The world we live in today looks nothing like the world that was promised to our parents and grandparents. That promise was shaped by the idea that humans are separate from the rest of the natural world, and the right amount of cleverness would offer us endless protection and wealth. Today, as institutions hollow out and simply existing becomes more and more difficult, many of us are waking up to a different possibility: we are not separate at all. If we accept that our existence is interdependent with the existence of others, how might we live differently?

In this episode, I welcome author and philosopher, , for a long-requested conversation on the mythologies underneath civilization. For over two decades, Charles has argued that the crises defining modern life all trace back to the story of separation, the largely unspoken belief that each of us is an isolated self, competing against other selves and against a nature made of indifferent, exploitable resources. Charles traces how this story co-evolved with technology, language, and scale, and how quantitative thinking both extends and distorts our understanding of complex problems. Charles and I also discuss why he has come to believe that ecological and energy constraints will not force humanity onto a wiser path, rather that the choice has to be made consciously, person by person.

With the story of separation starting to fall apart, do we have any say in which stories will emerge in its place? What sort of path might humanity veer toward if we start living into the truths we know but have been keeping buried? And if each of us begins to embody that story in our day-to-day lives, through small actions, choices, and beliefs, could it possibly build into a larger change in consciousness?

Listen on your favorite podcast platform

Want to dive deeper into the concepts covered in this episode? Follow along with the Show Notes & Links to Learn More, which you can find at the bottom of the page for every episode of The Great Simplification, or you can download them here.

In case you missed it…

Last week’s Frankly was an episode from summer of 2023, which was re-released to provide context for one of the most important questions we face today:

What is the role of energy, specifically oil, in the global economic system we’ve built?

Want to support The Great Simplification podcast?

The Great Simplification podcast is produced by The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future (ISEOF), a 501(c)(3) organization. We want to keep all content completely free to view globally and without ads. If you’d like to support ISEOF and its content via a tax-deductible donation, please use the link below.

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Join our community on Hylo

Greetings. Last year, I laid out some big directional headings and policy prescriptions for the metacrisis. Today, I want to try something a little different: I’d like to highlight a few small, specific, and slightly unordinary things that you and I can actually do in our own lives to respond to the metacrisis.

Before that though, I think it’s important to outline a bit of context regarding the metacrisis itself.

We often think of our biggest challenges as completely separate issues, which need to be taken on one at a time. The metacrisis tells us that they’re actually all symptoms of one interconnected system, and to ignore any one of them means misunderstanding them all.

Here’s a quick list of these interlinked symptoms:

• We’ve crossed seven of the nine planetary boundaries.

• The cheap, high-quality energy that built everything that surrounds us is depleting, and we’re papering over the gap with more and more electronic claims (aka debt).

• Monitored wildlife populations are down seventy-three percent in my lifetime alone.

• More and more of us (especially young people) are anxious, lonely, or hooked on the supernormal stimuli we carry in our pockets.

• Our politics have hardened into these tribal signaling contests where the loudest ape tends to win … and the loudest ape isn’t usually the wisest or kindest one.

• Artificial intelligence is speeding all of this up, including the risks.

• Trust in our institutions, the media, and each other is draining away.

• Underneath it all, there’s a meaning crisis where many people intuitively sense an incompatibility between the current system trajectory and their willingness to participate in it.

The painful part of laying this all out is that it will not be fixed. The metacrisis is a predicament, not a problem. It can be softened, either slightly, quite a bit, or not at all, depending on what we humans do, both as individuals and as a collective, over the coming decade or two.

After twenty years of working in complexity science, here’s what I’ve come to believe: in complex systems, tiny differences in the starting conditions can lead to wildly different outcomes down the road. We’re not really choosing the future so much as we’re seeding it. What each of us does now shifts the initial conditions of the next stretch of time, which in turn shifts what becomes possible in the stretch after that.

Most of these lists telling people what they can do about the metacrisis blur together the actions that will protect you and your family from what’s coming, and the actions that will actually help to change what’s coming. The former will help you personally weather the storm: storing food, getting better sleep, and finding people you can lean on. These might help you cope (or even thrive), which is important, but they don’t change much about the storm itself.

Conversely, all of the actions in this essay are aimed at shifting the storm – planting a seed of something that our entire system needs. Each of these works on the human side of the ledger, where individual choices can aggregate into cultural change, whether in our material demand, our trust in each other, the stories of meaning we tell ourselves, or our relationship to the rest of life. Yes, these suggestions are only at the scale of an individual human life, but if enough of us do them, it may be enough to move something larger in the world. Some of these will make your own life better too, which is a nice bonus but isn’t really the core point of this channel.

So here are some unordinary interventions that live at the scale of our own lives and choices … in no particular order.

Intervention 1: Measure Returns Differently

The first intervention is measuring our returns in something other than money.

The next time you spend your time, your energy, or your money on something, try asking what it actually gives you as a return. The catch is, you have to refuse to denominate your answer only in dollars. Maybe the return was your health. Maybe it was a friendship that deepened or an animal that’s still out there in the world because of something you did. Or maybe the return is just something beautiful that exists now that didn’t before.

Money has this way of feeding back on itself, pulling everything else into its vortex until it’s the only thing on the scoreboard. So my suggestion is that you consciously invert this and keep your own alternative scoreboard with your own categories. We have financialized the human experience, but it’s possible to take one part of your life back and measure it in wide-boundary capital instead.

Intervention 2: Rehearse Loss

The second intervention to set ourselves up for a better future is rehearsing loss before it shows up.

Loss aversion means we feel our losses about twice as intensely as an equally sized gain. This becomes a tough reality when we realize that the coming decades are going to have increasing amounts of losses in them. A society that can’t accept less is going to fight like hell to keep more, and that fight is one of the ways this whole thing ends quite badly. So it’s important to rehearse material loss now, while it’s still actually a dress rehearsal.

When I say rehearse loss, I mean actually rehearse it, rather than just sitting around thinking about it. For instance, pick one of the next few weeks, or even months, and try to live on thirty percent less. Cut the spending, cut the driving, cut whatever the equivalent is in your life, and find out empirically what you actually miss and what you don’t. Most people find that the list of the things they miss is actually much shorter than they expected. By rehearsing these things before the decisions get made for us, we might create more stable nodes in a shrinking system, and realize that some losses might not be so bad.

Intervention 3: Find Your “Enough”

The next intervention is finding, and maybe even writing down, your “enough.” Let me explain what I mean by that.

A growth-oriented society’s definition of “enough” is always going to be just a little bit more than whatever you’ve currently got. To counter this, you might find it helpful to sit down and write out specifically what would bring you actual satisfaction, perhaps in terms of income, housing, social recognition, and other categories that appear in our daily lives. Then you can start bringing your fixed costs down toward that number, letting the room that frees up just exist as biophysical spaciousness, instead of a gap to fill with more things.

Once you actually know at a gut level what comprises your own “enough,” Moloch and the growth machine lose some of their power over you. Advertising will have less to work with, because somebody who needs less is a whole lot harder to push around or knock over. The endless promise that the next purchase, promotion, upgrade, or achievement will finally make you feel whole starts to sound a little less convincing. You have fewer buttons for the world to push. The importance of that kind of independence cannot be overstated.

Intervention 4: Apprenticeship

The next unordinary intervention you can do right now is to apprentice someone younger than you.

Right now, wide-boundary understanding and skills live mostly in scattered individuals. Unless there’s a real, purposeful effort to hand them down, these worldviews and expertise tend to die with those individuals. So I suggest you find one younger human and share what you’ve actually got. It could be a tangible skill, a way of seeing the world, a place you love, or some hard-fought wisdom. Just share something, and make the connection.

If people don’t engage in this one, none of the other seeds outlined here will outlive us. Cultures don’t change by decree from the top; they change by transmission: one person to the next. The younger generation holds the future of humanity and the biosphere. They are going to need this – they’re going to need us.

Intervention 5: Lower Dopamine Peaks

The fifth intervention is all about taking time to lower your dopamine peaks.

Our brains don’t really respond to how good something is. They respond to how good something is compared to what we were expecting. In this culture, we’ve pushed our expectations up so high that ordinary life can start to feel like a letdown.

Take phones as an example. Most of us pick up our phones around a hundred times a day, and every one of those is a small dopamine spike. Do that for a few years, and your dopamine baseline drifts up until you suddenly realize that a walk in the woods or a meal with somebody you love starts to register as flat by comparison. The walk didn’t get worse. We didn’t lose love for the person. It’s just that the baseline in our brain shifted.

About a decade ago, there was a study where researchers left people alone in a room for up to fifteen minutes with nothing to do but sit with their own thoughts. The only other thing in the room was a button that would deliver a mild electric shock when pressed. Even though the participants knew the shock was painful and had said earlier they’d pay money to avoid it, two-thirds of the men and a quarter of the women still chose to press it rather than sit still. This behavior is a glimpse into how uncomfortable stillness has become for us.

So the action you can take here is to pick the one thing you reach for without ever really deciding to: your phone, a drink after work, the sports betting app, porn, or sugar. It’s not necessary to fully quit it, but try adding some friction – a speed bump – in its way to cut down on how often that dopamine peak arrives and how high it gets. Maybe you charge the phone in another room overnight, or have the beer on Friday instead of every evening. You could turn your phone to grayscale so your brain stops getting hit with vibrant colors every time you open it. I learned that last one from Audrey Tang’s podcast interview last year. Check out her episode on digital democracy if you want to learn more.

Give these speed bumps a few weeks and then notice what starts to come back. An addicted brain keeps reaching for the same few things over and over again, and stops reaching for anything new or unfamiliar. So when the highs come down, your options – and your freedom – might just open back up.

Intervention 6: Curate Your Status Environment

Next, I want to talk about what it means to curate your status environment as an intervention.

Our brains evolved to calibrate status against maybe a hundred and fifty people, also referred to as Dunbar’s number. Somewhere along the way, our media and phones upped that number to eight billion, an endless stream of people to compare ourselves to. So focus on recalibrating how you see yourself. Spend more time around people who don’t care about status. Or if they do care, they see value in the right things: someone who’s kind and patient, or fills up a full pantry for the winter, or can actually sit down and play an instrument, or pauses and reflects before answering a question.

Beyond that, be a transmitter of value yourself. Say it out loud when you admire the fixers and the growers and the caregivers in your life. We tend to become whatever our little reference group values, so choose your group with some care and consciously nudge what it rewards. I learned this firsthand when I left Wall Street finance cubicles and moved next to farmers. Two totally different groups of people, two totally different sets of values, and I found myself to be slightly different around each.

Intervention 7: Coordinate With Trusted People

Another intervention is doing more dedicated coordination with a small group of friends or trusted people.

At its core, the metacrisis is a coordination failure. Manipulators and dark triad types tend to proliferate in their societal impact exactly when the rest of us are scattered and alone. What dark triad types need, empirically, is people they can deal with one at a time, akin to the way predators pick off isolated prey on the savanna … except now the prey are fellow humans. It gets a whole lot harder for those types when ordinary people are actually working and coordinating together in groups.

So find a few folks, maybe three to eight people, and do something meaningful together on a regular basis. It could be a food buying club, a tool library, or just a monthly work party at someone’s house. Maybe you can be the one who starts this or hosts this. And every once in a while, do something physically hard together (harvesting, building something, or cleaning up after a storm), because we don’t really build deep trust over coffee or online chat groups. We bond best when we’re tired and sharing our toils alongside somebody.

I’ll say more on coordination in small groups in the future, as I think it’s both a deep driver and a response to what we face.

Intervention 8: Break the Negativity Chain

An underrated action you can take to shift our future conditions is breaking the chain of negativity.

Moods are contagious, more than we like to admit. Dread and cynicism spread from person to person the same way a virus does, whether over a dinner table or through a comment thread. Right now, the sentiment running through most of our networks is quite negative, which is pretty understandable given world events.

So my suggestion is to function like a circuit breaker: be the one who walks into a heavy room and brings a little lightness, who smiles at a stranger, or who does the small, kind thing first without waiting to see if it gets returned. This doesn’t mean you ignore our constraints and current predicament. On the contrary, it means refusing to be one more person wallowing and passing along despair. This takes a kind of courage, actually. It’s easy to match the gloom in a room, but it’s much harder to be the one who shifts it.

If you want the advanced version of this, it’s reaching back out to somebody you wrote off. Not to relitigate anything or to change their mind, just to ask how they’ve been. Polarization is a person-to-person problem, meaning it unbuilds the same way it was built: one relationship at a time.

Intervention 9: Be Wrong Publicly

The next intervention is probably one of the hardest for a lot of people reading this. It’s allowing yourself to be wrong, particularly in public.

So much of our polarization runs on the social cost of changing your mind, which means that hardly anybody ever does it. But you’re going to be wrong about something this week. Everybody will be. So instead of letting it slide under the radar, like so many of us do, try acknowledging it out loud.

Saying, “I was wrong about that, and this is what changed my mind,” in front of other humans, and not just your dogs, is huge in today’s age of doubling down. I’ve had to walk back things more than once on this channel, like my claim that peak oil was in November 2018, which I have since updated. Every time I admit an updated view, I brace for people to think less of me, and every time (well, almost every time) it goes the other way. Saying you’ve changed your mind out loud costs you almost nothing, and it lowers the price for everybody in earshot to update their own priors.

A culture that can correct itself is a culture that might still be able to change and steer toward a different future. Right now, that muscle has almost completely atrophied because our system overly rewards confidence, not humility and honesty.

Intervention 10: Do It Today

The tenth intervention is a call to treat today like the tomorrow you keep promising.

We all make these well-thought-out plans to change: wake up earlier, eat better, go on more walks, etc. We say, “I’m gonna do it, starting tomorrow!” Then we wake up, and suddenly tomorrow has become today. So we procrastinate and push the change out one more day, again and again. A lot of us blame ourselves or see it as a character flaw, but it’s our animal nature. We’re built to discount the future, to defer the cost that’s far off and reach for the reward that’s close. The problem is that just about every real response to the metacrisis is going to require some of us, and then a lot of us, to stop waiting to make a change.

So for this intervention, I want you to pick one thing you keep promising to begin tomorrow, and go do a little of it today, or even right now. Start to think of today as the tomorrow you’ve been promising yourself.

Intervention 11: Get Your Feet on the Ground

The next intervention has to do with our relationship with the natural world, more specifically rebuilding our connection with it.

My suggestion here is to take your shoes off and actually stand on the ground. This sounds like a small act, almost silly to an extent, but it underlies one of the foundational aspects of the more-than-human predicament. We’ve put layer after layer between our bodies and the actual Earth: concrete, rubber, floors, and screens. There are whole days that go by where we never once touch anything that’s alive. Somewhere along the way, we stopped really feeling that we’re animals who belong to a place.

That matters because we don’t tend to protect what we don’t feel connected to. So try taking your shoes off and standing on the grass, the dirt, or in a cold creek. Try not to think of it as some woo-woo wellness ritual. Just do it to close the gap for a moment, to remember in your own body that there’s a living planet under all of us that we depend on for everything. Consider it an action of removing one layer of insulation between yourself and your ancestors.

I think it’s a lot harder to stay blind to something you can feel right under your feet.

Intervention 12: Learn a Skill (Maybe Badly)

The next intervention is to learn one pre-industrial skill … and to be okay with doing it badly.

