Autopilot

Autopilot. Cruise control.

We humans love it. I know I do.

I’m constantly scanning for the perfect morning routine, meditation, yoga practice (yoga pants, for that matter) so I can just stick to it forever. Then, I think to myself, I will have cracked the code. I’ll be done. I can finally relax.

Set it and forget it.

George Saunders may not have known it at the time, but he describes me so perfectly in this great interview:“I get a little bit addicted to having a stance…but my life to date has been a sequence of having those stances, totally messing them up, recovering, having a new stance, contradicting that one…” and so on and so forth.

I carry this into so many aspects of my life, and it’s a challenge to consciously, continually remind myself: that’s not the point. The point is not to arrive. The point is to move towards.

It’s exhausting to endlessly recalibrate and learn and modify and adjust. But it’s also - exactly - what it means to live a full life.

I mean, if I stopped moving towards (read: learning) today, what would there be left to do? Go on a never-ending Netflix bender?

The pandemic shook some parts of the development sector (among others) out of autopilot, and we were on all the webinars chanting, Build Back Better! This Time Will be Different! Break the System! But now that some people in the places where development organizations are still centered (per my previous rants about Neocolonialism in Development) are vaccinated, that narrative is already feeling a little frayed.

2020 was supposed to be the year we started truly decolonizing development, dismantling racist norms and assumptions that manifest as onerous reporting requirements (among countless other places). But was that just a nice lockdown idea?

Just like the employers who are backpedaling on remote work commitments, many development organizations seem to be forgetting or renegotiating pledges to make direct funding more accessible. Fair and equitable development is becoming like all the box gardens and sourdough starter and Zoom happy hours - relics of that terrifying time we were all on the brink together.

And once again, I am here to tell you that I do not have a brilliant fix for this particular problem. I’m just the annoying person pointing it out. And noticing that, sure, it’s human nature to want to find a solution and settle with it.

But human nature is pretty short-sighted, human memory is practically nonexistent, and autopilot is really just inertia.