company.

Now with the advent of generative AI models, we are entering an era of disposable knowledge. Research studies are showing brain atrophy in people who rely on AI to do their research, write their papers, send emails, or generally outsource learning and cognitive processes. Sam Altman sparked outrage when he said at a conference that he believes in the future intelligence will be bought on a metre, much like electricity.

If we outsource our intelligence it becomes disposable to our minds, landing in a neuron waste bin never to be called upon again. We can no longer retain information, turning thinking and learning itself into a commodity that can, indeed, be purchased.

Disposable people

Giles’ story on disposable culture highlights the material side of conversations I have been having with friends lately.

“Everything feels disposable,” my friend complained while we ate a bag of chips and binge watched a mildly entertaining (and massively awful) reality television dating series.

The majority of women on this dating show had faces to match the current beauty standards. Lip injections, botox, and in some cases, a probable nose job or some cheek filler.

“Even our face is disposable now,” I complained as I grabbed a chip.

The newest plastic surgery trend that is terrifying me is buccal fat removal; where women have the fat taken out of their cheeks in favour of a hollowed-out, 1990s supermodel look. Think Leah Michelle, Miley Cyrus, and Chrissy Teegan as noted surgical examples.

What happens when the hollowed face look is out? How much will we tweak our bodies with irreparable surgery in favour of a disposable beauty standard?

Watching a dating show, my friend and I also ranted about dating apps. The term ‘ghosting’ is now common vernacular. Disposability is so entwined with our worldview that strangers are disposable, as are people who you may have gone on a few dates with, or even a friend you had a disagreement with.

Problems with people? Disappear. Those relationships are disposable. The longer the relationship (of any kind), the more painful the ghosting. I think it would suffice to say that when we get ghosted we feel pretty disposable.

I have tried to move my online conversations with friends away from social media apps. I don’t engage as much with DMs on Instagram, finding the majority of messages to be memes and replies to stories from people I am not necessarily close to. I am tired of the vague, if well-intentioned, potential future-friend “let’s get coffee some day” messages.

How many of our interactions online are disposable; empty words full of empty possibility?

Feeling a bit more like a sentient, disposable Bic pen? Yeah, me too.

Countering disposability

I feel that my suggestions will not be ground-breaking in any way, but we must centre both people and planet as living beings with inherent sacred value.

A lot of reducing disposability requires reducing modern inclinations. There is the obvious buy less, consume less that most of us are aware of now. But there is also returning to intentionality in our social interactions and non-material lives.

While walking through the forest this past weekend I was reminded of how little we need to be happy. I was walking my friend’s dog, stopping every ten or so metres to let her sniff a leaf, or for me to snap a photo of a beautiful mushroom. Disposability is not a word to fungi, who regenerate this world out of death and decay.

Social non-human animals build their communities based on presentness: who is there? What is their role in the social system? What do they need to do to maintain harmony and look out for one another?

In many ways I think that the nightmare of AI might lead to some unforeseen benefits. As we lose faith in the digital world, with fake profiles, fake news, fake images, fake everything, we are invited to return to each other in more natural ways. I think an important part of that conversation should include a reframing of our disposability mindset.

I have ADHD, which means that I struggle with executive function and sometimes my brain does not store information properly. This is why ADHD brains forget to pick up half of the items on their grocery list if it’s not written down, or mix up appointment times and birthdays. I’ve come to see my mind as a bit of a trickster that disposes of important information, despite my best efforts.

In terms of non-material disposable culture, I’ve come to see attention and intentionality as the antidote. Being present and mindful in our conversations, in who we choose to spend time with, in how we engage with the digital world, in choosing what we buy and whether we really need it… it’s all the same.

There is a book I’m currently reading called Let’s Become Fungal! by Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodriguez, which looks at all the ways humans can learn to live from fungi. In thinking of disposability, fungi teach us of information highways as knowledge sharing that helps the community, of recycling and regenerating rather than disposing, of seeing how you fit as an ecological and social part of your physical environment, and of course, of stillness and slowness. Their attention is on what matters, for that is the only way they can exist.

If would like to give a one-time support, you can buy me a coffee!

Have you ever walked somewhere so still it felt like a silence was the only nourishment to the landscape? As if only the gentlest of sounds could cohabitate with the trees and the birds? I felt this as I trekked along a leaf-covered forest path in Quebec.

My friends and family will tell you (correctly) that I am a very talkative and energetic person. I always have thoughts and ideas to share, perhaps too many opinions as well. But what people do not see is the amount of time alone that I take in order to bring out that more extroverted side. They don’t see the silence-craving side of me, because this magical setting is only found in true solitude.

Being alone in the city does not provide an encompassing silence; for this I must turn to nature. The woods have known silence for millions of years. I am nothing but a heavy leaf blowing across the ground as I step into the forest on this cool day.

Ever since childhood it felt like being truly alone in a place, with only silence and solitude at my side, was to step into a liminal realm. Away from the sounds of the radio or television, no kettle boiling, refrigerator buzzing, family chatter, or sirens blaring, my mind settled as if a stream running into a still pond.

Silence felt like a god that had never been given a name; which was fitting given what silence offered. Thoughts without words; existence beyond identity, labels, and attachments. The only time I glimpsed the deepest, truest parts of myself were in the presence of silence. I have no names for those parts, only sentience. Silence is a homecoming to the part of our mind that exists beyond words.

I pass a shallow pond that reflects the vibrant green leaves of the trees. A perfect reflection in its stillness. The fresh breeze teases my cheeks as I smile. There are nature sounds, but they pass through me with ease in this solitude. I sigh, hearing and feeling the exhale as I welcome that presence.

We live in a loud culture. So loud that a book called Quiet went viral for making a case in support of the introverted, the naturally quiet, and the reflective space enriched by silence. Dings from our phones, music always on in the background, the hum of generators, and the sound of roommates leaves little space for true silence.

There is visual noise too; the glare of billboard ads, the bright lights of cars at night, and the florescence of pharmacy lights. I look at little mushrooms as I think about all of the ways forests like this have been turned into industrial products, medicine, and rubber.

I think that sights, sounds, and smells can all be noise. It’s just noise relative to the sense. What is the difference between the cluster of trees, rocks, and shrubs that make up a nature scene, and the chaotic jumble of a shopping mall? How do my senses know that one is healing and the other drains? And yet, we have grown so accustomed to urban noise that we seem to have forgotten the wisdom of silence and solitude.

There are lessons that only silence can teach us.

There is an inner peace that only silence can offer.

There is a space to harness creativity that only exists in the liminal realm of silence.

Walking through the forest I step over mangled roots as two squirrels chase one another up a tree. I turn to watch the frenzy as they jump branches and continue their little choreography westward. I am stopped by the beautiful elegance of delicately falling leaves. They make almost no sound as they drift ever so slowly to join the sea of warm-toned leaves covering the forest floor, in a symphony only accessible to the eyes.

Silence taught me to see, because sometimes it is not enough to hear.

I think about my frenetic mind that is rarely silent on its own. My ADHD mind makes music and words dance through my mind every waking moment and give way to vivid dreams each night. But in nature, in this silence, my mind dissipates as if solitude has filled my thoughts with a rich emptiness, it is the only time when I may find myself without a song nestled in my mind.

I am reminded that I am not my thoughts or feelings.

My mind has seasons of its own that I can only discern in solitude. This became more apparent as I sought refuge in nature and turned to an earth-centred spiritual practice.

Thoughts have life spans, as do emotions. They rise up in the spring of our mind, growing through the summer and harvesting realizations about ourselves and our world in their autumn. Thoughts and feelings fall like leaves. I take what I learn and find that processing means lying dormant, so that what I experience can be transformed by the silence until I discover one day that I have grown again.

Without silence, how do we feed our mental growth? How else can we burrow into the roots of our mind and pull out the nearby uncomfortable weeds that wrestle for space among our neurons?

I walk up a wooden staircase, aware of the present moment as my hand grips the weathered railing. At the top of a mountain I gaze outward, knowing that the skyscrapers of downtown Montreal sit far off in the south. The sound waves disappear with distance. The clicking of keyboards, the buzz of overhead lighting, and the constant dinging of machines in retail stores was contained far away from where I stood, and I sighed in relief that there was a refuge from the place my civilized self called home.

If you want to help support my career as a writer, you can buy me a coffee here or become a paid subscriber!

I watched the apocalyptic footage of France on fire this past week with a growing sense of doom. Hundreds of thousands of people evacuated as thousands of acres burned through France and Spain, skies dark with ash and threat. While reading updates on The Guardian, I also learned of a horrifying natural phenomenon that I immediately wished I could unlearn: pyrocumulonimbus.

I knew cumulonimbus meant a type of cloud, but the prefix of pyro (fire) made the hairs on my arms stand up. The pyrocumulonimbus is a cloud that forms above a massive heat source, such as an exploding volcano or a wildfire, and when large enough creates dangerous thunderstorm-like conditions (though rarely include rain). They can make wildfires worse, and for the first time in recorded history, one was spotted in France. I felt an immense sense of dread for a phenomenon that I know will become part of our common lexicon in the climate crisis. I felt the urge to dissociate and transcend this earthly suffering.

According to Hinduism, all beings can attain release from the karmic cycles of life and death, moving beyond this world. “Life is suffering,” said the Buddha, who taught followers to release worldly attachment to achieve nirvana. “Be in the world, but not of the world,” said Jesus, telling believers to set their sights on entering the Kingdom of Heaven. The prophet Mohammed reiterated this sacred focus of transcendence, along with most other spiritual leaders.

I spent eight years in academia studying world religions. I poured over the six major world religions’ scriptures, finding similarities and differences, timeless wisdom and time-dependent cultural contexts. In all of them, this search for transcendence reverberates. To me, it points to a universal human awareness of the inequality, unfairness, and suffering in life. I was reminded of these concepts looking at the wildfires, recalling images of people weeping in front of their destroyed homes in the Greek isles in recent years.

Despite the pull, I have also always felt a sense of unease with transcendence. This outward focus that pulls us from the very environment our bodies are tethered to, born of, and return to in death. Life is suffering, but it is also unbearably beautiful. Life is grief and sadness, but it is also ecstatic joy. Part of me longs for transcendence, but another part of myself asked if this spiritual longing was actually the inverse of what we need right now.

Subscribe now

We stand at a precipice as a species. Do we look away and transcend until the earth cleanses herself of our entire race in order to heal? Or do we turn to face the physical, running towards both that earthly suffering and joy, and save ourselves?

The renowned author Thomas Berry clearly spent much time pondering this same question. And his response was that we should indeed run towards this earthly life. Berry coined the term inscendence, which means that instead of rising above the world, we should climb into it. Inhabit it fully. Enter deep within our own self, and then immerse ourselves deep into our connection with everything around us.

Berry was a Catholic priest and scholar of history, religion, and evolution. He was also a revered environmentalist, rejecting the term theologian for what he self-referred to as a “geologian.” For him, studying history, evolution, and religion shaped his understanding of the earth as sacred. He became known as the father of ecospirituality, and a lengthy obituary in National Catholic Reporter said that Thomas Berry “was among the first to say the earth crisis is fundamentally a spiritual crisis” and that “many created their own earth ministries, inspired by the work and life of Fr. Thomas Berry.”

Robert MarcFarlane roused this concept of inscendence in Is a River Alive?, where he argues that alongside a grammar of animacy (which I wrote about here), this grounded return to nature can be a collective awakening that strengthens the Rights of Nature movement. Alongside the hopelessness and ecogrief I felt witnessing the pyrocumulonimbus cloud, this call to inscendence transcended my feelings (pun intended).

Macfarlane makes the case that rivers and other natural phenomena are alive, just not in the way that humans are. He offers an expansive definition of what aliveness means that goes beyond anthropomorphization. That fiery thundercloud in France looked alive. It struck out with ashy tendrils, a suffering invasive species that belongs near volcanoes, dropped into a volcano-less region of Europe. Such clouds have also been forming in some western Canadian wildfires. She is a fire that breathes so hot she births her own weather.

Billionaires have decided to transcend. They build bunkers and buy massive private land in preparation for revolts and climate collapse. Politicians who continue to expand oil production, including Canada’s own prime minister Mark Carney, have also decided to transcend. They put the present moment’s financial question over the longevity of the world. A perverse rendering of “be not of the world,” their theological belief that collapse (rather than apocalypse) is already nigh, and the human world is no longer worth saving.

Their inscendence is extraction, transcendence their apathy.

We are all seeking to transcend, we just might not realize the spiritual undertones. Instagram scrolling while waiting in the checkout line, binge-watching television to avoid boredom, getting drunk to attain the holy neural pathways for uninhibited socializing, working overtime at your fancy job and then some more overtime and then some more, for good pious measure to the gods of capital.

In The Dream of the Earth, Berry pleads with us:

“We must invent, or reinvent, a sustainable human culture by a descent into our pre-rational, or instinctive, resources. Our cultural resources have lost their integrity. They cannot be trusted. What is needed is not transcendence but “inscendence,” not the brain but the gene.”

No longer can we afford to separate ourselves from the environment and call it rationality. Luckily, the Buddha also spoke of present moment awareness, noticing and appreciating the world around us. The Bible implores us to tend to the earth as stewards, caring for the creatures of the earth during our short lives. The growing global Neo-Pagan movement is rooted firmly in the reverence of here and now, innately inscendent in earth-centered practices. It does not have to be either/or, it can be both/and.

For the spiritually-inclined, inscendence offers a path of earthly care, thoughtful observance, and environmental protection that favours transcendence in the long run. In the same way that our actions towards others should live by the golden rule of “do no harm,” we can and must extend this to the earth. Attention is reverence.

For the environmentalist, it offers a deeper connection to the lands and waters we seek to protect. The deeper we connect with and care for something, the stronger our affinity to protect it. If this life is all there is, and if the next generation will inherit this earth, inscendence calls on us to be embodied for them.

I wish to be in the world, and of the world, as an earthly creature. The urge to dissociate, to transcend, to numb, to look away, to be distracted, is a sinister pull. Put away the endless scroll, the constant notifications, the clutter of mind, the vacillation between heightened news consumption and complete ignorance.

Reconnect with your local community. Touch grass. Identify different bird chirps and songs. Turn your focus towards your vicinity, since change begins not on a global level, but with tiny local steps, given embodied attention.

If you loved this post and would like to support my research into the confluence of nature, culture and spirituality, you can become a paid subscriber or buy me a coffee!

My body became porous, a vessel through which the wind blew like a ghost. Birds chirped without and within, the sounds never a surprise because we were one in the same. Time collapsed as sunlight warmed my closed eyes. Whether one minute or ten was the wrong question to ask, since I sat beyond time. The rock on which I sat hummed with a sense of aliveness, the subtle vibration of a life lived over aeons rather than decades. And then the words ceased and I merely was.

On this particular day, I had been in the practice of meditating an hour a day for the past year. Trained in the Shambhala Buddhist meditation style, I sat with legs crossed, eyes slightly down, focused on breath and surroundings. To say that the mind should be empty is an incorrect assumption many people make about meditation, the goal is merely to be present. To witness the thoughts, sights, sounds, touch, perhaps even tastes as they move through each moment. That collapsing of self was something I had longed to experience, and when I did, I finally let my mind and body remember that the earth is alive.

I grew up in a typical modern, Western context. A small urban apartment with a single mom, concrete blocks outnumbering trees, plastic belongings outnumbering natural fibers. I spoke English, which had developed alongside materialist science and colonialism, describing things in nature as “it” and separating everything into neat little boxes. We celebrated Christian holidays, hearing passages from a Bible that had been translated into many languages telling humans they shall have “dominion over” the earth.

Nature was a separate place we went to discover things and find ourselves, but it was never really alive. Most of us never really met nature, we just walked over her epidermal layer with a protective barrier of petroleum-based shoes.

I just finished reading Is a River Alive?, by Robert MacFarlane. A scholar and award-winning nature writer, his philosophical musing took him to three rivers around the world to make the case that perhaps rivers, like much else on this earth, are alive in a way that we simply have forgotten to see. He does not anthropomorphize, rather he asks readers to expand their definition of what it means to be alive. It is a deep time journey that shows rivers living through aeons, moving through intention to carve paths through mountains, as the vital veins that act as a mother to ecosystems.

Plants do not have brains like humans, yet they are alive. They have senses that we are only beginning to understand. Fungi are a fascinating mystery unto themselves. They are death-eaters and organic information highways, transferring knowledge to trees and other beings. All things communicate, if not with mouths, then with signals, smells, or movement.

