In Hindsight, 2021

If I were to give a quick review of 2021, it would be "generally filled with issues for the world at large, but it went pretty well for me personally." And it really did. I bought a house, which has appreciated an additional 50% of its original value since then due to a housing market I can only describe as "AAAAAAAAAAAAUGH". There's also been a shift of situations that has allowed me to be more closely involved with my boy's schooling and generally to spend more time with them, which is simply amazing. And I'm expecting child number 3 now, confirmed healthy which is a lovely note to end the year on. And that's aside from the steady work I enjoy, smaller, non-house-level purchases we were able to make (several vehicles and a 3D printer among them), and the fun stuff I was able to create myself and with friends. 2021, personally, went pretty well.

I'm still not really happy with it, though, because through a thought exercise I like to call "thinking of literally anyone who is not myself" I've come to recognize a few key areas where we, as a species, could use some work. I'll detail those things in a list below. There's three.

For you frequenters out there.

1) How We Treat The Earth

At least one person probably closed the tab already. They saw that and thought "not this hippie bullshit!" and left. It's worth noting that I'm probably related to that person. But if you're still here, we might be able to have a conversation! I'll get out in front with this; 4-wheelers are cool. So are snowmobiles and jet skis. Are they eventually going to get phased out in favor of some electric version of the toy? Yeah. But that's hardly anyone's top priority. That's just the direction everything is going to move as the technology improves, and let me tell y'all, if you think your machine can hill-climb now, just you wait till we get some all-electric torque behind the track.

Talking about how we treat the planet we live on is a much larger conversation than that. It's about deforestation, sure, and the amount of trash that ends up in landfills and the ocean too. It's about how much we recycle, yeah, and how frequently we water our lawns. But more than all of that, it's about how much carbon we dump into the atmosphere.

Stay with me, remember we agreed that your outdoor toys are fine. So's your truck and your cows. Just hang on a second longer Laurence.

It's okay, buddy, it's not about you

See, the fact that we've had an effect on the global climate as a species is just that; a fact. This is not in dispute any longer. It hasn't actually been in dispute since the 80's, when Exxon figured out we were having an impact, predicted how much temperatures would climb globally over the next 40 years, and then buried the study. We uncovered it recently; turns out their scientists were spot on. But it's progressed so far we really don't need to take their word for it. Let's just do a little thinking together.

Have you lived in or around the same place most of your life? I have. I've got about a 25-year useful perspective on this here place, and a lot of good memories to go with it. I remember when I was a kid that it was a foregone conclusion there would be snow before Halloween. Every year, just a few days before if not the day of, we'd get a storm come through and dump an inch or so on top of all our nice leaf piles. We'd still bundle up in our costumes and brave the cold to get our candy, of course, and come a week later the snow would melt off down in the valleys. But that was always the start of the wet winter season, and by Thanksgiving the sight of white on the ground was constant until about the beginning of March. Ski resorts would open early-to-mid-November with three feet of powder, and storms that dropped a foot of snow on the valley floor came through about once a month, interspersed with regular smaller storms.

I'm still living here. This past October we had a significant snow storm (about 6 inches on the bench) in the middle of the month that came on so quickly there was extensive damage to trees that still had their leaves on. Despite that the snow melted quickly and my kids wore shorts on Halloween, it was practically balmy. The ground was snow-free through Thanksgiving and the storm that came through in early December melted off in about two days. It's December 14th as I write this and while some of the ski resorts up above Park City, the high altitude ones, are open for business, there are quite a few who aren't projecting an opening date until the 20th while the low altitude resorts like Beaver, Powder Mountain, and Cherry Peak aren't even pretending to know when they'll be open. They can't make snow because it's not cold enough, and even some of the resorts that are open are operating on a total season snowfall of just 21 inches. Storms that dump a solid foot of snow in the valleys happen about every other year now, and they're greeted with the sort of despair that makes it seem like they weren't the norm 20 years ago.

