> [!NOTE] How to Live Fully and Beautifully in a Collapsing World > A philosophical journey through multisystem collapse — arguing that the hope of saving the old growth-based world is over, and that truth, grief, simplicity, art and love are what can hold us instead. Based on 200+ expert interviews (climate scientists, economists, philosophers, grief walkers, spiritual elders). No fixes or solutions offered — only "chosen ways of being" in an uncertain predicament. `Author:` Sarah Wilson ## Summary Wilson makes her case in three movements. First, she lays down the diagnosis: we are not in a series of separate crises but in one big, interconnected **multisystem collapse** — climate, energy, finance, democracy, population, biodiversity — driven by a civilisational pile-up balanced precariously on cheap fossil fuel and the growth imperative. Peak net fossil fuels hit in 2023; the era of cheap energy is over; and because fossil fuels were never properly priced (the "accounting error"), the whole structure may tip when extraction costs climb. Collapse here is not an event but a process — a drawn-out simplification, "fewer people, less convenience, failing institutions." Second, she works through the psychological terrain this demands: letting go of **hope** (which produces relief), arriving at **truth**, entering **liminality**, facing **death** (personal, planetary, and the death of the "old normal"), releasing **blame** and understanding **denial**, tolerating **uncertainty**, resisting manufactured **anti-chaos**, embracing **ungrowth** and **simplification**, taking up our **duty**, bearing **pain** without anaesthetic, becoming **humble**, recovering right-brain **wisdom**, growing into collective **adulting**, and making **art** in the apocalypse. Third, she lands on **reckoning** and **homecoming**: collapse as a gift that forces us to live simpler, more connected lives; "stunning possibility" replacing hopium; and nature itself as the guru we've been searching for. The recurring refrain throughout: there is no solution, only how we handle it — and the choice lies in that handling. ## Key Takeaways ### 1. Let go of hope; let truth hold you - Hope that we can fix things and continue comfortable, growth-based existence **is over**. This changes everything. - Removing hope produced *relief*, not despair — readers reported permission to be scared, to stop conforming. - Havel: true hope "is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out." - Jonathan Lear's "radical hope": moving forward with no rational justification, just the hunch that we're onto something important about being human. - Integral psychology calls this **post-tragic consciousness**: seeing the tragedy fully, not wallowing, not denying. - Stephen Jenkinson: "You don't need hope to get your bearings. What you need is a willingness to occupy the fact that you were born to a troubled time." ### 2. Collapse is systemic, not linear - Collapse loops and intersects; **complex ≠ complicated** (complicated can be planned; complex is multidimensional and unpredictable). - Every wicked problem is a **multiplier** — climate change increases migration, inequality, conflict, which increases nuclear risk. - Toby Ord: ~17% probability of extinction by 2100; Holden Karnofsky pegs it at 50%. - It's not nefarious force or human corruption — it's **systemic**. We're inside it, not observing from outside. - "Collapse is not an event, it's a process" — slow at first, then rapid. Often just: things get more shit instead of returning to normal. ### 3. The energy cliff is the keystone - Civilization is a "heaving Dr. Seuss picture" stacked atop one engine: **cheap, readily available fossil-fuel energy**. - Peak net fossil fuels: 2023. Now the system goes down the other side of the bell curve. - Not running out of fuel — **can't afford it**. EROEI blows out as reserves get harder to extract. - The "accounting error": fossil fuels never priced for externalities (climate damage, destruction of commons, escalating extraction cost). - If oil goes over $150/barrel, the exponentially-charged megastructure tips. - Tainter: collapse happens when a civilization becomes too complex to pay for the fixes its complexity creates. "We literally can't afford the fossil fuels to make the clean energy transition happen in time." ### 4. Moloch: the game that eats the prize - Named after the biblical god who rewarded child sacrifice with victory — we give away what we're trying to save. - Concert example: one person stands for a better view → everyone stands → everyone loses. - Nuclear arms race, fossil-fuel competition, AI escalation — all peak moloch. Once entered, no one can stop. - Liv Boeree's reframe: **"Don't hate the players, hate the game."** The inverse is the "Goddess of Win-Win" — competition propelled by aligned incentives where everyone wins. - Prisoner's Dilemma resolves if prisoners can collaborate, cooperate, communicate (the three C's). - Yochai Benkler: ~half of all people systematically behave cooperatively. Our desire to collaborate is as strong as our desire to compete. - Indigenous Australian rules of competition: injure someone so they get the message but can still provide for their family — so the game of life keeps going. ### 5. Denial is structural, not moral failure - Denial is evolutionarily essential — freezing in fear would have gotten us eaten. - Ernest Becker: we manage existential fear by subscribing to culturally constructed beliefs (religion, capitalism, the growth story). - Daniel Gilbert: brains wired for immediate threats (tigers), not emergent slow-moving behemoths. If no one is deliberately doing it, we don't perceive it as a threat. - Our tolerance for discomfort has plummeted — 30 years of tech designed to smooth over uncertainty. - Without systems-thinking, denial feels like the only cognitive avenue amid dissonance. - Krishnamurti: "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." ### 6. Liminality: between two worlds - From the Greek for "threshold" — one door shut, next not yet open. Fluorescent-lit no-man's-land. - Better seen as **convergence/emergence** than nothingness: a Venn diagram overlap of past and unknown future. - Jaspers' "axial age" (8th–3rd c. BCE): interregnum marked by unbelievable creativity and radical questions. - Chinese *wei ji* (crisis) = opportunity. English "crisis" from Greek *krisis* = to decide. - The interwar period (post-WWI, pre-WWII) was the last comparable liminal era — birth of existentialism, feminism, fascism, communism simultaneously. - Beauvoir: existentialism refused to render us victims; meaning is created through struggle against obstacles. - Camus: life is absurd; the paradox forces us into authentic happiness — "a happiness without hope," rooted in "the implacable grandeur of this life." - Collective adolescence: humanity stuck in a not-quite-adulting era, lacking rite of passage. ### 7. Death: three deaths at play - Personal death (Freud's mortality paradox: "no one believes in his own death"). - Planetary/civilizational death. - **Death of the "old normal"** — growth imperative, supply-demand model, well-being pegged to GDP, myth of human dominion over nature. - Secular culture replaced aging/dying rituals with obsession with youth and avoidant longevity protocols — leaving us ill-equipped for both dying and living. - Population: peaking at 9–10 billion (2050–2080), then declining dramatically. South Korea fertility: 0.7. By 2100, 98% of countries shrinking. - Timing problem: ecological/climate collapse irreversibly underway before population decline relieves strain. - Memento mori practice (Montaigne, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius): "Let each thing you would do, say, or intend, be like that of a dying person." - Kafka to Milena: "I wish the world were ending tomorrow. Then I could take the next train… Come with me. We are going to love each other without scruples or fear or restraint." ### 8. Ungrowth and the great simplification - Boulding: "Anyone who believes in indefinite growth in anything physical, on a physically finite planet, is either mad or an economist." - Degrowth (Hickel), Doughnut Economics (Raworth), UBI, four-day weeks, economics of arrival — all beautiful, all hamstrung by timing and by the system they'd have to overthrow. Classic moloch. - Friedman (ironically): "Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around." These ungrowth ideas will be the ideas lying around. - Nate Hagens: collapse = "great simplification." Vinay Gupta: "What you call collapse means living in the same conditions as the people who grow your coffee." - Historically, collapse often improved everyday people's lives (Luke Kemp: "After the fall of Rome, people actually got taller and healthier"). - Humans are designed for austerity — WWII rationing saw improved health outcomes and highest happiness levels (Blitz comradery). - Sufficiency: switching the end goal to well-being within planetary boundaries; glorifying "less." - "Living with fewer things is elegant. You move faster and lighter through life." ### 9. Pain, grief, and dancing - Joanna Macy: "sacred pain" — our pain becomes sacred when it deepens connection with the world. "If we're going to grow up as a species, we have to feel the horror of which we're capable, without an anesthetic." - Francis Weller: we're an ascension culture that dodges going "down." Grief is wild, feral energy — going into it is protest against living "numb and small." - Camus: "There is no love of life without despair of life." Despair is the spark of common humanity. - Pauline Boss: **ambiguous loss** — mourning something both present and absent (Alzheimer's, the old normal). Linear five-stage models fail here. - Rabbi Sharon Brous's ritual: mourners circle counterclockwise, against the current. Passersby ask "What happened to you?" and answer "You are not alone." - Courage as antidote to despair (Macy): walking toward danger makes you larger than life. - **Dancing**: eras of greatest distress see most dancing (disco mania: 1975, Vietnam ends). Fight-or-flight releases stress hormones; societal threats can't be fought or fled, so bodies seek to "shake off" terror. Dance is a "despair composter." ### 10. Wisdom: going right-brained - McGilchrist: civilizations become left-brained as complexity grows — rigid rules, bureaucracy, binary thinking, technocrats rising. "We are a civilization with severe right-hemisphere damage." - Right hemisphere: context, interrelationship, metaphor, the point of it all. Left: categories, linear order, time constructs. - Jill Bolte Taylor (stroke survivor, mostly right-brain now): "just go right!" Observe the left force-fitting things into categories; see it as false construct; notice how body feels. - Practices for going right: movement/exercise, being in nature, gratitude, soul nerding (studying wisdom traditions), Rilke's "live the questions now." - Le Guin: "To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness." ### 11. Adulting: warriors of the human spirit - Toby Ord: humanity is sixteen years old — "just coming into our power; just old enough to get ourselves in serious trouble." - Jung's apocalypse archetype: the collective Self must brutally uncover its shadows to allow maturation into a new worldview. - Meg Wheatley's "warriors of the human spirit": those who don't flee but bear it, abide, serve. Known by compassionate presence and cheerfulness. - Fairy tales vs hero's journey: fairy tales (mostly kids/women, undersized, marginalized) survive through **collaboration, cooperation, communication** — forming alliances with underdogs, old women, small animals. "The fairy tale is the more adult journey now." - Midlife women dominate collapse awareness and activism (~two-thirds of US climate activists are women, avg age 52). Calling for "a mature, feminized style of wisdom and leadership." ### 12. Art in the apocalypse - Churchill: "Then what would we be fighting for?" (re: cutting arts funding). - Teju Cole: the artist "raises a palm as if to say hush and listen and let's be still." - Ta-Nehisi Coates: books "should haunt us." Kafka: books are "the axe for the frozen sea within us." - Art cuts through distraction/chaos, gets us paying attention, shakes us awake into engagement. - We've spent 200 years lauding left-brained qualities (rationality, data, precision) while diminishing caring, stewardship, intuition, nobly bearing, wisdom. ### 13. Metacrisis and anti-chaos - Beyond polycrisis (many crises feeding each other), there's the **metacrisis**: our inability to fathom, discuss, or resolve the polycrisis — plus the underlying individualist/extractivist mindset that caused it. - In crisis, trust in institutions collapses → vulnerability to misinformation and conspiracy. We invent enemies when none is tangible. - Chaos is a tactic: Bannon's "flood the zone with shit"; fossil industry muddying waters (Oreskes); gaslighting; straw-manning; bullshit (Frankfurt: more dangerous than lying because it disregards truth entirely). - Arendt: chaos-making precedes totalitarianism. Antidote: **to think**. "It is nothing more than to think what we are doing." - Talking sanity through IRL in nature builds trust; treating attention reclamation as "a radical act of defiance." - Brontë vélez: "How will I be useless to capitalism today?" ### 14. Post-blame: forgiveness as strategy - Catherine Ingram: "Nearly all of us went along on the ride and enjoyed the benefits… But where can we lay blame?" - No single Machiavellian force. Opportunists exist and should be condemned, but blame isn't the energy we should engage in. - Shirky Principle: "Institutions will try to preserve the problems to which they are the solution." - Kunstler: we did destructive things because "it just seemed a good idea at the time." Forgiveness-provoking. - BP invented "carbon footprint" to deflect blame; Big Sugar invented "calories in, calories out." Neither had sound science. - Michael Dowd: dropping blame creates "a calm urgency to get complete with self, others, and legacy." - Jem Bendell: "We no longer have a problem; we have a predicament; there is no longer a solution, just an outcome." ### 15. Duty, care, and mutual aid - Hedonic treadmill: lottery winners no happier than controls; accident victims rate themselves above average. Happiness can't be the measure of meaning. - Max Wilbert: "We are solving for the wrong variable. The environmental movement has become about how do we save industrial civilization — the very thing causing the destruction." - The right fight: **democratizing survivability**, ungrowth, simplification, preserving humanity. - Vanessa Andreotti: our generation's role is to **hospice** the old normal — minimize suffering as things go down. - Margaret Mead: first sign of civilization = a healed femur (someone cared for the injured). - Indy Johar: "re-agenticizing nature" — animals, trees, soil have their own value, not inert resources. - Pablo Servigne: **mutual aid** as self-organization tool allowing communities to function without supply chains. - Build community and prosocially prep. Cultivate friends. Create "scenes" or hot spots of cool. - "If all else fails, or you lose focus, just care. Care all over the place. When a world sees care in other people's faces, it shifts." ### 16. Reckoning and homecoming - Collapse forces us to confront what matters when we "lose it all." Steers us to live simpler, more connected lives. - Frankl: a meaningful "why" helps us bear the treacherous "how." Collapse is laying out the why. - Would we want to preserve the old normal even if we could? Probably not. - Even if we're wrong about collapse: would we do it anyway? Face truth, simplify, consume less, build community, rise into maturity? - Collapse as **gift**: pushing us toward a way of being we're craving that nothing else could deliver. - Michael Dowd: "Great Homecoming." Joanna Macy: "Great Turning." - Jonathan Lear: the "we will not be missed" argument is avoidance — lets us bypass intolerable sadness. Spiritually wrong. - Meg Wheatley: "We have been gifted with the realization we were made for this time." / "It's time to ask who we really are." - Baldwin: "Wherever human beings are, we at least have a chance, because we're not only disasters; we're also miracles." - Fractal activism (Andrea Ritchie): small right moves replicated like snowflake patterns — efficient, effective, powered by fierce love. - Slime mold solving Tokyo subway: nature's emergent strategies more efficient than linear strategizing. Our guru is nature, it's life. - Osho: "Move the way love makes you move." Love enlarges, glides, does it anyway. ## Quotes - "Sometimes as an antidote to fear of death, I eat the stars. Those nights, lying on my back, I suck them from the quenching dark til they are all, all inside me, pepper hot and sharp." — Rebecca Elson (title poem) - "True hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out." — Václav Havel - "You don't need hope to get your bearings. What you need is a willingness to occupy the fact that you were born to a troubled time." — Stephen Jenkinson - "Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder." — Arnold Toynbee - "The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization." — Ralph Waldo Emerson - "We are not the dinosaurs. We are the meteor. We are not only in danger. We are the danger." — António Guterres - "The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters." — Antonio Gramsci - "Life is absurd… the paradox itself forces us into a truly authentic happiness, a happiness without hope… the implacable grandeur of this life." — Albert Camus - "Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now take what's left and live it properly." — Marcus Aurelius - "Dear Milena, I wish the world were ending tomorrow. Then I could take the next train, arrive at your doorstep in Vienna, and say: 'Come with me. We are going to love each other without scruples or fear or restraint.'" — Franz Kafka - "Negative capability: being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." — John Keats - "Stay with the trouble… We become, with each other, or not at all." — Donna Haraway - "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." — Upton Sinclair - "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." — Jiddu Krishnamurti - "Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around." — Milton Friedman - "Anyone who believes in indefinite growth in anything physical, on a physically finite planet, is either mad or an economist." — Kenneth Boulding - "Our pain becomes sacred when we allow it to deepen our connection with our world." — Joanna Macy - "There is no love of life without despair of life." — Albert Camus - "Grief is wild; it's a feral energy. So when people really open up to grief, the last thing they are doing is operating in a polite or socialized manner." — Francis Weller - "Eras of greatest material and moral distress seem to be those during which people dance most." — Philippe de Félice - "We are a civilization with severe right-hemisphere damage." — Iain McGilchrist - "To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness." — Ursula K. Le Guin - "Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves… Live the questions now." — Rainer Maria Rilke - "The artist raises a palm as if to say hush and listen and let's be still." — Teju Cole - "Books are the axe for the frozen sea within us." — Franz Kafka - "When your heart is broken… you show up. You entrust your pain to the community." — Rabbi Sharon Brous - "We have been gifted with the realization we were made for this time." — Meg Wheatley - "Wherever human beings are, we at least have a chance, because we're not only disasters; we're also miracles." — James Baldwin - "Be like the bird who, pausing in her flight awhile on boughs too slight, feels them give way beneath her, and yet sings, knowing she hath wings." — Victor Hugo ## Notes ### Structure of the book (chapter sequence) Hope → Relief → Truth → Collapse → Spiritual → Liminality → Death → Live → Metacrisis → Moloch → Post-blame → Denial → Uncertainty → Anti-chaos → Ungrowth → Simplification → Duty → Pain → Oh, and We Can Dance! → Humble → Wisdom → Adulting → We Must Create Art in the Apocalypse → Reckoning → Humaning → Homecoming ### Key thinkers referenced | Thinker | Contribution | |---------|-------------| | Joseph Tainter | Collapse of Complex Societies (1988) | | Jared Diamond | Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005) | | Sir John Glubb | Six stages of civilizational rise/fall | | William Ophuls | Sixth stage characteristics (decadence) | | Club of Rome | Limits to Growth (1972) | | Nate Hagens | Energy cliff, EROEI, great simplification | | Toby Ord | Extinction risk (17%), humanity as 16-year-old | | Liv Boeree | Moloch game theory, "don't hate the players" | | Iain McGilchrist | Left/right brain hemispheres, civilizational damage | | Jill Bolte Taylor | Stroke experience, "just go right" | | Meg Wheatley | Warriors of the human spirit, mentoring | | Joanna Macy | Sacred pain, Great Turning | | Francis Weller | Grief as feral energy, ascension culture critique | | Donna Haraway | Stay with the trouble, compost piles | | Albert Camus | Absurdity, happiness without hope | | Simone de Beauvoir | Existentialism, meaning through struggle | | Hannah Arendt | Banality of evil, thinking as antidote to chaos | | Erich Fromm | Point of it all, study in work and love, Art of Loving | | Jonathan Lear | Radical hope, Imagining the End | | Jem Bendell | Deep Adaptation, Breaking Together, predicament not problem | | Vanessa Andreotti | Hospicing Modernity | | Pablo Servigne | Mutual aid, Another End of the World Is Possible | | Stephen Jenkinson | Grief walker, occupying troubled time | | Viktor Frankl | Meaning (why) bears suffering (how) | | Carl Jung | Apocalypse archetype, collective Self | | Rebecca Solnit | Active hope, fairy tales vs hero's journey | | Pema Chödrön | Starting where we are | | Elizabeth Oldfield | Nonanxious presence | | Glen Albrecht | Solastalgia, Symbiocene | | Tyson Yunkaporta | Indigenous knowledge, custodial role | | Clay Shirky | Institutions preserve their problems | | Harry Frankfurt | Bullshit vs lying | | Naomi Oreskes | Merchants of Doubt | | Fredric Jameson / Žižek | "End of capitalism" line (attribution disputed) | | Kate Raworth | Doughnut Economics | | Jason Hickel | Degrowth economics | | Yochai Benkler | Cooperation over self-interest | | Dacher Keltner | Awe: vastness or kindness, oxytocin | | Brené Brown | "Something is happening" (reframing anxiety as excitement) | | Oliver Burkeman | Cosmic insignificance as empowerment | | Sebastian Junger | Tribe, WWII comradery, suicide rates dropping | ### Themes connecting to my own work - **NEB / climate awareness**: Wilson's framing of "democratizing survivability" vs saving industrial civilization maps directly onto NEB messaging. The hospice metaphor (Andreotti) resonates with emergency-briefing language. - **Comfortably Numb design**: Weller's "ascension culture" + Weller/Frankfurt on numbness + the "culture of uncare" (Sally Weintrobe) feed the anesthesia/waking theme directly. - **Sea/ocean in painting**: The book's title poem (lying on back, sucking stars from the dark), Sagan's pale blue dot, the Symbiocene, and the "be in nature" passages (tidal pools, murmurations, coastal walks) align with the Southsea cloud piece. - **Paradox and language**: Hypernormalization (Yurchak), ambiguous loss (Boss), metacrisis, the confusion etymology ("pouring together"), Camus's absurdity — all feed the interest in paradoxes language papers over. - **Teemill / Just Stop It**: The post-blame chapter and "it just seemed a good idea at the time" (Kunstler) offer a tone for messaging that doesn't demonize consumers. ### Red-highlighted passages (strongest reactions) 1. Post-tragic consciousness — "big and serious and, wow, we're all here together" 2. Collective liminality / not-quite-adulting for decades 3. "Yes, dear, we thought we were so very smart, but we're really just little specks—ants perhaps—marching to the beat of a far bigger system" 4. "We can't afford to question where so much upward trajectory will end" (growth critique) 5. Literature/art reacting to growth (Frankenstein, Romanticism, Dickens, Nietzsche) 6. "We are solving for the wrong variable" (Max Wilbert on environmental movement) 7. Grief as protest against "numb and small" (Weller) 8. Normalizing grief as appropriate response 9. "Certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out" (Havel) — full relief of arriving in solid truth 10. "It's time to ask who we really are" (Wheatley, closing line) > [!info] > Read alongside: *The Collapse of Complex Societies* (Tainter), *Deep Adaptation* (Bendell), *Breaking Together* (Bendell), *Imagining the End* (Lear), *Another End of the World Is Possible* (Servigne), *Hospicing Modernity* (Andreotti), *The Wild Edge of Sorrow* (Weller), *Tribe* (Junger) --- # I Eat the Stars Highlights and Notes Cover 0.2%, Yellow: ““As I read chapter after chapter of this book, I realized that Sarah Wilson understands it all—every aspect of our species, our societies, and our inclinations that make us vulnerable to collapse. I have met no one else with such knowledge and insight. Whatever your taste in reading, if you are concerned about our future, take this book seriously.” —Joseph A. Tainter, author of The Collapse of Complex Societies “A chilling and important book about the chaos and complexity of what’s happening in the world—and how to understand it at a human level.” —Johann Hari, New York Times bestselling author of Stolen Focus” I’d Love You to Know a Few Things Before We Start 1.7%, Yellow: “This book is not an easy book. It is about the collapse of the systems that once held our world together, and it requires facing a bunch of brutal truths and large feelings that perhaps you’ve been avoiding—for very fair reason. So it may not be for you just now. And this is very okay. That said, I’d urge you to read the first three chapters and see how you feel. You can best decide from there. I will say, however, for me, squaring with the epistemic, emotional, and sacred truths that I lay out in this book has landed me in the most profoundly fulfilled and joyous place in my life. In many ways the process is like a homecoming.” 