How did so many of us forget that the world is alive? But more importantly: how do we remember?

I have always hated plastic kitchenware. Plastic anything, really. As a child, I had this indescribable sense of “wrongness” when holding plastic cups, spoons or spatulas. I would marvel when teachers took us on field trips to old farms, where we would churn butter like an eighteenth century peasant. Everything in the room had once lived: logs to build walls, earthly metals forged into tools, rugs made of sheep’s wool, butter straight from the cow’s udder.

I’ve always been drawn to old things. Plastic creates a visual noise, one that I have never been able to forget. And technology emits a hum, which my sensitive neurodivergent ears can hear well beyond most others. A TV, even turned off, buzzes like a cicada cobbled together Frankenstein-like in a giant factory.

It took me until recently to realize that this post-petroleum-discovery urban world was not even dead, because it had instead been assembled. The artificial intelligence of our physical environment. It is that confusing uncanny valley, a plastic spoon replacing the wood-carved one of our ancestors. Stifled from intuition, from connection with nature, from simplicity and stillness of mind, of course we forgot that nature is alive. We live in a factory. We have begun calling life a simulation.

Several years ago I read another transformative book called Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility, by Keith Thomas. In a compelling yet scholarly examination of Europe’s industrialization, he explores how we came to see animals and the environment in such mechanical ways, arguing that restoring rights to animals and nature is a necessity for protecting the planet.

Materialism, a philosophical view that everything in our universe, even consciousness, can be explained through physical processes, began to take root as the prevailing scientific lens in Europe during the 1600s. This led to the deeply held conviction among many men (Thomas specifically notes the patriarchal, male-dominance of this view) that pigs and other farm animals did not have feelings. Any shrieks emitted before killing them was merely a biological, physical response. This view directly enabled the development of factory farming, and the cognitive dissonance most of us who eat meat experience when confronted with its horrors.

Thomas also explores my previously noted Biblical passage from Genesis, where God says that man shall have “dominion” over the earth and everything on it. But dominion is a very strong, authoritative, ownership-oriented word. Translations are powerful, they can reshape culture and faith. Many Biblical scholars, and other scholars including Thomas, debate whether “dominion” should instead have been translated as “stewardship” of the land.

It becomes a question of chicken versus egg: did the people believe they had dominion over the land, or did the shifting translation and its meaning change how people saw their place in the natural world? I asked myself this in regards to many myths and sacred texts while completing my master’s degree in the Philosophy of Religion. Where culture shapes belief, and belief shapes culture can often be a grey area, and when it is ancient history we must be careful not to be anachronistic about it.

Regardless of the perspective’s origins, Thomas shows how dominion became a proliferating idea that aided colonization, materialism, industrialization and monoculture farming. When the world is something to be claimed, it is no longer a working relationship, but a thing bound to be exploited.

In the process, we cut an invisible cord within ourselves.

Robin Wall-Kimmerer, the renowned botanist and author of the immensely beloved Braiding Sweetgrass, popularized the concept of “a grammar of animacy.” Growing up speaking English, I took for granted the way that our grammar describes the world. Replete with “it” and coupled with the materialist lens of my culture, there is no animacy that I can find innately.

Was early English different? How did science, culture, and the mishmash of linguistic origins shape how we interact with our world?

When I began learning Scottish-Gaelic in university, a language of some of my ancestors, the first major perspective shift I had was discovering this grammar of animacy. Gaelic still holds onto gender for weather, because the weather, like rivers and mountains, is alive and imbued with spirit. The grammatical structure and philosophy behind it denote a culture that viewed ownership more closely to stewardship, and saw land custodianship more in terms of clan and kin than individual dominion.

Could I bring this into my English world?

I did not return to this musing until I read Braiding Sweetgrass. Kimmerer gave word to something I had begun to pick at those years ago, the idea amongst most Indigenous languages that the world is alive. Cree and many other Indigenous languages of the Americas have verb-heavy grammar. The world is more fluid, alive, in constant transition.

In Cree you cannot say “he is a jerk”, instead you say “he is behaving like a jerk.” Cree-language speakers have said that this is because to give a noun-like label to someone is to “trap” them in that identity. It leaves no room for growth or change. This fluidity flows into the natural world and the way they describe animals and nature.

MacFarlane, in Is a River Alive?, notes how many Indigenous cultures living near rivers in Sikkum have a river-heavy language. The words they use to describe parts of the body are the same words they use to describe parts of a river. In other Indian communities, people are fighting to save trees, heart-broken and weeping when one is chopped down because from their animist perspective, they are alive and sacred.

There is much debate among linguists over whether people who speak different languages hold different worldviews, with most saying that we do not. Aside from the fact that the research on this topic is historically Eurocentric, and has been used to diminish, dismiss, and even demean Indigenous communities throughout the twentieth century, I also feel it’s the wrong question to ask.

If we are able to understand the way that other cultures and languages move through the world, it is more so that we are not using those concepts in ours. We all have access to a grammar of animacy, and we can bring it into English or any other language. I think the more important question is asking why some cultures see the world as animist and others do not, and what does this mean for our lives on a polluted, angry earth?

Who stands to gain in our distancing from the natural world? Certainly not humans, especially not the poor. Adopting a grammar of animacy can be a vital step towards our collective re-wilding and our internalized imperative to protect our natural world.

I stand above the rugged, rocky shoreline at Peggy’s Cove in Nova Scotia. There is a sign that says, “Danger of drowning! Keep off the rocks!” about forty feet below me lay the same type of stone I am on, but instead of a reddish-white, they are stained grey and black from millennia of being licked by waves and soiled by sea matter. They are always wet; always submissive to the thunderous spray of the turbulent Atlantic ocean.

My phone dings with a work notification. I snicker to myself, thinking that if the ocean were a person, she would swallow Teams whole and digest it in the bowels of the sunken Titanic. And then her feisty waves crash explosively into the rocks below. The sound, that ocean spray scent, the vibrations under my feet dismiss any human thoughts. I stand before her, a vastness of a being that touches five continents. Her movement demands my full attention.

Multiple tourists die here each year. Darwin Awards recipients who did not, in fact, keep off the lower rocks. I wonder to myself if the human delusion of “dominion” over the planet has warped some brains enough that they do not heed nature’s basic warnings. She drowns ships with glacial ice, sucks swimmers in with nearly law-defying eddies, sends her sharks to devour the arms and legs of surfers.

Dominion builds dams that Mother Nature cracks open with wild abandon. Dominion builds skyscrapers that send millions of birds to their death each year, weakening biodiversity. Dominion builds factories that pollute until rivers are declared dead, and a weeping mother ocean seeks revenge through category five hurricanes.

Dominion puts us inside buildings and declares nature to be everything outside of it. Dominion tells us industrial agriculture is both science and God’s will. Dominion pulls the sticky blood of earth’s veins to the surface, bleeding her dry to make Zara sweaters and billionaires’ yachts sail.

We forgot that nature was alive until she began to scream in ripples of wildfires.

A grammar of animacy gives us a way to learn how to communicate with her. And then to learn to ease her suffering in the same way that she would: not through words, but through actions.

I shall start with re-gendering the weather. My family in Cape Breton still say “she’s cold out” as a holdover to our Highland Gaelic ancestral language. When I move to Montreal people looked at me funny when I said it, so slowly I adopted “it” for the weather.

I shall make new words, or adopting words from other languages, that detail nature’s movements and aliveness. Bruchlas, for example, is a Gaelic word for the fluttering sound that birds make when they land in trees.

I shall learn the names for every tree that I see in my city. I shall hug them when I am not too shy.

I shall take care that my descriptions give character, rather than a label, to people and the more-than-human world.

And I shall continue to read, learn and share with others what I discover.

If you loved this post and would like to support my writing and research into nature, culture, spirituality and more you can become a paid subscriber or buy me a coffee!

I walked along a forest path in Sintra, Portugal, listening more for the sounds of the people than the birds. Part of the reason I love traveling to countries that speak languages other than English is because I love the sensation of being surrounded by other tongues. It’s like walking into a forest full of beautiful bird song, none of it makes sense to me, but it tickles my ears all the same.

Portugal had called to me for many obvious reasons—the geography, the architecture, the history, the food. But then there was also Portuguese itself, a language that sounded to me like a Spanish person speaking Russian; those hard ch sounds, along with some other phonetic similarities to the slavic language.

I booked the trip on a whim a month prior. The first thing I did after booking the flight was open up Duolingo Portuguese. It was the Brazilian dialect, but it was good enough.

I watched a YouTube video on the Portuguese language, and then another on why so many other people think it sounds like Russian. I read the entire Wikipedia page on Portuguese and the Brazilian dialect, then explored the African countries where many people also speak Portuguese because of colonization (Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé and Príncipe, and Timor-Leste). I spoke into my Duolingo app, trying to get those “ão” sounds down. I was thrilled when I arrived in Lisbon and ordered a double espresso in Portuguese.

Subscribe now

I begin writing this while listening to Rosalia’s Spanish-language, flamenco-inspired song De Plata.

Why certain interests, like my love of languages, captivate particular minds is a beautiful mystery. Why those interests can become so intense amongst neurodivergent people is another mystery, one that many researchers are exploring. Some new theories have to do with the concept of monotropism: the theory that the focus among ADHD and autistic minds is more narrow and intense, leaving fewer resources for other mental processes (hence chronic overstimulation).

As an adult with ADHD, I support the theory of monotropism, and I’m going to explore why through my special interest in languages and linguistics.

My playlist has moved onto Latvian folk band Tautumeitas.

As a child, my diverse neighbourhood exposed me to many languages including Arabic, French, Mandarine, Urdu, and Korean. Understanding only English, I marvelled at the other children walking to school speaking words I could not understand. To me, it was beautiful gibberish, a way to talk about the world that I could not perceive. I was always envious of children who spoke more than one language, feeling like their world was larger than mine.

More than that, I loved the sounds. Every other language had its own lilt, intonation, and vocalizations that I could not make with my English-speaking tongue. That Arabic “agh” sound, those Chinese rising and falling vowels, the rolled r of Spanish.

I would listen enchantedly to the ethereal sounds of the Scottish-Gaelic folk songs that my mother’s family played on their cassette tapes (this was the 90s, after all). The Celtic fairytales my parents bought for me needed a phonetic guide to pronounce the names correctly. These were apparently our people, and yet we had no idea that a bh made a v sound in Gaelic.

My playlist is now onto Trøllabundin, a Faroese-language song by Eivør.

I took French in school, like most Canadian children do. But this was not enough for me. I wanted to learn every language. Every time I learned a new Spanish word, heard a song in Italian, or heard my Greek friend talking to their parents, there was a thirst to know more. It felt as if only I could understand every word in the world, then I could understand the whole of the world; its meaning, its purpose, its people.

Deep in my subconscious, I felt that the desire to know languages had picked me. Not knowing things gave me anxiety. The only way to appease the anxiety of growing up in such a confusing world was to learn as much about it as possible, and words were the holy key.

My favourite TV channel was the travel and outdoor living one. Lonely Planet became the travel show that I would record on my VCR tapes and watch over and over while home sick from school or bored on weekends. I recorded one episode set in Hawaii, where a Hawaiian woman was singing a song about creation in her mother tongue. I played it over and over again, wishing I could be sitting around the fire with her, but probably infinitely annoying my mom.

I would watch The Weather Network when they did their global weather updates, eyes poring over exotic locales like Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, or the always hot Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. I loved the way that the names of places looked and sounded. This led me onto the early 2000s internet, where I would pore over maps of the world to see what people called their local places. I delved into the old CIA Factbook website, which gave demographic and cultural information on every country in the world.

In a very monotropic fashion, I would spend hours in complete oblivion to the outside world, online and imagining being in these places or knowing the meaning of these words. I turned down plans with friends at times because I knew my mom would be working late and I would be home alone, able to explore this obsession undisturbed. Some people stay in to play video games online, I stayed in to learn all 33 letters of the Russian alphabet.

My playlist moves on to Tamil song Enjoy Enjaami by Dhee, ft. Arivu

The social internet era was kicking off when I entered high school, and with that, YouTube. The early algorithm of YouTube picked up on my listening interests and began to feed me songs from around the world. On an ordinary evening I would click through titles to encounter everything from Latvian folk songs to South African pop music in Afrikaans. It felt like discovering a new type of candy, the joy of listening to music in another one of the thousands of languages spoken in this world. I closed my eyes and let the sonic landscapes sink into my very bones.

In the era of YouTube-to-MP3 converters, pre-Spotify and when many foreign songs were not yet available on iTunes, I would download the strangest music to go for a run. My friends were amused at how I would work out to an absolute bop from Russia, or a fast-paced electronic song sung in Brazilian Portuguese.

“Who goes running to Siberian throat-singing?” My friend laughed.

“That beat is so catchy!” I would reply.

I ran track and field, and despite being a good athlete, I was not a cool athlete. In hindsight, it makes sense that I struggled to befriend all the other girls playing Eminem to get pumped up for a race.

Wikipedia allowed for another level of exploration. I learned all about linguistics and the theories around whether people who spoke different languages saw the world differently. This is largely dismissed by linguists, though decolonial linguistics scholars are now asking whether the methodology, and even the question itself, is too rooted in a Euro-centric bias, including the negative consequences these findings have had for many Indigenous communities.

All I know is that learning new concepts for relating to each other and the natural environment in Indigenous languages has shifted my perspective on life, and that has had a powerful impact on me and countless others seeking to reconnect to the earth and our ancestral traditions.

Wikipedia was like smoking a giant linguistic blunt, for a nerdy teenager who had never smoked a blunt. Cool facts made me feel high on information and mind-opening discovery.

I learned that the Korean alphabet was the most phonetic in the world, and that Lithuanian is one of the oldest still-spoken languages in the world. Of the 33 letters in Russian, two of them didn’t even have a sound! Papua New Guinea is home to over 800 languages amongst its islands, some on the same island entirely distinct and unrelated.

Then I discovered language isolates; those rare languages with no known relation to any other language in the world. The Basque, Haida in British Columbia, Tiwi in Australia, and the Ainu in northern Japan were absolutely unique. A further fascination for these cultures ensued.

How fascinating that we live on the same planet, but we have created so many unique expressions of sounds, words, and meanings! Why did some cultures go so heavy on consonants, and others on vowels? Why did some have alphabets and others characters, such as Chinese? Why did some cultures write left-to-right and others right-to-left?

We’re now onto Bitanga, a Ukrainian electro-folk song by Alina Pash

If my love of languages is in part because of monotropism, then it becomes clear when I am talking with others. If I hear an accent when I am speaking to someone, I want to know what their first language or dialect is. I hone in on those sounds to the exclusion of much else until my query can be answered, either by my own identification or through their words. If it’s unfamiliar to me, I will go home and read about it.

I made a Brazilian friend on my trip to Portugal, and we immediately bonded over our mutual obsession with language and linguistics (“You watch Langfocus too?! Here in Portugal?”). We remain friends across an ocean today. He has taught me all about Brazilian versus Portuguese dialects, I teach him about Quebecois French and Scottish Gaelic, and we share our e-copies of books on languages and cultures.

My neurodivergence is clear to friends and strangers alike when the topic of language comes up. I will spout facts I have learned and drone on about whatever language-related topic comes up. I have fellow language-enthusiast friends who have come over to binge watch Langfocus with me, which does comprehensive breakdowns of the grammar, structure, history, and uses of languages around the world.

My playlist starts Tenía Razón by Daniela Lalita.

I finished my first full-length book in French last year. Not a French novel, but a book about linguistics, naturally. It was Catalogue des idées reçues sur la langue, a series of essays on linguistics by Russian-French scholar Marina Yaguello. And yes, they do not capitalize every word in French titles. Try reading how conversations are written in French novels, the editing is very different and was hard for me to get used to. And why is the table of contents in the back of the book? French readers, please explain.

There is a thrill, almost enough to make the hairs on my arms stand up, when I uncover a new language fact or learn a word that cannot be translated directly to English. This sense has never abated, it’s a reliable dopamine hit of the highest order. My curiosity is insatiable, I am only limited by what my brain refuses to store as eternal knowledge. It feels like a betrayal to my very core that my mind could allow such delicious information to disappear back into the universe.

The playlist turns to a Wolastoqiyik-language song called Mehcinut, by Jeremy Dutcher.

My fellow ADHD friends and I joke that we are “knowledge junkies.” We are consumed by our desire to learn a never ending amount of information about topics that interest us. We are driven by a compulsive need to acquire knowledge and an impulsive urge to share that knowledge. Even the restaurant is not safe when I am armed with the knowledge encased in The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu. When you ask a neurodiverse person about their special interest, be prepared to encounter facts in places you never expected. You might never read a menu the same.

