An Observation on Planning
Aug. 26th, 2020 02:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kevintaylorburgessI’d meant to talk this week about one of the major collective decisions made recently as such things go, when the movement towards sustainability which existed, and was quite successful, in the 1970s was thrown away in favour of wallowing in excess for just a little longer. Well, it seems that my muse is quite opinionated, and I have instead found inspiration for something else. The inspiration came from talking with a friend, who said that worrying about the past or future is pointless, and so it’s best to be present in the moment.
I don’t disagree: One of the worst habits people can get into is worrying about things which they cannot change, but this does not meant the future is irrelevant. What struck me about the comment is that it doesn’t make room for the fact that thinking about the future actually matters, for a simple reason: sooner or later, the present moment will end, and then the future will arrive on schedule. Since we will all go there, it makes sense then to think about the destination. It also makes sense to try to make the future as pleasant as possible. We call this planning.
Planning then is a fairly simple thing: it is looking at what you have, and at the kind of future you expect to get, and attempting to make the future better by using what you have intelligently. This is to say, planning requires you to think about the future, and then do something about it.
Watching people flaying around, I’ve come to the realization that for an awful lot of people, this is not something they’ve ever learned how to do properly; like any skill, planning is not something which you can do perfectly the first time, or even the first hundred times. Instead, it takes practice, and if you don’t have enough practice, then your plans will never work.
The utter absence of reasonable planning is evident everywhere you look these days: ranging from the people who make huge amounts of money and still go into debt since they can’t be bothered to plan their finances; to the fact that about a third of all food in North America is thrown away; to the fact that plenty of people seem to be unwilling to consider what will happen if the next presidential election in the states doesn’t turn out the way they want it to.
Needless to say, refusing to plan for the future is a bad idea, since the future will come anyway. Given how widespread this appears to be, and just how dysfunctional the outcomes of refusing to plan are, I think it’s safe to say this is one of the major sources of problems for us. Now, faced with a problem like this, the first step is to try to figure out where this strange mental block comes from, and I think I have the answer.
There are two places where planning can be interrupted: the first is if for whatever reason thinking about the future is problematic, planning for it becomes impossible. Sometimes this will manifest as the drafting of plans which have no relation to reality, but in our case it appears that plenty of people have adopted a philosophy of refusing to think about the future. John Michael Greer has discussed how one of the most toxic consequences of the ideology of progress is that people are unable and unwilling to think about a future that doesn’t feature progress, and how this is a motivating factor for people to stop thinking about it at all. This is seen in the insistence that being present is the best thing to do, and the future will come when it will.
The second way for planning to get mucked up is a little more subtle, but it’s far more insidious: planning is a skill, and if you never learned how to do it, then until you learn how to do it, it doesn’t matter how accurately your assessment of the future is, your plans will fail. It really is that simple: if you haven’t put the time and effort into learning how to plan, you do not know how to do it.
This is a problem since it used to be impossible to avoid planning. In most human societies, if you wanted to survive winter you needed to preserve food starting in the summer. You didn’t have the option to decide not to and then get more in winter: it really was that simple. Until the 1950s, if you wanted to buy something, let’s say a new radio, you needed to have the cash for it. This meant if you didn’t have the money for it, you couldn’t buy it; it might mean saving for a few months until you had the money for it, which meant planning.
There are plenty of other ways in which our luxury and comfort have meant we haven’t needed to plan nearly as much as our ancestors even just a century ago had to as a matter of course, and the result is that many of us have lost the skills needed in order to do just that. The result is a vicious cycle, as people who don’t know how to plan try to avoid it, meaning that they become less able to plan; and so the result is that a large number of people today are unable to plan ahead at all.
The people who are that to its logical extreme are by and large the most privileged members of our society. This strikes me as a very bad idea, but it would seem to explain the otherwise inexplicable way that our elites seem to run from one easily avoidable disaster to another. However, I’m quite confident that few people in North America, myself very much included here, have the skills needed to plan as well as people did just a hundred years ago.