2%, Yellow: “Along the way I interviewed more than two hundred experts—energy futurists, economists, philosophers, climate scientists, effective altruists, demographers, spiritualists, and at least two nuns. You can find most of these interviews on my Wild with Sarah Wilson podcast[*1] if you’d like to delve deeper into their work.” 2.2%, Yellow: “I present a kaleidoscope of ideas. No one expert, theory, or explainer can possibly hold it all. And to this end, don’t feel you have to either. Go easy on yourself. My suggestion: Have a felt experience and let things… emerge. I also want to warn from the get-go that I won’t be providing fixes or solutions. And I will avoid writing in absolutes. It’s because what we are in is a wholly uncertain predicament with no such fixes or solutions, only chosen ways of being in it. Again, I invite you to get okay with this. It’s part of the process.” 2.6%, Yellow: “Oh, and a note on the title, I Eat the Stars. It’s a line from a poem—“Antidotes to Fear of Death”—by astronomer and poet Rebecca Elson, who died at thirty-nine from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. It appears in her book of poetry, Responsibility to Awe (a thoroughly awesome title), which she wrote as she faced her own bodily collapse. Sometimes as an antidote To fear of death, I eat the stars. Those nights, lying on my back, I suck them from the quenching dark Til they are all, all inside me, Pepper hot and sharp.” Hope 3%, Yellow: “For decades as a climate activist I preached hope. I’d be asked, Sarah, do you think humanity can still wrangle its way out of this global heating crisis? Will we be able to bring along the deniers, the uber rich, Elon? Can we do it in time? Is there… hope? Yes! Yes! I’d cry. There’s still hope! I would use sporting analogies and tales of superhuman feats that saw us escape calamity at the eleventh hour as evidence that if we hung on to hope, we could make it. Of course, I was careful to talk of an “active hope,” drawing on American writer and activist Rebecca Solnit’s thesis that real hope is optimism combined with action. To blithely sit back and optimistically believe that someone else “out there” will magically fix things was as dangerous as pessimism, people like me would say. Both result in deadly inaction.” 3.6%, Yellow: “But what about the green energy transition? Won’t that save us? Look, I had truly hoped it would. I told everyone who’d listen it was going to. If we could all just electrify everything—switch out gas-guzzlers for EVs and gas cooktops for induction, and support solar and wind investments—we would right the ship. Wonderfully, we’ve been switching to renewables at an impressive rate. It’s a magnificent thing to witness. But we’ve also been dialing up our use of fossil-fuel energy at the same time. It’s a paradox, right? And it has a name. Jevons paradox describes how whenever humans invent a new form of technology or bring in new policies geared at saving time or money or energy, we wind up increasing overall consumption and negating any efficiencies we were shooting for. Sigh. Take washing machines. They were meant to save time and resources. But we wound up just washing our clothes more often. We invented more fuel-efficient cars and drove more. It’s what we humans do. The green switch also relies on existing emissions being offset. Alas, a 2023 joint investigation by The Guardian, Die Zeit, and Source Material, a nonprofit investigative journalism organization, found over 90 percent of certified forest carbon offsets are essentially worthless[5] for a bunch of complex reasons including the fact that corporations have largely exploited the carbon credit system,[6] and because it turns out that climate warming is increasingly causing these forests to be destroyed in wildfires, whereupon any stored carbon is released straight back into the atmosphere—to the point where, since 2001, Canada’s carbon offset forests have been a net emitter.[7]” 4%, Yellow: “Yes, sunshine and wind are renewable. But solar panels and wind farms are just not. We need to finally get honest about this. What about nuclear? And geoengineering—those sun visors and sulfur clouds? What about offsetting and abating? Can’t these human ingenuity solutions save us?” 4.6%, Yellow: “Are we going to make it? How are those deadlines going? They all told me that since I was asking so directly, they had to admit: The picture was no longer… hopeful.[*1] At all. One prominent US climate scientist and author told me she could no longer do media interviews. “I can’t push hope just to protect people’s emotions,” she said. A friend in the energy market space told me he was avoiding many social occasions now. “It’s got too hard.” * So, as I set out to write this book, I hit a very sticky juncture. We’re at it right here, now, together. I had to declare that I no longer have hope. Seeing the words on the page, I’m aware they sit so very awkwardly between us. And when I first said them out loud I felt I was betraying something or someone. The first person I said it to was my dad. He went quiet and put on his disapproving grimace. Then hot tears formed in his eyes, and he said, “But what about your nieces and nephews?”” 5.1%, Yellow: “One night I was talking Liam through this chapter. Like Dad, he got upset to hear me say that I didn’t have hope. So I clarified a few things, and he asked that I write them down here for all of you. I still, to be sure, live to a hopeful vibe. I get up every day buzzing with an “onward” energy. I continue to think there is something positive to fight for, to reach for. But hope is no longer the destination. That’s the big difference. I’m also just as committed as ever to the climate fight, for reasons we’ll get to. Plus, I have so, so much hope for a lot of other things. I have hope that humans will keep coming back to love. I have hope, or faith, in humans’ desire to survive. I have hope that there are a lot of brave people out there, and that the bulk of us—or at least enough of us—will rise to the challenges before us. I have hope that what comes next will be meaningful and beautiful. I really do. However, the particular hope that we have hung so much on—that we can fix things and continue our comfortable, growth-based existence on the planet—is over.[*2] And this changes everything.” Relief 5.5%, Yellow: “It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs—and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety. —George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London Now, a strange thing happened. As I started to talk and write about this idea of no longer having hope, I was met with a very particular reaction: relief. In the comments section of my Substack it was universal.” 5.6%, Yellow: “@Zoe: I found myself doing a long exhale. I think hope has kept us confused—like little kids who know their parents are stressed but are saying everything’s fine. @KarenE: I now have permission to be scared. To think Faaaaaaaark… [It’s] a huge hug telling me I am not alone. @KristyH: Does anyone else feel that by accepting collapse is happening and inevitable and losing hope that “they” will fix it, actually feels like permission to buck the systems that aren’t working or aren’t good for us? To stop conforming maybe or just feeling more of a sense of urgency to do things differently?” 5.8%, Yellow: “In 2005 the anthropologist Alexei Yurchak coined “hypernormalization” to describe the psychological experience of civilians in Soviet Russia. The term is now being bandied about to describe what we are in—a totally disorientating, alienating confusion as we witness the world falling apart while everyone pretends nothing has changed.[1]” 6.3%, Yellow: “My friend Eleanor helped me with these first few chapters. In her notes, she wrote, “It’s a quiet, humble surrender, a waving of the flag at the end of our sad attempt to cheat the basic laws of nature.” * All of which makes me think of the Stockdale paradox. James Stockdale was a POW for seven years during the Vietnam War, repeatedly tortured and made to believe he’d never make it out alive. He was one of the highest-ranking naval officers at the time and went on to become a vice-presidential candidate. After his release, Stockdale was asked which prisoners didn’t make it out. “Oh, that’s easy,” he told the reporter. “The optimists.” Stockdale explained that certain men clung to the hope that they’d be out by Christmas, but then Christmas passed. Then they lived for Easter, and Easter passed. Eventually, the men who were trying to hope their way out “died of a broken heart.” Skip Notes * It’s worth knowing, too, that Elon Musk’s Starlink currently controls almost two-thirds of said satellites.” Truth 6.6%, Yellow: “I wondered about this for many months. And then the answer slowly came into view. When I removed my own aching hope from the equation, when I freed myself from the tug-of-war between what I could plainly see was happening around me on the one hand, and the hopium on the other, I noticed that all that was left was… truth. And I began to see that truth is what could hold us instead. Indeed—and here’s the really hope-full reality—when we let go of hope, truth emerges as a far more solid and enlivening thing to peg a life to. The poet, dissident, and former president of the former Czechoslovakia, Václav Havel, captures this subtlety. True hope, as opposed to the dissonance-making kind we’ve been clinging to, “is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”” 6.9%, Yellow: “Of course, we could get bogged down in semantics. What I’m describing is in fact a kind of hope, in that it entails a reaching out to something better. The American philosopher Jonathan Lear fleshes out what he calls a “radical hope” that in some ways gets us closer to what I’m grappling with here. Lear describes radical hope as an honest reckoning that entails moving forward in the face of unbearable loss and with no rational justification for hope, just the “hunch that we are onto something important about being human.” The hunch that we are onto something important about being human… This is such a glorious line, do you agree?” 7.1%, Red: “I discovered that this repositioning from hanging on to hope to bravely confronting reality is called post-tragic consciousness in integral psychology. We see and feel into the tragedy, but we don’t wallow in it, or try to run from it, or deny it (by hoping it away). And we accept the brutality head-on. There it is. And here we are. This is big and serious and, wow, we’re all here together. The emotion is massive, and nothing has prepared me for being in this moment in history.” 7.3%, Yellow: “I interviewed the spiritual elder and author Stephen Jenkinson not so long ago about how to navigate the overwhelming truth we face. Stephen is a “grief walker,” or what some might call a death doula. He has counseled thousands of sick humans and the elderly in their final weeks or months to face the uncertainty, pain, and beauty of the cycle of death and life. “You don’t need hope to get your bearings,” he says. “What you need is a willingness to occupy the fact that you were born to a troubled time.” collapse The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization. —Ralph Waldo Emerson” Collapse 8%, Yellow: “In his 1976 essay “The Fate of Empires,” British historian Sir John Glubb posited that a civilization’s rise and rise and inevitable implosion happened over six stages, with the first couple of stages seeing a society or civilization progressively innovate, conquer, and become prosperous.[2] In the mid-stages, as affluence builds, the dominating discourse switches from morals and values to knowledge and discourse. A society will start to become secular and fixated on rights over collective needs. Academic and political infighting tends to become rife by stage five, “the age of intellect.” By the sixth and final stage, the “age of decadence,” all this growth, success, and intellectual infighting turns in on itself. Like all species and organisms that get too big for their proverbial petri dish, human civilizations can wind up eating themselves up from the inside or destroying their own defenses. Cyanobacteria once filled the oceans with oxygen, but their abundance eventually saw them poison themselves with their own waste. The Byzantines flourished exponentially, but spent the last fifty years of their empire in repeated civil wars (until the Ottomans popped by and were able to finish them off). As historian Arnold Toynbee once wrote, “Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.”” 8.3%, Yellow: “According to William Ophuls, who wrote Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail, the dangerously decadent sixth stage is characterized by behaviors and vibes that you might find frighteningly familiar as a person wandering around the planet today. Take a look at his list: Frivolity, aestheticism, hedonism, cynicism, pessimism, narcissism, consumerism, materialism, nihilism, fatalism, fanatics and other negative behaviors and attitudes suffuse the population. Politics is increasingly corrupt, life increasingly unjust. A cabal of insiders accrues wealth and power at the expense of the citizens, fostering a fatal opposition of interests between haves and have-nots. The majority lives for bread and circuses; they worship celebrities instead of divinities… throw off social and moral restraints—especially sexuality; shirk duties but insist on entitlements. Oh boy.” 8.8%, Yellow: “But one late-autumn afternoon, I finally sat down to start writing. I looked at all my notes, spread across notebooks, spilling out over my desk, and in open tabs and little blue folders scattered across my laptop screen. My breath shortened. And I spun out into a spiky panic. I’d spoken to renowned collapse theorist Meg Wheatley the day before. Meg had come on my podcast a few months earlier and at the end of the interview offered to mentor me. She told me this project would be too hard on my own. On our latest video call Meg warned me that “understanding collapse is not for everyone.” It’s a phrase a number of people in this space use. The sense is that not everyone has the psychological capacity for the brutal details, and to impose the information on them is irresponsible—it could induce mass panic and untold emotional distress. Meg then vigorously cautioned me against wading into the bamboozling, nonlinear complexity of collapse theory and endeavoring to map out all the different ways that we’re fucked. Instead, she suggested that I go straight to the more inviting psychological and spiritual insights that we’ll need for living in a dramatically altered world.” 10.1%, Yellow: “Okay, so since we’re doing this crazy thing (we are, right?) I want to remind you of that point I made at the start of this book. Collapse is not linear. It loops and intersects and so the explainers to come will have to do the same. This is also probably the right moment to flag that complex is not the same as complicated. Complicated things can generally be sorted with careful planning (for example, a long car trip with your partner). Complex things (such as being in a relationship) are multidimensional, unruly, unmanageable, and unpredictable. Also, there are a lot of exclusive (and, frankly, wanky) terms and theories, as well as vested interests, embedded in the discourse that can also do your head in. I got bogged down by most of them and will endeavor to save you from the same by explaining things in plain terms. Okay? We’ll meet at the end and move onward together.” 10.3%, Yellow: “It probably makes sense to start this exploration of multisystem collapse with climate collapse, given that we kicked off with the climate crisis and given we can probably see now that much of the world is already firmly in a state of collapsing climate conditions. This—wide sweep of hand to the back-to-back fires, floods, heat waves, cyclones, plagues, famines, species extinctions, and mass migrations—is what it looks like.” 10.4%, Yellow: “, we are in overshoot—we consume natural resources at a rate that exceeds Earth’s regenerative capacity. As a globe, we now overshoot our annual resources “budget” in July; Australia and the United States hit it in March, the UK and much of Europe in April.” 10.8%, Yellow: “In 1972, a group of esteemed thinkers and economists from around the world that called itself the Club of Rome got together to chew over the thorny question: What would happen if humanity continued to consume the world’s finite resources as if they were limitless? If it pushed infinite growth on a clearly benevolent but finite planet? If we went too far. They ran comprehensive mathematical modeling of future growth and resource use, which resulted in the now famous The Limits to Growth report, initially published by MIT and then produced as a book that sold more than thirty million copies before rather mysteriously going out of print. It is often said that the report spawned the modern environmental movement, as it became clear that growth is what is causing climate collapse. My dad tells me just now as I write this section that it played a part in him and Mum moving the family out to the country to live semi-subsistently in the early 1980s.” 11.1%, Yellow: “It adds that our civilization would descend into collapse shortly thereafter, around 2040. The authors detailed what they meant by collapse: “The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.”” 11.5%, Yellow: “Democracy is clearly collapsing.[7] The United States, which I think now presents as a portent for where the rest of the Western world is heading, is predicted to lose its democratic ranking in the near-term, while 40 percent of the world’s population now lives under authoritarian rule.[8] The progress that capitalism and liberalism are said to have made in eradicating poverty and “rising all ships” (a thesis rolled out by Steven Pinker and others) is now on the decline too.[9] The Gini coefficient, which measures inequality, has increased in 90 percent of all countries. The wealth of the world’s five richest billionaires has more than doubled since 2020, while 60 percent of the rest of us have grown significantly poorer. We’re living through the largest wealth transfer in human history. And it’s expected to get a lot worse.” 11.7%, Yellow: “The nuclear system has also become super wobbly. On January 27, 2026, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set the Doomsday Clock to eighty-five seconds to midnight, moving it closer to catastrophe than ever before. Britain’s army chief declared we have three years to prepare for World War III.[10] That was in 2024. Since then, the European Commission has advised its 450 million citizens to prepare survival kits, and the French health ministry told hospitals to start preparing for war.” 12%, Yellow: “Oh, and each such wicked problem, or complex system, is a “multiplier.” For example, climate change, by increasing migration, inequality, and conflict, in turn increases the risk of nuclear war. A few years back, the Oxford philosopher Toby Ord took all these multiplying risks and calculated the probability of an extinction event occurring by 2100.[14] He arrived at a one-in-six, or 17 percent, probability figure. Ord’s colleague, the long-termist Holden Karnofsky, told me that he pegs the chances at 50 percent (albeit with some caveats on what exactly constitutes an extinction event—full wipeout or just a large thwack of humans).” 12.2%, Yellow: “For about a year or so, I struggled to comprehend that so many different things, indeed everything, could be going wrong. This seemed wrong. Where do we put this much wrongness? How do we stand far enough back from the cinema screen to be able to hold so many “hyperobjects”[*3] in the one picture? But I began to find it weirdly helpful to view this everything through a systems-collapse lens. I saw that it was all the one thing—a big fat collapsing complexity. And we were in this big one thing, not outside it at an observer’s distance. Learning about collapse—of previous civilizations, of species, of microorganisms—has helped me understand that what’s happening isn’t about some nefarious force that’s out to get us. Nor is it unfurling because humans are inherently corrupt and disappointing. It’s beyond that. It’s systemic.” 12.4%, Yellow: “Another way to put it is to say that collapse is a decline of everything that has been relentlessly going up—growing and “progressing”—for centuries. It’s an undoing of all the complexifying we’ve been doing, a coming down the other side of the proverbial bell curve, resulting in fewer people, less convenience, less comfort, failing institutions, and so on.” 12.5%, Yellow: “This decline need not spell the end of the world, nor human wipeout. But it does spell the end of the world as we’ve known it. It’s also likely to be quite a drawn-out, bumpy ride of fits and starts, rather than an overnight disaster. Many commentators in this space like to say “collapse is not an event, it’s a process.”” 12.6%, Yellow: “Often I simply say that collapse is what we are currently in. You know, where things are a bit shit. And instead of returning to “normal”—continual growth and ever more complex systems—they just get more shit.” 12.8%, Yellow: “A complex system of complex systems. I then imagine that this entire heaving, expanding behemoth is balanced precariously atop a little engine, with spinning cogs and pistons—which signifies the fossil-fuel industry, another complex system. Which, in turn, is powered by the “growth imperative.” Here I visualize a propulsion fan, working from behind.” 13%, Yellow: “Indeed, in an interconnected, precariously piled-up system of systems, it only takes one such system to stop growing for the whole lot to come down, like the Ponzi scheme you could say it actually is.” 13.3%, Yellow: “If you can bear with me and this very long and dry section a little longer, we will need to get a real feel for just how dependent this pileup is on the fossil-fuel system, or specifically, its ability to continue to produce cheap, readily available energy. I should cut to the chase here and say that the era of cheap, readily and infinitely available energy has ended. Indeed, we hit peak net fossil fuels in 2023.