I don’t think human beings evolved to know what a click through rate is.

I think we evolved to point at oddly shaped clouds and insist they looked exactly like a duck. To eat mangoes over the sink because there’s simply no dignified way to do it. To accidentally fall asleep in the afternoon under a tree. To make soup from whatever happened to be growing. To tell increasingly embellished stories about the fish that got away 🫤.

Our brains and bodies are extraordinary things.

They invented mythology.

Opera.

Knitting. Weaving.

The concept of dragons. The theory of relativity.

Someone looked at flour one day and thought, I wonder if this could become cake.

Someone else looked at milk and patiently waited for it to become cheese.

Somebody saw an ant carrying a leaf twenty times its size and decided to write poetry.

We are a species built for wonder.

And yet.

Somehow I spend an alarming amount of my life thinking about things that I feel I should not burden my beautiful brain with.

1. KPIs.
   I’d much rather receive a weekly report that says:

   You laughed so hard you snorted twice.

   You remembered the smell of your grandmother’s kitchen because someone burnt garlic.

   You noticed a swallow.

   You finally learnt the difference between coriander and parsley without having to smell both, and you received 10 hours of Sun this week.

   Those feel like metrics worth tracking. I wish I didn't have to think about:

   CTR.

   MRP.

   ROI.

   CAC.

   LTV.

   ROAS

   At this point I have no idea whether these are business metrics or blood tests.

   

2. The engagement rate of this Substack piece I am writing.

   I don’t want my writing to engage.

   I want it to accompany.

   I want it to be something someone reads while waiting for a train, or avoiding replying to an email, or because they’ve had a strange Tuesday and need reminding that other people are also having strange Tuesdays where they are spending time thinking about what they do not want their brain to be used for.

3. Shareholder value.

   Shareholder value is another phrase I struggle with.

   I’d like shareholder value to be replaced by seedholder value.

   How many varieties of tomato did you grow this summer? Did you finally keep basil alive?

   I’d like a report saying:

   “Congratulations. This season you’ve collected twelve varieties of seeds and finally figured out what a swallow looks like.”

4. Charging my phone.

5. Charging my laptop.

6. Charging my watch.

7. Charging my earbuds.

8. Charging my portable charger.
   

9. Talking to an AI chatbot for customer support

   No, you don’t “understand my frustration”.

   A chatbot once responded to a complaint, “My order is lost in space,” with, “We do not ship to space.” Technically correct… but not very helpful 😅
   

10. Accepting cookies from websites I will never visit again.

    I would happily accept actual cookies.

11. Watching ads on a subscription service I’ve already paid for, only to be asked to pay even more to remove the ads.

    Please just rob me instead.

    

12. Paying extra for food that doesn’t contain poison.

    I want to invite my friends over for dinner without it burning a hole in my pocket.

13. Applying for a Visa

    I have to prove I won’t overstay in countries that once overstayed close to two centuries in mine.

14. Finding somewhere to sit down without buying something.

15. Building entire cities around cars.

    As if fossil fuels are infinite and electric vehicles don’t still require mining.

16. Planned obsolescence

    Cheap razor blades that do not stay sharp by design (At least Europe finally made some of this illegal.)

17. Commons spaces that shut by 10 PM.

    

    
    

18. Paying taxes. I’d love to meet the infrastructure everyone keeps talking about.

19. Proving my identity and that I am not in fact a robot, yet, to websites that already know too much about me.

20. Whether I sound too eager, too cold, too available, too unavailable, or just appropriately hydrated in text messages.

    I’m a yearner. Let me yearn.

    

21. Where I see myself in five years.

    Floating in a lake like a water buffalo.

    

    
    

22. Anti homeless benches

    

    
    

23. The meta ai glasses. BAN!

24. Chewing gum that gives up after thirty seconds.

25. Having to justify why dissent isn't disloyalty.

26. This headache. Is it dehydration, hormones, burnout, anxiety, or gas?

27. Replying “Sounds good!” when it does not, in fact, sound good.

28. Fruit wrapped in more plastic than fruit.

27. Trying to keep up with whether this week's billionaire wants to colonise Mars, replace my job, or buy another democracy.

This list could go on. I can't.

But curious to know what your list looks like.

If you could evict one unnecessary thought from your brain forever, what would it be?

And what would you make room for instead?

When did noble pursuits like knitting baby hats, collecting seed pods before the monsoon rains, dropping homemade sweets to a neighbor and relaxing after dinner with a book become synonymous with boring.

When did we begin asking ‘so what do you do’ as the first question to a stranger? Surely this is not how small talk began in the Vedic period.

And please, oh power above, tell us, when did the Ambani wedding become the cultural goalpost?

