Blogging at the end of the world

That's what it feels like. The country I live in is on fire, the apocalypse is with us. A thousand homes burnt to the ground. Communities that have lived on edge for week after week after week, and summer is only about a third of the way through. An optimistic eight more weeks to go. Even in comparatively well-watered Melbourne, I still have some water in the tank, but not much. Usually at this stage of the year, it's pretty much full.

I'm not entirely sure how to make sense of this world anymore, so I'm using this blog as therapy.

If you listen to the news, which nowadays I generally try not to, you end up with the impression that the only thing of any importance is "the economy", but I'm left completely unsure what that is anymore.

When I was a baby economics student, back in the early 1990s, there was a bit of a link between a growing economy - GDP per capita - and the quality of lives people led. Countries with higher GDP were happier, the people lived longer, the standard of education was higher. But even then, these figures bore little scrutiny if applied over time. The happiest times in the West were, apparently, the '50s and '60s.

Now, I don't buy this wholesale. The entire 1950s female lifestyle thing has little to recommend it - I've never been a big fan on antidepressants, and if that's what it took to make sure women were happy, it is an odd sort of happiness. And I can't imagine it was much fun to be gay, or black, or anything other than a straight, white bloke. In Malaysia, we were still trying to build both our own country and the UK up from the devastation of the Second World War, with the UK taking the bulk of our income for their own needs.

But I suspect that there is still some truth in the stats. Some. There was a belief in the better world being built, either by capitalism or communism. There was a sense of purpose and optimism and it wasn't all tied in to the purchase of stuff. Stuff's great, but we now seem to live to acquire, rather than acquiring to live. And we all know, we know, that this is meaningless. So we buy our way to happiness through paid-for meditation and self-help courses, or self-realisation courses.

I'm only a generation away from hungry. But I'm worried that it's a generation in both directions. We urgently need to role in the addiction to stuff, and the money that buys the stuff, and the addiction to the belief that the GDP defines how well lives are lived.

And thus endeth today's lesson. I am slowing down and reflecting, I am refilling my reserves, and next week, I will breathe deep and steel myself for the battles to come this year and this decade. I hope that we are up to the task. Good luck, and much love, my friends.