The Idea That Sparked 10 for Tomorrow

The genesis of 10 for Tomorrow

It’s not an easy time for those of us that care about equal rights, justice, ethics in general, or—the issue that eats at me every day—the future of life on Earth. The news, when I can bear to read it, is nothing but negative, as the new administration here in America is already issuing draconian threats to our allies and sending them into their corners to join forces against us. (Reading about the reactive, budding “Europe First” movement makes me want to die, both because it’s cringy, a bad mimic, and because it’s such a terrible direction for the world to be heading in.) If our intention is to become an isolationist country at war with itself, we’re heading in the right direction.

All of this leads me to the question that all of us who have a pulse and feel this way are asking ourselves: OK, so what am I going to do about it?

This is a question that I’ve been historically bad at answering. I complain a lot, and, at least before my 8 years staying silent while working my corporate job to feed my family, I attempted to write books that addressed issues, but for the most part I’ve been absolutely terrible at being an environmentalist, despite the fact that the wanton and deliberate destruction of the Earth is something that tugs at me every day.

Specifically, I continue to drive a gas-powered vehicle, because I’m both cheap and lazy, and never seem to get around to replacing my guzzling clunkers with new, electric vehicles. I’m a failed vegetarian—I wrote a guide for vegetarians about twenty-five years-ago—and now I’m a voracious meat-eater, despite being whole-heartedly aware of the carbon emissions of the cattle industry and generally saddened by the unnecessary death of the animals I eat. I don’t bother to compost. Every couple of years I resolve to join a climate organization and go to a couple of meetings (driving my car there, of course), and then back away when I fail to get the warm fuzzies from my fellow environmentalists.

A couple of years ago, my repeated failures in this area got me thinking—What would it take for me to get better at this? What kind of tools have I used in other areas of my life to be successful? And also—If I found something, would that particular thing be a useful tool for other people?

As someone with more-or-less functional ADD, I was able to write novels for about a decade, and then survive the corporate world for eight years, largely through an advanced system of personal gamification, involving productivity apps (Habitica and Toggl Track, currently), meditation, and a daily ritual of mapping out every hour of my day. There are things that are not so great about this routine, most notably it’s not very fun and it’s kind of lonely, but it keeps me mostly on track about 4 or 5 days out of 7. (The rest of the days, when I fall into various forms of distraction, I just have to forgive myself for.)

All of this is a long way of saying that I got an idea: What if I created a technique for becoming a better environmentalist that improved upon my system of gamification, made it social, and turned it into something that other people could use?

And so I started working on what’s essentially a system that gamifies climate action. It’s coming along. I have an instruction manual, a scoring system, and a playable, inexpertly rendered card deck, that I’ve timidly alpha tested with a few friends. (If you’re wondering, no, it hasn’t changed my personal habits a bit. I still don’t have an electric vehicle, I ate about a pound of turkey at Thanksgiving, and I still merely dip my toe in at climate justice meetings.)

This effort is feeling very futile these days, given the massive headwinds coming our way. We can all see the dust on the horizon and are mostly collecting our loved ones and heading underground into our storm cellars. And yet, it’s a thing that I’m doing. Small, but perhaps timely. I don’t exactly have a record of success in my creative endeavors, but frankly, what else is there to do but make your own strange little contributions?

In the words of Everclear from the song Santa Monica—

Walk right up into a brand new day

Insane and rising in my own weird way