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?

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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…

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.

Listen on your favorite podcast platform

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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.

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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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This week’s video is the sixth part in my ongoing series, “How to Think About the Future.” Today, I turn from describing possible futures to exploring how we can make decisions when certainty is impossible. I introduce 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 advocate that the most important compass for navigating the future is learning to distinguish between what can be rebuilt and what cannot. Overall, this episode examines how thoughtful planning requires balancing action with humility, while avoiding solutions that unintentionally deepen the problems they seek to solve.

I explore the value of “robust actions” that create benefits across many possible futures, while also reflecting on the role of personal calling alongside practical resilience. I end with a call for listeners to act where their agency is most visible – rather than seeking certainty about what lies ahead, offering a way of seeing the world that helps us remain grounded as the landscape around us continues to change.

What deserves our greatest protection, if some losses can be recovered while others cannot? Why is it important to be aware of the cognitive errors we might be making when evaluating the bigger picture? And how can we make meaningful decisions when the future is uncertain and every choice involves tradeoffs?

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 maritime historian and former merchant mariner, Sal Mercogliano, to break down what the ongoing events in the Strait of Hormuz reveal about the state of global shipping and trade. Sal traced how the rise of unregistered “dark fleet” tankers and increasing risk – and subsequent cost – of maritime trade are reshaping the safety and stability of shipping across the globe. He also walked through who actually “owns” the Strait of Hormuz, the improvised insurance and security arrangements now propping up tanker traffic, and the human toll on the roughly 20,000 mariners who have been stranded, attacked, or killed since the crisis began. Ultimately, Sal examined how the 80-year-old norm of ‘freedom of the seas’ is being tested by this standoff, exposing the fragile foundation of our hyper-complex, just-in-time shipping system.

Listen on your favorite podcast platform

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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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Roughly a fifth of the world’s oil and more than a tenth of all global trade has been navigating a literal minefield, a wary insurance industry, and whipsawing geopolitics since late February of this year. But looking beyond the Strait of Hormuz closure itself, the same pattern threatens every critical chokepoint: passages open to all shipping for the past 80 years are becoming strategic assets within a geopolitical power struggle. If we continue this trend, what does a more fragmented, higher-cost, higher-risk maritime system mean for the norms and safety of the shipping industry, and what are the ripple effects for global trade?

In this episode, I’m joined by maritime historian and former merchant mariner, Sal Mercogliano, to break down what the ongoing events in the Strait of Hormuz reveal about the state of global shipping and trade. Sal traces how the rise of unregistered “dark fleet” tankers and increasing risk – and subsequent cost – of maritime trade are reshaping the safety and stability of shipping across the globe. He also walks through who actually “owns” the Strait of Hormuz, the improvised insurance and security arrangements now propping up tanker traffic, and the human toll on the roughly 20,000 mariners who have been stranded, attacked, or killed since the crisis began. Ultimately, Sal examines how the 80-year-old norm of ‘freedom of the seas’ is being tested by this standoff, exposing the fragile foundation of our hyper-complex, just-in-time shipping system.

Why does the volume and velocity of modern trade make a conflict like the one in the Strait of Hormuz so much more consequential than at any other time in history? Is “might makes right” becoming the central pillar governing the world’s oceans, and if so, what does that mean for the cost of everything that arrives by ship? And what does this conflict reveal about the stability of our highly interdependent system as global powers continue to fracture and isolate?

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, in Part 5 of the “How to Think About the Future” series, I scaled my exploration of civilizational futures down to the future of a single human life and analyzed how the same patterns that shape economies, power, geopolitics, and Earth systems turn inward. Building on the framework developed throughout the series, I described how the factors from material throughput to personal agency are underpinned by our own physical/mental health and our web of relationships. I emphasized that we cannot build any stable future on top of cracking foundations, pointing toward the importance of cultivating a strong base of personal health and community to operate from.

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. Today I want to talk about something I don’t understand.

For a while now, I’ve been asking both people who come on the program (at least seven guests, I believe) and others in my life to define the term “non-duality.” These are all thoughtful people, with some of them having spent decades inside that paradigm. Yet, for some reason, I’m not totally grasping their explanations.

On a bike ride this morning, which is usually where realizations strike me, it dawned on me that every time I ask for that definition, I listen closely and feel like I’m right at the cusp of understanding it…and then it’s gone, and I walk away with my hands empty. I guess that’s why I’ve repeated the question at least seven times to guests and others.

Up until now, I’ve assumed that the problem was me – that I’m too impatient, or have too many ADHD tendencies, or am not advanced enough on my journey. But this morning, a different thought crept in: maybe I keep failing to understand non-duality because I was raised in a culture that makes it almost impossible to understand.

Why is ‘Non-Duality’ So Difficult to Define?

I’m sure you’ve heard the old line about a fish that doesn’t know what water is: the fish has never been dry, so wetness isn’t a thing that it can point to. To a fish, water is both everywhere and nowhere at once. I suspect a lot of us in the West are like that fish. We’re swimming in the very thing – culture – that makes non-duality invisible to us. We can’t see it because we’ve never once stepped out of it.

Let’s start with our language. Look at how I build a simple sentence, such as “I see the tree.” There are three things in our words: the watcher, the act of watching, and the thing being watched. We can barely open our mouths without sorting our world into buckets: a someone, a something, and an action. Our grammar is actually a little machine that generates separation, and we reach for that same machine to try to unpack non-duality, which has no cracks or seams in it at all. We pick up the tool that builds the wall and ask it to show us a place with no walls.

Of course, this tendency toward separation goes deeper than grammar. In this culture, everything is organized around the idea that we are each separate people. Your birthday, your name, your resume, your achievements, your stuff, your garage, your credit score – and your eventual death. From the time we’re small, we’re trained to become a “self,” a bounded little package of a person standing slightly apart from everything else, looking out at the world and putting things into categories.

Then non-duality comes along and whispers that we might have it all backwards (or as my dad would say, “bassackwards”). It tells us that the self could be less of a thing watching from behind your eyes and more of a motion, something the whole universe is briefly, simultaneously doing in the shape of you.

So this morning, it dawned on me that asking for a definition of non-duality was actually the wrong move from the very beginning, because to define something is to draw a line around it. It means labeling something as this and not that, as inside that fence or outside that fence. Defining things is a skill that we need, especially for energy, biophysical economics, or finance. But what the wisdom traditions have been pointing to as important in our lives is the one thing that has no ‘outside.’ There’s nowhere to stand that isn’t already part of it. So you can’t fence it, because the fence would be made of it too.

I’ve learned that this is why the old teachers almost never define non-duality. Rather, they point to it. It makes me think of an old Buddhist poem about a finger and the moon:

Relying upon a finger, we see the moon

Relying upon the moon, we understand the finger.

Moon and finger

Are neither the same nor different.

This expedient analogy is for guiding beginners.

Having seen reality as it is,

There is neither moon nor finger.

So as part of my conversations, at least on this platform, I ask good people to define and hand me the moon. In response, they keep gently offering me a finger, and I keep picking up the finger and turning it over, studying it, and asking why it doesn’t look more like the moon.

A Culture of Separation

I will be gentle on this late afternoon, because it might sound like I am describing a locked door, like it’s hopeless for people raised in the West to grasp the concept I’m outlining here. That’s not my intention at all.

The wall I’m describing in Western culture is thin in certain places. I think everyone listening to this platform has already stood in one of those thin places, possibly without naming it or understanding it.

There is a moment when you’re lost in a piece of music, and the part of you that keeps track of yourself, the default mode network, just goes quiet. There’s the feeling of standing in a forest at dusk, when it gets hard to tell where you stop and the rest of it, the trees, the soil, the birds, the full ecosystem, starts. There’s that half second of enjoyment that occurs when you look up and see something, especially something beautiful, before your mind labels it – before the word arrives. There’s also grief, in my case the recent loss of an animal, which hollows you out so completely that the usual sense of some tidy-little-Nate running the show falls away.

Of course, none of these experiences or feelings are proof. Nor are they a “proper” definition of non-duality. Those are just some of the times and places where our separate self goes offline for a moment. We’ve all been there at some point; we just don’t usually reach for a Sanskrit word to describe that feeling on a Tuesday morning.

That feeling of being a self that’s sealed off from the world, looking at it from an external point of view instead of from inside it, is a core theme of the work we’re doing on this platform. I believe it’s also a central part of what I’m referring to as a species-level rite of passage, as we move from feeling cut off from the rest of the world to feeling like we are a part of the world.

Once you see nature as a backdrop, or a resource waiting to be turned into something useful for our economy, you can justify doing almost anything to it. You can clear it, and drain it, and burn it, and eat it…and still feel nothing. Because by definition, it isn’t you. So the cultural wall between us and nature not only confuses us, but also anesthetizes us.

So much of what we’re living through might be sitting on top of that one piece of code that the Superorganism edited over into our cultural DNA: the deep, unquestioned sense that we are separate from the thing that grows our food, makes our oxygen, and holds the biosphere steady enough for all of us and our future generations to exist. We’ve built an entire civilization on the assumption that the world is a warehouse, and we’re the customers. For those paying attention, the bizarre part is that the bills are coming due for a self that still thinks it’s standing outside the system, watching and analyzing the numbers from a safe distance.

There is no safe distance. There never was. The smoke that travels for months from a forest on the far side of British Columbia ends up in local kids’ lungs, as one of countless examples. The line we drew around ourselves was always imaginary, and our culture supported and advocated it. Now the planet is spending a great deal of energy reminding us of that line.

If this is all true, then the concept of non-duality stops being some spiritual luxury for people with time and money on their hands, and starts looking like the missing piece. It’s the thing pointing at how we came to treat everything we depend on as numbers on a balance sheet and not simply… us. We keep looking for fixes ‘out there,’ in our policies, in technology, in AI, and in “better” numbers to analyze.

But maybe (dare I say, probably), some of the real work is in here, in our own dismantling of the wall that allowed eight billion humans to treat the living world like a dead one. That said, I would be remiss not to acknowledge that the wall was never universal. Plenty of Indigenous peoples and cultures never built it in the first place, and they have understood what non-duality points to all along, without needing a word for it.

Letting Go of Certainty

Sitting here today, I still cannot define non-duality for you. I’ve had many chances and have seemingly failed, but I’m starting to suspect that my hunger and my drive to nail down the definition are perhaps the most Western thing about me. The grasping itself is the wall.

So I will leave it where it actually sits for me today, which is unfinished. Maybe the gift here was never going to be finally understanding non-duality. Maybe it’s smaller, more honest, and a bit more potent than that.

I think the true gift is just that my grip has loosened a little and the idea that I am separate from the world gets a hairline crack in it. Because of that, a bit more light gets through than it did yesterday. I’ve not grasped the term or practice of non-duality, but I have definitely learned to stop being so sure that I’m separate.

I’ll talk to you more next week. Thanks for reading.

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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Today, in Part 5 of the “How to Think About the Future” series, I scale my exploration of civilizational futures down to the future of a single human life and analyze how the same patterns that shape economies, power, geopolitics, and Earth systems turn inward. Building on the framework developed throughout the series, I describe how the factors from material throughput to personal agency are underpinned by our own physical/mental health and our web of relationships. I emphasize that we cannot build any stable future on top of cracking foundations, pointing toward the importance of cultivating a strong base of personal health and community to operate from.

By outlining these scenarios – both on the personal and civilizational scales – I challenge the long-held assumptions that equate growth with success. I explore why the most regenerative paths available to us often look like decline from the outside and discuss the ways in which our civilizational foundations have been obscured by a societal trajectory of constant growth. Overall, this episode offers a mirror for reflecting on the landscapes we inhabit today and the quiet work required to navigate toward a better future for humanity and the biosphere.

Are your daily choices strengthening your foundations, or are they slowly eroding the capacity you’ll need for what’s ahead? Which personal future scenario do you feel you’re living in today, and what patterns are quietly shaping where you’re headed? And how would your life change if you measured success by regeneration instead of productivity or growth?