Just about everything in our lives shows up through a giant, global, just-in-time system that we can’t see and don’t control. As those reading this might know, that whole system runs on increasingly precarious cheap energy and complexity. (Watch the recent Jeff Currie episode for more on this.) So learning to grow one food or crop, or play a musical instrument, or fix one type of broken object allows you to become a foundational node for community.

You don’t have to be any good at it; it’s enough to be one person who knows how or is learning how. Every skill that comes back into ordinary people’s hands is a little piece of productive capacity rebuilt outside the machine of the Superorganism. A lower-energy world is going to need millions of people who know how to make things and mend things. That knowledge only survives if we start relearning it now, while it’s still in the “hobby” category and not yet in the “necessity” category.

Intervention 13: Shift the Odds

Another intervention you can make is to shift the odds for one species.

Saving a single animal in distress is easy, and it feels good. You carry the turtle across the road, you put the fledgling robin back up in the nest, you take the spider out of the bathtub (I did this recently with a wolf spider, and was very proud of myself). These are things many of us have done, and it means the whole world to that one creature, but a day later, nothing upstream has actually changed.

The less ordinary move is to shift the survival odds for a whole lineage. Then that animal’s offspring, and their offspring, have a better shot at making it through the bottlenecks of the 21st century. It turns out that subtracting what’s killing them is far more effective than adding a little habitat here and there. So keep the cat inside, because cats kill more birds in the United States than windows and cars combined. Put decals on the windows birds hit, and that’s another six hundred million birds per year saved. During spring and fall migration, turn your outdoor lights off, because entire rivers of birds navigate over our houses in the dark, and our lights pull them down and off their migration course.

If you want to go further than your own yard, you can support the land trust that’s buying and connecting parcels of land near you, or show up at the county zoning meeting, because that’s where habitat actually gets decided. These types of interventions, of which there are hundreds more that need cataloguing for many species, tilt probabilities across generations we’ll never live to see. If I had to do one thing in the next decade, I’d do this. Of course, “this” also connects to lots of other things.

Intervention 14: Regenerate Something Living

The second-to-last intervention is to regenerate something living. My recent conversation with Brett KenCairn really reframed this one for me, and I thought I would include my thoughts on it here.

Climate has often been thought of as a carbon problem, but that’s only half the story, maybe less. We face a living systems problem: the health of the dynamic, interconnected ecosystems of life that support everything about the Earth as we know it. By Brett’s accounting, the Earth is now running at something like half of its biological productive capacity. Most of that damage came from how we used (and continue to use) the land. Despite the harm done, this creates a bright spot for intervention: changing how we use the land can actually bring a lot of productivity back.

We wrecked the Southern Plains in the 1930s, and then by changing how we farmed, we essentially brought them back in full. There are countless other examples at the regional scale, which is just the right size for people like you and me to start contributing.

So find a way to put your hands in service of life somewhere. Turn a strip of lawn back into native plants, help heal a stream bank, join a local restoration day, or start one if there isn’t one yet. Living systems want to heal, and they can heal on their own if humans leave them alone, but the beautiful part of this story is that humans can also accelerate that healing and be integrated with these ecosystems once again. It’s true that we’re swimming against an enormous global metabolism. But every square meter we bring back is real capacity handed forward to the future.

Intervention 15: Train Like You’ll Be Needed

The last intervention I want to encourage is to train like you’ll be needed. This one might sound like self-help, but it’s not.

The Carbon Pulse has made comfort and convenience the default path for a great many of us. When the cultural conversation and action finally arrive, it will need capable nodes of mycelium – and that network will only be as strong as the humans in it. So push yourself, physically, intellectually, and spiritually, in the ways that you alone know are needed.

My series “A Guide to Staying Human” will address this category. I’m currently three episodes into it, but to be honest, there could be a dozen of them. At its core, the series is really a self-help guide from cognitive Nate to emotional, in-the-moment Nate.

Concluding Reflections

So here’s the provisional list in summary:

1. Measure your returns in something other than money

2. Rehearse loss before it shows up

3. Write down your enough

4. Apprentice someone younger

5. Lower your dopamine peaks

6. Curate your status environment

7. Coordinate with a small group of close friends

8. Break the chain of negativity

9. Be wrong in public

10. Treat today like the tomorrow you keep promising

11. Take your shoes off and stand on the ground

12. Learn on pre-industrial skill (maybe badly)

13. Shift the odds for one species

14. Regenerate something living

15. Train like you’ll be needed

None of these interventions “solve” the metacrisis, because nothing “solves” the metacrisis, and that was never really the goal. The goal is to affect it, ameliorate aspects of it, try to steer it, and change the starting conditions. Each one of these suggestions is a small push on one of the bigger things that’s actually driving our predicament. How those drivers continue to evolve likely decides which future we end up landing in.

If one person participates in these interventions, they might create a healthier and saner life for themselves. If thousands do them, this might become a subculture. But if millions engage, the drivers of the metacrisis themselves might start to move, and things could become possible five or ten years down the line that just aren’t possible today. Little pockets of people who’ve got it somewhat together, even if scattered through an increasingly chaotic world, can end up shifting the whole thing. Those pockets always start with individuals doing slightly unordinary things.

As always, thanks for spending some time with my thoughts today. Talk to you soon.

Want to support The Great Simplification podcast?

The Great Simplification podcast is produced by The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future (ISEOF), a 501(c)(3) organization. We want to keep all content completely free to view globally and without ads. If you’d like to support ISEOF and its content via a tax-deductible donation, please use the link below.

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This week’s Frankly is an episode from summer of 2023, which is being re-released to provide context for one of the most important questions we face today: what is the role of energy, specifically oil, in the global economic system we’ve built?

In this second part of a previous series on the channel – Just Stop Oil!? – I examine how and why energy is currently so deeply embedded in the foundations of our modern economy. I touch on the ecological and energetic laws that apply to all life, including humans and our economies, as well as the way accessing a huge surplus of dense carbon energy set us on the trajectory toward our current predicament. Building up from there, I look at the relationship between energy and economic growth and why declining access to abundant, affordable energy will have implications that extend beyond the price at the gas pump. Overall this episode unpacks some of the systemic implications of an economy tethered to perpetual growth, particularly as the foundations that allowed for this system to emerge in the first place erode.

Why did fossil hydrocarbons become so embedded in our modern economic system? What happens to an economy built around exponential growth when the energy surplus that powers it begins to decline? And how much “choice” do we really have within a system shaped by such intense physical constraints?

Listen on your favorite podcast platform

Want to dive deeper into the concepts covered in this episode? Follow along with the Show Notes & Links to Learn More, which you can find at the bottom of the page for every episode of The Great Simplification, or you can download them here.

In case you missed it…

In this week’s episode, I was joined by , a systems theorist and author of the Psychopathic Selection Hypothesis (PSH), to unpack why our institutions themselves have become so psychopathic, and how that affects the behavior of the average human. Drawing on evolutionary game theory, anthropology, and the neuroscience of psychopathy, Greg argued that cooperation is evolutionarily stable in small tribal systems, but that modern systems where anonymity and abstraction make exploitative, instrumental strategies more profitable. He walked through how this dynamic produces what he calls “entrapment games,” in which pro-social people become behaviorally locked into relationships, jobs, and systems where leaving costs more than staying. All of this built toward the core of Greg’s theory: winning, instrumental strategies get crystallized into the operating logic of institutions themselves and reproduced by anyone who plays the game, whether or not they are personally psychopathic. While Greg doesn’t see any easy answers, he did offer a set of possible leverage points: shortening feedback loops, increasing transparency and accountability, and rebuilding smaller, reciprocal communities.

Listen on your favorite podcast platform

Want to support The Great Simplification podcast?

The Great Simplification podcast is produced by The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future (ISEOF), a 501(c)(3) organization. We want to keep all content completely free to view globally and without ads. If you’d like to support ISEOF and its content via a tax-deductible donation, please use the link below.

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Modern companies, markets, and institutions routinely behave in ways that would be diagnosed as pathological in a person: emotional detachment, strategic deception, grandiosity, and the treatment of people, animals, and ecosystems as means to an end. Yet, most of the individuals who make up these organizations don’t naturally hold these traits and behaviors themselves. So, why does exploitation keep winning at scale, even when most people are decent, cooperative, and want the same basic things?

In this episode, I’m joined by , a systems theorist and author of the Psychopathic Selection Hypothesis (PSH), to unpack why our institutions themselves have become so psychopathic, and how that affects the behavior of the average human. Drawing on evolutionary game theory, anthropology, and the neuroscience of psychopathy, Greg argues that cooperation is evolutionarily stable in small tribal systems, but that modern systems where anonymity and abstraction make exploitative, instrumental strategies more profitable. He walks through how this dynamic produces what he calls “entrapment games,” in which pro-social people become behaviorally locked into relationships, jobs, and systems where leaving costs more than staying. All of this builds toward the core of Greg’s theory: winning, instrumental strategies get crystallized into the operating logic of institutions themselves and reproduced by anyone who plays the game, whether or not they are personally psychopathic. While Greg doesn’t see any easy answers, he does offer a set of possible leverage points: shortening feedback loops, increasing transparency and accountability, and rebuilding smaller, reciprocal communities.

If domination isn’t an aberration but a predictable output of the game board we’ve built, what does that mean for how we try to fix it? Is it possible for an entire civilization to behave psychopathically even when the vast majority of the individual people inside it are empathetic and pro-social? And if the ultimate goal is to steer toward a more pro-social system, is there a way to ‘win the game’ and re-write the rules without also resorting to psychopathic strategies and behaviors?

Listen on your favorite podcast platform

Want to dive deeper into the concepts covered in this episode? Follow along with the Show Notes & Links to Learn More, which you can find at the bottom of the page for every episode of The Great Simplification, or you can download them here.

In case you missed it…

Last week, I turned a late-night emergency vet visit for one of my dogs into a broader reflection on the extraordinary relationship between dogs and humans. While dogs have been human companions for thousands of years, the modern version of “man’s best friend” is a remarkably recent product of abundant energy, specialized breeding, industrial food systems, and increasingly sophisticated veterinary care. With the global dog population nearing one billion, I addressed the uncomfortable question of what might happen to these beloved animals as the metacrisis continues to unfold.

Listen on your favorite podcast platform

Want to support The Great Simplification podcast?

The Great Simplification podcast is produced by The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future (ISEOF), a 501(c)(3) organization. We want to keep all content completely free to view globally and without ads. If you’d like to support ISEOF and its content via a tax-deductible donation, please use the link below.

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Greetings, good humans. It is hot and humid here in Minnesota, and I’m coming back feeling refreshed from a short and needed break (from a place that was also hot and humid). Now, back to work.

A few years ago, I recorded a Frankly episode titled “The Limits to Podcasting About Limits” where I described a “triple information hazard.” These are three categories of true things one can know, but cannot say on a public platform. In the years since, that list has grown in my mind. I now count at least twelve of these categories, which I think explain a lot about what is said in our public discourse, what goes unsaid, and why.

So today, I want to walk through these twelve “Information Hazards of the Metacrisis,” and along the way, I’ll also try to get at why this even matters in the first place.

Defining “Information Hazards”

“Information hazard,” coined by Nick Bostrom about fifteen years ago, refers to a risk that results from disseminating true information. These are true things, not lies or misinformation, that have the potential to cause harm by becoming widely known.

The first four information hazards in this list all stem from the same uncomfortable fact: when you speak publicly about the metacrisis, you’re potentially speaking in front of everyone, including the very actors and systems you’re trying to change. First, the information can endanger the speaker. Then it can protect the powerful, and even arm and benefit them, especially in the era where AI metabolizes everything we say. That has its own huge implications.

That’s where I’m coming from on these first four.

Hazard 1: Truth to Power

The first information hazard concerns truth to power. Let’s use this platform, The Great Simplification, as an example: what we describe here is, at its core, a shift away from the global economic and political order of the last eighty years. Describing that trajectory too precisely eventually becomes threatening to the people and institutions whose power depends on the old narrative continuing.

Speaking truth to power has been dangerous for as long as there has been power. I’ve joked before on this platform about not wanting the proverbial “Eye of Sauron” to turn toward rural Minnesota. Well, really, I’ve only been partially joking. But this risk goes beyond just me or this platform. It applies to anyone speaking truth to power.

This hazard lands on the speaker themselves, and because of that, it silences voices you will likely never hear.

Hazard 2: Inoculation

Second, we have the inoculation hazard.

Suppose you’ve worked out a strategy for how ordinary humans, in service of life and the future of society, might collaborate to outmaneuver concentrated dark-triad power, the psychopathic individual and institutional behaviors that currently steer so much of the Superorganism. The moment you voice this strategy, the system you’re trying to influence has access to it, too, and develops antibodies. It’s like announcing your next football play over the stadium loudspeaker instead of in the huddle. It might be cool for the fans to get an inside scoop, but the opposing team would immediately shift their defenses to block you from scoring.

So some of the most important strategic thinking happening right now deliberately can’t be publicized. This bothers me quite a bit, especially as someone committed to transparency. But in order to remain effective and avoid this inoculation hazard, some things must be left unsaid.

Hazard 3: Dual Use

The third is a related hazard. I call it the dual use hazard, for lack of a better term. When information is synonymous with power, a clear synthesis of society’s bottlenecks, fragilities, and leverage points can both help and hurt your cause. The map that helps communities build resilience might also help a hedge fund position themselves to profit from decline or a hostile state find enemy weak spots.

I’ve spent twenty-odd years trying to draw an accurate map of the more-than-human predicament, and I have to live with the fact that metaphorical arsonists can read maps just as well as the metaphorical firefighters I hope I’m speaking to. Honestly, they can probably read it better; they’re often better funded, more incentivized, and have the ability to pay closer attention.

Hazard 4: AI Ingestion

Hazard number four is the newest one I’ve thought of: the AI ingestion hazard.

Everything said publicly, – every essay, transcript, or thoughtpiece – now becomes training data for AI. It gets ingested, and then metabolized by large language models that are owned (for the most part) by entities maximizing profit and growth. Then it gets served back into the Superorganism and its behaviors at scale.

It used to be that publishing something and having a bad actor actually find it, absorb it, and use it were separated by actual effort, time, and attention. That distance is now approximately zero, which means the previous three hazards stop being risks that might materialize and instead become the default condition for speaking or writing anything. I don’t think our culture has even begun to reckon with the phase shift this represents for what we say in public.

Personally, I don’t feel like I have any high-octane insights or intel. But I value the fact that my insights and intel are my own enough that I’ve recently decided to keep ten to twenty percent of what I know, think, and believe to myself, or for in-person meetings only.

I’ve come to feel that I have to consciously build a wall to separate authentic Nate from the brain of the Superorganism.

Hazard 5: Spotlight

The fifth information hazard is perhaps the most bittersweet of all. I’ll call it the spotlight hazard.

There are people right now getting extraordinary things done: protecting millions of acres of rainforest, using existing tax laws to shield local ecosystems, building super creative finance structures redirecting flows in service of life. I personally know some of these people and the projects they’re working on, and I’m also aware that there are many more happening that aren’t even on my radar.

But these strategies work precisely because no one is watching or aware of their details. If you publicize the land deal, prices triple because the sellers hold out. If you publicize the tax approach, the loophole gets closed in the next legislative session.

