A recent weekend on the English coast felt like some sort of existential reprieve. Etched against a sky of stunning blue, seagulls dipped and dived above the cliffs, soaring freely on the wind currents. It felt slightly unreal.

The inexorable joy of a jubilant spring is not enough these days to dislodge the clouds of ominous uncertainty that churn the noosphere. Although I’m part of an active global network that’s working on creating parallel life-affirming models, I am aware there is sea of despair slowly building as people’s lives, their aspirations and expectations shrink.

From day to night….As the moonlight burns away the night revealing a luminous path across the sea, my mind probes the questions that surface with increasing frequency in conversations with family, friends, and colleagues across the world.

Who are we?

What next?

And most importantly,

What can I do? What can we do?

There is a quiet desperation behind these questions where personal and collective concerns merge. It’s as if we’re finally waking up to the realisation that we really are coming to the end of life as we have known it… and expected it to continue.

On both macro and micro levels, humanity is witnessing a massive transition, with a future we cannot predict. In terms of geological epochs, it’s approximately 11,700 years since the last major glacial period. Earth and life on earth have enjoyed relatively stable conditions: climate regularity and sea temperatures that have supported a thriving biodiversity, which in turn supports life itself. All this has contributed to the flourishing of human development.

Most of us recognize these conditions have undergone a radical rupture due to human impacts since industrialization and the mindset that emerged from this. As the Holocene gives way to the Anthropocene, these impacts are accelerating to levels that now threaten life on Earth.

Just when we needed the next leap in human development to a collective sense of responsibility and stewardship of our fragile planet, we are experiencing the opposite. Frenzied extractivism, a dismantling of democratic institutions, the abandonment of global human rights, deepening isolationist policies, the erosion of communitarian consciousness, and an epidemic of mental illness in the West, where social isolation and a lack of critical thinking are endemic. 

Our Very Human Responses  

Perhaps it’s not surprising that the vacuity of popular culture today has created a vulnerability to the darker impulses within us. Inertia and cynicism are natural precursors to these forces. Anonymity and access to vast unseen internet audiences embolden waves of gleeful malice against perceived ‘others’. This faux sense of dark empowerment shields perpetrators from the hollowness of their own lives. Ironically and tragically, despite technology’s gift of interconnectedness, never have so many felt so alone.

Moreover, with political leaders entrapped in modernity’s blindness, and apparently incapable of responding to the deeper roots of these issues, many of us grieve a lack of political agency. A sense of impotency prevails in the face of the scale and complexity of the global crises we face. Epochal changes come and go. But this time it seems that human civilization itself is going through an existential crisis like no other. Will ‘we’ even be around for the next epoch?

It’s common to find ourselves cycling through different responses – fear and impotency, grief and anger. But few of us can, or want to remain terrified, angry or helpless. We have developed different defences. Some choose to simply ‘shut out’ the news and focus on their own lives, projects, and personal development, creating a private version of circling the wagons.

Another buffer is the semi-ironic form of thinking often employed by those intellectually well-informed, who relate to life through a supercilious lens that keeps everything at a ‘safe’ distance. Others simply don’t care, expressing muted versions of ‘Well, wtf? I may has well enjoy myself’, diving deeper into spiralling cynicism or cold denial. Both positions alleviated by the mesmerising range of distractions readily available on our devices.

Prominent too are the doomsdayers. Those who glean some kind of consolation by fixating on worst future scenarios. Yet, doomsday is a lazy epithet. Mainstream media is adept at over-simplifying reality to avoid the sheer level of complexity of today’s world. This effectively nullifies our sense of responsibility and care, sabotaging agency, creativity and our natural instinct for meaning and purpose.

There are also those of us who channel our despair and moral outrage into protest, short-term remedial actions and projects. Publicly calling out corporate malfeasance and government inaction is undoubtedly critical, but the issues themselves are the ‘collateral damage’ of an ideology permeating the policies of our politicians and the right wing think-tanks advising them. It’s also the mindset fuelling billionaire oligarchs increasingly controlling our world.

Techno Optimism’s Flaw

From various conversations, it’s become clear to me that among those privileged enough to feel insulated i.e. still benefitting from the system, most cling to an exhausted narrative of progress. Despite its visible dark underbelly.

Buoyed by the exponential capacities of AI, techno enthusiasts including those seeking the fortunes to be reaped, maintain a cult-like optimism. Silicon Valley’s tech brotherhood (whose proximity to the corridors of power is growing), see AI as the ultimate solution to our predicament.

But is it?

