Dark Places

I recently asked my son to send me the link to a video he was watching because I wanted to see a few seconds of the clip where it says "THIS was the view my kids had from the car and THIS was the view they had from the bike." 

But it's 52 minutes long and so far I haven't actually watched it because I don't really feel that motivated to watch 52 minutes of lectures on why you should be anti car or whatever when I've already lived without a car in America, not the cushy Netherlands, for more than a decade.

I'm seriously medically handicapped and I'm TIRED this week, tired in a way many people cannot comprehend based on the number of online wannabe "boyfriends" who gave me absolute SHIT for saying "I would love to talk to you, but I'm TIRED today."

I spent about three and a half months bedridden and it took me years to recover meaningful stamina for having something vaguely resembling a normal life. Being tired like this is in a category of revisiting my worst nightmare and it does terrible things to my mood and outlook.

So I'm in a pretty dark place and wondering what is THE POINT of my work. It isn't paying MY bills and my son is watching this video from this popular channel everyone has heard of and I'm wondering how the two compare.

According to a cursory search, @notjustbikes makes thousands of dollars a month and has millions of viewers. Initial search for its impact said its impact is "significant" based on views and subscribers or something like that, which is a meaningless metric frankly.

Today, I probably used a different phrase and it again uses vague language about "significant" impact and talks about fostering advocacy for a car-free lifestyle and says The Netherlands gave him citizenship for having a channel that is excellent PR for their country, so presumably he's extremely important.

Again, I'm seeing no meaningful, meaty statements you can really VERIFY with hard data.

That's not intended to trash talk The Netherlands. I have enormous respect for what they have accomplished, but I believe their bike-friendly, pedestrian-friendly built environment is a consequence of Polder Politics.

More than half the land mass of The Netherlands is land reclaimed from the sea and historically warring cities within The Netherlands had to cooperate in keeping the sea from killing everyone in both cities.

I don't believe a channel like @notjustbikes has any hope of exporting the actual secret sauce of The Netherlands and I don't believe the channel is even trying to export that piece.

So I'm not insulting The Netherlands. All I'm saying is them granting this guy citizenship does not constitute objective evidence the channel is making a big difference in the world.

And then today I tripped across a video about a charcoal powered car some guy in Cuba developed because of the American oil embargo on his homeland. And I am again wondering about things like impact.

I know America is not trying to improve the environment by having an embargo on Cuba, but I've read about programs that pay people for their junker cars to take the oldest, most polluting cars off the road and the TLDR is if you identify the worst cars and get them off the road by PAYING people to give them to you so you can destroy them, that's one of the cheapest and most effective means to reduce car pollution.

If I were still active on Reddit or Twitter, maybe I would post these two videos someplace like that without significant commentary because -- again -- I have not watched either of these videos and I'm not sure either of these videos is something I want to really promote.

Would it be a good thing for me to have a low friction means to share this stuff? Maybe NOT. 

Maybe people would go "She's FOR this!" when I'm really saying something like "I hope to FIND these videos again and maybe someday actually WATCH them because I'm wondering about stuff." So maybe I would regret doing that.

I try to write up useful information you can act on and I don't know if @notjustbikes provides something similar. It doesn't really appear to from what little I know of it.

My metric is actionable instructions and hypothetically that has potential to move the needle QUIETLY more than all the storm and noise of more popular channels.

I also state clearly you have my permission to translate my work, so hypothetically my work could be much more popular and effective than the paltry page views I have would suggest. 

Maybe people in places like rural Africa LOVE my work and it gets translated to languages I don't even know the names of and shared around via means that add few or no new page views to MY sites and implemented in places where everyone has a cell phone but no electricity at home and once a week some guy hikes to the nearest cafe selling electricity to charge all the phones in the village. And no one is emailing me to tell me that and I may never be told.

If you are someplace like Cuba or the Philippines and suffering because MERIKA is causing problems for your energy supply TODAY, I know you need relief TODAY and solutions like a charcoal powered car are probably extremely appealing, almost certainly vastly more appealing than my writing about passive solar design.

And I wouldn't blame you in the SLIGHTEST for LEAPING at such solutions with short term pay off for your people.

I wouldn't dare to suggest you shouldn't leap at short term solutions in the midst of a sudden crisis caused by some butthead in charge of some other country who shouldn't be in power at all.

But if I had your ear and your respect, I would implore you to please also read Eclogiselle and begin working on making passive solar design, car-optional design and local security for essentials like food and power a goal and a high priority without cutting your throat in the short term.

Because otherwise this garbage just repeats the next time some butthead wants to do this to you. And possibly with even worse consequences if your default is now charcoal powered cars with consequences like high rates of lung cancer and your people need to travel elsewhere regularly for expensive and debilitating medical care.