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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…

This week, I was joined by Matthew Monahan, co-founder of the nonprofit Ma Earth, to explore the emerging field of regenerative finance. Matthew dug into why top-down, siloed, and low-trust funding systems keep capital from reaching frontline communities, and how tools like open protocols, decentralized data commons, and blockchains might (with healthy consideration) help coordinate trust and resourcing at scale. Matthew also discussed Ma Earth’s collective crowdfunding platform that pairs philanthropic dollars with community fundraising for grassroots land and ecological projects – from mangrove restoration in the Pacific to a farmer’s cooperative for war amputees in the Congo – and how anyone can become involved.

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Every year, hundreds of billions of dollars flow through global philanthropy, yet only a small fraction reaches environmental, climate, and nature-related causes. Meanwhile, in small towns and rural communities around the world, a hidden throughline of regenerative work is already underway. This work rarely waits for large-scale funding to begin, but it does need resourcing to grow into replicable movements capable of propelling system-wide change. What would it take to build financial infrastructure that actually gets capital to the people already doing the work of healing land and community?

In this episode, I am joined by Matthew Monahan, co-founder of the nonprofit Ma Earth, to explore the emerging field of regenerative finance. Matthew digs into why top-down, siloed, and low-trust funding systems keep capital from reaching frontline communities, and how tools like open protocols, decentralized data commons, and blockchains might (with healthy consideration) help coordinate trust and resourcing at scale. Matthew also discusses Ma Earth’s collective crowdfunding platform that pairs philanthropic dollars with community fundraising for grassroots land and ecological projects – from mangrove restoration in the Pacific to a farmer’s cooperative for war amputees in the Congo – and how anyone can become involved.

How might we approach the ambitious goal of attuning money with the health of the planet and the life that inhabits it? Is it possible to use tools like blockchain and crowdfunding to route capital toward life without building a bigger version of the same self-eating machine? And can bottom-up, community-defined funding scale to the size of the problem without losing the trust and specificity that make it work in the first place?

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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…

As America marked its 250th birthday, I took a moment to step outside of the celebrations to seek out a wider boundary perspective on this week’s holiday. I posed the question of whether the United States has truly matured as a nation over two and a half centuries, particularly through the lenses of energy, ecology, history, and culture. Then, I walked through the extraordinary inheritance of fossil fuels that simultaneously shaped the American story while masking the real foundations of prosperity. I pointed out that even the symbols of this holiday – from backyard barbecues to fireworks lighting the night sky – are products of complex supply chains that are created by drawing down the living biosphere.

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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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Over the years of hosting the podcast, I’ve realized that pretty much every topic has its fans and its critics. This stands to reason with a large audience, especially since this isn’t a single-issue site that only focuses on Green Bay Packers news updates or learning about backyard owls (both of which are sites I personally subscribe to, by the way). Rather, we’re trying to cover and integrate multiple relevant issues in an effort to make sense of our world, in addition to trying to hone in on what the best possible paths forward are, and how we might generally head in that direction.

But over time, there’s also a pattern I’ve recognized in real life, disconnected from this platform. It’s the way that we see a headline, clip, or some name we half-recognize, and before we’ve actually taken in what’s being said, let alone the context for it, we have already decided how we feel about the person saying it and all the implied associations. We all participate in this way of thinking and judging, including me, because it’s one of the most human things there is.

So today I want to double-click on that moment and explain why it’s so important to this work. In an attempt to do this, I’ll use a chessboard analogy – starting with asking you, as the reader, to imagine yourself as a single piece on a chessboard and zooming out to include more and more context as a wider boundary perspective.

Lens One: Friend or Threat?

The first lens I’ll start with is us, the chess piece on the game board, staring directly at the piece right across from us. Down here at eye level, our brains and nervous systems are really only asking one question: friend or threat? Is this thing gonna hurt me or help me?

This is the oldest software that we humans run, even older than language, and it happens lightning fast, meaning that our bodies often feel the verdict before we’ve even heard a complete sentence. We respond to it just as quickly with proxies: Do I like them? Do they look and sound like me? Do they share my values?

But sometimes, even when the person is perfectly neutral, it’s actually the topic itself that trips the wire. Someone says ‘nuclear war’ or ‘collapse’ or any other word you’ve got a charge around, and that threat response fires before the person has been judged at all.

I see this happen in dozens of ways on this platform. One example is renewable energy, which has evolved to become a symbol for someone’s belief in climate science generally. It seems like a simple black or white answer to most of our culture. So, we often make snap decisions about someone’s stance as an environmentalist or climate denier just by their ability to give a yes or no answer to whether they’re pro-renewables. But if we dig deeper, there are hundreds of pieces of important context that might shape that answer: geography, energy return on investment (EROI), economic ideas, resource constraints, scalability, rematerialization, impact on the Global South, and much, much more. But we frequently shut down the nuanced conversation and write off the person before even knowing their full thoughts.

We can also look to AI as an example: if you’re worried about it, you’re a Luddite; if you’re excited about it, you’re a tech bro. Another example is Israel. If you don’t condemn Israel, you’re a Zionist. Condemn Israel, and you’re an antisemite. Two seconds in, and we’ve been sorted before anyone has heard the actual thoughts.

Lisa Feldman Barrett, who will be on the show in the fall, talks about how the brain predicts and judges before reasoning ever catches up. So despite understanding all these sorting processes and consciously attempting to suppress them, this is still how I react a lot of the time too. Somebody starts talking, and a little part of me has already decided how I feel about them before they finish their first thought.

This instinct shapes our perception and creates a mental trap that matters a great deal for the more-than-human predicament. The emotional verdict lands in us so fast and with such confidence that we often mistake it for actual consideration of what the person said. Our evolutionary fast and frugal heuristics tell us we’ve assessed the argument when all we’ve actually done is assess a face or a phrase.

Lens Two: Us Versus Them

Let’s widen out a little to the second lens, where we’re still looking straight ahead, but now we can see that the piece in front of us isn’t alone. It’s one of a whole line of pieces, all the same color: the “other side.” The moment we register that team’s color, something shifts and the question changes from “Do I trust this person?” to “Is this person one of us, or one of them?”

This is tribal thinking. This is political party identification, or ideology, or religious identity when it’s used against other people. Once a piece reads as the “other team” to us, much of what that piece says stops landing as information and instead lands as a strategic game move by that side. You can watch this happen in real time in just about any corner of the internet.

However, from this vantage point, we still can’t reason very well about the actual game. We’re still identifying allies and enemies first and foremost. So we have to zoom out a little further.

Lens Three: Seeing the System

Those first two lenses are our ‘factory settings,’ if you will. The ones evolution (for very good reason) installed first and reinforced the hardest. This is the equipment we were all handed, and it has obviously been adaptive to this point. But we need to be able to look beyond these two adaptive lenses in order to navigate the complex, systems-wide situation we find ourselves in.

That’s why these next lenses are important. The third lens is a bird’s eye view of the game board. It’s high enough that the good guys and the bad guys kind of disappear, and we can finally (at least in theory) see the entire game.

It’s still possible to see the two sides, but they aren’t necessarily “our” side or “their” side anymore. What we see instead is why the pieces are where they are: energy, debt, geopolitics, AI, supply chains, and all the things. We see that pieces move for physical and structural reasons separate from how we feel about them.

This lens trips a lot of people up, I think. If one’s viewpoint is still from down on the game board level, someone else’s aerial-view, dispassionate description of, for example, the world’s current power structure can come across as an endorsement of it. Similarly, refusing to express moral statements about something comes across the same way – as if you’re siding with the powerful.

So when someone climbs up to this third lens and describes the forces at play, specifically without picking a team, many of us who are emotionally invested in the issue might hear the statement as a betrayal. I fully understand this because those feelings are real, but they’re assessing two distinctly different things. Describing how the pieces move is very different from cheering for where they’re headed or where they land.

If we look at the lenses we’ve covered so far, there is a hidden and quite large cost of only using the lower two lenses. Once we’ve labeled someone using the second lens, we stop being able to learn anything from them, or even being able to see them from the wider lenses. We tend to throw out the description because we don’t like the describer.

Personally, I think that some of the most useful reads of the board come from people whose conclusions we would never sign on to or agree with. I’ve learned over a long, and sometimes tortuous, slog that it’s worth letting people we don’t fully agree with finish their sentences. (I wonder what Nora Bateson would say).

Lens Four: Planetary Stakes

But wait, there’s more!

In the fourth lens, we zoom out even further to see what’s beyond the board. We keep pulling the camera angle back, and it turns out that the entire chessboard is sitting on something living: a landscape of climate, oceans, biodiversity, the other 10 million species we share this planet with, the viability of our ecosystems, and the corresponding planetary boundaries.

This is both my physical home base and where I mentally operate from, which I suspect is the same for many of you reading. The game we’ve been fighting about on the board is actually quite small from a deep time and ecological sense.

The living world around us and underneath us is the actual thing at stake.

Lens Five: The Long Repair

This fifth and final lens shows that the board and the living world around it are sitting in a landscape – on a hill or down in a valley. Out ahead of us, there is a second game board. Maybe it’s smaller and simpler economically than ours, or perhaps it’s a different game entirely. This game board represents a possible future to move toward – a restructuring of the game entirely.

In the best cases, it’s some form of broad cooperation and stewardship-based community, which I call “the Long Repair.” I’ve expanded more on this in part four of my “How to Think About the Future” series, “How Might Daily Life Feel in the Next Decades?” From this fifth lens, we stop asking who’s the villain on the board that we’re standing on, or at least we throttle and quiet that impulse. Then we start asking how we get from this game board to that one, without flipping the whole table over on the way there.

Holding All Five Lenses

These five lenses, all with different heights and vantage points from which we can look at the same situation, are all important. We need to be able to recognize and use all these lenses to make decisions and direct our lives and community.

When a piece of information comes at us, most of the time we filter it using the first two lenses: the person and the tribe. Again, that is understandable. None of us should be considered flawed or diminished for starting at lens one or two. I personally start from these every single day.

But a core theme of this whole channel, which I will now make explicit, is that we cannot navigate the bottlenecks of the 21st century from only one or two levels. We can’t get to the destination game board by deciding which piece across from us to dislike, or which groups to write off, and then crafting our strategies and reactions around that decision.

As I’ve often repeated (and will likely repeat again), we are approaching a species-level rite of passage for humanity and the biosphere. The stakes of our time are asking us to also learn to look through the third, fourth, and fifth lenses. To see the human game board as part of the living world and to visualize that alternative game board off in the distance – the one with different rules and different players, and could possibly be played for a very long time.

We can’t drop the first two lenses. We’ll still use the face and the tribe, and we always will. The goal, I think, is to hold the wide ones at the same time.

So lenses one and two never go away, but from up high, they get put in proportion to the scale of the predicament we face. Call it “5D systems chess” if you like, but there really aren’t five dimensions out there. There are just five heights we can watch the same board from. Most of the charismatic voices in our culture primarily use one or two.

I think the real skill to be learned and practiced here is how to move your own camera – to hold all five of these heights at different times or all at once – and then to come back down and actually do something to meet the future halfway.

There’s a bookend risk here as well, because if we hold only the wide boundary view but have no agency attached to it, then that just turns into despair or dread at a higher resolution.

I’ll share something about my own challenges hosting this multi-issue platform: The really hard part of doing this work is not the content or the analysis. I actually love that part of it. The hard work is trying to show a large and diverse global audience the whole board without making any one of you feel like you’re a game piece getting pushed across it. This is not easy, and it feels quite Sisyphian most of the time. But I am trying.

I hope this was helpful. Much love to you all, wherever on this board you happen to currently stand, look from, or want to move to.

Thanks for reading.

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As America marks its 250th birthday, I take a moment to step outside of the celebrations to seek out a wider boundary perspective on this week’s holiday. I pose the question of whether the United States has truly matured as a nation over two and a half centuries, particularly through the lenses of energy, ecology, history, and culture. Then, I walk through the extraordinary inheritance of fossil fuels that simultaneously shaped the American story while masking the real foundations of prosperity. I point out that even the symbols of this holiday – from backyard barbecues to fireworks lighting the night sky – are products of complex supply chains that are created by drawing down the living biosphere.

Overall, this conversation reflects on what it means to become an “adult nation” in an age of limits. Alongside the costs of endless expansion, like declining wildlife and lower mental wellbeing, come reasons to hold hope for this nation – our traditions of reinvention, our conservation legacy, and our growing movement toward stronger local communities based in resilience and reciprocity. As the era of “more” begins to fade, perhaps the next chapter of this country will be measured not by what we consume, but by how well we learn to share the table with one another and the rest of life.

