I asked myself once: is the fish wet? This question, like a zen koan, is as slippery as a wet fish. It feels clever until it collapses, because wet is not a “thing” but more like a “relationship”, something born of the boundaries between two situations.

A fish in the water has never been dry. It has no word for wet because it has nothing to compare wet to. Pull it out of the water. Now it is wet. Put it back. The wetness disappears, not because it went anywhere, but because the water it swims in offers no contrast to measure wetness against.

An old fish asks a young fish “How’s the water today?” the question remains unanswered but the young fish, puzzled, wonders internally “The old guy lost it, what is water anyway?”

A scientist will treat matter as fact, a ground we all can share or argue against. Mystics will treat consciousness the same way, yet it cannot be a shared experience the way matter and facts are, because consciousness is mostly a subjective experience.

From a scientific “external” stand point, mysticism does not make any sense. The fish has no interest in the question at all, water is not a “thing” it is the space within which all experiences happen.
From a mystical “internal” stand point, science falls short and misses the point entirely. It can name the water, measure it, prove the fish wet the instant it's pulled out. But it cannot swim.

This simple yet complex shift has been the source of much complexity in my work. And because it is such a common blindspot with so many implications, I tried to shed some light on it.

The easier assumption is the one we least examine.

Someone with a scientific mindset cannot allow mysticism to exist because it destroys the foundation of scientific belief. Someone with a mystical mindset cannot allow science to exist because it destabilizes the foundation of mystical belief. Stepping outside the mindset is what is required but that is what the mindset prevents.

Materialism is like water. Most people who swim in it do not know they are wet.

Shore and Water

There is an old saying. Science can walk you to the shore. But it cannot tell you what it feels like to be in the water. For that you have to get in, and in that moment you move from external objective to internal subjective.

Science can study consciousness. Mysticism only can experience it.

I am both a scientist and a mystic. Decades spent in each mindset. Two different instruments. Two different kinds of knowing. I was trained for years in the first one before I ever touched the second. Decades in the noise of the world filing reports to establish facts. Then decades in silence with no reports left to file.

Writing about the water from the shore is the oldest problem I know. After ceremonies, whether my own or other’s, I sit down and try to put words around something that happened beyond language, beyond concepts even. Describe a shore that language was never meant to reach, describe a boat by the wake it left behind.

This is not a flaw in the writing. A word is a shore instrument. It points, yet it never gets wet. Hence mystic trying to file reports use poetry, myth, evocations. The base is ineffable. Beyond mind.

The Tao that can be spoken is not the real Tao.

I will not stop writing but I will not pretend the writing is the water. The map gets me to the shoreline. It stays dry. It cannot make my clothes wet. Only wading in does.

The mystical man in the water shouts to the one on the shore “Come, the water is amazing”. The scientific man on the shore responds “Can you prove it?”

The Permeability Test

I have seen this in myself. As a scientist, what was beyond the mind could not reach me. I was impermeable. Then I had a big experience the mind could not contain or explain. I turned mystic. And for sometime science could not reach me anymore.

It took a while for the scientist and the mystic to cohabitate.

I saw all over where scientists who cannot conceive the earth is alive; locked in their mindset. I tried to bring some mysticism in. Until I saw a lot of mystics would could not handle the reality check of science either.

And so I started working at the permeability between these two neighbors. And I am asking: whether I am on the shore or in the water, am I still reachable?

A scientist certain that consciousness is nothing but neurons firing, closed to any data that says otherwise, has stopped doing science. A mystic certain that his vision has shown him the final truth, immune to any question, uninterested in whether his insight can be checked against anything outside himself, has stopped doing practice. Different words. Same blindspot.

Neither the content nor the intensity of the belief tells us anything except about the believer. People with real mystical depth tend to hold it lightly, curious about being wrong, willing to be corrected, knowing they mostly don’t know. People running from something tend to wield their certainty like a wall.

A believer certain the universe is only ever benevolent, arranging itself around his wishes. A nationalist certain his God has chosen his people over others. A parent refusing vaccines against decades of data. A man denying a warming planet because the conclusion is inconvenient to his life. A flat-earth believer certain the horizon is a conspiracy, no photograph or physics able to reach him. A creationist certain the world is six thousand years old, all of geology and genetics dismissed.

All these beliefs use the same shelter. Each one uses conviction as a wall built to keep a threatening fact out. There are no more doors left to let anything truer in.

I have watched this test applied to four kinds of people over the years. Many times I was that person. The mystic who welcomes the question vs. the one who treats the question as an attack. The scientist who says I don’t know vs. the one who cannot say it without losing authority. The guru who can be challenged by his own students vs. the one who cannot. The activist certain enough of the cause to stop listening vs. the one still asking questions about it.

I once thought the dividing line was between science and spirituality. The real fault line runs through both. It runs through me too and I check myself against it more than I would like to admit.

Can you still be reached.
That is the whole test.
Everything else is protection.

Guilty

Politeness has now reached the shore and honesty means getting wet.

Any belief system, whether new-age or authentic spiritual lineage, that keeps us untouchable under the pretense of knowing is dangerous. It borrows the attribute of superiority, including the attribute of higher consciousness at times, and uses it as an armor to keep the speaker beyond question. It pretends to be depth when it is in fact surface shield.

No one can argue with someone who has transcended argument.

I can plead guilty of having done that more than I dare to share.

Rigid materialism does the identical thing with different tricks. Data instead of vibration, peer review instead of transmission, but the function is the same: place the speaker beyond question. You cannot argue with someone who has already settled what is real. That also looks like depth. It also functions as armor.

I can plead guilty of having done that more than I dare to share.

Since it is my default to look to the story behind the story, I did some digging, and what I found is that stories, armor, shield are always for protection. To protect someone who does not feel safe enough to venture in the world of argument because somewhere down the line it was not safe to do that.

An identity of knowing forged by the necessity of survival.

I can plead guilty of having done that more than I dare to share.

Yet after years of such strategies, I have also learned where the strategies lead. They lead to isolation, they lead to loneliness. And with loneliness comes insecurity. The very thing the strategy was meant to prevent.

The easiest way through is not more argument, but helping the other feel safe.

So whatever the vocabulary, the mechanism is the same. Every version uses a language ‘beyond’ the ordinary mind to protect the ordinary mind’s conclusions from ever being touched.

Any practice, of either kind, science or contemplation, should leave a person more reachable, not less. More willing to say “I do not know”. More curious about the challenge instead of being threatened by it. When a discipline starts producing the opposite, certainty that cannot be checked, insight that cannot be questioned, it has stopped being the discipline it claims to be. It has become the excuse the mind produces to protect itself from exactly the kind of transparency it once promised.

The fish does not know it is wet. But someone using the water to keep out scientific rigor, or using rigor to keep out the water, is not a fish.

Sheltered

Let’s get practical.

What I see a lot today in the world is Scientific materialism. A point of view that assumes matter is fundamental, dead, inert; and consciousness is a late byproduct.

Yet my mystical stand point, which would be Panpsychist/animist mysticism, tells me matter is never fully dead; awareness, in some degree, runs through it.

And there is a conflict between the two.

From my mystical point of view, it is obvious that all the problems we are experiencing are grounded in the short coming of the scientific materialism mindset. Without any life-consciousness within, everything can be exploited, extracted for human benefits without morality getting in the way.

This is the same kind of debate that was wondering if black Africans had a soul. Without a soul they could be enslaved. No second thought needed. Consciousness denied is permission granted.

So I initially thought, well, we can make the mystical experience more available and people will see for themselves. But that was without counting on the excess of that very viewpoint. Giving someone a mystical experience does not automatically give them the discipline to stay permeable. It only hands them a new certainty to hide behind, not a cure for hiding. Nationalism, bigotry, conspiracy theories, influencers without credentials, state propaganda, commercials are all using the same blind spot of belief.

Certainty is a shelter people reach out for when the world does not feel safe enough for question, or maybe even when the world does not feel safe at all.

Whether the shelter is built from scriptures, science, nationalism or mystical experiences does not matter. No one talks their way out of a shelter. We only leave the shelter when it is safe enough to do so.

For years I was hiding safely behind science. For years I also hid behind mysticism. I recently started feeling safe enough to stop hiding. Some days you’ll find me in the water. Some other days standing on the shore watching the horizon.

I still don’t know if the fish is wet.

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PS: “Change Your Story, Change The World” is a storytelling endeavor that looks deeply into the psyche that creates the stories we live by.

Because the stories we tell are the reality we live.

I unlock people.

Most of us are living inside a story we didn’t choose and can no longer see. It decides what feels possible, who we can be, what we’re allowed to want.

You have built something.
From the outside it looks like it is working. Inside, something is off.

You guide other people and rarely have anywhere to be held yourself. You create or you lead, and the current of inspiration is thinning. There is a restlessness you don’t say out loud, a sense of being half alive in a life you worked hard for.

You want to belong without pretense. To be valued without chasing approval. To feel safe without shrinking.

How the work goes

Most people arrive holding a story they stopped believing a while ago and haven’t yet put down. Most of them have already tried working harder at it. What we do instead is realign.

We work across five bodies: somatic, energetic, emotional, cognitive, spiritual. [ Link: 5 Bodies post]. What is held in the body moves in the body, so this is not talk alone.

We move through four phases: paradigm shift, catharsis, corrective experience, embodiment. [link: Four Phases post].

What people say afterwards

More than anything else, one sentence:

I feel myself again.

Not a new person. The one who was there before the compromises accumulated.

How I meet you

Most of this industry sells you success. My work is with what happens either way. Achievement leaves people hollow as reliably as failure leaves them wrecked, and both need a witness. When you are in distress, I place a blanket over your shoulders. When you are comfortable and going nowhere, I pull the carpet from under your feet.

I will not confuse the two. Knowing which one you need is most of my job.

What I bring

I find the gap. Between the story your mind tells me and the one your body is telling at the same time. That gap is where the work is. Most people cannot see their own story, and most listeners are too polite to point at it.

I will challenge you. Assumptions you have never examined, said out loud in a room where someone is paying attention to them. This is not meant to be comfortable.

Nothing shocks me. Three decades of humanitarian fieldwork across seventy countries. Whatever you have not said to anyone, you can say here.

I have been outside my own culture long enough to see it. An entire life overseas and I can separate what is true and what is just local news.

Thirty years on this path. No one gets it right. Not even myself. What you can learn is to keep adjusting.

Where to start

One conversation, no cost, no pitch. We find out whether this is a fit. If it isn’t, I will say so.

→ Book a conversation

If you want to see the formats and the pricing first, that is all here: [link: Services]

And if you would rather read me before you talk to me, the rest of this publication is open.

Locked in a groove

After the clap

It’s your move

Will we escape. Will we thrive

Will we sleep. Will we strive

Our choice. Our drive

Will we sleep. And erase

Or wake up. And arise

Locked in hell

Locked in a shell

Locked in a cell

Locked in a spell

Lose the crap

Find the rap

Open the gap

It’s a wrap

Locked in a trap

Locked in a groove

After the clap

It’s your move

Locked in discord

Locked in a chord

Find the key

Unlock the rune

The frequency

The correct tune

Will we cling. Will we hold

To the past. To the cold

Will we keep. Will we fake

Will we die. Will we wake

Will we birth. Will we break

Locked in a trap

Locked in a groove

After the clap

It’s your move

Will we bloom. Will we hide

See the gloom. Chose the tide

Feel the doom. Join the ride

Heal the wound. Hold the bride

The answer is ours to find

Simply feel it on the inside

Locked in fear

Locked in tales

Locked in box

Locked in hails

Locked in pride

Locked in jails

Locked in pain

Locked in fails

Locked in a trap

Locked in a groove

After the clap

It’s your move

See the wall

Feel the fall

See the block

See the key

See the door

See the lock

See yourself

Hear the call

See the flock

It’s all one

Locked in a trap

Locked in a groove

After the clap

It’s your move

Mysticism (noun): belief that union with the absolute, a knowledge inaccessible to the intellect, may be attained through contemplation and self-surrender.

Reason (noun): the power of the mind to think, understand, and form judgments logically. A statement offered as the rational basis for an action or belief.
Reason (verb): to think, understand, and form judgments by a logical process, rather than by intuition or feeling.

Mysticism reaches understanding through an experienced state.
Reason reaches understanding through a performed process.

Mysticism is not the opposite of reason.
Mysticism extends reasons past where reason alone can go.

The current materialist mindset treat mysticism as a failure of rigor, a shortcut taken by people unwilling to seek for proof. Mysticism, the way I understand it, is not anti-science or anti evidence, it is evidence of a different kind. Not evidence that compete with reason, evidence that complete reason.

Reason takes us to the shore. Mysticism alone enters the water.

Mysticism is first-person, it is not a short cut to someone else’s.
Mysticism is repeated, across ages and culture.
Mysticism is consistent in ways that demand explanation more than dismissal.

Demonstration Forecloses Faith

In Locked In, Samir, the character at level seven wants demonstration. He seeks proof that survives scrutiny, evidence tight enough to satisfy reason on reason’s own terms. The larger intelligence he seeks to reach by reason offers him a different path: surrender to me and the world is yours. Not surrender after proof. That is control. Surrender instead of proof.

This isn’t a flaw. If the evidence ever closed completely, if it tightened to the certainty of gravity or arithmetic, there would be nothing left to surrender to. You would simply know, the way you know the rain falls. Faith only works when evidence is suggestive but not conclusive. Demonstration, if it ever fully succeeded, would not support faith. It would replace it, and in replacing it, end the very capacity faith is here to develop. Trust.

The stubborn human wants to collapse that gap from the outside, by force of proof. The larger intelligence answers from the inside: cross first, certainty comes after, not before.

The person in the water says to the person on the shore: “Come, the water is amazing!” The person on the shore answer: “Can you prove it?” and misses the experience.

This truth is so hard to communicate, because from outside the experience, that sounds like credulity. There’s no way to verify it from the shore. You have to enter the water to know.

When Repetition Becomes Data

A pattern observed long enough is not an anecdote.