Here, today, in 2026, we are living in peak-capitalism. Where our value, and the value we assign others, is nearly inextricable from our commercial productivity and consumption.

And what does all of this have to do with energy descent?

Well, all of this affordable luxury and year-round, click-of-a-finger availability of stuff is made possible by crude oil.

Lots of it.

Crude oil enables our globalised consumer reality -- where raw materials are shipped to one part of the world, manufactured in another, and then consumed in yet another.

Heck, crude oil is also the raw material itself in our zillions of plastic products.

Just walk through a K-Mart, a D-Mart, or any of the x-Marts and the shelves top to bottom are crude oil. Polyethylene this, nylon that, acrylic whatnots and polyurethane thingamabobs.

Marking peak capitalism is an incredibly complex and energy-intensive globalised consumer economy that now underpins our very social fabric & social psychology.

The Energy Bottle Neck

As of this publishing in early-mid June, the Strait of Hormuz remains effectively closed, with the news reporting divergent and varied stages of a peace deal underway. For argument sake, let’s say that the Strait reopens fully by end of June.

What happens to the 1/5th of the world’s crude oil that historically has flowed through these waters?

Well, it doesn’t restart right away, and certainly not at previous capacity.

Why not?

Many interconnected factors.

1. Potential mines. Iran has warned of sea mines planted in the Strait; it would take Western naval departments several weeks to scan the area for safe passage.

2. Seaworthiness & Speed. Approx 1,500 tankers are stranded in the Persian Gulf for the last 3 months. Idle. Waiting in warm water. The perfect homes for barnacles and algea to make their own. Those little sea critters impede navigation and must be cleaned up. Getting these ships seaworthy takes time, energy and resources, which industry leaders say will take 30-45 days assuming labor is present. Plus, there is a risk that after cleaning, the vessels will be operating slower than normal, which is what shipping group Hapag-Lloyd found for the 1 vessel they were able to retrieve from the Strait since lockdown. In their company’s podcast, exec Rolf Habben Jansen said “We also noticed that once we got her out that the maximum speed she could still achieve was significantly less than normal.”

3. Crew. AI robotics ain’t there yet folks! These 1,500 or so tankers are operated by very real, in-person human beings, at least 20,000 of them! Each with their own life trajectory, list of priorities, and decision making. Reforming the crews needed to operate these vessels is a task of its own, as the majority would have found other reliable work by now.

4. Insurance. With an average tanker carrying 2 million barrels of crude oil, those suckers are carting around $200 million worth of product. I don’t know about you all, dear readers, but that is a number that we cannot even conceptualise, let alone take the responsibility of losing. This is where insurance comes in. Ships need insurance to travel; precisely because their stock is so darn valuable. As per their stereotype, insurance companies hyper risk-adverse, and the risks of war, violence, and late deadlines loom near.

Even if everything goes to plan and the Strait can reopen to pre-war operations, (which it does so often in complex situations, right?), energy experts agree there will be fewer tankers through the Strait, at slower pace, for months to come. And the ripples of geopolitics will be felt for years.

What does that mean for our consumer society? A global constraint on energy.

_{Illustration from children’s book Henry’s Quest}

Energy Descent

The declined availability of crude oil has been prophesied by many. Including some of our personal favorite thinkers at ALT EFF - David Holmgren (co-originator of the Permaculture movement and former ALT EFF Juror), and Nate Hagens of The Great Simplification podcast/think tank.

Ps. Holmgren is bloody brilliant. We recommend reading everything he writes. In this case, his article on the Two Faces of Energy Descent here and in more detail in his book, Future Scenarios.

Both agree that energy descent will completely reorganise society, namely

• shortening supply chains and eliminating many goods currently transported worldwide

• reorienting agriculture towards local and biodynamic (with fossil fuel fertilizers and pesticides unavailable)

• re-localising society around bioregions

• ending, or significantly stunting our globalised consumer economy.

Goods would be made and sold in place. International travel and even car travel would be features for the hyper-elite. Food would be produced slower, and with less input, making it less abundant and certainly ending the possibility of buying kiwis 🥝 year-round in Mumbai.

Read: the end of globalisation.

Which has us thinking...is this the end of capitalism as we know it? So ironically accelerated by the hubris of the leader of the world’s richest economy, that has the most to lose if Capitalism’s house of cards falls.

When will there simply not be enough energy for virtual carts promising next-day-delivery of plastic-wrapped rapture?

We cannot say, but our spidey-senses are tingling.

Joy in Austerity

There are those age old saying - “the best things in life are free” and “money can’t buy happiness” -- which globalisation has allowed us to ignore.

Dust those off, shall we?

“It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism?” - Fredric Jameson

Indeed, Fredric, Indeed. But maybe it’s time to practice life as if we could imagine that end. Because the bottleneck on crude oil may just force our hand.