How did geography and fossil deposits shape both America’s greatest successes and greatest blind spots? What would it mean for America to “grow up” as a nation after 250 years? And if the age of endless expansion is ending, what kind of future might we be capable of building in its place?

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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…

Last week, I continued my “How to Think About the Future” series, where I invite listeners to imagine what it’s like to live in different versions of the reality that lies ahead. In that edition, I built upon the frameworks outlined in part three to create four distinct future worlds – composites that emerge from various combinations of economic conditions, geopolitical scenarios, power structures, and Earth systems stability. The resulting worlds are not meant to serve as a prediction, but as a set of thought experiments designed to stretch our imagination and to sharpen our understanding of how societal shifts show up in our everyday lives.

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Good morning. This essay is the third part of my series, “How to Think About the Future,” where I invite listeners to dive into scenario building, and to imagine what it’s like to live in different versions of the reality that lies ahead.

I keep making the series longer because, as most of you tuning in here feel, we’re approaching a really serious juncture in our global economic situation and our culture. The hope is for more people to be able to visualize, discuss, and engage with all the unknowns steering toward life and continuity, and away from dystopia. Though some dystopian things are probably now baked in…and indeed are happening now.

In part one, I discussed why it’s helpful to hold the future as a landscape of possibilities rather than being overly certain about one future. This is especially important in a dynamic world that has coupled systems, phase shifts, and shortfall risks. In the second part, I built four grids of variables that will be core components in shaping the future: economic direction, power distribution, geopolitical relations, and Earth systems. I also highlighted why technology should not be considered good nor bad, but instead an amplifier acting on whatever system on which it resides.

In part four, the next part of this series, I aim to combine sections of those four grids into composite worlds. These will be specific futures that are descriptive enough that you can feel the difference between what it might be for us to live inside one versus another. But before I do that, I decided to add one more conceptual tool.

The composites I’m going to build are not just a list of possible futures sitting side by side with equal likelihood. They all reside in a landscape, and I think the contour of that landscape – which valleys are deep, which ridges are steep and hard to cross, and which routes flow downhill or uphill from where we stand right now – matters enormously. All these concepts come from biology and ecology, and in my opinion, are pretty useful for thinking about where human civilization might be headed.

Which futures are we most likely to arrive at if we do nothing? And what will it take to climb towards the futures we want?

The Waddington Landscape

Let’s start with the biology underpinning this concept. In the 1950s, a developmental biologist named Conrad Waddington was trying to understand how a single cell – a fertilized egg – eventually becomes an entire organism. Every cell in your body carries the same DNA. They start from the same place on the map, if you will – but a heart cell, a liver cell, and a brain neuron end up as completely different things. How does a cell that starts with all the possibilities open to it end up committed to one specific pathway?

Waddington imagined all this as a landscape. Picture a ball sitting at the top of a series of rolling hills and valleys. That ball represents a stem cell that has the potential to become many different things. As it develops, it rolls downhill and enters a valley. In that valley, there’s a fork, and when the cell enters one branch, it forks again. At each fork, some of what was previously possible to that cell closes off. By the time it reaches the bottom of a particular valley it’s now committed to being, for instance, a heart cell. It will never again be a stem cell, nor any other type of cell.

The valleys in this landscape are not all the same depth or size. Some are deep and have very steep walls, and once a cell enters it ends up staying because the constraints to leave are quite strong. Some valleys are quite shallow, and a small perturbation, some chemical signal, or a mutation might push the cell out and into a neighboring valley. The ridges between those valleys also vary in height: some transitions between cell states are relatively easy, while others would require enormous energy or very specific conditions that rarely occur naturally.

I think this way of looking at a situation – with valleys and ridges and mountains – is useful because I think it maps directly onto human civilizational futures. When we imagine, discuss, and work toward various futures, we’re not choosing from a list of possible futures the way you would choose from a restaurant menu, where everything is equally available and the only question is your preference. We’re also not sitting at the top of a series of rolling hills and valleys like our imagined cell. We’re already rolling through a moving landscape with a shifting topography.

I would argue that most futures are downhill from where we currently are. By downhill, I mean the path of least resistance, or the futures that current momentum and incentives already favor. The ones that take the least new energy or coordination to reach. By contrast, uphill futures are the ones that require sustained effort to climb toward and sustained effort to stay in once we arrive there.

Once we find ourselves deep in a particular valley, the high walls constrain the possible next moves. A farmer in Malawi or a software engineer in San Francisco are standing in very different parts of the landscape. So the uphill futures for one community may be the default valley for another. The focus here is the systems we share in common, not a specific location in the landscape.

Aquatic Tipping Points

Think about a lake. Ecologists have studied the aging process of lakes extensively. A young, clear lake with abundant plant and animal life will gradually accumulate sediment and nutrient buildup over its lifespan. As it ages, it will become shallower and murkier, eventually reaching a point where it becomes a wetland.

There are ecological forces that regulate the speed of all this happening. The plants filter the water, the clear water lets sunlight reach the plants, fish populations eat the plants, and the algae and bottom feeders filter out the excess nutrients, creating a gradual succession. Humans benefit greatly from young and middle-aged lakes as sources of fresh water, food, and as beautiful places to live near.

Importantly, we can impact how and when a lake ages depending on how we interact with it. There are regenerative techniques that can expand a lake’s lifespan by increasing water-filtering wildlife, reducing sediment, and nutrients that would naturally run off into the water. These techniques require intention, planning, and energy, but they’re actually quite effective.

Conversely, we can also accelerate and distort this systemic degradation by adding even more nutrient runoff like fertilizer from farms, sewage, or phosphorus, causing the lake to become murkier more quickly. The lake might even flip via algal blooms. The water then becomes thick and cloudy with the suspended sediment, and light can now no longer reach the bottom. Most of the plants die, the oxygen drops, and then the fish die. Plus, the unnatural aging of this system has tipped the lake into a new stable state, a new valley made up of a murky, algae-dominated lake. So this is now a deep, stable valley, because the conditions that maintain the cloudy lifeless murkiness are now in a self-reinforcing loop.

Here’s the interesting, relevant, and (in my opinion) important thing. These are both examples of systemic processes, but the transition between the dynamic life-perpetuating system and the dead zone is profoundly asymmetric. Flipping a clear lake to a murky one might take a few years of excess nutrient loading. Flipping it back, even after you completely stop that nutrient runoff, might take decades or much longer. That’s because you wouldn’t just need to remove the offending pollutant or stressor, you would also need to rebuild the entire ecosystem that was lost: the plants, the oxygen, the fish populations, the nutrient cycles, and the ecological webs.

The Seneca Effect

So the system settled into a new valley, and getting it back out requires climbing a ridge that didn’t exist before. This pattern I just described for lakes shows up everywhere in complex systems, but it also shows up in human societies too.

Think about a society that transitions from democratic governance to authoritarian control during a crisis. Maybe there’s a war or an economic collapse, or maybe there’s gasoline and diesel shortages, and empty store shelves due to military action overseas. Fear and uncertainty spike, people accept restrictions that they wouldn’t normally accept, and a leader consolidates power.

Then surveillance expands and opposition is algorithmized and suppressed, sometimes violently, sometimes through social pressure and institutional capture. The transition from open society to authoritarianism during a crisis can happen in years or decades, such as the slow erosion of the Roman Empire. We’ve also seen it happen in months or even faster, with modern examples of Peru in the 1990s and Tunisia a few years back.

This is what I would label a “behavioral downhill” roll because, once started, it gathered its own momentum. It follows the gravitational logic that we talked about in part two of this series: contraction plus fear pulls power toward consolidation.

But now try to reverse all that, try to rebuild democratic governance after authoritarian rule. You would need, among other things, independent courts and a free press in a landscape where civic habits of debate and disagreement have atrophied. You would need institutional knowledge that was purged and a population that knows what self-governance feels like (and believes that it’s possible). You would need to rebuild trust itself, which is arguably our most valuable resource from neighbor to neighbor, and citizen to government. Such a transition probably takes a generation at minimum, often longer – and sometimes it doesn’t happen at all.

So the transition from democracy to authoritarianism downhill took months, but the transition back takes decades. This asymmetry refers to something my friend Ugo Bardi calls the Seneca effect, where things grow slowly and collapse suddenly. It’s not an accident or bad luck, rather it’s a feature of the landscape topography itself. Organized, high-trust, coordinated systems like democracy and civil discipline require energy, effort, and social engagement to maintain, just like slowing down the aging of a lake system. Degraded, low-trust, coercive systems are, in a thermodynamic sense, the lower energy state. They’re what systems roll toward when you stop investing energy and collective effort in them.. They’re the default societal valley: the place that gravity pulls us when we stop climbing.

This brings me to the practical point of this episode ahead of when we start building composite worlds: the futures that are easiest to reach from the valley we currently inhabit are not necessarily the futures most worth living in. And in contrast, the futures most desirable and worth living in will require some hard climbing.

Dynamic Terrain

To many of the viewers of this channel, it will appear obvious – of course the easiest futures ahead of us are not the most desirable. The most desirable futures for humanity and the biosphere will require sustained effort to reach, and sustained effort to maintain. If we stop climbing, then gravity, both social and ecological, will pull us back down into a valley we don’t want.

An important caveat to this is the landscape we are navigating is not static. It’s dynamic and always changing, whether through human or nonhuman forces. As we move through the peaks and valleys of the terrain, the ground beneath us continues to shift under our feet because of energy descent, climate change, biodiversity loss, and much more. In other words, a future that was uphill in the 1990s may be downhill now or a decade from now, or vice versa. So I like to think about this in terms of what we covered in part two: contraction.

Economic contraction combined with adversarial geopolitics and increased concentration of power is now the path of least resistance. This is now a downhill roll. It does not require any conspiracies or villains, it merely requires people being afraid and leaders responding to fear the way leaders have responded to fear for thousands of years: consolidation, control, surveillance, and walls.

Economic contraction combined with cooperative geopolitics and broadly shared power – that’s something that is possible. That’s uphill from where we are, and it requires people to trust each other during precisely the period when trust is hardest to sustain. It requires leaders to share power when the incentives to consolidate are strong. It will also require communities to coordinate when coordination is the most expensive, tiring, and difficult.

But at the core of the work of The Great Simplification is the idea that uphill does not mean impossible. Plenty of things in nature are uphill and they happen all the time. Every living cell in your body has succeeded in an uphill project. Salmon spend their adult life swimming against the current to spawn. A redwood tree in California spends centuries pulling water hundreds of feet up against gravity. So this landscape metaphor doesn’t tell us that the climb cannot be done. It just informs us that the climb has costs, and what happens if we stop before we’ve reached a more stable resting place on the other side: we slide back.

This is true at every scale: your personal health, your relationships, your community, national and international governance, and the biosphere. These are all states that are maintained with effort. They exist because someone or something is doing ongoing work, and putting in energy, attention, and care to maintain it. The moment that work stops or shifts, the contours of the system’s landscape reassert themselves.

These systems devolve in years or even months because the landscape is always gently but persistently pulling them toward lower energy configurations.

Questions for Part Four

So when we get to part four, where I will walk through four composite worlds I’ve come up with, I invite you to hold this landscape idea in your mind.

I also invite you to sit with a few questions:

1. Looking at the near and longer term future, where do you see the steep valleys, and where do you see the open ground?

2. Which civilizational pathways feel uphill from here, and which feel downhill?

3. Where are you actually standing in this landscape right now? Your sense of the terrain is shaped by where you start.

4. When you imagine the futures ahead, notice which ones you find yourself wanting and which ones the physics and the data suggest are likely. Are those the same? And if they’re not, what does that tell you?

Four Key Terrain Terms

Before closing, I want to go over the key terms surrounding this terrain that will help carry us through the rest of this series. The landscape itself has two features:

• Valleys: the stable states where systems settle and reinforce themselves.

• Hills (or more technically ridges): are the barriers between these valleys, the cost of transitioning from one stable state to another.

The valleys and the ridges are the terrain of the future. We don’t choose them. They’re given to us by physics, ecology, and history.

