Saturdays are when I get to do deep dives into interesting articles from my ‘go-to’ sources, such as The Guardian and The Saturday Paper, bringing me to insightful reflections and musings about the state of the world and my own life. What caught my attention were three different angles on the state of the world that is impacting us:

• The nature of nationalism and future viability of the Nation State as political architecture, particularly in a world being shaped by libertarian platform capitalism
• The longevity challenge being posed by modern medical science on intergenerational relationships and our economy
• Consumerism, and the possibility of a pivot toward a new morality of ‘enough’ and the embrace of the circular economy slogan: reuse, repair, regenerate.

NATIONALISM

This morning, reflections on the coming Farrer by-election in NSW, hot on the heels of the One Nation surge in the SA State elections, drew this conclusion.

People no longer see any real difference in economic offering put forward by the major parties and they’re fed up,” he said. “The social contract is fundamentally broken and for many there’s no way to get work that is remunerated appropriately. There is little security for most people.

This idea of the broken social contract, led me to Stan Grant’s musings on 21^st century nationalism, because this idea of a modern social contract is what underpins the legitimacy of the modern democratic nation state. The nation state itself is a recent social innovation, a creature of 19^th century imperialism and political adjustments to the devastations of WWI and WWII as various polities jostled for territory, influence and resources.

Australia talks about itself as the ‘most successful multicultural nation’ in the world, celebrates its national resilience in the Anzac legend, whereby Australian troops were led by the British to sacrificial slaughter on the slopes of the Gallipoli against Turkey in the WWI, and subsequent loss of life memorialised in the French graves of WWII. This Anzac legend of resilience finds purchase in the subsequent losses under the US alliance in the failed wars of Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. The only war of significance to Australia, territorially, was the Pacific War with the Japanese, where our alliance with the US was so deeply forged. Today Japan is our ally and trading partner.

In Australia, our modern nation state came together as a federation of colonies of the British Empire, colonies largely formed by the establishment of convict settlements to take the overflow from the social unrest of industrialising Britain and its troublesome relationship with its nearest neighbour, Ireland—part colony (Northern Island), part independent nation state (Republic of Ireland), shaped by the legacy of the Protestant Reformation and the 17^th century English civil wars, which eventually entrenched Protestantism as the dominant faith in England and Scotland, and restrictions on Catholics, leaving a legacy of sectarian conflicts over faith and access to political representation and resources.

The present map of the nation states of the Middle East is a creation of the colonial powers: particularly the United Kingdom and France, the post war attempt to settle the Jewish problem with the creation of Israel as the expense of the displaced largely Muslim Palestinians, and the later involvement of the US in securing oil resources and transport routes, impacting Egypt, Iran (previously Persia), the Kurds (now split between different nation states), Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, Syria and Lebanon. Like the Christian sectarian conflicts between Protestants and Catholics that consumed Europe, the Middle East has its sectarian conflicts between Sunni and Shia Islam, a potent force simmering beneath attempts to create modern nation states which could take their place in the world of Pax Americana as the international rules-based order established under the United Nations and its various agencies, such as WHO, WTO, UNICEF, UNESCO etc.

In reflections on the SA elections and Malinauskas’ and Hanson’s appeal to Australianess, in a yearning for roots in a rootless world, Stan Grant asks:

In the 21st century, will the nation survive at all? The modern nation mirrors Newtonian bordered states of equal and opposite force. Gravity no longer determines political stability. The 21st century will be quantum: uncertain, entangled, super- positional. Nations will be untethered and less defined. Technology, too, will erode political sovereignty.

What we are seeing is a last gasp of nationhood, a fearful reaction to a world spinning beyond our control. We are living through an age of neo-tribalism. It cuts across the political spectrum, but populists like Hanson are devastatingly effective at tribal warfare. Her followers want to take us back to the future. It is an irrational response to an irrational world. It is also political dynamite.

The 2026 System Release exhibition at Healesville’s Tarra Warra Museum of Art positions art as a field of experimentation that confronts entrenched histories of imbalance while proposing new forms of care and coexistence. Curator Emily Cormack brings together 10 artists from Aotearoa/New Zealand, Australia and Mexico whose practices move beyond linear, human-centred world views towards more critical, relational understandings of existence.