It doesn't take a scientist to see there's some differences there. I say that because I can see it and I'm no scientist. The weather now is largely unpredictable, with the only easy-to-spot trend being that it's warmer for longer and there's less snow all winter long. The climate is changing, and it's affecting everywhere. The pacific northwest, the bastion of so-rainy-it's-depressing, burned to the ground this past summer because there wasn't any rain. New England, so named for its ties to an extremely non-tropical place, is consistently getting battered by tropical storms the way you'd normally only expect if you lived in Florida. And just to add insult to injury, Texas gets caught in a cold snap severe enough to break their (admittedly crap) power grid while Utah, home to The Greatest Snow on Earth according to all these license plates, gets half the snow we used to.

Reader, none of this is your fault. I want it to be clear that your carbon footprint, the amount of contribution you pour into the greenhouse gases surrounding our planet, is tiny. Even with your toys and your truck and your cows. Doing stuff to decrease your footprint is admirable, but it's the corporations that are to blame for this mess, and the government who went ahead and let them do it. So the best thing you can do is vote in representatives who will regulate the corporations into doing something about this.

Either that or start making plans to move to Antarctica sometime in the next 30 years. I'm guessing once all the ice has melted off that place it'll be pretty nice.

2) How We Treat Ourselves

Okay, this one is going to seem scarier to a lot of people than the last one, though I've gotta say I do not fall into that boat. I think that's because I've been blessed with a generally pretty solid neurochemical balance, meaning that the stuff that affects me most is almost always external. Like the fact that I live in a place that seems like it's gonna run out of water within the next few years due to, you know... item number 1. And I've had my bouts with depression, but again, always brought on by external factors, not by something internal.

So I'll have less useful stuff to put into this space than I'd like, but speaking as an outsider (so give me my salt, please), y'all need to simultaneously stop being so hard on yourself, and buck right the heck up.

Those are two incredibly difficult pep-talks to combine, so bear with me.

Yes, you're being very patient.

You are your own worst critic. I'm sure you've heard that before, and the reason people keep saying it is because in a lot of cases it's true. But being your own worst critic isn't necessarily a bad thing. Being self critical is how we grow in a lot of cases. Where it starts to become an issue is when you let that internal criticism convince you that everyone else is critical of you. From a simple perspective of population, they can't possibly be. The vast majority of humanity doesn't know you exist, personally, and therefore has no valid criticism to level toward you. And while maybe there are some overly critical people in your life, I promise they're in the minority. You can turn a critical eye inward and use it to find the parts of yourself you'd like to improve, but before you even think about doing that you need to go out and find the support group that's going to help you make those improvements. Anyone around you who is being critical of you doesn't get to be in that group; they haven't earned the right. Because it's your job to be your own biggest critic. The people you choose to have in your life, their job is to be your friend, and for what it's worth your responsibility toward them is to also be a friend. Until you have that support group, you're not allowed to talk badly about yourself.

Says me.

Now, on the other side of the coin... I probably don't actually have anyone in the audience who needs to see what's written here. They probably all closed the tab over the "hippie bullshit" above. But let's go ahead and spell this out, just in case someone just skipped to section 2, m'kay? Because on the other side of the coin we find the weaklings who refuse to accept any critical thinking, especially from themselves. If that's you, if you find yourself incapable of looking inward with a critical eye and finding something you could do better at, you're a self-entitled waste of chemistry and you are the problem in any lousy situation you find yourself in. You're only right about a third of the time, and even then you're incapable of convincing other people because you're incapable of making real human connection. The world isn't out to get you; again, from a purely population perspective, the world doesn't know you exist. But you've decided that because you're so right, so deserving all of the time, every problem you drop yourself into through your own self-blinded decisions must be the world out to get you. As I said, buck up buttercup; nobody cares. Step one here would be to look in a mirror and try, for once in your life, to think critically about yourself. Try to figure out what makes you tick, and don't come back until you've got more than ten words to say about why you think the way you do.

To be absolutely transparent I will once again state that these are two different groups of people. If you're in the first group, that last angry paragraph will have made you feel bad, and so therefore it doesn't apply to you. If you're in the second group, that last angry paragraph will have made you angry.

That's right. If that paragraph made you angry, it was intentional. The advice given at the end was for you. If you want to better yourself, that's where you start.

