Systems Thinking on a Beautiful Life
2023 was a brutally hot year and broke all existing records. However, the climate fell somewhat behind other evil traumas like the still ongoing war in Ukraine and the horrific situation in Gaza. It forces us all to think about the world, where we are heading and how completely incapable we are of having some kind of agency to change directions.
During my many years within systemic design work I’ve noticed I’m inclined to move backwards in time to truly try to understand why we, humans behave as we do, and why we have created the structures we live by. Humanity is part of a large system, the ecology of planet Earth. Yet, nature is cruel and death is a daily occurance. But as the writer Alison Lurie puts it, ‘nature can seem cruel but she balances her books’. The planet has a system in harmony where life and death is a cycle sometimes harsh but in equilibrium. If humans are also part of this system, do we need to both expect and accept a portion of cruelty? I’m asking this critical question since I personally find it hard to live by, to see barbarity while closing my eyes and saying it's part of a natural course, does not seem right.
Only by looking at just one of the many cruel traits of humanity - slavery, can we quickly get an idea of how vast this suffering has been over thousands of years. Slavery was a way for a man to gain a larger personal profit while using free labour. From the success of slavery in early Egypt, to Vikings, American slavery but also women as free workers, the nazi slavery and even slavery in our current system with a type of mass production that requires modern slaves in both South East Asia but also in Africa. Mica mining is not only a form of slavery but also often involves child labour, only children are small enough to get through the tunnels to find the mineral used for batteries in our electric cars.
“The nature of man is evil; what is good in him is artificial.“
Said Chinese philosopher Xun Zi almost 2500 years ago. Which makes me think of human capabilities and our newest major innovation, artificial intelligence. And here comes my wonder, my extensive hypothesis. IF humans are intelligent enough to create mobile phones, computers, AI, door handles, air planes, batteries, lipstick and sidewalks. How can we be so strikingly incompetent in creating and innovating a more kind society?
My argument continues that we have lifted ourselves from the ecological system of the planet. Artificial intelligence is no longer part of the natural world, which means we as human beings, are no longer part of the balanced ecosystem. We stand with one foot in the cruel yet functioning order of life and death, while the other foot is standing on unknown grounds disconnected from the original framework of the planet. And if we are no longer fully part of the cruel order of nature, then we are fully free to redesign a structure that is less cruel than the one nature lays out for us.
I don’t know why I live. No one does. We didn’t ask to be born, nor do we ask to die. It is something that just happens to us and how we decide to deal with it - that is life. Depending on when, and where you are born, you are given different tools and possibilities to create your own life. If you lived 500 years ago on beautiful Busuanga (an island in the Philippines), if you lived 2000 years ago on a damp farm in Sweden or if you live today in an expensive studio apartment in Manhattan - it will affect your options and actions. If we also add in unpredictable flux, nature, biology, genetics and personalities, the outcomes and ways of living is a complex weave of tangible and intangible conditions. Life is not easy to make sense of. However, we now live in a time where our life choices and decisions suddenly have a global impact on billions of other living things. Where we in prehistoric times used to choose between options that had an impact on possibly ourselves, a small group of people and some plants and animals surrounding us, we now find ourselves creating tremendous impacts on life beyond our knowledge at a terrifying scale. Everyday. The pondering of the meaning of life went from a relatively harmless philosophical idea to a life threatening reality. And we have not yet fully understood the scale of impact that our everyday modern decisions have on the planet. That scale of impact is what has led us to what many call ‘the planetary crisis’, or ‘our meta crisis’ which includes climate change, pollution and biodiversity loss.
Many are now trying to grasp and understand the complexity of these massive and interrelated problems but also to find solutions at the same scale and impact. That we live in a time of global catastrophes, and more of them to come, is a fact. Not a hypothesis anymore. The recent report on the state of our work with The Sustainability Goals show a devastating trend of reverse and a move backwards. As a citizen it’s easy to feel depleted and apathetic. Even I, who work with sustainability everyday and gather new research, innovations and solutions, feel confused about how to proceed. To phrase English Victorian slang from the 19th century, ‘I think I’ve got the morbs’ (a meaning describing a person afflicted with temporary melancholy or sadness). I don’t know how to live, where to start and how to make both use of, and sense of, what will become my brief moment on this planet.