Our long-time mind-muse Sarah Wilson, in her new book I Eat the Stars (brilliant! read it!) reminds us that humans can thrive in times of frugality and simplicity:

“During the World War II rationing period, Brits experienced a spike in health outcomes. Infant mortality dropped, longevity increased and lower rates of type 2 diabetes and hypertension played out down the track. It’s also been well documented that Brits experienced their highest levels of happiness during the London Blitz...the comradery of coming together in tough times was cited as the reason.”

Proving that what we truly need (connection, meaning, relationships) is different from what the globalised machine has convinced us we want.

She also offers sound advice for all of us wanting to reclaim presence without the distraction of consumption, be it digital media or material:

“...the only technique that works for me is treating the reclamation of my attention as a radical act of defiance.”

She goes on to quote activist brontë velez in the provocation ‘How will I be useless to capitalism today?’

That is the question we offer you today for your further mental mastication. How, oh how, can we be useless to capitalism today?

Because if the geo-political gridlock continues its tightening on crude oil shipments, the end of capitalism as we know it may be here sooner than we think.

So here is your homework. Here are 10 things you can do now to access joy without our crude-oil guzzling globalised system.

Post-Capitalism To Do List:

1. Tinker. Knitting, knot tying, sewing, crafting, fermenting, building, and endless other types of tinkering, are all the real currency of the future. A great place to start is to collage! Reuse scraps of newspaper, magazine, ticket stubs and old ALT EFF programs to create just for the sake of creation.

2. Dance! Did you know that during Europe’s Black Plague, where 1 out of every 3 people died and whole villages nearly vanished, the remaining danced. They danced themselves into ecstasy, into acceptance, into integration with their new reality. Dancing brings us joy.

3. Cook and share food. Best done with a bit of ambience - light some candles, start the record, pour some drinks and lay the table cloth. Not all meals have to be served. Friends can help with the cooking and the cleaning to share the load. Dust off an old cookbook in the corner and cook through it cover to cover. You’re bound to discover new tastes and experiences.

4. Host a clothing swap. We all are likely to have 10+ items in our closets that are gathering dust. Message some friends, tell them to bring their friends, and everyone must bring at least a couple items of clean, in-tact, fun and stylish clothing pieces that they have grown weary of. Organise by category: shirts, pants, accessories etc, and let the people shop’. Everyone leaves with things that are new and fabulous, and free.

5. Lean into community and reciprocity. Sharing, bartering, swapping, and teaching each other new skills are the surest way to enrich life without the purchase of new things.

6. Retrain your senses to subtly. In the same way that our tastebuds can get retrained to be mind-blown by the sweetness of a grape when we cut our refined sugar, all of our sense can recalibrate when we offer our presence. Complete, toddler-like presence to the birds outside our window in the morning, to watching the sky darken with rainclouds and release, to tracking the jamuns budding and growing till rich purple fruit on the trees outside. Presence is the great multiplier of pleasure.

7. Write a letter to a friend or relative, address it, and mail it. Some of us at ALT EFF have reclaimed letter writing as a genuine form of correspondence with friends, finding it richer, more intentional, and with the right sprinkle of anticipation and unknown than the seemingly obligatory exchange of WhatsApp messages.

8. Perform reading children’s books aloud in groups. Ha! This is inspired by a recent experience at a friend-of-a-friend’s birthday gathering. One by one, grown adults took the mic to read a childrens books aloud. They read with humor, with passion, with drama, and ooooh how we laughed.

9. Buy a paper map and learn to navigate with it again. This doomsday-prepper suggestion may lead to more initial frustration than joy, but there is also joy in getting lost! And keeping the map reading skill alive is one we deem essential.

10. GET IN NATURE. The true panacea to all the confusion we humans stir up with the mind. Be present, observe the micro-interactions happening at all levels.

While we still have the autonomy, remembering that joy, usefulness, connection, worth and meaning lie outside of capitalism is an apt practice for an uncertain tomorrow.

Start ticking off that list, and let us know how you feel when you do!

_{Note: There are a zillion rabbit holes that are worth taking when exploring energy descent...today’s lens is middle class and privileged, as there are billions in the world that do not and can not participate in consumerism on tap. Many are the the very same people that are producing the cheap goods for middle class consumption. This article is not intended to overly simplify energy descent or materiality, but to look at just one fiber of the tangled knot.}

I asked my parents for their financial advisor’s advice.

The suggestions came back: invest in stocks in oil, gas, and defence companies.
(The unholy trifecta built to withstand crisis, and cause it too.
Thanks very much, uncle.)