[16] And now the system goes off what’s called an “energy cliff”; it goes down the other side of that sharp bell curve. The system begins its collapse. This, however, is not to say we will run out of fossil fuels. It’s more complex than that. The issue is that we won’t be able to afford them. As we exhaust easy-to-access reserves, more (fossil-fuel) energy and resources (that require fossil fuels to extract them) are required to dig deeper and extract new reserves. Ergo, the energy return on the energy investment (EROEI) blows out.[17] This is something Big Oil is very aware of. The Journal of Petroleum Technology published an article in 2023 forecasting “energy cannibalism” in 2025.[18] A major petroleum company CEO warned similarly: “2025 and beyond is when the world is going to be short of oil.”[19] This prohibitive cost of extraction will then become too much for, well, the whole system to keep surging onward and upward. It will compromise, then collapse, the global debt system, for instance. And so on down the run of dominos.” 13.6%, Yellow: “But wait. There’s more. Energy futurist Nate Hagens (and others) explains that embedded in the heaving Dr. Seuss picture that is our entire civilizational existence is a profound accounting error (my jargon), something someone really should have thought about before we built that monstrosity atop the precarious huffing-and-puffing premise of unlimited fossil-fueled power and an economy handcuffed to compounding interest and returns. The error rests in the fact that fossil fuels have never been properly priced. Our civilization has only ever paid for the cost of extraction, and per the price when the stuff was simple to extract. It has never factored in, um, more energy-costly extraction, for instance. Nor what are called “externalities,” such as the cost to nature, the cost of climate disasters, and the price of destroying the commons. And so on. According to a study by the Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability on societal tipping points, a peak and fall in global oil production would bring down the entire financial and trade system like a house of cards.[20] In this scenario, following a collapse of the banking system—due to a large amount of debt becoming impossible to repay (global debt is now three times larger than the entire world’s economic output)—all lending would stop overnight. So it’s now dawning that our civilization has been held together for the past 270-odd years not only by a finite and nonrenewable resource but also on a metric the system can’t sustain. This “accounting error” is now catching up with us as the cost of extraction goes up, geopolitical tensions threaten supply, and the emissions bills are rolling in. Estimates by senior economists around the world suggest if oil, which has hovered around $70 to $85 a barrel, goes over $150 a barrel, the whole exponentially charged Dr. Seuss megastructure tips.” 13.9%, Yellow: “We will run out of energy on Earth. This is just arithmetic; it’s going to happen. —Jeff Bezos, explaining why we need to go to the moon[22] * Joseph Tainter argues in his 1988 book The Collapse of Complex Societies that collapse happens when a civilization becomes too complex to fix the problems that its complexity creates. Or more specifically, when it becomes too complex to be able to pay for the fixes, as we saw in the Roman Empire example we fleshed out earlier. Complex societies tend to have all their resources tied up in trying to keep the behemoth propelling forward. So whether the tipping factor is a flood or famine, a war, a supply-chain hiccup, a population drop-off, or some AI-generated chaos, the ultimate blow will be that there is no financial fat left to recover and repair. In our global, postindustrial civilization’s case, our carbon emissions and, by proxy, our energy and resources problems are what are ultimately too expensive to fix. And so… we literally can’t afford the fossil fuels to make the requisite clean energy transition happen in time.” 14.3%, Yellow: “In 2005 the historian and scientist Jared Diamond published the bestselling book Collapse, touching on many of these themes, somewhat more speculatively. The book has the subtitle How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Here, I home in on the word “choose.” There is a choice here. I think it lies in how we handle what we are now in. I’ll flag here that this is a theme that I will keep coming back to.” 14.6%, Yellow: “As climate psychologist Margaret Salamon once told me, “Starving people don’t just lie down and die, they fight for the last of the food and water.” * Do you mind if I flesh this out just a touch more? It’s pretty key. The Complexity Science Hub in Austria has found that societal stability is the best predictor of whether a civilization will handle a climate challenge, for instance.[23] Flip side, in a wobbly society (with crumbling trust issues, a proliferation of fake news, binary tit-for-tatting as public discourse, etc.), even a small climate stressor “can lead to chaos—and collapse.” Stability, they clarify, is determined by low levels of—and do read this twice, please—inequality and polarization. Peter Turchin, a Russian American scientist and veritable polymath, builds on this in his book End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration. He argues that inequality and polarization happen when a society produces an excess of “elite” men (Turchin specifies men) who feel locked out of socially accepted positions of success and thus stir up conflict. Fans of the Russian and French revolutions would be familiar with this story arc. Today these disenfranchised (mostly) male elites launch podcasts that spread conspiracy theories, they champion the sovereignty movement, they start up the alt-right think tanks.” 15.1%, Yellow: “ “The only question left is, are we too late?” “Well, it depends,” I replied. Too late for what? Too late to save the crumbling fossil-fueled, extractive, exploitative, colonialist complex we’ve been embedded in for almost three centuries? I’d say so. Too late to save humanity or the bulk of it? I don’t know. But, I said, there are a bunch of things we are definitely not too late for. Such as putting our efforts into saving as much of the natural world (and each other) as we can. And handling things like fired-up, fully adult warriors. We are also not too late to live, like really live. Actually, we might be just in time.” 15.3%, Yellow: “My mate Timothy Morton coined this term to describe “entities of such vast temporal and spatial dimensions that they defeat traditional ideas about what a thing is in the first place.” *4 It’s back on page 27 if you’re looking for it!” Spiritual 15.6%, Yellow: “I tell Anthony that I think we do things—the work, the sacrifice, the small and large gestures even when no one else is doing them—to be the person we actually want to be in this lifetime. In final washups, when we’re stripped bare (as I think we are likely to be pretty soon), how do you want to go down, what sort of person do you want to be looking at in the mirror? “I think the person we want to be is kind,” I say to Anthony. Because kindness is the substance that keeps our sense of self vertical. We ultimately ache to downgrade our own self-importance and to release our inward obsession with finding our own happiness and to instead give to others. Because it’s in relationships, in the giving outward, that we find real joy. I’m on a roll. Our happiness, our sense of the point of it all, is an outward-moving thing (not a clutching outward, but a giving outward). We recycle, we pay the donation to the climate or refugee charity when no one’s watching, because being part of this productive, aligned momentum onward and outward to each other is congruent with the flow of life. And when we’re in flow with the rest of life, the psychologists tell us, we get hit with the sense that we belong. We belong in life.” 15.9%, Yellow: “I once interviewed Brown University neuroscientist Professor Jud Brewer, who studied the way kindness works in the brain.[1] Kindness, he told me, opens up certain neural pathways in the prefrontal cortex that create an expansiveness that we, once again, experience as a profound sense of peace and belonging. Studies show that even watching other people perform acts of kindness can produce this neural sensation. It’s contagious.” 16%, Yellow: “The philosopher and psychotherapist Erich Fromm arrived at the same place, writing about “the point of it all” in the face of nuclear threat in the 1960s. “What is left if we lose it all?” Fromm asked. What brings us calm and meaning? It’s a question I often asked my guests on my podcast. Invariably, the answer I would get back was a version of “being of service to others” and of dropping our addiction to ourselves. Fromm wrote that he chooses to make his life a “study in work and love.” By work, he meant contributions that best serve humanity. The Sweden-based systems thinker Nora Bateson frames things similarly. When asked questions like, How long do we have? and, What will the world look like in ten years? she replies that the only question to be asking right now is, “Who will I be in this dynamic for others?”” 16.1%, Yellow: “Theologian Martin Luther was famously asked what he would do if he knew the world would end tomorrow (which, for an apocalypse-aware leader of the Reformation, was not merely a hypothetical). He said he’d plant a tree. This answer lands so honestly and beautifully. It ties in with what historians call “cathedral thinking”—in the face of doom (such as during the medieval period), humans build monuments that honor the divine, even though we know we will never see them completed. * I also love what Indigenous knowledge scholar Dr. Tyson Yunkaporta once told me: “Young cultures” always ask the same three questions: Why are we here? How do we live? And what happens when we die? Yunkaporta notes that his culture answered these long ago and that they just don’t arise among a people fully aware of their custodial role in the ecosystem. The answer is simply known.” 16.3%, Yellow: “I, too, had been getting the deep sense that we were going to have to access a very different mindset to even begin to fathom what was going on around us. Of course, in times of crisis, humans have often turned to spiritual traditions and religion to cope with their fear of death and the unknown. As the current chaos and uncertainty mounts, fundamentalist and evangelical Christian ideas have gained a lot of traction, particularly among the conservative right in the United States and among young men.[2] I find it terrifying to witness powerful leaders, such as senior members of the Trump administration, Australia’s former Prime Minister Scott Morrison, and many of the big players in Silicon Valley, actually espousing ideas such as the Rapture, which almost relishes collapse, or what they call “end-times.”[3] According to these Christians, if you’re a “true believer” you’ll be fine because when collapse hits, you will suddenly be taken up to heaven—alive and without dying—while the rest of us are left behind to face tribulation. Naomi Klein calls it “end times fascism.” The separatism, the narcissism, the fear, and yes, the fascism, is almost embarrassingly transparent. It’s also pure sixth-stage stuff.” 16.6%, Yellow: “I think Anthony and I were both experiencing a felt sense that what was happening was returning us to some sort of truth, back to essences and back to a place where we do, in fact, find ourselves forced to ask, “What is left if we lose it all?” “What matters?” and “Who do I want to be in this dynamic for others?”” 17.2%, Yellow: “A select few, of course—monks on mountains, Eckhart Tolle et al.—manage to reside in this spiritual realm closer to full time. But I’ve noticed that some kind of complete break-apart-and-open event invariably took them there. Eckhart Tolle describes waking in his London bedsit one morning at twenty-nine and witnessing the death of his “small i” self. He promptly gave up his old life. The thoughts stopped and he took to sleeping rough on Hampstead Heath. These spiritual types often have to live apart from the rest of us—in nunneries, monasteries, or in remote retreats somewhere in Canada—to remain dialed in.” 17.5%, Yellow: “What was left was a very real right now. And I’m now realizing that my collapse awareness journey has effectively dumped me into the present, the very place (or mindset) that I’d been struggling to land back into for decades. What does this actually look and feel like? I’m noticing that music feels more intense; I get goose bumps often. Art brings tears and small kindnesses touch me deeper. Like, they make me stop and register, and, yes, cry with what I think I’d have to call recognition. When birds sing at sunset, I am exultant. I sense that many of us here are in a similar raw, receptive space. It feels delicate and special, don’t you think? And like an expansion, a stepping up. It seemingly makes no sense. Our world is falling apart, and yet I feel a very particular peace and belonging in my being. And I’ve definitely got a hunch that we’re heading somewhere better. That we’re onto something important about being human.” Liminality 17.7%, Yellow: “liminality Midway through life’s journey I woke to find myself in a darkened wood, Where the right road was wholly lost and gone. —Dante Liminality is a lovely word. It has an onomatopoeic tinkle to it. It describes a time or a space between two things. It stems from the Greek word for “threshold,” that place between two rooms, such as a hallway or a doctor’s waiting room. In liminality, one door has shut behind us, the next has not yet opened. And we are left in a fluorescent-lit no-man’s-land. Moving from childhood to adulthood is liminal.” 18.2%, Yellow: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.[*1] —Antonio Gramsci * If you’re staying attached to the status quo right now, you will be unhinged, because there is nothing there. —Liz Lenkinski, writer at Burn It All Down * There’s a tendency out there to regard in-betweenness as a nothingness (no-thingness) that we flail around in, like Wile E. Coyote suspended over a terrifying, infinite chasm, legs pedaling madly, reaching for a solid edge. But it’s way more helpful, I find, to see liminality as a convergence, or emergence. I visualize a Venn diagram, where the past is one circle and the unknown future is another and the bit where they overlap is the liminality.” 18.3%, Yellow: “The overlapping liminal bit is still connected to the dying “No Longer.” In liminal times we can selectively draw what we cherished from the past and carry it into the “Not Yet” future that we are also partially in, or becoming.” 18.4%, Yellow: “The philosophical and scientific concept of emergence comes into play here. Emergence is where something—a new era, for instance—“becomes” via the interaction of various patterns and parts and behaviors, without any single entity directly steering the outcome. Its “becoming” is more than the sum of the parts from which it emerges; it takes on a life of its own that we can neither predict nor control. We can only be a part of it. Think of a flock of starlings swirling in the sky—each bird follows simple rules (keep a certain distance, align with neighbors, avoid collisions), but it all emerges into a breathtaking, coordinated murmuration that no single bird is directing. The way kids learn to speak is an emergence too—of countless small interactions, trial-and-error imitations, which the child’s brain organizes into patterns of grammar and vocabulary until, seemingly all at once, fluent speech emerges.” 18.6%, Yellow: “Previous liminal eras have been notably potent. The philosopher Karl Jaspers singled out the volatile in-between time in history from about the eighth to the third century BCE and called it the “axial age.” He describes it as an “interregnum between two ages of great empire… a deep breath bringing the most lucid consciousness.” Jaspers argued that this suspended era of uncertainty was marked by unbelievable creativity in which the “unquestioned grasp on life is loosened” and “man asked radical questions.”” 18.9%, Yellow: “The Chinese word for “crisis”—wei ji—also means “opportunity.” * The English word “crisis” stems from the Greek krisis, which means “to decide.”” 18.9%, Red: “I just had this thought. As I mentioned a moment ago, adolescence is liminal. I think the collective has possibly been stuck in a similarly liminal, not-quite-adulting era for decades, failing to step into the next stage, perhaps lacking the appropriate rite of passage or guidance. The challenge before us, then, is to choose or to “decide” as a collective to emerge into our full collective adulthood and to provide the guidance to each other. I will flesh this idea out further in a bit, I think.” 19%, Yellow: “At some point along the way, I clipped and saved a line written by William Davies, author of This Is Not Normal: The Collapse of Liberal Britain: “To experience a crisis is to inhabit a world that is temporarily up for grabs.” Yes!” 19.5%, Yellow: “The French also appear to argue a lot. They will go hard at a philosophical or political issue with you. Equally, they’ll challenge an everyday banality. I think this derives from a few factors: the robust 1970s-style schooling approach, their proud revolutionary history, and a distinctly anti-anti-intellectualism. But again, I find the root of it is invariably about curiously establishing a truth, gleaning your take, making sense of it all.” 20.8%, Yellow: “It was also a supremely liminal time. The Spanish flu and World War I had wiped out one hundred million people globally, while another world war and a depression (as well as nuclear threat) loomed. It was a time not too dissimilar to our own. Much of the world was emerging from pandemic lockdowns that had sent young people into a spin. It had witnessed unfathomable human-caused destruction, which was then met with economic and ideological flux. The economy roared, then crashed. And from such chaos, a bewildered humanity tried to make sense of it all. The first wave of feminism hit its peak, and women were granted the vote in various parts of the world. Fascism and communism took hold. And so did existentialism. In her essay “What Is Existentialism?” Simone de Beauvoir wrote that during this period, various “isms” competed to “respond to the same need: In France and all across Europe the individual is seeking with anguish to find his place in a world turned upside down.” Intellectuals, dictators, and spiritualists all scrambled to answer a question that burned: How do we live now? How do we live our lives when none of the old rules apply?” 21.1%, Yellow: “Beauvoir described existentialism as a framework that refused to render us victims to our circumstances, however hard they might be. The meaning of the world is created by us, she and the other existentialists wrote. It becomes, it emerges, through us. Beauvoir argued that we do this via our struggle against the very obstacles and oppressions that try to limit us. In other words, the troubles of the world are what lift us to create the meaning we have always sought. I asked AC to check I had this one-paragraph summation correct. He taught existentialism for decades and, if pressed to define his philosophical affiliations, would describe himself as an existentialist. “Yep, spot-on,”” 21.5%, Yellow: “I have always found the Algerian outsider Albert Camus (he kept his distance from the “bobo”[*6] Deux Magots set and famously had a massive fallout with Sartre over communism) provided the most helpful (and less individualistic) wisdoms for navigating how to live “now.” Camus argued life was absurd.[*7] Absurdity, at a psychological level, is a cognitive clash that happens when a larger perspective (like the whole of our civilization unraveling) undermines the reality of a smaller perspective (our BAU lives). For Camus, life is absurd because we are aware it has no intrinsic meaning and yet we still, doggedly, choose to live. Why do we not give up, why do we not kill ourselves in the face of this paradox? Camus’s answer is that the paradox itself forces us into a truly authentic happiness, a “happiness without hope,” funnily enough. This happiness is not predicated on conditions but on the experience of simply existing in the “implacable grandeur of this life.” The implacable grandeur of this life. I love this line. And since I’ve made quite the habit of pulling out lines I love and italicizing them for emphasis, I’ve done the same here.” 21.8%, Yellow: “Oh, and by way of a beautifully relevant postscript: The French interest in collapsology has been described by leading tech news website TechCrunch as “the latest manifestation of French existentialism, updated for the 21st century… in that… the only way to avoid collapse is to fully see the world in all its complexity.”” Death 22.1%, Yellow: “May we apprentice ourselves to the curve of our own disappearance. —David Whyte” 22.2%, Yellow: “ We will all die one day. We know this. In fact, to be human is to be the only species aware of its own mortality. At the same time, we largely live in denial of this truth. I mean, it’s tricky for a human to reflect on the absence of the very thing doing the reflecting! Sigmund Freud called this dilemma the mortality paradox and wrote, “It is indeed impossible to imagine our own death… [Therefore] at bottom no one believes in his own death.”” 22.3%, Yellow: “We once had aging and dying rituals to help us navigate this paradox and to bring a calm reverence to the cycle of life and death. We shared wisdoms that put the brutal inevitability of our nonbeing into context as part of this bigger cycle, allowing us to live courageously and fully alongside the fear and absurdity. But, sigh, our secular, individualist culture has replaced these rituals and wisdoms with… an obsession with youth and a bunch of thoroughly avoidant longevity protocols (Botox, ice baths, NMN, cryonics) that shield us from facing this “certain uncertainty” as the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard called it. Which, of course, leaves us thoroughly ill-equipped for dealing with death. And for living, in fact.” 22.7%, Yellow: “We are not the dinosaurs. We are the meteor. We are not only in danger. We are the danger. —António Guterres, secretary-general of the United Nations[2] * When I first began to feel into the shock, guilt, and grief of this momentous truth, I was reminded of William Burroughs’s response when a journalist asked him to explain the meaning of his book title Naked Lunch.[3] It’s the “frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork,” he said. I think collapse—and being forced to confront death like this—plants us at our collective naked lunch, in a frozen moment together, facing what we’ve been blindly eating up for too long.” 23%, Yellow: “The very stark fact is that over 13 percent of the world—1.1 billion humans—is currently living in what most would describe as collapse, where population, identity, and socioeconomic order have been decimated by various other collapsing systems—the climate system, the food and water systems, and the collapsing global world order.[8] Due to a collapsing geopolitical (world order) system, the 2.3 million residents of Gaza are now living in full collapse, displaced, starving, and with 90 percent of the infrastructure required to run the territory destroyed, and tens (and very possibly hundreds) of thousands of Gazans murdered. Very significantly from a civilizational-collapse perspective, up to 90 percent of those killed by Israel are said to be children and people of childbearing age. Meanwhile, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Sudan are regarded as on the brink of breaking, largely as a result of systemic colonization. Entire nations in the South Pacific, such as Tuvalu, will have collapsed (be uninhabitable) by 2050 due to the rising water levels from climate collapse.” 23.4%, Yellow: “A number of respected global institutes recently released headline-dominating reports that show that global population won’t keep growing and growing, but will peak at nine to ten billion aching, messy humans between 2050 and 2080.