Card #354 – Thriving on the Present Resources

“Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without.”
— Depression-era slogan

Resources do matter, but they have always fluctuated, and that fluctuation occurs with need as well as want resources. A good strategy is to learn how to thrive, or at least work with, the resources currently available.

That’s the two-sentence version, which may or may not be a sufficient resource. For those willing to read more, here’s the rest:

Life rarely gives you everything you want. For all we know, this squirrel may be fantasizing about walnuts and silently cursing the universe for giving it leftover Halloween pumpkins instead. But as far as I could tell, when I photographed this squirrel on a residential street in Denver, it seemed to be thriving on what it’s got. It appeared plump and healthy, with a good chance of getting through winter.

But additional resources can sometimes be just the thing. Resources do matter. The squirrel would probably be much better off in a more animal-social-service-intensive universe where, for example, a squirrel catering service dropped off a raw nut buffet several times a week. One imagines, however, that the squirrel isn’t holding its breath for the buffet. My anthropomorphic impression of this squirrel was that it was happily feasting on the currently available resource — leftover Halloween pumpkins. Of course, no discerning squirrel will mistake the raw, wet cellulose taste of pumpkin for the oily, nutty, high-Omega-3 richness of a good walnut. But whatever a pumpkin loses to a walnut in taste and nutrition, it more than makes up for in size. And when you are trying to build body fat to get through the winter, size does matter. In general, resources matter.

Resources matter/inner self-sufficiency trumps circumstance is a classic paradox where each pole of the paradox is sometimes truer than the other pole. I believe most important truths exist as a double-poled paradox — the opposite of a profound truth is another profound truth — and each pole is more valid in some circumstances and less so in others. (See my philosophy: Dynamic Paradoxicalism — the anti ism, ism.)

The Dynamic Paradoxicalist uses real-time global intuition, plus every sort of wisdom and faculty available (and, yes, that includes those disparaged and politically incorrect psychic functions — the mind and ego), and chooses where they need to be — at either of the poles of the paradox, somewhere on the spectrum between the poles, or taking the cosmic overview that unifies the duality tension. The third item, the cosmic overview, tends to get glamorized and inflated as the “answer” to the paradox. But the soul doesn’t thrive on a mono-food diet and can’t live on rarefied cosmic overviews alone. It wants the intensity of a dynamic relationship to the paradox so it can experience the poles, the spectrum, and the cosmic overview.

Don’t get me wrong, I like cosmic overviews as much as the next guy, but as a Dynamic Paradoxicalist, I also realize that transcendence includes that which is transcended. This inclusion means that even with the cosmic overview, I’m still going to spend time on either pole of the paradox. So sometimes I need to focus on self-sufficiency when a resource isn’t available and other times I need to make an all-out effort to get a needed resource.

The cosmic overview is the Taoist assumption that the universe is unfolding as it should, that resources, like everything, fluctuate, and that fluctuation is the heartbeat of life, an essential part of the dynamic aliveness and interest of incarnation. It takes times of both abundance and scarcity, along with every other sort of fluctuation, for there to be development individually and collectively. People who have lived through scarcities sometimes develop strong characters as a result. Other times, people die of scarcity or survive it only to become obsessive and neurotic about resources during abundant times. So as much as we could glamorize and inflate self-sufficiency, a pole that could be highly beneficial if you are, for example, a well-fed American tempted to acquire luxuries via credit card debt. It is not such an attractive pole, however, if you are watching your children starve, and the only self-sufficiency available is a detached acceptance of whatever comes.

From the point of view of my present economic status, where I always manage to keep myself in groceries and have a certain amount of what’s called “leisure time,” an important resource distinction is the quality of the audio/visual equipment I possess. For example, movies, which I increasingly watch at home, are a priceless resource, and one of my most important cultural experiences is still the Queen of the Arts, an art form that incorporates all other art forms. Movies operate like a mass-dream-delivery technology. When movies are done right, they can create encompassing, life-changing experiences and participation mystique with parallel realities. When it comes to the projection or video screen on which you experience the movie, size does matter — that’s why people pay to go to the movie theater. It is far better to see a powerful, visionary movie in high resolution on a big screen than on a small, poor-quality one. But if I were starving, screen size would probably diminish somewhat in importance. In other words, the resource point of view fluctuates with resources.