I’m now listening to Quebecois musician Les Louanges - La journée va être chaude.

Special interests are different for everyone who is neurodivergent; but many people only think of the stereotypical autistic boy who loves trains. There is much more to it, and those of us with deep passions share a rich inner world where those interests add great value to our lives. They are also a safe space. When I am stressed, I can distract my mind with books and shows on my favourite topics. Who knew the anti-anxiety effects that the etymology of words could have?

My monotropic brain has blessed me in many ways. My passion for learning meant that I spent eight years in academia studying religion and anthropology, getting excellent grades and top grants because I was obsessed with the topic. My special interests are my anchor in life. They enrich me, fill me with a child-like wonder that is at odds with our disenchanted modern era, they mean that I am never bored.

I dance to the beat of global tongues, a linguistic symphony as vast and diverse as the world’s music. Just don’t ask me where I put my keys.

If you loved this post and would like to support my writing and research into nature, culture, spirituality and more you can become a paid subscriber or buy me a coffee!

I love when words in one language cannot be directly translated into another. To me, it shows how differing cultures view the world in different ways. It also denotes the things that certain cultures may pay extra attention to, or none at all. For example, Inuit culture (of the modern day arctic Canadian region) has dozens of words for snow depending on context. This is also why I love learning new languages; they are portals to seeing the world in new and exciting ways.

Awen (pronounced ah-oo-en) is perhaps one of my favourite words that has no direct translation into English. The closest it comes to would be “divinely flowing inspiration,” or “a force that flows with the essence of life.”

The Welsh, which includes my father’s family, are known as a people of poets, storytellers, Druids, and musicians. So important is the concept of Awen to the Welsh, that it is found in the third stanza of their national anthem. The mountains and coastlines of Wales has inspired its people for thousands of years. And now, thousands of kilometres away in Canada, I have begun to use the concept of my paternal ancestors to harness my own creativity.

What is Awen and what is creativity?

Where do ideas come from? Sometimes they come to us from the inspiration of the world around us. A beautiful sunset, an inspiring renaissance painting, or the haunting lyrics of a folk song. Sometimes ideas seem to arise without an exterior inspiration, which has always made it feel like magic or divinity to me.

How do such things come to us? And why do they speak in different ways — the words of poetry, the sound of music, the striking visuals of a painting or the emotional performance of an actor, every creative has a preferred medium.

I’ve often felt like we don’t choose our art form, rather, it chooses us. Whether you are born to a family of musicians, or one day as a child you pick up a paintbrush and an immediate relationship is born, we cannot explain why creativity works the way it does. I have a friend from a family of musicians, but music has never connected with her in this way, she is more of a visual artist. Despite my deep love and appreciation for music, it has never called me to create like the writer’s pen begs to be in my hand.

I’ve always felt that creativity is sacred. And from those magical moments when ideas appear practically fully-formed out of seemingly nowhere, I find that no science can deliver a satisfying explanation. Creativity cannot be quantified or explained, but this is the beauty of it. Perhaps this is the divinity of it too; we harness creativity, we cultivate it, we nurture it, we practice it, and we feel blocked from it at times. Such goes the spiritual journey. Divinely flowing inspiration feels an apt description.

In Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert suggests that ideas are living things, and that we are merely conduits for them. She recounts a time when she had developed the plot to a book with a very specific story, characters, location, and plot twists. During a more stressful period in her life, she shelved the potential project, never picking it back up. Years later she spoke to a fellow writer, who began to tell her about her latest book project, only to find it was practically the same book! The Awen is alive and well in Gilbert’s world, though she does not call it this. In her book she guides us through the stories of others who have tapped into this source.

Harnessing Awen

Awen is a concept featured heavily in the Welsh Druid tradition, while the Irish and Scottish have a similar concept called Imbas. Within this worldview surrounding creativity, inspiration is within us and around us always. All we need to do is harness it through practice.

Awen is also closely tied to nature. Since the ancient Welsh, and especially the tree-revering Druids, lived harmoniously with their land, Awen was often sought through nature. I like to seek out Awen while on long nature walks. Much of the world-building and plot of my fantasy novel was developed on long strolls.

Observing rocks, the sounds of trees, the movements of birds, and fallen trees that made portal-like holes, provided me with a wealth of inspiration. Sometimes I would only look at something, and an idea would spring forth as if it came from the land itself and decided to latch on to me.

I find guided meditations to also be immensely helpful for the creative journey. The idea for my first fantasy novel came to me during a guided meditation on my life’s purpose. In this meditation I was in a forest, asking what the next step in my life would be after deciding to leave my nine-to-five career. I bolted upright as a voice came into my mind, not fully my own, urging me to write my book. I tossed and turned all night, wondering what that book would be, having had many ideas for ones in the past that I never followed-through on.

The next morning I awoke with the idea for the book half-developed. It must have found me in my restless slumber, because I did not consciously conceive of the plot. That book is now undergoing the editing process, having been breathed into fruition during the long covid lockdown that I had no idea was about to happen.

I believe, as well, that ideas exist outside of ourselves and they come to us when we are finally ready.

My biggest life goal has always been to write and publish books, but life (or my own career choices) had never provided me the time or the headspace to make this happen. But as the pandemic neared and my previous career disappeared, it felt in hindsight as though Awen knew the time was right.

Walks in nature, sitting in meditation, attending a live concert, watching a beautiful film or live play, we never know when Awen will strike. But when it does, I would have to agree with Elizabeth Gilbert, we must seize the opportunity, or perhaps it will find another conduit.

When it comes to you

I carry a pen and a small notebook everywhere I go. If I forget that, I have my phone for notes. When a big idea comes now, I know that if I don’t set aside time to deliberately develop this idea, I risk losing it. As adults, we will never “have time,” we can only “make it.” So, I have also come to see working with Awen as a type of relationship. I make time for my friends and family. I must also, as a writer and artist, make time for my relationship with Awen.

Inspiration breeds inspiration. This relationship is cultivated like any other; it requires time, consistency, care, and openness. We never stop learning and growing in this relationship, and it may also go through ups and downs. But developing a consistent and healthy relationship with Awen means that we also provide a stronger buffer to those low periods.

Set aside one evening a week or schedule even just two hours a week to practice your craft. Instead of a cafe or a pub, go on “inspiration seeking” adventures, such as galleries, museums, nature walks, or creativity sessions with friends. Instead of shopping for things you don’t need, take those depleting hours in crowds and consumerism to instead create something more enjoyable than the experience of purchasing things.

Awen is available to everyone, it only asks that you give it time and care. The more you cherish it, the more gifts it will bestow upon you. And then, perhaps, the world will get to witness the beauty of your collaborations.

If you loved this post and would like to support my writing and research into nature, culture and sacredness, you can become a paid subscriber or you can buy me a coffee!

READER’S NOTE: This story was originally published in NOUN Magazine’s inaugural spring 2026 issue, where I also served as Editor-in-Chief.

NOUN is a new publication on the people, places and things in Canadian publishing, and it will be an annual student-run project under the Centennial College Publishing-Book, Magazine, and Electronic graduate certificate program.

If you like this story, you can download the spring 2026 digital issue FOR FREE here. Our class put a lot of love into this issue and we’re so proud of the final product. The “curiosity” theme inspired articles such as why we crave the feel of paper, marginalia (or, why you should write in your books), a playful publishing “what’s in their bag” visual story, and more. It’s a great read for anyone who loves to read (how meta)!

Subscribe now

Has anyone ever proposed an anarchist bookstore for your first date? Have you seen the Communist Party on your local ballot box? If so, you might be living in Montreal. I arrived on this island twelve years ago, bringing my Nova Scotian accent and sub-par Acadian French with me. After all these years, Montreal, more than any other city in Canada, remains a paradox to me: a city of stark cultural contrasts, a thought experiment in begrudging bilingualism, a pothole-heavy work in progress.

Seeking to understand this island city of two million people is not a simple task. Many people from outside of Quebec consider Montreal to simply be a Canadian city that speaks French. But to speak a language is to be entwined with a worldview, and Montreal’s turbulent linguistic and cultural history shows how this shapes a place. I want to excavate those complex layers by showing how the literary world has shaped the soul of Montreal.

Bookstores act as microcosms of community formation, linguistic identity, and even political affiliation. They reveal what a city values, whose voices it amplifies, which histories it clings to, and which futures it imagines. Wander through these spaces, from anarchist collectives to feminist co-ops and queer reading salons, and you can begin to understand what makes Montreal truly unique.

BONJOUR, HI: MONTREAL’S COMPLEX LINGUISTIC HISTORY

Montreal’s literary culture begins with its linguistic story. The French first arrived in traditional Kanien’kehá:ka Territory in 1535, and what became Montreal remained French-dominated until the British conquest in 1760. After decades of tensions between the two colonial powers, in 1867, Quebec joined Confederation as a founding province of Canada. This layered history produced parallel French and English cultures that alternate between competing, merging, and resisting one another.

That tension became fertile ground for literature, activism, and artistic experimentation. But language alone didn’t shape the city’s radical sensibility. French political culture, shaped by Enlightenment philosophy, labour radicalism, and a long tradition of street protest, migrated across the Atlantic with settlers and later intellectuals. Montreal inherited this tradition, and its literary culture would help lay the groundwork for shaping the city’s identity.

HOW SUBVERSIVE POLITICS INTERTWINED WITH BOOK CULTURE

“What are they protesting this time?” My mom laughed when I called her one day, stuck on an unmoving bus due to what felt like an almost-daily road closure due to protests. I went online looking for any indication, but the demonstration event possibilities ranged from student fee hikes to immigration policy, or even environmental issues.

I knew that French, and by extension Quebecois culture, had long been known for demonstrations, but in Montreal this translated into a thriving ecosystem of alternative politics. Having lived in five provinces, I have never experienced any other city with such a fervor to demonstrate its democratic right to protest. Montreal’s literary scene has long reflected an openness to active participation in imagining societal futures.

In 1948, local bookseller Librairie Tranquille hosted the release of Refus Global, a manifesto written by Paul-Émile Borduas. Holly Rhiannon of Montreal’s Stygian Society Press says that Refus Global “called for freedom from the rigid moral and religious codes of Quebec society, shocking the public and altering the province’s cultural course.” This space also provided another launch: laying the groundwork for Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, where Quebecers en masse left the Catholic Church throughout the 1960s.

Librairie L’Insoumise is an anarchist bookstore that has been situated on the commerce hub of Saint Laurent Boulevard for over thirty-five years. L’Insoumise has provided another home for Montreal’s radical political imaginings, which became my own first encounter with anarchist culture. The shop functions as a political hub and an archive of resistance literature, and even features an anarchist library on the top floor of the same building. When I asked about the library’s regular hours, the volunteer’s reply was, “It’s best to call. We’re anarchists, so sometimes a volunteer just says, ‘screw it, I’m not coming in today.’”

L’Insoumise also hosts the annual Montreal Anarchist Bookfair, the largest of its kind in North America. Students, activists, and international scholars pack its rooms every spring, evidence of the city’s appetite for radical thought. It helps that Montreal is an educational powerhouse, with six universities and over 188,000 students. My alma mater, Concordia University, hosts the Concordia Community Solidarity Co-op Bookstore, a non-profit that is collectively run. L’Université du Québec à Montréal hosts a similar one for the French academic community with its own Librairie Jasmine.

Students cycle through the city, absorbing and reshaping its political culture, making bookstores like these natural hubs for new ideas. In many ways, the political, intellectual, and literary aspects continually replenish one another in this city.

NATIONALISM, SOCIALISM, AND LGBTQ+ COMMUNITY SPACES

Questions of identity became more visible in the 1970s, Quebec’s most turbulent modern decade. Literary hubs provided a place for separatists and intellectuals to begin imagining an independent Quebec. A tiny radical cell called the Front de libération du Québec even carried out bombings, prompting a brief national crisis. After these events, Quebecers began to articulate what made them distinct from the rest of Canada, and literary spaces reflected the shift in the political and cultural atmosphere.

Bookstores became anchors for discussion around sovereignty, socialism, labour rights, and decolonization. English-language bookstores began stocking more Quebecois political theory and Indigenous scholarship. French-language stores began reflecting a wider range of queer and feminist writing. Many bookstores began to stock titles in both languages.

As the gay rights movement progressed in the 1990s, LGBTQ book-lovers longed for their own literary space for radical thought. Montreal-based author Christopher DiRaddo created the Violet Hour queer reading series in the early 2000s because, at that time, Montreal had no LGBTQ-dedicated bookstore. Organizers staged the first reading at Stock Bar, a gay strip club in the gay village. DiRaddo told Read Quebec he saw this as “literary outreach,” inviting a new demographic into the robust milieu of culture-shaping book spaces. Montreal is now home to several LGBTQ bookstores including my favourite, Librairie L’Euguélionne.

As Francine Pelletier observed in her article “The Generation that Outgrew Quebec Nationalism” in The Walrus, “Quebec requires a commitment to collective life that is unparalleled elsewhere in North America; everyone, allophone, anglophone, or francophone, is involved. This is what makes Quebec so culturally rich and politically captivating.”

Bookstores, cafés offering bilingual spoken word poetry events, and niche reading series are the public squares where that collective life is negotiated. Radical literary life in Montreal thrives precisely because the city’s bookstores and cultural institutions blur boundaries between art, politics, and identity

THE SOUL OF MONTREAL

Montreal, while increasingly diverse and multilingual, remains rooted in its historical French worldview. It is this balance of openness and rootedness that makes the city unlike any other in Canada. Bookstores here are community archives, ideological battlegrounds, experimental art spaces, informal classrooms. They reveal a city that is always imagining alternatives politically, linguistically, socially, and artistically.

In walking through these bookstores—whether anarchist, feminist, solidarity-based, or queer—you can begin to see Montréal as a deliberate project in collective life. A city negotiating its identity on an island shaped by protest, poetry, and the stubborn persistence of two languages and worldviews alternating between challenging and enriching one another.

Why is it so hard to find an apartment with a damn bathtub? I griped in 2024, as I searched listing after listing on Facebook Marketplace. One of the things I love about living in Montreal is the French architecture and design. I used to actually enjoy apartment hunting years ago, when the rent was cheaper and often came with that historic French moulding, hardwood floors, big old windows, and a cozy little balcony encased in an elaborate black metal railing.

Over the past few years, whether looking for myself or helping a friend looking for a place, I see monotony creeping in.

Juxtaposed with the urban French beauty of Montreal’s past, sits the cold, sterile facades of new condo towers. And hidden inside other historical brick and stone exteriors, are gutted interiors excavated of the culture they once held.

The first thing that struck me when I began my search for a one bedroom apartment a in 2024 was the lack of bathtubs. Why on earth are there no bathtubs to be found in newer dwellings, and sometimes even renovated older ones? Does nobody appreciate a good bath? Or is it that we no longer take the time?

Aside from the people that do not enjoy baths, there is a huge demographic that probably have merely forgotten to consider them. Or view them as a time luxury.

To me, the cold Canadian winters always felt synonymous with bath season. As that -40 degree wind chill seeps into your bones from a long walk or too much time waiting for a bus, there are very few things that can alleviate that sensation beyond a bath. Stressed? A bath. Aching muscles? A bath. A really good book and an hour left alone? A bath. Freezing cold apartment? Obviously, a bath.

The bathtub is synonymous with slow living.

The bathtub is a relic being lost to our hyperconnected, fast-moving world. Who has time for a bath when they are hustling? Who has time for a bath when they are busy with hobbies, work, family, traveling, or using social media?

Showers are efficiency.

The water flows immediately, no waiting for a tub to fill. You can lather your hair and then wash your body quickly while the shampoo and conditioner work through the strands. In and out in record time.

If bathtubs are disappearing, so is kitchen space. Who cooks anymore? Microwaves are usually included in these newer dwellings, an efficient necessity for our fast-paced urban lives. Ovens are sometimes smaller too. Counter space, especially in a one bedroom or studio apartment, is inching itself into oblivion.

As I was grocery shopping recently, I discovered that a refrigerated aisle that used to hold cheese was now filled with pre-made meals. One grocery store near me did not even have a to-go meal section until last year, now it seems to expand every month.

We are cooking less, if the pre-made fresh meal market is any indication. Long gone is the idea that the pandemic would slow us down, that we would return to cooking more meals, baking sourdough bread, and savouring quiet moments at home.