There are certainly some good ideas that have positive feedback loops when shared publicly. But in other cases, perhaps most cases, a public spotlight kills the very thing it celebrates. The few stories that ever do become public get told years afterward, once the telling can no longer disrupt the systems and powers at play.

This hazard is particularly poignant for me, because so many of you look to this channel for evidence that good directional things are happening. I don’t have a ton of these examples, but I have numerous stories of amazing initiatives happening right now that I simply cannot tell you all about.

There is hope out there, but it is now also structurally invisible. Perhaps those things are related.

Hazard 6: Cassandra Timing

Hazard number six is one that many of you might relate to: the Cassandra-timing hazard.

True things said too early burn the credibility of the person or the group saying them. I watched this happen with peak oil, where being early on a nuanced, critical issue looked identical to being wrong for about fifteen years. By the time the underlying logic reasserts itself, the messengers have all been discounted and the warning arrives pre-refuted.

So timing itself is a part of the information hazard calculus. The same thing happened with climate, plastics, and other metacrisis topics. Say true things too early, and you lose the audience you’ll need later; say them too late, and it no longer matters. Hitting that narrow window where a warning is both believable and actionable is perhaps more art than science.

Hazard 7: Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

The seventh hazard is the self-fulfilling prophecy hazard.

There are times when being aware that something might happen actually makes it more likely to occur. A bank run would be the classic example: a bank can be perfectly solvent, but if enough depositors suddenly believe their position is precarious and act accordingly by pulling out their money, then it becomes insolvent in a few days. It was the change in belief, not a change in facts, that triggered the chain reaction.

There are many risks in our financial system, our supply chains, and our geopolitics that are dormant as long as they stay below the threshold of collective attention and understanding. Describing them precisely and publicly, with enough reach, would move them across that threshold.

I worry less about this risk now because our information ecosystem is inundated with serious and risky truths, and the world pretty much hasn’t budged. Probably because the information is embedded in an ocean of algorithmic noise. That said, in theory at least, this is still a risky information hazard.

Hazard 8: Musical Chairs

Hazard eight is what I’ll call the musical chairs hazard.

Long-time viewers know I often use musical chairs as a metaphor for our financial system. From a biophysical claims perspective, the hypothetical “seats” that people think they own via money vastly outnumber the actual resources or “chairs” in existence to be claimed by that money. Once people truly internalize that there aren’t enough “chairs” for everyone’s claims on them, the individually rational move is to grab your chair early, before the music even stops. The wider this awareness spreads, the more you risk seeing hoarding, capital flight, resource nationalism, or a prepping arms race.

That very scramble, in aggregate, makes the music stop sooner. The information itself doesn’t create the shortage, but it can accelerate the stampede. On top of that, the people who move first are generally not the people who most need a chair.

Hazard 9: Despair

The ninth hazard is what I refer to as the hazard of despair.

Hearing the full truth of our situation (particularly if one feels they are without agency, community, or something to do with their hands, time, and neighbors) can make a lot of people worse off than if they had never heard it. I’ve said before that telling someone the whole metacrisis story and then walking away is almost a form of spite. It almost always leaves people more helpless and distressed than before.

I get emails every week from people who found the material on this platform and then went through a very dark period of ecological grief. So every time I record something, there is a weight on me regarding how much reality a general audience can metabolize, which is itself an information hazard calculation.

Hazard 10: Reassurance

The next information hazard, number ten, is the mirror twin of despair: the reassurance hazard.

In order to avoid the despair of hazard nine, a lot of communicators respond by softening the story, keeping people comfortable by adding a hopeful ending. But if everyone tells a gentler story than they actually personally believe, or than actually exists in reality, society ends up planning for a future that none of the analysts actually expect.

So we’re kind of damned in both directions, which is why this work is damned hard! Telling the whole truth hurts some of the people hearing it, but softening the story hurts all of us, because a culture that only hears the gentle version will never take action to prevent the worst.

Back in that original Frankly, I mentioned James Stockdale, who was a prisoner of war and observed that neither the optimists nor the pessimists survived the camps. Rather, it was the realists who survived, the ones who faced the brutal facts while keeping faith that they’d eventually get out. I think that’s poignant for our planetary situation as well.

Hazard 11: Half Map

There’s an eleventh hazard that follows directly from the last two, and it lands on you, the audience. I’ll call it the half-map hazard.

When communicators like me share these meta-risks but hold back the strategies – or more accurately don’t know the strategies – for all the reasons I described earlier, people end up with something like half of a map. These people still act, but only on a fraction of all the information. So we get panic responses, snake oil solutions, and demagogues who channel real anxieties toward the wrong villains.

So, naming the problems without the corresponding playbook might invite responses that make the problems worse.

Hazard 12: Paranoia

I thought this list was complete after hazard eleven, but it turns out that managing the previous eleven hazards creates one final hazard. This one lands on the holder of the information. I might call it the weighing hazard or the paranoia hazard.

Once you start weighing everything you know against everything you can safely say, that weighing itself becomes a burden and a risk that makes you second-guess and self-censor. You start to constantly wonder which sentence will be the one that draws attention, especially negative attention.

Carrying unsayable knowledge by yourself, especially over years, is psychologically hard. It’s a bit like slow-drip water torture. So managing the hazards becomes another information hazard.

Where Does This All Leave Us?

So what do we do with all these information hazards?

My aim in voicing these is to encourage us to think more about what to say, when, to whom, and at what resolution, rather than to argue for silence. It’s to explain why I will keep being honest and open with you, while also acknowledging the fact that there are things I know that I’ll never say. I’d rather explain that openly versus pretending these constraints don’t exist. To me, the alternative seems a tad worse – a world where the only people speaking freely are those who haven’t thought about consequences, or don’t care about them.

This all applies to anyone working on any of the civilizational risks we collectively face, not just The Great Simplification platform. But I do feel these risks and wanted to share a bit of how I’m thinking about them.

Trust and Local Community

Perhaps the deepest response to all twelve of these hazards is the same one I keep arriving at from other directions: trust and community at human scales.

Some truths travel best at the speed of real-life relationships. The information that is hazardous when shouted into a global microphone can become benign, or even healing, when we share it around a kitchen table among our fellow people.

So continue to prioritize finding the others. Build the islands of coherence in your own life: the pockets of life and community that make sense and ground you. If more and more of these small pockets form and become connected, just beneath the surface and away from the Eye of Sauron, perhaps the emergent outcomes will positively surprise us in ways no one could predict.

Something a little lighter next week, maybe.

Have a good weekend, and I’ll talk to you soon. Thanks for reading.

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This week, I turn a late-night emergency vet visit for one of my dogs into a broader reflection on the extraordinary relationship between dogs and humans. While dogs have been human companions for thousands of years, the modern version of “man’s best friend” is a remarkably recent product of abundant energy, specialized breeding, industrial food systems, and increasingly sophisticated veterinary care. With the global dog population nearing one billion, I address the uncomfortable question of what might happen to these beloved animals as the metacrisis continues to unfold.

Ultimately, sitting in an emergency clinic and confronting the possibility of losing my pet led me to larger reflections on grief, care, and the strange emotional power animals can have over us. In a world increasingly shaped by AI, surveillance, economic instability, and existential risk, I realized that the unconditional love of a puppy perhaps represents the exact opposite - something profoundly simple and real. For me, that may make dogs one of humanity’s greatest “inventions” and one of the greatest antidotes to the grief of our modern world.

How has the modern dog become a reflection of the energy abundance and complexity of human civilization? Why can something as simple as spending time with a dog feel like an antidote to the complexities of modern life? And what happens to dogs, and our relationships with them, if the economic abundance that supports modern pet ownership begins to disappear?

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Want to dive deeper into the concepts covered in this episode? Follow along with the Show Notes & Links to Learn More, which you can find at the bottom of the page for every episode of The Great Simplification, or you can download them here.

In case you missed it…

Current geopolitical events continue to expose just how complex and fragile our global economic system is. As such, this week The Great Simplification team re-released this episode with , which covers the deceptively critical materials that continue to underpin everything from the phone in your hand to the house that you live in.

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Current geopolitical events continue to expose just how complex and fragile our global economic system is. As such, The Great Simplification team is re-releasing this episode with Ed Conway, which covers the deceptively critical materials that continue to underpin everything from the phone in your hand to the house that you live in.

In contrast to ‘The Great Simplification’, some might call the events of the last few hundred years a ‘Great Complexification’ in terms of relationships, governance, supply chains, and many other human activities. This conversation with economics journalist focuses on the six essential resources that underpin our modern economies – sand, salt, iron, copper, oil, and lithium - and dives into the (often unseen) environmental and human costs of extracting them, as well as the surprisingly fragile global supply chains they fuel. In order to understand what possibilities – and dangers – may await us in the future, we need to understand the realities and constraints of the present, as well as the failure points of the past.

What does it take to mine, refine, and transform the materials that are foundational to the world around us – which many of us now take for granted? How can we ensure the stability of global supply chains, and could we predict potential disruptions and chokepoints before they arise? If we understood the intricate web of complexity, energy, and resources that go into everything we consume, would it change our expectations for how much we need in order to live a good and fulfilling life?

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Want to dive deeper into the concepts covered in this episode? Follow along with the Show Notes & Links to Learn More, which you can find at the bottom of the page for every episode of The Great Simplification, or you can download them here.

In case you missed it…

How can humans – at least those with access to the internet – ingest the same facts and data, yet arrive at radically different worldviews? That’s the question I explored in last week’s Frankly, which unpacked eight different lenses through which people understand the current more-than-human predicament. Each of these perspectives identifies a different source of the problem and offers a different path toward action, but what looks like an obvious solution from one perspective can look irrelevant, or even dangerous, from another.

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This summer, I spent a week of uninterrupted time with a friend. It ended up being a real chance to slow down and be present. I also got to see what unfolds when I actually make space for that presence.

That week has stayed with me, especially as I’ve come back to more news about Iran, more weeds in the garden, more podcast work, and all the other things I was able to step away from for a bit.

So today, I’ve decided to share a bit about this experience, because I suspect it touches on something many of us wrestle with.

Rediscovering a Part of Myself

My friend’s organization is working adjacent to the more-than-human predicament, and many on his team follow the podcast and Franklys, at least casually. As such, I felt completely at home. It’s rare that I don’t feel the need to navigate a long conversational onramp where I’m explaining what I do, why it matters, and how all the pieces fit together. All that was implied and understood, even though – surprisingly to me – we spoke about it very little, and certainly not at dinnertime.

One night, we went out for Chinese food, and it ended up being one of the funniest dinners I’ve had in years. I kind of felt like a stand-up comic, and it seemed like I’d found some forgotten aspects of myself that hadn’t shown up in a long time. It wasn’t until later that night that I was able to reflect on what was different about this scenario.

I realized we didn’t talk about climate, AI, energy depletion, or the geopolitical cluster we’re currently hip deep in. Each of us knew about all these things, they just went unspoken. It took an experience like this for me to realize that the rooms I usually find myself in are either too hot – talking about systemic risks with all the gory details – or too cold – talking about football, fireworks, or some politician without any deep analysis, awareness, nuance, or recognition of the times we live in. It was striking to me that it took a group of humans who knew all these things but were being their best human selves regardless for me to feel like I could fully be myself. I found that I had missed the full version of Nate who showed up in this space.

I think we’re doing good work through the podcast, but the version of me that shows up in this context is but a mid-size sliver of the totality of Nate. But when I was with this group of ten or eleven people, it became clear to me that these were people who could see and sit with both the beauty and the horror of the world.

What’s more, they could still show up with joy, meaning, and presence. They could still get up in the morning and work on the things that matter. For me, being around them was like breathing pure oxygen, especially poignant after returning home to all the smoke blowing through from the wildfires in the Boundary Waters.

Seeing With Both Eyes

Seeing the whole depth of our reality requires both eyes to be open at the same time: the one that sees the beauty in our world, and the one that sees the horrors unfolding. I think some people have the horror eye closed, for good reasons, and some people have the beauty eye closed. In both of those cases, the world becomes two-dimensional and gray. After spending a week with ten people who had both eyes open, I felt like my social world had full 3D depth again.

So why did this hit me as hard as it did?

Two years ago, after spending six weeks in India with thirty people, I realized I had been naïve about community: I had thought it was about borrowing your neighbor’s lawnmower or trading garlic for potatoes. I had found that the real benefit showed up in my physiology: in the oxytocin and serotonin delivered by close, repetitive, daily interaction with other humans (and dogs, in India’s case).

Last week was a booster shot of that lesson, which I had gradually forgotten over the last two years. I got a shot of the oxytocin I didn’t even know I was low on, like discovering a deficiency at the exact moment someone hands you a vitamin to fill it.

In that week, my mammalian body did some accounting that my analyst brain would not … or could not. We are Homo sapiens. We evolved in small bands where everyone saw and reacted to the same world outside. For a couple of decades now, I’ve been seeing a different world than most of the people in whatever room I’ve happened to be in. I don’t think I fully internalized what that has cost me on a daily basis, at least until the cost went away for a week. Despite the connections and relationships I’ve formed with people from around the world through this work, I now realize I often, paradoxically, find myself quite lonely.

Technological Versus Tangible

None of this is to complain about online communities and the connectivity they allow us. I have a big online community that I’m grateful for every single day: the systems ecology folks who I’ve been exchanging ideas with for almost 20 years, and the thousands of you who see what I see and write to me about the remarkable things you’re doing.

But oxytocin, at least in its truest sense, doesn’t necessarily travel through fiber-optic cable. The internet has nearly infinite bandwidth for information, but very little capacity for the felt presence that only happens by being physically in a space with other beings. For me, that felt presence is strongest when I’m around others who deeply understand all the risks that are now converging (and I suspect many of you feel the same).

I have family whom I love dearly. My brother, his wife, and their son were here the last three days visiting, and it was wonderful. I have local friends. I have farmers and neighbors who would help me in a crisis. What I don’t have, at least not yet, is ten people within driving distance of my home who are fluent in the more-than-human predicament and don’t need to talk about it all the time. I suspect a lot of you reading are in the same position: aware, engaged, and locally alone.

As we increasingly converge on reality, or as reality converges on this system synthesis, this is likely going to change, even if only out of necessity.

Looking Forward

So, of the “no-regrets” strategies I can recommend here, I cannot recommend finding a local community strongly enough. This is foundational for the work ahead, even if the work is only on yourself. I do feel like this platform, The Great Simplification, has a role in that. Dare I say, we have a responsibility to assist in this, which we’re taking seriously and beginning to work on some things behind the scenes.

I hope you are well. Thanks for reading and being present with me today. More to come soon.

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How can humans – at least those with access to the internet – ingest the same facts and data, yet arrive at radically different worldviews? That’s the question I explore in this week’s Frankly, which unpacks eight different lenses through which people understand the current more-than-human predicament. Each of these perspectives identifies a different source of the problem and offers a different path toward action, but what looks like an obvious solution from one perspective can look irrelevant, or even dangerous, from another.

These perspectives often have such a grip on us and on the narrative of our lives. To give up one of these lenses is not just to revise an opinion, but to loosen your grip on the story that made the world somewhat coherent in the first place. That kind of loss is disorienting, even when you can see the limits of the story that you’re holding. The task at hand is not to discard any of these views in favor of one single “correct” view, but to hold them in relation to one another and recognize their truths while also acknowledging the deeper constraints of ecological overshoot and thermodynamics that sit beneath it all.

