[Essay] Why the World Feels Like It’s Falling Apart: A Superorganism Speed Round
This essay is adapted from the Frankly episode posted on May 30th, 2025 titled, “Why the World Feels Like It’s Falling Apart: The Superorganism Explained in 7 Minutes.”
On this platform, the Great Simplification, we’re trying to change the initial conditions of the future. We do this by putting together a quite complex, wide-boundary overview of the human predicament, including how humans and the biosphere interrelate. We also explore what the underpinnings, scenarios, and interventions are in this predicament. It’s complex, it’s threatening, and it’s not for the faint of heart. This content isn’t for everyone.
But then there’s another filter, which is attention span. A lot of people today, including me, don’t have the attention span for a 90-minute podcast. I can interview someone for 90 minutes – or for three and a half hours in Daniel Schmachtenberger’s case – but I am just too busy and don’t have the attention span to sit and watch something for that long (or read a 4k-5k word essay). I’m sure there are increasing numbers of people falling into that category.
So, this platform’s message could be parsed into something shorter. Last year, I was in California doing a sort of pre-TED talk event called “Ignite.” The challenge offered to me was, “Nate, can you give a five minute talk, with only twenty slides?” Of course, I say, “Sure, I’d be happy to.”
It ended up being one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. When I actually presented, I only had fifteen seconds for each of the slides. The one I had prepared on the economic Superorganism, which is a central theme of this platform, ended up not working.
Because of that, I decided to take this opportunity to redo the Superorganism – in a shorter, tighter delivery. I hope this can be a helpful resource for those new to my work, and to send to those unfamiliar with the more-than-human predicament.
Surplus and Civilization
Let’s start by looking at the conditions we live in today. Modern civilization looks impressive relative to the past – invincible markets grow, planes fly, artificial intelligence has arrived. Yet, something doesn’t feel right beneath the surface. More vital signs are flashing red. There are lots of people working on “cures,” but we are mostly prescribing fixes without first diagnosing the underlying condition. The “patient” is the energy-and-materially-coupled system of the global economy embedded inside Earth’s biosphere. The symptoms we’re seeing and feeling make sense, but only once we zoom out and see how the whole system fits together.
Most people believe that money powers the world, but this is a narrow viewpoint. If we zoom out further, it’s really energy. Animals were the first investors, spending calories in order to gain more. This surplus energy built organisms, ecosystems, and eventually human cultures and the civilization we experience today.
Two centuries ago, we tapped into the stored energy of ancient sunlight in the form of coal, oil, and gas. A single barrel of oil, when combined with a machine, can do around five years of human labor for mere pennies. It’s portable, concentrated, and incredibly cheap magic. This fossil jackpot underpins the phenomenon I call the Carbon Pulse – a one-time release of energy that’s been stored over deep geologic time. In under 200 years, we’ve burned what took millions of years to form. This isn’t a paycheck that keeps showing up in our bank account, it’s a trust fund with which we’ve been throwing a planet-wide party.
When paired with machines, this huge energy surplus has done wonders. Population, production, and profits have all soared, powered by an invisible fossil army equivalent to half a trillion human workers.
But such power also comes with blind spots. Our culture confuses the tiny cost of fossil energy with the enormous value it provides us and ignores the pollution impacts almost entirely. We built a global economy that’s fully dependent on these two hidden subsidies, without acknowledging or even seeing them. Today, we remain energy blind, mistaking financial and technological growth for progress and forgetting what enabled and empowered these things in the first place.
Emergence and the Superorganism
In nature, complexity builds through flows of energy and materials. Forests, coral reefs, and even brains all emerge from this dynamic. Human systems are no exception. Cities, economies, and technologies are all self-organized as emergent structures powered by energy and shaped by matter. From simple patterns like this, nature creates beautiful patterns.
For example, a single starling follows three rules when flying in a group:
Stay close to your neighbor
Don’t run into your neighbor
Move towards the center.
From these seemingly unremarkable behaviors, a breathtaking murmuration appears – fluid, unpredictable, and alive. This is called emergence, and it happens in the human world too. Billions of individuals, businesses, and nations each follow simple cultural rules: seek profit, minimize cost, and grow. All of this is tethered to energy, materials, and ecosystem impact. The result is global physical patterns that no one designed or intended – and few are accounting for.
If we zoom out far enough, human civilization itself starts looking and acting like a giant organism with its own metabolism. Data flows, echoing neural signals, while highways and shipping lanes function like veins and arteries with gasoline and diesel as blood. Fractal nodes in the global system require a higher and higher baseline metabolic requirement each year.
