This is not for everyone
Except it is, because I'm making Part 3 of Chapter 11 free to everyone here. I feel the message should be accessible to all.
Everything we have covered so far necessarily begs a second question (in addition to the one in the last post). I’ll try to answer it swiftly so that we can keep moving forward with the juicier good stuff, like humility, compassion and so on.
If you’re new here you can start at the beginning and navigate around using this Table of Contents. The audio version is at the bottom. Part 1 and Part 2 to Chapter 11 are here.
Normally these posts are only available (in full) to paid subscribers. Ditto the conversation in the comments section where we workshop things together in real time. But I’m going to make this post available to everyone today. I think it’s an important consideration and I’d love to get lots of voices in on it.
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Q: How do I convince others about collapse?
I’ve asked the same. Many of you here have, too. It’s inevitable that we would.
“I want to share this work with others, but fearful of whether they can ‘handle the truth’. How do you approach this in the wild?”
“As devastating and heart wrenching it all is, it leaves me with a true wake up call to love, live and laugh hard. To fully feel joy, sadness, fear as lucky parts of the human experience. My question is how do we share this with our loved ones and the world to serve them in the readiness of it all without them having gone through your 'Wild' journey, or those who don't want to read into it because it's so much to face? I struggle to even talk about it with my partner…”
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The short answer to the above question is: You don’t have to. And sometimes it’s better not to.
As Meg Wheatley says, “This journey is not for everyone”. Not everyone is equipped or ready for it, nor is everybody right for it.
(🧐 A lot of you ask where to find the second half of the Meg Wheatley interview that accompanies the PG version above and that answers the ghastly question that burns, “How long have we got left?”. Well, it’s here.)
As we’ve covered already, the climate crisis demanded that we convince as many people as we could to switch to renewables, to #VoteClimate and to quit their disposables habits. We could stall warming only if everybody did everything they could all at once. But with collapse we are in a predicament that can’t be solved or fixed, no matter how many of us have woken up and rolled up our sleeves; indeed no matter how many leaders and fossil fuel companies do a conscionable about-face. I explain this in Part 1 of this chapter.
So, frantically, furiously rallying others is not the answer.
And combatting denial is not the best use of our care and time.
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You might also find it fascinating to learn that a 2020 survey found 71 per cent of Italians and 65 per cent of French people agreed with the statement that “Civilisation as we know it will collapse in the years to come”. Somewhat surprisingly 56 per cent of Brits shared this apocalyptic vision – slightly ahead of Americans, at 52 per cent1.
So it’s very possible many people around you know that we are in something akin to collapse. But they need to deny it for all the evolutionary reasons we just covered in the previous post. In short, for a great deal of people, denial is required for cognitive, and possibly physical, survival2.
Also for reasons we just covered off, our best course of action (as sleeves-rolled up concerned and loving engagers) is a radical and somewhat pragmatic acceptance and forgiveness of this reality.
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This said, I do get the deeply heartfelt nub of the question. Most of us here in this wrangle are experiencing an astonishingly cognitive relief and a surreal sense of belonging, or congruency, as we reckon with collapse awareness. We know that it’s freeing us up to be best equipped for what is to come. And we want our loved ones to experience the same.
So what to do instead of cajoling and convincing? A few ideas…
We put our energy into creating islands of sanity. We be the island of sanity. We be the invite.
We take on the mantle of being the ones who will calm the farm when shit hits the fan. We get ourselves ready to hold our loved ones when they do make the transition (on their own or when collapse forces them to). Last week the collapse explorer and author Elizabeth Oldfield and I did a joint podcast interview (where we interviewed each other in her London commune home). In her book Fully Alive, she writes that “my ambition is to be a non-anxious presence”. She admits she’s a long way off this, but she holds it up as the most worthy of goals now3.
We role-model calm, radical acceptance and forgiveness. And joy. And love. As I put it in This One Wild and Precious Life, we make the new way of being look sexier than the status quo. TBH, this framing works most convincingly for me. I mean, it’s a damn good brief! Enjoy the gift of life fully! And show it off to the world. Go!
We are mindful to avoid being dogmatic, binary, blaming or scapegoat-ish. We live the better way. And wait for others to catch up, to notice the vibe over in our ‘hood is really rather nice. And sane.
At dinner parties and barbecues we talk visions of values, not lifestyle aims.4
We be the more loving one. We just make this choice. We go straight to it. We do not pass Go. I’ve been trying to find the right place to put this W.H. Auden line from his poem, The More Loving One. I figure here is as good as any:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.You might have some other ideas to add to the mix? Jot them below….
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I think the other reason we so passionately want to bring others into collapse awareness is because we feel lonely. Many of you have expressed feeling lonely with your close friends and even partners (particularly husbands). It’s hard to hold this information in our souls while sitting next to someone on the couch laughing at a TikTok meme.
Waking up is existentially lonely. It always has been, ergo hero’s journeys and solitary retreats. It requires standing well back from the matrix of meaning that once held us secure. We suddenly must exist out beyond the self-esteem-preserving “worldview”. We must self-exile. And then we must go about building new emotional and spiritual buttressing for ourselves, with no roadmap and no smiley stamps. It’s a lot.
