May 1st in the UK and Europe. Is it still Winter or is it Spring? Walking, shivering in the brilliant sunshine, smiling at the blossom while grieving the likelihood of its short shrift, is a familiar confusion these days.

Are we in decline—or are we in development? For many, the only “waking up” we need is to the climate crisis and the extreme difficulties coming down the line. If we don’t focus 100% on this—give up flying, meat, luxuries of any kind—we are in unimaginable danger.

For others, this is a moment of unprecedented innovation. We have the technology to extract carbon from the air, and turn it into bricks. We can turn the sun, wind and rain into an infinite, renewable energy source. We possess intelligent machines that can help us transcend the bad thinking that caused the polycrisis.

For many, politics is irredeemably broken. We have to root out corruption, bring down the elites, shame the patriarchy, beat the bastards.

For others, waking up means that new intelligence of all kinds has entered the public space. The old world is no more and progress is inevitable.

For many, those who proclaim they’re facing up to the facts of climate science simply look like doomsters. They’re Indulging in fatalism as a new form of comfort that we simply cannot afford.

For others, focusing on solutions primarly is blind. To be positive at this time feels like Kim Jung Il’s forced song of joy for the people. If you haven’t seen the latest video – currently finding favour with many joy seekers outside of Korea – take a moment to do so. We should all note the power of this kind of attraction.

Some readers here will take sides in these debates, others will call the present moment a paradox – a seeming-contradiction of positions that have to be held in tension. Others still – anti-nuclear protesters, vegans, the excluded - might call the willingness to hold that tension “cognitive dissonance”: or worse, a tacit collusion with the status quo.

And indeed the call for balance is too often a call to slow down change. A desire to hold problems that present by means of the same terms on which they arose. For example, finding a balance between growth and de-growth of the economy, the talk tends to growth by numbers. Is the economy growing, constantly generating more jobs, food and shelter, as the population increases?

Politicians often describe such a bottom line as ‘realistic’ and ‘just’ for the average citizen. But they cannot see their way past a civilisation that was built on the model of a homo economicus. We value ourselves for the amount we can work, our capacity to generate material output. Yet this is irrespective of the cost to our well-being, to communities and to nature’s ability to regenerate. In this model, human lives do not develop steadily as we age. We are worn out.

Within this narrow framework, degrowth means doing less – with less resources. It means taking time off, investing in quality rather than quantity of life. It decentres the work ethic—a shift from being at the office to more leisurely pursuits, changing your eating and travel behaviours.

Balance is not the answer

Balance between these two modes of action has made both of them easy targets: we imagine them as a zero-sum game in which too much of one style is a direct loss for the other. Keeping the economic targets escalating in a post-Brexit Britain, or a deeply divided and competitive US, looks like suicide to those who are aware of the environment at almost any level. Slowing down industrial activity and shifting attention to well-being looks like an assertion of laziness and privilege to the other side. How can we afford to stop!

With this mind-set, balance is more like a see-saw between positions - a bit here and a bit there. The tension increases as each side tries to take advantage, to be on top. Neither feel they are making headway, and they aren’t. The old economy is in terminal decline worldwide, but we are not making meaningful progress towards net zero either. Locked in this inadequate narrative, we live day to day in the hope that our minimal trade-offs (electric cars, meat-free Fridays, voting Green). Meantime, we head for the cliff.

But where is the alternative to growth? Even nature lovers – or parents, entrepreneurs - find it hard to articulate a narrative that doesn’t imply healthy growth is necessary. Maybe even harder to answer is where is the alternative to balance?

A new concept of balance: AI image generated by **alfamaxts677195**

Imbalance is not an attractive proposition for anyone. From biology and neuroscience, we hear that homeostasis is a settled state that’s vital to human flourishing (ref). Anything else seems like a non-starter, an invitation to chaos and risk. Yet when we look back at our lives, have we not all gone through periods of profound imbalance? From childbirth (see Pippa Evans podcast on The First Six Months?) to adolescence, and then to the early tottering years of a career, or a marriage that often ends in failure. It’s a rare person who cannot look back on periods of profound instability in their lives, some lasting for years.

The vast majority of people move past those early developmental crises (“I was a mess!”) reaching a more mature assessment of what happened. We see who we were then and what we might have done differently. But then the mid-life crisis comes, which causes much deeper questioning. It’s no longer simply about ourselves and increasingly about the meaning of life itself.

In societies that don’t value elders it’s difficult to measure the benefits of old age. If we are still thinking of life in purely material ways, there is unavoidable profound loss and diminution. But if we have taken our lessons along the way, there’s the possibility of wisdom, inner strength from hard worn self-acceptance and love, forgiveness of others through understanding – these are all associated with old age too. We say youth is wasted on the young but even more poignantly, ageing is too often wasted on the old.