[10] After hitting this peak, the world population won’t then plateau and stabilize. No, it will decline. And rather dramatically.[*3] The reason for this is simple and certainly a lot less gruesome than some of you might be imagining: We are having fewer kids and at a scale that will have cascading, exponential effects in the coming couple of generations. Humanity requires a fertility rate of 2.1 live births per woman to maintain replacement (a steady population).[11] But today, two-thirds of us live in parts of the world where fertility rates are below this replacement level. By 2100, that number jumps to 97 percent.[12] The United States is at a fertility rate of 1.6 live births per woman, and Italy is down to 1.3. Japan, which now sells more adult diapers than baby diapers, is at 1.2, Australia is at 1.6, and the UK is at 1.5.[13] Africa still has a total fertility rate of 4.1, but it’s down from nearly double that in the mid-twentieth century, while India, whose heaving population was the prompt for Ehrlich to write his book, is now below the replacement rate. China’s, many are shocked to learn, is at 1.2. And wait for this. South Korea’s fertility rate is 0.7. Which means the nation is currently on track to produce only four to seven great-grandchildren for every one hundred South Koreans alive today, constituting a 93 to 96 percent reduction in population (or extinction rate) in a century.[14] A Lancet study projects that by 2100, 98 percent of the world’s countries will have shrinking populations[15] (twenty-three nations are expected to see their populations more than halve; China is expected to be at half its current population by 2066[16]). A fertility collapse takes around thirty years before it causes a population collapse, but—and this is the bit to take note of—once that happens, the collapse is inevitable. This is because the many factors driving the collapse (a multitude of other collapsing systems and societal shifts) would themselves take decades to reverse (and that’s assuming some omnipower sweeps in and makes all the required adjustments all at once, all around the world), by which time several generations have aged out of their reproductive years.” 23.9%, Yellow: “According to economists and demographers interviewed for a recent New York Times feature, as well as the conclusions of that Lancet study above, world population decline will somewhat mirror its ascent since industrialization (in a sharp bell-curve fashion), dropping by one billion people by the end of this century from its peak and then dropping to a total of one to two billion people left on the planet three hundred years later[*4] (though some models show this happening earlier).[17] Which, somewhat neatly but perhaps not surprisingly, is the number of humans many scientists, including Paul Ehrlich, have been saying can exist comfortably within the Earth’s carrying capacity.[18] It’s also—what do you know!—how many of us were on the planet just as industrialization, and our current civilization, kicked into gear. I drew this up based on the figures and dates above to give a rough visual indication only. Taken from another angle, Nate Hagens calculated how many people the planet could hold without fossil fuels, which is where he argues we will land as the energy system collapses. Again, roughly one billion people. * On first reading, population collapse doesn’t look so bad. I mean, a lot fewer humans defiling and pillaging the planet is a good thing, no? And imagine if we find ourselves living within Earth’s carrying capacity without requiring mass carnage? But, alas, it’s more complex than that. Again we come up against a timing issue. Ecological and climate collapse will be irreversibly underway (it already is) by the time population collapse kicks in. A smaller population might possibly reduce some strain as ecological (and to a lesser extent, climate) collapse escalates, but it won’t stop it.” 25%, Yellow: “There is another factor leading to fertility decline, which fits the sixth-stage picture of all collapsing civilizations (the Age of Decadence we covered earlier).[31] According to Jennifer Sciubba, author of 8 Billion and Counting, a key reason for the collapse is an “opting out” by women driven by collapsing gender relations—schisms between men’s and women’s voting patterns, morals, and online engagement. I clipped this quote from German polymath Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, which he wrote in 1918; it slots in quite well here: “When the ordinary thought of a highly cultivated people begins to regard ‘having children’ as a question of pros and cons, the great turning point has come.”” 25.3%, Yellow: “The only (albeit temporary) “fixes” that have a chance of alleviating things, according to demographers, are migration policies and gender-equality policies.[35] Which, you have probably already noted, are precisely the hot-button issues that conservative governments rally violently against.” 25.5%, Yellow: “Finally, and I’m not sure we are meant to say such things, but I find myself wondering if life, in all its emergent beauty, doesn’t know exactly what it’s doing. As I’ve waded my way through this wad of human decline data, I’ve wondered—at a visceral level, rather than intellectually, if that’s possible—if Life, impervious to our yearnings for permanence and according to the second law of thermodynamics, is simply correcting excess.” 25.6%, Yellow: “Before we wrap there is also a third death at play in a collapsing world. It’s the death of the “old normal”—all those structures, assumptions, and mindsets that make up our postindustrial civilization. I’m talking the growth imperative and the supply-demand model; well-being being pegged to economic output; the idea of “getting ahead” of others (neighbors, colleagues, friends); the myth of human subjugation over nature; the endless exploitation of resources and other humans; and all those competitive races to the bottom.” 25.7%, Yellow: “The “old normal” is clearly in its last death throes, whether we wish for it or not. We are now at the structural limits to the growth that it relies on. And we—to put it in fittingly crude economic terms—literally can’t afford to keep it going. I read the other day that by 2050 climate change alone will be causing economic damage worth a minimum $38 trillion (indexed) every single year.[37] For context, the entire world economy at the moment is about $100 trillion. The social philosopher Daniel Schmachtenberger, who has developed an almost cultish following in the collapse awareness community, and the team at the Consilience Project published a detailed report, “Development in Progress,” that highlights this phenomenon.[38] It homes in on one tiny cog in the (collapsing) system—the cost of PFAS (perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances) on humans and ecology. To remove and destroy just one small subclass of these so-called forever chemicals from the environment would cost about seven thousand times the annual global GDP.” Live 26.8%, Yellow: “Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now take what’s left and live it properly. —Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 7.56 We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing. —Charles Bukowski, The Captain Is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship” 27.1%, Yellow: “When we contemplate the end or disappearance of a thing, we must also contemplate the worth of the thing itself. When we sit with death we necessarily ask, “What is life?” and “What does it mean to live a good life?” And so, as philosophers and spiritualists from Seneca to Simone Weil have told us, to face death is to learn how to live. Not to merely exist, like, I dunno, an amoeba.” 27.3%, Yellow: “When I spoke to the grief walker Stephen Jenkinson, he told me that our civilization’s biggest challenge is to die well. What does it mean to die well? Stephen says this simply entails facing the truth, horror, and unfathomability of death and of something ending. To allow it to be and not deny it. Nothing more. French Renaissance writer Michel de Montaigne, who holed himself up in a tower in the French countryside to learn how to die well, argued that this process involves talking and reading—philosophizing—about death incessantly.[2] He went as far as suggesting that we dig our own graves. The idea is that the practice of memento mori (remembering your death) “premeditates adversity.” You sit in the discomfort of the idea of death as often as possible, and then, when the real thing presents, you’ve removed much of the sting.” 27.5%, Yellow: “Picking up on this urgency to live, Seneca wrote in How to Die (a far cheerier read than indicated on the tin): “Let us prepare our minds as if we’d come to the very end of life. Let us postpone nothing. Let us balance life’s books each day.”[3] Marcus Aurelius similarly wrote, “Let each thing you would do, say, or intend, be like that of a dying person.” Which, ultimately, we always-already are, no?” 27.6%, Yellow: “In that liminal time between the two world wars, Franz Kafka wrote a love letter to his muse Milena, wishing for the end of the world so that he could live fully:[4] Dear Milena, I wish the world were ending tomorrow. Then I could take the next train, arrive at your doorstep in Vienna, and say: “Come with me. We are going to love each other without scruples or fear or restraint. Because the world is ending tomorrow.” Perhaps we don’t love unreasonably because we think we have time, or have to reckon with time. But what if we don’t have any time? Or what if time, as we know it, is irrelevant? Ah, if only the world were ending tomorrow.” 27.9%, Yellow: “According to Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and one of the world’s leading experts on the phenomenon, awe is mostly aroused by witnessing one of two things: vastness or human kindness. A whole planet of humans experienced a collective sense of awe when in 1972 they first saw the Earth—a pale blue dot—in pictures taken from Apollo 17. As Carl Sagan later wrote, viewing our home from this distance underscored “our responsibility [my italics] to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another.”[6] Keltner’s research shows awe indeed triggers the release of oxytocin, the hormone that promotes love and trust.[7] But Keltner’s work also shows about a quarter of awe experiences are “flavored with feeling threatened.”[8] Awe can arise, for example, from looking at a lion in a zoo or even gruesome videos of genocide (Keltner’s examples). Or by facing death. Goose bumps are the signifier, he says.” 28.6%, Yellow: “month or so later I’m on a train, in a backward-facing seat, en route to a hike south of Paris. I’m reading The Garden Party by Katherine Mansfield in a collection of short stories that I bought from the kiosk at the station. It occurs to me I’ve read a number of books about decadent garden parties set in that liminal time between the world wars. Ian McEwan’s Atonement and Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts were set in the mid-1930s. Ditto Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, which is about a garden party that goes ahead in spite of a tragic death earlier that day. The Garden Party follows a similar arc. The privileged Sheridan family are set to host a garden party one afternoon. That same day, a commoner at the end of the lane is thrown off his horse and dies, leaving “a missus and five little ones.” The Sheridan family are faced with a moral quandary: to party or not to party in the face of death? The specter of death hangs over the story: the death of the poor commoner, but also of the hundreds of thousands who had died in trenches only months earlier. The matriarch of the family makes the call. The party must go ahead! “People like that,” she says, referring to the underclass down the way, “don’t expect the rich to sacrifice themselves.” The garden party is clearly a trope for exploring the moral implications of indulging in decadence and sensuality in dark, uncertain times. Should we meet the precariousness of life with sobriety and reflection? Or do we avoid death and eat the cream puffs, marvel at the rose garden, invite the vicar? Do we tell each other, as the Sheridan family do, that we must live while the dead cannot? For life is clearly short. Of course, garden parties are a comment on class and equality, much as Aperol-spritzed thirtieths on yachts are today. But Mansfield makes it clear that the Sheridans’ party features the fashionable foods and habits of the prewar times, before such moral confrontations. In her short story, nostalgia abounds for the simpler times when death, the poor, and complexity didn’t crash your party. Which reminds me: In general it’s the rich who have the most to gain from clinging to the “old normal.” And from not facing the truth, or death. The poor bank on the shake-up being better than what they’ve got now.” 29.9%, Yellow: “British writer Oliver Burkeman has written about the importance of being reminded of one’s “cosmic insignificance,” of being reduced to a speck. “[It] isn’t just relaxing, but actively empowering… you’re free to take meaningful risks, to let unimportant things slide, and to let other people deal with how they might feel about your failing to live up to their expectations.”[9] Perhaps it’s worth taking a minute in a clearing somewhere to think about—or feel into—whether you, too, are sensing a relaxing empowerment that comes from being so abruptly planted in your own cosmic insignificance?” Metacrisis 30.7%, Yellow: “However, I have found the most helpful term for what’s going on to be “metacrisis.” Metacrisis thinking acknowledges that in addition to there being a stack of crises all happening at once, feedbacking and intensifying everything into a polycrisis, there’s also the overlaying crisis of our inability to fathom said polycrisis. And to discuss it sanely. And to have a chance in hell of resolving it. Here I point your attention to the misinformation, fragmentation, polarization, and bifurcation that abounds. Plus, there’s also an underlying crisis, which is loosely the original, collective mindset that allowed the polycrisis to come about in the first place. In most cases, this underlying crisis is the individualist, extractivist, colonialist mindset of postindustrialism. The crisis is meta because it’s so thoroughly self-referential. We’re in it. And our in-it-ness is adding to the problem.” 31.1%, Yellow: “Our inability to fathom everything, to talk about it in a helpful way, and then to make constructive changes is the bulk of the crisis. As crises intensify and life gets more uncomfortable, humans tend to lose their trust in the very institutions designed to help us decipher truth and to solve problems—institutions such as science, democracy, and media. And these said institutions stop trusting each other. We stop trusting truth. The whole lot of us then become vulnerable to misinformation and conspiracies. Former US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy wrote in his book, Together, that in a crisis, we are evolutionarily programmed to blame an “other” out there, an enemy onto which we can scapegoat the problems. When there is no tangible, discernible enemy to blame (like in a pandemic), we invent one.” 32%, Yellow: “The historian Niall Ferguson has scoffed that the metacrisis is “just history happening.”[7] He and other academics of his (mostly conservative) ilk argue that we can count on well-established counterbalancing forces, like price mechanisms and, yup, human ingenuity, to keep today’s crises from causing widespread devastation.[8] Cynics might also bring out the growth-based optimist theorems of Steven Pinker, Johan Norberg, and the techno-optimists, the ones who tell us the rising tides of capitalist progress have managed to reduce global poverty and violence in the past century and, therefore, will simply do the same again.[9] They will also fix climate collapse and the energy fiasco while they’re at it. Pinker, for instance, describes climate change as “a problem of engineering.”[10] It can be hard to muster the clarity and confidence to explain that… well… it’s more complex than that.” 32.5%, Yellow: “For sure, humanity has faced many of the crises before us today, and others besides. However! We’ve not faced so many all at once. We’ve also not experienced them at this scale and level of interconnectedness—with so many people on the planet, with so many complex systems, nor with global warming (each degree causes more human mistakes, crime, violence, and fractured behavior).[11] In short, it’s never been this complex, not even during previous complex civilizations. And so the individual crises (and their level of severity) are not the issue, per se; it’s the way they feed into, and accelerate, each other unpredictably and beyond our ability to model, preempt, or control them.” 32.8%, Yellow: “But this time is different because our civilization is global. Collapse is projected to domino out around the world, and there may be barely a square meter on the planet to which we can feasibly decamp our resilient, rebounding spirits and start over. There certainly won’t be the same safe economic setup, food system, or viable climate in which to do so. * Jared Diamond highlighted that a climate crisis—like a volcano eruption, a flood, a drought—was often the straw that broke the back of a civilization. Today is different on this front too because the climate crisis we face is also not localized. Nor is it likely to pass in a season or two. Atmospheric heating is global. And irreversible.” 33.1%, Yellow: “Oh, and there’s this too: Pinker and Co.’s figures have more recently been declared misleading by the UN and other global groups, and, regardless, are now going the other way—extreme poverty and violence are both now increasing. I also challenge us all here to consider that while we focus on growth and progress as the measure of our well-being we ignore the damage said growth and progress causes to “externalities” like the animal world and our environment. And our mental and spiritual health.” Moloch 33.5%, Yellow: “moloch We human beings now have the power to exterminate ourselves; this seems to be the entire sum of our achievement. —James Baldwin I have another paradoxical, mind-warping framing that I have found very useful. When I got my head around it, a lot of the competing chunks of data in my head began to slot into a lovely Tetris-esque order. At least for a bit. It’s called “moloch,” and it’s a game theory concept named after a God in the Hebrew Bible who rewarded child sacrifice with a war victory.[1] Which is just ghastly: Humans were required to sacrifice the very thing they were trying to save with their battle wins. Indeed, moloch is an invisible “force” that arises in competitive scenarios that sees us (often unwittingly) give away or destroy what we hold dear in exchange for a short-term gain but that, ultimately, will leave us all categorically fucked. A benign example of moloch: You’re at a concert. Someone in the front row decides to sacrifice their comfort and stand up to get a better view. This, of course, forces everyone behind them to also stand up. Soon enough the room is standing, competing to get a better view. The upshot? Everyone has to stand for the entire concert. Everyone loses. I find that moloch explains why and how we just can’t stop doing so much of the insane, zero-sum, self-destructive stuff that winds us all up in a horrible race to the bottom. It’s because… We. Just. Can’t. In a competitive system like our civilization, moloch emerges, mostly without our noticing, and becomes a force greater than our individual or collective will. In gaming parlance, moloch forces our hand.” 34.1%, Yellow: “But, alas… moloch. * The nuclear arms race, which saw the world compete to produce technology that could wipe us all out, is peak moloch.[3] By 1985, the United States and the USSR had produced sixty-three thousand weapons—enough to flatten every major city on Earth and plunge the rest of us into a nuclear winter. Of course, neither country could actually use the weapons because the destruction would be mutual. But this grim standoff, which we still find ourselves in, expended trillions of dollars and rubles and has left the world under a radioactive shadow. That’s the thing with moloch. Once the competition is entered, no one can stop, because stopping sees you lose. But not stopping sees everyone lose. The atomic race worked the same way.[4] The US couldn’t stop, not if the Nazis didn’t. Same with burning fossil fuels. No nation-state is going to put up their hand to go first in materially committing to the Paris Agreement they signed. Not if no one else does.” 34.3%, Yellow: “Moloch can leave a soul fully deflated. If it’s all so inevitable, and if no one can stand up to it, what can be done? Do we just give in to the game? When I first encountered the theory, I was seduced by the beautifully neat explainer it provided for what was going on around us. Soon, though, I experienced a doomy turn and felt a desperate helplessness. I fought it (the helplessness). I dug deeper. And I came across the work of former world poker champion and game theorist Liv Boeree. Liv had done a few YouTube videos about how moloch works[*1] (she plays with the example of Instagram beauty filters, using detailed game theory language), but her presentation had a distinct rebelliously compassionate tone and she used a phrase that resonated: “Don’t hate the players, hate the game.”[6] And so I reached out to her. Liv explained to me that the human condition is driven by competition. Competition isn’t necessarily bad. But it can go very wrong when it works to misaligned incentives such as infinite growth and winning at all costs (an incentive that winds up destroying the opponent and the game itself). This is moloch. But there can be another kind of competition, or game force—one that’s propelled by aligned incentives, where you win, but so does everyone and everything else. She calls such a force the Goddess of Win-Win (the inverse of the God of Lose-Lose that is moloch). Win-win is ultimately incentivized by a desire to keep the game going. So you compete, but not at the expense of the game, or life.” 34.8%, Yellow: “This might be reminding some of you of the Prisoner’s Dilemma.[7] Two prisoners from a gang are being held in separate cells. The police, who don’t have enough evidence to pin them on the main charge, go to each prisoner and say, “Hey, if you snitch on the other guy, you get to go free and he’ll get three years. However, if you both don’t snitch, you both get six months (for some lesser charge).” There’s also this catch: “If you both snitch, you both get two years.” It’s an impossible, thoroughly molochy dilemma. Although it would be immediately resolved if the two prisoners were able to draw on those three C’s and collaborate, cooperate, and communicate with each other and agree to not snitch (and both go down for the lesser charge), right? * Tyson Yunkaporta has described how First Nations cultures in Australia were not averse to battles and bloody competition (despite some mythologizing to the contrary).[8] But, he says, in his culture if you injured somebody in a spear fight, you were then responsible for their livelihood. As Tyson explained, “the rules of the competition” made sure that when you injured someone you did it in such a way that they got the message, but could also still provide for their family and not wind up on your doorstep needing charity.[9] Which is to say, so everyone can keep the game of life going!” 35.3%, Yellow: “Liv points out that our desire to collaborate, cooperate, and communicate is as strong as our desire to compete. I recalled a study to this effect, which I hunted down just now: In his book The Penguin and the Leviathan: The Triumph of Cooperation over Self-Interest, Harvard professor Yochai Benkler argues that in any given experiment, about 30 percent of the people behave selfishly. But “fully half of all people systematically, significantly, and predictably behave cooperatively.”” 