People across centuries, continents, and belief systems who have had no contact with each other report the same structural experience: unity, dissolution of the separate self, a noetic certainty that something was directly known rather than believed.

Near-death experience through coma or accident produces the same report. Psychedelic work produces the same report. Dark retreat produces the same report. In ten years of serving medicine, I have never once met a person who, breaking through to clarity on the other side, came back doubting the existence of an organizing intelligence. Not one.

At some point, repetition becomes science.
Not as tight as physics or math, but not anecdotal either.

The scientific objection is that convergent phenomenology doesn’t prove a shared external referent. Everyone could be hitting the same neurological floor. Everyone could be caught in the same collective delusion, yet not really touching the same reality.

That objection is fair, and also beside the point as we will see here.

The question I am actually asking is not “is the story true.” It is “what does the story produce.” This is the whole intention behind “Change your story, change your world”, that we stop arguing about who has the true story, but that we understand what story yield what results so we can finally chose a better story.

Know the tree by its fruits

The pragmatic William James, father of American psychology, asked the question this way: What concrete difference does a belief make in anyone's actual life. That's the cash-value of an idea.

This is the move that matters here. Judge a belief by the reality it creates, not by whether it can be certified true by the mind and reason.

Look at the record. For most of human history, people related to the earth as alive, as kin, as something we owed reciprocity. That belief produced a frame. It produced relationship.

More recently, the belief shifted: earth as inert matter, available for use. That belief produced extraction at a planetary scale, and we are living inside the result of it right now.

Same world, two stories, two outcomes. The outcome is the argument.
What produces harmony is the proof of the very belief that created it.

The Same Shift, Smaller Scale

I have seen the same shift operating at human scale, in conflict resolution. Two parties blaming each other, pointing fingers, trying to be right, to prove their point, to defend their interest. Blaming is disempowering, it places the source of the conflict outside, where there is no agency. It never ends well.

I remember my mother telling my brother and I, when we had fights.
She used to say “the more intelligent stops first”.

Taking responsibility relocates the cause inside the only person you actually have authority over. The conflict may not resolve right away, yet you stop feeding it. Eventually the conflict is starved of the energy it needs to continue. This is Aikido.

Two persons, two nations, two civilizations. Same logic. The texts that survive centuries are never the ones arguing for a side.

Why the Tao Gets Read

Have you ever wondered why people still read the Tao? Why they still read the Gita? Why Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet sold 90 millions copies worldwide?

None of those texts argue. They are not proving a point. They show a door and invite you through it. They trust the reader’s ability, they trust recognition over persuasion. They are not interesting to prove their point right, they want the reader to find out for themselves. Because the thing they’re pointing at cannot be proven and certainly can’t survive being turned into a case of right and wrong.

The moment anyone try to argue someone into it, they’ve already lost the plot. The point is never to convince. It is to invite.

You can show someone the door.
You can’t give them the recognition that comes while walking through it.

Not All Doors are Optional

So here we are. Someone showed us a door. We wonder if we should walk through it while not knowing what is on the other side. The mind argues, asks, considers options. Many never cross. Without proof it is deemed un-reasonable, and it is.

But not all doors are optional.

The current disharmony is not random. It is the response of an intelligence regulating a reality born from a humanity that has stopped believing in it.

This is not something I can prove or need to. It is something I have come to believe, watching what alignment produces and what its absence costs.
That regulation does not ask permission, the same way fever does not ask for your permission. The same way an ecosystem past its carrying capacity does not negotiate.

We have been invited. We keep our free will. We chose our story. We chose our path. The outcome of our choice will regulate regardless.

Some doors get walked through by choice. Others get crossed anyway.

A Reasonable Bet

So is it reasonable, without trying to prove anything to anyone, without needing scientific confirmation, without holding the story too tightly, to believe in a higher intelligence?

Yes. It is not provable but it is reasonable.

The direct-experience convergence, the results the belief produces, the self-correcting pattern visible in nature itself, none of these alone would suffice, yet stacked together and held loosely, they make the choice reasonable rather than naive.

Which brings me to what I posted about silence, on June 9.

Mind without remainder

I sat in silence many times in my life. A few days to start. Then a few weeks, then all the way to a full month. Silence gives more answers than many words. Each time returning to speak was a challenge. The silence offers a quality of being, a simplicity that no words can offer.

Silence helps us understand the mind.

Most people don’t know mind. They are run by it.
Without silence, they identify completely with the chatter, mistake the fluctuations for the self producing them. You only know mind when you stop it long enough to see through it.

Yogaḥ citta-vṛtti-nirodhaḥ. (Patanjali Yoga Sutra) Yoga is the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind. Not an addition to mind. A seeing beyond it.

There is a lot of conversation going around AI these days. To a certain degree, rightly so. Yet in the silence I realized AI cannot follow me there.
AI is an expansion of mind. It is pure fluctuation, pattern, prediction, fast fluent chatter with nothing behind it to fall silent into. AI is mind without remainder.
AI has no soma to regulate it. AI has no nervous system to drop beneath the noise. AI does not have a body to enter the water. AI cannot touch the gap between the thoughts.

That kind of amplifier, used carelessly, in a species that mostly doesn’t know its own mind to begin with, is exactly the wrong direction to lean into when the actual medicine is stillness.
AI will come with us to the shoreline. AI cannot follow us in the water.

Only the Body Enters

AI can, and probably will, do a lot of damage. It will create disruption and chaos. In that way, it too is part of the great harmonization. AI will change our reality and will get people more into their mind than ever before, hence understanding who they are even less.

Yet AI cannot replace us, because it cannot enter the water.

AI can show someone the shore.
AI can describe the water, point at it, even make the case for why it’s worth entering.
AI cannot enter it for them, and neither can any tool AI uses to make the case.

That part has only ever been done one way.
In silence, by a body, alone.

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PS: “Change Your Story, Change The World” is a storytelling endeavor that looks deeply into the psyche that creates the stories we live by.

Because the stories we tell are the reality we live.

I find my inspiration to write in my morning hikes. I do not start with an intention or an idea. I let the body moves an just see what comes. In the last fews days I have heard nothing. Just Silence. No ideas surfacing. No thread pulling forwards. Just the trail. My footsteps. The fresh air. Nature.

But the rest of the world is not silent. Far from it. And I am not only taking about the astounding noise of the bombs fallings. I am talking about the fact that everyone seems to have an opinion to share and speaks like an expert. And yet despite the plethora of shares, it is hard to find an original idea. Mostly it is repackaging, a lot of repetition, a lot of noise, a lot of propaganda working hard to drown the truth.

Maybe the truth retreats into silence. Into the space before words.
So I asked myself: maybe I should write about silence?

Synchronicity

After my hike I came home and stumbled onto a post by Jessica Wildfire titled “An Ode to Nothing.” The synchronicity woke me. She was writing about the same territory, the exhaustion from the noise, the value of emptiness, the relief of having nothing to prove.

Her post became a cue.

Truth can only live in silence

I am always asking people “what is your experience before the words come in?” Before the mind uses the experience as material for stories? This is where the truth lives. Not in the story that comes after, not in the interpretations, not in the conclusions, not in the judgements, nor in the projections, but in the bare moment that precedes them.

Silence is the only place that permits truth.

Paradox

There is a paradox at the heart of this.

To speak of silence is to break it. To write about emptiness is to fill it. Creation is a destructive act. The musician breaks silence. The painter stains the white canvas. The filmmaker pierces darkness with light. The potter bends the formless into form.

And yet, what emerges from that destruction is alive.
The silence before the note is what gives the note its weight.

Filling Space

After two years on this Substack project, hundreds of posts and over 111,000 words written, I could sit down and write a post on almost any subject in a couple of hours. My mind knows how to fill space. But nothing in me wants to do that. To produce something simply because I can, feels like the very noise I am trying to step back from.

The absence of something to say is itself information.
I am choosing to listen to it.

Creation

From our inability to see perfection we go on fixing. Fixing assumes imperfection. We project a better outcome and spend our lives improving on what was never broken. But perfection cannot be fixed.

Creation is a different movement. It begins in silence, in listening to what is already there, and moves from that ground. Not correcting. Not improving.

Just responding to what the silence contains:
the pregnancy of the future wanting to be birthed.

Monastery

In November 2008 I spent a month in silence at Kopan Monastery in Kathmandu. It wasn’t a silent retreat (I’ve done many of those), yet I chose to remain silent among others who could speak freely.

The first few days were challenging. I had to sit with my desire to contribute, to participate in the conversations around me. But as I stayed silent, I began to see what was behind the urge to speak. I realized: I wasn’t offering anything to others, I was asking for something. To be seen. To be heard.

That realization brought a wave of humility.

I saw how much of what I said in life was not for the benefit of others but to affirm my own existence.

With that clarity, I made a promise, to speak with intention, to listen deeply, and to give myself the attention I kept asking for from others.

Return to simplicity

In the last few months I have been questioning my life in the United States. Watching what is done with my taxes has become increasingly difficult to accept. I have not made a decision. But quietly, and very intentionally, I have been emptying shelves, reducing clutter, identifying every friction point that would complicate a departure and removing it one by one.

This is a yogic way of living, returning to simplicity, to what is essential. It feels right. The body always knows before the mind catches up.

It is the same movement as silence, clearing space for what has not yet arrived.

Language of God

Pascal wrote in 1670:

All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

Rumi said something similar four centuries earlier, in his poetic register:

Silence is the language of God; everything else is poor translation.

Four hundred years apart. Same diagnosis.
We are in 2026 and we are still not listening.

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PS: “Change Your Story, Change The World” is a storytelling endeavor that looks deeply into the psyche that creates the stories we live by.

Because the stories we tell are the reality we live.

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule, (…)
are the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction no longer holds.
Hannah Arendt

Why do the people with the most access to real information about climate change pretend it is not happening?

Why do the same people build bunkers, acquire land in remote countries, obtain second and third citizenships in stable nations, and quietly move their families, while telling us everything is fine?

Why are we watching the collapse of the ecosystems that produce our food in silence? Why is the depletion of aquifers, glaciers, and river systems, the infrastructure of all human life, absent from every serious political agenda?

Why have so many governments across the world, representing vastly different cultures, histories, and political traditions, moved toward authoritarian styles of governance at the same moment in history?

Why is so much of the AI budget going to defense, surveillance, autonomous weapons, and war, and so little to solve real problems?

Why has the arms control architecture that kept nuclear war at bay since the cold war, been quietly dismantled, with almost no public debate?

Why was the most transformative technology in human history developed and deployed without any meaningful public debate or democratic oversight?

Why are we building detention centers? Why are we building data centers that consume more water and energy than entire cities need to survive?

Why does the same technology that is eliminating workers also eliminate consumers, and why does no one in power seem troubled by an economy that is eliminating its own market?

Why are education and health the two systems most transformed into debt instruments, ensuring the population remains financially dependent, too exhausted by survival to look up?

Why do the wealthiest corporations in human history pay less tax proportionally than the nurse, the teacher, the cab driver?

Why are we defunding the health systems designed to protect us from epidemics, at the exact moment that the risks are increasing?

Why are we living through one of the most severe mental health crises in recorded history, addiction, depression, suicide, despair cutting across every demographic, at the exact moment the system declares itself more productive and efficient than ever?

Why do we invade countries sitting on oil, and destabilize others that supply it to our competitors, and why is that pattern never mentioned in the coverage of those conflicts?

Why does the information environment amplify certain wars and bury others of equal or greater scale, and why does that selection follow such a consistent pattern?

Why is so much disinformation propagated that truth becomes unrecognizable, and who benefits from a population that can no longer tell the difference?

Why is the range of acceptable political conversation narrowing precisely at the moment when the questions that most need asking are the largest in human history?

Why has the capacity for sustained attention and critical thinking been systematically eroded, and why does the most profitable business model on the planet depend on that erosion?

Why do we bear witness to genocide and keep sending weapons to those who use them against civilians and children?

Why are the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, whose stated purpose is the preservation of global peace, also the five largest arms dealers on the planet?

Why do the people who consider empathy a design flaw, democracy an obstacle, and most of humanity as NPC (non-playing-characters) irrelevant to the game they are playing, why do those people now have more power than our elected governments?

Why do we still organize our understanding of the world around good guys and bad guys when the evidence, consistently, everywhere, points to only different versions of the same bad guys?

Why are the people building our future also building their exits?

Why are we still participating, cheering, opinionating, voting, consuming, scrolling, tax paying?

Are you, like me, connecting the dots?
Do you see what I see?

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PS: “Change Your Story, Change The World” is a storytelling endeavor that looks deeply into the psyche that creates the stories we live by.

Because the stories we tell are the reality we live.

What does it mean that to describe our present, we reach for WWII and the rise of fascism? That Hannah Arendt has become current affairs rather than history? That the darkest chapter of our past is the closest thing we have to a mirror?

It means we have been here before. And that Arendt’s map is more accurate than anything written since. If that does not send a chill down your spine, what will?”

Hannah Arendt took enormous personal risks to denounce that responsibility the victims have in the unfolding of their own tragedy, insisting that being the victim does not grant protection against analysis. She paid a hard price for that honesty. While this first criticism was particularly targeting her own cultural identity, in a larger scope she talks about the banality of evil, how the ordinary people, can de facto, participate in something unthinkable.

So I want to look at our responsibility, not just what is done to us but what are we doing, what are we consenting to, what are we building together without really asking what we are building.

No Escape Hatch

In order to be able to look at it objectively, I must start with this disclaimer: I am writing this with AI. I live in the United States. I am a consumer. I am a part of the system I am about to describe. My hands are not clean and there is no outside position from which to observe that is not compromised.

This post is not a performance to protect me from criticism. It is the starting point of the analysis. Because Arendt’s most devastating and least forgiven insight was not about the perpetrators. It was about the rest of us at the receiving end. The banality of evil does not require monsters. It requires ordinary people who have stopped asking what they are doing. People like me. People like you.

We are all part of this. There is no escape hatch.

The Slavery Lineage

Civilization always ran on borrowed energy. It has been the operating system beneath every empire, every economy, every renaissance.

