A kind of withdrawal eased my suicidal plans. In the early 2020s, three things mattered to me in an otherwise disturbingly absurd life without an apparent lack of overall direction or intelligible structure—an extremely exciting sense of energising curiosity about learning as much as I can about everything to make some sense of the panoply of real patterns human communities have been establishing through our intersubjective sense-making, a desire to experience how the Anthropocene will unfold, and my brother. The unbearable mental simulations of my brother living on, knowing that I left the game, were the last threads I was hanging by.
Please allow me to talk about a short, but critical period between 2019-2024. Turning 50 this year, I feel that it was my family’s understanding and compassion through that period that crucially contributed to my safely attuning to a developmental trajectory grounded by reflexive, iterative, wonder-filled understanding and appreciation of interdependence and the incomprehensibly complex and gapless relationality that enmesh all explanation and sense-making.
Through 2024, I had been arriving at an ending. It was after a ~5-year period of continuous, absorbing, systemic existence-inquiry that began after I finished my GCSEs and A-Levels in a country where I lived with a foster family for ~4 years, beginning 2 years before my GCSEs. I began an intensely attentive, slow, systemic, open-ended, autodidactic exploration of ‘the situation’ after returning home to my family, due to not being able to afford living costs, let alone tuition fees for university, despite securing partial financial support from my then-dream university in Scotland.
I experienced periods of jarring, crisis-stimulating panic and confusion after the combination of some psychedelic experiences (for which I had been preparing for a year by then), and joining a vegan activism group, where, during preparatory research, I first found out about the reality of industrial factory farming, which quickly directed my attention to voraciously researching as much as I could about the other disturbing features and structures of our extreme ecological overshoot and global industrial civilization that thus far have been conveniently out of sight, out of mind. I always experienced an unignorable, pleasant, though sometimes excessively exhausting drive to engage, with laserlike focus, the topics and activities that I felt I cared about, which before this period have mostly been music, dancing, ‘the humanities’, and only since my A-Levels started to include empirical science, so I knew that learning about the collapse-related types of explanations will be a difficult journey. At times, thinking through the possible outcomes, mentally simulating all the novel kinds of suffering and conflicts that were implied by this ‘predicament’ was nauseating. Sensing the enormity of our ‘situation’, combined with a sense of growing, paralysing despair from learning about all this, constantly thinking of my younger brother and my chronically ill mother, relying on fragile, ultra-complex supply chain networks for treatment, and my discoveries co-occurring with a newfound level of cognitive flexibility and boosted information-handling capacity from my psychedelic experiences, I decided to talk about all this with my family and try to withdraw for a while from my usual social activity, becoming nonsocial, attuning as much as I could, mostly alone, in my room, to exploring our entangled problem and solution spaces.
I presented my findings to my parents, frenzied to support all my claims and worries with tons of research papers, lectures, books, interviews, Q&As, letters of concern, and other source and secondary material from relevant experts that I had been consuming and collecting for some weeks by then, desperate to show that I simply couldn’t ignore or ‘compartmentalise’ all this and go through applying again to some university, or to job(s), because this was paralysing and permeating both my waking and my dreaming life by then. We talked several times, for long hours, me presenting my research, answering and discussing all of their questions, and I sensed that they were worried about ‘all this’ putting me on an unstable trajectory, as they struggled in reconciling their early habit of forgetting what’s actually going on and thinking about the future through the structures and logic of the then-relevant status-quo, with adjusting their simulations in line with the new information and all the uncertainties I presented. My father had a stable, working-class job in the tourism industry, and since I am pretty low-maintenance, we agreed that I could live in his flat, not having to go to work for a while. Thank you, dad. Your patience, understanding, and non-coercive, non-hurrying approach was hugely helpful at that time.
Safe, reassured, and grateful to my father for being able to stay at home for a while, focusing on learning all I would like about ‘the situation’, I began to do just that, as a project I took most seriously. Sustaining the drive to study and maintain my health proved to be difficult amidst further bursts of comprehension of our interlinking multipolar traps, as my capabilities to selectively process, analyse, and synthesise increasing amounts of interrelated information grew as the weeks and months went by. I guess the process wasn’t particularly glamorous, and I have a feeling that not everyone would prefer or tolerate this kind of isolationist learning marathon. Anyway, on most days of the years, I was reading research papers, books, textbooks, interviews, specialist forums, watching Q&As, lectures etc., but also learning research methodology, the science of the learning process, and others’ experiences of effective learning methodologies and stories about how others experienced discovering and understanding the same topics. Then, I started creating a selective, hyperlinked bibliography and online library, which I later started co-editing with a pioneering Deep Adaptation community leader and collapsologist in my country. We started sharing this collection with members of the DA community and anyone who was interested, such as graduate students and postgraduate researchers seeking to do research in a collapse/ecological overshoot related area, curious relatives, people with whom we were discussing all this online, and it was shared and used by thousands in several countries… After some months, while keeping up with the baseline learning, I started to discuss more and more of what I was learning with a new, doomer friend of mine I met at a Deep Adaptation meeting, and I also started to give more structured presentations and explanations to my brother and parents, testing and refining my understanding. Aside from the relevant earth sciences material, I was also learning lots of critical thinking methods, complexity, social, and metascience, such as the cognitive science literature on heuristics, cognitive biases, belief-consistent information processing, social epistemology, philosophy of science, and I also had conversations with actual university students and professors about these topics, plus huge amounts of vicarious learning, courtesy of the internet. I was still mostly doing what I was doing alone, in my room, as my nonsocial tendencies due to the shock of the situation were still very much present. I am not sure whether I would’ve done better to not be so isolated, and while I wasn’t feeling lonely, I know that at the time I simply did not feel that I am capable of being more outgoing, and I wasn’t bothered by that. The occasional doomer vibe was rather resilient and gripping.