It can also be crazy-making to watch denial play out (on the couch next to us, at barbecues etc ) once we start putting everyday habits and responses through a collapse lens. I feel like an alien at a lot of social occasions and often have to have an internal conversation running in parallel to the out-loud one to keep me calm. We’re talking about your laundry renovations while - and, indeed, because - babies are being slaughtered in the Middle East!!
I have also lost a few friends to this journey, or rather there have been a number of “fade-outs”. The projected, refracting guilt and shame that is volleying back and forth has seen one friend tell me, repeatedly via late-night DMs, that I’m not doing enough, that I exist in egoic denial. Others accuse me of inciting anti-semitism, others of pandering to the fossil fuel lobby. I’ve gone into deep hurt and bewilderment, and done a lot of ugly, hard self-reflection.
However, these losses and disconnects must also be accepted. These are very rupturing times and there will be fallout.
I have had to actively seek comfort from others committed to the same work and create an intentional community and forum (this one here!) to cope. The heart-based experts I speak to - Meg Wheatley, Catherine Ingram, Elizabeth Oldfield, Nate Hagens, Iain McGilchrist, Corey Bradshaw, Jem Bendell and others - have all told me they feel lonely a lot of the time. But the salve truly is to seek each other out and to moosh together our weird-ass islands of sanity.
Jem Bendell writes in Breaking Together, “Expect a change in your personal relationships and how you spend your spare time. Some forms of small talk and light-hearted social interaction with acquaintances may seem pointless… a vector of reclusiveness and loneliness. Therefore, it is important to find new ways of connecting with people on the new levels that feel meaningful to you.”
Here’s my Wild chat with Jem from two months ago:
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Two final thoughts to complete my answer.
Firstly, one must check one’s smugness! I’m aware that declaring from on high that some (lesser) people are just not ready for something as big and important as collapse is possibly very arrogant and separating. For this reason, it’s a sentiment I try to keep to myself and I am careful to hold it (as) gently (as I can) and without judgement. When I fail in this, mercifully, I feel super grubby and get a grip of myself pretty quickly.
I must also be conscious that I’m not managing my own fear by seeking refuge in being right and separated.
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Second, it’s possible that each of us will need to retreat into denial at times and might feel we’re not ready to hold what we’re being hit with.
“It hit me that I was only partway prepared for the crises and that there was still a sense that this is all something to come in the future, somewhat abstract. I also remember feeling I am not the warrior that you, Meg [Wheatley] and others are and I’m feeling like a bit of an imposter engaging here and learning about all the crises we face.”
Kei, I feel this way, too at times. I’m in the privileged position of writing a book on the topic and this keeps me vigilantly focused and committed. But when I take my foot off the pedal I can easily veer into fear, cynicism, imposter syndrome and other cognitive safe houses. At such times I will take to watching videos of babies or dogs, or videos of babies and dogs together. Or I fling myself off on a hike. Or I dance. It’s important we have go-to strategies for these free-falling moments.
I also defer to wisdoms from folk who, too, existed in frightening liminal times before me. Here are two such wisdoms that provide some very paradoxical serenity:
“Perhaps this rings true: a person who has remained a person and not become a thing cannot help feeling lonely, powerless, isolated in present-day society. He cannot help doubting himself and his own convictions, if not his sanity. He cannot help suffering, even though he can experience moments of joy and clarity that are absent in the life of his ‘normal’ contemporaries.”
- Erich Fromm, The Sane Society.
And Elly Both shared this in the comments last week:
“It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs — and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety.”
- George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London
Sarah xx
PS A reminder I have put together this “dinner party rundown” of easy to grasp collapse explainers if you do find yourself needing to explain the complex clusterfuck of it all:
We've been through crises before, what makes the metacrisis so...deadly?
So this chunk of my Book Serialisation continues directly from last week’s instalment that explains the “metacrisis”. Today, I take the opportunity to answer a question that comes up a lot, using the metacrisis framing.
Audio version:
I can’t hazard even a guess as to where Australians would sit. You?
Catherine Ingram wrote in The Huffington Post back in 2019, “There is one category of people that I have found especially resistant to seeing this darkest of truths: parents. A particular and by now familiar glazed look comes over their faces when the conversation gets anywhere near the topic of human extinction.”
Heartbreakingly and honestly, I get it. Parents and anyone charged with having to continue a particular storyline for others have to make the dissonant and sacrificial decision to adhere to the status quo. For now.
This episode will run very soon.
The podcast episode with Meg was the first of yours I ever listened to and I remember crying in the bath while listening to it, with a sense of both deep sadness and a kind of relieved acceptance. At the age of eighteen I dived headfirst into climate activism with the sense that the world was at a massive turning point. Looking back, threaded through the subtext of every moment of this work was the knowledge that so much change needed to happen combined with the messaging I received that it was the responsibility of every person (myself in particular of course) to "do our bit" or the world would end. And though I know that that urgency and sense that each individual can have enormous rippling impacts was meant to be empowering, I can definitely see now that it was actually crippling for me and led to an eventual burnout that lasted for years. I put in tens of hours every week to leadership roles in a floundering youth climate organisation, and each time we lost a campaign or a protest got a less-than-optimal turnout I was crushed by the feeling that I was failing in my responsibility to be the one person to fix everything.