3) How We Treat Each Other 

This last point feels so basic to me that I'm not even sure how to go about communicating it, but like, I can see what's going on in the world around me and clearly some elaboration is needed here? I guess? I have a hard time wrapping my head around why "don't be a jerk" is complicated. The standard of discourse has taken a pretty steep dive over the past few years (I'm not gonna beat around the bush here, that was Trump's fault), but honestly I'm not even sure that was really a bad thing. Apparently people were being jerks before, they were just better at hiding it. Now that everyone is screaming whatever pops into their head on social media constantly without worrying about how it makes them look like a bigot, it's pretty easy to spot, well... all the jerks.

Honestly by this point I'd be amazed if any of the jerks that clicked this post managed to make it this far. My impression is that they'll have felt like I've been personally attacking them this whole time, which is weird, considering I don't know who they are. But if for no other reason than because I want to spell this out so I can feel like I've been complete here, I'd just like to say that if you have said or done something mean to someone over the course of 2021, you are a jerk. 

Okay, that's a pretty broad definition that most likely encompasses the entirety of the human race. For extra credit I'd include that even thinking about saying or doing something unkind qualifies, but let's lower the bar here, for everyone's sake. And let's just assume we're all on the same page about how physically assaulting someone for pretty much any reason makes you a jerk. Saying something derogatory, rude, or inflammatory to someone, whether it be directly to their face or via a message directed at them on the internet, makes you a jerk.

Hopefully we've sufficiently lowered the bar there. Plenty of room for most of us to improve beyond that, of course, but even just having a filter in place that allows you to deescalate conflict in your day-to-day interactions is probably good enough for now. The standard for social living in an organized civilization is that the populace must largely agree to not be jerks. If you can't agree to put that filter in place, I feel pretty comfortable in saying that you've kinda decided to be an enemy to civilization.

The standard for how we treat each other hasn't changed from when you were a kid. "Do unto others" and all that; treat people the way you want to be treated. Do you want people to leave you alone when you're doing stuff that doesn't affect them at all? Me too. Which means you gotta leave people right the heck alone when they're doing stuff that doesn't affect you at all. Do you want people to take you seriously when you approach them with a concern about something that you think affects you? Big same. Then you've got to take people seriously when they approach you about something that they think affects them.

There's no excuse here; gender, skin color, nationality, sexual orientation, political preference, absolutely none of that matters. It can't because the instant you start making excuses about being a jerk to some group of people, you are inviting them to be a jerk to you. And thus you contribute to the downfall of civilization. No, I'm not being dramatic. That is how you trigger the end times; might as well just climb aboard a red horse and call yourself War.

What Now?

The obvious question is what will 2022 look like? The obvious answer is I don't know, duh. What do I look like, an ancient calendar? But the future can sometimes be predicted by looking at the past, so why don't we take a minute to muse over what we might predict. I'm going to guess, based off the perpetual line of "hold my beer" year memes that stretch back to like 2015 at this point, that 2022 is going to be worse than 2021. People, generally speaking, will continue to be worse to each other, themselves, and the planet we all share. Every step toward improving the lives of some group of people will have to be fought for, and we're going to be fighting against people and institutions who are not afraid to lie and cheat and screw over anyone who isn't themself. Some forms of communication might get easier, but as a result we'll just discover how many more people have given in to the lies and conspiracies that have been flooded out there in an attempt to tear the world apart.

But I do have some hope, even with all that said. I'm hopeful whenever I see people who aren't terribly concerned about the pandemic quietly put a mask on because they see someone else wearing one. They aren't asked, and they're certainly not doing it for themselves. In some cases I've even heard them say they don't think masks help. But they do it because it makes other people more comfortable. I'm also hopeful whenever I hear someone apologize for saying something they didn't realize might offend someone else. They don't pretend they're going to change the way they talk among their inner circle, but they do express regret for not understanding why something was offensive, and they watch themselves a little closer afterward. And I'm hopeful that as I try to do better with all this stuff that 2022 will be an okay year for me, personally. And we're even building a little camper-bus. Maybe spending more time away from civilization will help my outlook somewhat.