Those long nights feel like a fever dream in retrospect. A vision of a possible utopia, a slow-living science fiction genre that sold ten million copies, now exists in the bargain bin of a used book store.

My desires for a home did not seem lavish when I set out on my search: a separate bedroom, a bathtub, a kitchen area big enough to cook in and have a little table to eat (even just a two-seat one). This used to be a baseline that was not even a requirement, more of a given.

Five years ago, as my old roommates and I were slowly pushed out of our spacious three-bedroom apartment, we overheard the new owners talking. The building had 24 units over four floors, but they wanted to get rid of those three and four bedroom units, making more one and two bedroom units.

Maximize profit, minimize space.

Families are smaller now, anyway. But what would happen to our stunning stucco walls? The golden radiators? The antique mouldings and precious historic charm? Renovating those would require time and care, but efficiency culture values neither.

So many one bedroom apartments are actually studios now. The online images, regardless of how many stainless steel appliances and floor-to-ceilings windows, felt claustrophobic. If you are lucky, you might get a balcony big enough for two little chairs.

But there was your bathroom with a modern shower, a kitchenette with no eating space, and then sometimes enough space for a couch, but often only enough for a bed. A glorified dorm room for the tech bros and influencers who are rarely home but want a building with all of the amenities.

These tiny dwellings are perfect for the busy: just bring a bed and your necessities. No need to think about arranging furniture, having guests over, wasting your time in a bath. This is a home that gives you what you need and nothing more. The finishings are sleek and the building has a pool.

We are sold minimalist luxury, but under the facade is the efficiency economy co-opting office utilitarianism for the bedroom.

As we lose certain spaces in our homes, we also lose what those spaces mean: connection through cooking and shared meals, adequate space to exist in solitude, time to enjoy a bath.

The loss of these simple things has shrunk slowly but steadily with each generation over the past century. And it is not as if the shrinking of personal spaces are being replaced with larger shared spaces designed for community.

The bulk of new buildings and condos that go up might offer a pool, a sauna, and a gym, but if they have a collaborative space it always reads as this: a co-working space.

Where historical buildings across most cultures might be centered around a courtyard, or housing co-ops may have a large shared kitchen designed for communal meals and events, these new buildings highlight what our social world has become: personal fitness in a shared space, mostly personal-yet-shared amenities (power lifting with headphones so you don’t have to talk to your possibly annoying neighbour), and the ability to work together, yet alone (more headphones, to really get in your zone).

Our personal lives have shrunk as work, hustle, and busyness have filled in all of the previously quiet, social, and slow spaces. Even if we do take a bath, how many of us take our cellphone into the bathroom with us? We scroll Instagram or TikTok as we fail to notice just how nice the scent of lavender is that has filled the tub.

Our mental preoccupations take up more physical space than we realize.

In 2024, I moved into a cozy one-bedroom,. It was a character-rich older place that even has a beautiful (but some may hate it) green floral wallpaper in the living room. Remnants of a former tenant who perhaps loved botany as much as I do. It had just enough space for my needs, but it did not have a proper bath.

There is enough room for a tub, but for whatever reason, that space was renovated to include a tub-length shower instead. I have endometriosis, a condition where baths alleviate sometimes debilitating pain. I thought I could survive without a tub, but within the first month I realized my grave error and cursed modernity.

Consumerism had a remedy though: I discovered that I could buy a portable “tub” that expanded into my shower.

The purchase felt like a resistance to efficiency culture, but also a sad state of buying back a cheaper, uglier version of what is being taken from us.

They will never take my bath! I laughed maniacally, as I spent money on something that most people would probably use to buy a microwave (don’t get me started on the “chronic illness tax” we spend trying to live a semblance of normalcy).

I will cling to my private slowness. To every ounce of personal space that allows for non-work related usage. I savour my ability to cook a meal and sit with a friend or two. To be able to walk into a separate room and know it is still my home.

I see this city I have lived in for a decade being washed of its visual history, but it is also shrinking our communal lives. We have lost local cafes that hosted benefit concerts, pop-up shops, and artisan fairs. No less, affordable lunches and coffee.

We are losing old buildings in lieu of expensive condos that look like they could be in Anywhere North America.

In Quebec, a French-speaking province surrounded by the majority English-speaking rest of Canada, there is a never-ending debate on how to save French language and culture. Our government goes on about schooling, workplace French aptitude, and media, mainly.

But what also feels so French to me is what we are losing due to efficiency culture: the precious detailing of French homes, shops, cafes, solidarity and communal places. Any culture being gobbled up all the way to its most private places, residential dwellings, is at risk of losing itself.

Saving beauty and slowness in our personal spaces, these things let culture live and breathe as much as they let us properly relax.

What began as a question about the lack of bathtubs ruminated into a broader question about what our physical spaces mean for us individually and culturally. Losing our bathtubs is the personal equivalent to replacing mom-and-pop shops with generic malls.

We no longer are, we merely work and buy. Everything else is a luxury.

On that rambling note, I am going to take a bath in my new home. Yes, it’s finally a real bath.

In 2008 I participated in one of Canada’s greatest social experiments: the Katimavik volunteer program. I spent nine months total living across three provinces, along with eleven other young adults from across the country (plus a house leader).

We came from a variety of socio-economic and cultural backgrounds, but the shared task was to become active members of each community we lived in, while learning about social and environmental issues across the nation. It remains one of the best decisions I have ever made; dramatically shifting the way I thought about the world, and how we live and work today.

Katimavik took me from a home where I was an only child with a single mother, and thrust me into the drama of sharing a bedroom with three other young women. It showed me the path from self-involved teenager to a person who spent the bulk of her time being of service to others. It led me out of social anxiety into confidence and hope.

The value of being part of such a community has shaped me into who I am today, and most importantly taught me that community and relationships matter more than anything else in life.

With the rising cost of living, and having lived through the isolation of the pandemic, I have been thinking more about the role that community plays in the capitalist system. More people in North America live alone than ever before. More people suffer from loneliness and depression than ever before. Despite the rise in technologies and systems that were supposed to give people more leisure time, we also continue to work ever-longer hours.

The isolation caused by pandemic lockdowns only served to highlight the fractures that have long been building in our society. Capitalist, competitive, and hustle-culture mentalities are in direct contrast to healthy, supportive community systems.

This is why any antidote to the damages done by capitalism must involve an emphasis on community and social relationships.

Housing and community networks

Humans are social animals. While some animals, such as turtles, emerge from birth ready to survive alone, human children cannot survive infancy without constant care. Some of us may have competitive natures, but we are still social beings with social needs, built into our DNA and our shared history. For millennia we lived in foraging and hunting communities. The first towns and settlements were small, and while tribalism and competition over land and resources always existed, we took those battles as community against community.

In those ancient communities there was also no such thing as a homeless humans. Homelessness only exists where us humans have come to define housing, commodified it, and decided who is allowed access to it.

We are the only species that can be homeless on the very planet we live on.

No economic system is perfect, and I would argue we need something entirely new or revised from what has been tried, but capitalism especially has been detrimental to housing and community. Capitalism, or any socio-economic system that stratifies wealth and endorses mega-mansions and private ownership over multiple acres of land, is in contrast with meeting basic human needs.

If the trickle-down effect worked, we should have long since eliminated homelessness.

Housing as a competition, not a right

Under a capitalist scarcity mindset, housing too becomes a competition. And thus is born a model that destroys community-centric architecture. We see intentional, community-centric design projects popping up in places like Denmark, where buildings are designed with central courtyards and communal spaces meant for engaging residents. Many people have even left cities since the 1960s, with the popular “back to the land” movement, forming eco-villages and communes.

But all of these are counter to the bulk of development cropping up across the West.

Despite pockets of intentional community-based living, more people wish to live alone, should they be able to afford it. The common historical four-to-six bedroom flats that one can find in my trendy Mile End neighbourhood of Montreal (a holdover of historically large Irish Catholic families) have given way to a majority of one-or-two bedroom condos.

People do not want to deal with roommates (we almost all have a bad roommate story), but I would argue that in many cases, people no longer want to invest in the communication skills or patience for sharing homes. We no longer want to compromise on anything. Living alone is easier, simpler, and requires less navigation around cleaning and house rules, like having the heat on in winter. But it is also lonelier.

Living alone is success for who?

Under capitalism, living alone is seen as the goal. Housing is no longer about community, but personal success. To have “made it” you should be living alone. Is living alone another lie we have been taught about success? Is it also a lie that increases profits for housing corporations?

To me, success is not only defined by being able to pay my bills and have savings, but by having a community around me that I can rely on in both good and bad times. I have learned from the financially difficult periods of my life, that if we lean on one another, our needs are always met.

When I have a strong social network that I prioritize over the accumulation of substantial wealth and material possessions, I may not end up with a mansion, but the wealth I have from my community means more than square footage ever could.

I would rather have a life full of friends knocking at my door, than a life alone in a mansion surrounded by a gate because I fear people stealing my possessions. Mutual aid amongst my friends and I not only helped me in times of struggle, it also nourished my spirit and gave me hope to push forward.

Media: everything is a competition

Instagram has long been a playground for consumerist culture. The app now even allows you to tag the specific clothing item you’re wearing so that other people can link directly to the company and purchase the same item. Influencers show off clothing hauls, their fancy new homes, sports cars, or life of general luxury. Netflix documentary The American Meme even sought to expose the loneliness of these influencer lifestyles.

These people have lives of material luxury and travel adventures most of us can only wish for, and yet they are lonely. I wish wealth was more focused on how strong our social networks are, and less on how big our closets are.

Reality television is often also a playground for consumerism and competition. Even shows like Selling Sunset, which is supposed to be about a group of successful women in the LA real estate market, focuses on competing over expensive listings while stabbing each other in the back.

There is no genuine community or strong social networks to be found on reality television. Instead we have closet tours and Real Housewives, whose careers depend on one-upping each other and gossiping for paycheques. Shows that are not labelled as competitions are still competitions — each person is competing to be the prettiest, the most desirable, the richest, the coolest.

Our music venerates lives of wealth and opulence. Where are the rappers and singers bragging about how much their community has helped them get to where they are? Who is singing about how much the people in their lives mean to them? How they have the biggest “posse” or “squad” that is not just hot, but also full of wonderful people? I know, this doesn’t sell big records.

The chart toppers are all about the capitalist lifestyle, a lonely experience of being the Greatest of All Time (“G.O.A.T”), the hottest, the baddest bitch in the room, or the man with the most swagger.

Everything in our media celebrates our independence and success; our “badassery” and uniqueness. But the older I get the more I read this as propaganda. While it is fun to workout and dance to songs that pump us up and make us feel special, it’s not the mantra I want for my life as a whole.

There is a difference between being confident and independent, and living in an illusion that we do not need anybody and success relies only upon ourselves.

I am tired of the delusion of a self-made person.

Centre people, not things

My remedy for coping with life in a capitalist society is to continue centering community and relationships in my life. I am nothing without the people who stood by me or guided me to where I am today. I am proud of the help I have received, of the care and time others have honoured me with, so that I could achieve success in the things I want to do.

We need to shift our thinking from scarcity and competition to a mindset that cherishes the people in our lives above all else. People who live the longest and healthiest lives, found in the well-researched Blue Zones, all center community in their lives. They may not be the most materially wealthy, but they have support every step of the way.

I wonder how many of those centenarians would scoff at the self-importance and isolating features of life in our generation?

We are products of our environment, but we do not have to stay stuck in the world we were born into. We recreate this world everyday. We get to choose how we shape the future.

The only way to move forward through a planet on the verge of collapse, an economic system that is making it harder for people to pay their bills, and the depressing sense that we’re always in competition, is to admit that we are in it together. That we cannot live without each other. And that all of this would be a lot easier if we stopped idolizing those lonely mansions, and instead idolized loving communities.

My old roommates and I used to enjoy indulging in some petty rich women drama. We spent our days in grad school, filling our brains with knowledge and ideas on how to change the world. Then, at night, we would joke that it was time to render our intellect worthless and watch the Real Housewives flip tables over the most pointless of matters.

The Housewives lived in these oversized mansions with closets bigger than our apartment. They ran various “successful” businesses (more on that later). They went through husbands like fashion trends and delivered one-liners worthy of the memes they became. Every season they had a new face that moved a bit less than the previous one.

We would laugh at their emotional immaturity and wonder if other viewers were aware that the series was supposed to originally have been satire. For the bulk of my fellow queer friends, these types of reality shows were, and still are, a big part of our subculture. You can see it in memes, popular phrases, and even some drag queen personas.

It’s just television, we said. Just a highly edited version of semi-reality to be consumed with empty calories on the couch when all the day’s thinking was done.

From Escapism to Dystopianism

Selling Sunset debuted in 2019 to a decent viewership, but it really took off the following year when the world went into lockdown. With nothing else to do but sit at home, millions of people watched these women with unnaturally perfect teeth sell mega-mansions in LA, fight over office seats, and gossip about who had the favour of management (two small male twins, looming ever present in the background with their equally unnatural white teeth).

My friends and I watched this series with equal parts awe and horror. These mansions were beautiful, the outfits iconic, but so were the environmental and socio-economic costs. As our world became caged, the reality of the wealth divide and the growing climate crisis only grew.

The fancy mansions shown in season one blended into every future season. Another glass-heavy (bird-killing nightmare), marble-countertop, infinity pool equipped home. Add to this with outfits that never repeated, concerns about a downturn to the real estate market (oh no! A mansion tax!), and rhetoric that celebrated hustle culture and endless growth (yaaas queen, #girlboss! #slay).

My roommate and I watched in horror as the Real Housewives ignored covid restrictions to host parties and go on lavish vacations, both on screen and off. We watched obnoxious rich clients on Below Deck throw temper tantrums over minor inconveniences, while crew members cried after their 12+ hour shift.

Our guilty pleasure felt increasingly painful.

My roommate had started working as an occupational therapist with vulnerable clients, and I was working in a university chaplaincy helping students navigate pandemic isolation. Working with vulnerable populations while also navigating our own isolated lives had taken the fun out of what many called “escapism” television.

It left me thinking: should I feel guilty about my guilty pleasure, not because it’s low-brow entertainment, but because it actually has much worse societal implications?

The Prettiest Propaganda

Since the success of Selling Sunset, we’ve been inundated with tons of luxury real estate spin-offs. Just on Netflix there is: Selling Tampa, Million Dollar Beach House, Selling the OC, Buying Beverly Hills, Owning Manhattan, and The Parisian Agency. Am I still missing some?

I took a peak at a few of these other shows and found that they all follow a similar premise. Beautiful (though sometimes absolutely gauche) mansions are highlighted alongside office gossip and a constantly refreshed wardrobe. The stakes get higher, the mansions more expensive, and the drama kept constant in order to keep viewers tuning in.

How many more of these shows can we make? Should we make?

Clearly it works, because millions of people continue to tune into these shows. And this is not a story of judgement, because clearly, so have I.

I began to wonder if these shows were merely propaganda that perpetuates the socio-economic and environmental lies that are harming our society. Were these shows harmless entertainment when so many people grew to idolize, and sought to emulate, these exact lifestyles?

I considered myself a critical viewer, but is my viewership itself still contributing to a destructive ideology and lifestyle? After all, I was keeping the ratings up, helping more seasons to be greenlit.

What we see at face value is beautiful faces selling a lifestyle. Whether they are real estate agents, housewives with their various branded products, or influencers cashing in on their moment of relevance, everything is drenched in a materialism that is drowning our planet.

The luxury homes on all these shows are still coveted by millions of people. The American Dream still tells us that if we hustle hard enough, we can become like these people. Meanwhile, most of us are only a few pay checks or one major health crisis away from joining the growing population at the local food bank.

The cultural myth of endless upward mobility through hard work (read: hustle culture) is part of the reason why many viewers idolize these reality stars. It fits with the broader societal narrative that is still trying to maintain dominance in the face of alarming inflation and worsening climate disasters.

These shows may serve as entertainment, but really they are a mirror to our fractured reality.

We tune in to see the rich and famous act entitled and egotistical, all while trying so hard to drown out what’s happening outside our homes, even just for an hour. Even for someone like myself, who’s biggest dream is living on a piece of land with a few friends, growing our own food, and fixing up a barn into an art studio, I still enjoyed the insanity of these people’s lives.

But these shows are a problem. They perpetuate the myth of endless growth and upward mobility, the idea we can all become a Kardashian if we try. They perpetuate the environmental disaster of wanting to own a mega-mansion, the reason young people say they would rather be famous than be a politician or spaceman.

We adopt their #girlboss energy as part of our lingo, singing pop songs about how we want it all and we want it now.

