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.

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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.

Subscribe now

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.

If anyone asks how I ended up in Los Angeles, I tell them it’s my mother’s fault.

I felt so constrained by the family rules, that I left as fast as I could and went as far as possible. That impulse turned out to be the whole story.

At twenty-four I got my first job guiding adventure tours in the Sahara. My next posting was Uganda, 1987, with Médecins Sans Frontières, a french NGO working populations in needs around the world. By the time I landed in Los Angeles thirty years later, I’d worked across seventy countries on five continents.

United Nations

In 1989, I got my first job in the UN system. High Commissioner for Refugees.

The conference room was immaculate and cool while outside the tropical heat was crushing and the red dust of laterite ever present. Eight of us around the table, eight countries, eight mother tongues operating in eight different accents of English. The conversation had the particular fatigue of people trying to solve problems that shouldn’t exist.

I made my point. I no longer remember what it was. Something practical, something logical, something that made complete sense inside the framework twenty-eight years of being French had given me.

My boss looked at me. He had cut corners to get me on the team, I knew he liked me. He was from Sierra Leone, educated in England, sharper than anyone I’d met before. Everyone was waited for him to speak. He let a small silence pass, looking at me with a smile.

That is so French!

The conversation moved on. I sat with the unsettling surprised of someone who looked in the mirror and did not see what was expected. The worst of it wasn’t the comment. It was that I had no access to what he was seeing. The filter was so close to my face I couldn’t bring it into focus.

I was looking through it, not at it.

Fast forward

Five years in Africa. Fifteen in Asia. Eight in North America. Two in South America. Europe where it started.

The French filter, visible only when surrounded by people who didn’t share it. The Western filter, visible only in the south and the east. The white filter, visible only as the single white man in a small African town. The religious filter, moving between Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Christians, Animists. The language filter — I learned three more languages and watched what each one made thinkable.

Each frontier crossed removed a filter.
Each filter mistaken for reality until the next crossing exposed it as a lens.

Transfiguration

Thailand 2013. The hall was vast, open on all sides, fans where keeping the heat outside. Men in white, sat in a circle facing outward. Women in red, a larger circle facing in.

A bell rang. With careful movement, the women rotated one position left. A new face to witness.

This went on for several hours.

After a while something happened, not a single noticeable moment. More like the eyes moving from bright light to the shade. First blinded then slowly seeing. The particular details of each face began to blur: the smiles, the shape of the lips, the way someone held her gaze, the intensity of her presence, the hair color, the specific history written in the wrinkles. The details lost their edges. Became transparent.

What remained had been present in every face and visible in none of them.

I was sitting with the feminine principle. A presence. The archetype that had been wearing each of these faces in turn, patient, waiting to be seen past the costume.

I sat very still. The bell rang again. Another face.

That’s when I understood. I had been looking at women through a man’s eyes for so long I had never really seen anything but my filter.

Angels

2016, Los Angeles, the first year. I kept a discipline: every name, every face, committed to memory. The least I could offer was full presence to the specific person, not a problem, not a case.

Quickly numbers and time made that impossible.

Session after session. The room could change. The process refined itself. The quality of attention that build proximity deepens. What went unsaid became louder than the story shared. Stories, defenses, explanations, my job was to wait, or probe, until they exhausted themselves and something else pierced through.

What remained when the explanation ran out is always simpler than the story. Fear, grief, longing playing hide and seek within the story. At some point the surface vanished and the depth became more visible than the performance. And in the depth: our shared humanity. All of us. No exceptions.

Myself included. I see myself in each of my clients. The same essence. And also the same fears, the same grief, the same longing.

Then I saw the human filter. The unexamined assumption that the human perspective is a vantage point, a place to stand and observe from.

It is just another lens.

The Last crossing.

You’re smart enough to see where this goes.

The frame through which I had been watching everything, including the dissolution of all the other frames, was itself a frame. It was not an epiphany. Just the sudden visibility of the last lens.