In Carolyn Barnes review of the catalogue essays on Systems Release by Lana Lopesi and Stan Grant, she refers to Stan Grant’s commentary that frames ‘collapse’ (of assumptions about nationhood, for example) as a condition of existence. Here, he again draws on modern physics, linking it to Indigenous philosophy to argue that uncertainty, instability and displacement are intrinsic to the universe and human history. He critiques the modern reliance on history as a source of truth and meaning, suggesting it cannot restore what has been lost. Instead, he proposes that renewal comes from openness to transformation.

LONGEVITY

Lucinda Holdforth posted an article that speaks to something that has been troubling me for some time. I’m right there in this story, as I find myself in my 80^th year, dealing with the vagaries of an ageing body, and contemplating the unwanted challenges of longevity. The great fear of my generation of living too long, of lost independence, of ending up trapped in loneliness and boredom in an aged care facility. Either lost to dementia or lost to a body that no longer functions well enough to enable meaningful engagement with life.

Modern society faces a new dilemma. Not the old one of defeating sickness and old age, but a new one of prolonged longevity. As ˚Holdforth says:

Looked at one way, the modern longevity narrative is an inspirational story of human scientific and social progress. Looked at another you could say that we are now condemned to longevity – our own and other people’s. . .  

For those in or near retirement right now, advances in medical science and public health mean that we are better educated about the health risks we face and certainly better equipped to protect ourselves from those risks. But whether or not we protect our good health, there will still be all those medical interventions to keep us alive in poor health when the time comes.

I’ve been experiencing prolonged abdominal discomfort that had me vegging out on TV watching endless episodes of ER on ABC iView—yes, all 14 seasons. What struck me was not only insights into the chaotic nature of US culture seen through the lens of a Chicago ER trauma ward, but the heroic efforts of doctors and nurses to keep people alive, against all odds, at vast medical expense, only to deliver either subsequent failure as in death, or a much-diminished quality of continuing life. According to The Medical Journal of Australia,In 2013-2014, research reveals we spent over $2,110 million annually on ICU care, at the cost of $4,375 per patient per day. By 2025-26, these costs would be expected to have increased substantially, and will continue to do so, with the aging of the population. The National Institute of Health estimates that Global demand and costs for intensive care services are rapidly increasing due, in part, to technological and treatment advances, ageing populations and rising rates of co-morbid chronic illness.

Holdforth talks about her own father.

My dad, Michael, worked as a butcher until he was 70 years old. He was always kindly, vague, modest and lovable. When he turned 85, his personality started to change. By then he’d been treated for, and survived, several bouts of cancer, a stroke, a heart attack, water on the brain, a broken pelvis with a bout of delirium caused by the morphine, a few more falls, life-threatening sepsis and encroaching peripheral neuropathy that turned his feet and hands into cold, clawed, semi-useless appendages. Dad’s final years were difficult and traumatic for our family as well as genuinely awful for him.

So desperate are many of we modern folk to deny the reality of death in our society, as a natural part of the cycle of life, we treat defeating death as a great medical triumph—whether it’s keeping babies born very premature alive, people suffering traumatic injury, or old folk like me. Yes letting go of loved ones can be sad, very sad. But sadness and grief is also part of life. Older cultures, unable to ‘defeat’ death all had grieving practices that support people through this process of letting go, that bring communities together to collectively share the grief and reweave the fabric of togetherness.

Many who have no faith tradition and are either agnostic or atheist might find it hard to let go into ‘nothingness’. Perhaps we need new rituals of letting go into the vast embrace of Mother Earth, the regenerative dynamism of life itself of which we are but a small part for a time. For others they have their various faith beliefs. Here it is important to emphasise traditions of forgiveness rather than punishment, of compassion rather than vengeance.

For often religious reasons or fear we might encourage suicide, we resist granting people the legal right to die when facing prolonged illness. Yet surely this is as much their right as the right to refuse treatment in their Advanced Care Directives. As a greater proportion of the modern population reach old age, the urgency of addressing these issues will only increase. And in this context, it is important to remember that the burden of caring falls overwhelmingly on women—as daughters or aged care workers—often at a time when they are also having to care for their own younger children. This double care burden, on top of having created the necessity of a two-income family, is placing a terrible burden on family life.