What judgments could be avoided when you recognize that the person you disagree with is looking at the same reality through a fundamentally different lens? Why exactly is it so hard to lose the narrative we hold as central to our worldview? And can we find solutions that remain useful, even when people disagree about the diagnosis?

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Want to dive deeper into the concepts covered in this episode? Follow along with the Show Notes & Links to Learn More, which you can find at the bottom of the page for every episode of The Great Simplification, or you can download them here.

In case you missed it…

In this week’s episode, I was joined by Dr. Richard C. Schwartz, the therapist who developed Internal Family Systems (IFS), and Steffi Bednarek, a climate psychologist applying that same model to organizations, governments, and culture at large. Dick walked through the origins of IFS, which describes the mind as naturally made up of “parts” – protectors and exiles – with their own histories, fears, and roles, which are all held by an underlying “Self.” Steffi extended the model outward to show how institutions and even entire countries can be read as systems of exiles and protectors, and shared how she uses IFS with governments, financial institutions, and wealth holders to defuse shame and effectively guide toward pro-social behavioral change. Together, we explored why healing our relationship to our own most despised parts may be inseparable from healing our relationship to the rest of the living world.

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The Great Simplification podcast is produced by The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future (ISEOF), a 501(c)(3) organization. We want to keep all content completely free to view globally and without ads. If you’d like to support ISEOF and its content via a tax-deductible donation, please use the link below.

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Most of us were taught to treat emotions like distress, numbness, and burnout as private failings to manage and move past, rather than normal responses to living within a world full of crises. The unintended result is a distrust in our own bodies and mind, further leading to more confusion about what is ‘normal.’ One framework offers a potential path to living in harmony with all of the mind’s distinct parts, breaking the defensive and counterproductive loops we tend to get stuck in. What sort of systemic ripples might become possible if we stop trying to smother uncomfortable parts of ourselves, and begin embracing them as critical pieces of our own mental ecologies?

In this episode, I’m joined by Dr. Richard C. Schwartz, the therapist who developed Internal Family Systems (IFS), and Steffi Bednarek, a climate psychologist applying that same model to organizations, governments, and culture at large. Dick walks through the origins of IFS, which describes the mind as naturally made up of "parts" – protectors and exiles – with their own histories, fears, and roles, which are all held by an underlying “Self.” Steffi extends the model outward to show how institutions and even entire countries can be read as systems of exiles and protectors, and shares how she uses IFS with governments, financial institutions, and wealth holders to defuse shame and effectively guide toward pro-social behavioral change. Together, we explore why healing our relationship to our own most despised parts may be inseparable from healing our relationship to the rest of the living world.

How can looking inward to our own thought processes and patterns help us better understand and relate to others, especially those whose behavior we find hardest to accept? As we continue through challenging times, how can we balance critical physical and policy work with the internal work of healing our relationship to the mental parts we shy away from? And would our decisions and actions change if more and more humans began to lead from curiosity and compassion, instead of fear, and could that be enough to shift the larger system?

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Want to dive deeper into the concepts covered in this episode? Follow along with the Show Notes & Links to Learn More, which you can find at the bottom of the page for every episode of The Great Simplification, or you can download them here.

In case you missed it…

In last week’s Frankly, I explicitly outlined just a few of the countless actions we can take to actually change what’s coming, rather than just prepare for it. I touched on why the metacrisis is better understood as a predicament to be continually shaped, rather than as a problem with a single solution – calling for a shift in mindset in order to navigate the uncertainty ahead. In complex systems such as ours, even seemingly modest differences in initial conditions can lead to wildly different outcomes down the road, meaning that what each of us chooses to do today shifts what becomes possible in the decades ahead.

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Over a series of five previous installments, I’ve been laying out my framework for “How to Think About the Future.”

Before we dive into this sixth part, I want to provide a quick recap of where we’ve been. In the first part, we talked about how to hold the future as a landscape of possibilities with coupled systems, phase shifts, and the like. In part two, we built four grids regarding economic growth or contraction, power and wealth distribution, geopolitical interconnection and stability, and integrity of Earth systems. In part three, we explored the shape of the landscape itself: the valleys and ridges we navigate, and how switchbacks and erosion make futures more or less possible. In the fourth essay, I showcased four potential composite worlds – the Long Repair, Mordor Persists, Fortress World, and the Unraveling – making the case that the futures most worth building will likely look like failure to a culture calibrated to growth. Finally, in the fifth part, I mapped these composite worlds onto a single human life, exploring how the same patterns that shape economies, power, geopolitics, and Earth systems turn inward.

Throughout all of this, I can imagine a question may be building: “Okay, Nate. Given all that…what do I actually do?”

Well, I’m not going to tell you that today, or – to be blunt – probably ever. What I will talk about is how to think about what to do and how to engage in the logic of planning under uncertainty. I’m not going to highlight a list of specific actions or causes to support, although they remain important. I’ve spoken about them elsewhere and will continue developing that work.

From my vantage, there’s a piece missing, which is what this series attempts to provide. That piece is a methodology for you to find your own plan of action based on what you care about, your local context, and what you want for the future. Without that, sometimes even well-intentioned actions can make things worse.

That’s where I’d like to start.

The Civilizational False Positive

Before we talk about how to prioritize what to do, I’d like to talk about how I think about what not to do. We can fail in two different directions, and the causes of those failures look completely different from each other.

Type 1 and Type 2 errors are concepts from statistics that mathematically describes what we might call “false positives” and “false negatives.” I want you to imagine you’re woken up by a noise in the middle of the night, and you automatically assume it’s a burglar. Maybe you call the police or sit frozen in anxiety … but it turns out that the “burglar” was just your cat knocking stuff over in the kitchen. This is a Type 1 error: a false positive. You overreacted to a threat that wasn’t real, creating an entirely different problem.

Now imagine the flipside. You hear a noise in the night and assume it’s the cat (especially plausible if your cat, like my cat Toofie, is always running around in the night). Maybe you roll over and go back to sleep. Only this time, there actually was a burglar! You missed it because you overlooked the warning signs, exposing yourself to a dangerous situation. This is a Type 2 error: a false negative. You missed a real threat because you didn’t act.

Both types of errors are dangerous. Both happen all the time. The challenge of planning for a hazy and uncertain future involves both.

Type 2 errors happen due to omission: the things we miss and the shortfalls we create by failing to act. Not protecting topsoil and biodiversity because GDP doesn’t measure it. Not building community resilience because there’s no institutional incentive to do so. Not transitioning energy systems because the current ones still technically work. These are the things we should do and haven’t, at least not yet. By the time the shortfalls become visible, it’s often too late to reverse them. Using the landscape language from part three of this series, we might refer to these as the “washouts” that happen due to individual and cultural “erosion.” These are the switchbacks we allow to disappear through neglect and inattention.

Type 1 errors, on the other hand, are the shortfalls we create by doing the wrong thing and acting on a model of the world that’s incorrect or incomplete. These false positives, with respect to the metacrisis, are numerous and come in a few flavors. The obvious one is taking action while using only a partial map of the system, like shutting down fossil fuels overnight when 80% of the world and 99% of the supply chains still run on them. The diagnosis may be partially right … but the prescription ends up killing the patient.

There’s also the Type 1 error of fighting the wrong battle entirely. Maybe that looks like pouring resources into things like carbon offsets that don’t offset anything, or ESG scores that don’t change the behavior of the economic Superorganism. This might look like taking action, but it’s action aimed at the wrong target. Said differently, the burglar is real but we called the fire department instead of the police.

There’s another really big Type 1 error that I always talk about on this channel. It’s the fact that nearly every institution on Earth – every government budget, pension fund, infrastructure plan, corporate strategy, and international agreement – is built on the assumption that the global economy will be larger in the future than it is today. We don’t treat growth as one possible scenario among several; we assume growth as the ground we’re standing on in order to work on all our other interventions.

What that means is that when contraction arrives (and I think the evidence strongly suggests it will) almost everything we’re currently promoting, investing in, and planning for suddenly becomes a ginormous Type 1 error. Many individual projects can be smart, well-designed, and well-intentioned, but if they assume growth in a period of decline, they would make things actively worse. Infrastructure designed for expansion becomes a maintenance burden during contraction, financial instruments designed to compound become Wile E. Coyote traps, and institutions designed to distribute growing surpluses have no idea how to distribute shrinking ones.

What Can Be Recovered…And What Can’t?

So how do we thread that needle? I think it starts with a distinction that will sound pretty simple but changes everything once we really internalize it.

Some losses can be rebuilt. Some cannot.

If you had to choose between losing fifty thousand dollars and losing your left arm, which would you consider to be the bigger loss? You probably don’t even have to think about it. You can make the money back, but you can’t regrow an arm.

Even if this is obvious at the personal level, when we move to the civilizational level our planning frameworks lose this distinction entirely. We treat losses as if they’re interchangeable: a dollar of lost GDP gets the same weight as an inch of lost topsoil, but they’re fundamentally different. One can be rebuilt fairly quickly, and the other takes centuries to regenerate.

Reversible losses – like money, market positions, consumer goods, jobs, and careers – all matter in our world. But they all sit in one category, while irreversible losses sit in an entirely different one. I suspect the list of irreversible losses is longer than most people realize. They also exist as a spectrum from the things that are gone forever once depleted to the things that are practically irreversible, which come back so slowly they might as well be gone.

We’ve talked about the examples on this channel before. Topsoil: it takes centuries to build back a single inch under natural conditions, and we’ve been depleting it across major growing regions for decades… far faster than it forms. Water aquifers: the Ogallala Aquifer under the United States’ High Plains region still holds fossil water from the last Ice Age, which accumulated over ten thousand years. We’re draining it in decades. Once depleted, it doesn’t refill on any human timescale.

Like diamonds, species extinctions are forever. Pollinator populations have spent millions of years co-evolving with plants, and their decline cascades through the entire food system. Social trust is lost in societies much faster than it can be rebuilt, and below a certain level of trust, cooperation becomes impossible for quite a long time.

Wisdom and institutional knowledge held by experienced practitioners often goes undocumented and unrecognized. But once an institution loses its experienced people without proper knowledge transfer, that wisdom is gone. The nuclear taboo represents roughly eighty years of non-use. If it’s broken once, proliferation incentives will mushroom overnight … pun fully intended.

There are also irreversible losses in more subtle areas, like the developmental windows of children. You cannot give a child back the years of their early development. Those windows close, and any disruption that happened within them can have long-lasting impacts that are difficult to overcome.

Take a look at that list of irreversible losses and ask yourself where most of our institutional energy is going right now. Certainly not toward backtracking so we don’t lose some of these things. Our society is optimizing for quarterly earnings and GDP, while allowing topsoil, aquifers, trust, democratic norms, and ecological corridors to erode underneath us.

The radical inversion I am suggesting is obviously much easier said than done. It means spending disproportionate effort protecting the irreversible, while accepting more risk on the reversible. It means being willing to lose money to protect topsoil, to lose efficiency in order to protect ecological corridors, and to lose some comfort to preserve the developmental health of our children.

On a personal level, this distinction changed how I weigh decisions in my own life. The question I try to ask now (never perfectly or consistently) is, “Which of my actions protect something in my life or local surroundings that can’t be rebuilt?” Because those are the actions that matter most, even when they score worst on the metrics our current culture approves of.

Unicorn Strategies: Robust Actions For Any Future

So if the priority is to protect the irreversible, the next question we might ask is which actions would help, regardless of which of the composite futures we end up in. This is where I think the scenario planning logic I’ve been laying out becomes most helpful. We don’t need to know which composite world is coming to know what to do, because some actions act as switchbacks in almost every landscape.

Building soil health is valuable in every world because regenerative agriculture is foundational: food security determines survival and holds communities together. Strengthening community relationships will be favorable in every composite, because the people physically near you will matter more as conditions get harder. I would claim that, in every plausible future, your relationship with the people within walking distance of your home will become more important than it is today. That’s a personal and cultural switchback you can start building this week, because community ties that exist before a crisis are exponentially more valuable than ones you try to build during one.

Practical skills are helpful in any future scenario: food production, repairs, basic medical knowledge, water management, building, and teaching. These have value in every world, including our current one, and become even more valuable as larger systems become less reliable.

Reducing dependence on fragile supply chains is necessary, since local food, local energy, and local water act as buffers in the best composites, and survival in the worst. Protecting local ecosystems, watershed health, pollinator populations, and soil biology is in the same category. These are foundations for everything else, and their value doesn’t depend on which composite arrives.

The reason this principle works is that it lets you act decisively without any need for certainty about the specifics of the future. Speculation bets everything on one outcome, and you lose everything if you turn out to be wrong. Robust action, in contrast, produces meaning and value regardless of which future shows up. This is how ecologists think about resilience under changing conditions. Organisms that are robust across a range of environments persist through change, even if they’re less optimized for any single one. In a period of genuine uncertainty, robustness will beat optimization.

Of course, there are limits to this. Being robust across multiple composite worlds is a good general principle, but it’s not the only legitimate strategy ahead of The Great Simplification.

We could call these “unicorn strategies.” They’re deliberately focused rather than hedged across worlds. They make sense because human beings are not interchangeable planning units. We are beings with particular loves, passions, drives, and callings. Someone whose life’s work is protecting wild salmon runs shouldn’t divert that energy to community building just because a framework told them they should.

For most people, I would guess a reasonable posture is probably a mixture of both: a base of robust actions that serve you and your community across futures, plus one or two focused commitments that express what you specifically care about most and enjoy.

Constrained and Determined Futures

If you’ve been watching this whole series, you’ve absorbed some difficult information. Painting out the Long Repair and other composites was actually kind of eye-opening for me. But at some point, most people who sit with this material hit a wall that feels like despair: “What can I possibly do? The systems are too big. The physics are too constraining. My individual actions are just small rounding errors.”

I do not pretend I have a reason to believe any one of us can personally change the civilizational or biospheric trajectory. I don’t think that mindset is very helpful within a predicament larger than any single human. But here’s the mental framework I’ve come to after more than twenty years of stewing on all this: agency becomes real at scales where you can see the results. In turn, your actions contribute in unknown ways at the scales where you can’t see your immediate impact.

At the level of your household, your garden, your relationships, your neighborhood, your community, or your watershed, the impacts of your agency are visible and direct. Cultivating biodiversity in your garden supports your harvest and the soil. Relationships deepen, and local institutions get slightly better because you showed up to the meeting you’d never gone to before. Every one of those actions begins a switchback on the terrain that’s right in front of you.

At the level of your bioregion and your job, the impacts of your agency are slower but still real. You can shape the culture of your workplace. You can contribute to a network of people working on shared problems.

At the civilizational level, agency is a lot harder to feel. The trends and systemic shifts are, by definition, the sum of individual choices, plus some emergence. Your contribution is real, even if you can’t see it clearly from where you stand. If many of us pursue switchbacks in our own terrain, possibilities open up at larger scales that none of us could have created alone.

