A moment in time in 1997 near killed me, creating a mess of problems — physical and emotional — that doctors attempted to moderate with anti-anxiety medication.
Those pills worked as expected, emotionally calming me and stilling the post-road collision trauma troubling me and, because of less confusing behaviour on my part, made life somewhat easier for my family and friends.
However, after more than two decades of swallowing those tiny pills it was time, I figured, to break the habit, wean myself off this intellectual crutch and stand to face the full force of life.
After discussion with my doctor the daily tablet was halved, and several weeks ago I left the medication on the shelf and after a few days a new world began to emerge.
I felt intellectually and emotionally sharper, I found myself engaging more willingly in conversation, I was able to respond more quickly to fast-moving quips and turns of conversation and I could feel the old me, a distinct memory, returning.
The world, however, is a problematic place and being a resident, although just one of about eight billion fellows, I have an inescapable sense of responsibility for how we treat what the American architect, systems theorist, writer, designer, inventor, philosopher and futurist Buckminster Fuller called “Spaceship Earth”.
I ache with concern watching others rush about pursuing ideas and ideals that risk it all, effectively flushing humanity down the toilet.
Some say we shouldn’t worry about things we can’t change, but that jarring philosophy encourages individualism and panders to the prevailing business-as-usual system.
So although we must of course attend to individual needs, our heart and soul must rest with the tribe, the community, the eight billion who make up the crew on this Spaceship Earth, and everything said, we are all just people, the differences we sense are simply human constructs.
I watched with alarm as Americans voted for a fellow who treats with contempt those things I care about, promising to “drill, baby, drill” and pursue other ideas that will worsen the climate crisis.
Here in Australia we illustrated our limited understanding of how colonialism had impacted our Indigenous peoples and voted against the Voice to Parliament.
My wife cried, as did many other Australians. I was sad, confused and disappointed.
Madness is afoot in the Middle East where people die every day and in Ukraine there’s more confusion and pointless deaths as a country held hostage to a strongman’s fantasies has joined the rush to flush decency down the loo.
We champion wealth, ignoring the plight of billions of people who effectively have nothing and are never sure where their next meal or sip of drinkable water is coming from.
We seem unable to understand that the lifestyle we presently pursue needs the resources of about three Earths and yet we only have one.
Should we willingly step back from the precipice, accept that sharing is the essence of progress, understand that if we live more moderately there is plenty for everyone, then we can embrace the second part of adage: “Alone we go fast, together we go far.”
I’ve explored the idea of degrowth; the concept of modern monetary theory; the steady state economy as conceived by Herman Daly; the idea of a universal basic income; I’m a card-carrying member of ‘Public Interests before Corporate Interests’; I’m a student of British economist E.B. Schumacher, who wrote Small is Beautiful in 1973; and while each in their own way would lead to a better life, they are trampled by the juggernaut that is the market economy.
I don’t worry about the planet, as it will be fine no matter what we do, but I do worry about our behaviour, and subsequently something that had its roots in a road collision about 27 years ago is back — I’m again taking a reduced amount of anti-anxiety pills.
Robert McLean is a former editor of The News.