But there are things humans can do to that terrain, specifically in this framework, two general categories. We can create switchbacks by using physical or social technology to carve paths up ridges that would otherwise be too steep to cross: building more social trust, restoring depleted soil, and creating cooperative institutions are all switchbacks. They make paths to cross the ridges possible that weren’t possible before.

On the other hand, we can erode the trail through actions or through plain neglect. We let the paths disappear, and then the ridges do become impassable. Depleting fossil aquifers or soil, losing civic norms, and building surveillance infrastructure that can’t be dismantled are all forms of erosion.

If erosion happens fast, it leads to washouts of all the switchbacks that have been built. These washouts do not have to be intentional, sometimes it’s just what happens when active switchbacking stops, while gravity and weather do the rest.

So when you hear me describe the composite worlds in part four, ask yourself: which passages are we switchbacking right now? And which ones are we allowing – purposefully or out of neglect – to erode?

Valleys, ridges, switchbacks, and erosion. I hope these ideas will be helpful for visualizing the future.

My last point, though it’s not the focus of this episode, is that these four things don’t only apply to societies. Each of us has valleys and ridges in our own lives. We’re each switchbacking or eroding our own future paths every day, whether we realize it or not.

The composites I’m building and will share are not equally accessible or equally stable, and the transitions between them are also not equally reversible. The landscape of the future of humanity in the biosphere is tilted, and knowing which direction it’s tilted is arguably as important as knowing what the valleys look like once we’re inside them.

Part four will be coming soon. See you then.

As always, thanks for reading.

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This week, I continue my “How to Think About the Future” series, where I invite listeners to imagine what it’s like to live in different versions of the reality that lies ahead. In today’s edition, I build upon the frameworks outlined in part three to create four distinct future worlds – composites that emerge from various combinations of economic conditions, geopolitical scenarios, power structures, and Earth systems stability. The resulting worlds are not meant to serve as a prediction, but as a set of thought experiments designed to stretch our imagination and to sharpen our understanding of how societal shifts show up in our everyday lives.

Along the way, I also explore why some of these futures seem more stable than others, why economic contraction does not necessarily mean collapse, and why power distribution may matter more than the economic headlines. As I unpack the logic of the four potential worlds, I emphasize that we are not yet locked into any one outcome – the choices made by communities, regions, and institutions today still determine which valleys remain reachable tomorrow. This episode is an invitation to think beyond conventional narratives of progress and to consider what conditions make a future not just stable, but worth living in.

What would daily life actually feel like in a world of managed contraction, ecological overshoot, authoritarian control, or systemic breakdown? Which institutions and practices are most important to preserve today, while the future remains unwritten? And why might the most desirable future also be the one that looks least like progress by today’s economic measures?

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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 earth scientist and thermodynamicist Tad Patzek for an exploration of the mechanics and mathematics of global heating itself. Tad explained why CO₂ has such an outsized effect in contrast to its small concentration, how water vapor amplifies the greenhouse effect, and why climate models sometimes get things wrong. His new research, currently under peer review at Geophysical Research Letters, identifies a declining Earth albedo as an additional accelerant of warming over the past 26 years. Combined with accelerating ocean heat absorption, melting ice sheets, and the dynamics of an approaching Super El Niño, Tad argued the warming curve itself may be bending upward.

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This year’s projected Super El Niño forming in the Pacific could become one of the strongest climate oscillations in over a century. As regions prepare for the effects, and continue to adapt to extreme heat waves, intensifying storms, accelerating ice loss, and increasingly erratic rainfall, scientists and citizens alike are questioning what our new normal will look like under accelerated global heating. From climate basics to unfolding atmospheric research, what do we know about the trajectory our climate is currently on, and what gaps of knowledge still need to be filled?

In this episode, I’m joined by earth scientist and thermodynamicist Tad Patzek for an exploration of the mechanics and mathematics of global heating itself. Tad explains why CO₂ has such an outsized effect in contrast to its small concentration, how water vapor amplifies the greenhouse effect, and why climate models sometimes get things wrong. His new research, currently under peer review at Geophysical Research Letters, identifies a declining Earth albedo as an additional accelerant of warming over the past 26 years. Combined with accelerating ocean heat absorption, melting ice sheets, and the dynamics of an approaching Super El Niño, Tad argues the warming curve itself may be bending upward.

Is the projected Super El Niño a signal of more extreme climatic swings to come? What sort of research is being done to explore and predict climate feedback dynamics that are only partly understood? And if the warming curve is indeed bending upward, what does it mean to plan, prepare, or adapt when the system itself may be moving faster than our models anticipated?

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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 explored a pattern of thinking that permeates so many of our conversations: we often decide what we think before we’ve fully heard what’s being said. Using the metaphor of a chessboard, I invited listeners to examine how we process information through a series of expanding perspectives. At the closest range, we instinctively assess people and ideas through lenses of threat, familiarity, and belonging. Soon after, conversations become filtered through ideologies, tribes, and cultural labels. That makes it harder to separate the argument itself from the person or source presenting it. From renewable energy to geopolitical conflicts, I presented real-world examples of how these deeply human shortcuts can limit our ability to learn from one another and shape the trajectory of our civilization itself.

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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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Today’s essay is the third part of a series I’m calling “A Guide to Staying Human.” The first part was about reclaiming agency in a world that feels largely out of our control. The second was about responding to the feeling and physiological weight of dread without being consumed by it. This week, I want to dive into presence, and what it means in a world where distraction is constantly available.

I’ll touch on the neuroscience of attention and the default mode network, reflect on how this ties into the lived experiences of those who are aware of the metacrisis, and offer some pathways and practices that can be used to move back toward presence in our daily lives.

A Missed Moment

Something happened to me a few weeks ago that precipitated this Frankly idea. I typically get up early so I can feed the animals and go on a bike ride before it gets too hot, so I was sitting down with a cup of coffee at 5:30 in the morning. The light was just coming up over the field behind the house, and it was that particular gray-pink that lasts maybe seven minutes or so before it turns into the light of an ordinary day. I had the cup in my hand. I was looking out the window – or rather – I was facing the window. And at some point, maybe five minutes later, I came back to myself and realized that I had not really seen any of it.

In those minutes, I had been somewhere else. Specifically, I had been in 2027 imagining a scenario about diesel rationing due to refinery constraints. The coffee was gone, the light had already turned ordinary. The orchard oriole that comes this time of year to eat the oranges I put out had come and gone – I had been physically ten feet away, but mentally somewhere else entirely.

So today, I want to talk about presence as a specific problem for those of us who have spent years building an intellectual synthesis about where this civilization is going. Presence is about actually being here, in the now. The work that has made me useful to life in a small way, I think, has also made me peculiarly absent from my own life. I would bet I am not alone in this.

I have lived in this kind of absence for years. I’ve had a front row seat to this particular cost of being aware of the more-than-human predicament. When you spend twenty years modeling futures, the mind develops a habit: it drifts forward. My brain runs scenarios when it has nothing else to do. To be honest, it runs scenarios even when it does have something else to do. It runs them while I’m eating, while I’m on a hike, while I’m watching the light come up over the horizon in the morning. This habit is probably what has allowed the work to continue, but it has had a significant cost. The only place life ever actually occurs – which is here and now, with this breath – becomes a place I visit only briefly, between simulations of the future.

The Default Mode Network

I’ll start with the neuroscience regarding presence, because deep within the brains of Homo sapiens is a structure that both helps generate the metacrisis and gives us the tools to create viable responses to it.

I recently learned about a study where two psychologists at Harvard sampled the moment-to-moment experience of thousands of adults across roughly a quarter-million moments, all via an iPhone app. They pinged people at random throughout the day and asked, “What are you doing? What are you thinking about? And how do you feel?” What they found was remarkable: people’s minds were wandering – thinking about something other than what they were doing – during ~47% of waking life. Nearly half of the time. And, quelle surprise, people were less happy when their minds were wandering than when they were not, regardless of the activity. Even unpleasant tasks were experienced as more satisfying when fully attended than pleasant tasks done with a wandering mind. They titled the study, “A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind,” unusually direct for a peer-reviewed paper.

In a related study over thirty years ago, researchers noticed there was a set of brain regions that consistently deactivated whenever subjects engaged in a task and reactivated the moment the task ended. By 2001, they had published the canonical paper proposing the existence of what came to be known as the Default Mode Network (DMN for short), because it described what the brain defaults to when not externally engaged. In the years since, the DMN has become one of the most studied structures in neuroscience. If you’re interested, we’ve covered it on this platform in Taylor Guthrie’s episode.

The DMN is a network of brain regions, including parts of the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus, that fire together in synchrony and activate the moment you stop engaging in a task. This network does self-referential processing, which in simpler terms means thinking about yourself: your traits, your history, your situation, and what others think of you. It does theory of mind, which entails modeling other people’s mental states, imagining what someone is thinking, what they intended, and how they will react. It also does spontaneous thought – the wandering, associative, image-laden flow that occurs when attention is not pinned to a task.

The DMN is also the structure that enables what is called mental time travel, or remembering the past and simulating the future. It turns out the hippocampus, which stores our memories, is the same structure used to construct hypothetical futures. In fact, people who have hippocampal damage actually have a harder time imagining future scenarios. To imagine tomorrow, you are using the same equipment with which you remember the past.

Mental time travel is one of the great cognitive achievements of the human species. It is how we plan harvests, anticipate winters, prepare for childbirth, build cathedrals, and move toward regenerative futures. Self-narrative is what gives a life its coherence. Theory of mind is the foundation of human cooperation. So the DMN is the center of what makes us peculiarly… human.

The capacity to leave the present moment is a superpower, but also a curse.

Mental Traps and the Metacrisis

We need the Default Mode Network in our daily lives, so we shouldn’t think of it as a bug in our physiology. The problem I’m getting at is actually the chronic dominance of this network in people alive today, at least in modern industrial societies.

Most of the time, in healthy mental life, attention flows fluidly back and forth between the DMN and another system called the Task-Positive Network, which is the operating mode of the brain while in attentive contact with what is in front of it. These two systems are anticorrelated, meaning when one is up, the other is down. You leave the present to plan, and then you come back. You drift into your memories, and then you return. That is the design.

What modern conditions – the phones, news cycle, attention economy, and for those of us who have taken on the metacrisis, the weight of what we have come to understand – have done is tip the balance heavily toward the DMN so that the brain stays there for more of our lives. Science now tells us that chronic DMN dominance is associated with several measurable changes: reduced gray matter in the hippocampus over time, increased rates of depression and anxiety, diminished sensory processing. The world literally looks duller and feels less present, all because the network that processes the present is being out-competed by the network that processes the future and the past.

What this looks like in daily life is probably familiar. You drive your usual route to the store and arrive with no memory of the drive. Your task-positive system handled the driving on autopilot while the DMN ran whatever scenario it was imagining. Most people experience this several times a day. You read a page in a book and only realize at the end that you read the words but none of their meaning registered. I’ve been doing this work for decades, and only since researching this did I understand the reasoning behind this pattern in my own life.

You take a shower and emerge realizing you have been thinking the whole time. The shower is famous as a creativity zone precisely because it is a familiar sensory environment requiring no attentional resources, freeing the DMN to roam. This is why insights come in the shower – or on my bike routes. Similarly, you have a conversation in which you are rehearsing your reply rather than listening. The DMN is running a social simulation of what you will say and how it will land, while the actual person across from you is reduced to a stimulus.

For many of us, time appears to accelerate as we age. This is partly DMN-related. Children spend much more of their day in task-positive, sensory-immediate processing. Everything is new, everything demands their attention. As we age and routines automate, a larger portion of our day runs on DMN, which compresses subjective time because the DMN does not lay down rich episodic memories the way novel sensory engagement does. The years feel short partly because we were not actually present for most of them.

How does this especially apply to those of you reading this? Well, several specific features of metacrisis awareness make DMN capture worse and more powerful than for the average modern person.

First, thinking about the future through this lens has an emotional component. The thoughts are loaded with grief, fear, anger, and moral outrage. The DMN preferentially processes what matters most. The very importance of what we understand is what makes it so colonizing to our mental lives.

Second, our metacrisis simulations have no resolution. Most worries the DMN processes eventually resolve: the test passes, the difficult conversation is had. But the metacrisis simulation has no endpoint. The DMN keeps running it because it never gets the closure signal.