And logically… yes, these are profitable. But, having worked for sometime now at an environmental festival, and seeing the damage caused by oil and gas giants who profit from bloodshed and keep feeding on our resources, futures, democracies, livelihoods, and rights, it feels blasphemous to even think about giving them my money. More money.

Advisor uncle (who was very patient, to be fair) explained that well, you cannot let morality drain your money. Your savings account net of inflation isn’t giving!! (not his language, mine, remember I am 26.) With India’s inflation rate pendulum-ing between 3% and 7%, if your money isn’t making returns of 8% and above...welp...you’re losing it.

So if you don’t invest, you’re still losing your money’s value.

Great.

So now the options are:

• Lose money slowly

• Or make money by feeding into the very systems you don’t believe in

What the hell?!?!?

If you’ve been caught in the money spiral, we’re in it with you. 🌪️
Knotted up in the ethics and confusion of earning, spending, investing.
So we brought it here. Into the ALT EFF living room. But before we get back into the dilemma, a very important disclaimer.

You hear far too often, your money is your power and vote with your dollar, so choose wisely. I ask financial uncleji to suggest some investible sustainable green businesses that do not aid the killing of people and planet. And even in that, I am reminded that anything investable in the share market has probably done, doing or will do something extractive to get there.…….Remember Tesla?

Once hailed as a beacon of the sustainable market, the personal antics of its tech mogul, Elon Musk, have turned it into a cautionary tale about investment enthusiasm. It’s a stark reminder of how money spent and invested can subtly sustain systems we do not want to endorse.

So…. the core question becomes:

Can we just take a second here?
the hard working, ass slogging middle class is carrying the full emotional and financial weight of these dilemmas…
while also paying what feels like the highest taxes ever???!!!

Be serious.

America's billionaires pay lower tax rates than many of its millionaires do. Indeed, they pay lower tax rates than many middle-class professionals. 1

(Watch this NYTimes reel to see how the likes of Jeff Bezos have found their way around paying taxes (link) )

And do you all remember Blood Wood screened during ALT EFF 2025? An expose on IKEA stripping native forests for cheap furniture all the while, not paying tax in any country because they operate as not for profit. 🤯

MAKE IT MAKE SENSE!

Back to Base: Where does this Dilemma Originate?

Well, if we trace the root cause of the moral deficiency in investing, we land at the same reason every time. No matter which diagnostic test or panel we run.

Which is…

An endless need for exponential growth on a planet that is, inconveniently for capitalism, finite.

It’s almost embarrassing how flimsy the premise is when held up to the light: that everything must expand, exponentially, all the time: profits, GDP, markets, output, and now even humans (geez).

But exponential growth for whom?

For a tiny, bunker-owning, golf-playing, dead in the eyes and dead in the soul fraction of the population. And how does a group like this even come to exist?Through a system that is structurally tilted in its favour. Market forces shaped by the Global North, and reinforced through post WWII neo-liberal institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, structure economies around profit, not need.

The Global South is the back kitchen, sweating through the heat, turning out dish after dish at low cost, often on exploited labour, while the Global North sits out front, elegantly waiting, knives and forks in hand, ready to carve into the profits. The outcome is predictable. Nations produce what is most profitable, not what is most necessary. Citizens, ecosystems, entire bioregions come second.

This is what Jasmine Bina describes as the Monster and the Machine. A system that in order to give its shareholders value, will take down whatever sits in its path forests, labour, and futures. Nothing is sacred enough to be off limits if it can be converted into value.

Bina, especially, points to moments where moral rupture and market celebration sit side by side. The Epstein files surface, and almost in the same breath, Pam Bondi asks you to instead look at the Dow crossing 50,000.

This is a system that metabolises even its own moral collapse.

While we think twice about turning the gas stove on, oil giants like ExxonMobil, Shell, and Chevron have seen share prices jump over 20% this year (on track for an extra $63bn in profits).

This monster doesn’t care whether gains are equitably distributed.
Distribution is not the point. Growth is.

The other head is the Machine, or what we might call the Matrix. The part that makes this feel normal, and asks you to look at all of this and still keep scrolling, and creates distance. Turns suffering into something you can observe, even profit from. 2 (Heard of Kalshi and Polymarket?)

Is this where the dilemma sharpens?

Because you can see the major tectonic cracks in this messed up system, and you’re still expected to act like you don’t.

The Implications on the Self

Capitalism, in its most devout form, trains our social behavior towards competition, pushing out generosity, cooperation, sharing and giving. These are the very instincts that allowed Homo sapiens to survive across nearly every biome on Earth. In their place: hustle, hierarchy, and the holy pursuit of “more.”

With the system rigged to only benefit 1%, the rest of us 99% are left to feel like we can never keep up struggling to earn ‘enough’ money to compete, to thrive, to exist.

