Let's get back on this horse

brutally refreshed and tragically clarified

I took an indulgent break for a month. I wouldn’t call it a holiday. But I did get to move around a bit and look at the world from different angles. I finished a round of book edits, working from an old mill in Provence, fuelled by coffee and a wild despairing surge; I wild camped in the Cevennes and felt numb; I stayed with some nuns and prayed; I hired a campervan and tried to get lost; and I joined friends in Hydra and marvelled at the wildly dissonant experience that summer tourism has become.

Assorted moments from my break

I also finished another round of edits while travelling by ferry and train back to Paris where I am about to start the (ongoing) process of finding a “home”.

Or at least a liveable apartment….Until I feel the urge to move again. (I’ve realised it’s in movement that I find my sense of home now, to a large extent; what is going on in the world needs to be moved through, and to keep moving through us, and so it feels congruent to find a sense of belonging by simply joining it.)

Anyway, I do want to say a quick thank you for your patience while I got my thoughts together again. Especially to those who subscribed in the past week and wondered what the hell you’d signed up for!

So where to head now?

This is a bigger question than it appears; I’m referring to both the future direction of our ongoing chat here and…life. It’s a question, I’m finding, that’s coming up in a number of forums where the “collapse aware” are like, OK, so now that we armed with truth, what comes next, what should we be focused on? I have recently been approached by a philanthropic trust interested in working with me on a project that would ideally address this exact question. I spent (European) summer thinking about the answer and I thought I’d share what I told the trust just yesterday:

I don’t know that we should be in a rush to head anywhere “next”.

Why? Because I think there is far too much work to do here and now.

Collapse is playing out faster - and worse - than many thought. Indeed, I’d say the devastating decline of All The Things has accelerated discernibly in the month I was offline. And so I think that the mass emotional fallout that we’ve known was coming as more humans arrive at that critical realisation threshold is about to hit.

Understandably, many of us who have been in this space for a while are impatient to move on from the doom and gloom of the “collapse awareness” stage, to telling the more (dare I say it) hopeful stories of communities seeding wonderful resilient projects, of degrowth concepts that are flourishing, etc. We want to leave “the old normal” and get on with the process of creating and nourishing the “ideas that need to be lying around” that I discuss in The Collapse Book (which now has a proper title).

Shall we give this book a proper name?

I’ve noticed podcasts and blogs trying to get wholesome series off the ground that profile folk already living what they might regard as “the new normal”. But as I said to the awesome folk at the trust, I don’t think the bulk of the population are ready for these visions. Not while they’re in the very confronting process of absorbing the news that the system they have clung to all their lives, and pivoted their entire worldview from, is crumbling. I think Israel’s brutal starvation of the people of Gaza in recent weeks was a tipping point (more on this below) for many. All kinds of dots are now joining. We’ve been duped! This system can no longer hold us! The system is rigged against our humanity! I can feel a mass panic rising…slowly for now…but I suspect it’s going to get wilder pretty soon.

Me, I feel that the most important job that people like you and me have at the moment is to be available for this. We need to keep a discussion going that’s still grounded in the muck and mire of this pain and discomfort. We need to be ready to support anyone arriving at this terrifying juncture and try to assist them in not freaking out. We need to ward off any kind of volatile mass civil unrest situation, or mass descent into a helpless despair. As per the thesis of my book, the severity of the decline that is ahead will depend on “how we handle it”. In the stark absence of moral leadership and appropriate cognitive buttressing in our complex, collapsing civilisation, we must triage this.

Which is not to say that the ideas for “what comes next” shouldn’t be supported, too. But I tend to think they will emerge naturally from the circumstances. They don’t need to be forced. Plus, we can’t really determining what these new ideas should or can be, nor what the circumstances are from which they can emerge, just as we can’t really determine anything in such complexified times.

So, in short, I believe that where we head now is …to do more of the same.

So, to this end, over the coming months I will continue to pick up on quandaries and bafflements and pain points that are being felt around us and keep leading a discussion that both enables us to sensemake the pain and discomfort together and that serves as an “island of sanity” for others as they go seeking for meaning in this batshit moment in history.

• I will also write about stuff beyond “collapse proper” (relationships, gender topics, politics, spiritual insights). Although, to be honest, I think all quandaries, all bafflements and pain points, are instances of collapse in action now.

