Melancholy and utopia

View this email in your browser

"I shall speak of how melancholy and utopia preclude one another. How they fertilize one another... of the revulsion that follows one insight and precedes the next... of superabundance and surfeit. Of stasis in progress. And of myself, for whom melancholy and utopia are heads and tails of the same coin." - Gunter Grass

A notebook about how we work, learn, love and live.

The daily news is brutally difficult to witness, let alone understand. Combine this collective suffering with personal sadness, triggered by a misunderstanding with a friend, and my notice of increased distance in another relationship, and this week I've been experiencing feelings of sorrow.

While I write this letter as a frame around a vision of a hopeful, creative and ecological future, sometimes I fear that with so much suffering in our human world this is a naive exercise in avoidance.

But Buddhism teaches us to embrace and hold the world exactly as we find it. As Chogyam Trungpa taught: "We cannot change the way the world is, but by opening ourselves to the world as it is, we may find that gentleness, decency and bravery are available - not only to us, but to all human beings."

So Grass's observation that melancholy and utopian vision feed each other helps me to keep my intentions in context. You know where to find the frightening truths. We need to accept and embrace them. But here's to the other side of the coin, how life can be better, too.

Happy Friday.

Making Peace
"We need to define a new ‘us’, a broad coalition that understands that we share an interest in peace and equality and in social and climate justice."

Arabs and Jews cleaning up a public bomb shelter in Haifa, together. Photograph: Sally Abed

Sally Abed is a Palestinian and also an Israeli citizen. She is a leader of Standing Together, an organization that fights for the end of occupation, the end of different treatment of Jews and non Jews in Israel and better conditions for all Israelis.

She says: "We need to not only work towards coexistence, but toward partnership and shared life, shared society... We Palestinians are always living a conditional existence, conditional democracy, conditional citizenship, conditional professional advancements. There are spaces where real partnerships still happen. Very rarely, but very surely. We are not only two different peoples. We are all part of a much larger majority. It’s us, all of us."

She said these things before Hamas attacked innocent people, showing no mercy towards fellow Muslims and Arabs. “What is happening right now" she said recently, "is fundamentally different to anything we have faced so far, and I think [recent events] will probably set us back many years in terms of equality and ending racism.” But in spite of this enormous setback, Standing Together is coming together to do "whatever we can to preserve a sense of Israeli-Palestinian solidarity and identifying triggers for incitement and violence before they spiral.”

Article: ‘I hope it can endure’: examples of Jewish-Arab solidarity offer hope in Israel

Related Article: Collaborative Water Management Can Be A Building Block For Peace Between Israelis And Palestinians

Social Imagination
We have serious problems that require us to think creatively. We need to get over our fear of utopian thinking.

Recently Nathan J. Robinson interviewed Kristin Ghodsee about her most recent book, Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life, a panoramic survey of utopian thinking through the human ages. He notes that many people are suspicious of utopias, and of what she calls a “persistent and profound suspicion of political imagination”. She explains why “utopian” should not be a bad word. Some pull quotes from the interview:

"In so many other aspects of our society, we tend to laud those who think outside the box, those who engage in what is sometimes called blue sky thinking. Like the old Apple computer ads in the 1990s—”Think different”—it’s the people who imagine the world differently who are the ones who are going to change it. In the boardrooms in corporations, and in academia and science, we really celebrate people who think different and outside the box, with no bounds to their imagination, but the minute we try to apply that thinking to our personal lives, or to our social problems, then it’s a terrible idea. It’s scary. It’s unrealistic."

"...It’s so important to realize that when we think about sort of ordinary things that we take for granted today, like no-fault divorce, or daycare centers—childcare where you drop your kids off and a bunch of other adults look after your kids while you’re at work—is those were initially utopian demands that were realized by a bunch of people working together and putting pressure on society and reorganizing their lives in such a way and made those things a reality."

"We need to decentralize and claim utopia for ourselves, understanding at the same time that utopia is always a horizon. It’s not a place that you actually ever really get to. It’s a place that you orient yourselves toward, and it’s in the orientation towards utopia that you make forward progress."

And she's just getting started.

Interview: Why We Need Utopias

Activism, Corporate Social Responsibility
Be a climate and CSR activist inside your own company.

Activists Xiye Bastida and Jerome Foster II represent an increasingly vocal youth climate movement. They want business to play a central role in supporting life on earth, not endangering it.

Last month Xiye Bastida and Jerome Foster II talked with Kate Brandt, chief sustainability officer at Google, on the keynote stage of the VERGE climate tech event in San Jose, California, apparently to multiple rounds of spontaneous audience applause.

"We come to the climate movement thinking not what we're upset about and what we're angry about, but what gives us hope for changing the world," said Bastida. "That is what I want to bring to this space. And I think all of you here have that in you. So the question now is: How do we work together so that we're proud of the legacy that we bring to our children?"

They encouraged companies to invite youth and community advocates into the work. "Have spaces in which we can inform the work that you do," said Foster, "and not just young people, but community organizations and people who can ground-truth the data."

Bastida concurred: "What we also bring as a youth movement is that diversity of perspectives,... indigenous wisdom, indigenous values of reciprocity — 'if I take I must give back'. These types of things have been missing from our global conversation and are so, so important." - Dylan Siegler

Article: Where to Find Hope You Can Change the World

Envisioning
See any street as a healthier and happier street by turning it into a Dutch cycling lifestyle street.

Now it's easy to see your street as a "Dutch cycling street".
1. Select your street.
Find your street with this site's form or via GPS.
2. Add a touch of Dutch.
The site's AI will create a Dutch street plan.
3. Pick your favorite and share.
The site's AI produces 4 different results for you to choose from.