If we can’t compete in the system, we look inward on what we perceive we can control...If the system only rewards growth, no matter the cost, then the pressure doesn’t just sit out there in markets and charts.

It seeps into the self.

Hanna Horvath, a personal finance journalist, puts it in her article “We are all maxxing now!”

We now have humans optimising for everythinggggg. There is a rise of looksmaxers, productivity maxers, biohackers and a constant emphasis on reaching an optimized version.

“What unites all of the (maxxers) is a shared belief that the self is a project to be optimized. Optimization is the path to security in a world where traditional markers of stability have slipped out of reach. When you can’t afford a house, you can still afford to be gorgeous. When the economy feels like a casino, at least you can control your body fat percentage.

The human body has become the last investable asset, and a multi-billion industry is eager to help you maximize your returns.”3

What Do We Choose?

We definitely do not believe in handing out “carbon footprint calculators for individuals,” especially when the second largest non state owned oil company in the world once ran that exact play. (Remember BP’s campaign? Yes. That one.)

But we do believe this: the superorganism that is “Humans” moves like a collective, like an octopus with eight billion limbs stretched across continents, each one sensing, reacting, and adapting.

Which means responsibility is layered. There is the individual, yes, but also the shared..And while the system operates at this massive, global scale, what actually sits within reach is much smaller. Regional and Local.

Investing Within Our Bioregion

Global markets operate at a scale the human nervous system was never built to intuit. It is almost impossible to fully grasp the ripple effects of what our money touches. And yet most of us would never willingly fund slave labour, child labour, displacement, or the slow violence of extraction and deforestation. The harm stays abstract. Out of sight, out of mind.

Would you invest in an oil company refining within ten kilometres of your home, where you wake up to diesel trucks and sleep in dust and tar? Even a 20 percent return would start to feel unbearable. Because proximity, at a human scale, makes consequence real.

And that is the scale that our evolutionary psychology can manage. The scale of Bioregions. Robin Dunbar, professor at Oxford and Author of Friends, reminds us that our hardwired capacity to really care extends to no more than 150 people and that we are programmed to understand things at the scale of our bioregion - where we can directly see how the watershed and natural patterns relate and interact with our daily lives.

Let’s put this into investment terms...

Money = energy.

Profit = return on our investment.

Imagine if we invest our energy into our local communities versus the global market.

Imagine if our economic system was geared towards meetings needs rather than making profits, growth was only spoken about in terms of fruit trees and ground water aquifers, bioregional self-sufficiency was the gold standard of civil co-operation. Imagine producing and acquiring goods from within the bioregion and the saving cost of transport, fuel, and packaging.

Or heck! Imagine if just one housing society within every neighborhood of Mumbai was converted to house a tool library, grain mill, meeting place, art gallery, workshop, furniture, household good repair center and surplus exchange.

It would likely mean a gradual reduction in car dependence, more walking where infrastructure supports it, and small but visible shifts like composting, urban greening, and some food growing within housing societies, alongside reduced duplication in production. Over time, parts of everyday life could move outside cash transactions, easing pressure to constantly earn and creating more space for shared, creative, and non-productive forms of time.

Gandhi was rightly skeptical of systems that concentrate wealth and power, and instead imagined an economic and social order where villages, localities, or bioregions could produce much of what they need, retain decision making, shape their own livelihoods, and protect their ecological wealth, the commons they live from and depend on.

Gram Swaraj can be read as a blueprint for a different kind of future. One that is not glamorous, where there is no room for Jeff Bezos’ super yacht or his wife’s casual rocket ship jaunts to space. It is one of freedom and aliveness. Of life within bounds. Of wealth redefined to be the diversity of our forests, the drinkability of our waterways, the breathability of our air, and the regulation of our nervous systems.

And to conclude…

What if the real answer is that this was never a fair question to begin with.

Maybe the way out of this rigged dilemma isn’t finding a cleaner portfolio. It’s rebuilding the local capacity that makes the dilemma less powerful in the first place.

Because a system where someone like Pam Bondi can say, without irony, that holding everyone mentioned in the files accountable would cause the economy to collapse…

Maybe that’s not a system worth protecting.

Maybe it should collapse.

Ted Trainer at University of NSW suggests:

“We do not need to get rid of our consumer-capitalist society before we begin to build a new way. Fighting directly against the system is unnecessary and unwise. We do not need to defeat it; we just need to replace it. We are going to ignore its death, i.e., to start building its replacement and persuading people to come across.”

But we do not need to wait for its collapse for something better to begin. We can start imagining it, rebuilding it, and replacing it starting where we are - in our building societies, in our communities, and in our homes.