• I will continue to do Substack Lives, available to the Paid Community. But, honestly, only if you want me to. I pick up from some of you lot, that you come to Substack because you are readers, and videos and audio conversations just don’t gel with you. I get it because I’m the same. That said, I enjoy doing the interviews and they’re a great way to flesh out an idea deeply with a good, robust mind. Let me know your thoughts…

• For the Paid Subscriber community, I’ll keep doing meet-ups, bringing you into the process of getting The Collapse Book onto shelves (cover deliberations to come soon), and, of course, to engage with your bright spirits in the comments.

• I’ve also opened back up the One-on-One sessions. You can book in here.

  You can book mentoring sessions with me here!

• While we’re doing PSAs, the meetup group thread has been super active, with a bunch of new groups launched in recent weeks (not sure what is going on there…perhaps the collective need to be in a room with like-minded souls is reaching a critical point?). You might want to dip in and see if there is one happening near you.

  Join a local subscriber meet-up group here!

• But mostly I will continue to fine-tune my thinking, which will hopefully encourage you to do the same. Because our collective thinking has become flabby, egoic, vulnerable and not particularly helpful, from a fundamental survival POV.

Uncomfortably naming the thing

I’m going to use this last point to segue to a thought I had this week. Yesterday I posted the tile below, written by Indian writer ANOOPREET , on my social accounts.

It’s a refined thought and an appropriately challenging one. I’ll just spend the last few paragraphs here playing with it.

I’ve observed similar refinement in other forums recently. Rachel Donald at Planet: Critical wrote a week or two back about a French politician she shared a stage with at a conference. He spoke (at length and from on high) about how fucked the world was, but, Rachel observed, “at no point did he refer to his role in engendering this crisis…

“He spoke like an oracle, as if the future had very little to do with the past. He spoke like a man whose wealth depends on his being in charge.”

Another example: While I was trying to get lost in my campervan the other week, I listened to the formidable Liz Plank interviewing pundit Professor Scott Gallaway on her podcast. As many blokes who are now engaging in “the boy problem” tend to do, Gallaway spent much of the chat outlining just how bad boys and men have it. Boys and men truly are having it bad and I’ve committed myself to refining my thinking on this topic (MTK). And (not but!) as Liz says to Gallaway, boys and men are suffering from the patriarchy, which, she says, is a system that men like Gallaway built and have profited from, and continue to hold the levers to. I have some (refined) issues with this line of argument (as I say, MTK), but I certainly agree that a conversation about boys can not exist without naming the less safe, more uncomfortable truth, the one that threatens the comfortable position of men like Scott Gallaway in a real way.

Back to the Israeli genocide example. We, similarly, cannot continue to talk about what is happening in Palestine from a distance (whether it’s from on high, or otherwise), as though Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu et al are exceptional. We must, instead, face the fact that they are not a bug in the system, but the inevitable feature. And we must face the fact that we are all part of the engendering of this crisis.

It suits us to pathologise Netanyahu (and Trump and the rest) as mad and evil. Because it lets us off the hook from having to look at how and why they came to be. People are bleating that starving children is soooo terrible and that it’s soooo mad that no one is doing anything about it. And some have timidly posted on their socials (for the first time since October 7) to this effect in recent weeks. But as ANOOPREET discerns, this is avoidant. Because it effectively allows us to appear human while maintaining the system that doesn’t just enable but also requires the famine. Once you name the real thing, however, “you can’t keep defending it”.

Which takes us to a deeply uncomfortable place.

Which is a place I think it’s time for us to embrace.

And it’s also where I’ll be continuing to head now.

It’s good to back, friends,

Sarah xx

PS I’m reminded just now of a chunk from my book that I wrote right on a year ago. It appeared in the chapter on Death where I talk about getting real and uncomfortable with the truth of our impermanence:

When I first began to really feel into the shock, guilt and grief of this momentous truth I was reminded of a line that William Boroughs gave to a journalist when asked to explain the meaning of his book titled Naked Lunch. It’s the “frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork,” he said. I think collapse - and being forced to confront death like this - plants us at our collective naked lunch, in a frozen moment together, facing what we’ve been blindly eating up for too long.