Our Civilization’s Crisis of Place

I want to leave my country without leaving my home.

Kirkpatrick Sale

We’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.

Joni Mitchell

A couple months ago, my wife and I finally got down to Costa Rica on vacation, for 10 glorious days. We have been trying to get there for a while now, but you know… pandemic and post-pandemic and all that. As we get further on into mid-life, we’ve been kicking around the idea of early retirement to someplace warm, and Costa Rica is always near the top of the list of attractive international retirement locations. There are certainly plenty of warm places in the US, but they are generally too expensive or too exposed to extreme weather events, or both. And of course, the specter of political polarization is stretched out as far as the eye can see in the US, with many warmer states racing to see who can implement theocratic governance the fastest.

Thus enter Costa Rica, a country in Central America about the size of West Virginia, with a population roughly the size of South Carolina (5.2 million). The capital is San Jose, which, at 335K people, is the size of Honolulu or Henderson NV, which would make it about the 56th biggest city in the US. The GDP of Costa Rica is $78 billion, with a per capita income of $15K, placing it about 80th in the world, on par with China. By comparison, the US GDP is $25 trillion, per capita income at $70K.

In looking at those stats, why would anyone consider leaving the exorbitant wealth of the United States to live in a place like Costa Rica? Costa Rica is obviously a poorer country, and certainly less ‘developed’ than richer countries. We visited the Southern Zone on our trip, and heard from many people just how recently the area had been largely inaccessible, before the addition of the main (paved) road. And while the touristy areas have most modern amenities, there are still large parts of CR with no utilities, limited and/or seasonal roads, and few people.

But Costa Rica just felt like a happier place, despite being poorer and less developed. The warm tropical weather certainly helps, but there are some other key elements that add to the widespread sense of Pura Vida, the ‘pure life’ sentiment that is the national motto and common greeting amongst Costa Ricans. Despite its modest wealth, Costa Rica protects 28% of its land. It is the first tropical country to have reversed deforestation, with rainforest coverage increasing from 40% of its total area in 1987 to 60% today. All of the nation’s beaches are public, and coastal development is heavily restricted, despite the potential financial windfall that could come from turning everything loose to the free market. Costa Rica has no army, instead pouring much of its national budget into education and health care, both of which come in fairly high on international lists (CR is ranked above the US on the WHO health care list, and life expectancy is higher in CR than the US). Costa Rica also has incredible biodiversity, with an estimated 5% of planet’s species occupying this small country.

But aside from all that stat stuff, it’s not a big mystery why we enjoyed our trip to Costa Rica: it is just a beautiful place, with breathtaking mountains, jungles, rainforests, and beaches, teeming with all manner of bird, bug, lizard, and monkey. And the Costa Rican people themselves are gracious, friendly, easy-going, and just incredibly pleasant to be around.

But of course, all vacations come to an end, and that got me thinking. In general, we obviously go to beautiful places for vacations. But that raises a huge question; why are our everyday places so crummy? Why do so many of us need to travel away from our home bases to enjoy pleasant surroundings? The depression that comes at the end of a vacation is not just about the bummer of having to go back to work, but is also about having to return to uninspiring and lousy PLACES.

Despite having the biggest economy in the history of civilization, why have we failed to create widespread, beautiful, everyday places in which to work, live, and play? Why must we go on vacation to escape our daily landscapes? There is certainly no lack of natural beauty in the US: lakes, forests, mountains, seashores, even deserts. Why don’t we all live in these beautiful settings themselves, instead of cramming ourselves into suburban tracts, city apartment blocks, and condo complexes? Why are the most beautiful places marked off only for part-time recreation, often for a fee?

The practical answer is: “Well, we can’t just hang out at the beach or the lake all the time. We have to work. So we need to live in specialized eating and sleeping places close to our workplaces, which are not themselves at the beach or in the forest.” If we delve deeper into Protestant work-ethic territory, people might also say that we shouldn’t just be lazily enjoying life all the time in beautiful places, because then nothing would get done. And that’s why all those tropical peoples are so poor in the first place. They don’t have any gumption, which comes from hardship and unpleasantness. They just sit in their nice warm places and eat mangos all day, which is not a recipe for riches and success.