Thoughts? Share them in the comments. We would love to hear from you.
If you are an expert and would like to partner with us to go deeper into this conversation, please reach out at comms@alteff.in.

3

Your Brain on Money

We’re all maxxing now

I wake naturally at 5:47 a.m. to my Hatch Restore 2 ($169.99). Before my feet touch the floor, I drink 16 ounces of room-temperature Acqua Panna, infused overnight with Sakara Beauty Water Drops ($40). I check my Oura Ring ($499 plus $5.99/month). My REM sleep was only 18% — probably because I didn’t take my Seed Daily Synbiotic ($49.99/month) at the ri…

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7 months ago · 3118 likes · 95 comments · Hanna Horvath

You reach the question while building your profile:

“Do you want to have kids?”

Apart from the bold decision to even show up in this dating scenario (seriously, go check out Substack, and definitely check out their Instagram page @submityourick ), you’re suddenly hit with a deeply existential question:

Do you want to be the bearer of a living, breathing mitochondria that turns into a whole human being with ethics, morals, religious beliefs, character, a future family, a pet dog, a smoking addiction, a hobby and a career?

And in this economy?

At a moment where world leaders are LARPing Mad Max, and seem intent on bombing the hell out of an already warming planet. In a world where missiles and smoke are starting to outnumber birds in the sky?

Is it even SANE to begin unpacking this question?

If that landed like a sucker punch, you're not alone. As a crew of twenty- and thirty-somethings juggling feelings of climate collapse anxiety and deep gratitude for the living breathing planet, this is the kind of question we chew on daily.

But we welcome you to our reflective (sometimes existential) living room that is the ALT EFF Substack 🎉. Here, we sink our teeth into juicy slice-of-life questions, all of which are essentially ‘environmental’, as there is nothing we do in our day to day that can escape the reality of our very planet-based dependence.

And for our debut edition, the question we are focusing on:

“Is it wise to bring a child into a world teetering on the tightrope of collapse?”

Yes. We said the C-word. Collapse.

It’s time that we graduate from pretending these times are simply “unprecedented.”

The world, as it stands, resembles a party that’s winding down as the host hints it’s time to leave.

We’re witnessing collapse unfold in real time, no cap 🧢

The Case for Not Having Children

Let’s start with the uncomfortable facts.
(Feel free to scroll past this section if you’re already familiar with terms like ‘IPCC’, ‘Paris Agreement’, and ‘1.5 degrees’.)

Children born today will likely experience climate realities that previous generations never encountered.

According to Save the Children, a baby born in 2020 could endure two, maybe up to seven times as many searing heatwaves as someone born in 1960 - provided, of course, we keep staggering along at our current pace.1

The Paris Agreement (remember its hopefulness?) aimed to keep us under 1.5°C of global warming, compared to the world before fossil fuels began to burn.

Scientists now widely acknowledge that this threshold will almost certainly be exceeded.

At our current pace, the planet is on track for three to four degrees of warming by the end of the century.2

The truth, tucked in amongst all this data? We are living in a hinge moment.
In short: things are changing, irrevocably. And the children arriving now will carry that truth in their bones.

But there must be some hope. Can renewables help? Surely, if we get solar and wind and nuclear? We could make a difference...right?

This is where many people reach for hope. Solar panels, wind farms, electric cars. Surely those will turn things around. They absolutely help.

But there is a complicating force economists call Jevons Paradox.

It describes a strange pattern in human systems. When technology becomes more efficient, people often end up consuming more of the resource rather than less. Efficiency leads to expansion. Not restraint.

Without even considering the environmental costs of ‘the green transition’ (infrastructure, water, batteries, transmission lines, rare earth minerals etc.) let’s level with the fact that despite the year-on-year rise in global renewable energy output, we just keep using more and more barrels of crude oil every year.

As energy gets more efficient, we find more ways to use up that energy.

Jevons Paradox...

None of this means transition is pointless.

The problem is, there’s just not enough time left to get them off the ground and make an impact in the window we have.

We’ve used up our window!

And besides, we have a Complexity Problem

Our systems have become extraordinarily interconnected. Energy systems, supply chains, financial networks, digital infrastructure, agriculture. Everything depends on everything else.

Researchers studying complex systems theory warn that when systems become too complex, they can reach a tipping point where small disruptions cascade into larger failures.

One wheel on the wagon bursts. Then another. And another. Until, suddenly, the entire vehicle breaks down. 3

The Civilizational Clock

Another curious observation from historians. Many complex civilizations lasted around three centuries before undergoing major transformation or decline. Roman civilization. Mayan civilization. Ancient Egyptian civilization.

If we consider the Industrial Revolution as the beginning of modern industrial civilization, we are now approaching roughly 270 years into that experiment.