What is normally on the agenda for societal change is technology and all the rational glory that it promises. Via impressive design and seductive branding, we are invited to believe our lives will change for the better through both serious, but also trustworthy technological innovations. Computers for example, not only make work efficient, but they also turn our personal laptops into an extension of ourselves, they mirror our personalities and what we can do. I have to admit my own laptop is nearby throughout my day, it is heavily full of my own thoughts and far away from other’s touch. Mobile phones even more so, they’ve turned into complete extensions of our bodies. AI is just about to open that same type of toolbox and the horizons of possibilities seem endless. The appeal for technology is mind blowing and it is easy to embrace technology as a powerful apparatus for change. However, what we often tend to forget, or what many of us even don’t know much about, is that all these tech objects are made from natural resources.
We are aggressively exploiting these resources without fully understanding how it will impact the future. But not only do technological products need materials, they are also shipped over the world multiple times and throughout both the production, shipping, distribution, branding and end use, do these objects, or the processes surrounding them, emit massive amounts of carbon dioxide. Even just one click on a google search on your desktop will emit carbon dioxide through the data centres that keep the information but also from your own charging of the computer by using energy from a socket. Information and communications technology already account for more than 2 percent of global energy demand, which is on a par with the aviation industry emissions. And, expected to greatly increase over the next decade.
Why are we then so focused on technological solutions to our planetary problems and to fight climate change. The answer might be enormously simple - our constant strive for money. Collective social behaviours as a tool for innovation and change aren't profitable business ideas. You can’t make money out of it. And since our core societal system is built around monetary growth, there are many that want to make the future a profitable project. So even if you have an idea of a powerful change for a community, you are better off making a digital app as a startup company rather than just talking and inspiring people to change. When we now find ourselves in a time where report after report clearly shows that we are not making enough progress on sustainability work and that we are actually moving backwards, then might it not be time to raise awareness and spark dialogues on our trust in technology as the best or only solution forward? Might it be time to give space to what is often labelled naive, less important or not efficient enough? Might it be time to shed light on emotions, care and generosity?
In 1865, the English economist William Stanley Jevons observed that as steam engines became more efficient and used less coal per unit of work, the demand for coal increased which led to higher volumes of coal consumption. He argued that, contrary to common intuition, technological progress could not be relied upon to reduce fuel consumption. This concept got the name - ‘Jevons paradox’. There are many examples of how this paradox works in real life and there are similarly many debates about how accurate this effect actually is on society. But one element within the Jevons paradox is the income effect - as the cost of a resource decreases, people can spend less by consuming it. Suddenly that frees up money for other goods and services with the end result of frenzied levels of mass production and consumption. By being fast and efficient, the world can use and consume more resources. There seems to be a structural system of living faster that is connected to the climate crisis.
Humans are amazing at forming structures to make life better, easier or more simple to understand and exist within. It is as if we feel better when there are a certain amount of rules and frameworks to adapt to, rather than everything around us being a messy chaos. Children clearly showcase this need quite straight forward, they like to know what is expected from them and what they are meant to do. Grownups are very much the same, although many of us probably don’t like to think that we like structure and rules like a 3-year old. The problem though is that the 21st century societal structures we see, and live by, in the Western world aren’t democratically constructed - they were made by mostly white men hundreds of years ago. Now we are trying to adopt new ways of existing within these structures, we are trying to change ourselves while still collectively being stuck in old mindsets. We need to be wonderfully open to discuss what a new set of structures could be, and look like, from generous systemic viewpoints.
A good place to start might be the actual biological start of life. Living beings and organisms are born. And most of them, by a mother. Mothers are the foundation for life. They bear and nurture. They create and they love. And when looking into what many of our societies need at the moment, it is just that - nurturing, creativity and love. We desperately need collective mothering. And we need it at a global systemic scale. Yet, most of our forward looking organisations and leaders tend to focus on economic growth, technology and personal profits. Mothering is never on the agenda as something that could change systems, that could radically improve lives for many and as something that is worth inviting into the decision making board rooms.
To mother better is a way to expand and disrupt parts of this stagnated system. But what does mothering actually mean in this context? Normally, mothering is the process of caring for children as their mother. But it can also be used when caring for people in the way that a mother does. And that meaning is what I talk about today. Mothering as a way of being when you take care of someone or something without conditions, without restrictions and with enormous patience and warmth.