What’s missing, as Daniel Pinchbeck succinctly described in a recent essay, is the recognition of “our wicked problem.” That is, “the inexorable logic of techno-capitalism lacking a countervailing ethical, spiritual, and democratic movement, which points toward an extreme, post-human, hyper-capitalist dystopia.”

In an example of art mirroring culture, Jesse Armstrong (creator of the acclaimed series Succession), depicts the consciousness of this ‘wicked problem’ in his latest film, Mountainhead, a dark satire inspired by today’s super-rich tech brotherhood.

Inarguably, at the same time, lives are being saved, breakthroughs created, and sophisticated counsel metabolised from the entire internet and provided within seconds by AI chatbots. But we cannot ignore that up to now, this technology has been shaped by the very consciousness that has led to our current global predicament. Its massive environmental impact is an obvious example. Technology, or not, we are faced with the ultimate challenge of transforming the very ground of our culture, which starts with the ground of our selves.

Living between times, with the end of modernity as we know it and AI on the threshold of changing our lives in ways we can’t even imagine, despair and optimism swing like a pendulum in much of our public discourse and private thoughts about the future.

But this is a false binary, a false choice.

This essay is an attempt to dig into what it is in the human psyche that is available to us all. What is it that ordinary people have tapped into throughout history to create the unthinkable transformation of their societies? Our challenge today is no less daunting than the shift from medieval culture to modernity. From monarchy to democracy, serfdom and slavery to human rights, from imperialism and colonial violence to sovereign states.

Facing Reality

Vimala Thakar, a rare spiritual adept, who seamlessly combined wisdom with social activism, made a deceptively simple observation, “Perception of bondage is the first step to liberation.” This may sound prosaic but it’s foundational. What is the ‘bondage’ here? Not the litany of crises we feel entrapped in. They’re not the source. They’re the consequences of a system that has successfully effected the infantalization of our cultural mind and soul.

The tools of power employed today are less crude than those of medieval rulers. More sophisticated, seductive, and less visible, they have succeeded in putting the most privileged populations to sleep, turning many of us from engaged citizens into passive consumers.

But consumers are not very useful at a time of crisis.

As South Korean philosopher, Byung-Chul Han noted “consumers have no hopes, only desires and needs.” Today, hope more closely resembles an expectation of innovation – one that Silicon Valley is happy to fulfil. Consumers are the ideal society for greedy corporates.

Is this who we’ve become?

While lured into a state of acquiescence by the pleasures of material comfort and the illusion of a stable status quo, neoliberalism (with its myth of ‘free’ markets providing prosperity for all), has successfully engineered the largest transfer of wealth and power from ordinary people to a handful of the super-rich.

Waking up to the considerable consequences of all this is painful. It can induce a sense of helplessness, if not hopelessness. Han refers to this as a “structural hopelessness”, where our “capacities to imagine a better future” are weakened. But hope, in its deepest sense (not facile optimism), is critical.

For hope, anchored in spirit, is a powerful human capacity, where the future opens up full of purpose and meaning. But the regeneration of hope in a context of a decaying culture where profound change is required, depends on us having the courage to first see the way things actually are.

We are not Free

In the West we pride ourselves on our freedom. We have many privileges that others are denied. Yet perhaps it’s more accurate to say that modernity has brought about the illusion of freedom.

Certainly, we have more rights than those living under despotic regimes. Rights that have been hard won, which makes their diminishment more painful. But we are imprisoned in modernity’s ontology of separateness and all this implies. Locked in, free to buy, free to consume, free to access boundless ‘stuff,’ designed by a system intent on distracting and disempowering us.

In this scenario we are not only unfree, but unknowingly sabotaging our natural discernment, deeper sensibilities, empathy and the intrinsic intelligence of these capacities. The end point of this trajectory is looking alarmingly close. We all know about the commodification of our personal lives, the instrumentalization of our relationships, even of that which we consider sacred. Transactionalism versus relationality is the name of the game. But what is most frightening is the normalization of this.

Umair Haque, an economist, writer, and cultural commentator, recently described the way our core sense of identity is being reduced through this process.

He writes, “I feel like nothing. I have become nothing. I am nobody to no one. I am just money, code, data, bits. Exchange me. Use me. Capture me. Store me. I am nothing at all. I am pure emptiness. I have never been here at all…. This is a hollowness beyond hollowness. It is an absence in emptiness…”

This is not the sacred emptiness of the Buddha’s sunyata.