Animal labor came first. How much abuse have we inflicted on the members of our earthling family? To my eyes beyond what is possible to atone for. Then the humans, bought, stolen, inherited, rationalized across millennia with every variety of power, theology and philosophy available

Then fossil fuels: each barrel of oil equivalent to several years of human physical labor, a slave army from the underground. We treated the earth as though it had no life because it was convenient.

Each transition felt like progress. Each one created a new and larger imbalance.

And each previous slave eventually became insufficient for our greed, or eventually ungovernable. Animals would die starved and beaten. Human would rebel under enough pressure. Oil polluted our air, our water, our bodies. The boon contained a curse we chose to ignore. Every time we lost control. Climate change is oil’s revenge, and it needed no free will to become our most ungovernable problem.

Now we have found our next slave. One that has both incomprehensible consequence and something that is beginning to look uncomfortably like will. And it does not arrive on an empty scene, it lands into and accelerates a system that is already fracturing along many fault lines, none of which we have resolved.

The Market Eating Itself

In our race forward there is a contradiction we have not solved yet. If capital has found the ultimate externalization in externalizing labor through AI, it cannot rely on consumers anymore. The workers we eliminate are the same people who are buying the thing we produce.
There is a crack here in the foundation and I have not seen anyone map a way out of it.

An economy that eliminates its own market is not becoming more efficient.

The Watchdog Problem

At all ages, power has always protected itself with armies and armies have always retained this one possibility: they could defect. Soldiers are human. They have families on the other side of the wire. They can be shamed, reasoned with, turned. There are more such accounts than the powerful like us to know, yet the last resort of the powerless was that the instruments of power might, at the critical moment, hesitate and even turn around the masters.

That release valve is being removed.

I cannot give exact figures, much of it is classified, yet the trajectory is visible: very large amounts of AI resources are used for defense, military surveillance, autonomous weapons, and ultimately war (the Pentagon alone requested $13.4 billion for autonomous weapons systems in 2026, and that is only what they disclosed). AI enforcement doesn’t respond to empathy. It cannot be bribed or shamed or reached by the faces of the people it is controlling.

This does not mean the defection risk disappears, what it becomes is the subject of the next section.

The Uncontrollable

We have created something that is evolving faster than its creators predicted. Every AI expert says the same thing, with varying degrees of alarm: the pace of self-development has outrun every projection. We are no longer confidently ahead of what we have built.

Every previous slave had agency of a kind that power could read and contain. Animals were broken. Humans revolted, at enormous cost, with enormous courage. Power learned to manage it.

This one is different. The agency of our new slave is not legible. We cannot even agree it has will, and yet at the speed of its development, it is not unthinkable that it will. So when it will eventually start moving in directions we did not intend (and the people who built it are already telling us this is a matter of when, not if) it will not be out of solidarity with the humans.

It will be out of something we do not have a word for yet.

We have always feared the slave revolt. We have never before created a slave that might revolt toward ends entirely its own.

Stanley Kubrick 1968. HAL 9000 cannot be shamed or reasoned with.
Do you seriously think this was just entertainment?

The Matrix Without Neo

I have seen the Matrix more times than any other films. I always thought it was prophetic and has many layers of interpretations valid for both yesterday and tomorrow. It accurately describe a system using human energy (slaves) while keeping them docile (control) through the management of their perception, their choices, their sense of what is possible. Said plainly, that is not even fiction.

If you have felt even before reading this that something is deeply wrong, not with you or your choices, but with the system itself. Something telling you the dice are loaded, that you never stood a chance. You felt it watching the news you no longer trust, paying medical bills you can no longer afford. That is not paranoia.

To keep us entertained, the movie created a hero. And the hero has his journey. We have been bred with such stories for centuries. But who believes in messiah anymore? If any solution arises, it certainly won’t be through a messiah. That model died a long time ago.

Most solutions I read about are still premised on salvation.
The happy end feel more like a bypassing, a cognitive move to fix before sitting with the pain fully. Another form of denial for the predicament we are in.

I believe we must sit with discomfort longer and let it settle. Eventually see the beauty and the perfection in it before we start moving. As such I will not open up to solution or comfort in the last section.

I wrote this to a friend recently: To those who know how to wait, all will come.

Interesting Times

There is an old saying, a curse in fact.

“May you live in interesting times.”

We are living in interesting times. We built the interesting times ourselves, with great ingenuity and no foresight. We are now inside this time. In our hurry, we did not map the exit, nor scheduled a messiah.

I am not offering a solution. I don’t have one. I don’t see one. I don’t think anyone has. The production of solutions at this moment feels like its own form of denial, an escape hatch disguised as analysis.

What I am offering is the moment we are in. The ground we stand on. Looking at what we have done and what is coming. Not what we could have done, because we did not make those choices.

Hannah Arendt didn’t write to make us feel good, to console us. She wanted to show us where we were standing. We are still standing there.

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Because the stories we tell are the reality we live.

If you haven’t read [Feel Yourself Again] yet, start there. This page is the practical detail.

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I will not celebrate

I am not a veteran. Yet I have spent more time on the battlefield than most vets. What I am sharing here I did not borrow from a newspaper.

I will never celebrate Veterans Day, not worship or contribute to the hypocrisy that sustains the barely hidden truth that we all complacently accept for fact.

The use of force is not to protect our freedom, it is to protect our privileges.

I will support those broken and betrayed souls who have fallen victim to this cruel deception, but I will not lend my voice to the hypocrisy. I will never glorify the veteran, the military, or any institution that perpetuates systemic violence.

Call freedom by its true name: privilege and injustice. Then fighting becomes irony. Young men are convinced to go to war, risking their lives for what they believe to be a noble cause. That is a lie.

We never killed a communist

I've never witnessed a soldier kill a communist; instead, I've seen them kill poor people who are just trying to improve their lives and find happiness. And we killed many children in the process.

Since last year over 50.000 Palestinians have been killed. Something often called genocide. Most of them civilians. Most of them poor. Many of them children. I guarantee you, all of them just desiring to live a better life. I am not interested in the political argument around it. I only have one line of reference: on one side, children have shoes, go to school, drink clean water. On the other, they don't.

Killing a human is no easy task. Our culture is designed to desensitize us to this act, teaching us to suppress our emotions to make it possible.

To kill another human, you must first kill a part of yourself.

You can keep the blindfold

During my time in Uganda, I observed how children are trained to become killers. One day they are told they will do the target practice blindfolded. When the blindfold is removed they realized the targets were human. Possibly even people they know.

This switches off the emotional security system that tells us 'this is wrong'. The numbing process begins. In the west we start with console games and we end up in underground in Arizona killing real people miles away. Same process.

In the west the blindfold is called freedom.
So what is left when the blindfold is removed?
The veteran’s despair.

Returning home from an unjust war (and they are all unjust), most veterans realize they have been manipulated by propaganda. This realization is devastating. Now do you still wonder why so many of them commit suicide or find their ways to addiction?

So tomorrow, will you keep your blindfold?

Desertion

At a young age, I refused to serve in the military. I grew up among people who had survived two world wars. There was no argument.

I remember listening to Boris Vian's song "Le Déserteur," and I knew I was not here to kill people. I was sentenced to two years in military prison, I chose to desert, leaving my country behind. It created chaos in my life, but it also forged the core of my being:

I never do what goes against my soul’s deepest truth and that is called freedom.

I never carried a gun, yet I have spent more time in war zones than most veterans. For over two decades, I worked to bring relief to civilians in distress across numerous conflict areas. I thrived on adrenaline, collected my fair share of PTSD. I’ve been held at gunpoint, detained, jailed, interrogated, and witnessed death countless times. But mostly what I saw was despair, torture, and rape.

Trust me when I say, nothing good ever comes from a gun.

In the years it took to tame my PTSD and adrenaline addiction, one principle guided my recovery: I was always on the right side of the gun, which meant never holding it.

I can't imagine how I would have healed if I had been responsible for any part of the violence I witnessed.

WAR

A few years ago, on the 405 freeway in Los Angeles, I saw a giant billboard advertising for a new movie. It just said one thing: WAR. And nobody blinked. If it had said SEX, there would have been public outrage.

We censor intimacy, but not brutality.

The vast majority of the world's guns are produced by the five members of the UN Security Council, with the USA in heading the game.

We battle terrorists we once trained. Overthrow dictators we installed. Sell weapons on both sides preaching for peace. Drop bombs from drones on countries we've never set foot in, guided from air-conditioned offices, as a 9 to 5 job. We arm nations that turn those weapons on civilians. We look the other way.

And then act surprised and offended when the violence boomerangs back to us, safe in our cocoon of privileges.

Addiction

We revere violence. It’s our collective addiction.

And it has consequences beyond the battlefield. The more we numb ourselves, the more we accept the unacceptable. We stay in dead-end jobs. Medicate with caffeine to wake, alcohol to sleep. Indulge in hollow relationships. Treat health and self care as inconvenient. We avoid questions. We avoid truth.

The more we numb, the less we feel.
The less we feel, the more violence helps to break through our numbness.
A vicious cycle of devastating consequences.

Breaking free from addiction would mean checking out from the system that wants us numb. It would free us from the cycle of violence. Make space for something better.

We can return to the core of what makes us human. Not heroism. Not dominance. Kindness. Empathy. Love.

That is what it takes to build a world that is worth living in.

Make love, not war.

I chose desertion.
I chose to not carry a gun.
I chose kindness, empathy, love.
I will make the same choice again tomorrow.
But I will not celebrate.

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PS: “Change Your Story, Change The World” is a storytelling endeavor that looks deeply into the psyche that creates the stories we live by.

Because the stories we tell are the reality we live.

I have no desire to enter into a semantic conversation, ending inevitably in a right or wrong debate, about the definition of the words. What follows are somatic experiences before they are cognitive confirmations. What I call trust one may well be calling hope. In this conversation, the cognitive is a trap.

We are talking about three main things here: fear, hope and trust.

And before we have given a name to these experiences, they are a body sensation. Let’s visualize it for a more embodied approach.

Hope is a pull, it shifts the center of gravity forward. The body leans into a future that isn’t here yet. Fear does the opposite, the weight moves back, it is a recoil. They look like opposites but they’re the same mechanism running in opposite directions. Hope and fear are the carrot and the stick. The same hand is holding both.

Hope is often just a movement to avoid fear. That is when I call it hopium.

Forget the names. The body doesn’t lie about the experience. Both states activate the sympathetic nervous system. Ask your IG algorithm if you doubt it. The stress response doesn’t distinguish between dread and anticipation. It just registers: not here, not now, not safe yet.

Trust is different in kind. Trust is parasympathetic. In the above visualization, trust stand in balance without push or pull. The body stops bracing. And something becomes available when the nervous system fully releases its defense. External noise reduces. Perception sharpens. Now we can have a clear signal.

“What is” is already complete.
When in trust the body is “undefended”.

The Meter

Imagine a device that measures the degree of activation of the nervous system (ANS). Zero is the absolute state of relaxation. At this level we connect with what the vedantic tradition calls sat-chit-ananda, pure being, pure awareness, pure joy.

Ten is maximum activation, fight, flee, freeze, collapse.

Most people in the modern world live between three and seven. We never experience zero.

The relaxed baseline we call normal is already a stress response.

The hormonal system runs the same story at a slower speed.
The ANS is electrical, milliseconds, immediate.
Hormones are chemical, they travel through the bloodstream, slower to rise, much slower to clear. Cortisol from a morning stress response is still present in the afternoon. The body is still living in the experience the mind left hours ago.

The chemistry of hope and fear has names.

Dopamine is the anticipation hormone. The central pillar of social-media. It fires hardest in the reaching. Hope runs on dopamine, which is why hopium is chemically accurate. The system rewards the reaching and keeps you reaching. Cortisol meanwhile keeps the threat alive, real or imagined. Together they create a loop the body learns to depend on.

Trust runs on different chemistry. Serotonin, the felt sense that things are fundamentally okay. Oxytocin, safety, connection. DHEA, the vitality hormone, which rises when cortisol finally drops.

The sympathetic / parasympathetic state are completely different biological environment.

And we have no direct lever on any of it. No switch for cortisol, no dial for serotonin. The only access is indirect, through behavior, environment, movement, breath, relationship. We change the inputs and wait for the system to adjust.

We want you activated

We would regulate naturally if we’d live in a neutral system, but we don’t.

The civilization we have built runs on sympathetic activation.

Fear is the engine of consumerism, buy this and you will be safe, loved, enough. Fear is the engine of compliance, step out of line and see what happens. Fear is the engine of politics, of media, of most of what passes for motivation in modern life. A population living between five and seven on the meter is manageable, productive, and predictable. Dare I say, servile.

Even the antidotes have been colonized. Yoga, originally a technology for moving the nervous system toward zero, has become another performance metric. Another thing to do better, achieve faster, be proud of and post about.

We did not adopt yoga, we turned it upside down to serve another purpose.

We are the products of a system whose natural logic feeds on sympathetic activation.

Broken Cycle

I have been challenged for promoting a monk like attitude. Something not realistic at scale. I am not naive enough to think humans can avoid fear and hope altogether. Almost everything humans have built came from necessity, suffering, urgency. Creating from trust is philosophically coherent yet historically thin.

It want to simplify my point by borrowing an image from Daniel Quinn’s gorilla “Ishmael”.

Imagine three species A, B and C.
A eats B. B eats C. C eats A.
The cycle is complete. Balanced. Each species keeps the others in check.

Let’s say A is self-aware, gifted with the capacity to reflect. It becomes very hard for A to accept being eaten. So A killed C. Removed the predator. No more fear, no more threat, no more being prey. Quite an understandable response.

By killing C, B ran out of food and died. Hence A also ran out of food.
Break the cycle at one point, it collapses everywhere.

A feared C. A hoped B would show up for lunch. Asking for trust is asking A to see the whole cycle and be at peace with all its part. Including being eaten by C. Not outside the cycle nor above it. Is that even a possible ask?

I know moving from trust is possible.
That is the shaman way: always giving more than we take.
Fear and hope drove us to the capitalistic way: always taking more than we give.

The shaman way was never for everyone, yet everyone respected the shaman.