If we peek behind the bright white veneers and botox, we see the ugly truth.

The Real Housewives of Prison

Jen Shah, one of the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, was infamously chased by the FBI and Homeland Security during shooting on season 3, and arrested on fraud charges. Shah now sits in jail serving a six-year sentence for scamming dozens of elderly people out of their money in order to fund her lavish lifestyle. Real Housewives of New Jersey star, Teresa Giudice, also spent time in prison for fraud.

Even many of the Housewives cannot afford to be Housewives. They go to jail trying desperately to live this broken American Dream.

The Kardashians also play a big role in that mirrored dystopia. Thousands of women undergoing cosmetic surgery in order to achieve the assets that these sisters claim to have gotten through squats and diet. Even if the sisters were telling the truth, there are millions of people trying to chase the image of photoshopped perfection, even if it means possible botched surgeries and lifelong consequences.

This is a dystopia. These shows are jarring, but only if viewed from the right perspective. They represent an ideology that our planet and people can no longer afford to cling to.

Imagine a show that traces everything celebrated and touted by these stars:

• Clothing made by SKIMS, Kim Kardashian’s line, has been traced back to inhumane labour in developing nations. The bulk of beauty products created by stars are full of harmful chemicals; a cash grab for the fan base with no regard to the earth or our health. The plastic and polyester from these never-ending “side hustles” are merely added to the mountains of forever chemicals that end up even in our blood.

• Mega-mansions torn down after 5 years just to rebuild a new, even more monstrous mansion using rare wood, marble, and other exotic items. Trace the owner to a non-local billionaire who uses it as an investment property, and watch it sit empty as we coast down the highway to homeless encampments in LA.

• See the end result of that teenage girl so desperate to get larger lips that she lets a friend inject filler, only to watch it deform her face and cause permanent swelling to one half of her upper lip. See these Housewives brag about their wealth, only to be discovered as a con artist in too many layers of mismatched Gucci.

Confronting The Real Housewives of Dystopia

So what do we do about it? Should I stop indulging in Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, even though as a scholar of religion and anthropology the show acts as a fascinating case study on contemporary faith and life in America?

These shows do not benefit us in any way, but perhaps that’s the point.

Like a bag of tasty bbq potato chips, these shows are empty calories that when consumed in high volumes, may begin to negatively impact your life.

My very real question to readers is this: is it ethical to continue watching reality shows that promote unsustainable lifestyles and planetary destruction, even if you are aware they’re troubling?

I spend a lot more time these days watching permaculture and ecology vlogs on YouTube. But every once in a while I end up watching a new season of Real Housewives, out of that same curiosity. And every time I watch it with that mix of entertainment and horror. Maybe we can navigate the nuance together, or at least, empathize over our shared brainrot.

If would like to support my work, you can buy me a coffee or become a paid subscriber!

The four noble truths of Productivity:

1. Life is suffering

2. The root of suffering is lack of productivity and success

3. The way out of suffering is to master productivity

4. One masters productivity through the eightfold path. Subscribe to my newsletter for eight tips on how to maximize your productivity while sleeping!

One good conversation that has come out of the Covid-19 pandemic is that more people are beginning to re-examine their relationship to work. Many people left their jobs during or after the pandemic, not wishing to return to either corporate life, or their specific career as a whole. Others were forced out of jobs after developing long covid, or complications from the virus, that have made them unable to sustain the type of work they had been doing.

I was one of the people that left my career as we returned to the “new normal.” I left the university world to go and work with plants. I became an urban agriculturalist, and spent a year learning and teaching others how to grow food in an urban setting, and building raised bed vegetable gardens for locals, non-profits, schools and businesses. I worked hard up to eight months of the year, and then rested in the worst of Canadian winter.

The joy of being outside, in nature with plants, and teaching people how to grow food to nourish themselves and their communities was a new type of fulfilment. I never wanted to “not work,” I just didn’t want to work “like that” anymore. I had given so much, almost all of myself and all of my time, in my previous work as a chaplain and event coordinator. I experienced burnout and it led me to reconsider my entire relationship with work and productivity.

Subscribe now

In a way, this four-part series has been the culmination of my two years of exploring my own personal relationship with productivity. How might I avoid another burnout? How can I be successful in a healthier way? How can I learn to value myself according to my inherent worth rather than how productive and outwardly successful I appear to be? I am still learning, but I want to share what has been helping me move forward in a healthier, happier way.

This is not an anti-work or anti-productivity deep dive. What I have aimed to do is highlight the ways that our relationship with productivity has become a deeply embedded belief system in society, and ask how we might reframe it so that we can be productive in healthier and more sustainable ways.

Thus, I would like to add something to Kim Kardashian’s infamous statement that, “nobody wants to work anymore.” This statement is missing two key words: “nobody wants to work like this anymore.”

The Protestant Work Ethic, much like our law system has been based in the Ten Commandments, has created the “secular” beliefs we hold surrounding productivity. The Cult of Productivity is more of a way to explain that our obsession with productivity has infiltrated our society so that we accept these beliefs as fact, despite its insanity. This type of cognitive dissonance is incredibly human. We often believe things that do not align with other beliefs we have, or that contrast with undeniable facts:

• We live on a finite planet, we have finite resources, and that our finite human bodies have limits.

• We are being productive in ways that are harmful to our health, our communities, and our planet.

• We think we can master an unachievable level of productivity, and that we should.

• Continuing on this path of “endless progress” will only progress us towards a quicker societal collapse and faster global warming.

• We can individually and socially begin to take steps to change things.

  ---

Deprogramming

Time operates in a crushed silo when we are on our phones while walking, eating while working, answering emails while watching television. We surrender not to God, but to time, as it becomes our new master. So how do we reorient our lives so that time is no longer the master that pulls all of our strings? How do we survive in a world that is moving ever faster and never ceases to demand more from us? I have a few suggestions based on how I have been re-orienting my own life.

Eight steps (inspired by the eightfold path of Buddhism):

Right view: Re-centre relationships and community

We can shift from a productivity-oriented mentality to a people-centred mentality. In a corporate mindset, this includes valuing employees and their human needs. In a personal context, this can include setting time aside to be away from technology and goals to nurture friendships, romantic partnerships, and family. In a societal context, it might include examining ways that we can make life easier for people who cannot work full-time, due to illness or other factors. This view is compassionate at its core, and goes along well with B Corp certification ideals.

Right intention: Set daily intentions to prioritize health and community

“Renunciation” of a productivity-centred mindset means taking time to look at the ways in which you might spend your days moving forward. In what areas of your life could you let go of certain “productivity” mentalities or behaviours? Think about your daily routine, do you eat while working? Are there things you are saying yes to out of a compulsive need to say yes, or a fear of saying no? Examine your average weekday and look at where you can adopt a “less is more” mentality.

Right speech: daily reminders that worth is not tied to productivity

I talked about the self-flagellation of the Cult of Productivity, where we seem to take pride in how tired, overworked, and overwhelmed we are. Or, we hate it, but we accept it as fact, and often judge ourselves when we do not succeed. How can you be kinder to yourself today? Become mindful of how you talk about yourself, your worth, and your productivity. When you catch yourself thinking you are unworthy or unsuccessful, practice repeating mantras like “I am inherently worthy and so are the people around me,” or “my worth is not defined by my success.”

Right action: Create healthy boundaries in work and life

Establish what is a necessity and what is time pressure illusion. Take small steps like beginning to say no when something will add unnecessary stress to your day. Turn off your work email on evenings and weekends, if possible. Set aside tech-free times to reprioritize your wellness, your relationships, and time to do “nothing.”

Right livelihood: unlearning and speaking up

Since our relationship with productivity, self-worth, and success are so deeply embedded in our daily lives, change will be a lifelong process. If we want to see a cultural shift towards healthier productivity, we must also model what we wish to see. As we retrain our brains to value our lives and relationships, we can also make changes that affect the world around us.

Perhaps we buy fewer things and waste less, reducing the environmental burden of Productivity. Maybe we speak up at work about best practices (unions were made for fair labour practices, but even without unions, we can still find a voice). How else might we champion healthy boundaries, encourage others to have more self-compassion, and lower our environmental impact by slowing down?

Right effort: cultivating new habits and norms

We can make a daily effort to unlearn productivity traps and cultivate healthy relationship with goals, desires, output and realistic capabilities. Have another look at your schedule. What is one thing you can remove from it? Where is there time you can add for self-care, being social, or simply doing nothing and turning tech off? What are some realistic goals you can achieve this month, taking full consideration of your health, your family situation, and your financial situation?

Sometimes, when I have a busy day, I will find thirty minutes where I can be away from phones, computers, and stimulation. I use that to sit in silence, go for a walk, or re-center in some way. On Sundays, I avoid social media and news entirely, turning off the Wi-Fi on my phone. I am slowly cultivating more realistic goals and scheduling, and finding that having those boundaries makes me more successful and productive when I do get back to work.

Right mindfulness: mindful consumption and behaviours

As I wrote about in my article on digital mindfulness, my life transformed positively by changing my relationship with technology. Instead of mindlessly using my phone, computer, or anything else, I am now trying to ask in what ways they benefit me. How can we have a more mindful relationship with stimulating media, which often takes away our focus and harms our ability to be productive in a mindful way?

We can also take more time to be present, whether it is at work or in our free time. How often are we doing one thing, while thinking about the next? How often do we achieve a goal and move on to the next thing before we even stop to enjoy the fruits of our labour? We can slow down to savour our accomplishments. We can take time to appreciate what we have, developing gratitude for today that also reminds us we are inherently worthy, even when not being productive.

Right concentration: work deeper, rather than harder

In Cal Newport’s eponymous book “Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World,” he sets out a framework and steps to enhance concentration and productivity. This book offers a great way to re-examine our Cult of Productivity mindset and create a healthier relationship with it.

How can the above steps, especially ones around media use, multi-tasking, and using stimulating social media, help your concentration so that when you do want to be productive, you can do so in a focused way? Finding time and the headspace for deep work enhances your ability to concentrate, and hopefully get done the things you need to do with less stress.

Setting daily app limit timers, adding “do not disturb” times on your computer and phone, creating time and space to really get into flow states can all help. What other things can you do to work deeper rather than harder? How can you work smarter, rather than longer? And, just as importantly, where can you set aside time to rest?

If you have read all four parts of this series, thank you! It has been a lot of fun for me to explore how our society views productivity. I am happy to hear your comments. How are you shifting your relationship to productivity? What helps you? What would you add to my suggestions?

If would like to support me, you can buy me a coffee or become a paid subscriber!

They paved paradise to put up a parking lot — Joni Mitchell

When I started middle school, I used to walk up a big hill from my home on the way to class, stopping at the top to admire the scenery. The humble, rolling hills of Dartmouth, Nova Scotia were peppered with trees that sloped gently into a series of lakes. It was a daily dose of joy to view this timeless refuge of nature. A mere five years later, as I neared high school graduation, my sacred hills were replaced with a concrete forest. The hills had been paved to accommodate a movie theatre, a sprawl of stores that used to exist in a more-condensed mall nearby, and hotels with conference spaces. I would look out with grief, realizing that as long as we valued endless growth, our sacred earth would continue to be paved in favour of a parking lot.

We used to build beautiful temples, churches, and mosques. Before that, we erected great pyramids, colosseums, and stone henge monuments to showcase our reverence and inspiration. Now we erect skyscrapers, sprawling shopping complexes, industrial parks, and hastily-built condo towers. I always wondered what bothered me about the architecture of modernity, and now I realize it is because the bulk of it is minimalist and utilitarian. There is no soul in the endless skyscrapers, no craftsmanship in the condominiums. This is the mark of the Cult of Productivity; time is money and paradise could be a parking lot.

Subscribe now

In part one and part two of this series on the Cult of Productivity, I explored the general belief system, rituals, customs, and social isolation it has created. Now, in part three I will explore the saints and martyrs we revere who turn paradise into a parking lot.

SAINTS

If there are saints in this tradition, then Elon Musk must be a patron saint. There are few names that come to mind as much as the Tesla and Space X (and now ‘X’ owner) when thinking about the Cult of Productivity. Musk often makes the news for his pursuits of endless growth and tireless work habits. He boasts about his 80+ hour work weeks, and expects the same of his workers. When he took over at Twitter (now X), he even sent an email to employees telling them to expect a “hardcore” work environment. Many quit, but many others stayed (for varying reasons, I’m sure).

Musk’s work ethic is not only seen as acceptable for somebody who wants to run multiple corporations and projects, but is revered by countless individuals who would aspire to the same great heights of fame and fortune. Jenny O’Dell, in her book Saving Time, writes about what she calls, “productivity bros.” These are the (predominantly male) people who blog, vlog, write books, and run podcasts on enhancing productivity in the pursuit of achieving more and more in life. Are productivity bros the most strict adherents of the Cult of Productivity (perhaps even the ‘monks’)?

These are the type of people who wake up at 4am to bullet journal, drink Soylent, write articles about writing articles to make money, and post videos about the (insert specific number) of things you can do to enhance your productivity or personal growth. Productivity bros preach the prosperity gospel with their testimonies of how much they have made in the past month doing (insert media platform or passive income stream). They teach us how to follow their ways, so that we may also grow closer to God… I mean self-actualization and financial freedom.

“Nobody wants to work anymore. Get your f**king ass up and work!” — Kim Kardashian

Lest we leave out women (or any gender identity), I give you our female patron saint: Kim Kardashian. Regardless what you think of her, she and her family have shown enough business savvy and sheer determination to create an empire out of a once-humble reality tv series. Kim is considered a mogul by countless women and has worked tirelessly to craft a public image as a hardworking business woman who wants to be taken seriously (read: girlboss).

Years after Paper Magazine attempted to “break the internet” with her voluptuous derriere, she nearly broke the internet again when she declared that the working masses no longer wanted to work. Her tone-deaf comment landed on the ears of people struggling through a pandemic, dealing with rising living costs and declining social support systems.

And yet, she remains revered. It may not be cool to publicly proclaim admiration for the girlboss of all girlbosses, but the continued success of her show, sales of her makeup line, skincare, and SKIMS clothing line do not lie. When I tried to understand the appeal of Keeping up with The Kardashians I realized something: people love them because capitalism tells us that we can be them if we just work hard enough.

This is the great myth of the prosperity gospel turned productivity gospel. Despite growing awareness that factors such as economic background, race, gender, and physical ability play a role in our potential level of success, the saints of Productivity highlight our delusion that success really is possible for everyone.

Would the masses still revere Kim and Elon if we really, truly understood that we will never come close to that kind of success, no matter how hard we work? Or would they turn on them like the French Revolution, demanding the guillotine so that we may all access affordable healthcare and use their billions to solve the housing crisis? Our admiration or toleration live in a realm of myth. We want to believe.

It is capitalism, consumerism, and the Cult of Productivity that allow us to look at homeless people and see personal failure rather than societal failure.There are no homeless monkeys in the wild. Before we created cities, there were no homeless humans either. We are the only species that can be homeless on our own planet. But the saints of Productivity do not value things like universal housing, affordable (or free) healthcare, and community-centric businesses that place people above profit.

If our focus is on our communities, rather than individual success, we will never achieve the status of mogul or girlboss. We must leave the others behind, become self-made, and donate a tiny fraction of our successful profits to charity (and don’t forget to post about it, so people know you are altruistic)! The path to sainthood in the Cult of Productivity is an isolating journey.

MARTYRS

So what does that make us mere civilians living under the glory of our saints and prophets? Have we become the martyrs? There is even a psychology term for those of us who take on more than we can handle because we feel like we have to: martyr complex. We all have friends and family members who, while certainly well-intentioned, never take time for themselves because they feel the need to give 110% at work, care for one or more family members, and still offer their last crumb of time to whatever else calls to them. Perhaps you are one of those people. “If I don’t do it, nobody will. If I don’t finish this work, the company will surely crumble,” are all sentiments from kind, hardworking people I know who never give themselves a break.

Those of us who are not on top of the Productivity food chain (CEOs, billionaires, the rich and famous), live in the constant martyrdom of time pressure illusion. As touched on in part one, this illusion is what causes us to voluntarily work more, despite no genuine necessity. “I worked eighty hours last week; I slept four hours last night; I’m taking six courses and working as well…” is language that both celebrates and self-flagellates our submission to time. Our martyrdom leads to burnout, chronic health problems, mental health issues, severed social connections and relationship strains, and in extreme cases like Japan it has earned its own word, Karoshi: death from overwork.