How can we import the wisdom of maturity into every waking moment, however old we are? How do we embrace the mind-set of experience - a certain confidence that development is likely - before we have it? One way would be to keep elders central to our societal mix. Indeed there is a growing appreciation for how the wisdom of indigenous elders can enable thinking through the future. Another way might be to adopt the model of more extended family culture, common to Asian countries, where age grants you status as you get more vulnerable.

Check your wiring

On the other hand, women have some advantage over men in that they experience the cyclical nature of growth, its rise and fall, in their own bodies each month. They are wired to regenerate. Pain is often the gateway to the next phase of an otherwise predictable growth cycle. What could be more challenging than, after nine months of careful gestation, the obligation to give birth to a child, through the agony of labour? Even women who do not have children – through choice or not – will experience bodies that are designed, hormonally and neurologically, for regeneration as normal.

Historically – and some would claim predominantly till now – women have been responsible for raising children. Of course, that has not led to universal truth about all women – or all children, or families. But the social structures within which women worked gave rise to different cultures and behaviours, leading to possibilities which still portend today.

For example, when staying in the home, a parent can observe at close hand the stages of growth of their offspring, and learn to take waves of development in their stride – especially if there is more than one child to raise. Separated from the expectation to produce profit for an external boss and shareholders, a parent (historically women) sets goals that don’t pitch the ‘growth of the child’ against the ‘harmony of the family’, but hold each of them as interdependent. Growth in this sense means developing the capacity to take responsibility for self and others. Imagine this as a redefinition of ‘growth’ for the wider society.

For those practiced in this work – and it is hard work, generally unpaid - it’s not a balancing act. It can’t be achieved by ‘giving in’ to either the child or the family, without there being losses for everyone. For the parents and older children, witnessing the needs of the youngest child is always directly related to the growth of all the other members of the family. Siblings battling it out for attention move themselves towards independence, within a structure that will continue to hold them—until they are capable of standing on their own two feet.

This interrelatedness is not taught through books; it’s learnt through play, by participation, and becomes natural. For men and women alike, it offers both a way to individuate and to become a team member – to become whole.

The skills of the home parent (historically female) have to be capacious to succeed. They don’t react to the changes in hormones with simple corrective measures. They allow each child to become themselves, often in contrast to the child that arrived before, rather than fit a mould. They create space for upsets – failures, fights, disappointments – without becoming negative about the future. Because they know, from experience, that difficulty develops strength, creates value.

All of this is done, past and still present, without direct forms of monetary payment for its effort and commitment. Instead, it has its own forms of subtle currency, deeply valued and life defining. A non-capitalist system persists – in the private space, under our very feet - throughout the age of capitalism, which is itself now severely in disrepute.

Extending our private space

Our formal sources of information reflect and sustain established structures of socio-economic-political power that were designed, historically, by men. So we tend to separate the system we experience in our homes and call it private. When we go into the world, carrying this knowledge of a different universe of feeling and connectedness in our bodies, we make a distinction between what tends to be called the inner knowledge with the outer.

The public space, for most of us, is quite different from the private, often to the point of contradiction. We can’t afford to be too interested in others when trying to succeed in a world of hard business. In politics, we have to make an enemy of those who overtly make distinctions from our stance in the world. That’s how we make progress.

Yet this separation is not true for everyone. Certainly in the world of the internet, it has become harder to distinguish between public and private. Emotions, relationship and community feel has fused with information and connection. Soft power – persuasion, attraction, storytelling – is the internet’s dominant mechanisms of attention. What might be described as more feminine structures of interrelatedness have become more visible and available.

Maybe this is a moment for all of us to drop this distinction between the public and private, and instead take on the task of ‘growing up’ together. Can we apply the non-capitalist structures and cultures, those that bring us back to wholeness, to our daily lives more broadly? Would that not help us to address our lostness, our cognitive dissonance and move ourselves more directly towards planetary flourishing?

In the Northern hemisphere particularly, there’s a challenge to women that is not simple. How can we avoid the politically dynamic framing of valuing the home as a backwards step that appears conservative. There is no going back: even women who have always preferred to be at home, are now operating in a wider culture that has emancipated women from dependency. They are expected to show up as self-expressed, self-authoring their identities.

The challenge is to be aggressive – confident, decisive, forward - about moving into the public space with relational values without being forceful, coercive or reductive. Understanding that these values are life-saving for individuals while being socially transformative and urgently needed for planetary survival. If we are to be true to our biological and evolved design, we will take everyone with us.

For men, it might be more of a challenge to stop separating the private from the public, to stop allocating emotions, feeling, spirituality to the inner space, appropriate to home. Men should start to recognise the work women have traditionally done (and currently do) as equally important to the work men have done. And that it has always been present, if hidden.

And maybe to give it more priority at this time, as the results of this separation are showing up everywhere as the polycrisis? True partnership between men, women and all genders is not easy. But it’s the quietly radical way to go.

Alternative Editorial: Post-Capitalism From Home