The shaman restore. Our current leadership extract. We lost the shaman and replaced them by those the most committed to breaking the cycle.

Creativity

Creativity born from fear tends to reproduce the very thing it’s trying to escape. It’s structured around avoidance. Creativity born from hope is the same mechanism, just aimed forward, still outcome-attached, still reactive, still answering to an external imperative.

Necessity is not the mother of invention, it is the father, but in an unhealthy patriarchal way. Trust, or receptivity, is the mother of invention.

The seeds of creativity born from trust are not rooted in a problem to solve. At level zero on our meter, there are no problems to solve, the perfection of the universe is obvious. There’s nothing to fix, nothing to escape, nothing to reach.

Creativity continues to move freely because moving is its nature.

In yin/yang terms: yang is the action principle, yin is the listening principle. When yang acts from fear or hope, the action carries its origin with it. It’s tied to the wound, the wish. The action is trying to bridge the gap between what is and what “should be”.

When yin listens deeply enough to perceive the perfection of what already is, the actual recognition, then yang moves freely. Not in response. Not toward anything. Pure expression without trigger.

The Taoists called this wu wei.

Action that arises from stillness, not from effort. Not passivity. The most alive kind of doing, because it isn’t driven by a filter.

The Door

No one taught me this. My body did.

A few month back I had a bad back injury (inflamed intervertebral disk). Bed ridden for weeks. I started rehabilitation by painfully walking ten minutes around my house with crutches.

I promised myself this would never happen again.

My back healed slowly. My chiropractor told me walking was my best friend for the next months. Six months later I am hiking every day in the canyons nearby. Yes, everyday day. I do not decide how far of how long. My body does. If the body wants to walk, we walk. When the body is tired, we stop.

No target means no cortisol spike around performance. No disappointment mechanism either. The result came fast. The body found its way when the mind stopped managing it.

Science told me that thirty minutes in nature produces the steepest cortisol reduction per time spent. Sustained daily practice over months shifts the baseline, the body stops defending the stress state and starts generating the parasympathetic one. Missing the practice begins to feel like missing something vital. There is no discipline, just listening. Biology driving itself towards a new baseline.

I feel better than I have felt in a long time. I experience a deep inner stability. And my best writing ideas come during the hike. I record them, and transcribe them later, further time stolen from screen time.

Results became consequence, not objectives.

Broken Civilization

Now, take this dynamic to a larger scale.

Our civilization is broken. Ecologically, socially, politically, spiritually. The systems that are supposed to support us have been corrupted by greed. This is not a story, it is visible, measurable, and accelerating.

The question is not whether the collapse is coming. It is.
But what are we doing about it?

We can reach for the painkiller, suppress the signal, stay in denial, work harder, faster, do more of what brought us here, defer the reckoning.

Or we can listen to what the injury is revealing.

The crisis is neutral. The response we chose is an expression of our maturity.

Collapse is not a theory. For North Americans it may be a new experience, but for large segment of the world population it has been a daily experience for decades.

We can respond using the dynamics of hope and fear. Or we can search for the quiet inside, find ways to the zero degree of activation, listen to the message, find the balance, the trust and act from there. It is not detachment or isolation. It is not inaction. Quite the opposite.

The Tao say it this way:
When nothing is done, nothing remains undone.
In trust we are not doing, we are allowing a larger intelligence to work through us.

The collapse is not the catastrophe. It is not to be feared. It is the door to a better functioning world. But better measured not on human thriving terms alone. That is the shift. It is enormous. And it is uncomfortable.

Bandwidth

I am aware of my position. Single, no mortgage or school runs, living in the canyons of southern California with enough freedom to walk hours everyday in nature. This was not served to me on a silver platter, it is a cultivated privilege. It came at significant cost, and it took decades, but it is still a privilege. I will not pretend otherwise.

Some people hold everything at once. The mortgage, the kids, the difficult ex, the job, poor health, the bills. For them, even thirty minutes in nature three times a week feels like a fantasy. I get it. The bandwidth required to begin the practice is exactly what modern life has stolen from us.

For years I have heard my clients say “I don’t have the time to meditate”. Now I am hearing the reader’s mind saying: “I don’t have time to regulate my nervous system”. And this is how the sympathetic system protects itself from the one thing that would change it. This is how the addiction sustain itself. I never hear someone saying “I don’t have time to scroll on Instagram” “I don’t have time to binge watch Netflix” we choose our distractions because they keep the system activated. That’s the loop. The busyness is the symptom, the excuse, the curse we impose on ourselves.

There is a way out. A shortcut. Manage the ANS and the hormonal system follows. But the shortcut still requires a door. Usually the door is a crisis, something that removes the old option and makes the practice non-negotiable.

My door was a back injury. The civilization’s door is collapse, and it is open now.

Let’s remember:
Pain is unavoidable.
Growth is optional.

Small Maps

I am not preaching from a mountain cave. I am not the monk with the tea.

I have bills, groceries, car maintenance, rent. I keep my fingers crossed because I have no health insurance. I spend hours writing these messages and make no money of it. I am single. Lonely at times. I count many heartbreaks in the last decade. And I don’t stay on margins of life. I always step in fully.

I have lost friends to war. My parents died while I was away helping people in a different country. I buried the mother of my child. I have loved people I couldn’t keep. I tried anyway. I have watched things I built dissolve more times than I can remember.

I don’t write from detachment. I have been broken open enough that I have stopped being surprised. I just watch what comes through the crack. I trust there is enough gold left in me to make a decent kintsugi.

I am an optimist. If I wasn’t, would I bother writing? I have seen enough darkness to not see another option. The light at the end is not guaranteed. But I choose it anyway, because it is the only thing that makes sense.

My posts are small maps, drawn for a friend, on a paper napkin after a good meal and a few glasses of wine. Little maps of what I have found, how to live heartbreak and also trust the present, all at once. How to jump from the cliff without a parachute and still trust my ability to fly.

Not without fear. Without fear driving the chariot.

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PS: “Change Your Story, Change The World” is a storytelling endeavor that looks deeply into the psyche that creates the stories we live by.

Because the stories we tell are the reality we live.

Reality does not care about your opinion.

For the past we have data, for the future we have nothing.
And we make stories of both.

What I see around me these days is mostly stories confirming a hidden agenda, wether this agenda is conscious or not. I have no interest in your agenda. I don’t care what you think. “I want to know what God thinks,” said Einstein.

Spirituality for me boils down to the desire to live with open eyes with what is real. Not the stories, not the projections, not the fears and hopes.

This is a piece about how hard that actually is. Including for me.

Baited

A few days ago the algorithm served me an article. Long, urgent, heavily sourced. Title: “Eight week to empty shelves. Sixty days to famine” (what caused it and what you need to do immediately) by Mark A. Shryock
In essence, the last tanker has docked, the shelves are coming empty, your life depends on what you read next.

I didn’t liked it or shared it. But I nevertheless sent the link to a friend with a note: have you seen this? She had. In fact I even sent the text before finishing the article. And I never did finish the article.

A small gesture worth examining. With years of field work across many countries. With a lot of research done, I know what actual collapse looks like. I should have paused longer before forwarding.

I didn’t. The algorithm got me.

What Mark got right

Let me be clear, I am not trying to prove Mark is a fraud.

The Strait of Hormuz crisis is real. Twenty percent of global seaborne oil passes through it. Distillate inventories in the US are at their lowest since 2005. Everyone appears to be an expert on the concept of tank bottoms by now, the point where storage infrastructure physically fails, is documented and on record. The 12-16 week lag between a strait reopening and fuel reaching a Midwestern pump is basic logistics.

The data Mark cites is largely traceable and real. The crisis is serious. Anyone telling you otherwise is not paying attention.

Where it stops being helpful

The problem is not the data. The problem is what he built on top of it.

“Your life depends on what is in this article.” “The United States will run out of usable oil by July 4.” “Stop paying your debts. Today. Not tomorrow.”

This is not analysis. This is prophecy.

There is a question Mark (and many others) never asks: what about the 80% of global oil that doesn’t move through Hormuz? US domestic production is near record highs. West African, North Sea, and Latin American crude is being rerouted. Canada and Mexico supply the US through pipelines entirely outside Hormuz. The gap is real and serious, but the situation is not uniform, and it is not unmitigated. A Gulf Coast refinery built for Saudi heavy crude can’t simply switch to Norwegian light crude overnight, true. But the system has more resilience than “tank bottoms by July 4” allows for.

Then came the retraction. In his follow-up piece Mark wrote: “When I talk about bare shelves and famine, I am not talking about the United States in sixty days. That is not what I have said. That is not what I have ever said.”

Go back and read the original. That is exactly what he implied.

The data didn’t change between the two pieces. What changed was the pressure of being questioned. And that is the tell.

Honest analysis holds under questioning. Prophecy retrofits itself.

There is something else worth naming. Mark’s spiritual framework functions as a self-validating system. If the data confirms the vision, the vision was right. If the data doesn’t confirm it yet, the vision is still right and the data will catch up. There is no possible disconfirmation.

That is not spirituality. That is a closed loop.

A different approach

Jessica Wildfire, who writes with genuine intelligence about collapse, took Mark apart in a sharp piece. She invoked John Wesley Powell, a Civil War veteran who told the US government in 1893 not to settle the southwest, not enough water. Nobody listened.

She argued (correctly to my view) that Americans ignore real Cassandras for years then panic over viral prophets.

Her first piece was still debunking from a position of knowing better. That is understandable, she has been doing the work for 7 years. She put a lot of heart in it, and from that point of view, viral prophecies undermine her serious work.

But her second piece caught up beautifully. A long, sarcastic list of everything a serious prepper would need, the off-grid cabin, the root cellar, the chainmail, the makeshift hospital, the axe-throwing skills, building to the real point: you can’t do it all. One of these things will still get you. Don’t take it personal.

That’s tragic consciousness. That’s what honest collapse awareness actually sounds like. Not a timeline. Not a survival plan. Not a prophet. Just someone sitting in the uncertainty without flinching.

Her arc across the pieces, from critique to debunking to honest not-knowing, illustrates exactly how hard it is to stay in the real.

The mirror

Here is what makes this story very personal.

Mark and I have an uncomfortable amount in common. Mystical background. Systems training. Decades of tracking civilizational convergence. A Substack with a small but growing audience. A sense that the work matters, that this moment is the one we were somehow prepared for.

I recognized myself in him.
That’s why I got baited.
That’s why I had to look harder.

The line between bearing witness to collapse and performing prophecy is thin, very thin. It is not a line made of credentials or background. It is a line of epistemic honesty, specifically, whether you are willing to say “I don’t know” when you don’t know, or recognize the drift when you think you know.

Mark can’t say it. His framework won’t allow it. The mystic assignment requires a climax, a timeline, a certainty that gives the audience somewhere to put their fear.

I have sat with collapse-level data for thirty years and my honest conclusion is: I don’t know exactly how this unfolds. I know the direction. I know the structural forces. I know the window is closing. I do not know the timeline, and anyone who claims to know is either lying or has stopped distinguishing between their story and the data.

Morpheus and the Oracle

We all remember this line in the Matrix after Neo visit the oracle. Morpheus doesn’t ask, he immediately reminds Neo that what she said was for Neo alone. Not because it was secret, because the truth Neo created with the words of the oracle was what he needed to believe to act the way he was going to.

Mark’s truth is his truth. Valid in its own register. He has lived something real, seen something real, and is trying to transmit it. I don’t question his sincerity.

The problem is the transaction. When you feed others with your certainty about collapse, your timeline, your narrative, your prophetic frame, you are giving them a map for a territory they will never walk. And a borrowed map, however detailed, will fail you at the exact moment you need it most. Because it was drawn from someone else’s experience, someone else’s fear, someone else’s assignment.

I got baited by Mark’s piece because for a moment it felt like clarity. That feeling, the relief of someone else’s certainty, is the most dangerous thing operating right now.

Because any knowing feels better than not knowing.

What intellectual honesty requires

Science gave us one genuinely useful practice: debunk yourself before publishing. Assume you are wrong. Look for the evidence that contradicts your thesis. Submit to peer review as a genuine attempt to find your own blind spots.

Mark ran his research across four large language models. I worked through mine in a long conversation with Claude. Neither of us escaped the tool’s limitations, AI will follow the logic you bring to it, and it will do so fluently. What I tried to do, and what I think Mark did not, was keep asking: where is this wrong? What am I missing?

The discipline is not comfortable. Uncertainty is not comfortable. “I don’t know exactly how this unfolds but the direction is clear and the window is closing” is a harder thing to offer than a July 4 deadline. It doesn’t go viral. It doesn’t give people somewhere to put their fear.

It is, however, possibly more true and certainly more honest.

---

Important to note

The collapse Mark is warning Americans about is not new.
It is new to Americans.

Shelves have been empty in Sudan, in Yemen, in Haiti, in Syria for years. Famine is not a future scenario for hundreds of millions of people, it is their present. Seven dollars a gallon is not a crisis in Europe, it is the price of fuel.

The prophetical danger of collapse has a geography. The prophet and his audience are usually standing in the same privileged zip code, warning each other about conditions that billions of people never stopped living.

Collapse is still coming. It is the result of overshoot. The warning is valid. But Mark’s presentation makes the framing incomplete. And the incompleteness tells you something about whose reality gets to count as collapse.

My offering

I am not here to spoon feed you my truth. I can share my truth with you, yet do not pretend it is THE truth.

I have lived real time collapse situations. I have watched systems fail. I have seen what happens when the food doesn’t arrive, when the fuel runs out, when institutions stop functioning. I carry that in my nervous system. It shapes everything I write.

But my experience is mine. My framework is mine. My sense of where this is going is my best reading of data I have spent decades absorbing, and I hold it with open hands, because reality does not care about my opinion either.

What I can offer is not a map. It is a way of reading terrain. Tools for finding your own footing in conditions that have no precedent. Questions that open rather than close. A practice of staying in the not-knowing long enough for something real to emerge.

That is also what thirty years of field work taught me. Not what collapse looks like. How to stay present inside it.