(We’d like to acknowledge Sarah Wilson’s “This is Precious” for inspiring much of our thinking and language around collapse. Her work has deeply influenced our perspective. If you’re interested in exploring collapse concepts further, we highly recommend her writing.)4

The implications are unsettling.

Virtually all past civilisations have faced collapse. However, some like China and Egypt, adapted or recovered, while others, like Easter Island, were lost for good. One may argue that we now have a globally connected world and advanced tech. This reasoning doesn’t make us immune to the dangers that ended earlier societies; if anything, it brings new risks of its own. 5

Ecosystem collapse aside, many in the child-bearing generation are choosing not to have kids simply because life is already too expensive, too busy, too hard, and too much time dedicated to work.

Then there is the cost of living crisis and the fact that child care fees nearly match one parent's full time salary.6

And finally, The Gender Burden:

Women face major career setbacks and health challenges after pregnancy.

Here’s some advice on stitches, piles, bleeding, and other physical changes after birth, straight from the NHS.

After birth, women often deal with stitches, soreness when peeing, constipation sometimes needing to support stitches during bowel movements. Leaking urine when laughing or coughing is common, as are hemorrhoids. Heavy vaginal bleeding is normal, especially when breastfeeding, and may come with cramps. These are just some of the physical realities women face in postpartum recovery.

It can take a solid six weeks just to get back to normal when it comes to even peeing and pooing after birth.7

What society expects from women, what they’re supposed to endure, and, worse, they’re expected to let go of is staggering and, frankly, infuriating.

Then there’s the gut-wrenching news we keep seeing, like the Epstein files. The details coming out are beyond vomit-inducing. It exposes just how deep the obsession of the rich and powerful goes in exploiting kids. It’s so blood-curdlingly, nauseatingly cruel, and it’s impossible not to worry about the world we’re putting our own children into. Sometimes, the harsh truth is that just surviving childhood without deep scars is a kind of privilege.

So yeah, faced with a world that sometimes seems engineered for pain, and seeing how little support there is for women, even after we literally build humans from scratch, not wanting to have kids doesn’t feel selfish or cynical.

The Case for Having Children Anyway

Simple, Sentimental Reasons for Parenthood

Despite all the overwhelming reasons not to bring children into this world, the majority of people still imagine themselves becoming parents someday.

Why?

Journalist Kerry Eustice, writing in The Guardian, compiled a list of deeply human reasons people still want children:

• Kids are fun, weird, and interesting

• To snuggle a baby and smell their soft little head

• Bedtime stories

• Holiday mornings

• Watching children grow into themselves

• The strange magic of seeing a tiny human who is part you and part someone you love

Some of these reasons are simple. Almost embarrassingly sentimental. But hey, they’re real. (And we get it. We’re not above binge-watching too many Recess Therapy videos, feeling our hearts melt)

Parenting as Mentorship

Humans carry a powerful instinct to reproduce. All of life does. To continue family lines. To preserve culture and memory. You catch yourself daydreaming (just for a moment) about passing on the “right” values, raising someone genuinely good, funny, and a little weird in the best way, and pass on to them what life’s taught you.

Like how the nighttime teeth brushing can help avoid a scratchy throat afterwards, or that family story: how your grandfather named you after a Bollywood actress crossed with a legendary sweet shop, or the lesson that forgiving someone is usually more for you than for them.

And, sure, you’re secretly hoping to pass down your collection of Sade’s best vinyls, because someday, someone should appreciate “Smooth Operator” and “Like a tattoo” on a lazy Sunday morning the way you do.

Parenting is mentorship, in its best form. Or maybe it’s just about wanting these bits of you, to outlive you. There may also be something slightly narcissistic in it. The delight of seeing a miniature version of ourselves in the world. The grand adventure of not knowing what kind of person will emerge from whatever randomness of DNA and lived experience they bring.

There may also be something deeper at play.

The Need for Purpose Beyond Ourselves

Many people long to dedicate themselves to something larger than their individual lives. Parenthood offers that. A reason to care fiercely about the future.

Or maybe it is our need to serve something bigger than us, to feel more responsible. Having a kid kicks your butt into growing up, confronting your own childhood baggage, learning to cook things you never liked, and re-experiencing the world through fresher, super-honest eyes. It means to feel like the centre of our being can sometimes reside outside of us and make like worth living.

Children as Community and Security

There are some unromantic reasons as well across cultures for having kids, children are seen as your retirement plan. As unromantic as it sounds, in many places, having kids is seen as an investment for when you’re old and creaky.