Constrained futures are very different from determined futures. This concept is at the core of the ethos underpinning this channel. Our civilizational trajectory is constrained by physics, ecology, and the deep patterns of human behavior. This is all demonstrably true. But within those constraints, the difference between the best and worst versions of what’s coming is enormous. It’s the difference between the Long Repair and the Unraveling scenarios. Between communities that hold together and communities that fragment apart. And between a world your grandchildren can build a life in, and a world that is broken for them.

That difference is largely determined by what people do at the scales where their actions are visible. So you don’t need to try to save the world to make a difference. You don’t need to mitigate global heating by yourself. You can act at the scale where you can see the results.

This ties back to the start: protect what matters most. Build what you can build. Accept that your contribution is one of many. Trust that the sum of many people switchbacking on their own terrain and protecting the irreversible things near them is the mechanism by which the better futures have higher odds of arriving.

Reflection Coda

Over these six essays, I’ve tried to share with you the strategies I’ve personally developed for holding and responding to what’s ahead. That includes a framework for holding the future, a vocabulary to describe it, a landscape for understanding the terrain, and a few built worlds in order to emotionally feel the differences between composite futures. And now, a planning logic for acting inside it.

What I deliberately have not done is advise you on what to do: which domain to work in, which skills to build first, or which personal commitments to make. I don’t specify those things because those specific actions depend on who you are, where you are, what you love, what your passions are, what your community needs, and what phase of your life you’re in.

So I hope some of these questions can now move from the screen to your life and the actions you take within it.

What are you protecting? What are you building? And what are you willing to let go of?

Where are you switchbacking, and where are you letting things erode, maybe without even realizing it? Is there a unicorn commitment within you, something you love enough to focus on even if the work is narrower?

These aren’t one-and-done questions for any of us to answer this week. These serve as an open invite for you to return to and reflect on as conditions change … and as you change alongside them.

The future is going to keep surprising us. That’s what the future does! But people who have a method for thinking about it – who can hold multiple possibilities at once, who know the difference between reversible and irreversible, and who understand which direction the landscape is tilted – are harder to knock over when the inevitable surprises come.

That’s what I’ve attempted to convey with this series, “How to Think About the Future.” Instead of providing certainty or a concrete plan, this framework serves as a way of seeing all this while allowing you to stay oriented, even when the ground is shifting beneath us.

Thanks for bearing with me. This series has been a lot to unpack. As always, I appreciate you spending your time with my thoughts. I hope they can translate into some action in your own life. Until next time.

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What can one person actually do about the metacrisis? In this week’s Frankly, I explicitly outline just a few of the countless actions we can take to actually change what’s coming, rather than just prepare for it. I touch on why the metacrisis is better understood as a predicament to be continually shaped, rather than as a problem with a single solution – calling for a shift in mindset in order to navigate the uncertainty ahead. In complex systems such as ours, even seemingly modest differences in initial conditions can lead to wildly different outcomes down the road, meaning that what each of us chooses to do today shifts what becomes possible in the decades ahead.

Small, specific, and slightly unordinary interventions like reducing dependence on constant stimulation, cultivating humanity and humility, and finding our own version of what is “enough” serve to challenge the forces driving the metacrisis. Resilience grows through shared effort, meaningful relationships, and a renewed sense of responsibility for the more-than-human world. None of these things will solve our predicament on their own. But if millions choose to start living differently in the immediate present, the forces shaping our future might just start to shift.

How can redefining success, consumption, and community make us less vulnerable to today’s systemic challenges? Why does “practicing loss” help change the way we respond to disruptions? And what if the most meaningful response to the world’s biggest challenges isn’t a sweeping political movement or a technological breakthrough, but a collection of ordinary actions practiced consistently over time?

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Want to dive deeper into the concepts covered in this episode? Follow along with the Show Notes & Links to Learn More, which you can find at the bottom of the page for every episode of The Great Simplification, or you can download them here.

In case you missed it…

In this week’s episode, I was joined by biologist and biophysicist Olivier Hamant to explore why living systems prioritize robustness over performance, and what that means for a civilization built almost entirely in the opposite direction. Olivier distinguished performance (efficacy plus efficiency) from robustness (the capacity to remain stable and viable despite fluctuation), and pointed out that nature rarely selects for the most efficient organism; it selects for the most adaptable one. Together, Olivier and I also traced how cheap, abundant energy allowed human societies to substitute the “safety net” of resource abundance for the safety net that living systems actually rely on: diversity, redundancy, and cooperation. As the twenty-first century moves from an era of stable averages into an era of volatility and standard deviation, Olivier argued that the path forward likely isn’t degrowth or continued growth, but a third way: economies and institutions designed to be robust and adaptable to risk, rather than avoid it.

Listen on your favorite podcast platform

Want to support The Great Simplification podcast?

The Great Simplification podcast is produced by The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future (ISEOF), a 501(c)(3) organization. We want to keep all content completely free to view globally and without ads. If you’d like to support ISEOF and its content via a tax-deductible donation, please use the link below.

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For decades, modern civilization has treated efficiency as an unquestioned good: the leaner, faster, and more optimized anything is – from supply chains to your morning routine – the better. But emerging systems science argues that this obsession with performance is actually making humanity more brittle. What if the over-optimization baked into our economies, our agriculture, our institutions, and even our own bodies is at the root of our shared predicament, and how can nature’s intelligence show us a different way?

In this episode, I’m joined by biologist and biophysicist Olivier Hamant to explore why living systems prioritize robustness over performance, and what that means for a civilization built almost entirely in the opposite direction. Olivier distinguishes performance (efficacy plus efficiency) from robustness (the capacity to remain stable and viable despite fluctuation), and he points out that nature rarely selects for the most efficient organism; it selects for the most adaptable one. Together, Olivier and I also trace how cheap, abundant energy allowed human societies to substitute the “safety net” of resource abundance for the safety net that living systems actually rely on: diversity, redundancy, and cooperation. As the twenty-first century moves from an era of stable averages into an era of volatility and standard deviation, Olivier argues that the path forward likely isn’t degrowth or continued growth, but a third way: economies and institutions designed to be robust and adaptable to risk, rather than avoid it.

What wisdom have we forgotten for the sake of maximizing material output and efficiency? How has our search for optimization affected our quality of life, and what do we risk by continuing down this same path? Most importantly, could balancing our focus on performance and robustness be the key to reframing our relationship with the entire Earth, bringing more stability, rest, and meaning to our lives?

Listen on your favorite podcast platform

Want to dive deeper into the concepts covered in this episode? Follow along with the Show Notes & Links to Learn More, which you can find at the bottom of the page for every episode of The Great Simplification, or you can download them here.

In case you missed it…

Last week, I took on a tension I have been navigating for years, at the heart of communicating about the metacrisis: the hazards that arise from sharing true information with a global audience. Building on my earlier episode, “The Limits to Podcasting,” where I first described a “triple information hazard,” this Frankly outlined twelve distinct risks that emerge when honest insights about the more-than-human predicament are broadcast at scale. Drawing on philosopher Nick Bostrom’s concept of an “information hazard,” I explained why certain ideas become dangerous precisely because they are true, and why the era of AI raises the stakes, as everything said publicly is now ingested as training data and metabolized by the superorganism.

Listen on your favorite podcast platform

Want to support The Great Simplification podcast?

The Great Simplification podcast is produced by The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future (ISEOF), a 501(c)(3) organization. We want to keep all content completely free to view globally and without ads. If you’d like to support ISEOF and its content via a tax-deductible donation, please use the link below.

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Hello there. Today I want to share the next part of my ongoing series, “How to Think About the Future.” So far, we’ve been exploring how to engage in scenario thinking in order not to limit our thinking about the future, and to open up multiple scenarios that are affected by the actions we take in our daily lives. Originally, I’d outlined this fifth part to be about robust action and no-regret responses to the composite worlds I had outlined in part four. But on a bike ride recently, I realized something was missing ahead of that.

This whole series has been about civilizational futures. We’ve built 2x2 grids describing macro-scale stuff – economies, power structures, geopolitics, and the Earth systems underneath everything else. We’ve engaged in various composite worlds that attempt to convey how future scenarios’ daily lived experiences might feel. We’ve looked at the landscape to reach those various futures as an assortment of valleys and ridges, which are navigated by creating switchbacks that inch us toward better futures. This entire series has been aimed at helping us think about what’s coming – not just for ourselves, but also for societies, nations, and the biosphere.

Every single person reading this is also navigating a personal version of the same landscape – and the dynamics are strikingly similar between the personal and civilizational. So today I want to turn the lens inward and ask: what do these landscapes look like at the scale of a single human life?

In this part, I’ll outline four things that are precursors to taking action in order to move toward better futures. First, I discuss two dimensions that we have to personally navigate: material throughput and agency. I then outline two foundations that lie underneath these dimensions, which constrain what is possible: the functioning of our bodies and nervous systems and our relational webs.

Let’s start with the first dimension.

Dimension: Throughput

At the macro level I outlined in part two, we asked whether the economy is growing or contracting, and whether that growth or contraction is regenerative or extractive. At the personal level, the question is pretty much the same: is your material throughput expanding or simplifying, and is that building you up or wearing you down?

It’s important to point out that these are independent things. You can be expanding your income, your career, your commitments, and your consumption in a regenerative way, but only if it’s actually aligned with what matters to you: capability, relationships, meaning, and personal development. Expansion can also be extractive. Your career grows but it feeds on your time with your kids, your dogs, or your passions. Your income rises but your health declines to fuel it. Your social presence expands but the depth of your actual relationships thins out. More activity and throughput, but with less life.

You can be simplifying in a regenerative way, such as spending less, owning less, doing less. You drop the obligations that were draining you and discover you sleep better and think more clearly. On the other hand, simplification can also just be plain decline. You’re contracting because you’re exhausted, you’ve given up, or you just can’t sustain what you were doing anymore. The simplification isn’t chosen … it just arrives.

What I would call the “Personal Mordor” scenario is the one I think many people reading this might recognize. Perhaps uncomfortably. Your throughput is expanding, and the metrics look fine because your income, career, productivity, and social presence are all expanding. Underneath that growth, you’re drawing down the principal: your health, your close relationships, your creative capacity, your ability to actually be present in the moment. But the scorecard, at least the one our culture taught us to check, says you’re doing great.

In contrast, the scenario of “Personal Long Repair” looks like failure by those same cultural metrics, but it feels like coming back to life. There’s less status, less stuff, less busyness, and maybe less money. But there’s more sleep, more meals cooked at home, more connection to the web of life outside, and more actual conversations. Just like the civilizational version, this might look like decline or failure to most people in our culture.

Unless you’re surrounded by others with very similar ideals and practices, that can feel really difficult.

Dimension: Agency

The second dimension has to do with agency, which is a topic I’ve discussed many times on this platform as an essential concept. At the macro level, we asked who holds the power in our system, and who reaps the benefits that are produced. At the personal level, this becomes a question of who actually controls your time, your attention, and your daily decisions, and who benefits from your effort.

Is our time genuinely ours, or does our employer own our daylight hours? Does our mortgage own the anxiety we feel in the evenings, and do social expectations own our weekends? Does our phone own all the tiny gaps of time in between?

We might feel autonomous. I “choose” to check my phone. I “choose” to work late. I “choose” to say yes to the obligation. If I tracked it honestly, I’m not sure who actually decides how my hours get spent, and who captures the value of what I’m doing in those hours.

Think about the four sources of power I talked about in part two: military, political, financial, and technological. At the personal level, those translate roughly to your own biology, social expectations, financial obligations, and the platforms that structure your attention. These are the things we navigate in our daily lives that give us (or remove) our sense of agency and power over our own time and gains.

Someone with broad agency and broad gains is a person whose time actually reflects their values. They’re not necessarily free of obligations; rather, the obligations are mostly ones they chose. The benefits flow back to them and the people they care about.

Someone with narrow agency and narrow gains is living the personal version of a “Captured Democracy” scenario from part two. This is a person whose life looks like freedom, but functions more like a trap. Every day they get to “make” lots of choices, but the choices are mostly predetermined by preexisting obligations, debt, habits, and phone or social media addiction. It all feels like freedom … but it doesn’t really function as such.

So those are the two dimensions we navigate: throughput and agency. They describe what you’re doing with your life. Whether any of it holds up fully depends on what lies underneath.

Foundation: Body and Nervous System

This is the point where the personal scenario thinking diverges from the macro one. At the civilizational level, the two other grids of geopolitics and Earth systems are what constrain everything else. You can have the best economic model and the fairest power structure, but if the biosphere is falling apart and geopolitics is fragmenting, those good choices get quickly overwhelmed.

The same thing happens at the personal level. The foundations are different, because we don’t navigate them the same way we navigate the dimensions I just outlined. They’re slower and deeper, less responsive to conscious decisions. They’re the accumulated result of years of choices, plus stuff we didn’t choose – our childhoods, genetics, traumas, experiences, and just plain luck. They’re the ground our personal composites sit on.

The first one is related to our physical body and its functioning: How much sleep debt are you carrying? How regulated is your nervous system? What’s your baseline when nothing is going wrong? Are you rested and calm and capable? Or are you running on caffeine and cortisol and momentum?

You can ignore this foundation for a little while, maybe even years. Your body will keep performing … but it sets the outer limits on everything else. Like the Earth systems at the macro level, by the time the indicators clearly register that something is wrong, the damage is often pretty advanced and recovery takes a long time, if it’s even possible at all.

A person whose body and nervous system are intact has more slack. They can absorb a bad week. They can think clearly under pressure. A person whose foundations are depleted has no slack and no buffer. Every setback cascades, every demand feels difficult or impossible. It’s not because this person is weak; it’s because there’s not much left to draw on.

Our physical and nervous system foundation is either providing us with options or taking them away. No amount of good strategy on the dimensions above makes up for a foundation that’s crumbling.

Foundation: Relational Web

The other foundation that our personal composites sit on is the web of care and relationships we operate within. This is your personal geopolitics, while your health is your personal biosphere.

This foundation is measured by the quality and depth of your actual human connections in real life. Not your network, or your followers, or your contacts, but the people in your life who would show up at 2am if you called. The people who know what you’re actually going through, and care about you.

This inner network also determines what’s possible when things get hard. If your relational web is strong, a “Personal Long Repair” scenario is a lot more achievable because you have people to simplify with, to share the burden with, to hold you accountable, to remind you who you are when you forget. If this group of humans (or I suppose non-humans) is either thin or adversarial, stress pushes you toward rigidity and isolation – or worse, toward things falling apart entirely – regardless of what you choose in the dimensions above.

So we can make all the right decisions about our throughput and our agency. We might simplify beautifully and reclaim our time. If we do this alone – without deep relationships, without community, without people who actually know us – I think, given what’s ahead, we’re building on sand.

Four Personal Futures

So the four personal composites come together the same way the macro ones did. They emerge from the dimensions and the foundations combined.

A “Personal Long Repair” looks like deliberately simplifying with genuine agency. The body and nervous system are intact, and you have a strong relational web. This is a hard scenario to achieve. It requires, at a minimum, sustained honesty with yourself. It’s both the hardest personal composite to reach and the easiest to lose: one bad month, seductive job offer, or crisis, and it’s easy to slide back. Still, this is the only personal trajectory that is genuinely regenerative over the long term.