We seemingly don’t hesitate to get in the way of ‘God’s will’, when we use extreme medical intervention to prolong life. We celebrate people reaching the 100yrs as a great triumph, when soon we are told that will be the norm, so clever are we at delaying death. Some of us have even invested in cryogenics as a scientific way of somehow claiming immortality, now that belief in an everlasting life in heaven for the virtuous seems to have slipped from our culture.

Or maybe we children of modern profligacy all recognise we are sinners, destroyers of our world through rampant consumerism and overarching pride in our selfish cleverness.

SIMPLIFICATION

And this reflection on profligacy brings me to Ann Kilpatrick’s new book, ‘Not Needing New: A Practical Guide to Finding the Joy of Enough.’ She reflects what many have learned. Owning more stuff doesn’t usually bring more happiness. Constantly buying stuff is a short sugar hit that fails as soon as the desired object is purchased. No matter how hard you try to keep up with the ‘Joneses’, you always somehow feel behind.

Instead she suggests we adopt the following strategies:

1. BORROWING—Reach out to your neighbours and borrow stuff where you can, and lend to them what you might. This builds neighbourly connections, neighbourhood resilience, a spirit of generosity, tolerance and trust.

You have to push yourself out of your comfort zone, but the rewards are enormous. When you get to know the people you live around, they start looking out for you and everyone feels valued. To avoid being all take and no give, baks cakes or buys small gifts for lenders. Whatever is possible.

2. RETHINKING GIFTS—instead of valuing gifts by the amount they cost, think of gifts in terms of simple gestures that make a difference. Most of us have more stuff than we need.

Kilpatrick recommends making gift tokens: Doing things for people – babysitting, baking a cake, mowing the lawn – is a brilliant way to show your love.

3. RESIST THE COMPARISON TRAP—social media and advertising are designed to push our comparative thinking buttons. “Wow that’s nice. Why can’t I have one?” “Why should they have that, and I don’t?” “How can I make that happen for me?” With these thoughts, the direct intent of advertising, comes jealousy and envy, two of the seven deadly sins, which in turn leads to rage and frustration—the spiral into self-pity and self-loathing. Spoiler alert: the world of air-brushed social media influencers and advertising is not REAL – it projects an unattainable fantasy that is designed to make you spend money, usually on what you don’t need. She suggests that “the more you leave the distraction of social media, the more your own self comes back and the comparisons go away.”
4. SLOW SHOPPING—resist impulse buying, especially as a distraction when you are feeling low, and are looking for some for some form of self-soothing. Impulse buying is the same as the tendency to reach for a sweat treat, or a drink or cigarette. It’s addiction country. Instead slow the shopping instinct down and treat it as a research project, really investigating that object of your desire/need. Check against the reality of what you can afford, and make sure you are going for quality and endurance, rather than the throw-away of ‘fast fashion’.
5. CARE AND REPAIR—take care of your possessions, and repair them as much as possible. There is now a great deal of interest in rejecting the throw-away culture of modern appliances, and returning to a time when it was possible to repair things. When it comes to our clothes, we can return to the art of mending, and even learn and develop the joy of sewing and making things ourselves. Many communities now have repair cafes, where we can take our things to see if repair is possible. Men’s Sheds and Women’s Sheds are now common in many communities as mostly retired folk have found a way to keep their skills alive, develop new skills and make friends. Women are learning how to use power tools, and men are learning how to thread the needle. Everyone is learning some basic skills in making small repairs themselves.
6. LESS HAVING, MORE DOING—it’s time to shift our self-soothing practices from getting and having, to more getting out and doing, enjoying the small pleasures of life. Many can be solitary pleasures. Walking in nature. Taking a small sketch pad and recording your thoughts in words and images. Pausing to notice what is around you. Practising the art of appreciation on a daily basis really helps us shift our attention from wanting/dissatisfication and unhappiness to appreciating/satisfaction and inner contentment.