Do you find the world baffling, overwhelming, or just plain sad? Are you losing hope of the belief we can each change at least something for the better? These days I am morbidly fascinated by how paralysed so many of us feel: afflicted by the sense we have no agency to affect the political and economic systems that bludgeon us into misery.
In a bit of a personal quest to examine how the hell to to feel better about our world – and what I can do to make some impact, I started reading new books and articles. These include my step-father’s old copies of New Scientist magazine.
For a bit, I struggled with its geeky science-talk – I spectacularly failed physics in school, was condemned to the general science group for idiots & clearly still bare the scars. But nowadays is a different story – I’ve emerged quite addicted to the NS. My early morning reads now include pieces on quantum crystals, super-lasers on the moon, the glue that holds reality together (not easy but sorta thrilling), octopus sex arms – and a quite poetic exploration of the earliest writing systems.
The joy is learning a new language of ideas; the fact I don’t fully understand some of the articles, or rather their arguments, doesn’t bother me one scrap. This nerdy portal of new ways to see and hopefully understand our world is beyond worthit, even though I read quite a few NS articles at least twice. Right now one particular article stands out – because it helps me make sense of these overwhelming political maelstroms.
Jo Marchant – science writer, author and podcast host – describes our cosmos as ‘stitched together from interlocking perspectives and experiences’. She quotes QBism, an ‘interpretation of quantum mechanics’ birthed by physicist Chris Fuchs. My take away is that QBism tries to make sense of the world from the inside, where your reality ‘is a process of constantly updating your predictions of the future according to what you’ve already experienced’.
Then Jo Marchant dances onto a revolutionary philosophy of mind called enactivism, which I can best encapsulate by quoting enactivist activist Ezequiel Di Paolo. He declares it to be, ‘an ever-changing moment of creation in which we are all carving out ourselves and our worlds.’ For Ezequiel this carving extends way beyond humans to incorporate every living organism. Which will take me about a year to digest.
I love this article and its hypotheses because it defies my own festering fears of utter powerlessness, insisting each of our actions have impacts.
Is it, Jo writes, ‘so strange to say our choices and actions can shape what happens? Or that what’s true for each of us depends on the questions [that] we ask?‘ For me, this is the drum roll. Whatever questions we ask fundamentally change the answers that we receive.
I do understand if all this sounds a bit bloody ethereal. But ideas initially derided as ethereal, or wacko, have often changed the world, or more accurately our perspectives of our world. And how we view our reality, and our own place within it, is one of the most important questions we ever ask ourselves. Another is what can I do, like right now?
To be utterly open and honest for a moment, sometimes the world feels so heartbroken to me, I sit in my old green armchair at home and literally weep. And at some point I stop blubbing, dry my eyes and remember it’s my turn to volunteer at the small rescue-food project based in one of our local charity shops. Since October 2024 our team has saved 35 tonnes of food from supermarkets being chucked in the bin, and that feels really good. Even when I’m hauling bags of Tesco food to the shop in the pissing rain.
Then, last year a few of us also got together and decided to host a community supper to raise money for a Palestinian women-led organisation running mobile food kitchens and maternity services inside Gaza. It was such a success we hosted a second, a third, then a fourth supper. People stopped me in the street to donate twenty quid straight into my hand, a local artist donated all the proceeds from his exhibition. Altogether we donated around £10,000 from our community to Gaza, and that felt good too.
None of this was me alone; all of it was and is about changing what we can whenever we can.
Numerous charities, movements and initiatives, from tiny actions to international platforms, started life from someone believing things could be a bit better. The philosophy of sod this, I am making a stand right now.
If QBism kind of excites you, here’s a longer article – with a trigger warning that this is a dense read – though it also features my new superhero, Captain QBism.
Now go and do something to change your world.
photo credit: Joshua Sortino @unsplash https://unsplash.com/@sortino
