Where I live right now, the city has apparently decided to change the entire street for some reason. They do it every year, but somehow they manage to get more and more creative about it each time.
It's a surprise every day.
You never know what kind of route you should take to get home. It's a mysterious, endless labyrinth that changes shape daily.
One day the street might be missing, the next day the sidewalk, back street, or access to any business on the street might not exist anymore.
One day you might wake up without water or electricity at home, but at least you'll have the bike path (hopefully, in a couple of years, if we don't propose a new urban plan to change the street again next construction season to make it even better).
We change the street every year with the pretext that you will be able to use it better one day. But we forget that you can't use it properly for six months of the year because it's winter, and you can't use it during the summer either because it's construction season. So, basically, you very rarely have authentic access to the street you pay for. But at least your streets are super performant, wisely designed, and new every autumn!
Most of what is being done in the construction sector makes literally zero sense.
If you want people to ride bikes, you don't need to change the street. You need to educate your population properly on the importance and benefits of choosing the bike as their main mode of transportation.
You are not supposed to use urban design to impose your vision of a sustainable future on your population. You are supposed to implement strategies where your population is wise enough to make those choices themselves, no matter what shape the street you build for them takes.
People are supposed to have free choice and personal sovereignty to make aware and conscious decisions about how to ensure our collective survival and co-create a reality we desire to experience together.
We are supposed to invest our resources, money, energy, and time in proper education and training of the population to satisfy our basic needs efficiently and coherently as a community. We are not supposed to invest in new streets, new laws, new 'green' markets, and the same old industries that make no sense anymore.
Have you ever thought about how much petroleum, new mines, huge factories, ten levels of management hierarchy (that probably don't do much of value either), and big machinery were required to give you a new bike path?
Do you consider how much environmental cost you actually pay to encourage people to ride their bikes more often?
Don't you think it might have been better invested if we just explained to people why taking care of the Earth and our shared natural resources is important?
What if we stop treating our citizens as ignorant, uneducated, greedy, unfixable, and egoistic beings?
What if instead of creating rules and new streets that force them to adopt a more sustainable way of living, we just sit with them as adults and talk together about the best way to care for our community, Nature, and the city we all love and share?
What if people came up with the solution that biking makes sense by the power of their own brain power, conscious thought process, and self-reflection? What if we didn't need to invest in all sorts of new stuff, useless jobs, or even new markets that honestly are not really required to be truly sustainable?
Sustainability is not about renewable, green, organic, or whatever else. Sustainability is about cutting the unneeded work, projects, and inefficiencies directly in the system.
The most sustainable source of energy is the one you don't even need!
The most efficient and performant change is the one that happens naturally and does not require any change in the existing infrastructure or the extraction of additional raw resources.
If you depend on the 'system' to make you or your life more sustainable, you will continue investing in the nonsense of the corporate world, not in a greener future.
You don't need a PhD in environmental studies to understand simple mathematics.
If you think you use too many resources from the Earth, you should probably use fewer of them. You should probably work less and change your street less often. You should probably simplify your reality and use less stuff, not make our future even more complicated, virtual, or globally interconnected.
You should probably be investing in the proper education of your population, not in innovative ways to control and punish your citizens while growing economic benefits at the same time.
You need to decide what exactly you want to be investing in with your money, time and personal energy : the sustainable and coherent future, the simplicity of pure human happiness and authentic wisdom of your community, or the new high-tech streets, carbon market nonsense, renewable energy revolution, and new corporate jobs every year?
What do you want?
The economic status quo, but with deeper and more creative self-delusions that you are being 'green,' or a simple and happy life you can share safely and with pleasure with your kids and grandkids?
Both of these paths do not require the same strategy. But the good news is that to implement the second one, we don't need anything other than our own courage, wisdom, and the power of our free choice to do what we truly believe in with our time and energy. And not blindly follow what the 'others' with their ties and supercomputers have calculated for us as an optimal strategy to implement.
The power of simplicity and responsibility belongs to you, and you can choose it at any time.
The system cannot create this for you. The system only survives because you make it way too hard, complicated, and full of suffering for yourself for no reason. The system feeds on your lack of power and wisdom.
The system gives you a job, safety, comfort, and stability, yes, but it also strips you of your actual quality-based future and your authentic happiness in the now.
You choose: the sustainable 'system' or your own and our collective well-being in a world that just makes sense to start with.
Your boring, super sophisticated job or the natural co-creation process of a desired shared reality with a community of other passionate and wise beings around you.
New jobs and streets or a healthy and creative community? Education and collective wisdom or the extraction of natural resources and economic growth?
Sustainability or Simplicity?
Control or Choice?
Love or Fear?
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