If we go even deeper, we’re talking about the transition from a hunter-forager lifestyle, which was the norm for humans and our ancestors for millions of years, to the sedentary city-building lifestyle of civilization, which locked us into agriculture, expanding populations, slavery, boom-bust patterns, feast-famine cycles, axial-age moralizing and world religions, and all the rest of the trappings of huge societies that seem out of sync with our primate brains.

Deep in our psyches we are still hunter-foragers. Eons and eons of evolution have predisposed us to living in, and loving, natural surroundings. When you think of your true happy-place, I would bet that it’s outside somewhere, a natural setting that feeds the senses: lapping surf and warming sun on a beach; crunching pine needles and birdcalls in the woods; cold wind and powder snow spackling red cheeks on a winter slope. No matter how creatively-engaging your workplace, or how awesome your crib, it is likely a natural setting that feeds your dreams.

Similarly, many of your peak experiences in life probably include larger groups of people, and likely not just immediate family, but a wider group of friends and extended kin. This is also baked into us from the deep past, with our brains longing for that magical group size of 50–150 that appears across a wide range of studies as the ideal size for an intimate human community.

So the places that our brains want involve dynamic mixes of natural surroundings and larger groups of intimates. But the places that civilization needs and creates, especially for modern, industrial/consumer societies, are almost exactly opposite: artificial institutional spaces for our economic functions, largely cut off from the outdoors, with small and separate private domiciles for our personal stuff. The border environments that prevent us from going totally insane mostly deliver one or the other of our deep brain needs: offices give us some semblance of community, our gardens give us some measure of cultivated nature, and vacations usually give us a temporary combo of community and nature.

But the reason that our societies just don’t feel right is that our place needs are all severed from one another. At their best, schools and workplaces might feel like an enduring tribe, but they are fundamentally time and function bound, serving only particular socioeconomic needs of a discrete part of life. Vacations feel temporarily wonderful, getting us in touch with nature and our fellow travelers — but again, time-bound and economically prohibitive enough to be a rarity for most of us. Even some of the closest approximations to our deep place-needs, like walkable towns and cities with great indoor-outdoor shared spaces for leisure and commerce, are few and far between. And the cost of these special places is perpetually on the rise, precisely because of their rarity.

Instead, the vast majority of the places we have created in the US are just crummy: office parks (largely abandoned post-Covid), strip malls, highways, underpasses, cookie-cutter suburban wastelands, abandoned factories, shuttered rust-belt cities, shoddy trailer ‘parks.’ We have filled America with junky places at a breakneck pace, usually just packing up and moving on when the old places cease to serve their original, temporary function.

In many respects, the energy of the modern economy, two-thirds of which is household consumption, comes from people trying to turn their lonely domestic places into stuff-laden comfort zones, or trying to escape their depressing domiciles by transporting themselves into the fantasy-spaces of entertainment, or trying to substitute social media for the actual, physical group intimacy that our pleistocene brains need.

Covid swept through and laid waste to the last delusions we had about our institutional places. With schools, offices, and stores shuttered for extended periods, most Americans were thrown into a fugue-funk of loneliness and anomie, as we saw how over-dependent we had become on utilitarian, time-bound places, which are poor substitutes for permanent communities that can feed our souls and psyches for a lifetime. This, I think, is the primary cause of the long-tail of Covid depression. It’s why so many people you know still have that faraway stare when trying to engage in small-talk or general catch-up chat. We’ve seen how shallow our socially is under the current arrangements, and it is spirit-crushing.

As industrial civilization continues its steady march to ecological catastrophe, our best (and only, I think) hope is to quickly create better places for people, places that combine larger groups of people into new types of household units, units that can then commit themselves to living much lower-consumption lifestyles, in physical settings much closer to natural cycles of sustainable activity. I’m not exactly sure how other countries might tackle the overall problem of ecological overshoot; but in the US, we need to create as many of these larger household units as possible, replacing the junky places we have now, by dismantling, cleaning-up, and rehabilitating the dysfunctional infrastructure we have been living in for so long.

See earlier posts in this blog for some of the more specific mechanisms/policies needed for this transformation: Basic Income, Bigger Home Bases, and Modern Money Theory.

Cover Image: Dominical Beach, Costa Rica

Originally published at http://entropolitanblog.com on May 29, 2023.