Hi Everyone 👋🏽

If you're new here, welcome to Growth Imperatives, an ongoing curation of found ideas that deconstruct the current world, and ask how to build a new one.

I wanted to try something new this week: Instead of three long excerpts and even longer articles—which can be a bit overwhelming, especially on mobile—I want to share one main article and a few interesting thoughts I've picked up along the way.

Please let me know what you think! All it takes is a button click at the end of this email 😉

👽 Would being aliens' descendants make us more life-centered?

This article tells the hypothetical origin story of Ǵenh, a microscopic traveler from a distant planet who landed on our own. Spencer R. Scott crafts this story as a contrast to Judeo-Christian and Ashininaabe origin stories and examines how the dynamics of those stories affect their relationship with nature and life as a whole.

There's no doubt that origin stories help us understand the world. With this in mind, how would our not being of this world—of it being a liferaft rather than an inheritance or damnation—change our appreciation of it?

History has shown us that origin stories deeply affect our search for purpose and how we behave on this Earth. In the face of climate change, the importance of origin stories has never been more pronounced. [...]

What if we had grown up with the origin story of Ǵenh? What culture would we create if we saw Earth as a miraculous celestial garden bed that seeds scattered to the cosmic winds found, against all odds, a home in?

We might start to wonder what kind of garden it is we’ve landed on. We might internalize how miraculous it is that a planet, so perfectly outfitted for life, received a seed. For what science can tell, Earth appears to be extremely special in its ability to foster life. [...]

The power in the story of Ǵenh is less in re-imaging where we come from, and more in what it says about which direction we might choose to head. If we are merely seeds planted in an unlikely bed of soil wondering if we will flower, we see there is no guarantee for us, no space gardener, “no hint that help will come from elsewhere”. Whether we thrive or die in our pot of soil will be determined by our ability to accept the responsibility of this position. As the newest Inheritors of Life.

Read → The Book of Ǵenh: Reimagining our Origin Story for a Life-Centric Reorientation by Spencer R. Scott

🏗️ Reconstructions

You are akin to a planet. Within your body are different climates that give rise to different types of ecosystems. Within these different environments live varying types of species that altogether make up your microbiome. The swampy atmosphere of your armpits and feet play host to an entirely different cadre of life than the caverns of your gut and the cold tundras of your hands. But even between similar habitats, there is diversity to be found; for example, the palm of your right hand shares only a sixth of the same microbial species as that of your left hand.
— Willow Defebaugh in Being Human
The French priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin famously said that “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience”. In other words, our minds and souls are having a material experience here on Earth. You would imagine that a healthy society would therefore cherish both sides of this duality - the non-physical and the physical. The strange thing about our modern culture though is that we have rejected almost all concept of spirituality and, according to Watts, we have also forgotten the value of the material world, leaving us with nothing that we truly value. No wonder our society and environment are creaking at the seams.
— Tom Greenwood in Is materialism really such a bad thing?
Implicit in the promise of outsourcing and automation and time-saving devices is a freedom to be something other than what we ought to be. The liberation we are offered is a liberation from the very care-driven involvement in the world and in our communities that would render our lives meaningful and satisfying.

In other words, the promise of liberation traps us within the tyranny of tiny tasks by convincing us to see the stuff of everyday life and ordinary relationships as obstacles in search of an elusive higher purpose—Creativity, Diversion, Wellness, Self-actualization, whatever. But in this way it turns out that we are only ever serving the demands of the system that wants nothing more than our ceaseless consumption and production.
— L.M. Sacasas in The Work of Art

That's all for this week! Thanks for reading.

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