A “Personal Mordor” would mean expanding throughput with captured agency. Your body is quietly depleting, and whatever relationships you have are maintained mostly at a surface level. The scoreboard says everything is fine, but everything is not fine. Just like civilizational Mordor, the danger here is that you use up the resources you’d personally need for a graceful transition out of this scenario: your health, your close relationships, and your time. Once the metrics catch up to reality, your options have narrowed significantly.

A “Personal Fortress” scenario means walls up, controlling everything. Maybe you’re well-prepped for what’s coming, but you’re doing it alone. Rich in financial capital, poor in all the others. All the prepping but none of the neighbors. This is survivable, sure, but you’re not able to flourish here. We are social beings, and the constant self-management and vigilance that are required here is exhausting. It’s energetically expensive to maintain a personal fortress, same as it is to maintain a civilizational one.

Lastly, a “Personal Unraveling” scenario is where things are coming apart in more than one area at once. Your health is getting worse, your relationships are fraying. There’s no real structure to the days; it’s mostly just reacting to whatever hits next. This scenario doesn’t happen because you’re weak. It’s because the ground you were standing on gave way and everything on top shifted with it. Each setback hits before you’ve recovered from the last one, and there’s very little room for error.

Feedback Loops and Gravity

Just like the macro composites reflect the inner composites, the gravitational pull that creates feedbacks in the civilizational composites also exists in our personal landscapes.

When our bodies are depleted and we don’t really have people around us, our agency shrinks. Our throughput defaults toward “extraction,” because we just don’t have the energy for anything else. Stress plus scarce (personal) energy pulls us toward rigidity, or “Personal Fortress” mode. In the same way, scarcity plus fear pulls toward authoritarian consolidation at the civilizational level. It becomes the path of least resistance. It doesn’t require a decision; it’s just what happens when the foundations erode and we stop switchbacking.

The civilizational asymmetries hold as well. It’s easier to slide from “Personal Long Repair” into “Personal Fortress” under stress than to climb from “Personal Mordor” into “Personal Long Repair.” That’s because that climb requires at least partially giving up the metrics that say you’re fine. It requires looking at the scoreboard and acknowledging that you’re measuring the wrong things. Honestly, that’s the same confusion from part four – healing versus dying – just at the scale of one life.

The personal future most worth building looks like failure to a culture that measures everything by growth, productivity, and busyness.

Personal Switchbacks Over Flashy Fixes

Now, here may be the most important insight I can offer in this essay. Most people trying to change their lives focus on the headline dimensions: What should I do differently? How should I spend my time? What should I consume? What should I cut?

Those are all throughput and agency questions, and they skip the foundations entirely: Am I sleeping enough? Am I mostly calm in my body, and can I return to that calm when stress hits? Do I have people around me who actually know me and care about me? Is my body giving me slack and buffer, or taking them away? Is my relational web strong enough to hold a difficult transition? Do I spend enough time outdoors?

Skipping those questions is the personal equivalent of building economic policy on top of a degrading biosphere. We can have the best plan in the world, but if what’s underneath it is crumbling, the plan doesn’t hold.

I will be expanding on all of this in the ongoing “Guide to Staying Human” series, as I reflect on my own life at this stage of the metacrisis. This foundational work isn’t glamorous … nor is it strategic. It doesn’t feel productive by most metrics our culture respects. It’s sleeping enough, taking walks, cooking food, and sitting with someone without an agenda. It’s the soup you bring to your neighbor, and having the conversation you keep putting off. It’s making the doctor’s appointment you’ve been avoiding. It’s putting the phone down at 7pm even though your brain is insisting on the dopamine.

This is what I’m calling “personal switchbacking.” It’s the patient and unglamorous work on the terrain that’s just in front of us. No one other than you is going to see this work or give it “likes.” The progress, just like building cultural switchbacks, builds so slowly we can’t see it week to week. But we can see it month to month and year to year. This is the kind of progress that, when the ground finally shifts underneath us, turns out to be the main thing that keeps us steady and oriented.

I will have a lot more to say about this in the coming months, because more people building these switchbacks in their own life will underpin all the important cultural work ahead of The Great Simplification.

Reflection

So the question I’ll leave with you rhymes with the ones from the macro series, but pointed inward this time.

Which personal composite are you living inside right now? Not which one you want to be in … which one are you actually in today, if you’re being honest?

Are you switchbacking or eroding? At the level of your foundations – your body, your nervous system, your actual human relationships – are you building something that will hold? Or are you letting it wash out while you focus on the dimensions?

The good news is that personal switchbacks are available right now. Today. This week. They don’t require permission, policy, or institutional reform. They just require honesty about where you are and one small act in the right direction. And then another one. And then another one.

Now that we can see both landscapes, the civilizational one and the personal one, the question is how to act inside them. That’s what’s coming in part six. I’ll see you there. Thanks for reading and following along with this series.

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This week, I take on a tension I have been navigating for years, at the heart of communicating about the metacrisis: the hazards that arise from sharing true information with a global audience. Building on my earlier episode, “The Limits to Podcasting,” where I first described a “triple information hazard,” this Frankly outlines twelve distinct risks that emerge when honest insights about the more-than-human predicament are broadcast at scale. Drawing on philosopher Nick Bostrom’s concept of an “information hazard,” I explain why certain ideas become dangerous precisely because they are true, and why the era of AI raises the stakes, as everything said publicly is now ingested as training data and metabolized by the superorganism.

Some of these hazards land on the speaker, some benefit the powerful, and some fall on the audience itself. I reflect on the dangers of despair and false reassurance, the “half map” problem of naming risks without corresponding strategies, and the private burden of weighing what can and cannot be said. These hazards argue for care rather than silence: attention to timing, context, scale, and the trust of the people listening. Truths that become hazardous when shouted into a global microphone can become benign, even healing, when shared around a kitchen table, and that growing trust and community at human scale may be the deepest response to all twelve.

When does sharing the truth create new risks rather than reducing existing ones? How do we balance openness with the responsibility to protect people, strategies, and emerging possibilities? And what does honest communication look like in an era when every word can be amplified, weaponized, or metabolized by machines?

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Want to dive deeper into the concepts covered in this episode? Follow along with the Show Notes & Links to Learn More, which you can find at the bottom of the page for every episode of The Great Simplification, or you can download them here.

In case you missed it…

In this week’s episode, I was joined by Jeff Currie for a wide-boundary look at what happens when the buffers that have suppressed energy price signals for fifty years finally run dry. Using his decades of experience as a former commodity strategist at Goldman Sachs and as a current senior advisor at The Carlyle Group, Jeff walked through why the “crack spread” between crude and refined products just hit its highest level in three decades. He also described why draining strategic reserves is, in actuality, simply a bet that scarcity can be avoided rather than solved – in Currie’s eyes, the West’s refusal to admit scarcity since the 70s has left it structurally unprepared, particularly compared to China’s security-driven build-out of nuclear, solar, and battery capacity. He also laid out the “Grand Bargain” underlying the postwar dollar system, wherein the U.S. protects global sea lanes in exchange for global trade running through New York. Jeff explained why a failure to reopen the Strait of Hormuz could unravel this arrangement, bringing forward consequences that would land hardest on middle-class Americans’ access to credit and consumption.

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For three decades, most of Wall Street has treated energy and commodities as a rounding error, or as a small slice of the portfolio rather than the physical foundation everything else runs on. But in mid-2026, with the Strait of Hormuz disrupted, tankers burning in the Red and Black Seas, and nearly half of Russia’s refining capacity knocked offline, that complacency is being tested in real time. The noise around increasing crude oil prices is loud, but this week’s guest argues that the signal beneath it – the decline of refined products like diesel and jet fuel – is already sounding the alarm bells of a world in crisis.

In this episode, I’m joined by Jeff Currie for a wide-boundary look at what happens when the buffers that have suppressed energy price signals for fifty years finally run dry. Using his decades of experience as a former commodity strategist at Goldman Sachs and as a current senior advisor at The Carlyle Group, Jeff walks through why the “crack spread” between crude and refined products just hit its highest level in three decades. He also describes why draining strategic reserves is, in actuality, simply a bet that scarcity can be avoided rather than solved – in Currie’s eyes, the West’s refusal to admit scarcity since the 70s has left it structurally unprepared, particularly compared to China’s security-driven build-out of nuclear, solar, and battery capacity. He also lays out the “Grand Bargain” underlying the postwar dollar system, wherein the U.S. protects global sea lanes in exchange for global trade running through New York. Jeff explains why a failure to reopen the Strait of Hormuz could unravel this arrangement, bringing forward consequences that would land hardest on middle-class Americans’ access to credit and consumption.

Is the world entering a new commodity supercycle driven by scarcity and deglobalization, or is the market going to keep shrugging off these shocks? What might it mean for ordinary people if the credit and dollar system that has funded American consumption for eighty years starts to break down? And if, as Jeff argues, we are only in “the foothills of the Himalayas,” how much higher does this climb go before societies are forced to reckon with the physical limits behind the price signals?

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Want to dive deeper into the concepts covered in this episode? Follow along with the Show Notes & Links to Learn More, which you can find at the bottom of the page for every episode of The Great Simplification, or you can download them here.

In case you missed it…

In last week’s Frankly, I reflected on a week spent with a group of friends and peers who share my understanding of the world’s converging crises, and what it revealed about the deeply human need to be fully seen, without having to explain yourself first. Though the group rarely discussed climate, AI, or energy depletion, the shared awareness of these issues created space for humor, joy, and the reemergence of a version of myself that had quietly faded into the background over the years. I observed that most rooms I find myself in either run either too hot – where people are overly fixated on systemic risk and its gory details – or too cold, where the state of the world goes unacknowledged entirely. This group served as the rare in-between: people who could hold both the beauty and the horror of our moment with both eyes open, and still show up each morning with presence, purpose, and laughter.

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Today, I want to share the fourth part of the “How to Think About the Future” series, in which I imagine what life might be like in four different futures.

In parts one through three, we laid out foundational concepts: coupled systems, shortfall risks, and how to visualize possible futures as a landscape of ridges and valleys. I proposed four grids that represent variables shaping our future trajectory: economic growth or contraction, power, geopolitics, and Earth systems. Today I aim to build four whole composite worlds out of those pieces, and to visualize what life would feel and look like inside those worlds.

Mathematically, four grids with four quadrants each would give us 256 possible worlds to explore. Of course, I’m not going to build 256 worlds in this video (or ever). Instead, I will highlight four that are broadly representative of some general directions we might move in.

Looking Beyond Growth

I want to add a bit of context before we get into building these worlds. It’s important to acknowledge that these four futures are not equally likely. The economy, in my opinion, is not a simple coin flip between growth and contraction going forward, especially as the years and decades go on. Energy limits, resource depletion, excess debt, and ecological overshoot will all pull toward the economic contraction side, which is one of the core tenets of this platform. “The Great Simplification” is really an economic simplification.

We might still see regional growth, growth in certain sectors, temporary growth, or growth in things that are not physical, but the steady material growth we’ve come to expect will run into walls that most institutions and governments are not anticipating, nor are the markets pricing them in.

You will also notice that I do not build a world around “Green Growth,” which assumes we can keep growing and heal the biosphere at the same time. Ecological restoration and economic growth pull against each other too hard for that combination to hold at a global scale. So the four worlds I will outline today all lean toward economic contraction, not because I want contraction, but because the physics and the ecology point that way.

On the Earth systems side, we also do not start from neutral. We’ve already loaded the atmosphere and the oceans, and we’ve deeply eroded Earth’s carrying capacity. A “strained but workable” biosphere is the best realistic case …and a badly degraded one is also on the table.

The next point of context I want to provide is that these grids are not independent of one another, and they each actually interact with and pull on the others. For example, when resources get tight and the world outside looks hostile, governments tend to consolidate, which leads to power concentrating, and people often go along with it because they’re afraid. This has been the historical default. While you can keep power broadly shared during hard times, it takes unusual leadership and a lot of social trust. That’s the path that we hope for, but it certainly isn’t the path of least resistance.

Steady economic growth needs at least somewhat cooperative geopolitics, because global just-in-time supply chains need a functioning (and peaceful, for the most part) international order. Growth under the “geopolitical danger zone,” which I referred to in part two, is extremely hard to sustain – as the Iran situation is showing us in real-time.

Severe stress on our Earth systems slowly eats away at our ability to govern human systems. Constantly focusing on one crisis response or another burns through budgets, institutions, patience, and (maybe most of all) any hopeful collective visions of the future.

These worlds each have their own internal pull. Some combinations are stable, some will take extraordinary effort to hold in place, and some will slide right into something else.

My hope with this segment of the series is to stretch both your and my thinking by imagining these scenarios. What I’m not doing is handing you these four futures and asking you to choose one. I invite you all to build your own composites with these grids or to create grids of your own. The goal is in the logic and the thought process, and to think about where the risks, interventions, and possibilities are before we launch into knee-jerk responses. Or worse, do nothing.

So here are four scenarios to help you think about, and visualize, the future.

The Long Repair

The first world I want to outline is one I’m calling “The Long Repair.”

This is a world of managed contraction, and from where I sit today, this is the most aspirational path for us, but it won’t come easily.

The composite of variables goes like this: we have contraction and ecological stewardship on the economic side, which is the scenario I’ve named “The Great Simplification.” Power is broadly shared along with material gains. There are cooperative geopolitics with a good deal of regional self-sufficiency. We have a strained, but workable biosphere. Technology in this world is aimed at making people more capable, such as repair culture, regenerative technology, and tools that make us more competent instead of more dependent.

There are a few reasons why these pieces pull together. Cooperative geopolitics takes the outside pressure off, which usually shoves governance towards authoritarian-type behaviors. When you’re not staring at an openly hostile outside world, holding on to democracy and open societies during contraction gets easier. Regional self-sufficiency means a Hormuz-style global shock doesn’t actually ripple everywhere, because regions have shortened supply chains for the things they depend on. Sharing material gains and power builds and maintains trust in the social contract.

So what would daily life feel like in The Long Repair? Material and energy use would shrink, so there would be fewer goods and fewer exotic choices: no G.I. Joe with the kung fu grip or other plastic toys, less travel, more local and seasonal diets. Social life would probably get richer for many people under this composite, because community starts to matter in practical ways again. We would have to depend on our neighbors for things, and in turn support them back in a reciprocal relationship. Local decisions would matter more because they’re made closer to where they’re implemented, and skills would be regrounded in regional needs. I suspect that demonstrated competence would become a higher status signal than credentials, degrees, or fame.

Under this scenario, work would get more physical again. Maintenance and repair would be prioritized over replacing things for the newest shiny model. There would be more growing food, more caring for people, and importantly, there would be more cultural respect for that kind of work. We would have less financial engineering, less marketing, and fewer of what David Graeber calls “bullshit jobs.” For a lot of people, this type of world would bring more meaning to their lives, not less, even as their consumption shrinks.

This type of world already exists all over the place in the form of transition towns, regional food networks, community land trusts, energy co-ops, makerspaces, and repair cafes. The open question is whether these tiny islands of coherence can still grow and start to connect as the Superorganism makes new highs, or if they will remain isolated islands.

The Long Repair is certainly not a utopia. People grieve the futures that contraction takes off the table. There is still conflict and grief. But like my Lebanese friend communicated to me, which I shared in a previous Frankly, there is still community and deep bonding, and there’s a shared sense that the project being built is worth contributing toward. Even amidst hardship and loss, there remains a feeling that the direction is chosen and fair, and that a smaller future is far from an empty one.