Sweatshop workers and refugees may be the most tragic of the martyrs under Productivity. Sweatshop workers suffer insanely long work days, and sometimes get one day (or none) off each week, so that we may have more clothing options. Workers in factories in developing nations are regularly in the news when the buildings collapse, and we mourn the loss of their lives for a few days before news turns to the next story. They are nameless faces; the price we pay for endless growth. If the factories don’t kill them, the slow death of cancer from toxic chemicals, poverty from wage slavery, or violence from gangs in long-impoverished communities might.

Climate and war refugees are becoming a bigger global concern each year. These martyrs of Productivity and consumerism are pushed out of their homes when war is declared (often where precious natural resources are conveniently found such as gold, lithium, or oil).

Tesla doesn’t want us to think about the lithium mining that is creating warfare, child labour, and environmental ruin. Saint Elon Musk knows it’s bad for business, and worse for the myth we believe in. The US is already in talks about what to do with the natural gas they have discovered off the coast of the Gaza Strip; this is not coincidence (just check this article written about Gaza’s untapped oil published on June 18, 2023). Nor is the oil in Ukraine and the Black Sea near its coast.

The Cult of Productivity giveth, and it taketh away. I used to wonder why it felt like a hopeless task trying to disentangle our world from the clutches of consumerism and endless growth. I realized recently that it was because I was looking at it wrong: it is not just a concept, it is a belief system.

When we are talking about belief systems, we start to realize the depth and difficulty we are dealing with. It is hard to change belief systems and the traditions they carry. We have developed and then clung tightly to the rituals, beliefs, customs, and social systems that encapsulate the Cult of Productivity.

So how do we come to a place where we can begin to view productivity in a healthier way? Is it possible? In the final instalment of this four-part series, I explore how we might begin to deprogram ourselves from this belief system, what that would look like, and encourage readers to chime in with their own thoughts and suggestions.

If would like to support me, you can buy me a coffee!

The slow and steady march of time rouses me from my sleep with the shrill coo of an electronic alarm. I jump out of bed to turn off the overly cheery sound on my phone, refusing to look at my notifications until I have at least eaten breakfast. I make tea, stare out the window, and observe the subtle changes of the trees, which are now covered in a shiny snow coating.

I feel that my morning ritual is in the minority. I have to no sleep tracking app, I don’t count my steps, I only wear a watch if a job requires it, and I avoid reading books and articles that tell me to get up at 5am to be more productive.

These are my tiny rebellions against what I have come to term the Cult of Productivity. In part one, I explored the origins of how we came to be dominated by time, productivity, and the belief in endless progress. After writing about the unfounded beliefs and the strange productivity “purity” we are taught to aim for, I realized that I had a lot more to say. So join me for yet more exploration into the ways that our obsession with productivity has led to a near-religious fervour.

Subscribe now

RITUALS

Every religious tradition and culture has rituals, whether the secular thanksgiving in the United States, national holidays celebrating independence from a colonizer, or days that mark important historical events, we live our lives by ritual. Part of the time-vortex that was the pandemic was because we no longer had a way to mark the rituals that normally pass time; no birthday parties, anniversaries, or annual celebrations. Who are we, really, without our rituals? We may walk in a material world, but we see the world with the myths we create, which cloak our material lives in meaning and purpose.

The Cult of Productivity has rituals of its own. Devout Muslims may pray five times a day, but there is a devotional level to the way that many of us, even secular individuals, manage our modern daily lives. We love schedules, and if bestseller lists and even top tags on Medium show, productivity is always a hot topic. Through popular books like Atomic Habits and The 5am Club, we learn to adopt rituals and habits that will enable us to produce more on a regular basis.

The overt goal is self-improvement, the underlying message is to become a more productive (aka better) member of society.

Rituals might include your morning routine; perhaps you are one of the people trying to get up at 5am everyday. Maybe your ritual includes intermittent fasting during weekdays to boost your brain power or exert some form of control over your physical body. One trend that began several years ago and remains popular is bullet journalling. Maybe you are one of the thousands of people who take time at the beginning and end of each day to take stock of your calendar, log your diet and habits, or see how far you have advanced towards a goal.

One of the biggest ritual events are marathons, and I am not talking about running. We have Hack-athons, Work-athons, Tele-thons, Study-athons, and more. These rituals are designed to fully inhabit the time pressure illusion placed upon us and pump out exorbitant amounts of work in densely packed timeframes. We are in it together, lacking sleep and any other duties, for the excitement of possibility delivered by these marathons. Sometimes we perform these rituals solo, if we stay up all night finishing a paper or project that we have procrastinated. Some people even need to feel the adrenaline of the time pressure illusion to produce their work.

What rituals of your day are devoted to productivity?

CUSTOMS

Then there are the customs of Productivity. One could even argue that there is a dietary norm in the Cult of Productivity. Forget Kosher, Halal, or veganism, Productivity demands faster food for faster lives. Fast food remains as popular as ever, but I have noticed a growth in ready-made meals becoming available at the grocery stores near my home. A clear indication that people are eating like this more often.

I see Good Food and Hello Fresh meal-kit boxes on doorsteps when I walk down the street. If we cook, these meal-kits make sure you have everything set up so that all you need to do is throw it in the oven. What working woman has time to grocery shop and meal plan? Order the kit! Need we forget the Soylent craze, when people were prepared to stop eating in lieu of this protein shake, so they could use food time for productivity time.

The customary clothing, far from the beautiful gowns of an Indian wedding, the crimson robes of Thai monks, or the vibrant turban for Sikhs, Productivity garb thrives on its blandness. The minimalist wardrobe has taken over fashion vlogs on YouTube in recent years. A quick dive into videos about how to make a minimalist wardrobe often show a series of monochrome, earth tone colours, or perhaps even just a Steve Jobs-esque black and white. For some, this is an environmental choice, but for a lot of people (like Steve Jobs) it is a removal of choice that takes up precious productivity time.

Less time thinking about clothes means more time thinking about more important, more productive things. Just like communist brutalist architecture, the customary clothing of Productivity honours the belief that clothing is mere function. Our clothing can be personal expression, but in Productivity culture, a simple wardrobe is an adherence to strict functionality.

I cannot count how many times people have told me that I should get a FitBit or a smart watch. The fact that I do not track my steps, nor my sleep patterns, places me in the category of a senile luddite compared to most people in modern society. There are many customs around how we manage our time, but the only important thing to note is that we should manage it. Master it, even. Employers track workers through their computers, in some companies tracking every single key stroke. Jenny O’Dell, in Saving Time, writes that at some companies, they even monitor employee’s washroom breaks.

Therein lies a great religious obsession with our pure use of time. Are we taking enough steps? Are we getting exactly eight hours of sleep? Is our heart rate at a regularly good pace? Are we on enough multivitamins to maximize productivity? Are we taking too much time getting dressed? Are we timing our use of social apps so they don’t cut into time for other things? Are we making the best use of our work hours? Are we getting every ounce of time out of our workers?

At every turn, in every facet of our lives, we’re checking how we measure up to our use of time. I wonder what my sheep-herding, inner-Hebrides dwelling Scottish ancestors would think if they saw the way that time dictated every portion of our days. We live by our schedules and our micromanagements; our ancestors lived by the seasons and the daylight. To quote O’Dell once more, in the modern era, “freedom is not needing to time life.”

ISOLATION

Another popular topic is the growing “loneliness epidemic.” So severe is it, that WHO has called it a new global health concern. Could a loneliness epidemic have existed in history when communities were smaller, where everybody knew each other, and especially before money existed? Our loneliness is arguably a partial result of the Cult of Productivity. We have taken communities and made everyone a competitor. Capitalism states that only the best will rise to the top, only those who work the hardest, the longest hours, those who sacrifice the most to time, will win. The world is now a competition, not a community.

We also have more people living alone than at any point in history. Digital nomadism can be a lonely experience — a new home every few months, a new group of people (and that’s if you’re not staying in an AirBnB alone), freelance contracts with humans you may never see in person. Meanwhile, back home, office cubicles keep us from social distraction, and long hours at work mean many people go home alone and rest until the weekend.

Then take entrepreneurship, where one turns time dominance inwards. Self-employment under the Cult of Productivity is not necessarily a freedom; it can even sometimes become a self-flagellation. Failure to live up to ones’ own standards of success and fiscal goals can be met with self-loathing, anxiety, and even negative financial consequences. Neither the employee or the self-employed is free from the time pressure illusion of Productivity, there are merely different types of pressure on each. When the solo entrepreneur fails, in our culture, they suffer that failure alone.

Social media is where many people get a glimpse of each others’ life and productivity. Really, social media is a digital tour of “what could be.” The concept of FOMO, which has become especially common in the digital era, is a time possibility—it is filled with sentiments of should, could, and would. Posts are viral for a blip of time, and content creation never ends in a search for visual and experiential infinity. Time passes in a wild cosmos of endless images, videos, and possibilities; the digital answer to capitalisms’ belief in infinite growth. All the while, us viewers are left wondering if we could, should, or would do these things, live these experiences, or become as great as the others.

Is the Cult of Productivity part of what is keeping us from connecting with ourselves and others? In what ways are the rituals and customs helpful and harmful? Where do we draw a line between healthy productivity, a desire for growth and betterment, and a dangerous obsession that only holds us back from experiencing and appreciating the full richness of our lives today?

In part three I will explore the saints and martyrs of Productivity. If would like to support me, you can buy me a coffee!

In the beginning, there was the Protestant Work Ethic. On the first day the Ethic created industrialization, so that the people may have leisure. On the second day the Ethic created capitalism, so that people may have endless growth. On the third day the Ethic created light, so that the people may see and work during the night. On the fourth day the Ethic created computers, so that the people may work faster and smarter. On the fifth day the Ethic created smart phones, so that the people may always be connected to work. On the sixth day the Ethic created social media, so that people may compare their lives and see that there may always be more. Finally, on the seventh day the Ethic rested, feasting on social media and Netflix. — Productivity Genesis 1:1–8; The Gospel According to Modernity

The Cult of Productivity

Every civilization has its beliefs, customs, rituals, and norms. The Enlightenment era and the Industrialization began to usher in a new secular belief system that dominates our world today. First, it was entangled in the Protestant Work Ethic, a Calvinist view which believed that hard work honoured God and could bring about salvation. Next, it mingled with the Prosperity Gospel and capitalism, the idea that endless growth was not only possible, but part of God’s plan. As God disappeared from overt political and economic life in the West, the burgeoning Cult of Productivity overtook many of the beliefs of organized religion.

Humans are meaning-seeking creatures, which is seen in our universal creation of myths and cultural legends. My background as a scholar of religion and my fascination with the varying beliefs, rituals, and customs of the world has led me to seeing productivity as its very own belief system, with a religious fervour that has had wide-spread implications on the lives of virtually everyone it touches.

The concept of cults themselves are a subject of debate within the academic sphere. There are several indicators that may define a cult, and some are less harmful than others. Academics and policy makers alike usually define their characteristics before defining a specific movement as a cult. To go into great detail on cults and definitions is beyond the scope of this article, so I will graze the surface.

What makes a cult, from my perspective? Some of the most important aspects include an inability to leave without repercussions from those within (i.e. losing family, friends, or being shunned/ostracized); beliefs that cause psychological distress, but adherents are unable to see the harm; internalized feelings of unworthiness, self-loathing, and anxiety around unrealistic expectations of behaviours, thoughts and actions; an inabiity to question the beliefs and norms of the group; and fear, which keeps people trapped (whether fear of leaving, or fear of what will happen if the gospel rings true).

So what is the Cult of Productivity, and is it harmful?

Subscribe now

Purity

The Cult of Productivity runs on the central belief that we can master our individual and collective time to optimize endless personal, societal, and economic growth. Nirvana is found when we hit the sweet spot of managing every moment of our waking lives; compartmentalizing our human needs with the demands of productivity. As Jenny O’Dell writes in her book Saving Time: Discovering a Life beyond Productivity Culture, we “surrender not to God, but to time.”

The grand delusion of mastering time is puritanical at its root. In the Cult of Productivity, our humanity is to be overcome, much like the denial of self found in many world religions. There is a puritanical disembodiment that we are supposed to achieve through multitasking, pushing our bodies to or beyond limits, and operating in a machine-like manner.

We see examples of the Saints of Productivity when the likes of Elon Musk celebrate their 80+ hour work weeks, demanding the same of their workers. We see it in the fact that Amazon warehouse workers are suffering mentally and physically due to the increased focus on speed and efficiency to fulfill ever-increasing orders. We even see it when employees are sick and are still expected to work, even if it is while they lean over a waste basket to puke at their work desk (as noted in O’Dell’s Saving Time). Our bodies are sin, and that sin is having needs that distract from productive ends.

Those with chronic illnesses or burnout have failed the test; their limits are seen as stopping them from achieving such purity of mastered productivity. When I worked as a university chaplain, I often saw students with chronic illnesses or disabilities that held them back from being full-time students. Despite the university’s attempts to help students succeed in class, they all knew that the working world would not be so kind.

Most companies offer a limited amount of sick days, and those who are unable to work for health or ability reasons often end up in precarious living situations. Support may come from the government, family, or non-profits, but many struggle through life with feeling like they can never fully participate or be accepted in a society where one’s worth is largely equated with the productivity they can achieve.

Burnout is a failure of one’s own making, it is believed. If only we had mastered our time better—done more yoga, woke up a bit earlier, taken our vitamins, figured out the way to outsource some work—so we can focus on other things. A quick Google search will even show you articles on how to be productive during a burnout, or how to get out of a burnout faster (so you can get back to being productive and worthy).

Burnout exists in an inhumane belief system that values our productivity over our inherent worth as living creatures on a finite planet. And yet, all of my friends who have taken time off of work for burnout have expressed feelings of guilt, shame, and unworthiness. Some even wondering if they were “burnt out enough” to deserve the rest.

Unfounded Beliefs

A main concept for O’Dell in Saving Time is that we live in a “time pressure illusion.” She distinguishes between somebody who genuinely has no free time (due to caring for children, elders, needing two jobs to pay rent, etc.) and somebody who voluntarily works long hours based on the personal belief of necessity, then only to wish for more time. This time pressure illusion is why people willingly work more than forty hours in a week, pick up their work phone during the evening, answer emails on weekends, and always say yes to more projects and expectations, despite the time pressure it adds to their lives.

There is also an “adapt or die” belief. This fear-based belief posits that if we do not find ways to adapt to new technologies, which will allow us to work faster (and apparently smarter), then we will become useless or obsolete. How often do we read headlines that talk about humanity becoming obsolete? As if technology overtaking work makes us as beings obsolete. What are we as a species, if not our productivity?

As AI and ChatGPT become a regular part of workplace discussions, they add new levels of time pressure illusion. AI could theoretically give us more leisure time, but in the Cult of Productivity, it has only emboldened us to continue to do more, since we can edit faster, write faster, and have answers faster (though these are arguable).

We must prove our worth over technology in ever-increasingly difficult ways, lest we be unworthy of our mere existence.

How strange that everything since industrialization that was supposed to give us leisure has only given us more work and expectations? We are chasing the carrot stick of promised release from busy-ness, but we find no relief.

The belief of endless growth and progress is the most harmful to our planet.In the Cult of Productivity’s answer to the Biblical“go forth and multiply,” we see how the endless multiplication of material objects and fossil fuels has destroyed forests, ecosystems, communities, and global health. It is a dangerous belief to be a culture of endless growth; we are finite beings on a finite planet. It, to me, is as wild a belief as one that states cats are aliens that are mind-controlling us for their benefit. But this belief underlies our entire economic system, it persuades governments and policy, and it puts pressure on companies and individuals. We can always create more, do more, have more, and personally be more.

In part two, I will explore the rituals, customs, and social isolation of the Cult of Productivity. As always, I am curious to hear your thoughts.

If would like to support me, you can buy me a coffee!

“Desire is the root of all suffering,” proclaimed the Buddha.

The Seven Deadly Sins of the Christian Bible warn against specific desires: pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth.

The Hindu Bhagavad Gita tells us, “But a self-controlled man, moving among objects (of enjoyment), with his senses under restraint, and free from both attraction and repulsion (from sense objects), attains peace.” (Gita 2.64)

Judaism, a tradition that emphasizes right action, teaches in its Decalogue about right desire: turn away from lust, greed, coveting what others own.

Even modern day “minimalists” can be seen as (often) secular individuals still seeking to move through life without worldly attachment to possessions.

What our world religious traditions, and even modern secular movements like minimalism showcase is a longstanding desire (pun intended) to forsake materialism and the trappings of certain worldly desires.