Third, the simulation is socially isolating. Most people in our lives do not share the model. So the DMN is also running social simulations, like wondering “How do I talk to my brother about this? Why does my partner not see this? And what do I tell my children?” These layered simulations multiply the load.

Fourth, our vocation itself sometimes requires DMN engagement. If you are a metacrisis researcher, writer, or even just an attentive citizen, your job is to run the simulations. You cannot stop. The DMN is your professional instrument. The very mode that is eating our present life is the mode our work depends on.

Fifth, and this one hits home, is that there is a moral dimension that licenses the absence. The metacrisis-aware person can rationalize, often correctly, that their preoccupation with the future is necessary and appropriate, that being fully present at a birthday party while the world burns would be a kind of obscenity. This is the trap, because it’s easy to feel like it’s the only logical conclusion. The moral seriousness that drives this work licenses chronic absence from one’s own life, and that absence becomes a sign of how much one cares. But I’ve learned that absence is not care. Absence is absence. And the children growing up next to an absent parent will not remember that the parent was thinking important thoughts. They will remember that the parent was not there.

Absence, Drift, and Future Capture

The metacrisis-aware mind often experiences DMN time as more real than present time, because the DMN content – collapse, contraction, loss, intervention – feels weightier than the apparent triviality of the present moment like the dinner you’re having tonight, the weather outside, or the cat’s litter box you need to clean. I recently came to see this as an inversion of reality. The DMN content is modeled, while the present moment is actual. However, our felt sense of importance reverses this. The model feels solid, while the present feels watered down and uninteresting. This inversion is one of the central pathologies of how this work has trained our minds.

Not all absence is the same. Some forward-thinking is necessary regarding planning, modeling, and creating strategy. The surgeon visualizes the operation. The farmer thinks about next season. The mark of healthy mental time travel is that you can leave the present, do the work elsewhere, and come back. The key is that the traveling mind actually returns.

There is a second kind of absence, which we might call drift. The mind wanders because the present has become less compelling than the simulations. Drift is what’s happening when you scroll. It feels like nothing, and that’s part of its power, but it is the slow erasure of one’s own life.

There’s also a third kind of absence that I’ll label future-capture. This is when the future is so loud, so vivid, and so saturated with consequence that the present cannot compete with it. This is the territory of the metacrisis-aware mind. The future is not a place we visit, it is a place we live. The present becomes a kind of waiting room… provisionally pleasant sometimes, but always a waiting room. The laughter of children, the taste of food, and the light on the field all have the quality of being prologue to something else. Of being, somehow, not the thing itself.

Future-capture is what full DMN dominance feels like from the inside, when the content is civilizational. It is the same phenomenon I called “full dread” in the last Frankly, viewed from a slightly different angle. Dread is what it feels like. Future-capture is what it does to our attention. Both are the mind unable to leave a future it cannot stop modeling.

I have lived in future-capture for years. Much of the work I have done has depended on it, and it has cost me more than I have wanted to admit.

Five Pathways Back to Presence

So what do we do with all this?

I want to offer five pathways, or at least directions, knowing that none of them are sufficient and even all of them working in tandem is still only a beginning.

The first pathway is through the senses. The mind cannot be in the future and in the body at the same time, at least not really. So when you find yourself gone, the most reliable way home is through the senses. What do I hear, right now? What do I see, right now? What is the texture of this cup against my hand? This is what every contemplative tradition has known for thousands of years, and what neuroscience now confirms: somatic attention quiets the DMN. The Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh built an entire body of work around it: drink the tea, wash the dish, walk the path. Each of these is an entire practice, if done with the senses awake.

The second pathway is the pause, or speedbump, before the reach. There is a moment, almost subliminal, between the impulse to grab one’s phone and the actual movement to do so. The same moment occurs before you open the news app, the email, or the next thing. In that moment, there is a small window of choice. Most of the practice of presence in our era comes down to learning to recognize that tiny window. It doesn’t even mean you have to decide not to reach for the thing. It just means that you acknowledge, when you reach, that you are reaching for some stimulus, and that the reaching takes you away from presence, from the moment right in front of you.

The third pathway is single-tasking. The ideology of multitasking is one of the great lies of the late industrial era. The brain does not do two attentional tasks at once; it switches between them, badly, at significant cognitive cost. To eat while reading, while half-listening to a podcast, while glancing at the phone is to do four things poorly and to be fully present for none of them. Choose one thing at a time.

The fourth pathway is through beauty. Iain McGilchrist highlighted this in a recent episode: the human nervous system is built to be arrested by beauty. The oriole eating the orange you put out for him. The way the wind moves a particular tree branch. The face of someone you love when they don’t know you’re looking. Frank looking at me like I am his entire universe. When you let yourself be stopped when the world offers something, you’re practicing presence. Beauty is the present moment announcing itself. The metacrisis-aware mind has often trained itself to push past these announcements, because there is so much heavier work to do. I now think this is a mistake – the announcements are the work, or at least an essential part of it.

The fifth path I’ll suggest is the hardest. Perhaps we could label it the gift of finitude, prescience, or perhaps even awe. The reason presence is so difficult for many people (but especially those of us who have learned what we have learned) is that we have been given a strange and terrible gift. We have a sharper-than-usual awareness of the contingency and connectedness of everything: the species that go extinct, the forests that burn, the institutions that fail, and the Carbon Pulse that depletes. We carry, as a daily companion, the knowledge that what is here will not always be here. That the ordinary world is not ordinary. That this particular oriole, this particular cup of coffee, and this particular morning light that I missed has never happened before, will not happen again, and is not guaranteed to anyone.

Such awareness, held wrongly, is the driving engine of dread. I talked about that in the previous edition of this series. But held rightly, this awareness is the engine of presence. Because if everything is contingent, and if the present is the only place where contingent things can be received, then attention to the present moment becomes the most appropriate possible response to the situation we find ourselves in.

There is a phrase from the Christian contemplative tradition, “The sacrament of the present moment.” It comes from a priest in the eighteenth century, Jean-Pierre de Caussade. The idea is that whatever is occurring, right now, is the form in which life is being given to you. To be elsewhere is a kind of refusal of this gift. Across traditions and centuries, the conclusion is similar: the present is the whole of life, presenting itself in installments.

If the work I do on The Great Simplification platform has any meaning at all, I think it must come down to this. The future is what we are trying to protect, but the present is the only place we can protect it from. To say the world is precious, finite, and rapidly changing, and then to spend our days imagining 2035 or 2050, is to abandon the one position from which anything can actually be done.

Presence is the ground the work stands on. Carrying this knowledge does not set us apart, it ties us more tightly to what is here today. Anything less is a way of conceding what we claim to be defending.

A Practical Daily Practice

Like last time, I’ll close with something practical, because the abstractions are only so helpful. So, when you notice you have left the present, try these things.

First, don’t scold yourself. The Default Mode Network will activate ten thousand times a day no matter what you do. Scolding is just another form of leaving. Instead, notice that you have come back. The coming back to this moment is the practice, and you will come back a thousand times. I’ve actually been increasingly able to do this in my own life.

Second, choose one daily encounter you commit to being fully present for, maybe your first cup of coffee, the hike around the field, or lunch with a friend. Find one thing every day, and do that thing as if it were the only thing. This is small, but it serves as a foundation to stay in the moment.

Third, practice receiving each thing as if it were the last. The last cool morning. The last conversation with the person across from you. Receive it with tenderness and gratitude. Sometimes it actually will be the last time you experience something, and you won’t know it at the moment. The only response that does justice to that fact is to fully be here for it now.

The Great Simplification is going to be hard. We are likely going to lose much of what we love. Some of it is already gone. Some of it is going as we speak. The temptation, given all that, is to live in the going, to spend our days in the projected future where we are bracing for the next loss. I understand this temptation, and I have not personally escaped it. I am not even sure “escape” is the right word for what we’re after.

But I notice, when I manage to come back even briefly, that the world is still here in its splendor and blue-green magnificence. The beautiful morning light will be here tomorrow at 5:30 in the morning. The oriole, or its babies, will still arrive. The coffee is hot and dark and bitter and good. Being present for these things will not solve anything, nor will it lessen what is coming. But it is the life we have – the only life. To miss it because we are watching for its end is, I have come to think, the deepest kind of loss.

I felt this episode very personally, both the content and its implications. It all points to a pathway I’m trying to walk myself, with mixed success so far. I have not learned it, but I do see the path, and I strongly sense that it’s the right direction. I’m grateful for the company of those on the path with me, many of whom are reading this right now.

Thank you for reading and for staying present with me (hopefully) as I share my reflections.

More to come soon, especially along this vein of awareness.

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In this week’s Frankly, I explore a pattern of thinking that permeates so many of our conversations: we often decide what we think before we’ve fully heard what’s being said. Using the metaphor of a chessboard, I invite listeners to examine how we process information through a series of expanding perspectives. At the closest range, we instinctively assess people and ideas through lenses of threat, familiarity, and belonging. Soon after, conversations become filtered through ideologies, tribes, and cultural labels. That makes it harder to separate the argument itself from the person or source presenting it. From renewable energy to geopolitical conflicts, I present real-world examples of how these deeply human shortcuts can limit our ability to learn from one another and shape the trajectory of our civilization itself.

As the camera continues to pull back, a larger picture emerges. Beyond personalities and factions lie the structural forces shaping our world: energy, economics, and the biophysical realities that underpin civilization. The view widens again to include the living Earth itself, along with the possibility of a different future beyond the trajectory of our current social and economic game. I argue that the work of our time is learning to hold those instinctive ways of thinking alongside broader systems perspectives, so we can see the whole board without feeling pushed across it.

Are our strongest convictions helping us understand the world, or narrowing what we’re able to see? How does the scale of our perspective shape the futures we believe are reachable? And if a more resilient future is possible, what kinds of thinking will help us find a path toward it?

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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 Rob Hopkins, co-founder of the Transition Network and author of “How to Fall in Love with the Future,” for an exploration of what tips people over the edge and into action to build more livable futures, and what role imagination plays in cultural motivation and agency. Rob explained the neuroscience behind envisioning the future, explaining the link between memory and imagination, and how chronic stress and cortisol can shrink our capacity to picture the future. Drawing on research showing that creativity and imagination scores have been declining for decades, he argued that our collective inability to vividly picture a better future may be the deepest barrier to building one. Throughout the conversation, Rob and I wrestled with a central tension: how to be honest about the scale of the predicament while still cultivating the kind of longing that moves people to act, and what role grief, limits, and slowing down might play in that process.

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These days, I find myself quite worried about the future and all the things happening in the world, especially in the context of Iran. While reflecting on this recently, I honed in on what exactly it is I’m feeling – dread.

Irrespective of how the situation in Iran resolves, I am already paying for it. Not specifically in money, loss of convenience, higher grocery costs, or unavailable parts – at least not yet. Rather, I’m paying for it in my lack of daily attention. In my poor sleep. And especially through a low-grade, but continual, tightening in the middle of my chest whenever my thoughts spiral and interrupt my day…which is often. Perhaps many of you feel something similar.

This is what the feeling of dread does. Dread is the tax we pay on a future we cannot escape, or at least believe we can’t escape. The insight I had this past weekend is that the dread itself is often worse than the event it’s directed at.

The work I do on this platform, The Great Simplification, has been a public anatomy of difficult truths: climate change, net energy decline, the end of material growth, the unraveling of the social contract, soft feudalism on the horizon, and accelerating biodiversity loss. These aren’t abstractions to me, they’re a synthesis I’ve spent my adult life building, and I believe more and more that the synthesis is roughly correct. Which means that I, and a growing number of you who have followed this conversation, carry around a particular kind of weight about what’s coming, akin to a psychological millstone.

Carrying this weight around, day in and day out, is changing people. I see it in the emails and letters I get. I see it in the eyes of people who come up to me after talks. And I see it in myself. There’s a phrase climate psychiatrist Lise Van Susteren coined that I think encompasses this feeling: pre-traumatic stress. The actual trauma hasn’t happened yet, but the body is already responding as though it has. The amygdala, an almond-shaped structure deep in the brain whose job is to scream “FIRE” when there’s smoke, is screaming. It has no way to know whether the fire is in two months, in twenty years, or is already smoldering in the floorboards.

