The Real Work: Four Kinds of Work for a Less Catastrophic Future

This week, Nate zooms out from recent headlines about climbing diesel prices, a thinning U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and inflationary bond markets to ask the deeper question: what is the real work that’s required of us as the systems that underpin modern life begin to buckle? He draws on decades of tracing the links between energy, ecology, and economy to argue that our response to the predicament is not necessarily to prevent the inevitable economic deflation, but to begin to shape how society moves through it.

From this premise, Nate outlines four areas of intervention that he feels are underattended, given the scale of what’s coming. He calls attention to how we can help communities bend and not break as supply chains strain under pressure, and the ways we might shepherd ecosystems and species through this bottleneck of humanity’s own making. He describes the sobering work of steering nations away from nuclear catastrophe when the proliferation fears that once restrained global powers have faded. Finally, he shows that underlying it all is the slower, generational project of recovering a sense of the sacred in a culture that has learned to measure everything in dollars. Woven through these areas of “real” work is the opportunity to rediscover meaning itself – including the idea that a life well spent is one oriented toward sustaining and enriching life beyond ourselves. 

Why should we view what we’re facing as a predicament to mitigate and not a problem to solve? What would it take for society to absorb systemic shocks without fracturing the social bonds that hold it together? And in a culture built on extraction and convenience, what would it mean to reestablish a sense of the sacred in our relationship with the living world?