this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2024
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Solarpunk
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I'm a shut-in, with untreated health issues, someone who partakes in escapism, and even someone who likes the idea of programming but can't really do much (I tinkered on rendering polygons from text input last September and didn't even finish it enough to be usable for me).
I haven't seen much solarpunk but I've never thought to myself that it'd be worse for me. If I existed in an environment like that (particularly from birth or at least for a long time) I don't think I'd be the same escapist shut-in. I could see open-source games still existing, and maybe programming being better even if people are less likely to have videogames as their most common activity. I've taken care of already-growing plants before, but it seems to me like a lax solarpunk environment would offer more options/opportunity than employment currently offers. Probably actual opportunity to travel, too.
Even carrying over my current mindset and (lack of) capability, I can't see a solarpunk environment being even half as restricted as my experience now. I mean the whole idea is better community and technology used to help people (not strictly for money) so it seems to me you wouldn't be required to garden.
To be fair, it seems like I may have had bad luck in the first three solarpunk works I ever experienced. My issue against the whole idea is "this is a society that can no longer afford to value non-practical pursuits, it is the future we are headed towards, therefore our present society can no longer afford to value non-practical pursuits" that was somehow in all three solarpunk works I encountered.
The three in question were Girl in Wave: Wave in Girl, the Necroverse by "RichM", and a story that a fair-weather friend wrote that I no longer have a copy of that showed a dystopian cybersolarpunk hybrid where "Covid-19 has ended the modern age and now everything is powered by wind turbines because most of us are dead".
As a result of such bad luck, I may have overestimated how central that theme of "self-sufficiency or die" is to the genre.