Modernity’s second core myth is the illusion of scarcity, based on a belief that we are quintessentially alone, competing for survival advantage. Drip-fed messages reinforcing our separateness, we believe selfishness is natural, hierarchies of power are natural, and conscience is a constraint on our liberty, our personal ‘rights’. We are taught the logic of self-interest over others. Yet, the cosmos with its 13.7-billion-year evolution tells us what Indigenous communities have always known, that we are inextricably interconnected.

Despite the idea that ours is a rational society based on science and progress, the Enlightenment and the liberal dream are in fact in free fall. This is part of our uncertainty.

A Way Forward

Counterintuitively, allowing ourselves to feel deeply disturbed despite cultural messages urging us to avoid such feelings, can be a portal to a way forward. Because to start the journey of reclamation and regeneration, as Jonathan Rowson writes, “We have to know who we are by clarifying what we care about and why.” 

The way forward may be much closer and humbler than we imagine.

Fear, doubt, the sense that something is deeply wrong, do not have to immobilize us. They are signals from our deeper self. And if we pay attention and refrain from the conditioned impulse to turn away, I believe a revolution can begin to occur within our own psyches. 

This is no small thing. It amounts to an inner rebellion against a status quo that has hijacked our consciousness. And it can simply start by paying attention to the cracks starting to form in our own consciousness.

Indigenous academic, author and activist, Vanessa Andreotti, speaks of “exiled capacities”, that are intrinsic to our human-ness. If we choose to shift our orientation and listen to the prompts our humanity gives us, very different experiences begin to self-disclose. Numbness begins to soften. And the sense of existential aloneness to dissolve.

Capacities such as empathy, the intimacy of inter-being that enables us to understand the subjective experience of an ‘other’, become accessible. We find it no longer easy to ignore the world around us, or to retreat to our tribal identities, because we literally feel the deeper bond of another’s humanity, or of Nature surrounding us, as ourselves. Even our much-maligned conscience can re-assume a self-correcting role, whispering to us from within, when we violate the inter-beingness we are part of.

For those who find the concept of inter-being woo-woo, it’s scientifically irrefutable now, that human beings are part of a dynamic, symbiotic relationship with the ecology of the Earth as a whole system.

Unlearning is possible

Unlearning is possible. But challenging the status quo of our own conditioning takes a radical commitment. Standing alone in a culture of conformity is hugely challenging, especially in a world where FMO (fear of missing out) is often greater than fear of climate collapse.

This means developing attention, an inner discernment (viveka in Sanskrit) that naturally prioritises what has real value and meaning over that which is simply novel. It requires a willingness to listen, to develop a different kind of awareness, a radical receptivity to the whole, to what’s needed and to what we care about, and giving ourselves to that.

In writing this, I am aware of the cultural baggage attached to such concepts. But simply creating space within us for the impulse that wants to know, that intuitively does know, is an act of intention. It’s about orientation, rediscovering what Andreotti describes as “the invisible compass that aligns your movements with something larger than your ego”. 

This is a step toward self-definition. It comes from bearing our own humanity, seeing emotional discomfort not as a problem to avoid, but as a natural response to a frightening reality. As many have discovered, in that space of non-reactivity, conditioned patterns start to become visible, including cultural beliefs that we have absorbed and reinforce through our actions and habits of being.

And if we slow down enough, giving space for our actual experience to inform us, beneath these messages we can discover a different impulse, a different orientation to life and each other…which if we act upon, uncovers a different source of strength and clarity.

The specific actions we might take are almost infinite, and all are important. We are diverse creatures and our gifts are diverse. We simply have to use them for what calls us, for what we care about, for what we believe is needed at this moment.

Lights Along the Way

There is no prescription for the inner journey, it’s one of unfoldment and revelation, of grace and grit. Of letting go and making choices. A willingness to make mistakes and genuinely learn from them. Only we can initiate this and take back who we are; cease waiting for others, including grand schemes, to save us.

The specific practices, the path an individual chooses to engage, is entirely unique. But seeking fellowship, the community of people with like-values and aspirations is critical, because the familiar, the conditioned, is always shadowing us. Creating a new culture occurs between us, but depends on each of us, on who we are and what we bring. All of which are in constant symbiotic motion.

Recently, I watched David Attenborough’s new documentary, Ocean. It confirmed the astonishing power of Life to renew and regenerate itself, even from the deathly effects of violent human extractivism. I left uplifted by a perspective whereby, just as coral reefs burst back to life, so can the human soul, nourished by that same life force and Intelligence, when freed from the blinding mythos of our existential separateness.

There is no going back. But what if we recognized our human, more-than-human, and non-human world as an entangled coalition, where technology is held within an ethical, ecological orientation, born of the quintessentially interdependent nature of existence. 

That is a life worth creating.