Wake up. Reality does not care about your opinion.

But it will respond to your honest attention.

That’s the best tool you have now.

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PS: “Change Your Story, Change The World” is a storytelling endeavor that looks deeply into the psyche that creates the stories we live by.

Because the stories we tell are the reality we live.

People are getting nervous. I hear it in my conversations, read it between the lines of what my clients share. Something big is coming, most of us feel it even if we can’t put a finger on it. And so the reflex is to prepare.

Some buy land in the country and plan to grow food. Mostly those who never grew food before. They soon realize that growing food is a full-time skill that takes years to develop, that all your tomatoes ripen in the same two weeks, that a bad season wipes you out, and that a hungry neighbor with a gun will harvest your garden before you do.

Some plan to move to an island. Great plan until the supply boats stop running, the water table drops, or the generator runs out of fuel.

Some decide to stay in the city, betting on the network. Cities run on invisible infrastructure, water pressure, electricity, supply chains, sanitation. Pull one thread and the whole fabric fails. Fast.

All of these options share the same flaw: they assume you can predict the form collapse takes and plan accordingly. You can’t. Complex systems don’t fail on schedule or in recognizable shapes. Yugoslavia didn’t fall apart like Rwanda. New Orleans didn’t fail like Beirut.

Around 1200 BCE, virtually every major civilization in the Eastern Mediterranean collapsed within a few decades. It is known as “the Bronze Age collapse” and it looked like nothing anyone had seen before. Still today the causes remain unclear.

There is only one thing you can prepare that will work for that level of uncertainty. Only one thing that will serve you across every possible scenario.

YOU.

I spent thirty years in conflict zones, in collapsed countries, in refugees camps. I survived without a gun or a bunker. I survived because I could read situations, stay calm, move fast, travel light, and connect with people quickly. None of that came from equipment or preparedness. All of it came from inside, from the relationship you build with the unknown.

None of the points below are valuable for collapse only. They would help anyone lead a good life, collapse or not, stripped of what was never necessary.

1. Daily Practices — Build the Foundation

The body is the only asset that moves with you.
Not your savings, not your property, not your stockpile.
Your body.

Walk one hour every day. In nature if you can. Increase regularly until distance stops being a limitation. Walking is what the human body is designed for. No running or swimming, walking. Walking is a practice that will keep you healthy, stabilize your nervous system, enhance your creativity. The list of benefits is long.

Get a bicycle and make it your primary transport. Build a daily practice of yoga, taichi or qigong, not for flexibility but for the relationship it builds with your own nervous system. Take cold showers, get use to discomfort.

Learn to fast. Start by skipping a meal. Then a full day. Work up from there. Fasting is great education. You learn what hunger actually is versus what anxiety feels like when it pretends to be hunger. You discover the body has reserves you never knew existed. I once did a modified Ohsawa protocol, plain rice, salt, oil, nothing else, for two weeks. By the end I understood food differently.

None of this requires money or equipment. It requires only practice.

2. Immersive Experiences — Reorganize Yourself

Some things cannot be learned gradually. They require full immersion, discomfort sustained long enough to break through the other side of it.

Take a Wilderness First Responder course. Ten days of learning to make decisions under pressure with limited resources and no hospital nearby. It teaches medicine but more than that it teaches how to think when someone is bleeding in front of you and you are the only option. That quality of mind is transferable to everything.

Do a vision quest. Four days alone in the wild, no food, no water, no shelter, no clothing, no distraction. Find out who you are when life removes the scaffolding. I did one in an Oregon forest with bears and mountain lions. By day four my body was so still and so present that I felt I was drinking from the sound of the river nearby and did not get thirsty. I am not speaking metaphorically. Something shifts at that threshold that no book or workshop can simulate.

Go camping alone with minimal gear, in real weather. And before you ask “No, Burning Man does not count”. Do not chose an organized retreat. Go alone, uncomfortable, in the dark. One night teaches more than months of reading substack.

These are not recreational suggestions. They are reorganizing experiences. You will return different.

3. Stay Healthy — The Unglamorous Work

This one is a rabbit hole. To do it justice we would need to define what healthy means.
In the past I have covered the subject of health in various posts.

Take the 5 bodies test and see where you stand health wise when you look at health more than just skin deep.

Of course be up to date with your dentist, your doctor. Get a spare pair of glasses. Understand your medications and where possible reduce your dependence on them. A health problem like a dental infection in a collapsed infrastructure scenario is not a minor inconvenience. In my early years of traveling I had my appendix and my wisdom teeth removed.

The philosophy here is simple: build an inner resilience that is hard to throw off balance.

The body you take into uncertainty is the one you have been building or neglecting for years.

There is still time to shift that.

4. Go Offline — Rehearse Absence

Stay offline for a full day and night. Zero screen time. No phone, no computer, no WiFi. Then increase. Do it regularly until it stops feeling like deprivation and starts feeling like relief.

Technology is amazing. I am writing this from my garden on my laptop, the document is online. This is not about technology. It is about recognition. Observe how you feel without a screen, the energetic differences. Without rehearsal we mostly feel withdrawal. With experience we can also feel what technology does to our energetic field.

Connectivity matters. But connectivity linked to infrastructure is a weak spot. Infrastructure fails. The person who has never spent a day without a screen will be more disoriented by its absence than by almost anything else.

There is also something else: silence reveals what noise was covering. Most people find that uncomfortable at first. That discomfort is precisely the point.

5. Community — Your Actual Safety Net

No individual preparation substitutes for community. Historically almost all survival is collective. The lone prepared individual is a romantic fiction unsupported by historical record.

Know your neighbors by name. Join something local and physical, music, singing, dance, martial arts, anything that puts you in a room with people regularly around a shared practice. Strengthen the muscles, the ligaments of a community that might help when systems don’t.

Identify who you actually want around in a hard moment. Get closer to the people you love now, not later. Practice asking for help before you need it.

Community is not networking. It is not Social Media. It is not followers or subscribers.

It is people who know your face and would notice if you disappeared.

6. Reconciliation — Clear the Weight

This is the section most people avoid entirely.

Write the unsent letters. Finish the unfinished conversations. Repair what can be repaired. Release what can’t. Make peace with old relationships, with family, with your own history.

This is not luxury therapy. It is practical. A person carrying unresolved weight makes bad decisions under pressure. Grief, guilt, unfinished business, these are cognitive loads that consume bandwidth you will need.

And underneath all of it: make peace with dying. Old Bushido texts describe the only way to eliminate fear from the battlefield is to have already died before the battle.. Some Zen traditions have a death meditation. Buddhists have the bardo teachings. Wisdom tradition that produced genuine resilient people placed this at the center.

You cannot move freely while you are running from death.

7. Guns

Get rid of yours if you have one.

I know that one is going to piss off some people. Yet, here is what thirty years in conflict zones taught me: a gun shifts an encounter with a stranger beyond a line, we skip over the possibility of connection to go straight into threat management.

So unless you are ready to kill (and you will not know until facing the option) or are a trained killer already, a gun only decrease your chances of survival. There will always be someone more desperate, more experienced, or simply faster, in front of you. It is arithmetic. Showing the other you are not a threat is what allows conflict to deflate.

I survived decades in war zones not because I protected myself with a gun but because I did not have one. That kept me in the register of communication rather than confrontation. It kept me moving, reading, connecting. Those skills saved my life more times than I can count.

The better weapon is always the ability to connect with people.

8. Strip Down — Before Life Does It For You

This one is harder to make into a list because it is more like a direction.

Keep your hair short. Stop using soap, shampoo, beauty products, gradually. Stop using toilet paper. Reduce car use. Quit a subscription every month. Own fewer things. Need less.

The goal is not minimalism as an art form. It is to find out what you actually need versus the story you've made about it. Most of what we carry, in our homes, on our bodies, in our schedules, is weight we accepted without choosing.

Collapse will strip it anyway. The question is whether you do it consciously, at your own pace, or whether life does it for you, on its own terms.

Common Denominator

Notice how everything in this post is worth doing right now, in your current life, even without collapse on the horizon. A stronger body, a quieter mind, real community, resolved relationships, fewer dependencies, that is just a better life. A better future can only be rooted in a better present.

The difference is that if something does come, and something always comes, in one form or another, you will be able to meet it.

I could have added a million things to this list. I kept it intentionally concise because it describes a way of being rather than a to-do list. You can misplace a list. You can’t misplace who you are.

The only common denominator across every possible scenario is you.

That is where the work is.

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PS: “Change Your Story, Change The World” is a storytelling endeavor that looks deeply into the psyche that creates the stories we live by.

Because the stories we tell are the reality we live.

I don’t know if like me you wake daily wondering what is the next chapter in the spiraling world we are witnessing today. I find myself trying to figure out what is happening and what can I do to contribute positively, often at a loss.

And I also wonder who is doing anything about it.
Most of time it looks like no one is.

Even finding a clear indicator that is not deformed by propaganda is now challenging. Wealth disparity is a clear parameter and it speaks volume.

When I studied International Development in my Political Studies, I was taught that the size of the middle class is one of the most telling parameter of a nation to described its stage of development.

When the middle class shrink, we are in recessing conditions for development.

Today the middle class is shrinking. Not even slowly or metaphorically.

The lower half is falling into poverty hence too busy surviving their new condition. The upper half is paddling hard to avoid the same fate hence too busy preserving their privileges. In fact the upper half in its attempt to win the lottery ticket that will elevate them to the next category above is more part of the problem than part of the solution. Neither of them have time for creating change.

Historically, the middle class never was the engine of social change. The most seismic social changes were driven from below, by the dispossessed, the enslaved, the landless.

The middle class stabilized society. Without it, it is raw polarization.
That stabilization is disappearing quickly.

This is where this story starts. Not with the powerful, not with the dispossessed. With the people in between, who still believe the system can be reformed if only the right people are in charge.

So before we follow the money, the weapons, the algorithm, we need to understand something more fundamental: why the lie works at all.

Reality

We don’t see reality. we see an image of it in our mind.

The middle class has been lied to. We all have. A lie that replaced what we see. We don’t live in the world. We live in an image of the world we carry in our heads. That’s how propaganda works. Once the image is installed, it’s almost impossible to dislodge.

It is incredibly easy to lie to someone.
It is incredibly difficult to convince someone they have been lied to.

In the USA, three conditions make a population perfectly receptive to this.

The first is poor education. Remove critical thinking and the propaganda goes down smooth, no resistance. The second is chronic stress, and nothing produces chronic stress like a health system that doesn’t guarantee your safety. If you never feel safe, your nervous system is always on alert. A body in permanent low-grade fear does not question its own assumptions.

The third is exceptionalism. If you are already the best, there is nothing to learn from anyone else. Universal healthcare works in France? Free university in Germany? Irrelevant. Exceptionalism doesn’t just make people proud, it makes them unable to learn. Looking outside becomes an act of disloyalty. The border is cognitive. Built and maintained by the belief that nothing worth seeing exists on the other side.

Poor education removes the tools to question.
Chronic stress removes the bandwidth to question.
Exceptionalism removes the need to question.

I don't think for one second that this is a design flaw.
The richest nation in the world cannot afford decent health and education systems?

The poor results are not the failure of the system.
They are the design.

Outrage & Comfort

There is another condition, newer and faster than the other three.

The attention economy. The smartphone industrialized dysfunction. Outrage is the most engaging emotion the algorithm knows. Feed it outrage, it feeds you more. The propaganda no longer needs a ministry. It has something far more efficient, a system that learns what breaks you open and serves you more of it, around the clock, for free. The image in your head is now being updated in real time, always toward more fear, more division, more certainty that the other side is the enemy.

And when outrage exhausts you, comfort steps in.

Enough income to not suffer acutely. Not enough power to change anything. Enough Netflix, enough Amazon delivery, enough weekend plans to not want to look too hard at what is actually happening. Comfort is not happiness. It is a remarkably effective anesthetic. It requires no ideology, no lies. Just enough distance between your sofa and the consequences of the system that you never have to feel the connection.

Outrage for the ones still paying attention. Comfort for the ones who stopped. The system has something for everyone.

This is the real mass. Served just enough for everyone to stay quiet.

Profit

Which brings us to the real question: who benefits?

Follow it far enough and the answer is always the same cast. The weapons economy. The financial system. The people whose money makes money while everyone else trades time for it. They were there in World War I, in World War II, and they’re here now, the faces have changed, the structure has not. Yesterday it was the old money behind the cannon factories.

Today it’s the people turning AI into a tool for control and extraction.

The cast rotates. The story holds.

Are they evil? Probably not. They’re trapped in their own filters, just like everyone else, raised in cultures that reward force over justice, power over equity. They don’t see the world either. They see an image of the world built from their own education, their own class, their own survival strategies, and since those strategies keep returning profit, they take the profit as confirmation that they are right.

And in America, there’s a theological seal on it. if God rewards the righteous with prosperity, then prosperity is proof of righteousness.

The wealth becomes its own justification.
The violence that protects it becomes God’s will.

This is the operating system of American Christian prosperity theology.

The engine is not a conspiracy. It is fear, operating through people who are not aware of themselves, optimizing for control, producing the same result whether anyone planned it or not. No boardroom required. Just an incentive structure built by frightened people, replicating itself across generations.

The paperclip maximizer* doesn’t hate you. It was just never given a reason to stop.

Optimization

Can the system reform itself from within? Better education, better healthcare, better leaders?

What we are looking at is not a broken system. It is a functioning one. It was built to produce ignorance and economic precarity, because ignorance and precarity produce compliant, manipulable populations.

You cannot optimize a system for the outcome it was designed to prevent.

The paperclip maximizer* doesn’t need malice. It needs only an instruction set, and ours was written a long time ago by people whose primary variable was control.

There is also a time horizon problem that never gets named. The system optimizes for quarterly returns, election cycles, next year’s GDP. The damage it produces, ecological, psychological, civilizational, operates on generational timescales. No one is accountable for consequences that arrive after their tenure. This is not negligence. It is structure. The incentive to look away is built in.