Website: dutchcyclinglifestlye.com

Advertising
Another really good reason to improve the effectiveness of your advertising: digital ads and printed paper emit a lot of carbon.

Photo: Sean Da Ros via Creative Commons Zero

Clients and colleagues get tired of hearing me say it: to reach more people who matter to you, reach out to fewer people. Don't waste your message on people who don't care about your message. Here's another reason to be more careful: every year the digital waste of unseen ads emit as much carbon as the global aviation industry.

Writing in Sustainable Brands, Myles Peacock observes that when "ads fail to land, they don’t just waste the budget. Unnoticed digital ads saturate the landscape — consuming valuable resources, draining server capacity and increasing the size of a business's carbon footprint.

"The CO2 emissions from online advertising alone account for a whopping 10 percent of the internet’s total infrastructure emissions. Multiply that waste by factoring in all the communications a typical business creates beyond advertising, and it’s clear that a major problem exists."

Article: Sustainability in Advertising: How Marketers Can Waste Less and Grow More

Brand Messaging
The truth is a very powerful marketing tool.

Kagi Search describes their service as "a highly accurate, lightning-fast, user-centric, 100% privacy-respecting search engine with results augmented by non-commercial indexes and personalized searches." On their website they ask "Think about it. Do you want the results you find in your search engine to give you the information you need or the information an advertiser wants you to see?"

To make their case they asked Google Bard: "What are the downsides of ad-supported business model for search?"

Then they published the chatbot's verbatim response.

Webpage: Why Pay for Search?

Manufacturing
A thriving local yogurt business with a great brand and a lot of potential is for sale.

The founders and owners of Sidehill Farm, Paul Lacinski and Amy Klippenstein, have announced that they want to sell their business. Photo by Bella Levavi

One of the many things I love about living in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts is that we enjoy a local yogurt made with grass-fed organic milk.

This week the founders of Sidehill Farm, the company that makes it, announced that they are ready to move on. They want to sell the recipes, facilities, accounts and brand to someone who might be able to take this established and trusted business to the next level.

“The business is in really good shape. There is a lot of demand for the yogurt,” co-founder Amy Klippenstein said. “There is tons of potential.”

Importantly, the couple says that they are not in a hurry. They want to wait to find the right buyer, someone who believes in the mission of the company they started.

The story was in our local daily, Greenfield Recorder (yes, we have a daily paper, too) on Monday. While the story didn't include contact info, there is a contact page on their website.

Website: Sidehill Farm.

One-liners

Article: Millennials and Gen Z are tilting left and staying there.

Article: American Theatre Magazine explains why they have resumed publishing in print

Article: Wind turbines kill only a fraction as many birds as are killed by house cats, buildings or the fossil fuel operations that wind farms replace.

Article: John Steinbeck got his kids to read good books by locking the books in a cabinet and warning that they held secrets the kids were not supposed to know.

Article: Violent and disturbing war images from the Mideast can stir deep emotions − a PTSD expert explains how to protect yourself and your kids from overexposure

Article: Why the Nature Conservancy is investing some of its $3 billion endowment in startups

Playlist

Video: Choir! Choir! Choir! + Feist sing for Sinéad O'Connor - Nothing Compares 2U

Upon hearing the tragic news of Sinéad O'Connor's passing, the producers of Choir! Choir! Choir! worked quickly to present a night in her honor at Toronto’s Opera House. The show sold out quickly. Then, "Forty-minutes before show time, our friend, Leslie Feist, texted us to say that she was on her way to join us to sing lead on Nothing Compares 2 U, a Prince-penned song that Sinéad made uniquely her own. What followed this sequence of events was nothing short of magical."

There is such power unleashed when humans sing together, especially when those people fill an entire opera house all the way to the rafters.

Weekly Mixtape
Sinéad O'Connor, nobody compares to you.

Playlist: Nothing compares to you

Image of the Week

Lena, London, by Zanele Muholi, 2018
Silver gelatin print. Image and paper size: 80 x 56.5cm

"Where does art deemed controversial go after it’s been removed, banned, or denounced? One possible destination: the Museu de l’Art Prohibit, (opened this week) in Barcelona to house a wide assortment of censored artworks.

"Spanning two floors with over 200 paintings, sculptures, installations, photographs, and more by mostly modern and contemporary artists including Gustav Klimt, Ai Wei Wei, Tania Bruguera, and Banksy, the museum’s diverse collection explores the censorship of art due to 'political, social or religious reasons.'”

"The new institution will be located in the center of Barcelona’s historic Eixample district, only a block from the sculpture-filled Plaça de Catalunya, in an early 20th-century building designed by architect Enric Sagnier. Overlooking the interior’s spiral staircase, a silver gelatin print of Zanele Muholi’s “Lena, London” (2018) gazes over the middle space of the museum. As a human rights activist who uses their lens as a tool to give visibility to South Africa’s marginalized LGBTQ+ population, many of the Black queer participants in Muholi’s portraits have faced physical and sexual violence. The artist’s photography was honored in 2013 with the Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Arts Award." - Maya Pontone

Article: Barcelona Museum Gives Censored Art a Permanent Home

What's Love & Work?
Love & Work is the weekly newsletter by me, Mitch Anthony. I help people use their brand - their purpose, values, and stories - as a pedagogy and toolbox for transformation.
If you get value from Love & Work, please pass it on.

You can learn more about me and my work here: mitchanthony.net

Not a subscriber? Sign up here.

You can also read Love & Work on the web.