how we survive _this_

if you zoom out, way beyond the timescales we’re accustomed to planning our lives on, you might start to think of yourself as a participant in a culture of transition. You can engage with what he called the “thousand year clean-up,” where the “new normal is about a millennium from now.”

Let me be clear: I've been exercising regularly my entire adult life. I've logged hundreds if not thousands of hours on the meditation cushion and counting. I am incredibly well hydrated! I'm not writing this from some place of resistance to developing healthy habits. I’m writing this as someone who’s done the work and still wakes up some days feel

It’s worth pointing out that in Bendell’s definition I shared above, he does not say collapse is the end to sustenance, shelter, security, pleasure, identity, and meaning — just that it’s an end to our “normal modes” of acquiring all those things.

So start thinking today about how you can attain some of those things elsewhere, from non-monetary or t

Surviving…whatever all this is… doesn’t have to mean being left a shell of a human. In culture today, there’s an attempt to make something out of it. To process the tension of living through a long drawn out societal collapse with a sense of wonder, a new perspective, or new ways to overcome challenges.

Maybe things will start getting better. Most l

precarity, fear, competition, and ruthless self-optimization direct us away from the sort of solidarity and small and large sacrifice and patience that would enact change. And so we flounder, eager and anxious, wondering what it will take to actually act .

The intersecting catastrophes unspooling all around us don’t offer an escape from reality, but an intensification of it. So we have a choice: (1) Accept this reality. Accept the full toxic soup of conditions we’ve put ourselves in, as well as the thick, messy, profoundly human dramas playing out amidst it. And awaken to the burdens — of grief, hope

these emotions weren’t distractions to be soothed with meditation apps or dietary changes. They were born from the raw, combustible energy of dissatisfaction, that uncomfortable but essential force that powers transformation, both personal and collective.