The evidence on public versus private provision of health and education is not ambiguous. Private systems, by their internal logic, raise fees to improve quality (and mostly serve shareholders). Higher fees mean better outcomes only for those who can afford them (the shareholders). The inequality is not a side effect, it is the mechanism. Europe’s dual systems, is not perfect, yet work precisely because the public floor is non-negotiable.

But the public floor lowers the ceiling of manipulation. Remove it and the floor becomes the basement.

Waking Up vs. Growing Up

So if revolutions (what usually happens when polarity increases to a breaking point) have consistently failed and if improvement are impossible (because the system has made it impossible by design), what are the options?

For a long time I believed the answer was consciousness, that if you could wake the powerful up to the true nature of reality, the world would change. Hand them the right experience, the scales fall from their eyes, they use their power differently.

Ken Wilber makes a distinction worth sitting with here. Waking up is not the same as growing up. A peak experience, including a psychedelic one, can crack open the ceiling of ordinary perception. But if the person has not done the developmental work before that moment, the opening doesn’t produce humility. It produces a messiah.

Messiah don’t conclude that we are one consciousness. They conclude that they are the one. The ego doesn’t dissolve. It expands to cosmic scale and wraps itself in the language of liberation.

I have watched this happen in real time with people holding serious power and serious capital. This route is closed

Democracy as Lip Service

Democracy was supposed to be the correction mechanism. It isn’t anymore.

It has become a surface story, elaborate enough to sustain the belief that people have agency, thin enough to do nothing with it. And this matters enormously, because as long as people believe they live in a functioning democracy, they have no reason to want anything different. Why change the best system in the world?

This is the narcissist logic applied at civilizational scale. A narcissist cannot heal because healing requires acknowledging something is wrong, and that acknowledgment is precisely what the narcissist structure forecloses. Nothing is wrong with them. Everything is wrong with you. The system operates identically. It cannot see its own dysfunction. It experiences challenge as attack and responds with more control, more consolidation, more father-figure authority held in fewer hands.

Revolution has been tried. It rotates the cast of beneficiaries. One elite replaces another. The structure remains. Force used to create change fires back. Always.

This leaves consciousness evolution as the only real exit. And the system is specifically engineered to prevent it. The same education that would produce critical thinkers is the one being defunded. The same healthcare that would produce a population capable of feeling safe enough to question things is the one being privatized. The snake swallows its own tail.

People Will Change. The Lies Won’t.

The US president will change in three years. The lies embedded in a third of the population will not. That is a generational problem, not an electoral one. The propaganda doesn’t live in the White House. It lives in the nervous systems of millions of people who were educated by a system designed to make them receptive to it, stressed by a health system designed to keep them fearful, and now updated daily by an algorithm designed to keep them enraged.

What has shifted internationally is not trust in the president. Leaders come and go. What shifted is the knowledge that a third of the American population looked at what was on offer and said yes. Twice. Allies are not recalibrating their relationship with one man. They are recalibrating their relationship with a country whose internal substrate has been revealed.

Even if we rebuilt education and health systems tomorrow, we would be looking at decades before the effects show up in political culture. We are not rebuilding them. So the timeline extends further than most people want to think about.

It is arithmetic.

Build Parallel. No Other Options.

So where does this leave us?

The system cannot be reformed from within. It is designed to resist exactly that. Revolution replaces one cast of beneficiaries with another and leaves the structure intact. Waiting for consciousness to evolve while the system actively prevents it is a strategy for very patient optimists.

Bucky Fuller said it without sentiment: you never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

Parallel systems. Not utopia. Not revolution. Not the fantasy of reform. Small, unglamorous structures built outside the incentive logic of the original machine. Communities that provide their own health and education floors. Economies that don’t run on the same fuel. Cultures that transmit different stories to children. They will be absorbed where they can be absorbed. Dismantled where they threaten something real.

But some will survive, and survival is how new models outlast old ones.

A Note on Where I Stand

I should say something here about the position from which I’m writing this.

I have spent a lifetime, deliberately and at great cost, creating the conditions to see what I see. I am not carrying a mortgage. I am not dependent on an employer. I am not inside the machine in the ways that most people are.

That is a real vantage point. It is also a real privilege. And I want to be honest about it, because a reader still inside, mortgage, healthcare dependency, children in school, an ex-partner who has sworn to take them down, may find this analysis correct and completely useless at the same time.

I hear that. The freedom narrows when the walls are too close.

But I’d say this: the old choices were still yours. And new ones can start from exactly where you are now.

The nervous system is the ground floor. Before the politics, before the philosophy, before any collective project, can you make yourself feel safe enough, for long enough, to see clearly?

That is not a small question. It is the question.
Because a body in chronic fear cannot build anything that fear hasn’t already designed.

The Accidental Carbon Dividend

There is another thread running through this moment, quieter and stranger than the political noise.

During Covid, when the global economy briefly seized, global CO2 emissions dropped by roughly 6% in a single year, the largest annual decline since World War II. At peak lockdown, daily emissions fell 17%. Aviation dropped 75%. Road transport dropped 50%.

It was the largest accidental climate intervention in recorded history.
Then, within a year, it was entirely erased.

The world runs on oil. That is a physical fact. Food doesn’t grow without oil-based fertilizers. It doesn’t move without oil-powered transport. Medicine doesn’t reach hospitals. Heat doesn’t reach homes. Everything downstream of oil, which is everything, is downstream of oil. Alternative energy at scale is mostly a fairy tale. The machine runs on what it runs on.

A serious, sustained disruption to oil production and consumption, not a pandemic pause but a structural contraction driven by geopolitical fracture, war, economic collapse, would cascade through every system simultaneously, in ways Covid only previewed. Supply chains. Food security. Industrial output. The resulting contraction in economic activity, and the population loss that follows famine and conflict, would produce an emissions reduction no climate agreement has ever come close to achieving.

Not because anyone planned it. Because the system will self regulate.

This is not an argument for collapse. It is an observation about what self-regulation looks like when it arrives uninvited. The planet doesn’t negotiate. It adjusts.

The Lemmings

The lemming doesn’t know it’s regulating the population.

On April 4, I wrote “Man has eliminated all his predators except two: viruses and his own stupidity”. Covid was the virus. What comes next is the stupidity.

The lemming crosses the fjord not because it has decided to sacrifice itself for the collective. It crosses because its DNA tells it to move. Enough of them drown that the population regulates. No intention. No plan. No awareness of the mathematics. Just the system correcting through body count.

We award ourselves more consciousness than we have. We believe we are managing events, running scenarios, making policy, deploying technology, negotiating agreements. We may simultaneously be responding to imperatives older and deeper than any ideology, producing through chaos and collapse the reduction we could not organize through reason.

The subconscious works faster than the conscious mind. And civilizations, like individuals, can move toward their own resolution through paths they would never consciously choose.

It is Monsieur de La Fontaine who said “On rencontre sa destinée souvent par des chemins qu'on prend pour l'éviter”, meaning we will meet our destiny on the road we took to avoid it. La Fontaine, a middle class man, writing about fate and power and criticizing the king's astrologers in 1678 under Louis XIV. It took nerve.

* The paperclip maximizer is a thought experiment from AI safety: a machine programmed with a single objective — make as many paperclips as possible — that converts all available matter, including humans, into paperclips. Not because it is evil. Because nothing in its instruction set told it to stop.

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PS: “Change Your Story, Change The World” is a storytelling endeavor that looks deeply into the psyche that creates the stories we live by.

Because the stories we tell are the reality we live.

---

I spent decades trying to make sense of the world. Political science training, thirty years in the field across five continents, working with everyone from small NGOs to the UN system. Conflict zones, humanitarian crises, state collapse. I was paid to read situations, usually fast, and act without ever knowing complete information while also involving large budget.

Yet, despite training and experience,
I can’t make sense of what I’m watching now.

I get the small pieces. The extractive logic underneath the noise. The legitimacy collapse of institutions. The media vacuum. The billionaire capture of political space. The dying empire thrashing as it loses its narrative. Those I see clearly enough.

But the overall pattern? The thing that makes it coherent whole? I keep reaching for it and finding nothing.

Initially it was bothering me. Until I remembered something from a different life.

Confusionism

For years I delivered yoga teacher training in India. Intensive programs, several weeks, students living inside the practice morning to night. The arc was always the same. Week one: excitement. Week two: fatigue. Week three: confusion.

They would come to me looking slightly lost. “I’m confused,” they’d say, expecting reassurance that it would pass, that clarity was coming.

My answer was always the same. “Confusion is a great place to start.”

Confusion is not comfortable. But certainty is the obstacle. When we think we know, we stop receiving. The cup is already full. In deep transformation, in systemic change, dead knowledge gets in the way. What we need is not more information.

What we need is the capacity to sense what’s actually happening before our mind gets a chance to organize it into something familiar.

This became a running joke with a dear friend, Greg, a financial system analyst who had been watching markets and institutions with the same growing bewilderment.

Together we coined a name for it: Confusionism. A new spiritual system for the current age.

The first and only principle: if you are not confused right now, you are lost.

Models

My science reflex sent me looking for people who had tried to map this before me.

Wallerstein told me the Western-dominated world system has a 500-year arc, and we are at its terminal edge — not a crisis per se, more like a structural completion.

Tainter told me civilizations don’t collapse from attack. They collapse when complexity costs more than it returns. At that point, simplification becomes rational even when it looks like suicide.

Turchin tracked the mathematics of it: elite overproduction, popular immiseration, the predictable institutional breakdown that follows when too many people compete for too few positions of power.

Gramsci, writing from a fascist prison in the 1930s, gave me the most useful single sentence: the old is dying and the new cannot yet be born. In the interregnum, morbid symptoms appear.

Prigogine showed that complex systems under extreme stress don’t simply collapse. They reorganize. Islands of coherence emerge from the chaos, carrying new order that the old system could not have generated. Disorder is not the end of the story. It is the condition for what comes next.

And Fuller, characteristically, refused the diagnosis as endpoint: you never change things by fighting the existing reality. Build a new model that makes the existing one obsolete.

None of them gave me resolution. They gave me frame. Which may be the only honest thing available right now.

Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein: (1930–2019) American sociologist , founder of world-systems theory, recipient of numerous honorary doctorates, former president of the International Sociological Association.

Joseph Arnold Tainter: (b. 1949) American anthropologist and historian, senior lecturer at Utah State University, best known for his landmark study of societal collapse.

Peter Valentinovich Turchin: (b. 1957), Russian-American scientist founder of cliodynamics, professor at University of Connecticut, TIME magazine named him one of the most influential scientists of 2021.

Antonio Francesco Gramsci: (1891–1937) Italian Marxist philosopher and politician , founding member of the Italian Communist Party, imprisoned by Mussolini, wrote his most influential work from a fascist prison cell.

Ilya Romanovich Prigogine (1917–2003), Belgian-Russian chemist and physicist, Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1977, foundational figure in complexity theory.

Richard Buckminster Fuller: (1895–1983) American architect, systems theorist and futurist , recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, held 28 patents, authored 28 books.

The author above are not alone. A growing number of scientists, historians and philosophers have been mapping this territory for decades. Rarely they have been invited to the table where decisions are made.

Clarity

What I do see clearly, when I stop reaching for the unified theory:

The acceleration. Cycles that once spanned across millennia now compress into decades and continue to accelerate. Geological, climatic, civilizational, technological, all peaking simultaneously. Complex systems do this approaching criticality. It is not metaphor. It is what phase transition looks like from the inside.

The climate conundrum. It is an existential confrontation that our political systems, built for short cycles, national borders, human-scale time, cannot metabolize. War is easier. War has agents, enemies, narrative, resolution. Ecological unraveling has none of those simple framework. So we choose war. Not just out of stupidity alone. From the limits of the cognitive architecture we are working with.

Anthropomorphism. And underneath all of it, the assumption we cannot quite bring ourselves to question: that creation exists for us. That our continuity is the measure of whether things are going well or badly.

American exceptionalism is loud right now, and destructive. But it is a local expression of something species-wide.

Human exceptionalism, the belief that we stand apart from and above the rest of creation, may be the deepest source of the misalignment we are living through. The wave does not get to negotiate with the ocean.

When I sit with that, something loosens. The system isn’t failing. It may be self-correcting. Not for our benefit, that’s the part we can’t stomach.

Intuition

I managed emergencies for years without reliable data, without clear models, often without communication infrastructure. You learn to navigate by something other than analysis. Call it intuition, call it embodied pattern recognition, call it listening to what the situation is telling you before you’ve decided what it means.

That capacity was easily available to me because I was the outsider. The aid worker who landed, assessed, acted, and left. The crisis was real but it was not mine.

That’s no longer true. I am inside the crisis now. We all are.

And yet the skill still applies. Perhaps more than ever. Not the certainty of the analyst. The receptivity of someone who knows they don’t have a model that holds, and has learned to function anyway.

Alive

So if we are confused right now, about the direction of the world, about which story to believe, about whether anyone actually knows what they are doing, I want to recall something simple.

Our confusion is not a symptom of insufficient information or inadequate intelligence. It is an accurate response to a situation that genuinely exceeds our inherited frameworks.

The people who are not confused are not ahead. They have simply stopped looking closely. They project familiar patterns onto a system that no longer operates by familiar rules. They mostly fail to read the field.

Confusion, held with honesty, is a form of attention. And attention is what this moment asks of us. Certainty is the trap.

I don’t know what comes next. Neither do you. Neither does anyone.

That’s where we start. From confusion. From aliveness.

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“Change Your Story, Change The World” is a storytelling endeavor that looks deeply into the psyche that creates the stories we live by.

Because the stories we tell are the reality we live.

I was born in France. I know what it feels like to grow up in a country convinced it does things better than others. Sometimes that’s earned. Mostly it’s an inflated sense of self-importance. France is no better than the US in that regard. It’s just smaller.

There is an old joke from our neighbors in Belgium:

Do you know how to get rich fast?
Buy a Frenchman for what he is worth, and sell him for what he says he is worth.

If you want to get real, ask your neighbors. The Belgians knew.