Nature has a wide variation of mothering. Wolf spider mothers carry their babies on their backs until they are old enough to hunt, male seahorses keep their eggs in a brood pouch and provide care, protection and nourishment for the embryos, before releasing them as independent young. The extremely intelligent octopuses are semelparous animals which means they reproduce once and then they die. After a female octopus lays her eggs, she quits eating and wastes away, and by the time the eggs hatch, she dies. The small cactus ‘Mammillaria hernandezii’ keeps seeds inside the mother plant where they experience the stress of the habitat they live in, including pulses of rain and the lack of it. By learning from this experience, while still being protected by the mother plant, the seeds are more prepared to face the unpredictability of their habitat once outside. Black-browed albatrosses mate for life and take care of their offspring as a couple for as long as they live, which can be up to 70 years. On the darker sides of mothering in nature we find for example insects like a certain hymenopteran who inserts a tube into a ladybug and lays its egg inside the bug where the egg later hatches and the larva eats through the hosts internal organs before squeezing itself out of the ladybug and leaves her to her fate.
The evolution of parental care in nature is extensive, sometimes caring and in other cases enormously brutal. Humans mother in a multitude of different ways, we are not as static in our ways of mothering as some of our fellow living beings. The evolution of humanity has turned our species into social complex beings with a large brain which among primates is associated with a long juvenile period that requires extensive parenting. Yet, in human history mothering was kept mostly for women to perform, whereas nowadays it is a much more gender neutral activity. Recent research has now made it possible to create human embryo-like structures without the need of neither egg nor sperm, which makes it easy to get lost in what ways humans will adapt and shift due to innovation, evolution and climate change.
The profound mothering among humans that I’m envisioning is not a burdensome technological revolution but rather a simple way of being together. Yet, mothering is not something only women can, or should do. In 2015, professor Sydney Engelberg at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, was completely unfazed when the child of a mother at his lecture on organisational behaviour began to cry. The embarrassed mother tried to leave the class, but instead of letting her do that, the professor and father of four, scooped the kid up and soothed him in his arms so that the mother could continue the class and not miss anything at all. Engelberg always allows mothers to his masters lectures to bring their children and to breastfeed with the powerful message that no-one should ever have to choose between a child and an education. After this episode there has been a plethora of stories of professors who welcome students with babies into their classrooms and there are many examples of personal stories and videos showcasing how these teachers are changing lives by letting anyone be educated.
I sternly believe we breathe in revolutionary times and that mothering might be a solution just as powerful as AI, robots and technological innovation. And if I until now have seemed like someone who is fully against technology, I want to make it clear that I’m not. There are some amazing innovations that have made life both easier and safer and which can dramatically alter our chances of collective survival. But to phrase economic anthropologist Jason Hickel - “less is more”. I see care and technology working perfectly together although I’m slightly biassed towards solutions that don’t require natural resources, energy or emit carbon emissions. How can we carefully select the few heavy carbon emitting options that might be needed for a little bit longer and which have great impacts on shifting our ways of being with the planet, while leaving the rest behind?
The suffering we will see and experience over the next few decades will force us to a drastic change, either through personal will, national and global regulations, or more likely, both. Until then we can either pretend all is going to be fine and live ‘comme d'habitude’. Or we can actively try to adjust ourselves to a future more in line with nature and healthy systems created millions of years ago. Today the choice is unfortunately yours alone to take. No government or global body so far has taken the bold decision to dictate in detail how citizens need to live to prosper collectively. And this profound choosing of personal pathways is where complexity lies. We are all alone when it comes to forcefully taking agency and changing our lifestyles. But when I look around me I realise that not everyone has the knowledge or capacity to do the same. Many people live on the frontline of emergencies where their only focus is to survive on a daily basis. Yet, for the rest of us who think about emergencies, rather than feel emergencies, I believe we have to start small yet radically in our own personal lives and community settings. Care and generosity - mothering - sits at the core of many solutions and it is what motivates my female anger to keep working within fields that otherwise can seem quite dystopic and dark. Only through practising true care in our everyday lives can we scale up and practise the very same and much needed global care that is necessary if we want to see a future with minimum of suffering for all.