But I do want to acknowledge something alongside this: if the work we do only ever delivers more reasons to be afraid, then we’ll have failed in an important way. Honest reckoning with what’s coming is necessary, but it isn’t the whole picture. The other half is the question of how a person and a society actually lives with this knowledge without being eaten by it.

That’s what this essay – the second part of a series I’m calling “A Guide to Staying Human” – addresses. The first part was about reclaiming agency. This one is about responding to dread, because for many of us who have come to see the shape of what’s unfolding in the world, dread is our daily weather. Learning to live inside it without being consumed by it is one of the foundational disciplines of the time we are in.

Today, I’ll give an overview of the science behind dread – what’s actually happening in the brain and body – and then offer some pathways on what we might do with it.

Stress Effects

Let’s start with the human brain, which is where we often start on every issue in the more-than-human predicament.

When you encounter a threat – a bear, an angry boss, an unpaid bill – your amygdala lights up. It has a direct, almost hardwired connection to your hypothalamus, which then triggers what’s called the HPA axis: hypothalamus, pituitary, adrenal. Cortisol floods the bloodstream. Your heart rate climbs. Blood is pulled away from the digestive system and pushed into the extremities. Your pupils dilate. Your body, in less than a quarter of a second, has prepared you to either fight or flee.

This is one of the most beautifully evolved systems in biology. It saved our ancestors from countless lions, snakes, and rival tribes. In its proper context, this response is a gift – a literal life saver.

The problem is that this system was tuned for threats that are immediate, brief, and physical. The bear charges, you run, and you survive – or you don’t. Either way, the cortisol clears. But the amygdala does not distinguish well between a charging bear and a slow-moving systemic risk. For some, the amygdala reads civilizational decline as a threat. Net energy descent is read as a threat. The super El Niño now forming is read as a threat. The multiple ongoing wars are read as a threat. And the resulting increased food prices are read as a threat. Once the amygdala perceives a threat, it activates that same survival machinery. Except in this case, the machinery never has a chance to discharge. There is no running and there is no fighting the threat, just more cortisol in your blood – hour after hour, week after week, even year after year.

This is what neuroscientists call allostatic load. It is the price of an ancient threat-response system colliding with modern, abstract, slow-moving threats. The cost of this load is significant. Sustained cortisol elevation impairs the hippocampus, the part of the brain that takes what happened today and turns it into a memory. Chronic cortisol elevation also compromises and actually physically weakens the prefrontal cortex: the part of the brain responsible for planning, nuance, and impulse control. It dysregulates sleep and compromises immune function. It also pushes people toward addictive behaviors, because addictive behaviors are (among other things) ways to temporarily silence the fire alarm ringing in our brain.

So the first thing to understand about dread is that in addition to being a feeling, it’s also a physiological state. In its chronic form, it actively narrows the cognitive bandwidth that you would need to face the very thing that you’re dreading. That’s the cruelest irony of dread: it shrinks the capacity we need to face the challenge.

There are many studies that capture this phenomenon and measure what dread actually costs a person. In a famous one in 2006, Gregory Berns and his colleagues put participants into an fMRI scanner and offered them a series of choices. Each choice was a tradeoff between pain and time. They could receive a more intense electrical shock soon, or a milder shock after a longer wait. Most people, sensibly, chose the milder option. But roughly twenty-eight percent of people – nearly a third – chose to receive more pain sooner, just to be done with the waiting. The researchers called these subjects the “extreme dreaders.” Later experiments by other researchers found an even more striking finding: at the limit, some participants would accept almost any additional shock just to escape the pain of the anticipation of pain. The dread of the thing was, in measurable terms, worse than the thing itself.

Think about that. A third of us, when offered a clean experimental choice, would rather suffer more now, rather than wait in anticipation of suffering less later on. The dread of waiting itself is a form of suffering, separate from and sometimes greater than the suffering of what we are dreading. Yet that dread is happening in the present, in the only moment any of us actually has. We are paying, in the real coin of our physiologies, for an event that has not occurred and may not occur in the form we imagine.

I invite you to pause for a moment and reflect on this as it applies to the more-than-human predicament. Because this is the bind we are in, those of us who hold a long-arc anticipation of civilizational difficulty, especially the young people among us. We are not necessarily “extreme dreaders” by temperament, we are “extreme dreaders” by information. The data we’re holding produce in us the same neurological state as a forty-minute wait for a stronger shock, except the wait is not forty minutes, it’s years. And the shock, in our case, is nebulous at the edges and ginormous in scale.

Types of Dread

Of course, not all dread is the same – there are different flavors.

There’s the kind of useful vigilance that gets you to winterize your house or make a doctor’s appointment. There’s rumination, which is when you think over and over about something, and it feels like you’re working through it, but in reality, it’s just circling endlessly in your mind. Then there’s full dread, where the future emotionally collapses into the present. It’s like you’re carrying an incredible weight, but can still function. Your friends and family don’t know your internal reality at all, just that you’re kind of sad, thinking about all this ‘tough future stuff,’ but not aware of your agony or the acuteness of it.

I’ve experienced all these flavors, and continue to. So the real question here is what to do with dread. Because it’s likely a constant companion for those of us paying attention to the biophysical reality that is the future of humanity within the biosphere. I only have partial answers, but I at least have directional advice to offer.

Pathways Out of Dread

I have recently spent enough time in this headspace and read enough of the literature on chronic stress, trauma, contemplative traditions, and grief that I feel I can offer some pathways that might be helpful. None of them are silver bullets for dread. But all of them, used together, can begin to change our relationship with it.

The first pathway is mental reframing. Not denial – I’m not asking you to ignore the data or pretend the data is wrong. The data is what it is. But the meaning that we layer onto the data is something we have some say in. There is a difference between “We’re doomed“ and “We’re on the precipice of a historical period of profound upheaval and material contraction, and I am alive to witness and participate in that.” Both can be true. The first one freezes you. The second one orients you in reality. A slight reframing like this isn’t lying to yourself, it’s more like choosing – among the many true things you could think about the situation – the stories that leave you able to act. This is essentially Viktor Frankl‘s insight from “Man’s Search for Meaning:” even in conditions we can’t change, we retain the freedom to choose the meaning that we layer on top of them.

The second pathway is the body. This sounds almost embarrassing to say in the context of civilizational analysis, and I might have rolled my eyes at this a few years ago, but the most reliable way to interrupt the cortisol loop is not through the mind. It is through the breath, the vagus nerve, and movement. Purposeful long exhalations that are longer than the inhalation signal to our parasympathetic nervous systems that the threat has passed. Cold water on the face, or the full body, does the same. Walking, especially outdoors, measurably lowers stress hormones in study after study.

None of these responses solve the underlying problem. But they do give you a working nervous system from which to engage the underlying problem. And that’s how we respond to the metacrisis – one grounded nervous system at a time, which then enables further responses. Peter Levine has spent nearly 50 years studying and treating stress and trauma, and what his somatic work addresses is that for many of us, the unresolved fight or flight response has nowhere to discharge. So those of us that mostly inhabit our minds have to train our bodies to complete the response that the modern world prevents.

The third pathway is agency. I spent the first installment of this series discussing agency at length, because I think it is the foundational discipline – the one that makes the others possible. I won’t review that ground here, but I do want to connect how agency specifically meets dread. Dread is the experience of being acted upon by a future you can’t influence. Agency is the opposite stance. When you take a meaningful action within your reach, the brain’s threat system gets a different signal than the one it’s been receiving. Cortisol begins to clear. The fight or flight response quiets down. The body learns, slowly, that you are not purely a passive recipient of the future, which is how it often feels. You are also, in some small but real way, an author of it.

This is part of why agency work is so foundational. Because agency goes to work on the cortisol itself, it can reach places that reframing and reasoning cannot. As my coach keeps reminding me, we cannot brute force our way to calmer nervous systems. Most of what I worry about today, I cannot personally affect. But some small slice of it, I can have an impact on. I can plant potatoes. I can build a relationship with a neighbor. I can put words to what I’m feeling. The action does not have to be commensurate with the scale of the problem to be psychologically useful. It only has to be real and tip the scales just a bit in the direction you want – and it has to be yours.

The fourth pathway is community. I think this one is the most underrated and the most misunderstood. It’s taken me probably over a decade to not only learn this one, but to really feel it. Put simply, the dread you hold alone is heavier than dread held together with others. The neuroscience on this is pretty striking: the simple presence of a trusted other person dampens the amygdala’s threat response. We are a social species, and our nervous systems are designed to co-regulate. When you sit with people who also see what you see – not to amplify each other’s fears, but to witness together – something shifts. The dread doesn’t disappear, but it stops being so isolated and lonely. Lonely dread, I’ve come to believe and observe and feel, is the worst kind.

The fifth pathway I’ll call befriending the darkness. This pathway assumes some baseline stability to do the work from. If you’re in acute crisis right now, this is not the moment for this pathway. But there is a tradition across Buddhist contemplative practice, Stoic philosophy, the deep history of mysticism, and the work of psychotherapists like Francis Weller and the late Joanna Macy, who spent decades sitting with people in ecological grief. This tradition tells us that the way through dread is not around it. It is into it. You sit with the worst-case scenario and let yourself feel it fully. You don’t try to argue yourself out of the grief, the fear, or the anger. You just let your body have its response.

What tends to happen, if you can stay with it long enough, is something unexpected. The dread, when fully met, transforms. Not into hope exactly – I think hope is still living in anticipation, rather than in the present – but into something that is no longer purely negative. No, I think if you stay with and through dread, it transforms into presence. An open-eyed clarity that says, “Okay, this is the situation. Much of what I’ve taken for granted and love might be lost. And I am still here now – in this body, with these people, with this breath. With this meaningful work.”

The late teacher Stephen Levine, who spent decades working with those at the end of their lives, often noted how alive the dying frequently are. Not always, but often. There is something about directly facing the worst that strips away the noise and reveals what is actually here, which is mostly love, breath, and the strange luminous fact of being humans on Earth and being conscious at all.

The dread can, fully metabolized, become a kind of teacher. It tells us that this conversation, meal, thunderstorm, or these dogs and ducks running across the yard are the gift, and to not miss it.

A Guided Practice for Dread

This movement from dread into presence is the bridge into the next installment of this series. For now, I want to close with something practical. I know that for those of you doing this work, or for those of you who have come to this work simply by remaining awake in a sleepwalking world, the dread is real, and the abstractions can only do so much.

So when the dread shows up, here is what I would offer, based on the advice of many wise individuals who have helped me process these emotions.

First, name the dread, out loud if you can: “I am feeling dread about X, Y, and Z in the future.” Simply putting a feeling into words shifts brain activity from the amygdala to the prefrontal cortex. This is well-established neuroscience. Daniel Siegel calls it “name it to tame it,” and it works.

Second, locate the dread in the body. Where do you feel it? Chest? Stomach? Throat? Just notice. Don’t try to fix it. The problem for me is that I am so much in my head that it really takes a lot of time for me to articulate where I actually feel emotions like dread, but eventually I can. With practice, this gets easier.

Third, take five long exhalations. Not deep breaths. Long exhales. In through the nose and out much more slowly through the mouth.

Fourth, ask: “What is one thing, today, within my reach, that I can do?” Not solve or fix. Just do. And then actually go do it.

Fifth is to find one person to sit with this week. Not to fix anything. Not to spiral on these issues. Just to be in the present with. Tell them what you’re carrying. Let them tell you what they’re carrying. The carrying does not exactly get lighter, but it stops being yours alone and so it feels lighter. We evolved for this as social beings.

Concluding Thoughts

The Great Simplification is going to be hard. I cannot, and will not pretend otherwise. But the dread of the Great Simplification, if we let it run unchecked, will steal the very things we’re trying to protect. The point of seeing clearly is not to suffer in advance. The point of seeing clearly is to live with our eyes open, in the time we are given, with the people we are given, doing the work that is ours to do. I believe that work matters a great deal.

The dread many of us feel is real, because the situation is real. Ecological overshoot, the Carbon Pulse winding down, societal polarization, and all the things… These are not catastrophic predictions, they are emerging facts and realities on the ground. Our nervous systems are responding to information our culture is still pretending isn’t there.