As conversations around the attention economy remain high, I’ve begun to ask: why is our attention pulled in the first place? What lays behind the Attention Economy?

That is what I want to explore here, because at its base there is one very particular facet that dominates: desire.

Subscribe now

The Attention Economy at a Glance

We know that companies want our attention for a few reasons, but the main ones that come to mind are these: advertising and marketing, data collection, and swaying opinions on matters (which conflict or culture war need I mention?).

Data collection serves companies that seek to mine and profit off of our information, but that is not so much related to our own desires. It is more the hidden ‘tax’ we pay while our attention is focused on other things. We exchange our data for what we think we are getting out of the digital world: community, memes, education, entertainment, perhaps a following, maybe even fame and fortune.

But the focus of this article is on why we are willing to engage with the attention economy.

The Desire Economy

Studying world religions is an underestimated way to deepen our understanding of why people not only believe what they do, but why they behave in certain ways. The more traditions you study, as well as the living cultures that keep and transform those traditions, the more you understand about human nature.

My master’s degree in the Philosophy of Religion could easily have been a master’s in the study of human nature.

While there is an incredibly diverse array of beliefs and practices unique to each religious worldview, there are also endless commonalities. These commonalities underline our universal human experiences: how do we deal with change and grief? How do we navigate lifetime events like marriage and death? But also: how do we deal with desire?

My opening paragraph sought to highlight that religious traditions across the world have navigated this question for millennia. While their answers may differ, they all point to the reality that all of us wrestle with desire.

The Attention Economy Profits from Basic Human Desires.

On the simplest level, we desire to be entertained or distracted. On a deeper level we desire things like community and connection, status and clout, and sometimes fame and fortune.

Social media advertises for these desires.

We see other people’s aesthetics that we like and we covet them. Then advertisers swoop in to offer “affordable” ways to get the look. We can click a link on social media to buy clothing, experiences, and home objects to curate our worldly desires.

The more influencers we follow, the more likely we are to desire what they have or what they do. Marketers know that Millennials and the younger generations are moving away from material object purchases in favour of experiences that are displayable online. This has led to a market for businesses to profit off of vacations, dining experiences, art installations, and outlandish ideas like goat yoga to draw in consumers.

In a way, businesses and marketers are now choosing our desires for us.

Productivity Bros profit off of our desire to have it all: money, time, and a perfect life balance under a capitalist system where none of us can really win (unless we are very rich). Celebrities with their own merchandise, such as the Kardashians, profit off of our desire to look like them, be like them, and do the things that they do.

This is why Kylie Jenner’s lip kits sold out within minutes when they launched, and why butt implants skyrocketed after the family embedded themselves in popular culture. It is also the reason a ton of people still watch their show and admire them; deep down there is a desire, perhaps a hope, that we too, can be like them.

Desire is also the reason why FOMO has become popularized. We desire to be where the fun is. We want to be part of the experience everyone else seems to be having. Desire is why we continue swiping on dating apps, hoping for a hookup or the love of our life. Desire is why we have a new capsule wardrobe for every season and spend half of our trip uploading instagram stories and sharing Facebook photos. We desire envy from others, if not praise for our looks and life choices.

The Attention Economy is the Desire Economy.

Battling the Desire Economy

Though I spent several years as part of a Buddhist community, meditating, attending dharma talks, and reading books on the eightfold path, there was one concept that never fully resonated with me. It is also a core tenet of Buddhism: that we must renounce all worldly desire in order to attain nirvana.

I agree that worldly desires can and do cause suffering, but I struggled to feel like the answer in life was to fully detach from this beautiful world. There is much suffering, but there is also joy. There is also community, nature, the warmth of a sunrise, and the serene calm of watching birds play in a puddle.

Most other religious traditions are also focused on a life after death. Live well in this life so you can go to Heaven, achieve nirvana, or become reincarnated into a better life. With these beliefs we do good in this life in order to live better in the next.

Under secular capitalism we lather ourselves in individuality, possessions, and status. We live the best we can in this life for the sake of what we are told we are supposed to live like. Get a job, buy a house, fill it with things, go on vacations, spend $20,000 on a lavish wedding, instagram your success.

The planet is burning anyway, you might as well live it up until you die!

But what if the answer, especially in an age of climate collapse and late stage capitalism, was somewhere in between of both of these mentalities.

What if now, more than ever before, our focus was against worldly possessions in order to become more fully immersed in the experience of being human in this world?

What if we turned away from the Desire Economy and the potential it offers to favour a different type of desire—a desire to save ourselves from climate change, to come back to caring communities, to live more simply so we can treasure what we have rather than what we want.

What if those desires became stronger than our desire for individual fame and fortune?

It is utopian, but if we have desired worldly things to the point that fossil fuels are collapsing our jet stream, we can desire different things into existence. In fact, we must.

Questions to Ask Ourselves

I have realized that battling the attention/desire economy successfully includes an introspective examination about why I am giving away my attention. You may have heard the popular quote, “if you are not paying for the product, then you are the product.”

If my attention is the product, then what, or who, is my attention serving?

I have started asking myself a particular set of questions when it comes to my attention, which are finally helping me step back from old habits and digital distractions.

When it comes to navigating social media, anytime I log onto an app I ask myself:

why have I come on here now?

Is it a desire for distraction?

Is it a desire to look at cool stuff (coveting)?

Is it a desire to see what others are posting about?

Sometimes I only log on to message a friend directly, but I always land back on a homepage full of ads and content that never stops flowing. Those ads are targeted towards my desires, and so are suggested page follows.

I installed a “newsfeed blocker” for Facebook, so when I log on my homepage only shows a daily quote. There is nothing to scroll. So if I want to buy or sell a piece of furniture on Marketplace, or message a friend, there is no desire to pull me in beyond my actual needs.

When it comes to shopping, I buy second-hand as much as possible, and even then I ask myself:

Why do I desire this particular item?

Is it necessary, or is fitting a trend or aesthetic?

Is it something that will “spark joy” like Marie Condo says, or am I just brainwashed into thinking it sparks joy?

Should I even be in this store, or could I be reading a book, watching birds, or calling a friend right now?

There is wonderful and useful wisdom in the millennia-old spiritual traditions that warn against worldly desires. But for us ordinary folk just trying to live a fulfilling life, perhaps we don’t need to shun everything in favour of nothing, Heaven, or a future life.

Maybe we can take that wisdom and ask how our desires are impacting our wellbeing, our community, and our planet. We can use that knowledge to remove ourselves from the trappings of the Attention Economy.

For me, a fulfilling life is found in intentionality. Always questioning why I want what I want, why I do the things I do, and who I want to become as I move through life. My questions are rooted in the here and now, whether this life is all I have or one step in a long path of existence, my desires have an impact on the world around me. So do yours.

Desire wisely.

Art is both deeply intuitive and deeply logistical. I realized this at a young age, when I was first consciously attempting to draw a bowl of fruit in front of me. As I honed my skills over the years, I discovered just how much of my left and right brain I actually needed to use.

Art is logic

The logic behind art is that its physical creation is really just a matter of geometry and colour theory. Positioning lines and shapes in the exact placement needed to correctly display a rendering of what we see. Making a pencil drawing of an apple look 3-dimensional is really just about the placement of pencil strokes. Thicker, deeper strokes where there are more shadows. Gentle strokes near the light.

Artists make it look like poetry, but art is also geometry and science.

Even if we’re inventing a mythical creature, there is something within us that looks at a beast and thinks “those legs seem out of proportion.” As if there is a logic even to the make-belief visual world.

Many great art teachers will tell you, “draw what you see, not what you know.” This is the logic of art, the part that looks at rationality and metrics, that sees colours as coded combinations that, when mixed, create a nearly algebraic solution of something new.

We know that an apple is red, but when you see it on your table there is also shades of yellow, brown, white, and whatever else is reflecting the light of the room. But the technical is nothing without the intuitive. And it is the artist that draws the intuition and consciousness that turns an image into a deeply-felt masterpiece.

Art is intuition

The intuition behind art is what my Welsh ancestors would call awen. I have written about this concept before, but the word roughly translates to “divinely flowing inspiration” and denotes the idea that inspiration is a living essence that can be drawn upon for art, poetry, music and more.

Awen has fuelled the creatives of the Celtic nations for millennia (the Gaelic languages call the same concept imbas). Today it pours out of my fingertips as I latch onto a pen, scrawling over the paper in an image that has yet to even take shape in my mind. The above piece is deeply intuitive. The logic of lines, colours and shapes is present as a physical foundation, but as with all physical things in this world, I believe consciousness embeds itself in there too.

Why do artists feel drawn (pun intended) to painting certain images? Why do some people excel at life drawing, while others mesmerize us with their abstract pieces that somehow make us emotional? Why does a walk in the woods inspire my friend to create a folk song on her guitar, while awen compels me to capture a drawing of a chickadee? Our intuitive connection to inspiration can be found in word, visuals, sound, or even culinary exploration (taste).

Art is a living entity

As an ADHD individual, I have the capacity to hyperfocus on my art to the incredible exclusion of all other stimuli. My intense connection with the pencil traces back to the very first times I was able to master my grip. My mother would speak to me and I would hear nothing, it was as if awen had possessed me mind, body and spirit, compelling me to draw.

When I become captivated by the idea of something—an animal, a plant, a mythical creature that I just developed in my mind’s eye, it really feels like I am a conduit. Art is not just a hobby that I do, it is an embodied practice that connects me with the natural world and my deeper self.

Lost in the brush strokes my conscious mind fixates on those logical lines and shapes. My worries often take a backseat and sometimes I come up for air hours later with my subconscious having solved a worry or question I had. But I have not been alone all this time, I have been communing with my art.

Once I understood how to draw what I see, I could draw what was yet to be seen. My understanding of the intuition and logic of art means that I have a perfect image of every character, scene, costume, beast, and object in the fantasy novel I have written. If I one day publish this novel, I would love to do so along with a compendium of artwork that I have also created in the process.

As a visual thinker and a writer, my books (and even some articles) often begin as mood boards or sketches and scattered brainstorming clouds. Writing, too, is art. For every word I type I also see it in my mind, and when there is a fictional story, those characters spring to life behind my eyes.

I find myself even frustrated at times when I am trying to draw something as I see it in my mind, but my technical skill is not matching. There is a fantasy world as profound as Avatar or Lord of the Rings just sitting between my eyeballs and yet I am the only audience for this masterpiece!

When my hands cannot convey the beauty it feels like a betrayal. Awen has given me so much, but sometimes it also demands that I give back. The only way to improve as an artist is practice. The more connected to art I become, the more it channels more clearly through me.

Find your muse and run away together

Every artist has their muse. Mine is nature; all of her. My connection to nature through art has also served as the gateway to my intellectual curiosity about the natural world. She drew me in and encouraged me to question why some flowers have four petals and others have five. She encouraged me to fight against climate change in order to protect her beauty and life-giving powers.

Creating art is an act of engaging with our world, helping us explore it, and even make sense of it. My artistic journey has been nothing short of spiritual. I think the world makes more sense when we blend science and art to more fully understand our lived realities. I also think that the lines between the two can be blurred.

Art is a teacher, a communicator, a friend, a wise sage, a conduit. Artistic capacity exists within all of us, no matter our skill level. With art, there is only relationship, anyone can be an artist, they need only get to know art.

If would like to support me, you can buy me a coffee! Find me on instagram here.

My last name tells a story. Crouch is an English surname that comes from the Anglo-Saxon root of Cruche, which means ‘at the cross’. This would assume that my ancestors worked at a crossing point for markets and trade, perhaps as innkeepers. I have one distinct Crouch relative who became a famous courtesan in Paris, rebranded herself as Cora Pearl, and went on to live a rather scandalous life.

There are also my Scottish ancestors, from the MacDonald clan, who arrived in Boston by boat in the late 1800s and walked (yes, walked!) all the way to Cape Breton, Nova Scotia (over 2 weeks on foot according to Google Maps).

Why do I mention this in an article about community in our current day? Because I am not only Ashely Crouch, a random Canadian writing on the internet. I am the summation of my past; genetically, ethnically, culturally, and in the lore of the people that lived so that I may live today.

This is part of what I have come to term Deep Community.

Subscribe now

The Deep Movements: Ecology and Time

The environmental philosophy of deep ecology was very popular when I was studying religion in graduate school. Popular in certain spiritual communities (such as Sufism and progressive Christian circles), the movement was all about reorienting our view of humanity and the natural world to one that considers ancient history and the far future.

Deep ecology wants us to move beyond a superficial understanding and navigation with our planet. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, deep ecology is defined as an:

“environmental philosophy and social movement based in the belief that humans must radically change their relationship to nature from one that values nature solely for its usefulness to human beings to one that recognizes that nature has an inherent value.”

In deep ecology, we de-center ourselves in order to re-center the world around us. There is no transactionality in this movement, our planet is no longer a resource but a relationship. We acknowledge that this planet was here before we came along and it will remain here when we die.

Deep time operates on a similar mindset. Used first by geologists, it asks us to explore time in eons and reorient our understanding of our planet and our own tiny lives in the greater expanse of a multi-billion year old universe. This too has taken on spiritual dimensions; as mystics seek understanding and wisdom in our relationship with time.

Deep time resonates amongst indigenous voices like Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall-Kimmerer and the Australian aboriginee concept of Dreamtime.

In a piece for The Conversation, Ann McGrath states,

“Deep time asks us to rethink our narrow conceptions of time by looking back far into Earth’s history, and looking forward far into the future.”

She continues with an example:

“In the late 1960s, erosive winds took away sand deposited over tens of thousands of years, revealing the grave site of Lady Mungo in southwestern NSW. Here, her remains were ritually burnt 40,000 years ago. For Aboriginal people, these events constitute their ancestors revealing themselves; people of the past speaking directly to those in the present. It is almost as if the ancestors are living today — in what anthropologist WEH Stanner translated as an “everywhen”.”

As I write more about community and the loneliness epidemic I have started to think that perhaps community needs its own addition to create a trifecta: deep time for our spatial awareness, deep ecology for our physical awareness, and deep community for our social awareness.

Beyond the vapid fluff of memes, the attention economy, and frazzled daily lives, there is a longing. It’s echoed in Medium posts, tweets, and between coworkers on a short lunch. We lack depth in our lives. And we don’t know how to reach into the barren soil of our social lands and begin to fertilize new roots of belonging.

What these “deep” concepts share is a mentality that pushes us beyond ourselves, taking into account our surroundings (space) and our place in history (temporality). They ask us to respect the planet, to respect time.

They force us to be rooted.

Deep Community

We always talk about family trees but we also have a friendship tree. We have our friends, and then the friends of friends, and then the people we don’t know at all (other trees).

I think of the loneliness epidemic as trees that are all leaves and no roots. The relationships in our lives, whether to ourselves, our families, friends and broader community, are like leaves searching for nourishment.

I have many white Canadian friends who have no idea about their ethnic background; their parents never spoke much about it, as if it mattered little. This is a very different circumstance from some black friends who do not know their ancestral roots due to the slave trade.

I also know a lot of people who say they have no close friends. Others who, by necessity of their sanity or other misfortune, have very little to no close family. Many people have friends but complain they have no proper community. Our social roots are dangling in a breeze searching for soil.

What our current social and economic culture has created is a society of shallow community.

As I spoke about in my article on how disposable objects have led to disposable people, dating culture has also become increasingly transactional and shallow. We ghost because we do not have deep connections, or are unwilling to nourish them. Some friendships are considered expendable too.

Many people are struggling to find the time to nourish friendships and community alongside work and other commitments. Many people do not know where to look for friends, as social anxiety levels skyrocket amongst youth. Others have felt like outcasts most of their lives, having given up on efforts to attain deep, genuine friendships. What do we do?

What does deep community look like, then?

It begins with asking where we come from and how the stories of our ancestors have shaped who we are today. It is a privilege that not everybody has, to be able to look back over multiple generations towards individuals that share your genes.

But even in a current setting we can ask, how have our parents, families, and childhood community shaped who we are?

This can be useful for self-examination, for rooting ourselves to our past, for better and for worse. Taking the good with the bad and acknowledging all of it. The familiarity when I run into another Nova Scotian living in Montreal feels like a homecoming. While I carry ancestral shame about what my European ancestors have done to other cultures, I also carry the warmth of the Celtic people, the food culture of the English and French, and the music that speaks to my soul.

In the long story of my ancestors, how will I become an ancestor that future generations will be proud of? How can I root myself in the story of my heritage, while asking how I can be a positive impact on the society that I live in today?

Then we look at our present:

Who are we to our community?