35.9%, Yellow: “We, the four-year-olds in the equation, need the robots to help us tidy the bedroom. The uncanny and crazy-making thing is, they don’t try to disagree with, or even sidestep, the fact that their very technology is contributing to the destructive mess that humans can no longer fix. Indeed, the destruction seems to be part of their master plan. You see, many of the bros are also convinced that their AI is the vehicle for finally achieving absolute human dominion over nature and the world. In 2023, the tech billionaire investor Marc Andreessen released a lengthy “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” that set out this overlordy vision in point form.[12] It’s referred to in many tech circles with reverence. A selection of the bullet points: “Techno-Optimists believe that societies, like sharks, grow or die… We believe everything good is downstream of growth.” “We believe that since human wants and needs are infinite, economic demand is infinite, and job growth can continue forever.” “We believe that there is no material problem—whether created by nature or by technology—that cannot be solved with more technology.” “We believe in nature, but we also believe in overcoming nature.” “We are not primitives, cowering in fear of the lightning bolt. We are the apex predator; the lightning works for us.” Toward the end he adapts a quote from Italian fascist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti from his Futurist Manifesto, written in 1909: “Technology must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.”[13] It perforated my brain when I first read it.” 36.2%, Yellow: “But my advice here is that we do not dwell too long on how utterly illogical, repulsively arrogant, and unwise such thinking is. Let’s just note it. And the fact that Andreessen became Trump’s tech policy adviser in 2024. And that his company Andreessen Horowitz installed the infamous DOGE team. And that we instead move forward.” 37.1%, Yellow: “I do think the zero-sum Frankensteinian situation that Silicon Valley has created is genuinely scaring its creators. In 2023, Altman addressed the US Senate, calling on the government to regulate AI, effectively asking to be saved from themselves, which in any other climate would stop presses. Meanwhile, more than one thousand tech leaders, including Elon Musk and Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak, signed an open letter calling for the same, more specifically for a pause on further AI advancement.[20] What’s more, Mark Zuckerberg is building a $270 million apocalypse bunker in Hawaii.[21] Tech billionaire Peter Thiel was reportedly attempting similar in New Zealand, ditto hundreds of other tech billionaires all around the world.[22] Meanwhile, Elon Musk is investing billions to decamp to Mars.” 37.2%, Yellow: “Yep, it’s moloch. And, yes, it’s also marketing spin to some extent (“Invest in our technology; it’s so amazingly advanced it could kill you!”). But it’s also this: As I flagged in the “Death” chapter, the rich have the most to lose when the old world collapses, and one way to create agency in, and ownership of, such wobbly circumstances is to own the (frightening) storyline. I think a perverse feeling of safety is experienced when you’re the superiorly informed person in the room with the big, bad news. Tech writer and OG cyberpunk Douglas Rushkoff shared something similar when we spoke on my podcast. His take is that the tech bros are obsessed with the apocalypse and talking about how their wares will wipe us out “because it provides a confirmation of everything they’ve been preparing for with their high walls and increased separation from the rest of us.”” 37.6%, Yellow: “I often wonder how these people can sleep at night. Surely being right cannot trump their human empathy. Well, for the mega-rich it almost necessarily has to. Studies show the more wealthy you are, the less empathy you have due to the biases you have to put in place to maintain such separation.[24] At the peak of the DOGE fiasco, Elon Musk told Joe Rogan, “The fundamental weakness of western civilization is empathy.” It all fits with the stuff we’ve already covered off: It’s fully sixth stage of collapse (age of decadence) stuff. In this final stage, which a complex civilization descends into just before it crumbles, so much growth and success turns in on itself and a “last days of Rome” myopic and destructive meltdown takes place. I came across a viral TikTok meme that uses the psychological phenomenon of “extinction burst” to explain what we’re witnessing. Extinction burst is a short-term surge in a behavior that is about to be rendered redundant or extinct. A toddler who’s been told their tantrums must stop otherwise they don’t get to watch TV will chuck the Mount Vesuvius of all tantrums. Likewise, a class of people that can see that their exploitative, fossil-fueled excess is going to grind to a halt due to climate, economic, or technological collapse might respond by taking everything down with them.” 38.5%, Yellow: “It really is difficult to accept that there is nothing we can do to stop such moloch-y madness. But, then, I’m increasingly thinking we won’t have to stop anything. Because I’m not sure the takeover can happen. You see, AI is ludicrously inefficient. Our brains run on twenty watts of power (less than a dim light bulb); the most efficient AI consumes megawatts of power.[*4][29] At this stage, there is not enough energy on the planet to pull off what the bros are frothing about. And perversely, they know it. Toby Rice, chief of the largest US natural gas driller, EQT Corp., cited a prediction that AI will gobble up more power domestically than households by 2030. Sam Altman told the crowd at Davos, “I think we still don’t appreciate the energy needs of this technology,” adding that he didn’t see how these needs could be met. “We need fusion, or we need, like, radically cheaper solar plus storage, or something, at massive scale—like, a scale that no one is really planning for.”[30] In 2024 Musk announced, “You will see that they just can’t find enough electricity to run all the [AI] chips.”[31] This collective fear explains why Big Tech is now buying their own energy plants. Musk’s xAI has reportedly bought an entire power plant to ship to the US to power his “colossus” supercomputer.[32] Amazon has invested heavily in a nuclear company, and Microsoft has paid to restart the controversial Three Mile Island nuclear power station in Pennsylvania.” 38.8%, Yellow: “I’d been hearing rumors to this effect, but then a team of top-tier researchers at Oxford and Cambridge universities released a peer-reviewed report that found that generative AI, by virtue of the way it’s trained on recursively generated interconnecting data, will eventually degrade until the output is a worthless distortion of reality.[33] As some commentators are saying, AI will eat itself before it does too much else.[34] * I used to panic about the bunker-building by the billionaires. The grossness of such a divisive idea world ate at my moral fibers. But then it occurred to me—how will these people pay the guards required to defend the bunker from the masses outside when society has collapsed (which is presumably what the bunkers are for) and money no longer has value? How will they produce food, do bunker repairs, and keep the postindustrial growth fervor going? I can’t see how they can. The plan will fold in on itself before the final brick in their high-security wall is laid. It’s quite a stunning irony, isn’t it—the complexity of everything going on won’t allow these morally injurious existential threats to fully present themselves. Life, the sturdy rhythm of the universe, is working to a different plan!” 39%, Yellow: “ I really do believe it’s worth going into as much tedious detail as I have. I think it can help release us all from the grip of the techno-optimist, accelerationist myth. This myth has left us feeling a doomist panic, and like we are trapped in something we must join if we are not to be left behind. It has also created a false hope among many (indeed most of the climate activists I know cling to the hopium of an AI solution to the climate crisis). And ultimately this is distracting our attention and resources from what really, really matters. Instead of being tied up in the tech bros’ zone-flooding and spatting over whether children should get implants for foreign languages (a real debate in Silicon Valley) or how the first Mars colonies should be run, we should be having urgent conversations about what’s happening to democracy down here on Earth and helping each other—and our kids—to rise to the heroic moral and physical adjustments required for the years ahead.[35] We should be confronting our endless quest for control over nature head-on and creating new visions of ourselves as beings embedded in nature.” Post-blame 39.9%, Yellow: “In her viral essay “Facing Extinction,” the Buddhist writer and elder Catherine Ingram writes: “Nearly all of us went along on the ride and enjoyed the benefits, and now the party’s over, and the bill has come due. But where can we lay blame?” * Here’s the thing. As I progressed my understanding of collapse, I really did come to understand that there is no overarching Machiavellian force at play nor any one individual or corporation that devised this shit show. Nor is there one individual or corporation (or leader) who can stop it now. There are, of course, god-awful opportunists out there doing the work of vultures—investment firms, Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Ag, Big Oil, the broligarchy—all of which are certainly the full, depraved expression of where we have landed. I condemn the behavior of every narcissistic, hedonistic, immoral, and, in many cases, murderous player operating within these behemoths; they should be held to account and punished. But can we lay all the blame on them? When we still buy their products and invest in their companies? And more importantly, is blame the energy we should be engaging in?” 40.2%, Yellow: “There’s also the Shirky Principle, named after tech writer Clay Shirky, who first identified the phenomenon, which states: “Institutions will try to preserve the problems to which they are the solution.” That’s what they do. Shirky writes, “An organization that commits to helping society manage a problem also commits itself to the preservation of that same problem, as its institutional existence hinges on society’s continued need for its management.” The Big Pharma companies that created and profited from the opioid epidemic, for example, now position themselves as essential to solving it—they now sell the addiction and anti-overdose treatments. US private prison companies are formidable lobbyists for harsher sentencing laws and underfunding rehab programs.” 40.4%, Yellow: “Writer James Kunstler (who writes, appropriately, at the site Clusterfuck Nation) argued a few years back that the simple reason why we humans do the (in hindsight) destructive things we do is that “it just seemed a good idea at the time.” I tend to agree. When we conceived capitalism and the growth model, and when we built more and more sophisticated technologies, we thought we were making life better, easier, faster. We never could have known that our desire to create more of a good thing would land us in so much trouble. Nor that signing up for all those competitive games we get drawn to instinctively—like a dog to a ball—would wind us up in such an inescapable race to the bottom. Humans, I sense, just don’t have the capacity for so much foresight. I find this a very forgiveness-provoking thing to sit with.” 40.7%, Yellow: “we, as individual units, should shoulder the blame and the responsibility of “fixing” everything. We saw this happen with the climate fight. Fossil-fuel giant British Petroleum confected the notion of the personal “carbon footprint” about twenty years ago. They hired the PR firm Ogilvy & Mather to devise the calculated PR stunt, the brief being to deflect attention and blame from Big Oil. Big Sugar did the same when they invented the “calories in, calories out” myth that made us all think that our weight gain resulted not from being addicted to sugary products but from our not doing enough exercise. There was not a skerrick of sound science to either stunt. But they stuck.” 40.9%, Red: “Yes, dear, we thought we were so very smart, but we’re really just little specks—ants perhaps—marching to the beat of a far bigger system of emergence and competition and looping truths and mutual construction and destruction, a system so big it’s Everything.” 41.2%, Yellow: “In his 2014 essay “Spirituality and Intellectual Honesty,” German philosopher Thomas Metzinger predicted the saddest of fates for our generation: The increasing threat arising from self-induced global warming clearly seems to exceed the present cognitive and emotional abilities of our species. This is the first truly global crisis, experienced by all human beings at the same time and in a single media-space, and as we watch it unfold, it will also gradually change our image of ourselves, the conception humankind has of itself as a whole. I predict that during the next decades, we will increasingly experience ourselves as failing beings.” 42.1%, Yellow: “The two hosts of the podcast were discussing how even if we had the most progressive leader ever in charge of the world, they would not be able to “fix” collapse. Systemic collapse is baked into the financial and resource infrastructure now. As British professor and author of Deep Adaptation Jem Bendell writes, “We no longer have a problem; we have a predicament; there is no longer a solution, just an outcome.”” 42.2%, Yellow: “You know what this means, Sarah? It’s time to move on from the rage to something more productive.” 42.5%, Yellow: “The late Reverend Michael Dowd taught that this graceful acceptance, which comes about when we drop the blame, sees us reprioritize what matters most.[4] It creates a “calm urgency to get complete with self, others, and legacy.”” Denial 42.6%, Yellow: “denial It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it. —Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor Frodo: I wish the Ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened. Gandalf: So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us. —The Lord of the Rings” 42.7%, Yellow: “My dad had also messaged to say that his Hating On All The Humans had gotten the better of him the past week. He was feeling like he was going insane amid the denial and resistance he was observing in the world. I sent him that famous line from Jiddu Krishnamurti: “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” I think they’re just the right riddle of consoling words to put here before we dig down into another, perhaps deeper type of “radical” acceptance and forgiveness—the kind required to handle the damn denial we see everywhere (both our own and others’).” 42.9%, Yellow: “I think understanding how and why denial works is crucial to this process. * It’s worth recognizing that denial is essential for humans to function in the world. A recent theory of mind argues that denying reality may have been central to our evolution as a species.[1] As our self-awareness and intersubjectivity expanded, the accompanying fear (our awareness of our own mortality, for example) ran the risk of being a dead-end evolutionary barrier. If we were to constantly freeze over in fear as we went about our humaning, we would likely get eaten or fail to reproduce. * Similarly, we are evolutionarily programmed to maintain confidence in a collective worldview, which is another form of denial. The cultural anthropologist and Pulitzer Prize winner Ernest Becker famously argued that many of us manage our existential fear by subscribing to culturally constructed beliefs that tell us we’re valuable people in a meaningful universe.[2] This explains why billions of us flock to religion. And capitalism. And why a lot of scared humans cling to the growth story. And to hopium.” 43.1%, Yellow: “Becker points to Mayan priests who threw children from cliffs and the families of suicide bombers who celebrate the martyrdom of their sons to illustrate the extent to which humans will go to preserve and defend the cultural worldview they’ve chosen to cling to. Jem Bendell writes in his book Breaking Together that “worldview defense,” as he calls it, can see climate experts cling to the “but we can still make it” and techno-optimism arguments, even when the facts don’t support them.[3] They “bargain with the death of their worldview in order to keep some of their existing identity alive,” he writes.” 43.4%, Yellow: “And sometimes our denial is sheer lack of capacity. Humans struggle to face what’s clearly in front of them when the threat in question is complex. Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert argues that our brains are wired to see immediate threats (tigers, tornadoes), not emergent, slow-moving behemoths like a collapsing system.[5] Furthermore, Gilbert explains that we are social animals, evolved to be highly sensitive to our fellow creatures’ intentions. If no one is deliberately imposing global warming to, say, intentionally kill kittens, we don’t see the warming as a threat.” 43.5%, Yellow: “We won’t believe it when we don’t see it. * I think this is relevant too. The bulk of life works to reduce entropy, per the second law of thermodynamics. Sigmund Freud picked up on this to explain our denial of complex problems and argued that our brains always try to conserve energy and unnecessary fuss where we can. If we don’t have to act now, we won’t.” 43.8%, Yellow: “There’s also the issue of tolerance. As our complex civilization has provided more avenues for escaping discomfort rather than facing it, we’ve lost our ability to cope with discomfort. The bulk of digital technology developed in the past thirty years has been about getting rid of discomfort. The well-known technologist Genevieve Bell has said that tech automation is “about smoothing over moments that feel uncertain or risky.”” 44.2%, Yellow: “Finally, let’s not lose sight of the fact that without a complex system or an emergence-based understanding of what is going on in the world, we are abandoned to our overwhelm and belief that we must shoulder the blame and responsibility for fixing everything and everyone. Most people do not have such an understanding yet; our world stubbornly operates to a linear worldview. And so denial can feel like the only cognitive avenue amid so much dissonance. * Even those of us who’ve pulled off the denial scab and are bravely allowing the wound of awareness to be aired are struggling. We are in a time between two worlds and it can be hard to hold firm to the new ideas being presented in a book like this while still paying off a mortgage, trying to get the kids to school, and, yes, maintaining relationships with people who are not seeing things as we are.” 44.6%, Yellow: “As devastating and heart-wrenching as [collapse] is, it leaves me with a true wake-up call to love, live and laugh hard. To fully feel joy, sadness, and fear as lucky parts of the human experience. My question is, how do we share this with our loved ones and the world to serve them in the readiness of it all without them having gone through your “Wild” journey, or those who don’t want to read into it because it’s so much to face? I struggle to even talk about it with my partner… @Michele: I want to share this work with others, but [am] fearful of whether they can “handle the truth.” How do you approach this in the wild? The short answer to the above question is: You don’t have to. And often it’s better not to. Meg Wheatley has repeatedly said, “This journey is not for everyone.” Not everyone is equipped or ready for it, nor is everybody right for it. Catherine Ingram says the same. She wrote in HuffPost some time back, “There is one category of people that I have found especially resistant to seeing this darkest of truths: parents. A particular and by now familiar glazed look comes over their faces when the conversation gets anywhere near the topic of human extinction.”[11] Heartbreakingly and honestly, I get it. Parents and anyone charged with having to continue a particular storyline for others have to make the dissonant and sacrificial decision to adhere to the status quo. For now.” 45.2%, Yellow: “I think the other reason we so passionately want to bring others into this collapse awareness (and I’m aware how elitist such a term is each time I use it here!) is because we feel lonely. Many in my community have expressed feeling a separation from their close friends and partners (particularly husbands). It’s hard to hold this collapse information in our souls while sitting next to someone on the couch who’s watching inane doorbell-camera videos on TikTok. I can only offer this somewhat spiritual solace: Waking up is lonely. It always has been. Heroes do solo quests and monks do solitary retreats. The awakening process entails standing well back from the standard matrix of meaning and the self-esteem-preserving worldview that once held us secure. And it demands that we then go about building new emotional and spiritual buttressing for ourselves, with no road map and no gold star stickers.” 45.5%, Yellow: “Erich Fromm wrote in The Sane Society: Perhaps this rings true: a person who has remained a person and not become a thing cannot help feeling lonely, powerless, isolated in present-day society. He cannot help doubting himself and his own convictions, if not his sanity. He cannot help suffering, even though he can experience moments of joy and clarity that are absent in the life of his “normal” contemporaries. Jem Bendell wrote in Breaking Together: Expect a change in your personal relationships and how you spend your spare time. Some forms of small talk and lighthearted social interaction with acquaintances may seem pointless… a vector of reclusiveness and loneliness. Therefore, it is important to find new ways of connecting with people on the new levels that feel meaningful to you.” 45.9%, Yellow: “The aim is to build these islands now, “starting where we are,” per the lovely Pema Chödrön’s advice to work with the skills and offerings we already have (as time is of the essence). It might look like using your existing book club or community garden groups as a forum for working through acceptance and grief strategies; creating cohesion and commitments together (to serve, to care for each other, to educate); building interdependent relationships and living out those life-saving three C’s—collaboration, cooperation, and communication. My friend Michael, a former TV network executive, started up a gardening group for the men in his semi-rural neighborhood in New Zealand, where they take turns helping each other with laboring projects. “Mostly it’s about sharing a beer afterward… we talk about what’s going in the world and, in an informal way, share our skills and get on the same page,” he tells me.” 46.2%, Yellow: “Author and spiritualist Elizabeth Oldfield and I discussed the need for more people to role-model the hell out of sanity and calm in a podcast episode recorded in her cooperative living home in central London recently. “My ambition is to be a nonanxious presence in the world,” she said to this point. I’m not sure there is a more important mission we can sign up for. In This One Wild and Precious Life, I push something similar. “We must make the new way of being look sexier than the status quo,” I wrote, referring, at the time, to low-carbon living. I think I probably pulled the idea from something that marketing guru Seth Godin taught me years ago over a series of conversations we had. When you want to entice change, simply embody it in such a way as to say, “People like us do things like this.” You get straight to normalizing the new way.” 47.3%, Yellow: “Sartre later clarified that he meant that being “othered” by others is hell. “Heaven is each other,” he said. I love that he fought to make this clear.” Uncertainty 47.6%, Yellow: “I now ramp up the imperative. We must now become fiercely warrior-like in our ability to sit deep in uncertainty, ambiguity, confusion, and the terrifying unknown. And not just as an occasional thing but as a state of being. We can no longer strategize or control what’s going on around us. We cannot predict our way out of this emergence. We have little choice but to embrace and to hold in our vulnerable beings all the contradictions, paradoxes, and even hypocrisies that this entails. Because we are already here in it, up to our eyebrows. * I think I’ll go a bit further. If we wish to do more than merely survive—if we want to thrive—in these times, we’d do well to delight in uncertainty. * The precocious Romantic poet John Keats was in his twenties when he lashed out at his older peers for their materialist, linear thinking and coined the term “negative capability,” prescribing it as an antidote. Negative capability is “being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” I adore the particular use of “irritable.” Because I do, in fact, get irritable when I feel the tug to justify the mysterious and complex.” 