A cultural update: In 2024, when I’m revising this card, streaming TV series have risen above movies to be the new Queen of the Arts, and when cultural historians look back at this era, the best of the series (the Sopranos, etc.) will be seen as the cathedrals of this era. I also need to add, especially now that I have completed my sci-fi epic Parallel Journeys, which took me forty-five years to write, that great works of fiction are their own pinnacle that do things movies and series can’t. They exercise your imagination as you film the movie of what you’re reading in your mind’s eye. Parallel Journeys is written in a cinematic, immersive style with lots of visuals and first-person/present tense to amplify this effect. Novels can also take you inside characters, allowing you to hear their private thoughts. Also, relating this self-promoting tangent to the card topic, the resources of the Internet and personal computing have allowed me to publish this book in multiple forms available on Amazon and also free on this website. When I first conceived of Parallel Journeys, it was pure science fiction to imagine I could publish a book online and make it a free resource to the entire planet. Novels put the power of such creation in the hands of a single individual without great wealth, whereas movies and series require an army of people, money, and other resources few of us can command. You probably don’t have that level of resources either, but without the resources of the Internet and devices, you could not be consulting this oracle and the forty-six years and counting of work that’s gone into it. Since you probably have a smartphone, you have a simplified movie studio in your pocket and the ability to command more information than any president before George W. Bush.

Resources do matter and on all sorts of scales. The hierarchy of survival needs like air/water/food/shelter obviously matters, but there is also a meaningful hierarchy of gadgets, the power objects of technological magic, those lesser rings of power. We tend to take some of this for granted. Most of us now have access to hundreds of thousands of movies. But a hundred twenty years ago in 1887, whether you were king or robber baron, you had access to exactly zero movies. Anyone with internet access possesses a portal to a once unimaginable abundance of information, culture, and the ability to communicate with almost anyone on the planet for little or no cost.

Yeah, I know that I’m supposed to be wringing my hands about the shadowy, fractured world of internet socializing, social media, etc., and lamenting it as a cheap substitute for what internet critics call “live contact,” those unsanitary face-to-face 3D encounters that were favored in yesteryear. Not too long ago were the good ol’ days when everything was done up in wholesome country style, and there were amber waves of grain and women in gingham dresses and all that. But those were also the days when your nearest neighbor might have been a three-mile walk in the snow from your house. And although the nearest neighbor might be the Waltons family, who were just hoping you’d drop by for a spell to eat a lavish Thanksgiving dinner, it is just as likely that the next little house on the prairie might contain a guy who drinks too much moonshine and would like to beat a wife if he could get one. Since he lacks such in-house entertainment, his strongest drunken perception is that your fences encroach on his land, and amongst his limited repertoire of social skills and the communication tool of choice, the one best able to represent his linguistic and social intentionality (in a world deprived of internet social experience) is very likely a shotgun. Today, an adolescent in a rural area with a sexuality rejected by family and community can find others who share that sexuality and alienation. For all the terrible things that happen online, that happens also.

When I grew up in the Bronx, back in the day, there were the kids on my block and the opportunity, off-block, to get beaten up by children of all races and creeds and colors. Video was a one-way sort of thing. Even in New York City, there were only seven channels, and there was no interaction with what appeared on the screen except changing between those seven channels I had to view in black and white. Twas the night before Internet, when all through the house, not an input device was stirring, not even a mouse. But now I live on Planet Boulder, and besides local friends, I can have video conversations with fellow mutants who live thousands of miles away. It may take a whole village to raise a child, but it may take a whole technological-magic-enabled civilization to raise a certain type of mutant.

The presence and absence of resources have shaped me in all sorts of ways. I am largely the mutant product of a whole technological magic-enabled civilization, while my grandfather grew up in a Latvian village without electricity or indoor plumbing, and therefore, he was a different sort of mutant. When my father was born in New York City (not exactly a backwater), there were no commercial radio stations, and yet he lived long enough to surf the Internet). When I was born, Sputnik had just been launched. Walking on the moon was only twelve years away, and I never lacked food, plumbing, or television.

Younger generations have never had to endure a world without the internet but may be tormented by social media. So there are always tradeoffs, the fluctuation of resources, the fluctuations of the matrix. Sometimes, you need to focus on resource acquisition, but even while doing that, focus on thriving with available resources. So, if life gives you leftover Halloween pumpkins, then make pumpkin-flavored lemonade or write a book about how much weight you lost on a raw pumpkin diet. Properly advertised, everyone will eventually want pumpkin-chai flavored energy drinks or something like that, and with sufficient marketing skills, to paraphrase the ancient Chinese, every crisis is also a retail marketing opportunity.

They say that stress is the difference between what you want and what you’ve got, and sometimes it’s better to get what you want, and other times to want what you’ve got. Wanting what you got always works well as an aphorism, but unless you are a world-class Taoist master, there will be times when wanting what you’ve got just doesn’t cut it. I think that a useful aphorism for the leisure class, like, “It’s not about getting what you want, it’s about wanting what you got,” might not, however, be just the thing to buck up a baby dying of starvation (though that’s rarer now than any time in the past). In my present circumstance, where I have a weather-resistant home filled with groceries and gadgets, wanting what I’ve got is a lot more viable. And in any situation where continuing to live is better than dying, there is one strategy that works if you are a plant, animal, or person — a strategy that will work equally well if you are a transhumanist cyborg with a quantum neural net and titanium alloy exoskeleton, a demigod, or a walnut-deprived squirrel — figure out how to thrive on the present resources.