the final word on the reality of climate change

Here’s the thing.

I feel like there was a time, before this past year, when widespread belief in climate change was catching on. I had a sense that there was a growing concern, that perceptions were becoming steadily and markedly more decided on the matter. Local responses to the problem were proliferating. More recycling programs were starting up. Composting was a real consideration. Farmers’ markets started cropping up in places they hadn’t been seen before.

Sustainability was a buzz word. Green was a bright color.

Now, maybe I only think this because I was in college then, and college is a skewed bubble universe sometimes. But I really did feel, even just last year, that our eyes were on Copenhagen. I really did feel that, when that conference proved to be a disappointment, we were sad.

It’s not that I sense the progress has stopped. On the contrary, I think it continues. But I do have a sense, these days, that public opinion is not—and maybe it never was—anywhere near totally swayed about climate change.

Here’s the final word on climate change and whether or not it’s real:

So what?

So what if it isn’t real?

It doesn’t matter. We have to act like it does.

what kinds of problems are there

In my bio post I mentioned that there are a number of extremely complicated issues I think Gen Y and us Millenials have to start facing. Like what?

Give me a shout if you can think of a category of problem that is not covered here. These are, to me, the big questions. They’re not new. Every generation has to take a good hard look at a lot of the same questions. We’re no different. What is different is the era, our context, these circumstances. Since we’re young, we’re the ones—and this is also cyclical—being critiqued for not thinking about them enough.

I’d catalog the history of the human question if I were qualified (and who knows what would safely grant anyone that qualification), but I’ll risk falling short and stick with some broad-stroke categories.

rubrics for problem-solving

It’s been said that, when a problem arises, men want to find a solution and implement a plan of action, while women want to understand the problem and talk through it.

To start with, underneath this statement is a very quick simplification of gender. I can safely say, as a woman, that I want to solve my problems. There are men, many men, who want to better understand the various problems they encounter.

I think all of us want to pursue a right plan of action. None of us want to rush headlong into action unless we have some basic understanding that the plan is appropriate and, most importantly, will work. We’re all always asking ourselves, What’s going to work?

We do have rubrics for problem-solving. We have criteria we consider, and we always ask some or all of these questions as we work towards a solution:

Efficiency: What’s the most streamlined amount of time, energy, and resources needed to solve this problem? How quickly and cleanly can we act? How focused can we be?

Quality: What’s going to work the best? What’s the smartest solution? What choice incorporates the most ideas? What do best, smartest, and most mean when applied to this particular problem?

Reach: What solution will help the largest number of people? What solution will have the greatest impact? What solution will yield the largest benefits? How do we define a benefit? And benefits for whom?

Purpose: What’s the point? What needs fixing? How do we fix that problem? Versus some other problem, or some fraction of the problem, or ignoring the problem altogether.

the bio and the reason

The bio is short. My name is Catherine. I’m one of these inscrutable 20-somethings The New York Times isn’t sure how to decipher.

I’m writing this blog because I’m 23. And being 23 has made my life exponentially more complicated.

I’m kidding, but I’m not. There are two relevant numbers, really: my age and the date.

Being 23 in 2010 is really complicated. 2010 on its own is complicated. The future, exponentially more so.

I am a young adult who is really past the point where my elders are looking at me and portending that the future will one day be mine. I’m at the point when my responsibility for the world we are all inheriting has to start. And there are a number of extremely complicated issues that Gen Y — Millenials, the Net Generation, Generation Next — have been being told, for years now, we are going to have to start considering.

I would like to start considering them now.

opting out: consumerism

This is going to be the first of a series of entries on Opting Out. Opting in or out, actually, may be what this blog is really about.

What all of this complexity comes down to, in the end, is the constant rephrasing of the question of choice.

One of the major consequences of information and product overload is that all of this proliferation leads to a glut of choice. Decision-making happens on a micro- and macro- scale every single day. What are you going to do today? What are you going to eat?  How are you spending your time? Who are you spending it with? How are you living your life? What won’t you do?

the black room

I’m going to elaborate on this white room / black room metaphor, as I think it greatly simplifies a lot of the more tangled concepts I am trying to uncomplicate.

Why am I inventing the complexponent? What’s the point? What am I talking about?

Whenever something bad is happening, whenever I am upset or someone is hurting or there is increased pain in the world, I think it is—or I am—in a pitch black room. I mean black in the absence-of-light sense.

In the black room, we are paralyzed. We can’t do anything because we can’t see. We are overwhelmed by darkness. We don’t know where we are. We don’t know what we’re doing. We don’t know how to get out.

Whenever something gets to the point where it is exponentially more complicated, it is a problem.

the white room

Think about an empty white room. White walls, white ceiling. White floor.

Imagine it. Imagine being in it.

Now imagine something on the floor. One thing. It’s glaring, isn’t it? A red ball. A paperclip. A chair. A pen.

If you were in this room, you’d be drawn to this object. The surrounding area would quickly become peripheral. You’d probably pick it up. You’d figure out ways to use it. You’d start to get creative after a while, with nothing else to do. With enough time, the red ball would give birth to a game. The ink in the pen ends up on the walls. The paperclip becomes a plan to escape.

If all you had was a paperclip and a keyhole…

less is more—except…

I am pretty obsessed with Leo Babauta’s mnmlist.com. If you click on more, down in the bottom left corner of the homepage, the first bit you’ll read answers the question What is mnmlist.com?

“It’s a site by Leo Babauta of Zen Habits.

It’s about minimalism, and why it’s important today.

It’s about stuff, and how it has come to overwhelm us.

It’s about distractions and commitments and a neverending task list.

It’s about the culture of more, of bigger, of consumption.

It’s about how less is the answer.”

I am a huge fan. Of all of this. Of his.

However—

(and I do think that minimalism and minimalists address this, if often indirectly)

—less is not the whole story.

project 10 to the 100

This blog is coming out of two major threads I have been researching. One is the growing lifestyle trend towards minimalism. I will write more on that topic in another post. But first, I want to talk about Google’s Project 10¹⁰⁰, an idea I only started reading about recently. I want to explain why I admire the project as a model for modern day problem-solving and how it inspired me to invent the idea of thecomplexponent.

what is a complexponent?

A complexponent is an elision of the words complex and exponent.

It’s a few things, but in a sentence, a complexponent is the point at which one thing becomes exponentially more complicated.

A complexponent is a modern factor, a value that I believe is a uniquely 21st Century phenomenon. Pick any one thing in your life, anything that you may consider one discrete concept or idea, and you quickly realize it’s not discrete or singular at all anymore. We are living through a huge period of increased hyperconnectivity. That right there: it’s not even just connectivity; it’s hyperconnectivity. The word complexponent, to me, is about acknowledging and breaking down the hyperactivity in our lives.

It’s not math, really. And I’m making it up.