Go Read "One Hundred Years Of Solitude"

Just a short blog as I haven’t had a ton of time today to write…

I just reread “One Hundred Years Of Solitude” for the first time in 20 years at least. When I was a younger man, I had loved the book, but I don’t think I had any sense of its depth, the cycles of growth and decay, life and death, and the sense that time can often feel like it’s moving in a circle instead of linearly.

Reading it again now, I was surprised how much I loved it immediately. I have reread quite a few of my favorite novels from my youth recently, including “The Brothers Karamazov,” “The Sun Also Rises,” and “The Great Gatsby.” All of them were still excellent books, but somehow didn’t move me or bring me to awe the way they did when I was younger.

But this book did. Choose any one paragraph in Marquez’s book, and there is more energy, more to say about what drives us, our flaws and joys and sadnesses, in any one paragraph than I’ve read in other author’s entire books. Somehow it captures all that is profound magical about life, along with all that is banal and useless. It is the best novel I’ve ever read, and is on the short list of the best books I’ve read…

Can Psychedelics Help Prevent Suicide?

I just finished this fascinating piece about psychedelics and mental health that I wanted to share. It's worth a read yourself but I wanted to highlight this key passage: 

"Creating meaning in life is dependent upon hope, and it begins with the story we tell ourselves about ourselves. Consciousness, in part, is a continual narrative we both invent and listen to inside of our heads. And there are brain regions involved in that process, which is why Pollan sees psychedelics as a potentially potent therapy for when those interior voices go awry:

Getting overly attached to these narratives, taking them as fixed truths about ourselves rather than as stories subject to revision, contributes mightily to addiction, depression, and anxiety. Psychedelic therapy seems to weaken the grip of these narratives, perhaps by temporarily disintegrating the parts of the default mode network where they operate."

Thre is lots of truth here. Human beings are narrative creatures. We see our lives as a story. And if the story starts to go awry, depression and self-doubt are common byproducts. In my own life, psychedelics have proven life-changing with regard to my own mental health. It's hard to explain fully in words, but I could see how unimportant all our cultural standards were so much more clearly. I could see what was beautiful and what was worth living for and what was not. I personally recommend everyone try them at least once in their life. It's a bit corny, but they can change your life. 

Avoiding meat and dairy is ‘single biggest way’ to reduce your impact on Earth

I haven't had much time to write today, but I wanted to post something really quick. This article in The Guardian was insightful, I thought:

Avoiding meat and dairy products is the single biggest way to reduce your environmental impact on the planet, according to the scientists behind the most comprehensive analysis to date of the damage farming does to the planet.

The new research shows that without meat and dairy consumption, global farmland use could be reduced by more than 75% – an area equivalent to the US, China, European Union and Australia combined – and still feed the world. Loss of wild areas to agriculture is the leading cause of the current mass extinction of wildlife.

The new analysis shows that while meat and dairy provide just 18% of calories and 37% of protein, it uses the vast majority – 83% – of farmland and produces 60% of agriculture’s greenhouse gas emissions. Other recent research shows 86% of all land mammals are now livestock or humans. The scientists also found that even the very lowest impact meat and dairy products still cause much more environmental harm than the least sustainable vegetable and cereal growing.

I've written about this topic before. But I think it's important to reiterate. The truth is that we're desperately losing the battle against climate change. Even if we miraculously went down to zero emissions as a planet, the temperature is still going to rise. But it isn't hopeless yet as people like Bill McKibben and Naomi Klein have written. And the one thing that all of us can do to help prevent disastrous climate change is to stop eating meat and dairy as much as possible. 

That seems like an impossible, unreasonable thing to ask most people. But almost ever big social change has felt impossible. Does that mean we shouldn't try?