This year, alongside working on my PhD I taught my first ever university course. The class? "Climate Change". While teaching this course, I was progressively listening to more episodes of Wild and the steadily released chapters of the Serialisation project. In the first week of classes, we talked about pathways to influencing change. I split the group up into discussions of transformational, reformist and alternative approaches. Many of the students regarded transformational approaches like protests and non-violent direct action as "too radical" or "too controversial". When talking with the struggling group discussing alternatives, I suggested that it wouldn't take as much as we think for ideas that might now seem radical to become realities. Alternative ways of living that might be more connected with local communities or based on moneyless societies. Societal shifts at the scale of collapse (which, I reminded them, had happened to every society prior to the current one - why should ours be any different?). The group looked at me as if I was completely insane. It reminded me of the quote that 'It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism'.
In the second tutorial of the course, the structure I was given by the course lecturer for the class was a discussion in which the students were seperated into two groups - one discussing the pro's and con's of retaining a target for global temperature increase of 1.5C, and the other discussing a target of 2C. Midway through the class I introduced the discussion point (not included in the notes provided by the lecturer but an addition of my own) that we have actually already passed 1.5, and the room fell silent.
One student was particularly vocal. I think they were roughly my age actually (28), but in the way they spoke about the issue I saw so much of the urgency and black-and-white passion that I had had when first getting involved with climate activism. They spoke about how any increase above 1.5C was totally unacceptable - an apocalypse world. That we all had to be putting all our energy into reducing emissions and that was all there was to it. That there was still time. It was critical. That it was our responsibility to the world and to future generations to stop everything else and drawdown carbon. I tried to introduce the idea that it wasn't so black-and-white. That there were important things to consider beyond just (or alongside) reducing emissions, and that (holding back my own opinions about how possible a 1.5 or 2C world are) the values and narratives that guide us into this future world might actually be more important than how quickly we are able to reduce our emissions. And that the responsibility for fixing everything by some urgently approaching deadline shouldn't be shouldered by any of us as individuals (if at all). I could feel this idea being quickly dismissed.
The next week in class, that same student came up to apologise for being so passionate and dogmatic in their debate with me the past week. We had a brief conversation about it and I tried to gently reiterate my points, but in their eyes I could see a total dismissal of their poor, misguided tutor and her unambitious opinions. It hurt my heart so much. I could see the same emotionally draining, hyperactive urgency for action in this student as I knew I'd had when I first got involved with activism. I admired their passion, but I also had such a strong urge to hug them and say something comforting that might miraculously inspire them to take all the weight of responsibility off their shoulders. But if there was something I could have said, I didn't know what it was. So I said nothing.
Over this year, enveloping myself more and more in narratives of collapse and what that means for the way I go on living my life, I feel so so isolated. My closest friends look at me with a slightly concerned scepticism. Dates (I've now learned this is at least a 10th date kind of revelation to give about myself if ever) look at me like a bemusing curiosity to investigate or an insane person to escape from. Even the lecturer of this course, my PhD supervisor, gives me the kind of stern "settle down now" expression you might give an over-eager child when I introduce discussions of whether the course could perhaps incorporate a slightly more realistic take on where the climate is headed and what kinds of actions and ideas it should be encouraging in its students as a result.
Though this is my first time actually posting anything here, I've been reading each of these posts the day they come out and every time I tear up a little. I so deeply identify with what you say Sarah, it's not easy going back out into the world once you've started thinking about these things. It's hard to know when someone might be receptive and when (more often than not) you might just have to try and bite your tongue and blend in, like you said your discussion with Meg. I do struggle as well really trying not to convey or feel any sense of condescension or superiority whenever I am thinking or talking about the reality of collapse.... it's so hard when instinctively all I want to do sometimes is shake people. But I feel really held in the space you've made here so thank you so much.
I don’t know how else to say it, but out on the Canadian prairies here there’s a golden quality to the sunlight that comes to us slanted through the clouds and through the crimson and gold leaves. The size of the sky out here has to be seen to be believed. It’s all bittersweet and painfully beautiful at the same time, moreso because of the cold and the dark that are soon coming. I am reminded that the sun follows its arc through the sky, not worried or doing work that is not the sun’s to do. The moon follows and knows that its work is to reflect this light back. I take great comfort in this. What animates the seeds that are now buried but will grow; what animates the trees as they stand sleeping; what animates the geese to take wing and fly south in formation is present to me. The spirit of the land tenderly holds me. It reminds me to breathe, to pray that (I quote verbatim the wonderful Jen Willhoite here) “When I cannot say all is well, or all is known, help me say all is held, so I never believe all is lost”.