This is a predicament, and not a problem, since it has a very simple solution: practice planning. It’s possible to learn it easily enough: pick something and start planning. I’ll therefore encourage all of my readers to find something: it doesn’t have to be large, and in fact it’s best if it’s something small to start. Perhaps it’s a budget, a meal plan, or making sure to have directions for a trip before leaving. Whatever it may be, make sure to smile: you’re starting to learn a skill which will transform your life.
I don’t disagree: One of the worst habits people can get into is worrying about things which they cannot change, but this does not meant the future is irrelevant. What struck me about the comment is that it doesn’t make room for the fact that thinking about the future actually matters, for a simple reason: sooner or later, the present moment will end, and then the future will arrive on schedule. Since we will all go there, it makes sense then to think about the destination. It also makes sense to try to make the future as pleasant as possible. We call this planning.
Planning then is a fairly simple thing: it is looking at what you have, and at the kind of future you expect to get, and attempting to make the future better by using what you have intelligently. This is to say, planning requires you to think about the future, and then do something about it.
Watching people flaying around, I’ve come to the realization that for an awful lot of people, this is not something they’ve ever learned how to do properly; like any skill, planning is not something which you can do perfectly the first time, or even the first hundred times. Instead, it takes practice, and if you don’t have enough practice, then your plans will never work.
The utter absence of reasonable planning is evident everywhere you look these days: ranging from the people who make huge amounts of money and still go into debt since they can’t be bothered to plan their finances; to the fact that about a third of all food in North America is thrown away; to the fact that plenty of people seem to be unwilling to consider what will happen if the next presidential election in the states doesn’t turn out the way they want it to.
Needless to say, refusing to plan for the future is a bad idea, since the future will come anyway. Given how widespread this appears to be, and just how dysfunctional the outcomes of refusing to plan are, I think it’s safe to say this is one of the major sources of problems for us. Now, faced with a problem like this, the first step is to try to figure out where this strange mental block comes from, and I think I have the answer.
There are two places where planning can be interrupted: the first is if for whatever reason thinking about the future is problematic, planning for it becomes impossible. Sometimes this will manifest as the drafting of plans which have no relation to reality, but in our case it appears that plenty of people have adopted a philosophy of refusing to think about the future. John Michael Greer has discussed how one of the most toxic consequences of the ideology of progress is that people are unable and unwilling to think about a future that doesn’t feature progress, and how this is a motivating factor for people to stop thinking about it at all. This is seen in the insistence that being present is the best thing to do, and the future will come when it will.
The second way for planning to get mucked up is a little more subtle, but it’s far more insidious: planning is a skill, and if you never learned how to do it, then until you learn how to do it, it doesn’t matter how accurately your assessment of the future is, your plans will fail. It really is that simple: if you haven’t put the time and effort into learning how to plan, you do not know how to do it.
This is a problem since it used to be impossible to avoid planning. In most human societies, if you wanted to survive winter you needed to preserve food starting in the summer. You didn’t have the option to decide not to and then get more in winter: it really was that simple. Until the 1950s, if you wanted to buy something, let’s say a new radio, you needed to have the cash for it. This meant if you didn’t have the money for it, you couldn’t buy it; it might mean saving for a few months until you had the money for it, which meant planning.
There are plenty of other ways in which our luxury and comfort have meant we haven’t needed to plan nearly as much as our ancestors even just a century ago had to as a matter of course, and the result is that many of us have lost the skills needed in order to do just that. The result is a vicious cycle, as people who don’t know how to plan try to avoid it, meaning that they become less able to plan; and so the result is that a large number of people today are unable to plan ahead at all.
The people who are that to its logical extreme are by and large the most privileged members of our society. This strikes me as a very bad idea, but it would seem to explain the otherwise inexplicable way that our elites seem to run from one easily avoidable disaster to another. However, I’m quite confident that few people in North America, myself very much included here, have the skills needed to plan as well as people did just a hundred years ago.
This is a predicament, and not a problem, since it has a very simple solution: practice planning. It’s possible to learn it easily enough: pick something and start planning. I’ll therefore encourage all of my readers to find something: it doesn’t have to be large, and in fact it’s best if it’s something small to start. Perhaps it’s a budget, a meal plan, or making sure to have directions for a trip before leaving. Whatever it may be, make sure to smile: you’re starting to learn a skill which will transform your life.