Besides parental altruism toward children, parents can also be motivated by financial support from children in old age. While parents may invest in their children’s human capital simply due to their affection for children, they may be interested in the investment with the prospect of future financial and non-monetary support that they receive from children when they get old. 8

People often ask, “Who will be there for you when you’re old or sick?” As Zoë Noble shared from a hospice worker’s experience: it’s not about having kids, but about being part of a real, trusting community of people you show up for, and who show up for you.

It’s not the same story everywhere though…

Resistance, Resilience, and Cultural Survival

In certain contexts, not having children can feel like conceding ground to the forces attempting erasure. To colonisers. To extractive systems. To those who would rather see their cultures disappear.

Is today’s Gaza an ideal place to rear a child? No. Globally, we are witnessing the heartbreak every day.

But is it important for the Palestinian legacy to continue? Absolutely.

Where cattle farms encroach on rainforest in the Amazon and poison the soil and waterways, do the indigenous populations feel comfortable with feeding their children that drinking water? Of course not. But must their knowledge of respectful and thriving co-existence be passed on?

A resounding Yes.

In that sense, bringing a child into the world can become something more than a personal choice. It can become an act of resistance to erasure.

For some, having children and passing on language, traditions, and stories becomes its own form of resilience. A way of insisting that culture, identity, and memory will survive. This is where race, class, and geography enter the conversation.

For some people, climate change still feels like a future apocalypse.

But that is often because certain societies have the resources to temporarily shield themselves from its worst effects. For millions of people around the world, climate disruption is already unfolding now. Drought. Flooding. Extreme heat. Displacement. Crop failure.

For billions, the apocalypse is not coming.

It is already here.

To have or not to have kids in the future is not a valid question.

Living Fully in Uncertain Times

When people say the world is ending (whether it’s climate doom, political chaos, or just that personal feeling of how-chaotic-things-are) there’s this weird, rebellious urge that kicks in. Instead of shrinking away, you suddenly want to taste everything, feel everything, live as intensely as possible.

If the clock’s running out, what’s the point of holding back?

Existentialism has always said: Life is finite, and meaning isn’t handed to us; it’s made in the living. Now throw in a sprinkle of hedonism, and the argument becomes: Maybe the awareness of time running short is what finally gives us the permission we need to live fully, messily, richly. To savor, as you say. If the end is looming, scrambling for control seems even sillier. (What are we saving ourselves for, exactly?)

This comes up even in wartime diaries or survivors of disasters, moments of crisis make people more alive to love, connection, food, nature, fleeting joys. It’s sometimes framed as “mortality salience.” When you’re faced with the idea that time is short, you drop the act. You give yourself permission.

Permission to tell someone you love them, because sitting on that secret any longer feels like a waste of time. Permission to reach out and forgive that friend who faded away, or the parent you stopped talking to.

Permission to finally take that trip you keep putting off, to sign up for dance classes or, purely for the wild joy and heartbreak of it all, to choose to become a parent.

So: When everything feels fragile, permitting yourself to feel and experience life has a kind of wisdom. Or even resistance.

Because if the world really is ending, why not live all the way out to the edges?

And, Of Course,

You don’t always need a big, lofty reason. Just a because why not? For some, no earth-shattering reason is needed. It feels natural, it’s part of the adventure, or it just feels right, in a gut-level way.

And honestly, that’s reason enough.

Are there any Alternatives to this Binary

Perhaps the conversation does not need to remain trapped between two stark choices.

Have children. Or don’t.

Reality, as always, is more layered.

Family itself is something humans have constantly reinvented across cultures and centuries. Long before the modern nuclear household became the default ideal, children were raised in wider circles of care. Grandparents, cousins, neighbours, teachers, elders. A village in the truest sense of the word. Imagining the future only through the lens of biological parenthood may limit the conversation.

You might be the auntie or uncle who shows up with play and stories. The mentor who guides a young person through their first heartbreak or their first act of courage. The teacher who introduces a child to forests, rivers, and the quiet thrill of noticing birds. The friend who helps hold up someone else’s family when the world becomes heavy.

Human societies have always raised children collectively. Even when the language of modern life insists otherwise, the truth remains that no child grows up through the effort of two people alone. They grow up within webs of care.

Perhaps what is needed in this moment is not simply more parents or fewer parents, but stronger villages.

Final Thought

Choosing not to have children will not save the planet on its own.

And having children does not automatically make someone irresponsible.

The forces shaping the future run much deeper than individual reproductive decisions. They lie in how we organise our economies, how we distribute power, how we treat ecosystems, and how willing we are to care for one another when systems begin to strain.

So perhaps the deeper question is not simply:

Will you have children?

But

Who will you choose to be for the generations that come after?

(Honestly we would love to hear what you felt about this piece. Anything you wish we had said? Something you disagree with, or want to hear more of? Let us know. This community is built on honest sharing, and it’s always richer with your voice in the mix.)

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