It was a period of intense, but intensely enjoyable, thrilling exploration, changing and growth, savouring the feeling and use of cognitive flexibility and the extensive, but institutionally unconstrained, structured, but non-coercive learning, a truly psychedelic experience, in its incomprehensibly plastic, explosive mind-manifesting. I now think that not only did this help me unfreeze from my bizarre moments of groundless, near-incomprehensible null-state of panicky grief, it was an awesome preparation for living with others in a post-revolutionary world.
Lastly, let me try talking about a crucial realisation that I have been grappling and dancing with ever since my game of ilinx in the 2020s. It’s perhaps the most ineffable-seeming, difficult to communicate (perhaps even incorrect-in-some-important-sense) insight that helped me relate with the incomprehensible collective and individual suffering, hurt, ecstasy, elation, horror, and other weird intensities of the history and present of earthly life. Here goes. Everything Just Is. There is nothing that’s ever been unnatural, or non-natural. There is something brutally & disorientingly simple about this. Narrowing down to our species, nothing that happened with us seems stance-independently, or in a mysteriously, non-intersubjectively-given way, ‘wrong’, or ‘bad’, or that it ‘shouldn’t have happened’. And this doesn’t entail that I wish that everything should indeed have happened just the way it did, either. But it did. Accepting this, and building with this awareness evokes feelings of resilient boldness—a feeling I have not been familiar with. Desert, blame, retribution, responsibility, agency, control don’t make sense. In fact, they can actively undermine coherent collective sensemaking and collective flourishing, as resilient anti-explanatory constraints. For me, an empirically grounded understanding of ourselves as nodes of complex dynamical systems embedded in other complex dynamical systems embedded in… dissolved all the hostility, suffering, frustration, and anti-social urges I experienced as a reaction to reflecting on all the violence and suffering that darwinian populations have been participating in for hundreds of millions of years. It’s difficult, but letting go can happen, and realising that even cooperation can be polyvalent can help in enacting those ways of being with each other that we may agree are as win-win as possible on a planet with finite resources.
I guess that some people can describe my journey and findings as just coping, as vague, anticlimactic babble, being lost in the woods. But that’s the thing! I don’t think anyone ever can be lost in the woods, if we are the woods. With all the structured experientiality arising anew each moment, at nexuses of an untethered mesh of interdependence you cannot but realize being constantly constituted by, existence’s relentless progression just is, and we just are. Hilarious. Taunting. Patient.
In later discussions with several people with whom I was sharing all this, we agreed that there was immense potential through such learning for helping people prepare to live in a world co-created in awareness of complex, plural, untethered interdependence. Being a little deflationary at the end of my essay, I wish to make clear that I don’t refer to my experiences normatively, and I don’t claim any kind of authority, specialness, or even that I made sense everywhere throughout this text. It’s difficult to share all this, but I am sincere, and this is all I could bear to do.
Still, these unrelentingly disturbing & stable glimpses of maddening insights in my mind, that interdependence renders uselessness nonsense, and the inexorable progression of everything occurring exactly as it is, whisper that none of the struggle is wrong, or unnatural, or useless in a significant sense—but not in a sense that this provides ‘the meaning of life’. I don’t believe in that, I find that unintelligible. Instead, it is a weird, bewildering safety net that is perhaps a maddening, whirling glimpse of tricksterlike infinity. It can swiftly disarm, or sedate you, it can be reassuring with profuse, almost lethal stillness, or perhaps stimulate the most frenetic activity. It can also be hilarious. It can stimulate all of these in different patterns and intensities. I found sitting with it an excellent preparation for living in a post-revolution world, as a means of familiarising ourselves with the power and tenderness of a difference-based, strange, plural world without multipolar traps. And now, through difficult, open unlearning, testing, flexibly updating, and slowly experiencing grounding in an apparently groundless world, now we smile, and we witness ourselves, together, mechanisms all the way down, aware as co-arising anew each moment, mechanisms that live.
And it’s familiar, as
mechanism that lives,
is all mechanism.