This circular pattern serves as a distraction from focusing on the work necessary to interrupt harmful systemic behaviors and desires in oneself and others (e.g., “But don’t you see that I’m one of the ‘good’ ones?”).

it may be useful to evoke a distinction between problems (things that can actually or potentially be fixed) and predicaments (things that must constantly be dealt with, won’t be solved, and won’t go away).

Right from the beginning, I noticed that many people avoided the topic if it was approached logically and directly (e.g., with hard data). I observed built-in resistance in our cognitive and affective circuits that rendered questioning modernity counterintuitive and uncomfortable. This in turn generated defensive responses when people were prompted

Instead of “Is this story true?” or “What does this story mean?”—questions that come from the expectation that stories will describe reality and convey a fixed meaning—the approach to storytelling illustrated here invites us to ask, “What is this story trying to move?” and “What does it do over time and to time itself?”

The urgency to “move forward” with the program of modernity prevents people from sitting with the ways modernity paradoxically creates the problems it tries to address, and motivates people to seek simplistic solutions:

if the HEADS UP patterns are challenged all at once, the resulting narrative can become largely unintelligible to the general public or to funding agencies, which means initiatives that challenge HEADS UP can lose their funding and credibility.

“The bus within us” is a methodology created to support us in identifying and interrupting the nongenerative manifestation of the modern desire for a unified, coherent, and self-transparent self.

relational rigor: in more tentative and self-reflexive ways.

However, when these pleasures and comforts may be affecting the very possibility of the continuity of life on the planet, we need to consider our responsibility toward future generations of human and nonhuman lives.