This world is probably the hardest one to reach and the easiest to lose, because it runs entirely by maintaining legitimacy and trust while material throughput is falling for most people. The moment a large chunk of people decide the pain is not being shared fairly – that elites are cheating and the rules bend for some and not others – trust dissipates. Then, the glue that holds The Long Repair together dissolves alongside it

Mordor Persists

The second world is one I’m calling “Mordor Persists.” This is the world that keeps growing on paper, all while materially and ecologically digging us deeper into biophysical overshoot. In this composite, we’re spending down the principal instead of living off the interest. For a lot of people, this is our current world, just more of it. Comfortable for some, hardship for many, and the foundation eroding underneath.

The variables come together like this: We have a Mordor economy, which means continued growth at the expense of the biosphere. There’s a captured democracy, which appears democratic on the surface while the gains flow to a tiny sliver of people. Under this scenario we live in the geopolitical danger zone, where rival countries are still wired into each other economically, and there’s a quiet unraveling of the Earth system underneath it all. Technology in this world is tuned for consumption and engagement above all else.

The variables pull toward each other because liquidating the natural world for profit naturally concentrates the gains, since money comes from dumping the cost onto people, ecosystems, and the future. That concentration, in turn, tightens its grip on a hollowed-out democracy. The growth model needs global supply chains, so everyone needs everyone else’s resources, all while nobody trusts anybody else. The biosphere comes apart: soils, pollinators, and fisheries recede, but slowly enough that GDP and the stock market don’t really take notice.

The experience of daily life in the Mordor Persists composite depends enormously on where you sit. If you’re in the top 10 or 20 percent economically, life feels busy, stimulating, and comfortable, yet somewhat anxious. There’s amazing technology, good health care, and plenty of food, but you’re working harder for what feels like less. The news is always bad, and the information feels managed, creating the sense that something’s off. On the other hand, if you’re in the bottom 50 to 70 percent, life is precarious. You increasingly know and feel viscerally that the system doesn’t work for you, but the alternatives look worse or impossible.

Across both groups, there is this strange sense of unreality. The official numbers advertise that everything is fine, while the lived experience says otherwise. People vote and nothing changes. So that gap between the story and reality ends up breeding cynicism, conspiracy thinking, and apathy.

What I just described is Mordor from within wealthy nations: the global West and North. There’s another experience of Mordor, which most of humanity already knows. If you’re in the global South, in the places where cobalt is mined, where clothes are sewn, where plastic is shipped to be recycled, and where forests are cleared for soybeans and pasture…Mordor is not a future scenario. It’s been the dominant scenario for the last 30 or 50 years. The trajectory in Minneapolis feels very different from that in the Congo, or in Bangladesh, or in the Amazon. The material comfort at the center of this system has always depended on physical precarity at the edges.

Two primary things have the potential to break this Mordor world. First, the brittle interdependence that’s developed: one chokepoint fails and it cascades worldwide. Again, we’re watching this in slow motion with Hormuz. We’re gonna know by the end of summer how big a deal this is. The growth model has continually eroded resilience, so there are increasingly fewer (and eventually zero) buffers because things have been optimized for efficiency to such an extreme that there’s almost no slack in the system left.

The second thing that breaks the Mordor world is the slow ecological unraveling, which eventually pulls the rug out from under growth itself. Soil can only be stripped so far, fisheries can only be depleted for so long, and our ecological base erodes until growth just isn’t physically possible anymore. As many of you have commented over the years on this platform, the “home team” of Earth bats last.

This is close to the default for much of the world right now. Most people feel that this trajectory is unsustainable, but they also feel powerless to change it from inside. In my opinion, this is why these frameworks, and conversations about them, are so important right now. The real danger, risk, and tragedy of Mordor Persists is not that it continues forever, it’s that it burns through the ecological foundations, institutions, and resources that we would need to create any graceful transition. Then, when it finally can’t hold itself up, it falls apart fast and ugly.

If we step out of Mordor Persists with some foresight, we could move toward The Long Repair. But if we wait until it breaks, there will be fewer options available to us.

Fortress World

On to world three, which I’m calling the “Fortress World.” This is what happens when contraction does arrive, and the people in power decide to hoard instead of share.

The composite includes economic contraction alongside a power structure I deem forced feudalism, with those at the top managing the decline mostly for themselves, but handing out just enough to keep people from revolting. There’s a new cold war in geopolitics, where countries are hostile and grouped into self-sufficient blocs. We also have a hothouse triage on the Earth system: high climate stress with a somewhat functioning biosphere. The technology in this world is powerful but controlling for most people, and surveillance and rationing are all in the hands of the state. I will have a dedicated Frankly on this in the near future. If you’re paying attention, though, we can see this pattern unfold in real time in the AI robotics policy and business proposals in the news.

The logic here is the oldest pattern in politics. Contraction creates fear, and fear creates demand for a strong hand. The strong hand then consolidates power, and hostile geopolitics reinforce it because outside threats – real or invented – justify surveillance, military spending, and all other restrictions. Severe climate stress further reinforces it all because constant emergencies always seem to call for someone in charge to take control and act fast. If you’ve seen enough sci-fi movies, daily life here is not hard to envision. Think of The Hunger Games: controlled, rationed, and watched, but not necessarily chaotic. There is a grim order: you know what you’ve been allotted, you know the rules, and you know what happens if you break them. There are hard borders and movement is quite limited for people.

So living in a managed zone near critical infrastructure is gonna be a much different experience than living in a peripheral zone that’s been triaged. The feeling for most people in “Fortress World” is resignation and kind of an ongoing low-grade fear. People adapt because humans are astonishingly good at normalizing pretty much anything. But the constant surveillance and knowing the consequences of dissent creates hypervigilance, which hardens over time into emotional flatness. Life is survivable, but it is certainly not flourishing.

So what makes Fortress World fragile? Control like this is quite expensive, and running all that surveillance and enforcement while energy and complexity are declining is, in the end, an energy and complexity problem. Just ask the Romans, or Joseph Tainter since the Romans aren’t around. The system then has to keep choosing between spending to control people and spending to provide for them. As resources shrink, that choice will get harder. Meanwhile, the hostility between blocs in the world inhibits any real global cooperation on the shared ecological problems that are contributing to contraction in the first place.

So a Fortress World can manage its own decline for a while, but will eventually run short on trust and legitimacy from its citizens. Once those break, they don’t come back within the life of the regime that broke them.

The Unraveling

The fourth and final world is one I call “The Unraveling.” This is the dark one…though I do realize that this entire video might feel dark to some. This scenario is where large-scale human coordination has failed across most of the board.

The composite: There’s economic contraction with no ecological stewardship. There are local strongmen and no real governance larger than the local level, which I call “forced feudalism.” There’s a new Cold War within geopolitics with both fracturing and active fights, mainly over resources. There’s a cascading breakdown of Earth’s natural systems. Technology in this world is winding down: complex stuff that needs just-in-time global supply chains stops working, while the simpler, more robust stuff survives. Manual labor picks up where machines drop out. This is the state things slide toward when the other scenarios I’ve described lose their footing: when The Long Repair loses people’s trust, when Mordor Persists hits an ecological wall, or when the Fortress World cannot afford its own tight control of things.

Our days organize around immediate needs: Where’s the water this week? Whose field is still producing? Who has fuel and what do they want for it? Information moves at the speed of human conversation. The institutions that ran our parents’ lives – federal agencies, national supply chains, and global media – start to feel like storybook fables from ancient history. The threat of violence is always in the background, and health slips without pharmaceutical supply chains. In some countries, including mine, it slips a lot.

But there’s also community in this world. We are social primates, and even in terrible conditions we form bonds, make rules, love, and build meaning. We still manage to raise kids, to tell stories, to laugh, and to see fireflies and birds. The worst part of this world is not the absence of joy, but the complete absence of physical buffers. Cheap fossil energy gave us endless do-overs, but in The Unraveling world, they are gone. That means that every setback can turn catastrophic.

I include this world because it’s what we’re trying to prevent with this channel and all of this work. Understanding what pushes us toward it – lost trust, ecological breakdown, geopolitical fragmentation, too much coercion – tells us exactly what the levers are in the other three scenarios. I will get more into this in the next part of this series.

Mapping the Worlds Side-By-Side

So I’ve just outlined four composite worlds. Looking at them side by side, what can we notice?

The same economic contraction shows up in three of them: The Long Repair, Fortress World, and The Unraveling. All three of these involve the economy shrinking, but the lived experience could not be more different. The economic headline jibes with very little of the actual reality, and the rest of the variables in the composite – power, geopolitics, and Earth systems – decide whether contraction is dignified, survivable, or catastrophic. That’s why this mapping matters, even if you disagree with my entire energy and money thesis regarding The Great Simplification.

From my viewpoint, power and distribution make the biggest difference in how life actually feels. The Long Repair and Fortress World could have similar energy and material conditions, but who holds the power and how the material surplus is shared makes them completely different places to live. Last but not least, of course, the Earth systems constrain everything else, which is not even remotely in our current cultural conversations. The worlds with severe ecological stress have much less room for error in every other dimension. You cannot manage your way out of cascading ecological failure. You can only slowly reverse it or adapt to it.

I also want to connect these four back to the landscape I outlined in part three of this series, because where each world sits in that landscape says something that the headline descriptions miss. The key idea from part three was that stable is not the same as good. A system can be rock solid and deeply ill at the same time. Mordor is the clearest case here. Think about cancer in the human body: cancer is incredibly stable in a biological sense. It is self-perpetuating, and by a lot of the body’s own measures, such as blood flow, metabolism, and cellular division, a tumor looks vigorous and even productive. But it is eating its host by hijacking the body’s resources and spreading without limit. By the time the body’s signals say something is wrong, it is often too far along.

Mordor Persists works the same way as a cancerous tumor. Our main gauges, like financial markets, quarterly earnings, and GDP, are basically measuring blood flow to a tumor and calling the patient healthy. By the numbers, this composite looks healthy, and our civilization watches and approves. But it is actually liquidating the ecological and social ground that it stands on. It is stable the way cancer is stable: it keeps going until it kills the host.

Now look at The Long Repair through the same lens. On the landscape, it’s the valley that is both hardest to reach and healthiest to live in. It’s uphill from where we are today, and getting there will take sustained effort, coordination, trust, and leadership. It must also continually be held together throughout the journey. The paradoxical thing from our vantage point, as a culture wired for growth, is that The Long Repair looks like failure, even though it’s the future most worth striving towards. By every yardstick we currently use for progress – consumption, GDP, and physical wealth – The Long Repair reads as decline.

This reality creates a deep cultural dread, because a lot of people – even people who fully understand the more-than-human predicament – feel a gut-level resistance to The Long Repair composite. We read its pattern as collapse. Our nervous systems can’t easily tell the difference between the tumor shrinking because the patient is dying and the tumor shrinking because the patient is healing.

So the Superorganism, our collective economic and cultural system, resists The Long Repair the way a body resists a treatment that makes you feel worse before you feel better. That resistance is a big reason this composite is going to be so hard to reach. Not being able to tell healing from dying at the level of a whole culture is perhaps one of the deepest challenges in the entire more-than-human predicament.

I’ve laid out these four separate worlds, but if you or your community runs this exercise, your future worlds might look quite different. It all depends on the pieces you use. But the real future we arrive at will probably be some patchwork of all of them. Some regions will reach something like The Long Repair, while others will live in Fortress World conditions. Others might be in various stages of Unraveling, while corners of the world will run the Mordor Persists playbook a while longer until the ecological floor gives out.

The whole reason for this series is to emphasize that we’re not yet settled inside any one of these worlds. We are in a transition zone, wobbling between possibilities. Some weeks, the news looks and feels like Mordor is deepening. Other weeks, it seems like we’re making first moves toward the Fortress World. Many communities are already building something like The Long Repair.

The system has not yet been locked in. The ridges are steep, but they may not yet be too steep to climb and cross. But I do know that the window of opportunity will not stay open forever. Every year of soil degradation, every weakening tweak of global governance, every additional layer of surveillance, and each incremental drop in social trust all steepen the ridges around the valleys we’re striving towards.

The time when you can still move between these futures is now. Where you live, your community, the governance you’re under, and the ecological conditions that surround you are going to matter more than any global headline about our future. Your zip code may shape your future more than your country. And your circle of community may shape it even more than your zip code.

So, how do we plan amidst this uncertainty? I want to call back to the language from part three of this series: every choice we make either switchbacks up toward a stable, livable valley or lets one of those passages erode away. The switchbacks are social trust, working governance, an intact biosphere, and technology in people’s hands instead of over them. Some of these lead us toward the Long Repair. Every month we neglect them, the ridges get a little bit steeper and harder to pass.

The Game Board

Before closing this essay, I want to reinforce a core point. None of us are steering this game. The biggest moves on the board are made by nation-states and Superorganism-scale forces that cannot power down without losing the seats of their own power. You and I were never at that table. Our households, communities, or the few acres of land that we actually touch are not on that game board. But down at these smaller boundaries, the choosing and the agency are still completely real. We can still build trust. We can still keep a patch of the biosphere intact and supported and thriving. We can still put tools in people’s hands.

None of this is going to turn the entire game board. I do not pretend that it will. But it may be the one place left where the wheel is still connected to something, and where we might be able to steer toward a more desirable outcome. When the transition zone finally tips, those regions, communities, and individuals who dug the switchbacks up and through today’s ridges will be the ones who still have the optionality to climb towards better valleys.

That is the planning challenge. We no longer get to steer the whole thing, if we ever even could. We’ll keep drawing the map anyway, trying to avert purity and apathy as much as possible, so that when a path reveals itself, the people traversing it know which way is up.

That’s going to be the focus of part five next week. Thank you for paying attention, and for reading.

More soon. See you then.

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In this week’s Frankly, I reflect on a week spent with a group of friends and peers who share my understanding of the world’s converging crises, and what it revealed about the deeply human need to be fully seen, without having to explain yourself first. Though the group rarely discussed climate, AI, or energy depletion, the shared awareness of these issues created space for humor, joy, and the reemergence of a version of myself that had quietly faded into the background over the years. I observe that most rooms I find myself in either run either too hot – where people are overly fixated on systemic risk and its gory details – or too cold, where the state of the world goes unacknowledged entirely. This group served as the rare in-between: people who could hold both the beauty and the horror of our moment with both eyes open, and still show up each morning with presence, purpose, and laughter.

From there, I widen the lens to the role of community in an age of converging crises: our evolutionary wiring as social animals, the physiological nourishment of daily in-person connection that even the strongest online relationships cannot replicate, and the quiet loneliness of seeing the world differently than those around us. Many listeners of this platform might be in the same position: aware and engaged, yet locally alone. As The Great Simplification continues to unfold, I suggest that finding – or helping to build – local communities grounded in shared reality, mutual presence, and care may be among the most important no-regrets strategies available to us – and one this platform intends to help cultivate.

What changes when you no longer have to explain the world as you see it before you can simply be yourself? Why does in-person community meet needs that even meaningful online relationships cannot? And what first steps can we take toward the kinds of local communities that help us face an uncertain future with resilience, meaning, and joy?