Lost skills
Date: 2020-08-27 09:29 am (UTC)In my 20s, I went searching for an American generation with which I shared any values at all. I ended up having to go all the way back to the WWI generation before I found any common ground (mostly due to land use beliefs: I'm not a fan of suburbs or cars). The WWI generation lived through two world wars, the raging twenties, and the great depression. That generation in my family immigrated to the US because they were starving in Europe, just in time for the dust bowl. I doubt many members of this generation were fooled by the myth of progress.
When I evaluated the actions of that generation in my family, I also found peak agency and planning. They kept a victory garden, and a cellar with pickled/canned/jarred preserves from that garden. My great grandfather slept at the door to the cellar with his rifle in case anyone tried to steal their food. Even though they were technically in a city, he trained his horse to drop my grandfather off at school and pick him up, since buying a car was unthinkable and they needed to save cash rather than take any kind of transit. Their household economy produced almost everything they needed, and I remember the hand-crank fan my grandparents had from them, because the house back then didn't have electricity. No wonder they were called the Lost Generation.
Re: Lost skills
Date: 2020-08-27 07:31 pm (UTC)As for the different generations, I’d like to see a lot of the ideals, hopes, and dreams of the Lost through early Silent Generation to come back in a big way: I think we’ll have to get used to being far more self-reliant, community oriented, and far more local. I think one of the biggest issues we have is that we’ve gotten so used to someone else doing everything for us we don’t think about what we can do, and for earlier generations that would be unthinkable. I sometimes wonder if it’s a coincidence that this mentality went away in the 1950s as the myth of progress took over, saying the future will by definition be better than today.
I think it makes sense to pursue a do it yourself ethos, and having food on hand seems like a good idea, but sleeping with a riffle by the cellar seems a little excessive. But I guess people who lived through really hard times probably would have issues, and from the stories I’ve heard the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression both count.
no subject
Date: 2020-08-28 10:02 pm (UTC)A big thing people forget about planning is how many steps are in between the end goal and what they need to do right now . I'm a Saturn exalted in my 6th, raised by 80s parents kind of person, so this is no trouble for me, it baffled me - you just...do it...like breathing... but she was able to break it down for me: Say you want to be at your class at 9 am (set aside that you were capable of choosing what class, what degree, what university you wanted to be in).
Step 1: Calculate how long it takes to get there from where you live. Factor in traffic, getting lost, delays.
Step 2: Figure out how long it takes you to get ready, what things do you need to do in the morning to even be able to leave the house? Get dressed, feed self, pack lunch, pack homework...this is actually a lot of substeps.
Step 3: Now figure out when to set your alarm the night before. Actually SET IT.
Step 4: Now figure out when you should put yourself to bed in order to get enough sleep.
Step 5: Now the bonus round for actually passing, and not having a health breakdown... figure out when you need to eat dinner, how many hours of homework you can do, and thus schedule your evening...
A lot of young adults, I was told, fell apart at Step 1 - for their entire life to that moment, mom or dad drove them, they got there on time, they were woken up on time, they were served breakfast. So, I would say, for a lot of people scrambling to keep/get work during the next Depression, the first plan to try is: Plan to pack a lunch the night before, and leave for work on time.
no subject
Date: 2020-08-29 12:56 am (UTC)I’m most emphatically not a morning person, and never have been one. Even as a baby I was apparently a night owl, and according to my dad actually nocturnal, so my steps would be slightly different: I pack everything the night before, set it by the door, so I can get up, shower, dress, and grab everything I need. The basic principle is the same though: figure out what to do in order to get ready, and then break it down. It’s not that hard, but a lot of people don’t need to do it, and so never learned how to do it.
One example of this is how someone from one of my classes at university mentioned not knowing what time she needed to get up for one of our exams: her parents were away and she wasn’t sure how long it took to get to school. She was 18 or 19 at the time, well past the point where she should’ve been able to figure that out herself. People actually sympathized with her too, which I thought really weird, but then again I'd been getting myself to school since grade 2 or 3 (we lived about a five minute walk from the elementary school I went to). This was about seven years ago or so, and from what I’ve seen it’s gotten worse since.