Unpacking my last edition of Monocle Magazine

I subscribed to Monocle magazine in 2011. That’s quite a few months ago. I was intrigued by their evangelical commitment to hard copy journalism when everyone seemed to be going digital and the news stand was on the verge of extinction.

The design of the monthly publication had six sections: Global Affairs, Business, Culture, Design, Entertainment, Fashion. I loved the mix. It inspired me and even grounded me. It was, and is beautifully produced so the practice of reading it was sensually pleasing.

And then it changed. Or actually, it didn’t change. I did. So much so that it started to feel offensive. I cancelled my annual subscription, at least I thought I did. But I must have made an error because it auto-renewed for another year. I made sure I got it right last time, 12 months ago. So today I decanted my last edition, two years after I had intended.

It is unsettling to realise I’ve changed as much as I have. It’s unsettling because I had no inkling of the areas of my life that would invert. It wouldn’t be so unsettling if the conversions had been in areas that were inconsequential to how I live and behave. But not so.

Here are five sets of values and beliefs which have flipped. Not superficially but deeply. Each of these represents an awakening, a ‘seeing’ that cannot be unseen. I say flipped or inverted, because it’s not simply that I’ve rejected the aspiration, but that the thing itself has become repulsive. The first two I’ll say a tad more about because they are less common.

1. Social status: I used to covet symbols of social status, and understood them to be indicators of success. It was perhaps this that made Monocle so intoxicating. It was and is a magazine for the wealthy. Status symbols infuse every page and article. Somewhere along the line I got converted, or inverted maybe. No, not in the way that simply doesn’t covet status symbols, but in a way that means I am often involuntarily repulsed and sometimes amused by them.

Imagine a brothel scene from a Hollywood movie. There’s some middle aged bloke with a sex worker who is good at her job. So good in fact that the client believes the woman actually likes him. We, the audience, know better and we feel awkward for this poor pathetic bloke that has fallen prey to good customer service. Imagine that, paying to be treated as special and then believing that there is something intrinsically superior about yourself.

We pay to turn left when we board an aircraft. We get treated differently and it makes us feel good, even better. We feel superior. Pathetic us. We pay for a ‘better’ education and we get brainwashed with a story that we are special. We are not, but we believe we are. Pathetic us. Loyalty programs give us benefits when we spend more. We pay to belong to exclusive clubs. Or we pay more for equipment or products and believe we are therefore somehow better.

Entitlement is social supremacy and despite it coming in a wrapper that oozes power, it is sad and pathetic, no less so than the brothel client in the Hollywood movie.

So what do I do? Time to audit my beliefs about myself in relation to others. Time to prospect for and weed out the smell of entitlement and coast on the downward mobility spiral, yelling with freedom and hands in the air as we break the shackles of status anxiety.

2. Comfort and convenience: Comfort and convenience are an indicator of progress. Aren’t they? As our civilisation develops, as technology transforms our lives and a growing economy gives us greater consuming power, we become better people. Don’t we? We are addicted to the pursuit of more comfort and more convenience. They are the spoils of the success of humanity. Imagine living in times when the comforts we enjoy everyday weren’t available! Poor them, Lucky us.

Perhaps we have been frogs in the proverbial pot. As society has gradually got more and more comfortable and we have aspired to less and less inconvenience, we haven’t noticed that we are, in parallel, being diminished as people rather than enhanced.

When I was a student in year 11 at Gifu Technical College in Japan, I was the only one in my class that could not walk on my hands for at least a few steps. Most walked a quarter or half the length of the basket ball court. When this happened, it was the first time I had an inclining that there was something worrying about what western progress was doing with me.

I do not know how to survive in the wild. I have been completely domesticated. Instead of spending my discretionary time making, debating, engaging, I sit in front of a screen and consume. As a civilisation, and as the humans within it, we have been diminished in multiple ways and it is worse than being oblivious or unconscious. We have been sold the story that we are better. Whoopsies.

So, what do we do? Time for some re-wilding. Choose some practices that embrace inconvenience. Do things the long hard stupid way. Develop habits where the physical discomfort jolts us back to life and reminds us what being fully alive really feels like.

3. Colonisation and racial and gender supremacy: Oh dear, this is a biggy. I was taught white supremacy and patriarchy. Not in rhetoric, but by cultural norms and narratives. I have a lot of unlearning and re-education to do. I had been an adult for a long time before I had genuine relational engagement with victims of colonisation or with gender and/or culturally and linguistically diverse people. (By the way, Monocle did not endorse this prejudice. The previous two worldviews, yes, in spades, but not this one, in fact the contrary.)

I feel grief. How could we have been/be so arrogant? How could European explorer culture have confused a pioneering spirit with the right to steal?

4. Industrial progress and the model of extraction, consumption and disposal. I, along with most, have slowly woken up to the realisation that as a species we have been totally collectively stupid to the point that we have designed our own frog-in-the-pot suicide. And all the while, yes, telling ourselves our trajectory as humans has been positive. Haha. What a cruel tragedy.

5. Faith. I was so sure. I find it genuinely intriguing that so many smart people still are. When you step back from it, it’s such an unfathomably simplistic and fanciful story. My Christian fundamentalism was right, and everyone else’s was wrong. We had a divinely infused monopoly on love, joy and peace. Everyone else’s attempts were just a nice try. Hmm.

There are a couple of things I find scary about all this. Firstly, I had no inkling that there was anything wrong with aspiring to social status, pursuing comfort and convenience, thinking that settlers were more developed than ‘primitive’ cultures, plundering the earth for our apparent development and religious and moral supremacy. These inversions have side-swiped, jolted me, woken me in ways that cannot be undone. The world views that form the lenses through which I see the world are not the mature internalising of long held values or beliefs. They are truth bombs that make me feel like I’m in a parallel universe. It can be lonely lamenting what others celebrate. It is discombobulating for example when being in a shopping centre feels like a horror show when everyone else, including my past self, bathes in the joys of consumerism.

Secondly, because these inversions caught me by surprise, I have no idea what is next. What am I unconsciously believing and doing, aspiring to, that will get inverted in the future? Where will this journey of evolving consciousness take me?

Monocle is an amazing publication house. I have lots of respect for how they go about their work. But they reflect a world that I increasingly feel sad about rather than aspire to. Social status and its symbols feel increasingly repulsive. Comfort and convenience feel like addictions of weakness. I recognise cultural supremacy as a pathology of power. Unregulated progress feels like suicide and religious fundamentalism is sad and wilful blindness.

I feel like an urban hermit, trying to build a cottage of integrity while living in a forest of compromises.

“I have lost interest in the world you assume I want to make it in.” The Lucky Wonders