Matching Bug-out Bags

There's an article by Venkatesh Rao called Ark Head which I think about regularly. About how when things get rough, we tend to draw inwards. Look for ways to preserve the things that most matter to us and our inner circle. In particular, I think of one of the lines towards the end of his post:

Ark head is perhaps the right mental state for a Dark Age.

It affected me because, up to that point, I was reading the post and nodding my head and thinking 'yeah, this makes some sense to me.' And then I read that line and I got scared.

The last couple of years I've thought about what that daydream about the house in the country - The rows of rhubarb, a little stream at the bottom of the garden - means. The way it represents a stepping back from the mess of a shared life. At its worst, it represents a boundary to caring about the places we choose to live in. That yes, it is bad here, but the next place will be better. The next place won't have any of these problems.

It reminds me of the joke about every American being a temporarily embarrassed millionaire. Perhaps everybody in the UK is temporarily embarassed to live in community, and therefore subject to all that messy stuff.

I've done it again, I've made a sad post.

I suppose all I can write now is that I'm trying to transplant that daydream onto my current environment more. I'm trying to ask myself what it is about that daydream that makes me want it. Safety, agency, a sense of progression, all of them can be found in the city, alongside community and opportunity that would be quite unobtainable in the remote glen of these fantasies.

It is not easy. It is not the language of safety that my anxious mind was taught. But this year I aspire to learn it. And apparently you can basically grow rhubarb anywhere