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Want to dive deeper into the concepts covered in this episode? Follow along with the Show Notes & Links to Learn More, which you can find at the bottom of the page for every episode of The Great Simplification, or you can download them here.

In case you missed it…

In this week’s episode, I welcomed Dr. John Churchill, a psychologist and former Buddhist monk, to explore a map of human development that runs from “first-person” perspective of the isolated self all the way to a felt, embodied sense of interdependence with the planet itself. Drawing on decades spent synthesizing Tibetan Buddhist contemplative science with Western developmental psychology, John walked me through why our centers of power remain frozen at the level of third-person individualism. John also explained why “love wisdom” (the integration of heart and mind) may be the missing ingredient in how we respond to our more-than-human predicament. Along the way, I pressed him on whether this maturation applies to individuals, cultures, or our entire species, and on how a 2,000-year detour through empire and the carbon pulse pushed these traditions to the margins. The conversation ranged from the lost sacred academies of Alexandria to a simple attention practice anyone can do, and it kept circling back to a single throughline: that beauty, truth, and goodness are load-bearing structures for whatever comes next.

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A growing chorus of psychologists, contemplatives, and systems thinkers argue that most of us, and most of our institutions, are running an outdated psychological and spiritual “operating system,” one never built for the converging ecological, economic, and cultural crises we face. Technological and policy responses absorb nearly all of our attention and resources, yet the maturity of the humans making the decisions may be the most needed and least prioritized intervention of all. Could ancient contemplative traditions, paired with modern psychology, offer a map for the kind of collective growing up this moment demands?

In this episode, I welcome Dr. John Churchill, a psychologist and former Buddhist monk, to explore a map of human development that runs from “first-person” perspective of the isolated self all the way to a felt, embodied sense of interdependence with the planet itself. Drawing on decades spent synthesizing Tibetan Buddhist contemplative science with Western developmental psychology, John walks me through why our centers of power remain frozen at the level of third-person individualism. John also explains why “love wisdom” (the integration of heart and mind) may be the missing ingredient in how we respond to our more-than-human predicament. Along the way, I press him on whether this maturation applies to individuals, cultures, or our entire species, and on how a 2,000-year detour through empire and the carbon pulse pushed these traditions to the margins. The conversation ranges from the lost sacred academies of Alexandria to a simple attention practice anyone can do, and it keeps circling back to a single throughline: that beauty, truth, and goodness are load-bearing structures for whatever comes next.

What do beauty, truth, and goodness have to do with finding alternative paths toward a more flourishing humanity? How would it feel to be truly at one with the planet, and how might it change the way we act? And what can an individual do, this month, with the time and resources they actually have, to begin living into that shift?

Listen on your favorite podcast platform

Want to dive deeper into the concepts covered in this episode? Follow along with the Show Notes & Links to Learn More, which you can find at the bottom of the page for every episode of The Great Simplification, or you can download them here.

In case you missed it…

Last week’s Frankly was the final part in the “How to Think About the Future” series. In it, I turned from describing possible futures to exploring how we can make decisions when certainty is impossible. I introduced a framework for planning under uncertainty by distinguishing between two common mistakes – failing to respond to real risks, and taking decisive action based on incomplete understanding. Touching on examples like soil health, social trust, and children’s developmental windows, I also advocated that the most important compass for navigating the future is learning to distinguish between what can be rebuilt and what cannot. Overall, this episode examined how thoughtful planning requires balancing action with humility, while avoiding solutions that unintentionally deepen the problems they seek to solve.

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The Great Simplification podcast is produced by The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future (ISEOF), a 501(c)(3) organization. We want to keep all content completely free to view globally and without ads. If you’d like to support ISEOF and its content via a tax-deductible donation, please use the link below.

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Back in September of 2024, I went to New York for Climate Week. Returning to New York City is always strange, because I used to work on what might be considered the “beating heart” of the global economic Superorganism and the headquarters of fungible, digital claims on reality: Wall Street.

Walking these streets 25 years later, knowing what I know now, felt akin to a Twilight Zone episode… but from an aerial view. It was also amazing, fascinating, and motivating to be there trying to sow small seeds for better futures.

After returning home, I reflected on a few things, with a focus on the juxtaposition of the global economic financial situation and the global planetary ecological situation. I’d like to share those thoughts with you here.

The (Wide-Boundary) Pyramid of Human Decision-Making

One person I met at Climate Week complimented me on this graph, which we’ve used quite a few times, that shows a hierarchy of modern cultural priorities: the factors that humans use to make decisions.

This hierarchy isn’t based on what the median human cares about necessarily. In reality, the median human probably cares about the things that are lowest on this hierarchy: the environment and well-being of our citizens. Rather, this hierarchy of decision-making demonstrates the way that power manifests in our system and impacts the choices we make.

This conversation, and being in New York City, reminded me of the Exter Pyramid, which is a financial concept named after John Exter, who was a Federal Reserve economist. It shows a pyramid of various financial markers of wealth and describes how, during financial booms, capital flows upward toward higher-risk, higher-return assets and derivatives. The inverse is also true: when there’s a panic and corresponding flight to quality, wealth flees back down this pyramid towards safer and more tangible assets.

Exter’s Pyramid is inverted because there’s vastly more wealth in derivatives and leveraged claims-on-other-things at the top than there are physical things at the bottom, like gold. So when panic takes hold, not everything fits into the narrow base and some of the assets at the top are destroyed.

It’s a useful framework for thinking about systemic financial risk, and why “gold bugs” view precious metals as the ultimate safe haven when trust in the financial system erodes. We saw this manifesting in late 2025, when gold and silver were making new daily highs: silver up 145%, gold surpassing $4,000 an ounce. I don’t really see this as a panic, or even a “trade,” but more of a giant asset allocation from markers of wealth to “real” wealth.

However, this entire framework is a narrow boundary one, as many people will discover in coming decades. This view considers the financial system to be the whole system. But when we switch to using a wider-boundary lens, we see that the biophysical pyramid is even wider than we first thought.

From a biophysical vantage point, all money and credit are just claims on energy and materials, because when you spend a dollar, it’s ultimately spent on something physical. This means that all the higher financial layers sit on top of the throughput of fuels, ores, wood, soil, water, and oxygen cycling. A single barrel of oil contains the equivalent of around 5 years of human work, and therefore is many thousands of times more powerful than its cost. So if we remove affordable power, or even a fraction of it, the whole stack shrinks regardless of interest rates or the value of gold.

In an even wider-boundary sense, below gold and energy are the unpriced foundations of all our financial accounts: ecosystems that make oxygen, balance the water cycle, build soil, and host biodiverse species we benefit from. Our economy treats these as free until they’re damaged or impaired, at which point the pyramid doesn’t just wobble…it implodes.

I think popularizing a wide-boundary Exter Pyramid might help expose some of our culture’s ecology and energy blindness. We mistake the rising financial claims in our world for rising real wealth. When those physical supports – which are invisible to many – tighten, paper promises will cascade down towards the real floor: energy, materials, basic needs, and functioning natural ecosystems.

And part of that is (as most of you know) oil.

IEA Global Oil Update

In September of 2025, right before Climate Week, the International Energy Agency released a refreshing (for them) report on world oil data and analysis. The IEA has long been the cheerleader for a lower carbon, more renewable energy future alongside continued economic growth, AKA Green Growth. But if you didn’t know the author of this report, you might think that it was me or one of my colleagues, because it actually treated oil and gas depletion like phenomena. Let’s walk through a few of the charts from this report.

In this first chart on the left, we’re looking at oil production by type for the last 25 years. We can see that conventional oil, shown in the dark blue, light blue, and turquoise, has been on a flat to declining plateau during that time.

This brings up the question, what is oil really? What are all the things we consider oil? I was asking this question almost 20 years ago on The Oil Drum, and it’s still an extremely relevant question to be asking decades later.

I want you to recall that natural gas liquids, shown in green on the chart, often only have 50% of the BTU content of a barrel of oil. A lot of it is ethane, which isn’t even used for diesel, asphalt, or gasoline, but rather to make plastic bags. When we see natural gas liquids on a chart like this, what’s actually growing are things we previously didn’t even consider to be oil at all.

In fact, if you look at the accompanying chart on the right labeled “Average annual change,” it gives a clear view of what has grown over the five-year segments of the last 25 years: natural gas liquids and tight oil. Most of the conventional oil – the good stuff – in the light and dark blue is actually declining. We’re just adding lower quality resources on top.

So how does this aggregate globally?

On this chart, which shows oil production by region/country, the graph on the left shows OPEC and Russia having basically flat growth for the last 20 years, while the graph on the right shows that non-OPEC/Russia countries seem to be growing. But this is a misleading graph: the bottom part in dark red, which is the United States, is really the only one growing due to the shale revolution of the last couple decades. If they had put the United States at the top of this graph, all other countries would have been clearly flat or declining. Again, a lot of this is tight oil or shale oil: more costly, rapidly depleting, different energy properties, and with higher negative environmental impact.

Here’s another chart illustrating that in order to burn oil, you need to extract it, and in order to extract it, you need to find it.

This graph shows how much oil and gas discovery there’s been from the 1960s to today. The amount we’re finding has been dropping dramatically. We also found the most abundant and easiest to reach reserves first. It might look like there’s a lot left, but what’s left is smaller, more costly, and more difficult to find. On top of that, much of it is in places that don’t like the United States or the Global North very much.

The alternating shades of blue show all the wells in the United States that were drilled in that year and how rapidly they decline. These are stacked on top of previously drilled and declining wells. As of 2025, if we completely stopped drilling new wells, there would be a precipitous decline in the next decade for both tight oil and shale gas.

Exxon also had a similar graph in a recent report, shown above.

Given that conventional oil supply is already declining, this means if we did nothing more, the decline above is what would happen to all the existing oil production in the world. We would go from roughly 100 million barrels per day to around 16 million barrels per day in the next 25 years.

If this happened, it would have unbelievably massive implications for the global economy and beyond. This is a “bookend” scenario showing us an extreme, so it won’t happen. But clearly we are not going to stop drilling new wells in 2025, and realistic projections would incorporate these additions. Some have been incorporated into the IEA’s report.

For example, to make this more accurate, we would have to add projects that have financial approval but are not yet drilling, shown above. Looking out to 2050, we can see that these projects add up to 8 million barrels of production per day, which then declines down to 2 million barrels per day – mostly from the Middle East.

If we add these together and stack them on top of the “no investment” scenario, pictured above, then there’s still a massive gap even between this scenario and what is expected to be needed and demanded globally over the coming decades.

A brief aside on that note: the concept of peak oil was originally just focused on the world’s limited supply of oil based on geology. It’s a finite substance that took millions to tens of millions of years to form, and we’re drawing it down in 150 years. This is an issue with supply.

More recently, the idea of “peak demand” has become popular. This is the idea that the oil age will end because we drive electric cars and replace our energy needs with other substitutes, so we’ll no longer have a need for oil. I’ve never found this idea convincing because one barrel of oil does around five years of my work when combined with a machine. This is indistinguishable from magic, and I don’t think it’s likely that we voluntarily walk away from what I like to call “fossil pixie dust.”

I actually think something like “peak affordability” is a much more important concept, describing how affordability for the average person will decline more than oil production when a recession comes. A lot of demand will drop because people won’t be able to afford things beyond basic needs, which will push the prices for everything else down, including the price of oil. This creates a positive feedback loop: at (for example) $40 per barrel, the United States won’t be drilling for more oil, because we would then be down to the low-quality dregs, which require a higher and higher price to make a return.

So this is all to say that the IEA, without any fanfare, is painting a picture of supply constraints, and we’re going to need massive global investment into oil and gas infrastructure to avoid steep declines.

Additional Thoughts on Peak Oil

The other thing I want to comment on is that twenty years ago, when I first started writing on peak oil and everything surrounding it, I certainly got some things wrong. There were a lot of moments where people “cried wolf.” But it started the cultural conversation about oil, oil depletion, and the centrality of this fossil hydrocarbon to our lifestyles. Now it’s like crickets.

It seems that everyone I know in the oil industry takes for granted that oil is peaking now, or at least will be peaking in the near future. The United States has likely already peaked permanently. We had 13.6 million barrels, and now we’re down to 13.2, and we need $50-60 per barrel of oil as a bare minimum price to keep drilling. We’re bumping around peak oil by adding ethane and plastic bags and other things to the total, but generally, we’re there. All of a sudden, it snuck up on us.

The larger point is that Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, the United States, and other nations are well aware of the game theory of the master resource. We’re seeing conflicts in the Middle East, and more nations are starting to choose sides with BRICS and alternative currency systems. These are all in response to a growing, but not publicly acknowledged, recognition of limits. The question becomes, how are we going to control what’s left on the downslope?

When we talk about peaks, generally we show these symmetrical, normal curves with an upslope and downslope. But we have to remember that, while these are geological forecasts, the downslope will really be a socioeconomic and political event. The upslope was written by geology and economics, and the downslope will be written by crisis management…or mismanagement. Once we’re past the peak, we’re in uncharted territory where human systems will matter way more than geology. Peak oil graphs are really just suggesting to us the date when we lose control of the narrative.

I’ve joked – but not really joked – about the concept of draining America first. That a wise country would print money and buy other people’s oil, keeping their oil in the ground for as long as possible, the opposite of what we’re doing. How long is it before some nations recognize that oil in today’s world is power and then throttle down their internal production to save for a rainy day?

Seventh Planetary Boundary Breached

There’s one more thing I want to touch on before closing today. While I was in New York, Johan Rockström, a previous podcast guest, announced in the Planetary Health Check that we have exceeded a seventh of the nine planetary boundaries: ocean acidification.

We’ve already exceeded six other planetary boundaries. Levels of novel entities, such as plastics and endocrine-disrupting chemicals, have been found everywhere from the Mariana Trench to the North Pole. We’ve also exceeded the safe zones for climate change, biosphere integrity, land system change, freshwater change, and the biogeochemical flows of phosphorus and nitrogen.

In 2025, it became clear that we’ve also breached the safe level of acidity in the oceans.

There’s not a straightforward line-in-the-sand moment here, but we know that oceans have absorbed around 30% of the carbon dioxide we’ve emitted, and that in turn, they’ve become 30% more acidic. They’ve also absorbed about 90% of the additional heat in the biosphere.

So as we hit all-time highs in the financial markets, we are also hitting all-time lows in the functioning and stability of our global ecosystems.

In a full circle moment, I found it fascinating to be in New York, where the people that are studying and concerned about ecology, future generations, other species, deep time, and Earth (a group I consider myself to be a part of) were laser-focused on what to do about the ecological crisis that we’re in.

What happens when these worlds fully collide is yet to be written.

Concluding Thoughts

This has been a bit of a grab bag of things that have been working through my mental RAM recently. They’re all connected, just as we’re all connected.

Peak oil and breached planetary boundaries are here, but it’s also true that after basic needs, the best things in life are free.

It’s my hope that normalizing these conversations will result in some unknown future responses that steer us toward futures better than the default.

More to say very soon. I hope you’re all well.

Want to support The Great Simplification podcast?

The Great Simplification podcast is produced by The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future (ISEOF), a 501(c)(3) organization. We want to keep all content completely free to view globally and without ads. If you’d like to support ISEOF and its content via a tax-deductible donation, please use the link below.

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