This essay contributes to the recent criticism against individualism and cognitivism in environmental social scientific theorizing by conceptualizing two undertheorized phenomena related to environmental changes: uneventfulness and irrelevance. Under much of environmental predicament lies a process characterized by recurrent acts through which pieces of sociomateriality are taken from or added to a particular sociomaterial system. Such process not only produces cumulative sociomaterial changes, but also the corresponding withdrawals and additions lose their eventfulness over time. Elaborating on Theodore Schatzki's work, complexity is built into the concept of practice rather than accounting for complexity with the interrelatedness of practices. Another part of the essay analyzes the subjectivity of the actor, focusing on the relevance structures of the ordinary citizens in the Global North. Environmental changes are imposed to the consciousness as intellectual problems, which tend to be incommensurate with the pragmatic necessities of everyday life. Applying Alfred Schütz's phenomenological sociology to environmental phenomena opens up new avenues for empirical environmental sociology. Understanding the objective uneventfulness and subjective irrelevance associated with much of environmental changes helps explain the inactivity of the masses amid widespread attention on the environmental predicament.

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The diffusion of technological artifacts, in particular, devices of communication and the Internet have transformed the life-world of essentially everyone living in a modern society. In the past few years our everyday, including livelihoods, has seen a proliferation of activities within virtual worlds, such as games and virtual social networks. We can now live and experience actively in different virtual realms, as compared to being mere passive receivers in the era of television and radio. This has direct implications in what is inherently relevant for people and, in consequence, we have to take such transformation in account also in conceptual terms. The main implication to the conceptual palette of phenomenological sociology is that due to virtualization, we can no more equate the paramount reality as the zone of primary relevance. The paramount reality as conceived as the sensorily perceivable, physical world of concrete objects is increasingly far from being equated to the zone of primary relevance; that part of the world within our reach which we can immediately observe and also at least partially dominate. It is furthermore argued that the ongoing virtualization of societies urges us to conceive virtual worlds as transforming the subuniverse of the world of working instead of seeing virtual worlds merely as other finite provinces of meaning. Based on Alfred Schütz's work, this essay conceptually scrutinizes virtual worlds with an aim to clarify what is at stake with the virtualization of the modern society.

Drawing on Alfred Schütz’s thought, as well as on a number of modern pragmatists and practice theorists, we theorize incomegetting—referring to practices of getting income, typically salaried work—as the paramount structurer of everyday life and, therefore, also the chief mediator of the human–nature metabolism. Even though the pragmatics of everyday life as an aggregate underlie the bulk of environmental impacts, these insidious impacts impose little immediate influence on everyday life, in particular in the urban Global North. In other words, the pragmatic dimension of everyday activities—principally, work—that takes place within a vastly complex and globally interlinked productive world system, has most often no immediate connection to the “natural” environment. While parts of the populations are directly dependent in terms of livelihoods on the “natural” environment, these populations are typically pushed to the margins of the global productive system. The understanding formulated in this essay suggests that in environmental social sciences there is a reason to shift the epicenter of the analysis from consumption to everyday life, to the varied practices of incomegetting. Against the backdrop of this paper, universal basic income schemes ought to have radical impacts on the way we relate also to the “natural” environment and such schemes necessitate understanding the essence of money in our contemporary realities.