47.9%, Yellow: “Such a capacity, wrote Keats, was what was required for artists to pursue ideals of beauty, perfection, and sublimity. Or, as Albert Einstein wrote, “The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious.”” 47.9%, Yellow: “Researchers have since tried to pinpoint how this negative capability, or what’s also called “uncertainty tolerance,” works. When we encounter something unexpected, unknown, or uncertain, a neural “prediction error” signals a mismatch in our brains between what we assume should occur and what our senses tell us.[1] Ohio State researchers found that people who sink into uncertainty intolerance see unknowns as threats, rather than as a worthwhile challenge to rise to.[2] They tend to demand predictability and engage in binary thinking. During the pandemic, people who ranked high in uncertainty intolerance tests were associated with maladaptive coping responses such as denial and substance abuse, a British study found.[3] It will come as no surprise that leading psychologists have found that uncertainty intolerance is rising dramatically in the privileged West.” 48.3%, Yellow: “The boons of doing so go beyond Keats’s promises of beauty and sublimity. When we sit in uncertainty and confusion it sees our brains recruit more working memory and information-gathering resources to resolve the ambiguity, which leads to a bunch of neural upgrades, including in memory capacity and ability to hold attention.[6] Those with uncertainty tolerance also tend to choose to interpret uncertainty as exciting, not something that holds them back. Sitting together at the back of a community hall about twelve years ago, Brené Brown and I were discussing this very phenomenon, and she told me that when she experiences the discomfort of uncertainty she says to herself, “Something is happening.” She explained to me she chooses to regard the initial anxiety she feels as excitement, which are both processed in the same part of the brain and can often be confused. As one of the Ohio State researchers in that uncertainty tolerance study writes, uncertainty offers the “opportunity for life to go in different directions.” They added, “And that is exciting.”” 48.7%, Yellow: “I just looked up the etymology of the word “confusion.” It stems from the Latin for “pouring together”—a mingling of things that we assumed to be separate, or a confounding togetherness, you might say. I think this sums up what we’re in, in quite an inviting, beautiful way. And it reminds me of feminist ecologist Donna Haraway’s[*] injunction to “stay with the trouble” of living and dying with each other, particularly in troubled times. She argues when we stay with the trouble, rather than flee from it into further separateness, it provides the means to building more livable futures in which “we require each other in unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles.” Oh, yes, in hot compost piles—I love her phraseology; that’s exactly what we’re talking about here.[8] Haraway adds, “We become, with each other, or not at all.”” Anti-chaos 49.5%, Yellow: “Chaos is a tactic. It has been for some time. The Romans threw bread and circuses at the masses to distract them from the despotic measures they were implementing as their empire began to wobble and decline. Today, the powers that be use not dissimilar methods that also drag our care and attention from the mounting inequality, resource grabs, and Orwellian measures while also preventing us from cooperating and sensemaking our way through things. Trump strategist Steve Bannon, for instance, makes no secret of the fact that this is a conscious tactic that the Trump administration deploys. The way to win elections and get policy through, he says, is to “flood the zone with shit.” Folk become so confused and scared by the mad influx of information that they look away and go numb. They will also actively seek despotic leaders as a salve to the confusion. It would be brilliant if it weren’t so… despotic.” 50.1%, Yellow: “Chaos-making is a tactic used by many multinationals too. Naomi Oreskes wrote in Merchants of Doubt: The fossil fuel industry has deliberately attempted to muddy the waters, to poison the well of public debate, and to prevent action by confusing us about what the problem even is… The idea is to create confusion because if we’re confused, in most cases, we won’t act.” 50.5%, Yellow: “Gaslighting and straw-manning operate in a similarly infuriating yet seemingly innocuous way. A gaslighter will casually make an offensive or problematic claim and then focus the discussion on the emotional response it elicits in the other person. Straw-manning (and I’ve always been a bit hazy on this one, but perhaps because it’s a haze-making technique from the get-go) entails deliberately misrepresenting or oversimplifying an opponent’s position to make it easier to argue against. I think back to the 2023 Australian referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament. Opposition Leader Peter Dutton, instead of addressing the implications of the vote, repeatedly asked for “more detail” and bleated the slogan “If you don’t know, vote no.” Of course, he knew that referendums expressly don’t provide detail; they are an in-principle proposition.[*] It was a chaos-making straw-man tactic through and through. The human tendency is to get tied up in trying to follow and then refuting straw-man or gaslighting arguments, which distracts us from the actual important point being made.” 50.7%, Yellow: “Another strategy is straight-up bullshit. Princeton University philosopher Harry Frankfurt famously made the argument that bullshit is more dangerous than lying.[5] Frankfurt says people who are lying are at least still tethered to the truth—they remain alive to it when they try to conceal it. Bullshitters, however, completely disregard truth and its fundamental value in our society and care only whether they get their own way. Frankfurt adds that while bullshit might sometimes contain elements of truth, it muddies the information ecology so much that it undermines truth itself. In short, it creates chaos.” 51.5%, Yellow: “Where and how we sense-make also affects chaos levels. In a recent article for Nature, scientists show that we talk saner ideas when we talk them through with another person, IRL, rather than spouting them from a digital silo. Being in the tangle of discourse provides a “motivational dividend”: The partners gain momentum and morale from the process.[8] A number of studies show that being in nature as we try to talk sanity and temper chaos works best. More interpersonal trust is built.” 51.6%, Yellow: “We can also consciously deactivate our dopamine dependency. Which is to say, we can just… not have our attention hijacked every waking minute by the technofeudalist imperative. Honestly, there are all kinds of hacks and devices out there (bombproof phone safe boxes, apps that work to limit our access to, yes, apps, and many more). I’ve tried most of them. But, honestly, the only technique that works for me is treating the reclamation of my attention as a radical act of defiance. My desire to build anti-chaos creates the vigilance I don’t have otherwise.[10] Radical defiance galvanizes. It makes me think of a prompt from activist brontë velez that has always enlivened me. They invite us to ask, “How will I be useless to capitalism today?”” 51.8%, Yellow: “I have also found philosopher Hannah Arendt’s work particularly helpful for countering chaos. Arendt famously wrote on the rise of Nazism in 1930s Germany and on the “banality of evil” that can emerge in a society that doesn’t remain vigilantly alert to authoritarian creep. She warned that chaos-making comes first, followed swiftly by totalitarianism. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, she wrote: The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.[11] She also warned that conspiracy theories, cynicism (“a vague pervasive hatred of everyone and everything”), and loneliness paved the path to totalitarianism and fascism. But according to Arendt there was an antidote: to think. In The Human Condition, she argued: It is when the experience of powerlessness is at its most acute, when history seems at its most bleak, that the determination to think like a human being, creatively, courageously, and complicatedly, matters the most… What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing.” Ungrowth 52.4%, Yellow: “ungrowth It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. —Fredric Jameson (or Slavoj Žižek: The original source and who quoted whom is disputed)” 52.6%, Yellow: “There’s that famous line attributed to Kenneth Boulding, himself an economist: “Anyone who believes in indefinite growth in anything physical, on a physically finite planet, is either mad or an economist.”” 52.8%, Yellow: “There are countless graphs that show a steady but only just perceptible growth trajectory for all kinds of metrics over the past millennium or two. Life expectancy, GDP, the number of people not living in poverty, war-making capacity, and democracy all trundled along in this way, punctuated by periodic declines (during the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the Black Death, and so on). But then in the 1700s, as the Industrial Revolution kicked into gear, all of them shot almost vertically upward, in that hockey-stick fashion. Debt, colonization, the printing of more and more money, resource depletion, wasteful consumption, carbon emissions, ecological destruction, and animal exploitation also shot up at the same time and at the same angle. Ditto our cultural belief in growth. Because a belief in growth—the growth imperative—is needed to keep… everything growing.” 53%, Red: “We can’t afford to question where so much upward trajectory will end. Our leaders must go into more debt to prop up GDP figures, and we have tended, as a culture, to think of climate change, inflation, and the funding of endless wars as problems that can be solved with… more money, more technological investment, and…growth. Which is like a football team that only counts the goals it scores and not the goals it loses.” 53.2%, Yellow: “Indeed, today only 5 percent of all new income from global growth trickles down to the poorest 60 percent.[1] As the KPMG econometrician Gaya Herrington pointed out to me as a very sensible counter to trickle-down theory, “Why not lift people out of poverty directly? Why rely on the intermediary step of growth?” It’s a good point. While I digested it, she answered her own rhetorical point, “It’s because growth is the only way poverty can be alleviated without the rich having to give up something.”” 53.3%, Red: “Literature and art from the late 1700s onward often depicts physical and mental illness that arose in reaction to dramatic postindustrialization growth. Mary Shelley published Frankenstein in 1818. Romanticism, which promoted a reverence for natural landscapes, emerged around the same time. Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, and Charlotte Brontë wrote bleak novels depicting the despair and exploitation of this seismic shift to the growth imperative; the Williams (Blake and Wordsworth) crafted poetry on the subject, while Rousseau and Voltaire encouraged a return to nature as an antidote to, well, most things. My first ever “real book” (with no pictures) was Heidi by Johanna Spyri, which was published in the late nineteenth century. It told of a little girl psychologically suffering from the ills of industrialization who was sent back into nature to heal. In the same year, and just one mountain range away, Friedrich Nietzsche was writing of the same terrifying rootlessness and loneliness that society was descending into, which was eventually published as Thus Spoke Zarathustra. He, too, returned to nature in both protest and by way of salve.” 53.6%, Yellow: “Over the years I have followed all the alternate “degrowth” models that have been put forward by brilliant and generous minds around the world, all trying to circumnavigate the growth mythology problem. I love all of them and have interviewed many of their founders. Jason Hickel’s degrowth economics thesis advocates a deliberate reduction of consumption of energy and resources to bring the economy back into balance with the living world in a way that reduces inequality. Doughnut Economics, devised by Kate Raworth, does much the same but focuses squarely on meeting human needs within the planetary boundaries (without getting tangled in the weeds of growth versus degrowth). I’ve looked into—and got enthused and enlivened by—the universal basic income (UBI) thesis, four-day workweeks, and ending planned obsolescence. I applaud the conversations that call for switching out gross domestic product with gross domestic well-being and that champion the “economics of arrival.”[2] This latter thesis argues that once developed societies have reached a basic level of material satisfaction and medical care (once they’ve “arrived”), they should then extend the economics of arrival to everyone worldwide. It works on the premise that overall global growth and prosperity has actually reached a point where there is enough for everyone. Indeed, the world produces enough food to feed 1.5 times the current population (yet 2.3 billion people live in food insecurity).[3] They are all amazing, clever, beautiful ideas. But the problem they all face is that timing issue—most of the models can no longer be implemented in time to meet those climate and resource-limit deadlines. They are also hamstrung by the current system—the old normal—and our collective belief in the growth myth itself. Ultimately humans currently living in comfort do not want to give up any of their said comforts, even if they know they should and enthusiastically applaud ideas like UBI and simpler living. They can’t while everyone else is still signed up to growth. Classic moloch! I have followed the debate and the criticisms leveled at each thesis. My sense is that none of them can get off the ground without the system being overhauled.” 54.2%, Yellow: “I haul out this quote often, and always in contexts where the fact that it comes from the founding father of capitalist free markets, Milton Friedman, is perfectly ironic: “Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.” So, while it has been extremely frustrating and heartbreaking to witness all those inspired, human-focused, and beautiful “ungrowth” ideas repeatedly fail to get off the ground over the years, they were never to no end. Because they will, in fact, be the ideas “lying around” as our old normal descends into crisis. They will be there ready, to carry us into the “what comes next.”” Simplification 54.8%, Yellow: “As I’ve said a few times now, collapse looks like what we’re already in—everything being a bit shit, not going back to “normal,” and instead getting more and more shit. Slow at first, then rapidly. Collapse looks like the world watching as a (slow-at-first-then-rapid) genocidal project plays out in the Middle East. In real time. In 4K definition. And with no one being able to stop it.” 55.5%, Yellow: “And to this extent collapse very much looks like a (slow-at-first-then-rapid) simplification. Or perhaps a returning or unraveling to simpler times and simpler systems. Indeed, energy futurist Nate Hagens calls collapse a “great simplification.” * Vinay Gupta, the technology futurist who’s known as the “global resilience guru” for his work consulting on nuclear war, pandemics, climate change, and infrastructure collapse, goes this far: “What you people call collapse means living in the same conditions as the people who grow your coffee.”[3] Which really hits things home, I feel.” 55.6%, Yellow: “It’s also a powerful reminder that millions, potentially billions, of people are already living in quite advanced collapse in different parts of the world. And that collapse will only become even more unevenly distributed. It is also likely to exacerbate and exploit existing inequalities before any kind of “leveling out” where we’re all living like Bolivian coffee bean farmers. Although, I think I need to add here, aware of my privilege as I do so, that if you’re one of these marginalized, exploited people, the changed conditions may well be a positive thing. As Jem Bendell has written, “If your groundwater is being stolen by Coca Cola… then the collapse of the global economy might relieve the pressure and offer some years of more beautiful living.” The University of Cambridge’s Luke Kemp writes in his new book Goliath’s Curse that throughout history collapse often improved the lives of everyday people (the non-elites) because they were freed from domination and returned to simple subsistence farming. “After the fall of Rome, people actually got taller and healthier,” he says. Plus, you will no doubt have far more skills and resilience to cope with simplified conditions than the rest of us, who’ve only ever known comfort and who have never had to learn basic survival skills. Which is a stark but true thing to say.” 56.1%, Yellow: “I’m also asked about money and other signifiers of security—should we be buying a house, continuing to invest in the stock market or in elite education for the kids, and where in the world should we live now? I struggle to answer these kinds of questions and not just because of the inherent uncertainty of our predicament. It’s mostly because the answers can only come via the language and the flawed, increasingly redundant logic of the old normal, which tethers security to material possessions and financial status. Prepping, for me, is very much an old-normal mindset and therefore struggles to hold. Even homesteading—building intentional, self-sufficient communities up in the hills—is not something I’m able to support. I always feel compelled to point out when this subject is raised that studies show that fewer than 5 percent of intentional communities last more than five years.[4] The only financial advice I do allow myself to proffer is to invest in learning skills that will help you and your community in a simplified existence. But more on this below.” 56.6%, Yellow: “The first, below, is a list of mindsets, reflections, and wisdoms for emotionally decoupling from things. How many times have I said that I think this collapse experience, at a personal and tangible level, will come down to “how we handle it”? (Eight times, that’s how many!) Now I add this: It will also come down to how attached we are to “things.” Specifically, the comfort—physical and psychological—we derive from them. We must remain aware that this process will take a lot of inner work—an ongoing, supremely uncomfortable dialogue with our habitual, dopamine-addicted self and with our tendency to revert to greed and individualism. This inner work will also entail a hefty downgrading of our expectations. As many in this space have said, this is a “human behavior crisis” more than anything else. In no specific order… I consciously reflect on “sufficiency” as a concept. And I note that it is both a philosophical mindset and a policy approach gaining momentum in Europe.[5] It switches the end goal to human well-being and to operating within planetary boundaries, and it glorifies “less.” The 15-minute city concept, which kicked off in Paris, is a good example of “sufficiency” (indeed, it emerged from the World Sufficiency Lab, also in Paris). I also like to reflect on this: We have made satisfying wants the necessary virtue, at the expense of satisfying what we truly need. But “wants” are fickle. And they feel empty, especially if our needs—such as connection, meaning, and love—are not met. I have found it useful to reflect on my wants and just how little the satisfaction of them leaves me… actually satisfied. After our basic needs are met, the best things in life are mostly free. Walt Whitman wrote the quote that I’ve put at the top of the chapter after surviving the Civil War (he was a hospital volunteer who tended to wounded soldiers) and having witnessed all kinds of depravity and corrosion of moral and democratic ideals. Whitman’s quote continues: After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on—have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear—what remains? Nature remains; to bring out from their torpid recesses, the affinities of a man or woman with the open air, the trees, fields, the changes of seasons—the sun by day and the stars of heaven by night. I have an image in my head of my parents reading Alvin Toffler’s 1970 cult book Future Shock on a camping holiday. I finally got around to skimming it the last time I visited my family back in Australia. This passage grabbed me: To survive, to avert what we have termed future shock, the individual must become infinitely more adaptable and capable than ever before. He [sic] must search out totally new ways to anchor himself, for all the old roots—religion, nation, community, family, or profession—are now shaking under the hurricane impact of the accelerative thrust. Before he can do so, however, he must understand in greater detail how the effects of acceleration penetrate his personal life, creep into his behavior and alter the quality of existence. He must, in other words, understand transience.[6] I like to remind myself humans are designed to survive austerity. What we’d characterize as extreme poverty today was, until a few centuries ago, the condition of 94 percent of people on Earth.[7] I would go as far as saying, within limits, we thrive on austerity. During the World War II rationing period, Brits experienced a spike in health outcomes.[8] Infant mortality dropped, longevity increased, and lower rates of type 2 diabetes and hypertension played out down the track.[9] It’s also been well documented that Brits experienced their highest levels of happiness during the London Blitz (and not in spite of it, but because of it; the comradery of coming together in tough times was cited as the reason). Sebastian Junger writes in his book Tribe that suicide rates dropped almost to zero. Ditto admissions to mental wards. The experience “thrust people back into a more ancient, organic way of relating.” And here’s a thought experiment that also helps me. The Australian epidemiologist Dr. Richard Eckersley, who writes on the measurement of progress, posed this question to respondents in a study: “Given what you know about the state of the world and your own financial situation, is it absolutely your highest priority to become twice as wealthy in the next twenty years and consume twice as much?” Is it yours? Eckersley reports that very few responded in the affirmative. And yet, he argues, this is the metric that gross domestic product (GDP) works to and that our culture measures success by. Ideal GDP is when the total size of the economy grows at a rate of at least 3.5 percent, which equates to a doubling in twenty years. And, look, if the above fails to gel, simply go to nature. For me, when I lose my way with how to live honestly and in simplified flow, I “be” in nature. I hike, I sit under a tree, on grass, watching birds and clouds. I pull apart leaf segments. I observe the patterns. Nature never strays from the true rhythm of life; it doesn’t get distracted, it doesn’t attach itself to things. It is forever attuned. Tidal pools, tree-trunk rings, flower petals, and swallow murmurations are all pure expressions of the original congruence and belonging. We only have to “be in it” and our nature remembers how we are meant to be in the world.” 