Who are we to our family, friends and coworkers?

Where do our deepest connections form?

What connections are nourishing us, and which are merely filling space and time in our hectic days?

How can we deepen the bonds we already have?

Where do we find community, if we do not already feel like we have one?

Perhaps we need new hobbies, a spiritual community, or non-profit community involvement.

Deep community formed for me when I was involved in an LGBTQ-affirming church. We cooked for the homeless and raised funds to support a Syrian refuge family. We grew through bonding over difficulties and rejoicing in successes.

It also sprung up volunteering at a food bank that served people in my own community facing food insecurity. I know many people in my neighbourhood now, both volunteers and clients of those services. Seeing familiar faces when I walk around, knowing names and saying hello, brings warmth and rootedness. My neighbours are the root system of our geographic area.

Forming deep community for me means calling people instead of texting. It means making soup when friends are sick and letting them do that for me, too. It means recognizing interdependence over unrealistic independence, or unhealthy codependence.

We need each other, much as modern society tells us the contrary.

Deep community also begs us to ask how our social lives today will affect future communities. In many indigenous communities have the Seven Generations Rule: every decision we make should be considered for how it will affect the people living seven generations into the future.

Are we making decisions that will make the world a better place? Deep community looks at healthcare, education, and resources as communal rights and necessities. It acknowledges that the loss of third spaces and the isolation we feel is unhealthy and damaging, contributing to mental illness, financial insecurity, and even environmental degradation.

When we are rooted in our social sphere, our natural world, and in our historical context, we cannot help but feel it transform our existence. Our social, spatial and temporal lives need the soil, we are nourished by the minerals of our mutual belonging. If we forget this or if we discard this, we will only continue to nourish the rot of isolation.

How can we develop deeper communities today for a better tomorrow? I would love to hear your thoughts.

If would like to support me, you can buy me a coffee!

Trumpet lichen sprouted up from snow-covered logs in the boreal forest. Sunshine glimmered between the cedar trees as northern cardinals sang to one another. I stomped through knee-deep snow in my snow pants and thick winter boots, lugging the heavy bucket of clear sap towards the ATV parked along a little clear-cut path. Absolute paradise.

Growing up in an eastern Canadian city, I had the joy of buying fresh maple syrup from local farmers. Every winter, our elementary school would do a day excursion that involved a variety of wintery Canadian activities. Among the experiences, we would watch as a maple syrup farm employee poured fresh, hot syrup over a long tray of shredded ice. They would take a tiny wooden stick and roll the cooling syrup into a thick ball of taffy for us to enjoy; what they call in French “tire d’erable.”

Years later as an adult, I moved to the province (or nation within a nation) of Quebec, and found myself in a relationship with someone whose parents owned a small artisanal maple syrup farm. We met at a local donut shop’s anniversary party, in what was an extremely Canadian meet-cute. So, when I was invited to come and harvest the syrup with his family that first winter I immediately grabbed all of my plaid layers and hopped in the car.

When people think of Canada there are a few things that frequently come to mind for people. Among them are probably hockey, Celine Dion, cold winters, Justin Bieber, people saying “aboot” instead of about, and of course, our sweet golden tree syrup. What most people do not realize is just how much work goes into the production of this savoured liquid.

Modern, industrial-scale maple farms use hollow plastic lines to connect each maple tree’s sap and drain it into centralized barrels. From those large vats, the maple water is then dumped into massive heated trays that slowly warm the water until it develops that thick consistency and rich brown colour. In large farms, very little is manhandled. The production has been mechanized, making lighter work for harvesters while maintaining a good quality.

That is not what this artisanal farm was. In the 200 acres of forest on their humble hobby farm, maple syrup was still harvested the same way it was a century ago. Well, maybe they didn’t have an ATV vehicle to drag a wagon full of sap, but aside from that it’s very similar.

Subscribe now

We tap the tree with a little metal nozzle that drips the sap into a metal bucket. Each bucket can weigh 10–20 pounds when full, and those we dump into larger barrels that weigh up to 50 pounds. Then we use a wagon attached to the ATV to haul the hundreds of pounds of sap over to the sugar shack (or the more adorable French term, “cabane a sucre”).

After perhaps an hour or two of going back and forth, walking between swathes of birches, cedars, ashes and oaks to the clusters of maples, we make our way back to the sugar shack for the rest of the day. At this point, we have removed most of our layers because we get quite warm lugging the swishing containers through knee-deep snow to the cleared path. The air is full with the scent of evergreen trees and the sounds of chickadees fighting over the seeds we left on a tree trunk for them.

We go inside the little shack and gather around the boiler tray. A long hose draws the sap from the vat outside into the tray as we grab some logs, placing them into a little iron oven at its base. The heat quickly transfers to the tray and the sugar shack begins to smell (and look) like a sauna, the scent of wood and maple wafting up with steam that fills the room.

Now comes the patience. We bring books and snacks. Once the boiler is hot it can still take several hours for the first litres of sap to become syrup. It will take several litres of maple sap to produce just one litre of condensed syrup. On the iron stove above the oven, we make a grilled cheese and talk about the news, though the troubles of the world feel far away from our rural hideout. Conversation dies down and we turn to our books (there’s no wifi when the cabin is deep in the woods, and sometimes no cell service) or we go outside to examine nature.

I exit the shack and search for my favourite winter lichens that grow upon trees and decomposing logs. I find beautiful remnants of last fall’s mushrooms; some turkey tail, puffballs, chicken of the woods, and polypores of various beige shades. The smell of maple begins to fill the forest air and after an hour roaming the area I head back inside to see how production looks.

The sap runs through a winding passageway of trays, shaped like a rigid metal snake. Around each bend the sap becomes thicker and darker. Boiling the whole vat will take up to 12 hours, and my partner’s dad is prepared for an all-nighter, even bringing a small mattress to take naps on. For now, we sit on benches, eagerly awaiting the first syrup so we can make pancakes.

The sun sets and there is nothing but stars and a bright full moon. There is not much to fear in these eastern boreal woods, just the odd coyote and some raccoons that leave you alone. There are no grizzlies hanging out east of Alberta, though I laugh when I remember an episode of American TV series Riverdale when a character hides out in the Quebec wilderness and somehow gets attacked by a grizzly bear. I guess the show consultants never checked to see that we only get the shy little black bears up here.

The bird chirping dies down and it is now the leaves of the trees rustling that make the night songs. My thoughts are always calm and clear in the forest, far from the clutter of technology, to-do lists and news. I hear cheers and run inside to see the first bit of syrup being poured into the bucket. For sap to become syrup it needs to heat within a strict two degree temperature range. Anymore and it burns, any less and it’s too liquid. We pour the first of the pancake batter onto the stovetop frying pan and blast some Led Zeppelin.

Harvesting maple syrup occurs during a very short period anywhere from mid-February to mid-March. We need the temperature to be above 0 degrees Celsius during the day and below 0 at night. These are the perfect conditions, as the warmth of the day causes the sap to rise up into the tree trunk and give a bigger offering to our buckets.

Climate change has greatly affected the maple syrup industry. We can still produce if some days stay below 0 during harvest time, or if some evenings hover above 0, but it’s not ideal. Maple trees have their preferences and their needs, that sweet spot is what they have evolved to thrive in. When it is warmer sooner, or when the temperature wildly fluctuates, it confuses the gentle giants and they produce less. They are also less healthy.

Us maple syrup enthusiasts and harvesters worry about the future of production, considering that winters are less cold than they used to be and spring comes faster now. The Quebec Maple Syrup Federation prepares for shortages by keeping a massive reserve of the liquid gold in warehouses. All professional maple syrup vendors must be members of the association, paying dues and providing certain reserves to the warehouses.

This federation became the subject of one of the most infamous Canadian heists of all-time: the Great Canadian Maple Syrup Heist. From those warehouses, insiders conspired to steal thousands of barrels over a few years to sell it on the black market and make millions of dollars. Eventually they were discovered, convicted and sentenced to jail time.

The story was such a fascinating piece of Canadian lore that actress Jamie-Lee Curtis produced a television series inspired by the heist. In a hilarious turn of events for me, the winter after my breakup I went from harvesting maple syrup a the family farm to being an assistant director on that tv series about maple syrup called The Sticky (now available on Amazon Prime).

I wrote about that experience here, if you’re interested!

Maple syrup is truly something special. It has been used by indigenous peoples since long before the Europeans arrived. Indigenous nations like those in the Iroquois Confederacy, the Cree and the Mi’kmaq, worked with these trees as medicine. Maple sap has numerous health benefits, including providing immune support during cold winters, hydration, and reducing inflammation. It also contains helpful minerals like manganese.

We think of maple syrup today as a sugary confection and topping for pancakes and waffles, but its history and benefits run much deeper. It brings to mind a book I recently read by Robin Wall-Kimmerer called The Serviceberry. In this incredible book she explores the gift economy and the gifts that nature freely provides, calling into question the way we have commodified these life-giving things all around us.

Maple sap and syrup is a gift. The trees give freely of this gift each winter, providing us humans with nourishment in a way that does not harm the tree’s own growth and health. The gift now provides income for both small and large scale farmers, though some enthusiasts with maple trees on their property go through the effort of making their own.

Maple syrup was my gateway into an appreciation for the gifts of nature, leading me to study herbalism and develop an enthusiasm for gardening and agriculture. My life transformed over those few years harvesting sap and deepened my relationship with land, as well as the interconnectedness of all things.

The maple tree is so symbolic to Canadian life that it sits in the centre of our national flag. Like the Lebanese Cedar that sits on the Lebanese flag, our tree has clearly made it mark on the millions of people who have inhabited these lands. We do not have olive groves, we have maple groves. And through spending time with this tree and understanding her importance in the ecosystem, in our nourishment, and in our culture, I have come to revere her.

So the next time you find yourself consuming some maple syrup, you can admire the history, the labour and the love exported from our northeastern forests to your plate anywhere in the world.

If you would like to support my writing you can become a paid subscriber or you can buy me a coffee!

I swiped my card to enter the mall, the 50 cent toll to enter the fancy new complex deducting from my credit card. It was cheaper than taking my car, since I would have passed three privatized roads with their tolls. There was also the fact that I did not want to renew my tech subscription for the electric car I purchased last year, meaning I couldn’t use the navigation system anymore.

I just needed a new frying pan. Entering Canadian Tire, I looked at the options. There was a subscription plan for most frying pans now. Or I could pay an extra fee to buy the more durable one. My phone dinged, air tax payment due tomorrow. Oh yeah, we had to pay a monthly fee for the clean air filtration system our city bought from Blackrock.

Before leaving the mall I decided to get a drink of water from the nearby fountain. I looked down at the metal frame and the plaque above it, “Property of Blackrock Aquaworks Co.,” it read. I swiped my credit card again on the pay machine next to it; one dollar for fountain water. I let the tap run as I gulped as much as possible from the spout before heading to the bus stop.

Since the 2029 election, our government had largely sold out to the highest bidder. As public infrastructure crumbled, skilled workers left for better pay in other countries, and austerity measures continued to cut funding for everything from education to healthcare, the government’s solution was to privatize everything they could.

In came the willing and ready corporations. We used to only pay subscriptions for fun stuff like television and our favourite media platforms, and for useful things like digital security. Now we paid to breathe.

We didn’t push back enough. And now here we were.

Subscribe now

The Commodification of Society

We take for granted that anything we do or consume can be commodified.

We have already seen the commodification of water by large companies like Nestle, who have been privatizing and selling vital water back to local populations in the global south for decades.

In Canada, there has been an ongoing debate about whether, and how much, of our public healthcare system should be privatized. Indeed, we are struggling. Several times a year now, we see the news that yet another person has died spending DAYS waiting for care in a hospital’s emergency room.

The proposed solutions often depend on political affiliation: business-oriented conservatives say privatize; socialist-minded folks say reallocation of government funds and fixing the broken system is needed.

When I want to walk in any park in the city of Montreal it is free, but as soon as I want to head to a provincial park for a hike, there is a fee of at least $10. If I cross the border to New York State, the hikes are once again free. And thus far, so is crossing the border. Not all fees are bad though; our park fees go to maintaining those natural spaces and preserving nature.

Do not take for granted anything free in your daily life; if there is a way to privatize it and charge for it, there is a company that wants to do so.

I watched a fascinating and dystopian YouTube video this morning called, “subscriptions are ruining our lives. Here’s why they’re everywhere now.” I found myself wide-eyed as the host of the More Perfect Union YouTube channel interviewed an American woman about how she couldn’t use her HP printer if she cancelled the ink subscription plan it came with. Without a subscription for HP ink to be replaced automatically whenever the cartridge was low, she couldn’t print anything.

Then the host showed us how Tesla and other new vehicles charge additional monthly subscription fees to access features on the car that people had already bought. One would think that the navigation system and “find my car” features would be included in the steep cost of buying a Tesla, but that would be naive.

HP has since phased out their subscription printers, after facing immense backlash from buyers. Some other hidden fees and subscriptions are also facing backlash, but unless consumers continue to be vocal about absurd subscriptions and privatization, it will continue as it is.

If anything, the recent US election should serve as a warning call for consumers who are concerned about privatization. The Republican Party is cozy with big business, and Trump, as a lifelong businessman-turned-politician, thinks of a nation itself as a business.

We cannot consider ourselves immune to the mass privatization of things even if we live in Canada or another part of the world. Anywhere that business can operate in a profit-driven framework is vulnerable to this future dystopia I described above.

All Subscriptions are not Created Equal

Subscription services are not necessarily bad, and in some cases they make sense. Subscription services for newspapers have been around for centuries and are a way for important fact-checking publications to continue providing information to citizens while covering costs and being able to grow.

Subscription models like Netflix are not necessarily bad either, they just require a reorientation of how writers, directors, actors and other film crew works should be paid (the main reason for the WGA/SAG-AFTRA strikes last year). That process remains ongoing, even after strikes have ended.

What is bad is when companies that provide a product we used to own with a one-time purchase suddenly decide that we should be charged to continue using it. The CEO of HP Printers blatantly said in a televised interview that people who buy printers but don’t continue to buy their ink are “lost customers and lost profits.”

If this is a problem it is not the consumer’s fault, but the fault of the economic system itself.

Privatizing Human Rights

What is also bad is when life-giving necessities are privatized to the point that the ordinary citizen can no longer afford their basic needs.

This is what has been happening with Nestle and other companies as they take away the right to free water of locals. It’s what happens when Monsanto shuts down thousands of small family farms with their city-sized law firms, forcing people to sell their land and buy Monsanto products.

It is what happens when universal prescription plans offered in Canada refuse to cover certain medications, leading people to go into debt in order to stay alive.

My fear is that the dystopia I described above has genuine merit. It may seem outlandish to imagine a mall entrance fee, or citizens of an entire city paying a monthly fee for air purifier systems owned by Blackrock (who you really need to research, if you have not yet), but it is entirely feasible.

The sooner we stop taking our rights, our physical spaces, and our one-time-purchase products for granted, the sooner we can stand up to these very real, very prescient corporate intentions.

What Can We Do?

Being vocal is the most important thing. Use social media, newspapers, digital platforms, and community organizing to continue pushing back against companies that want to take advantage of us for profit.

We are the only thing stopping large corporations from hidden fees, subscription packages, and unnecessary taxes. We must be the voice of reason that counters these greed-oriented desires.

There are also lobbying groups and class action lawsuits that aim to protect consumers in Canada, the US, and other countries. If you find yourself wondering about surprise fees showing up on your credit card, emails from companies informing you about changes or the addition of new unnecessary fees, make noise.

Let politicians in your area, or even nationally, know that this is not acceptable.

Another, tedious yet important, thing is to do your research before making a purchase. HP Printers had the subscription services information listed in a very difficult to read way. This was intentional. Looking at online reviews, reddit threads, and even social media can help you discover if a purchase you want to make will come with financial strings attached.

We are already living in a rental market crisis in most cities across North America. Many of us are already finding ourselves struggling to pay basic bills, much less save for a home or retirement. The last thing we can afford is an even more privatized society.

If you want to learn more about how big companies plan to privatize and “subscribe-ify” everything from goods and services to the literal roads we drive on and the air we breathe, you can explore these links:

YouTube deep dive about Blackrock and housing.

How Blackrock is buying more and more of the world.

Pushing back against difficult-to-cancel subscriptions.

The ultra-rich buying and privatizing land in Montana.

The privatization of the prison industrial complex.

What else would you add? What shocking new things are you being charged for lately? What else can we do about it? Let me know in the comments!

If would like to support me, you can buy me a coffee!