Dread is like a reverse gravity that pulls us out of the present moment. Learning to metabolize it is what makes presence possible. That’s what I am trying to learn, and I haven’t yet. But I am trying, and I think that’s enough. I actually think that trying may be all of it.

Thanks for meeting me where my mind has been recently. The next part of this series talks about the default mode network and how it relates to staying present.

Thanks for reading – more to come soon.

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Self-fulfilling prophecies; manifestations; the Oedipus Effect: Humanity has long had an intuition that the stories we tell ourselves the most are often the stories we make come true. Science has found more and more evidence to back this up, through both historical cultural analysis as well as unexpected neurological connections in our brains. If we fully accept this, then what sort of future are we telling with our current cultural narratives, and is there still time to write a new one?

In this episode, I welcome Rob Hopkins, co-founder of the Transition Network and author of “How to Fall in Love with the Future,” for an exploration of what tips people over the edge and into action to build more livable futures, and what role imagination plays in cultural motivation and agency. Rob explains the neuroscience behind envisioning the future, explaining the link between memory and imagination, and how chronic stress and cortisol can shrink our capacity to picture the future. Drawing on research showing that creativity and imagination scores have been declining for decades, he argues that our collective inability to vividly picture a better future may be the deepest barrier to building one. Throughout the conversation, Rob and I wrestle with a central tension: how to be honest about the scale of the predicament while still cultivating the kind of longing that moves people to act, and what role grief, limits, and slowing down might play in that process.

In a culture that puts many of us in constant states of anxiety and stress, what happens to our ability to imagine and dream of the future? What would it take for more of us to feel, not just intellectually understand, that a lower-energy, more localized future could also be a more beautiful one, if only we plant the seeds for it to grow? And if the tools for building more local, resilient futures already exist, but the first step is to create a sense of longing for them, then what gap does that open up in each of our communities, today, to start putting these ideas into action?

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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…

This week’s Frankly was another in my recurring series “Uncomfortable Questions for Unsettled Times,” in which I pose questions about our shared future. In this edition, I used headlines regarding a potential ceasefire deal between the U.S. and Iran to confront a subject that has re-entered public discourse with a quiet but startling force: nuclear warfare. Through a wide-boundary lens, I outlined how the renewed discussion of nuclear force raises questions that extend far beyond the current conflict, including important (and uncomfortable) questions about nuclear proliferation, human psychology, and the erosion of long-standing taboos. I considered the possibility that many of today’s geopolitical tensions are symptoms of deeper shifts underway in the global balance of power, and ask what happens when societies begin revisiting assumptions that once seemed settled.

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This week’s Frankly is another in my recurring series “Uncomfortable Questions for Unsettled Times,” in which I pose questions about our shared future. Today, I use headlines regarding a potential ceasefire deal between the U.S. and Iran to confront a subject that has re-entered public discourse with a quiet but startling force: nuclear warfare. Through a wide-boundary lens, I outline how the renewed discussion of nuclear force raises questions that extend far beyond the current conflict, including important (and uncomfortable) questions about nuclear proliferation, human psychology, and the erosion of long-standing taboos. I consider the possibility that many of today’s geopolitical tensions are symptoms of deeper shifts underway in the global balance of power, and ask what happens when societies begin revisiting assumptions that once seemed settled.

While renewed public discussion around nuclear weapons provides the immediate context, this episode is ultimately less about any single weapon or conflict, and more about the forces shaping human decision-making during periods of uncertainty and transition.

Why do societies tend to realize the importance of a norm only when it is being broken? Are today’s conflicts fundamentally about ideology and security, or are they about power, resources, and influence in a changing world? And what happens when established assumptions about global leadership, cooperation, and stability are put to the test?

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 the latest episode, I was joined by Michael Every, Global Strategist at Rabobank, for an unflinching analysis of the Hormuz crisis and the fundamental principles pointing toward the Strait’s closure for several more months. Michael walked through multiple scenarios – a TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out), NATO military action, Chinese intervention behind the scenes – and explained why none of them offer an easy exit. The conversation expanded to explore what this crisis means for the future of global energy trade, the emergence of rival production blocs, the collapse of demand-side macroeconomics, and the surprising potential for a more equitable world to emerge from the chaos.

Listen on your favorite podcast platform

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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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This episode was recorded Tuesday, June 9th, before the current ‘deal’ was floated. Given world events, we decided to post this episode immediately as a special release, and deal or not, this conversation is an excellent overview of the issues and stakes of this evolving situation.

In a media environment constantly contradicting itself, with every side proclaiming the advantage for themselves, the reality of what’s happening in the Middle East gets lost amidst the day-to-day headlines. But for analysts who have been monitoring the underlying trends of the geopolitical gameboard for years, the direction is clear: the conflict over the Strait of Hormuz will likely not fully resolve within the next few months. If we truly accept the consequences of this, how will our global economy – built on interconnected supply chains and cheap energy – adapt to a geopolitical order fracturing before our eyes?

In this episode, I’m joined by Michael Every, Global Strategist at Rabobank, for an unflinching analysis of the Hormuz crisis and the fundamental principles pointing toward the Strait’s closure for several more months. Michael walks through multiple scenarios – a TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out), NATO military action, Chinese intervention behind the scenes – and explains why none of them offer an easy exit. The conversation expands to explore what this crisis means for the future of global energy trade, the emergence of rival production blocs, the collapse of demand-side macroeconomics, and the surprising potential for a more equitable world to emerge from the chaos.

If the Strait of Hormuz remains closed or mostly closed into September, which countries hit their breaking point first, and will the order in which they break fundamentally change the balance of geopolitical power? How does everyday life change when price signals stop working and access is defined by availability rather than cost? And if this crisis truly accelerates the fracturing of our hyper-connected, globalized world into polarized blocs of energy and production, how might the disruption, for better or worse, shake up nearly a century of the macroeconomic theory that has shaped every part of 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…

In this week’s episode, I was joined by Nora Bateson, creator of Warm Data Labs, alongside her colleagues Jonathan Goldsmith and Lucas Jackson, for a rich conversation about what it actually takes to build community and why so many of our attempts fail. Drawing on Nora’s concept of “communing” as the necessary precursor to community, the group explored how genuine human connection is being undermined by algorithmic fragmentation, scripted discourse, and cultures rooted in transaction and individualism. Rather than offering a formula for community-building, they made the case for something older: practices of mutual learning, radical hospitality, and a way of relating to others that breaks us out of the confines of our perceived roles. Together, they argued that the first step to being part of community is letting go of preconceived notions of what you are owed from the people around you, instead taking the first leap of giving more of oneself, and subsequently setting in motion the cycles of trust and generosity that keep a system alive.

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Many of us lack meaningful community in our lives, either from a complete absence of relationships or simply the sense of disconnection from those around us. In response, a growing number of people attempt to cultivate community based on shared values and interests, which inadvertently reproduces the very labeling that keeps real connection forming. The systemic forces that created this separation are real, but what if the deeper problem is that most of us have never actually learned how to commune with each other in the first place?

In this episode, I’m joined by Nora Bateson, creator of Warm Data Labs, alongside her colleagues Jonathan Goldsmith and Lucas Jackson, for a rich conversation about what it actually takes to build community and why so many of our attempts fail. Drawing on Nora’s concept of “communing” as the necessary precursor to community, the group explores how genuine human connection is being undermined by algorithmic fragmentation, scripted discourse, and cultures rooted in transaction and individualism. Rather than offering a formula for community-building, they make the case for something older: practices of mutual learning, radical hospitality, and a way of relating to others that breaks us out of the confines of our perceived roles. Together, they argue that the first step to being part of community is letting go of preconceived notions of what you are owed from the people around you, instead taking the first leap of giving more of oneself, and subsequently setting in motion the cycles of trust and generosity that keep a system alive.

What fundamental pieces get lost when communities skip directly to organizing, logistics, and shared objectives? Why do the dark triad traits find less hold in spaces built around curiosity and mutual learning? And how does the act of generosity shift when it comes from a sense of shared aliveness and the knowledge that tending to the broader whole is how we must also tend to ourselves?

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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…

Last week’s Frankly was part three of the series “How to Think About the Future.” In it, I built a framework for understanding the pathways that connect today’s choices to tomorrow’s realities. Drawing from biology, ecology, history, and systems thinking, I introduced a civilizational terrain of ridges and valleys that is constantly shifting as we are moving through it. I also used the concepts of switchbacks and erosion to explain why some futures emerge by default from existing incentives and momentum, while others require deliberate effort, coordination, and sustained commitment.

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Hello. This essay is the second part of my recent series, “How to Think About the Future,” where we’re taking a deeper dive into both scenario building, and ultimately planning and acting for our future.

In the first part I talked about why I think it’s important to hold the future as a landscape of possibilities – to not just hold the futures we’d prefer, but all those that are possible. I discussed the trap I often see people fall into: becoming settled on a particular view of the future, then framing and judging everything else against it. In contrast, I (and many other systems scientists I’ve studied) find it most helpful to have a distribution of possible futures to consider, with a midpoint.

The reality is, I don’t know which specific future is coming. None of us do. So the more honest, and ultimately helpful, move is to learn how to hold several at once. And today I want to lay out the building blocks for how to do that.

Four Economic Scenarios

I’ll start with a framework most of you have already heard me talk about on this platform. The four scenarios I’ve used for years to describe possible futures are Green Growth, Mordor, The Great Simplification, and Mad Max. If you’re newer here and want to dig deeper into these scenarios, I encourage you to check out my 2024 Summit Presentation.

I’ll quickly refresh the logic: the first axis of this grid represents whether the global economy keeps growing in aggregate, or begins to contract from today’s level of throughput. The second axis is whether that growth or contraction happens in a way that stays closer to ecological limits, or whether it runs further into overshoot and keeps liquidating the living world.

These two axes give us four quadrants:

1. Green Growth would give us physical expansion that bends toward ecological regeneration.

2. The Mordor economy would bring expansion that stays extractive and further exceeds planetary boundaries.

3. The Great Simplification would combine economic contraction with coordination and ecological stewardship.

4. In a Mad Max world we would see economic contraction, along with ecological (and other) deterioration.

Of course the world won’t land neatly in just one of those boxes – these are directional attractors. Different regions may be in different quadrants at the same time. The quadrant you’re in might also shift, sometimes abruptly. But I think these four categories are useful. They provide an immediate handle on the directional possibilities via a simplistic two-by-two grid. However they also hide something important, because none of our futures will be only an economic story. Two people can agree we’re heading into contraction, but still disagree completely about what life will be like and feel like, because they’re imagining different power structures, geopolitical backdrops, and ecological conditions.

So today I’m going to keep these four scenarios as the foundation – I’ll treat them as the first of four grids, adding additional ones that capture some dimensions the economic grid doesn’t cover: power and distribution, geopolitics, and Earth systems. There will also be an additional section about technology, and I’ll explain why I’m treating it as a wildcard or modifier rather than another grid layer.

Each scenario will consist of a two-by-two grid with four quadrants. The spectrums in these grids give us a way to talk about direction and tendency of the future, without pretending that it has any sort of precision. Growth or post-growth is one layer, now let’s add what determines the lived experience under that headline.

Types of Power

We’ll start with power. But before I lay out the axes, I want to step back and explain what I mean by power, especially because the word gets used so widely and loosely that it can get confusing.

When I say power here, I don’t mean energetic power – the ability to do work. I mean four specific sources of power that actually shape the outcomes in any society one could study. I’m expanding here on what I learned from one of the Daniel Schmachtenberger “Bend Not Break” podcasts.

The first source of power I’m talking about is military power: who has the guns, and the capacity to use or threaten force. Military power is the oldest source of power, and the one that ultimately backstops the other three. The second is political power: who makes the laws, appoints the judges, and controls the legitimate authority of the state. Political power shapes the rules everyone has to live under. Third is monetary power: who has the capital, decides what gets funded, and controls financial flows – and therefore resource flows. In a financialized economy, this source has gotten enormously bigger over the past fifty years, to the point where in many places it now drives political power rather than the other way around. The fourth source, which is newer and growing fast, is technological power: who controls the platforms, data, algorithms, and infrastructure that the rest of life now runs on top of. Twenty years ago, this would have been a footnote inside the money category. Today it’s becoming its own source. And honestly, in some domains it’s already the dominant one.