What has emerged is something new and massive: a globally-synchronized economic Superorganism, built from energy, machines, and billions of human decisions, all driven by both biological and cultural incentives.
This Superorganism is mindless, unplanning, and energy-hungry. It isn’t evil, it doesn’t feel, and it doesn’t care about equity, ecology, or human wellbeing. It solely optimizes for throughput, scale, and for more – even when more becomes the problem. There is no mastermind behind the wheel, only billions of incentives aligned in the same direction toward extraction and consumption.
We’ve inadvertently built a system that rewards material expansion, not wisdom, and we’ve outsourced our decision-making to markets and algorithms. As a result, we have consumed more energy and materials in the past thirty years than all humans before us combined. Our current culture feels and acts like it will continue forever, but infinite growth on a finite planet is not possible. Technology on its own won’t save us, because it runs on the same fuel and has the same master.
The Superorganism cannot see what’s coming. It doesn’t anticipate, it only reacts – and the signals it reacts to are prices set for profits, which ignore the deeper long-term risks of constantly striving for growth.
So far, our collective response when we’ve hit limits has been to go deeper into ecological and biophysical debt. Buy now and pay later at a planetary scale, now in full effect. When central banks print money, they are not printing oil, copper, or lithium. They’re actually printing claims on those things. In other words, we can double the money supply, but the fossil fuels, forest, metals, and orangutans haven’t doubled. The financial system assumes endless growth, but the physical world, both the sources and the sinks, have limits.
Down-Slope of the Carbon Pulse
For over two centuries, growth has been our default, fueled by energy and abundance and amplified by financial systems. But we are now hitting ecological, energetic, and social constraints. The cultural story of “more” is colliding with physical reality. What if more money doesn’t help, but only accelerates our transmutation of non-renewable wealth into temporary income?
The up-slope of the Carbon Pulse brought growth and complexity. On the down-slope, the inverse will happen: less energy, less complexity, less “more.” This phenomenon is what I call the “Great Simplification,” and is also the namesake of this platform.
This Great Simplification is not a “maybe,” it’s a “when.” The economic Superorganism is not something humans plan for, nor something we wanted. It’s an emergent phenomenon of large numbers of social primates blindly interacting with a large energy surplus. Downstream of aggregate behavior, as individuals, humans continue to seek the emotional states that served our ancestors. But now we live in a world of scale, speed, and stimulation they never faced. We are a species far out of context. But we are not just individuals, we’re also deeply social animals. Our values and behaviors adapt to our cultural environment. This is the bright spot, because culture can change – sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly. It’s in our nature to shift once the story shifts too.
At the end of the day, the things that truly bring us joy and meaning are not tied to material consumption once our basic human needs are met. What fulfills us is ancient connection, purpose, time in nature, and being in service to others. Humans don’t need endless growth to live rich, meaningful lives.
Responses to a Simplification
So what can we do as this Superorganism reaches old age? The responses fall into four broad categories, in my view:
Policy: biophysical realism and planning for bending rather than breaking as we approach a Great Simplification.
Cultural: new stories, less hubris, and more trust and social capital.
Community: mutual aid, more localized food and supply chains, and ecosystem repair.
Personal: skills, mindset, connection, and meaning.
We can’t easily steer or stop the economic Superorganism, but we can plant the seeds for what comes next. Each of us can be the mitochondria in the cells of a different social organism being born in the not too distant future – in communities, in bioregions, and in gatherings across the world. I talk about this more in one of my videos, 10 Qualities That Could Change the Future: The Seeds of New Cultural Mitochondria. This is already happening, and the stakes have never been higher for humans and the biosphere.
Power scales up – energy, money, control, hierarchy. Life scales deep – interconnection, regeneration, community. The future depends on which of these we feed. This is more than a crisis, it is a rite of passage for Homo sapiens. The Superorganism we are part of today is not our destiny as a species, but it is a fork in what could still be the long road of our time on Earth. So start the conversation. Build local resilience. Consider being more actively in service of life.
This was just a primer on the human predicament (the college course I taught on this was a hundred hours). There is a huge amount left unsaid here, and every sentence could have been unpacked further. That’s part of our problem, our culture has come to favor short, simple explanations, while reality is nuanced and complex. But I am confident that, over time, integration of our reality – the systems science – can help us meet the future halfway.
That’s why I continue to do this work on this platform. There are a lot of humans around the world who are hungry to understand what our situation is and want to know how to engage to make the future better than the default.
More to come soon. Thank you for reading.
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As explained in my current Substack series on Energy, Power and Semiosis, we are all dissipative systems. But the largest-scale dissipative system on this planet is what Nate calls the Superorganism. This is a concise sketch of it.