57.6%, Yellow: “I’ve referred to the work of Australian environmental scientist and philosopher Glenn Albrecht in previous work. He coined the term “solastalgia,” which means “a homesickness for our environment,” and has recently come up with the term “Symbiocene” to describe the epoch that must inevitably follow the Anthropocene.[10] The Symbiocene will see “human culture and technology symbiotically linked to both the structure and processes found in living systems.” He describes a forthcoming period of “deep remembering” back to simpler times.” 58.4%, Yellow: “A French friend, Celine, relayed a chilling anecdote when we were talking about this over an apéro one Sunday evening in Paris, which illustrates this point brutally. She lived in Brazil for many years and told me that when there was a power failure, you could hear screaming coming from the wealthy, gated suburbs. Without electricity, the security systems didn’t work, and the kids from the favelas grabbed their opportunity.” 58.7%, Yellow: “I raise it again here because I definitely got it. And chose to continue living this way. Because I came to learn that living with fewer things is elegant. You move faster and lighter through life (no extraneous equipment, no tedious weekend cleanouts); you exist in graceful attunement with the rest of life; you become more creative, agile, and alive. You just do. My sense is that a lot of people around me are aching for this more graceful, attuned way of living. But they have previously been too tethered to all their complexly nonanalog things to make the choice. Now that choice is being made a lot easier for everyone.” 58.8%, Yellow: “A short while back, the American social psychologist Devon Price wrote an essay entitled “Moving from ‘Who Is Going to Save Me?’ to ‘What Can I Do?’ ”[11] In it, Price argues that “the end of the world” will look like us all “attending to what needs to be done”—finding shelter, getting fed, and keeping the people around us as safe as we can. We will have to give up on worrying about appearances. We will also have to give up what anthropologist David Graeber calls “our bullshit job,” “a meaningless time-waster and meeting-holder designed to entertain middle management and bring nothing of value to the world—we would simply stop doing it, and place our focus on something more essential, like providing childcare.” (While no longer worrying that the sector is underpaid!)” Duty 59.3%, Yellow: “You might be familiar with that study from about forty years ago that compared the happiness levels of lottery winners and people who had been paralyzed in accidents.[1] It found that, over time, the accident victims—all of whom were left paraplegic—rated themselves as above average in happiness. Conversely, the lottery winners ultimately were no happier than the control group, and they rated the pleasure of mundane events of everyday life—dumb jokes, having breakfast, etc.—significantly lower than controls. The study introduced the idea of “hedonic adaptation” (and the hedonic treadmill) to the world—the idea that humans quickly return to a happiness set point, no matter the major event in their lives. It concluded that happiness can’t be relied on as a measure of our life’s meaning.” 60.4%, Yellow: “The Trump administration’s slashing of climate commitments and provisions, experts say, will see things deteriorate much further—and globally.[7] The investigative journalism site Carbon Brief published a study showing that the Trump presidency will add four billion tons of carbon emissions to the atmosphere by the end of the decade, the equivalent of $900 billion in global climate damages.[8] While we’re talking dollars, it has also been found climate change could cut global GDP in half by 2070.[9] I could go on and on. But you get the idea.” 60.8%, Yellow: “The hopeful/wishful messaging also ignores the fact that global warming is only one part of the problem, and combating it is not a cure-all. Most pollution, species extinctions, and habitat destruction are not directly driven by global warming but rather by our growth-obsessed, hyperconsuming, exploitative civilization.[10] We tend to avoid talking about this truth because it requires that we, hmmm, face the growth-driven, extractive—and exploitative—cost of all those “renewable” toys, as well as, yesss, our own behavior.” 60.9%, Red: “Activist and author of Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It Max Wilbert made this solid point on Rachel Donald’s Planet: Critical podcast recently: We are solving for the wrong variable. The environmental movement, instead of being about saving the planet and stopping the destruction of the natural world, has become about how do we save industrial civilization; how do we save the very thing that is causing the destruction of the planet.” 61.4%, Yellow: “For we should remember that once the dramatic implications of the climate crisis are recognized by the powerful as a threat to themselves and their children, they will, unless resisted, impose their own solutions on the rest of us, ones that will protect their interests and exacerbate unequal access to the means of survival, leaving the weak to fend for themselves. This is how it has always been. We must democratize survivability. Yes, that strikes me as the right fight: democratizing survivability. * So do we still focus on the climate fight? The “yes… and…” device will help here. Yes… and we must pick the right fight. The goal can no longer be green growth and fighting for BAU. It must be about democratizing survivability, ungrowth, simplification, and preserving our humanity.” 61.8%, Yellow: “I spoke to the Canadian Indigenous knowledge academic Vanessa Andreotti about this. She has a thesis that gels with me. In her book Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism, she argues our generation’s role is to hospice the old normal (the postindustrial growth myth with its green economy promise) to its death. Which is to say, our role is to minimize the suffering as things go down. This will require using the (largely fossil-fueled) energy sources that we have left to this end.” 62.6%, Yellow: “To reduce the former—inequality—we set about fighting extreme richness. Wherever we can. Collapse, particularly climate collapse, is a very direct result of the permitted exploitation of 90 percent of the world’s population by the “top” 0.00000032 percent (the global percentage of billionaires). Clive Hamilton has done a lot of the research to show systemic inequality and richness originates from private schools. He advocates (as do I) abolishing them.” 62.8%, Yellow: “Collaborate, cooperate, and communicate. These actions can seem a bit soft, and you might be inclined to dismiss them. But soft skills are precisely what’s going to be required in our future world together. Jem Bendell, in Breaking Together, says the most important thing to do is to talk to like-minded people. “Without talking to people, I believe we will be bulldozed back into denial by [messages that tell] us to be positive, hopeful and to carry on shopping and complying.” If all else fails, or you lose focus, just care. Care all over the place. When a world sees care in other people’s faces, it shifts.” 63%, Yellow: “Anthropologist Margaret Mead once said that the first sign of civilization was a healed human femur. In primitive times, a broken leg was fatal—it meant a person was unable to feed themself or run from danger. And so a healed femur indicates that someone cared for the injured person, helping them recover and providing food and protection. Indeed, this kind of altruistic behavior (particularly toward strangers) has been described as a trait unique to Homo sapiens.” 63.7%, Yellow: “Systems designer and professor of Planetary Civics at the University of Sheffield Indy Johar introduced me to the idea of “re-agenticizing nature,” which counts animals, trees, and soil not as inert, “free” resources to be extracted and exploited by humans but as having their own value (monetary or otherwise). Indigenous knowledge systems have long known this way of existing with the world; we can learn from them. We can start—now—to wrap our heads around these approaches. We can support the people voicing them, familiarize ourselves with them, and normalize their worth.” 64.1%, Yellow: “The existential risk philosopher Toby Ord points out that the world’s investment in protective technologies is dwarfed by its spending on ice cream.” 64.2%, Yellow: ““Mutual aid” is an idea put forward by French collapsologist Pablo Servigne. In his book Another End of the World Is Possible: Living the Collapse (and Not Merely Surviving It), he explains it’s not just about caring for others in times of need. Mutual aid is a self-organization tool that allows communities to function without depending on the supply chains. Further to this… Build community and prosocially prep! Mastroianni advocates creating “scenes” or hot spots of cool. Which requires cultivating a lot of friends. He explains that science “would not have happened” but for a motley crew of British scientists in the seventeenth century who hounded (inspired) all their scientist and inventor mates to stop hiding their results and to voice, or publish, them.[21] Economic historians call such people efflorescences, and Brian Eno called them sceniuses.” Pain 65.2%, Yellow: “A species that consumes its own beautiful, generous home? It’s such a crying shame. Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of Toronto, John Vervaeke, has written that as we become aware of what we have done to the world and each other, “We no longer believe in ourselves. We are strangers in our own world.”[2] Can we actually feel this much? Are we meant to? Are our nervous systems even built for such overwhelm?” 65.7%, Yellow: “Sacred pain. This is how Joanna Macy refers to the particular despair we’re feeling.[3] In her podcast series, she says, “Our pain becomes sacred when we allow it to deepen our connection with our world.” She adds that: “It is what has to happen for all of us. If we’re going to grow up as a species, we have to feel the horror of which we’re capable, without an anesthetic.” By which I take her to mean, we must be in this pain and we must be in it fully without numbing it. Without trying to soften the blow. We must bear it. We must bear it. “It’s a pain that you have to bow to as a human being… you wouldn’t want it not to be true for you,” she says. Which is kind of a riddle, a really beautiful one. I mean, it’s appropriate and perfect that we despair, precisely because we should find what’s going on in the world intolerable. As Donna Haraway would say, we must stay with the trouble until it passes through us because this is where sanity resides—in and through pain. To despair is a sacred duty. And to some extent, the pain is the point.” 65.9%, Yellow: “The grief psychotherapist and author of The Wild Edge of Sorrow, Francis Weller, acknowledges that going down into pain, bearing and staying with trouble, is supremely difficult. We are a culture, he says, that finds it particularly hard because it does not like going “down” into anything. “We are an ascension culture. We love rising,” he says. I’ve heard him make a super interesting point—that Christian mythology teaches us that human life on Earth is fundamentally “fallen” and that resurrection is the proper direction for a spiritual life. No wonder Christianity and capitalism have been bedfellows for so long!” 66.1%, Yellow: “The poet Kahlil Gibran wrote in The Prophet, “The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.” But Weller argues that our culture largely misses out on this alchemized joy because we dodge despair so desperately. We live “flatlined lives,” he says. Albert Camus observed the same. “There is no love of life without despair of life,” he wrote shortly after World War II ended. Camus explains how this alchemy works across a lot of his work. His argument is that when we really do despair, when we go down fully into the absurdity of having been born into a painful human existence that we know will end and that we decide to trudge through regardless, something in our humanity kicks into gear that must transcend the despair. It really must, for otherwise we would self-annihilate. Camus said that despair is the spark of common humanity expressing itself. Which I also find galvanizing.” 66.8%, Yellow: “Social scientist Pauline Boss was the first to term this kind of free-fall terror as “ambiguous loss.” She had been studying families in the 1970s in which fathers were too busy working to spend time with their kids, as well as wives of fighter pilots who were missing in action during the Vietnam War. In both cases, those left at home experienced a kind of lingering, nebulous despair. Boss coined the term to help these people acknowledge the paradoxical pain of having someone or something in your life who is also absent at the same time. Losing a parent to Alzheimer’s is “ambiguous loss”; the person you knew is both gone and still here. So, too, the predicament for First Nations Australians. Without recognition that their land was never ceded, without full acknowledgment of their experience of being ripped from their homes, and without closure on these “deaths,” Indigenous Australians’ grief is left in a traumatic limbo. Boss’s work then had a revival during COVID as psychologists tried to navigate the collective sadness being felt around the world. We were mourning something very hard to pinpoint, a slow death of something—the old normal—while still trying to live in it. Today, living between two worlds, ambiguous loss is all around us. Oh, the ghosts! The problem is that our current models for dealing with loss and grief (such as the standard “five stages” approach) are largely linear and work best when a death is conclusive. But when we are neither here nor there and the time of death is, well, becoming, I’m not sure there is such a fix. Boss doesn’t profess to resolve the paradox either. Instead, she offers ways to bear it, mostly based on finding meaning in staying in the paradox and the pain.” 67.3%, Yellow: “Rabbi Sharon Brous, author of The Amen Effect, has written about a two-thousand-year-old text that describes a Jewish ritual: Several times each year, hundreds of thousands of Jews would ascend to Jerusalem, the center of Jewish religious and political life. They would climb the steps of the Temple Mount and enter its enormous plaza, turning to the right en masse, circling counterclockwise. Meanwhile, the brokenhearted, the mourners (and here I would also include the lonely and the sick), would make this same ritual walk but they would turn to the left and circle in the opposite direction: every step against the current.” 67.5%, Yellow: “And each person who encountered someone in pain would look into that person’s eyes and inquire: “What happened to you? Why does your heart ache?” “My father died,” a person might say. “There are so many things I never got to say to him.” Or perhaps: “My partner left. I was completely blindsided.” Or: “My child is sick. We’re awaiting the test results.” Those who walked from the right would offer a blessing: “May the Holy One comfort you,” they would say. “You are not alone.” And then they would continue to walk until the next person approached. Rabbi Brous writes that this ancient ritual teaches us: “When your heart is broken, when the specter of death visits your family, when you feel lost and alone and inclined to retreat, you show up. You entrust your pain to the community.” We show up. Either as the community that can be entrusted or as the person who needs to entrust.” 67.8%, Yellow: “Thirdly, we must be courageous. And, yes, radically so. Courage is an antidote to despair, mostly because it creates the stability we need. As Joanna Macy writes: “When you walk toward the danger, in the danger, and dare to do what’s needed, you put your own safety at risk, so you become in some way larger than life. Fear makes you shrink, doesn’t it?” We must walk toward the danger now and role-model crazy courage, not the stoic kind but the kind required to live with a broken heart and to keep loving. The Irish philosopher John O’Donohue puts it slightly differently. He called for a “reverence of approach.” He wrote, “When we approach [pain] with reverence, great things decide to approach us.” Grief is not a passive state that we just have to get through. It’s something to engage with, to utilize.” 68%, Red: “There was an insight I came across, once again from Francis Weller. He argues that going down into pain and grief is an act of protest against living “numb and small.” It’s also a protest against “the collective agreement to turn our backs on what is happening.” I love this. It almost turns the invite, or push, to bear what we are in into a rally call. He says: “Grief is wild; it’s a feral energy. So when people really open up to grief, the last thing they are doing is operating in a polite or socialized manner.”” 68.1%, Red: “I also love this. To really let grief in is fitting with the times. It reflects the disgracefulness. It is precisely how a human should be responding, and we need to see more of it. It needs to be normalized. oh, and we can dance! I would believe only in a God that knows how to dance. —Friedrich Nietzsche” Oh, and We Can Dance! 68.5%, Yellow: “French historian Philippe de Félice wrote, “Eras of greatest material and moral distress seem to be those during which people dance most.” * I was curious to know when “disco mania” landed. I looked it up just now: 1975. The year the Vietnam War ended.” 68.5%, Yellow: “Which then got me curious about why dancing “works.” Why do we feel compelled to dance during collective despair? And does it help a culture process its pain? When humans are faced with distress or threat, the physical acts of fighting or fleeing[*2] not only have the potential to save our lives, but they also release the stress hormones that have built up, allowing us to regulate our nervous systems back to normal once we’ve outrun or fought off the threat. It’s a wonderfully neat system; without the release, we get trapped in the distressed state (known as trauma). Now, the thing is, a lot of large, societal threats (think plagues, a climate crisis, the threat of AI takeover) can neither be fought nor fled. Which can send us into a freeze state and sees all those stress hormones build up and up. Eventually, however, our bodies will seek out a way to “shake off” the layers of terror.” 68.8%, Yellow: “When we dance it is said we are processing despair, grief, shame, terror, fear at a biological level. It enables us to stay with the pain, to express it, to bear it, and in such a way that it can then pass through us. Dance, you might say, is a despair composter. * After my ayahuasca experience, I took to dancing. I’ve never been a comfortable or good dancer, particularly in front of other people. I have long, awkward limbs that miss beats. But suddenly my body just started moving to whatever beat it could find. It was involuntary. I woke each morning before dawn and ran along the coastline of Sydney’s eastern suburbs to Watsons Bay. I found rocky ledges above the ocean and danced (inelegantly, I’m sure) for an hour or more, sometimes without music. This intuitive urge has stayed with me. When I hike, I find a spot deep in the forest and dance-hike through the trees. I dance in the dark late at night with headphones on in my apartment in Paris. I often cry as I dance. Dancing seems to open up similar pathways as the Mother Medicine.” Humble 69.2%, Yellow: “humble We are the local embodiment of a consciousness grown to self-awareness, starstuff pondering the stars. —Carl Sagan When I was thirty-four, I disappeared. I could no longer see myself in the bedroom mirror that I’d been staring into, sideways, from the floor where I’d been lying in a twisted fetal position for three days.[*1] I had been in a dangerously suicidal ideating spot and was ready to step off. For more than a year, I’d been very unwell with a serious autoimmune condition, unable to work or walk. As I wrote in First, We Make the Beast Beautiful, “All the things that propped me up and defined ‘me’ had disappeared—my job, my athletic physique, my energy… my life savings. Gone.” And now I could not find a point to it all. I’d tried every angle, every strategic route. None led me out. I was at an existential crossroads. And so on this particular morning, I disappeared from view. I’m sure there is some neurological term for not being able to physically see yourself in a reflection; it’s not occurred to me to find it. The cognitive disruption, however, changed my life. It was enough to lift me up and out, and onto a new plateau of awareness. On this new plateau, I didn’t matter. I was mere star dust, per Carl Sagan’s quote. I was no more significant in the context of Almighty Life than the shard of sunlight hitting the carpet in front of me, than the neighbor’s dog I could hear scuffling outside, than a day, than a thought. And the most wonderful realization flooded in. As I described in the book” 69.5%, Yellow: “I (evidently) chose the latter route. I chose to fully embrace my “not mattering” and to join life where it is at. It was one of those “cosmic insignificance” moments we discussed earlier where something very, very big whacks things into perspective such that our ego, our “little i,” disappears or gets a healthy downgrading. Viewing the Earth from outer space as a pale blue dot for the first time does it.[*2] Illness, death, giving birth, and chronic insomnia can too. So can awakening to collapse. And really it must. * Another word for it is humility. Our lack of humility—our arrogant belief that we are masters of the universe, that we are entitled to lord over all other living beings in pursuit of our deranged, narcissistic ends—has imperiled us and most other species on the planet. Our denial of death and our stubborn belief in the growth imperative are also symptoms of a lack of humility, and they, too, have enabled our willful or otherwise ignorance of the truth.” 70.7%, Yellow: “A few years ago, I was at a book festival sharing a stage with Australian author Delia Falconer. We’d both written books about climate collapse, and I remember being quite stunned by the way Falconer described feeling awed by the destruction—the collapse—itself. She’d read from her book: “At the same time as global disarrangement is giving birth to signs of distress, it is throwing up phenomena of spectacular and haunting strangeness.”[1] She goes on to point to the beauty of the extraordinary interconnections of nature’s systems, such as how melting permafrost is revealing long-extinct signs of life that would otherwise remain obscured:” Wisdom 71.3%, Yellow: “wisdom To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness. —Ursula K. Le Guin Humans ache forward. We have an innate desire to be more, know more, reach more, reproduce more. We yearn to connect with the magnanimous nature of the universe, to be part of the love that connects the atoms, and to express it all generously.” 