As we are seeing in real time in April of 2026, military power remains the ultimate power – at least for now. Who controls violence holds the real power, and the other categories are more about how that power gets enacted. We are still fire apes after all, and a small percentage of us have dark triad traits. This is both an important point, and a provocative one for a future scenario analysis – that the backstop power, violence, might report to the technology or wealth class. As a reminder, the world’s 12 wealthiest people hold the same financial wealth as the four billion humans at the bottom of the financial pyramid. The AI race is in the hands of a relatively small group of people and an even smaller group of companies, and the current trend in many countries’ governments is moving toward concentrating and consolidating power.

Power Distribution Scenarios

Now that we’ve defined what we’re talking about when we’re using the term “power,” we can look at any society and ask which of these four aspects of power are concentrated and which are distributed. The answer often tells us something the headline numbers don’t. A country might have broadly distributed political power – one person, one vote – and still be deeply unequal because money and information are in very few hands. The vote might be broad, but other leverage in the society is very narrow.

So the first axis of this grid is power: is decision-making authority in the economy broadly distributed or pretty concentrated? The second axis is gains: are the material benefits of the system broadly shared, or captured by a narrow group? Where is the ecological and energy surplus flowing?

An important aside, and something I’ve been thinking a lot about recently, is that during a period of growth, the “Who gets what“ question feels like a question about fairness: Am I getting my share? Are things more or less fair and equal? But during contraction, that question may transform into something much more basic: Is there enough? Can I feed my family? Can I heat my home?

The axes stay the same, but how it feels to live inside each quadrant changes dramatically depending on whether the economic headline is growth or contraction. It’s like a phase shift from fairness to basic needs.

These two axes – power and gains – produce four quadrants:

1. The civic ideal has broad power and broad gains – people participate meaningfully in decisions, and the resulting outcomes reach most of the population. Think about functional democracies with strong public goods during growth, and coordinated rationing during contraction. Hard, but also dignified.

2. The stewardship deal is in the quadrant of concentrated power and broadly shared gains – a small group holds authority, but the outcomes are broadly distributed because the rulers choose to, or need to, keep the population functioning. Singapore and East Asian post-war development states are modern examples. It can be stable, but it’s dependent on the continued competence and goodwill of whoever’s at the top – and that’s a fragile thing to depend on over time.

3. Broad power and narrow gains might be labeled a captured democracy – everyone votes, but institutions are really only nominally democratic. The real gains flow to a small class, meaning industry leaders and lobbyists write the laws. The formal structure professes “shared power,” but the lived experience feels a lot more “rigged.” I think this is arguably where much of the West already sits today. During contraction, this becomes the most unstable quadrant because people have just enough political voice to be angry but not enough real power to change outcomes. You’d get extreme regime swings and rapidly dissipating trust in government.

4. Lastly, concentrated power and narrow gains could be called forced feudalism. A small group both rules and takes – this might look like kleptocracy or colonial extraction. During contraction, this would be the most dangerous quadrant because the people have no voice and also no share. This is where violent resistance or total societal breakdown becomes most likely.

I’m deliberately using one grid here to cover what you might separately call “governance,” “political economy,” and “social structure.” Those three things move together more than they move apart. This is complex enough, so I think one reasonable scenario grid with caveats is more useful than three grids that seem independent, but really aren’t.

We’re two grids in – both are “domestic” in the sense that they describe what happens inside a society. The next grid zooms out to the international level, because even the best domestic arrangement can be disrupted by what’s happening between nations.

Geopolitical Scenarios

This third grid captures the international backdrop that shapes energy security, supply chain reliability, whether coordination on shared problems is even possible, and the background risk of major wars.

The first axis is cooperation versus adversarial relations: can major powers coordinate on shared problems, even if they don’t like each other or view each other as adversaries in other realms? The second axis is interdependence versus self-sufficiency: are nations deeply enmeshed in global supply chains for essential needs, or have they built enough regional and domestic capacity to function more independently?

I should note upfront – true self-sufficiency is nearly impossible at modern levels of complexity. Even North Korea depends on China for fuel. The U.S. is mostly energy self-sufficient, but also deeply interdependent on semiconductors and pharmaceuticals. So “self-sufficient” on this grid means relatively self-sufficient, at least enough that a major disruption doesn’t immediately threaten your ability to function. Countries sit somewhere along this spectrum, and many are actively moving along it right now.

So what would the four quadrants along these two axes of coordination and dependence be?

1. The combination of cooperative relations and interdependence gives us the globalization ideal. Trade flows freely and shared institutions manage disputes – this is broadly what the world aimed for from about 1990 to 2015. It’s extremely efficient, but everything is wired to everything else, so a disruption anywhere eventually shows up everywhere.

2. You can think of the second quadrant as friendly neighbors but with good fences. States are cooperative, yet self-sufficient. Regional blocs trade and maintain relations, but don’t depend on each other for survival. Things move slower and are more redundant. This might actually be the most stable long-term configuration under the energy contraction of the carbon pulse because it reduces the transmission of shocks while preserving some cooperation.

3. What I would label the danger zone is a combination of adversarial relations and interdependence. There are hostile relations between powers that still depend on each other’s resources and chokepoints, and every economic node becomes a potential weapon. Hormuz as leverage, the Taiwan Strait as a pressure point – this is arguably where we are right now. This situation is extremely unstable because a single chokepoint failure cascades globally. The Iran war is demonstrating this in real time with sulfuric acid, helium, fertilizer, and the like.

4. Finally, we have the Cold War scenario, which combines adversarial relations with self-sufficiency. This is the Superorganism fission I mentioned in a recent Frankly on what I label “the quadruple bifurcation.” Two or more blocs have decoupled enough to survive independently, but they are hostile to each other. There is lower risk of supply chain cascade, but paradoxically higher risk of direct military confrontation because the economic deterrent of mutual damage is now reduced. If you don’t depend on each other, the cost of fighting goes down. That’s a sobering thought.

You can see this grid playing out live right now. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz is showing every country what adversarial relations with interdependent supply chains actually feel like. The Philippines has declared an energy emergency, Bangladesh is closing universities to save electricity, and Japan is releasing its largest oil reserves. The response everywhere is movement toward greater security and self-sufficiency. The question is whether that movement happens cooperatively or adversarially – that’s the axis that determines whether we get friendly neighbors with good fences, or Cold War fragmentation.

Three grids in – economic direction, power, and geopolitics. These describe human choices. The last grid is different from the first three because it describes boundary conditions – what the planet is doing at the same time we invent, legislate, debate, and fight.

Earth Systems Scenarios

The final grid is about Earth systems. This is the grid that “bats last,” as many point out. We might be able to steer it, but it has a momentum and metabolism of its own.

The first axis on this grid is stress from global heating. I don’t just mean average warming – I mean both the volatility and the extremes: heat waves, droughts, floods, fire seasons, and crop shocks, as well as compound events where multiple extremes hit at the same time. The second axis I’ll summarize as biosphere integrity: are the living systems we depend on still broadly functional, or are they unraveling? Soils, freshwater, forests and their functions, fisheries, pollinators, and trophic webs. This is the dimension the planetary boundaries work focuses on, and it’s the one that often gets overshadowed by the climate conversation, despite being equally critical. Maybe more critical in some ways.

Here are the four quadrants that these axes produce:

1. The strained but workable scenario brings moderate climate stress, with the biosphere still being broadly functional. Adaptation is hard and extremes are more frequent, but systems still mostly function. There is still some slack, and mistakes are survivable.

2. A quiet unraveling happens when there’s moderate climate stress, but the biosphere is thinning underneath. Soils degrade, pollinators decline, fisheries shrink, water tables drop, and food production gets harder even without dramatic weather. That’s because the biological foundations are weakening. This scenario is insidious because it doesn’t make headlines the way hurricanes and heatwaves do – it’s the slow erosion of Earth’s carrying capacity, and the slow shifting of baselines away from the stability of the Holocene.

3. The Hothouse triage means severe climate stress with a partially-resilient biosphere. This is the scenario of constant emergency management. Society is always responding to some major issue, and is in a constant state of rebuilding. Important resources are perpetually diverted from development to recovery.

4. The last scenario is the cascading breakdown, where we would simultaneously see severe climate stress and an unraveling biosphere. There would be multiple systems failing at once, and compounding failures where each shock hits before recovery from the last one is complete. In ecological terms, this is where overshoot finally stops being a fancy phrase and becomes a concept we feel every day.

An important thing to highlight here is that none of these four quadrants includes a fully healthy and stable climate or biosphere. That’s because we’re already locked in on some level of degradation in these systems. We’ve already loaded the atmosphere and oceans, significantly degraded soils across major agricultural regions, and pushed past safe thresholds on seven of the nine planetary boundaries. So this grid describes trajectories from an already-compromised starting point in 2026 – all these scenarios ask the question, “How much harder does it get?”

Let’s be clear though – choice still matters. Regenerative agriculture can rebuild soil health over decades. Ecosystem restoration can recover some biosphere function. There are many people working on global cooling initiatives and many other regenerative ideas. Yes, the overall trajectory is set, but the destination still has quite a bit of flexibility – it’s why I work so hard on these issues. Could humanity, at the eleventh hour, become more stewards than reapers?

Technology and Demographics

You might be wondering why I don’t have a separate grid for technology. AI, automation, surveillance, renewable energy, biotech – these will obviously shape the future.

Here’s my reasoning: technology’s effect depends almost entirely on the context in which it sits. The same AI is a tool for liberation in one power structure and a tool for enclosure in another. The same agricultural technology is regenerative in one economic model and extractive in another. Technology mostly amplifies whatever the surrounding system is already doing – for better in one context, for worse in another.

Some of you are going to push back on this, and say AI in particular deserves its own grid. I have thought about it. The reason I chose otherwise is that the data centers running AI are themselves a massive new draw on the energy system, and energy is the binding constraint in this whole framework. Global data center electricity demand is on track to roughly double by 2030, with AI as the main driver.

So AI isn’t outside these four grids, it sits inside them, amplifying whatever direction the underlying system is already moving. In Mordor, it makes extraction more efficient and surveillance more ubiquitous. But in a managed simplification, it could make design and repair more accessible. Technology amplifies things, and what it amplifies depends on which system it sits inside.

One more thing I considered, and chose not to give its own grid, is demographics. Global fertility has fallen faster than any forecast predicted. South Korea hit a fertility rate of 0.72 in 2023, a third of replacement. Most of the developed world is now well below replacement. This reshapes labor, care work, political power, and migration over the same timeframe these composite worlds describe. I chose not to give it a separate grid because its effects show up inside the other four, like technology. But demographics and population are sitting underneath all of this, and in a longer version of this framework it might earn its own dimension.

There are actually probably tons of other potential grids that could be made and incorporated into future scenarios – demographic change, mental and physical health, freedom of communication and information. Maybe you all can build on this and expand this conversation: what other grids might also be important spectrums for anticipating the future? How might they interact with the ones I’ve laid out today?

Looking Ahead

There are a zillion ways to parse all this – I came up with these four grids, which I think cover the main bases:

1. Economic direction – growth or contraction.

2. Power and distribution – both how it’s concentrated and how it’s shared.

3. Geopolitics – adversarial versus cooperative relations, and independent or connected.

4. Earth systems – basically warmer climate or much warmer, and more or less biosphere integrity.

Plus technology as a modifier to it all.

None of these can be a “future scenario” by itself – these are only layers. A real scenario would be a composite of these layers. We won’t live in a general Great Simplification, we’ll live in a Great Simplification with a particular power structure, a particular geopolitical backdrop, and a particular ecological condition. The same economic headline scenario will produce radically different lived realities depending on what else is in the stack.

In the next part of this series, I’m going to build a handful of scenario composites from this foundation that will be vivid and concrete enough so we can feel the difference between living inside one world versus another. Imagining these scenarios is important because it will then inform which interventions make sense depending on which stack we’re considering, or maybe actually moving into in 2026, and which ones we’d like to steer toward.

Once we can articulate the stacks somewhat clearly, we can perhaps reduce our arguing about single-story futures and start talking more about practical robust choices and effective strategies under genuine uncertainty.

I’ll see you then, thanks for reading.

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