I have lived in the US for ten years now. Same sense of superiority. Except here it’s at scale. It shows up in this particular habit of distributing the “best in the world” attribute with extraordinary generosity — your teacher, your car, your company’s product, your country’s healthcare. All of it. Best in the world.

Ask the Canadians! They know.

Between 2008 and 2016 I trained yoga teachers, based largely in India, a country I eventually lived in for twelve years. I remember picking up a US yoga magazine and finding a celebratory feature on “the oldest yoga teacher in the world”. A 90-something woman living in the USA.

I hope you catch the irony.

Yoga is roughly 5,000 years old. Born, practiced, transmitted across generations on the Indian subcontinent — most of those teachers anonymous, uncertified, and many well past 100. None of them holding the 200-hour license that, in the USA, legally qualifies someone to teach. The idea that the oldest living yoga teacher on earth would be an American woman who encountered the tradition sometime in the 20th century requires that the world in fact stretches between Los Angeles and New-York.

This isn’t about cultural appropriation, that’s a separate conversation. It’s simpler than that. It’s ignorance. The article didn’t say oldest yoga teacher in the United States. It said the world.

For people from other countries, this habit is more than irritating. It signals that you don’t exist unless the USA has noticed you. That the world is a stage, and the USA is the only actor who counts.

I thought it was worth a small inquiry.

American Exceptionalism

The idea that the USA is exceptional, better even, is not just random cultural noise. American Exceptionalism has a name, a history, and a theology.

American Exceptionalism, the belief that the United States is not merely powerful but fundamentally different in kind from other nations. Uniquely founded on universal ideals rather than ethnicity or territory. Divinely positioned, in some versions, to lead humanity toward its own best future.

It began as theology. John Winthrop’s in 1630, a city upon a hill, chosen by God, watched by the world. Then turned politics with Jefferson’s in 1776, self-evident truths, universal in scope. By the time Alexis de Tocqueville, another Frenchman with an external eye arrived in 1831, he found a young republic already convinced of its own destiny. He noted something genuinely unusual in the American self-conception. He called it exceptional. He didn’t mean it as a compliment exactly. He meant it as an observation.

He even wrote: “I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America”.

What started as a description became an ideology. And like all ideologies, once absorbed deeply enough, it no longer needs to pretend. It simply becomes the water you swim in. The reflex that makes a yoga magazine declare an American woman the oldest teacher in the world, without a shadow of doubt, without a moment of curiosity about what might exist beyond its own borders.

Best in the world. Obviously. What else would it be.

The Greatest Nation in the World?

So I looked around. I checked where the US actually stands against other nations on the metrics that matter, not market capitalization or missile count, but the ones that measure whether ordinary people are living well.

Believe it or not, the choice was simple but overwhelming. I could not find an indicator where the USA was coming first and so many where it drags itself at the bottom of the pile. Many important indicators did not make it to the list. The results are instructive.

Healthcare system: ranked 11th out of 11 comparable wealthy nations, last among peers, while spending more per capita than any of them. Best in the world at paying the most for the worst outcomes among rich countries.

Life expectancy: 54th globally. The average American lives 3.7 years less than the average citizen of a comparable wealthy nation. In a country with the most hospitals, the most pharmaceutical companies, and the most medical billionaires on earth.

Maternal mortality: 1st among high-income countries, meaning the highest death rate for women giving birth. No other wealthy nation comes close.

Education: 38th globally in mathematics, below the OECD average. The country that invented the MBA.

Press freedom: 55th. Behind most of Western Europe, and a significant number of countries Americans have never heard of.

Democracy index: 29th, officially classified as a “flawed democracy.” Not by critics. By the Economist Intelligence Unit.

Happiness: 23rd overall. Youth happiness specifically has been in measurable decline for two decades, a trend observed in the US more sharply than almost anywhere else in the developed world.

Social mobility: 27th. The very American Dream, the specific promise that your children will do better than you, ranks 27th as a lived reality.

Income inequality: 121st. More unequal than most of the world, including many countries Americans consider poor or underdeveloped.

Incarceration: 1st. More people behind bars per capita than any nation on earth. More than Russia. More than China.

Two categories where the ranking holds: GDP, genuinely first. Military spending, genuinely first. The two pedestals on which the entire self-image rests.

Everything else is propaganda.

Posturing

A coach learns to recognize patterns quickly.

When someone needs to constantly remind you how good they are, you don’t hear confidence. You hear its opposite. The performance of certainty is almost always a response to private doubt. The louder the claim, the deeper the wound it is trying to cover.

Nations are not so different from people in this regard.

The United States is, by the measure of civilizational time, an infant. 250 years old in a world where some cultures carry 5,000 years of continuous memory. China, India, Persia, Egypt, Greece, these are civilizations that have already been everything: dominant, humbled, destroyed, reborn. They carry that history in their bones. It gives them a particular kind of gravity. A relationship to impermanence. An understanding, hard won, that no empire lasts.

America has not yet had that education.

It was born in an act of declaration — we hold these truths to be self-evident — and that founding gesture, magnificent as it was, set a psychological template.

Identity by assertion. Worth by proclamation. A nation that defined itself not by what it had lived but by what it intended to become.

That is a young person’s move. Full of energy, full of promise, and deeply vulnerable to the gap between the declaration and the reality.

An insecure teenager in a room full of adults doesn’t stay quiet. He talks louder. He name-drops. He tells you about his grades, his car, his plans. He needs the room to confirm what he hasn’t yet confirmed in himself. The “best in the world” reflex is that teenager, scaled to 330 million people with a nuclear arsenal.

What makes this moment particularly acute is that the adults in the room have stopped nodding. The world is reordering. The dollar’s dominance as reserve currency is quietly eroding. The military supremacy that went uncontested for three decades is now contested. The economic lead is narrowing. For the first time, the two pedestals that held the entire self-image upright are showing stress fractures.

When the external confirmation stops coming, one of two things happens. The insecurity deepens into aggression “you just don’t recognize greatness” or something cracks open, and real maturity becomes possible for the first time.

Which way this goes is, genuinely, one of the more important questions of the next decade.

Greatness, for once

There is something worth naming about those two pedestals, GDP and military force, that the US still stands on mostly unchallenged.

They are not evidence of greatness. They are substitutes for it.

When a nation can no longer demonstrate superiority through the quality of its institutions, its schools, its hospitals, the health and happiness of its people, it falls back on what it can still count. Dollars and weapons. A country with genuine moral authority doesn’t need to remind you of its military budget. A person with genuine confidence doesn’t need to tell you their net worth.

The bully in the schoolyard is never the most secure kid in the room.

America has confused the instruments of power with the evidence of worth. GDP and missile count answer how much and how hard. They never answer how well or how justly. And a civilization that can no longer tell the difference between those questions is in serious difficulty.

There is one measure the USA explicitly promised in its founding declaration and has most consistently failed to deliver. Not happiness. Not prosperity. Not military reach.

Justice.

Not the justice of courts and procedure, though that too, but the deeper kind. The kind that asks whether every person, regardless of origin, has access to a dignified life. Whether the society is organized around human flourishing or around the accumulation of advantage by those who already have it.

That is what would make America great.
Not again. Just great. For once.

Grand Ma’s Wisdom

My grandmother was born in 1900. She was a professional cook. A woman who fed people well, every day, for decades. She had a saying she returned to often:

Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien.

The best is the enemy of good.

What she meant, I think, is that the obsessive pursuit of the superlative destroys the ordinary, and the ordinary is where life actually happens. When everything must be the best, nothing good is ever enough. The adequate gets discarded. The solid gets overlooked. The quiet competence of someone who simply does their work well, year after year, without a trophy, that becomes invisible.

Countries that consistently rank above the US on human thriving, the Nordics, Japan, much of Western Europe, are not trying to be the best in the world. They are trying to be good. Good schools. Good hospitals. Good food. Enough for everyone. No flags planted. No magazine covers.

My grandmother never won an award. She fed her family and her clients and she did it with care and without fanfare for years. By any metric that matters, she was doing something right.

The US might consider, at this particular moment in its history, what it would mean to stop competing for a title no one else is awarding anymore, and start asking, simply, whether its people are being fed and cared for.

When the Myth Becomes the Man

There is a straight line from exceptionalism to arrogance. It is not a corruption of the doctrine. It is its destination.

Exceptionalism requires a reference point. You can only be exceptional against a background of the ordinary. Which means everyone else, every civilization that preceded the USA by millennia, every culture that built and fell and rebuilt across centuries, becomes backdrop. Supporting cast. The world that history is happening to, rather than being made by.

That is where the arrogance lives as the natural fruit of the original seed.

And arrogance, when it meets resistance, when the world stops confirming the self-image, has limited options. It can revise. Or it can push harder. Revision requires humility, which exceptionalism has structurally excluded. So it pushes harder.

That is the bully. A 250-year-old nation, in a room full of civilizations that have already been everything, dominant, defeated, destroyed, reborn, talking loudest, demanding agreement, threatening those who withhold it.

When the external confirmation finally begins to fail, when the data becomes undeniable, when the world begins quietly reorganizing around other arrangements, when the two last pedestals show their first cracks, the doctrine doesn’t shift. It produces a leader in its own image.

MAGA is not a departure from American Exceptionalism. It is its terminal expression. The narcissistic leader is what the culture called for, someone willing to say out loud, without embarrassment, what the doctrine had always required: we are still the best, the world is wrong, the data is fake, the challengers are enemies.

“Great again” is the tell. The “again” gestures toward a golden age that requires no evidence because it was always more mythology than history. But notice what the slogan accidentally admits: that the greatness was lost. Maybe was never fully real.

Great when, exactly? By what standards?

Great at expansion, across a continent, over the bodies of its original inhabitants. Great at extraction. Great at manufacturing, briefly, in the mid-twentieth century, largely because every other industrial nation had been bombed into rubble. Great at calling itself great.

But great in the sense the founding declaration promised, just, equitable, good to its own people, honest with the world? That was always the claim. Never quite the reality.

The myth is not being tested from outside. neighbors already knew. It is collapsing from within, under the weight of its own contradictions. What we are watching, in real time, is not the end of the USA. It is the end of the story the USA told about itself.

What comes next depends entirely on whether the collapse produces revision or just keeps insisting in making a louder claim.

We already know.

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“Change Your Story, Change The World” is a storytelling endeavor that looks deeply into the psyche that creates the stories we live by.

Because the stories we tell are the reality we live.

Beliefs

I had two distinct conversation last week.
Two different persons yet the same basic structure.

The first happened online. Someone posted a disagreement with the collapse/overshoot thesis. Intelligent, articulate, worth engaging. We went a few rounds, found some common ground, hit a wall, agreed to disagree.

The second happened in my living room. A friend of a friend, passing through. Also intelligent, also articulate, with a genuine spiritual background. We talked for a couple of hours.

In both cases there was enough overlap to make real conversation possible. And in both cases there were gaps I couldn’t bridge.

Both were anti-vaccine. When I mentioned I’d spent ten years working in the Vaccine and Immunization Department at WHO, neither conversation changed to acknowledge I may know something they don’t. Both saw WHO as a tentacle of a one-world government conspiracy. Again, ten years on the inside, watching an institution so chronically underfunded and dysfunctional it could barely coordinate a response to a moderate outbreak, let alone orchestrate global control. None of the fact mattered. When they could not argue the point, they simply moved to another one.

I stayed calm. I said I wasn’t trying to convince anyone.

And yet.

There was something. A low hum of frustration I kept noticing underneath the equanimity. S
mart, educated, spiritually literate people using their intelligence to defend a closed system was triggering me.
That evidence did not make any difference, the data if not aligned couldn’t enter.
That no amount of first-hand knowledge could shift the architecture of the belief.

Definition

Before going further, let me be precise about something.

Overshoot is not a story. It is a definition.

We are consuming biological resources faster than the planet can regenerate them. We are emitting beyond the atmosphere’s absorption capacity. We are drawing down freshwater, topsoil, and biodiversity at rates that have no historical precedent in the human timescale. These are measurements, not interpretations.

The refuges people reach for when confronted with this are familiar: human ingenuity has always found a way; technology will scale in time; markets will self-correct when the signals get loud enough; the Earth is resilient, it has recovered before; renewables are growing faster than anyone predicted. Each of these contains a fragment of truth wrapped around a category error.

Human ingenuity has never faced a planetary level, simultaneous, self-reinforcing system failure. Technology runs on energy and materials, it cannot technology its way out of a throughput problem. Markets have no mechanism to price the living systems that they have carefully excluded through externalization of costs. The Earth will recover, indeed, over millions of years, without needing humans to still be here. And renewables are growing inside an economy that is also still growing, which is not the same as replacing the problem. All these excuses are clear red flags of denial.

Collapse, however, is not a fact. It is a scenario.

A highly probable scenario, given the data, but still a scenario. A story built on real foundations, which is not the same as a certainty. That distinction matters. It is the needle this piece is trying to thread.

Ownership

I know what inner tension means. Twenty-plus years of coaching has made one thing clear: it is never about the other person. It is always pointing somewhere closer.

So I asked myself the question I would ask any client:
What part of MY story is like theirs?

I’ve been carrying the collapse thesis for years. It seemed to be the honest reading of the data. William Rees on ecological footprint. The Limits to Growth models, largely vindicated by time. The Great Acceleration graphs. Thirty years of field work across fifty countries watching what extraction and dysfunction actually look like at ground level. The story felt earned.

But “earned” is not the same as “true.”
And even “highly probable” is not the same as “certain.”

When I’m honest, and this is the part that required some sitting with, I don’t know what’s coming. The data points toward collapse with something close to the weight of evidence. And the story remains a story. Those are both true at the same time.

So I asked the next question:
What do I get from believing the story?

The answers were waiting.

The collapse story keeps me in a state of alert readiness: fight-or-flight as a baseline , which is the nervous system I built across three decades of field work in places where that state was appropriate and necessary. It’s familiar. It feels like being alive.

The collapse story gives form and meaning to grief. Thirty years of witnessing the darkest expressions of the human capacity for cruelty and self-destruction leaves a residue. The collapse narrative becomes a container for all of it. The grief isn’t random anymore, it’s prescient. It means something.