72%, Yellow: “McGilchrist argues that we need both hemispheres to work in tandem, but that humans are at their best when the left is the emissary to the right. Our greatest discoveries, the most beautiful art and writing, most moral guidance, and certainly humanity’s cumulative wisdom have emerged from the right side of our brains, buttressed and supported by the left. It’s a dynamic that tends to work well for our species. But here’s the problem. As civilizations become more complex, they go left-brained. Chaos mounts, and societies react with rigid rules and increased bureaucracy. The Excel spreadsheets get more detailed, commentary gets more didactic and binary. Pretty quickly, the lean to the left becomes self-reinforcing. Left-dominated types (such as authoritarians and technocrats) rise to power. Thumos dials up. They think they can conquer other humans, other planets, each other. Left is as left does… and so these people shut down right-brain wisdom in the culture broadly. The society becomes one that oversimplifies life while overcomplicating its responses. I mean, it’s civilizational collapse in a brain scan.” 72.2%, Yellow: “McGilchrist has written about what happens when people suffer damage to their right hemisphere. They can still eat, breathe, and make their way through the world, but they do so with a devastating handicap—they can’t understand context, interrelationships, or metaphor. They can’t be in life; they can’t appreciate the point of it all. When we spoke, Iain used a wonderful phraseology: “We are a civilization,” he said, “with severe right-hemisphere damage.” * How do we get on with restoring ourselves and our world to right-brained sanity? How do we lean into wisdom again? When I asked Iain this, he simply advised appreciating that we are living in a derangement. “Moral sense is something we are born with; it is life-giving, it is a calling.” He effectively urges us all to normalize things back to a reverence for this moral sense, to return to being meaning-seeking machines. He promotes much of what we’ve been entangling ourselves in over the course of this book so far: being okay with ambiguity; shifting our focus from analyzing parts to appreciating wholes (by seeing connections and relationships rather than isolating elements);[*1] making art; and practicing mindfulness.” 72.5%, Yellow: “The truly awesome Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor told me much the same, speaking to me from her houseboat on a lake in Kentucky where she lives in isolation.[*2] You might recall her story from her 2008 TED Talk, the second most-watched ever. She was a Harvard brain scientist and cellular anatomist who got to witness the left hemisphere of her brain shut down from a stroke, leaving her almost entirely in a right-brain existence in which she was able to experience perfect presence and saw matter as clusters of floating atoms. “I became as big as the universe,” she tells me, “sharing a consciousness with everyone.” She has since managed to “rebuild” her left hemisphere a little but remains mostly “right.”” 72.6%, Yellow: “Jill tells me we can all shift our circuitry to the right with some practice and says repeatedly during our extended chat: “Sarah, just go right!” As in, understand the brain chemistry and make the choice to access a right-style relationship with the world. She advises observing the dialogue between the two sides of the brain whenever we can, noting how the left tries to take over. We just watch it force-fit things into categories or into linear order or into time-based constructs. Then, she says, resist the left-dominated thought. Or, rather, see it for what it is—false construct. As you do, take note of how your body feels. Does it feel… better? More… right?” 72.8%, Yellow: “Here’s a useful example. You might be thinking about preparing your family for the simplification process. The left brain will start to line things up in terms of “right” and “wrong” things to do. It will try to discern probabilities. No doubt it will inject the conversation going on in your head with judgments about how other people will behave, how to get ahead of them. And it will probably drift to a bunch of angry, resentful tangents about who caused the whole situation we’re in. I generally know when I’ve “gone left” because I feel my body become rigid and I will start to get overwhelmed by my thoughts. When this happens I have to walk away from the situation, even just briefly. This is how I resist the left; I exit the scene and go for a walk. When I can, I go into nature. Movement naturally gets my right brain activated. My thinking loosens up, and I can feel myself making wiser decisions, even if just incrementally. Jill agrees that exercising (though not too much) and observing nature are the most effective ways to go right.[*3] Focusing on gratitude, on the miracle of your existence (the same odds as winning the lottery a million times, a million days in a row) also works as a right-leaning practice that can open you into wiser ways.” 73.4%, Yellow: “That said, my publisher, Amy, has asked that I share a few things that I do to lean right, to cultivate wisdom (or the wisdom-receptive muscle). Well, for starters, I think simple exposure helps. And so I “soul nerd,” to borrow my own term from one of my previous books. This entails studying the wisdoms of the wise people who came before us. I like to collect them; here are a few that, to me, dance in a right-brained way: Wendell Berry: Be joyful, even though you have considered all the facts. W. H. Auden: We must love one another or die. Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen: Sometimes when you don’t fit in, it’s because you belong to the future. How wonderful! You’re going to build the world that you fit into.[*4] * I also consciously try to be in the questions, a wisdom I draw from a 1903 letter that Rainer Maria Rilke wrote to a young protégé poet in his care: I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves… Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. I invite you to flick back and read Ursula K. Le Guin’s quote at the top of this chapter too. Being in the question often means being wise enough to allow for unanswerable questions.” Adulting 74.2%, Yellow: “The Oxford existential risk philosopher Toby Ord writes in his book The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity that the postindustrial world emulates the liminal period between childhood and adulthood, that treacherous time in which strength and whim outmaneuver wisdom and restraint, and the future is rarely considered. He cites fossil records that show the typical lifetime of a mammalian species is a million years. “If we think of one million in terms of a single, eighty-year life,” Ord writes, then humanity is “sixteen years old; just coming into our power; just old enough to get ourselves in serious trouble.” We’re a reckless, overconfident teenager. We can build bombs and robots but we don’t have the restraint and maturity to use them wisely.” 75.7%, Yellow: “Carl Jung had something enlivening to say on this. He observed that an “apocalypse archetype” exists in the collective psyche.[4] The word “apocalypse” means an “uncovering or revealing of the truth,” and Jungian thinkers argue that the collective Self at distinct points in history reaches a stage where it must reorient humanity away from a worldview that has become redundant and dangerous, to allow for a new, more viable, and truthful way of life that matches the spiritual growth that it’s achieved. It does this by “realizing itself,” and in a particularly apocalyptic fashion. That is, by brutally uncovering its ugliest shadows, displaying its mistakes, and parading the narcissistic self-absorption and the devastation it has created. This can result in a dialing up of the madness, the vileness, the inhumanity. It uncovers the whole absurd lot. According to this theory, the old worldview must first be seen for what it is, to allow for the new way. In Jungian terms, this is seen as true maturation, where the Self can hold both its light and shade.” 76.1%, Yellow: “As I mentioned in the “Denial” chapter, Meg Wheatley writes of a certain type of adult that appears during times of crisis and collapse. She calls them “warriors of the human spirit.” She references historian Sir John Glubb, who noted that as societies collapse, the bulk of people descend with them, resorting to looting, depravity, denial, and indulgence. However, some find themselves going the other way—stepping up into service: While despair might permeate the greater part of the nation, others achieved a new realization of the fact that only readiness for self-sacrifice could enable a community to survive. Some of the greatest saints in history lived in times of national decadence, raising the banner of duty and service against the flood of depravity and despair. Warriors of the human spirit, Meg writes, are the adults who do not flee, but who bear it, or who “abide,” as she puts it: They serve as beacons of an ancient story that tells of the goodness, generosity, and creativity of humanity. You will know them by their compassionate presence. You can identify them by their cheerfulness. When asked how they do it, they will tell you about discipline, dedication, and the need for community.” 76.4%, Yellow: “During the pandemic, Rebecca Solnit read fairy tales online to fans. In a contrasting digital universe, a particular breed of “bro with a podcast” doubled down on the hero’s journey and warrior motifs, sprinkled with Stoic appropriations and ice baths. These self-professed warriors do a lot of ice baths! Solnit has made the point that heroes’ journeys, as per the structure set out by Joseph Campbell, are “stories in which exceptionally powerful, usually male figures defend and enlarge their power (and in which the power is often the power to harm).”[5] Fairy tales are also heroes’ journeys, of course. The protagonist is forced to face treacherous times and evil characters and then returns “home” to guide the community via a moral story. But in fairy tales the characters are mostly kids or women. They don’t have superior “hero” powers and tend to start out fifty yards back from the starting line, often poor or marginalized (Cinderella), locked up or isolated (Rumpelstiltskin), undersized (Thumbelina and Peter Pan) or neglected (Hansel and Gretel). Yet still they step up. Their ordeal is overwhelmingly unfair and cruel. And so, to survive—to bring the tale home for the reader—these little undervalued characters don’t conquer or slay things. Instead, they form alliances with other underdogs, invariably old women with fairy-godmother vibes, elves, small animals, and other natural world friends. So heroic journeys are about being strong and all-powerful, while fairy tales are about collaboration, cooperation, and communication;[*3] about being kind, innovating, listening, trusting; and about rewriting the story in tough times. They also console everyday humans that they are no Robinson Crusoe; other vulnerable, small, scared beings have been plunged into hard, uncertain times before too. They confirm that hardship and passing through hardship with the help of others are part of life. Funnily, I feel the fairy tale is the more adult journey now.” 76.8%, Yellow: “I also want to point out that fairy tales were always conjured during crises—global pandemics, famines, and periods of displacement. They had harsh endings that provided moral, guiding principles that helped the audience make sense of their own difficult predicament and loss.” 77.1%, Yellow: “There is one final, not-insignificant observation I want to make here. There has been another kind of “growing into” or “evolving into” that I have been observing. It is no coincidence, I feel, that the bulk of readers who followed the writing of this book in serialization form are forty-plus women. This mirrors the broader statistics on who comprises the bulk of activist groups fighting for change in the world—midlife women. A recent Brookings analysis found that almost two-thirds of climate activists in the United States are women and confirmed the average age was fifty-two.” 77.2%, Yellow: “The female thinkers and commentators in the collapse and activist spaces also tend to take on an empathetic, holistic, and often spiritual approach that’s about serving the collective. They don’t promote wading in and being heroes. Rather, they advocate getting jobs done, drawing on “soft skills” of cooperating, coordinating, restraining, allowing and bearing, and, to be honest, being mature. I cite many of them in this book: Meg Wheatley, Donna Haraway, Vanessa Andreotti, Rebecca Solnit, Catherine Ingram, Joanna Macy, and Nora Bateson. Throughout history, mature women, finally freed of child-raising responsibilities and many of the constrictions society has placed on them, have played important roles in steering communities and in fighting for justice. Margaret Mead called it postmenopausal zest. As our estrogen drops off, we have a whole lot less fucks to give about the wrong things (like what people think of us when we speak up). But since our care muscle is so activated from decades of (over)use, we find ourselves with a surprising amount of clear, targeted fucks to give about the right things. I’m now fifty-two. And I feel this to my core. It’s from this clear, zesty place that I also put forward this idea: One might argue that one of the features of the “old normal” that’s dying out is patriarchy, and with it the Western Modern Man that it confected (along with his lone ranger hero story). And that this moment might be calling for—demanding!—a mature, feminized style of wisdom and leadership that all men and women can lean into and benefit from. Will Ferrell suggested the same in a speech he gave at a Hollywood Reporter event: Isn’t it just time for women to run the planet? I swear, but I don’t know what else to do because we—men… and we’re not doing so good. So, please, can you guys just take over?” We Must Create Art in the Apocalypse 77.7%, Yellow: “we must create art in the apocalypse Then what would we be fighting for? —attributed to Winston Churchill (when asked to cut funding for the arts to help the war effort)” 78.1%, Yellow: “Is it appropriate that we be making art when the world around us is suffering and disintegrating? It can seem indulgent in these times to be engaging in the creative process and not, say, picking up plastic on the beach or protesting concentration camps for undocumented workers. But my answer is a hard yes! In fact, we must. * You see, art—whether it’s poetry, music, painting, or literature—gets us paying attention. It cuts through the distraction and chaos that is taking down democracy and polarizing us. As the poet Teju Cole told Krista Tippett on her podcast once, the role of the artist is “to get people to concentrate more.” He then added this stunning line, a line that demonstrates its point as it is being read: “The artist raises a palm as if to say hush and listen and let’s be still.” The other day I was listening to professor and author Ta-Nehisi Coates talk to Kara Swisher on her podcast about the role of books and writers. “They should haunt us,” he said. Kafka, similarly, wrote that books are “the axe for the frozen sea within us.” Both Coates and Kafka are pointing to something that I very much believe: Art exists, and must exist, to shake us awake and into engagement; it should enliven us to take responsibility for our existence.” 79.4%, Yellow: “We have spent much of the past two hundred years lauding left-brained qualities like rationality, data accrual, precision, and didacticism. At the same time, we have diminished qualities like caring for others, stewardship, intuition, nobly “bearing,” and wisdom. In effect, we’ve worked to define ourselves away from these so-called soft skills.” Reckoning 79.7%, Yellow: “What is the joy that even death cannot destroy and how do we discover it? —Meister Eckhart” 79.8%, Yellow: “Facing collapse, as it turns out, allows us to finally get around to exploring the beautiful questions we ache to answer within ourselves. It very literally forces us to confront what matters most. What matters when we “lose it all.” Then, as we confront the impossibly molochy situation it presents, we are invited into a post-blame compassionate and accepting maturity. Climate collapse has gotten us to confront truth in a fully adult way. The AI threat has us reckoning with what actually makes us us. I feel now that it is all steering us—with considerable urgency and force—to live simpler, more connected lives. To rise into a fuller, more mature, evolved expression of ourselves—as many other tumultuous, liminal, revolutionary times in history have tended to do. * Viktor Frankl famously shared that when humans have a lofty, meaningful “why” to their existence they can best handle the treacherous “how” of whatever tough predicament they find themselves in. I’ve been beginning to think that collapse is laying out the “why” that can hold us through the terrifying “how” of our situation. It’s seeing us live our way to the answer. Which is all kinds of perfect.” 80%, Red: “To go right back to the beginning, to our original confrontation with letting go of hope, I also now feel we have tortured and released and wrestled our way to that “certainty” that Václav Havel writes about, where “something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” I am feeling the full relief of this, of having arrived in a solid truth.” 80.5%, Yellow: “And absolutely there is room for the (albeit ludicrously remote) possibility that something or someone will swoop in with full deus ex machina vibes and stop the domino tumble just in time. But—and this is a question I do find myself asking now—would it be right to stop it? Even if it were possible, would we want to preserve or reinstate the old normal? Is this what we want to be fighting for now?” 80.8%, Yellow: “We retreat from life—nature, one another, love—and often to numb ourselves from our very crimes of separation and subjugation—slavery, human rights abuse, the raping and pillaging of our own home. Climate psychologist Sally Weintrobe calls this phenomenon “the culture of uncare.” She observes that our neoliberal or peak postindustrial setup has intentionally trained us to devalue the fundamental human quality of care, which sees us—so very disappointingly—fail to fight for the planet and to decry the injustices that pain us to even just witness.” 80.9%, Yellow: “I guess we could frame things differently and ask instead: Even if it turns out we were wrong, would we do it anyway? Given what we now know, would we not want to face truth, simplify our lives, consume less, choose truly sustainable options, build secure communities, value soft skills again, quit our “bullshit job,” rise into the mature versions of ourselves, build those islands of sanity and fully live our humanity regardless? I know my answer.” 81%, Yellow: “To this extent (and I know it almost seems obscene to acknowledge it), we might choose to see collapse as a gift. So very ironically, it’s pushing us to a way of being in the world that we’re craving that I’m not sure anything else could or would. And perhaps this is what we can hold on to as we tread this big, defining moment together.” 81%, Yellow: “Reverend Michael Dowd called collapse the Great Homecoming. Joanna Macy, as well as some Indigenous cultures, called it the Great Turning. Others have used the term “the reset.”” 81.3%, Yellow: “As Montaigne remarked, we can find some spiritual comfort in the fact that our death is merely one part of a much greater plan. Concluding that humans just aren’t meant to remain on Earth when the sum total of our achievement is destruction feels tidy. “Your death is but a piece of the world’s order, and but a parcel of the world’s life,” he wrote. This is true. But now, increasingly, I realize humanity still does very much matter. More than I’d thought that afternoon sitting on the veranda with my parents. * The philosopher Jonathan Lear explores this idea in his most recent book, Imagining the End: Mourning and Ethical Life. He argues that in our absence ecosystems would probably heal and there would be new life, but the world will have lost something irreplaceable: us. Indeed, life will have lost the capacity—the human consciousness—even to see itself as having lost something. Lear adds that the “we will not be missed” argument that declares that human extinction is some kind of karmic justice is an avoidance tactic. It allows us to bypass the intolerable sadness and complexity of the human experience. It lets us off from bearing our whole. Lear argues it is also morally, or spiritually, wrong.” 81.7%, Yellow: “I just got off a video call with Meg Wheatley. She reaches out when she senses, from the mountain ranges of Utah where she lives, that I need her. I’m not sure how she knows. But she does. We talked through this idea of collapse being a gift. She turned my statement around. “We have been gifted with the realization we were made for this time,” she said. There is so much in this statement. It immediately jerks me from the victimhood I often feel. I found myself exclaiming in response, “How wonderful!” It also makes me aware that even the despair, the sense of powerlessness, the grief, the guilt, and our lack of action and complicity thus far might make some kind of perfect sense too.” 81.9%, Yellow: “Meg finished the conversation with this simple line: “It’s time to ask who we really are.” Skip Notes *1 To reference that other awesome repositioning of “hope” from the start of this journey. *2 Luke is quoting from the Mary Oliver poem “Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches?” humaning Be like the bird who, pausing in her flight awhile on boughs too slight, feels them give way beneath her, and yet sings, knowing she hath wings. —Victor Hugo” Humaning 83.2%, Yellow: “There is a beautiful refinement to this idea of fiercely choosing (or being reduced to) love that I hold close to me. In The Art of Loving, Erich Fromm writes that our original human urge is to connect and experience oneness. Our civilization has increasingly delegated this search for unification to religion, charismatic dudes with podcasts, and, of course, consumerism. Fromm argues that we often confuse belonging with conforming to a herd, which tragically only ever works to separate us, not connect us.” 84%, Yellow: “I feel compelled to include one last list, a list of things we are radically ready for. We really are ready to suffer nobly. Suffering is what humans do and we are built for it. In Buddhism (as well as Hinduism and Jainism) the First Noble Truth is that life is unsatisfactory and entails ongoing suffering (dukkha). We are ready to be fully humble. To say, “We fucked up.” And then to add, “And now what am I going to do about it and who am I going to be for this moment?”” Homecoming 86.1%, Yellow: “We have also been searching for someone or something to save us, to tell us what to do. But it turns out our guru is right in front of us. And it’s in us. Our guru is nature, it’s life. Indigenous knowledge systems show that the emergent strategies of nature are far more efficient than anything we could orchestrate with our linear strategizing. Have you seen the video of that experiment in which a slime mold solves the Tokyo subway system in less time than an engineer can?[1] Basically, the slime “naturally” grows in the most perfectly efficient and resilient way to connect a series of oat flakes that the scientists lay out to represent the various cities and neighborhoods of the Tokyo metropolitan area. There’s no mucking around, the slime just “knows” the way and emerges its way to it. Indigenous author Andrea Ritchie speaks of fractal activism—making small right moves that get replicated, like the repeated patterns of a snowflake that emerges to become an avalanche. This truly does feel like the most efficient and effective way to go about change: small, right moves, made in congruent ease, powered by fierce love, that allow for unexpected turns and mysterious transformations.” 86.8%, Yellow: “One of my Substack readers posted the Osho line: “Move the way love makes you move.” I now sit and think through what this could mean. Love makes me enlarge. Love makes me glide, almost oblivious to the fear. Love makes me do it anyway. To remain faithful, we need rituals. We need mentors and “better prophets.” And we need help. I seek out all these things, as a practice.” 88.4%, Yellow: “Finally, a short, full-circling word on hope. Hope can’t hold us like it once did, and hopium is existentially dangerous. Truth is a far more helpful ballast in these times. But still—and this has plagued me the whole way along—the human experience is too mysterious, too wildly improbable, for me to let go of what I think I’d like to call… stunning possibility. “Wherever human beings are, we at least have a chance,” James Baldwin reminds us, “because we’re not only disasters; we’re also miracles.”” 88.7%, Yellow: “But I’ve had the deep sense that this is not how things will roll. We won’t be efforting (mind-mapping, force-fitting, projecting) our way there. We will, I feel, collectively and creatively, emerge with life into it. This is what I mean by stunning possibility.”