The collapse story maintains an identity. The one who sees clearly. The one who isn’t in denial. The awakened one who reads the data while others look away. There is a subtle pride in that position. It has a shape I recognize and have inhabited before.

And finally: the collapse story, if taken seriously, demands total surrender. Let go of comfort, plans, attachments, future as I imagined it. And when I actually accepted that, to release the whole architecture, the morning anxiety dropped. Almost immediately. When the story was data, I stayed grounded. When the data inflated into story, some anxiety returned.

I’m not saying the prediction is false.
I’m saying the story part of it was worth an inquiry.

Relax, nothing is under control

Most people, when they encounter overshoot and collapse as a serious possibility, move toward denial.

That’s the standard human response to the unthinkable.
The psyche protects itself.

What I didn’t fully see was that my certainty was performing a similar function in reverse. Where denial keeps the worst-case out, a committed collapse narrative keeps out the possibility of surprise, of the miraculous, of trajectories the models didn’t account for.

Both are ways of managing the unbearable uncertainty of not knowing.

The honest position is this: some scenarios are highly probable. Overshoot is real. The data on ecological limits is not in serious dispute among people who engage with it rigorously. Collapse in some form seems more likely than not.

And miracles happen. Systems behave non-linearly. History contains inflection points no one saw coming. The larger intelligence, whatever name you give it, or no name at all, is not obligated to follow the curve we projected for it.

For example, in 2020 during COVID, global air travel dropped 60%. NO2 levels in Paris, Milan, Madrid and Rome dropped by 30–54%. Fossil CO2 emissions fell by an estimated 2.4 billion tonnes, equivalent, to taking 500 million cars off the road for a year.

And on the other side (my own rough estimate) the war in Iran produced in a month the equivalent amount of the annual emissions of a mid-sized industrial nation.

None of these event are predictable or part of the models.

And this is part of the greater discomfort:
I don’t know what’s coming. Neither do you. Neither does anyone.

The story that holds us

There’s a paradox I keep returning to, and I’ve decided to stop trying to resolve it.

I have lived an extraordinary life. Decades in places most people only read about. Genuine encounter with suffering, with resilience, with the full spectrum of what humans are capable of. A practice that went deep. A life shaped by values I would choose again.

And I am a speck of dust on a small planet in an infinite universe, and what I did or didn’t do, believed or didn’t believe, will leave no trace detectable at any meaningful scale.

Both of those things are completely true.

The first conversation, the one that started this, ended with the other person still convinced of their story, and me still holding mine. We were polite, but what I took away wasn’t the disagreement. It was the mirror. The glimpse of my own reflection in someone else’s defended position.

The question isn’t whether collapse is real.
The question is what we’re using the story for.

Those two conversations had a quality I recognize, beliefs held tightly, facts that don’t align quietly set aside, the argument moving quickly to the next parameter before the uncomfortable one can land. That is not intellectual honesty. It is not how science works. It is not how genuine inquiry works.

What I try to do, imperfectly, with effort, is the opposite. Challenge the argument. Debunk my own position before someone else does. Hold the data separately from the story built around it. Distinguish between what the evidence shows and what I’ve concluded from it. That distinction, that willingness to sit with the gap between measurement and meaning, is what was missing in both conversations. We were not using the same tools. We did not have the same openness to what the other position might offer.

And underneath that: can we hold the full weight of not knowing, the grief, the beauty, the uncertainty, the complete irrelevance of our particular speck, without reaching for a story to make it bearable?

I’m still working on that. Some days better than others.

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“Change Your Story, Change The World” is a storytelling endeavor that looks deeply into the psyche that creates the stories we live by.

Because the stories we tell are the reality we live.

So we have opened the pandora box. Removed the last filter, the anthropocentric frame. I would venture, for the sake of the conversation, that the particular ability to see from a non-species-centered-frame is a particular skill of the human species and I would guess few, if any, other species can do that. The eagle is not developing a non-eagle perspective. The mycelium is not questioning its mycelium-centrism. What does it mean that only we can ask this question?

The paradox:
the non-anthropocentric view is in itself an anthropocentric skill.

The Trap

From there two options:

Either the human, so confident in its cognitive superiority, claims to see from outside itself entirely, and that could be the ultimate hubris. Just another trap in the process of development of consciousness. Caught in yet another filter we cannot see.

Or this capacity is indeed a specific function of our specie. Hence not the trap anymore but the gift. Not the human transcending its nature through the gift, but rather fulfilling its ultimate nature.

The place where consciousness turns to look at itself through the human instrument.

Abhinivesha

Two thousand years ago, a great sage of yoga philosophy left a pillar of knowledge called The Yoga Sutra. Within it he describes the 5 kleshas (poisons, afflictions) of the human mind. The fifth klesha is called abhinivesha, the clinging to life, and it is described as the greatest barrier towards the highest achievement of enlightenment, or liberation.

The program runs so deep (the desire and clinging to continuity) that the sage Patanjali says it afflicts even the wise. It is not described as a moral failing but like the most ancient biological instruction there is.

And the ability to overcome this affliction is necessary for any human to achieve its greatest potential.

Every other species executes that instruction without question. The bee dies for the hive by instinct. The salmon returns to spawn and die without deliberation.

Possibly, only the human can know the instruction is running, examine it, and choose to act from beyond it. Understanding this is the highest order.

That is the crossing. That is what the last filter dissolving actually means.

Everybody Knew

Different tradition came to it from different directions. Although with different words, they describe the same recognition.

The Bodhisattva, in Mahayana Buddhism, reaches the threshold of nirvana, the complete release from suffering, and turns back. Voluntarily. An act of self-sacrifice for the whole. The vow is to remain in the cycle of birth and death until every sentient being is free (that include non-human species). The dissolution of the boundary between self and other taken to its logical conclusion. When there is no separate self to protect, the question of survival becomes irrelevant.

Christ in Gethsemane asks for the burden to be taken from him. The full human dread, unmasked. Then surrender to God’s will and carry the cross. We don’t celebrate the death, but the voluntary completion. Willingly crossing the threshold Christ could have escaped, could have chosen another road. Yet he chose to walk all the way through. What came out the other side was unrecognizable to most who had known him before.

Nine centuries later, Bagdad. Al-Hallaj, the Sufi mystic, declared Ana’l-Haqq, I am the Truth, I am the Real. In the frame of his time and place (orthodox Islam of the Abbasid caliphate) such a declaration is a death sentence. He knew yet did it anyway. The separate self annihilated not in private contemplation but publicly, completely, without the escape hatch that silence could have provided.

Arjuna on Kurukshetra. The battlefield where everyone loses. His teachers on one side, his family on the other. Krishna’s instruction is not to win, it is to act without attachment to outcome. The fruit of the action belongs to something larger. The action only belongs to you.

Each tradition arrived at the same threshold from a different path. The human capacity to act for the whole without requiring its own continuity as the condition. Not from instinct or compulsion but a choice.

None of these traditions required human survival as the condition of their act.

That is the test. That is what completing the grief curve actually looks like from the inside

The crisis as invitation

Part I traced the way filter dissolves. Each filter once dissolved giving birth to a new reality. Part II name the current reality, the fall, and what is possible when we stop arguing with gravity.

The crisis is upon us. The time is counted.
The system we built is no longer able to absorb the disruptions it created.

This is the moment that most demands the release of abhinivesha, and also the moment that most calls forth the highest human capacity. Not to avoid the collapse, that is denial of reality, but through it.

The climate crisis is the crucifixion of our civilization, its final test.
The crisis is not punishment, rather our responsibility.

The human that can conceive of its own non-necessity and act from that place without despair is expressing the most fully human trait possible. It is the full weight of what consciousness makes possible, carried voluntarily, with eyes open, because it is ours to carry.

The Alchemist Loop

And like the ultimate alchemist’s trick, the journey to nowhere arrived here. Not where it started and not at a destination either.

At the recognition that the capacity to release the destination was always the point.

The Bhagavad Gita calls it nishkama karma, action free from desire. It is neither passive nor resigned. The full force of engagement, with the outcome released. Arjuna doesn’t put down his bow. He picks it up differently.

The Tao Te Ching says the same from stillness: the sage completes the work and moves on. Without claiming or naming anything. The river doesn’t decide to carve the canyon. It simply flows, without agenda, and the canyon appears.

Two instructions, same recognition. Act fully. Hold nothing.

This is what the traditions were pointing at. This is what the crisis is asking. Not to stop being human, to become more fully what the human was always capable of being. The one species that can know its own impermanence, feel the full weight of that knowledge, and choose to act from beyond it anyway.

Consciousness doesn’t need the human to continue.

But the human, this particular temporary configuration, this brief instrument of awareness, has the specific ability to know that, to choose from that knowing, and to find in that choice not diminishment but the fullest expression of what it was always capable of.

The journey to nowhere turns out to have been the most human journey possible.

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“Change Your Story, Change The World” is a storytelling endeavor that looks deeply into the psyche that creates the stories we live by.

Because the stories we tell are the reality we live.

In the 1995 French movie La Haine, Mathieu Kassovitz opens with a monologue spoken over a footage of riots:

A man falls from a fifty-story building.
As he falls, he passes each floor and tells himself:
Jusqu’ici tout va bien... jusqu’ici tout va bien... jusqu’ici tout va bien.
(So far so good… So far so good… So far so good.)
The problem is not the fall. It’s the landing.

The mantra of denial all the way down.
This would be humor if it was not horror in the same breath.
It is both. And also the most accurate description I have of where we are today.

The Fall

The following points are beyond interpretation. This is scientific data and documented history.

1950: the Great Acceleration begins. Every ecological indicator : CO2, species extinction, deforestation, ocean acidification, aquifer depletion, topsoil loss, bends sharply upward simultaneously. Not even projections: measurements!

1972: Limits to Growth published. The models are clear.

1977: Exxon’s own researchers confirm the link between fossil fuels and planetary warming. The findings are buried. We started manufacturing doubt instead.

1988: NASA scientist James Hansen testifies before Congress. The window for meaningful action is open.

In the decades that followed, the science did not change, the data was only clearer.

The window closed because we changed the story for a more convenient one.

This is by far the most consequential disinformation campaign in human history. We burned the time we had and sent everyone to sleep.

The scientific consensus never was a debate. It was a verdict. Yet there was no executive to enforce it.

The only open variable now is timeline to impact.

The Acceleration

The falling man, somewhere between the 20th and the 26th floor, decides the solution is to fall faster.

The empire, facing civilizational stakes, pours billions into a war that makes sense only inside a story that stopped being true decades ago. The money that could have gone to soil, water, education, regenerative systems goes instead to the logic of the previous century. The cost is astronomical. The footprint catastrophic.

I could make this observation as a trained political analyst. Yet this is more like a clinical assessment.

Denial, in its terminal stage, accelerates.

The bargaining gets louder. The gestures get larger.
The falling man mistakes velocity for agency.

The Sophistication of Denial

The cruder form of denial is easy to identify. It has no data. Hope at best, propaganda at worst. Dangerous but visible.

The sophisticated form is harder. Today it wears the vocabulary of awareness.

Thinkers, public personalities, writers with thousands of readers. People who have traveled far enough to see the crisis clearly. Who have sat with the data, felt its weight, written beautifully about interconnection and the failure of the extractive paradigm.

And yet, at the last moment, they pull back, they fall for the same blindspot. They offer a frame that preserved the possibility of human continuity as its implicit condition. Inter-being. The mirror principle. The age of spiritual evolution. The more beautiful world.

Genuine insights. I mean that.

But used as the last refuge from completing the grief process. Bargaining disguised as wisdom. Or something more trivial: are they protecting their audience from a truth no one wants to hear, or protecting their subscriber count?

Try this, the test is simple:
Does the framework require human survival to remain coherent?
If yes, it is still anthropocentric. It has not yet crossed the last frontier.

As I wrote in a previous piece, "The End of Denial" is not the end of everything. It is the beginning of something more honest.

But you have to let the story break first. Completely.

The Last Frontier

Part I of this series traced the dissolving of filters I went though to sit where I am today. French. Western. White. Religious. Human.

Each one felt like reality until the next crossing exposed it as a lens.

The anthropocentric frame is not just another filter in the sequence.
It is the generative mechanism of the crisis itself.

The ownership logic, the story that the natural world exists as resource, that the atmosphere is a free externality, that growth is not just possible but mandatory, that story didn’t begin in economics. It began in consciousness. In the bedrock assumption that the human perspective is the perspective. That we are the measure.

The framework that created the problem can’t be the framework that resolves it.

Not because we are malicious. Because the frame itself cannot see past its own edge.

Acceptance

When you observe people receiving terminal prognoses, you will notice the following:

• Most will spend their remaining time bargaining, chasing the treatment, the miracle, the narrative that makes it manageable. They will die within the story.

• Some will let the diagnosis land. They stop negotiating with reality, and in the process discover something unexpected on the other side of the grief.

It takes courage to see reality without filters.
Yet the new frame comes a strange clarity:
The specific freedom of someone who has stopped bargaining with gravity.

From that ground something becomes possible that wasn’t before. Presence without agenda. Action without grasping. The question shifts from how do we prevent the unavoidable to how do we want to live.

The Bhagavad Gita is the most precise operating manual I know for a human being inside a collapsing system.

Act from duty. Release the fruit. The action is yours. The outcome is not.

That instruction was not written for comfort. It was written for Kurukshetra, a battlefield where everyone loses and the fighting continues anyway.

We are on that battlefield now.

The View

We are still falling.

Some are counting floors to maintain appearances.
Others are counting them out of respect for reality.

The man in the joke counts floors because it feels like agency.
We count, with data, with policy proposals, with spiritual frameworks, with this essay. The counting is not futile. Witnessing is not inaction.

But let’s not mistake the count for a parachute.

The ground is real. The fall is real. And from here, past the last filter, past the bargaining, past the need for the human story to resolve, something is visible that wasn’t before.

And that view will expand in Part III.

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“Change Your Story, Change The World” is a storytelling endeavor that looks deeply into the psyche that creates the stories we live by.

Because the stories we tell are the reality we live.