I’ve now sat long enough with nature that I can lose that one too, when I choose.

The absence of filter is not emptiness. The journey to nowhere brought me to the ground that holds all the frames. Not void. Nowhere is the ground before all the somewheres.

That’s where I’m writing from. What’s visible from here, is coming next.
Journey to Nowhere, Part II.

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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.

In August 1971, a corporate lawyer named Lewis Powell wrote a memo, a confidential strategy document addressed to the US Chamber of Commerce.

The memo was a battle plan. Powell had looked at American society and concluded that business was under existential threat, from environmentalists, consumer advocates, academics, the press.

His prescription was total: capture the institutions. Fund think tanks. Infiltrate university boards. Build a legal pipeline. Own the referees so you never have to worry about losing the game.

Within a decade the Architecture was built: the Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, the Business Roundtable. None of these are secret organizations, none of this is hidden. They published their goals, held conferences, trained generations of judges, economists and politicians in a coherent ideological framework. The Federalist Society alone has placed six of the current nine Supreme Court justices.

This is not conspiracy theory. It’s public record. The documents exist. The money trails are documented. The results are visible in every major institutional decision of the last 50 years.

Then the project found its political vehicles.
One by one, across party lines, each administration added its layer.

• Reagan, 1981, fired 11.000 air traffic controllers, broke the unions and cut the top tax rate from 70% to 28%. People who made money from work paid taxes. People who made money from money, much less so.

• Bush Senior went to war in 1991. $61 billion, almost nothing compared to what his son will do 10 years later.

• Clinton passed NAFTA in 1994. Then in 1999 he unlocked the casino and let the banks play with your savings. Nine years later the house lost. You paid.

• Bush Junior, 2001 cut taxes on capital — if your income came from investments you now paid roughly half what wage earners paid. Then fought two wars on borrowed money: the bill — over three trillion dollars.

• Obama, the banks crashed the system in 2008. Obama saved the banks. Eight million families lost their homes. Nobody went to prison.

• Trump cut corporate taxes to 21% permanently in 2017. Corporations used the savings to buy back their own stock. Executive bonuses followed. Wages didn't.

• Biden printed money, gave it to the financial system, watched asset prices inflate. If you owned stocks you got richer. If you didn't, your rent went up.

The through-line is uninterrupted.
Republican and Democrat, it makes no difference.

Every administration inherited the logic and extended it. Some with conviction, some with pragmatism, some saying it was damage control. The result was the same: each decade the wealth moved further up, the institutions weakened further, the middle class thinned further, and the language of freedom was used to describe each step of the process.

If you are still waiting for the right election to reverse this, you are misreading the nature of what was built. This was not a series of policy mistakes. It was a system performing exactly as designed — across administrations, across parties, across decades.

The plan worked perfectly.

Which is exactly when it stopped being their plan.

II- The Serpent Takes Over

The discreet old-money establishment that drew up the blueprints understood one thing above all: the legitimacy of the system was an asset. You don’t want to kill the host, you want to extract from it indefinitely, quietly, across generations. The game required patience and the appearance of normalcy.

What their system generated instead, once the guardrails were gone and capital had nowhere left to flow but upward, were people for whom patience is weakness and appearances are for losers.

The tech oligarchs didn’t build the road. They arrived after the architecture was complete and the safety turned off. No gentlemen’s agreement. No strategic patience. No interest in maintaining the host. They had grown up inside a different logic entirely — Silicon Valley’s winner-take-all, move-fast-and-break-things ethos that had no institutional memory of why the guardrails existed in the first place. To them the remaining constraints weren’t a necessary cover story. They were just friction.

The old establishment — the think tank world, the traditional donor class, the discreet men in good suits who funded the fifty-year project — did not plan for someone who would dismantle federal agencies on a live stream while his followers cheered. They wanted a stable system they could reliably extract from. What they got was someone who finds the extraction insufficient — who wants the architecture itself, the state machinery, the direct operational control that their gentlemen’s agreement had always kept at arm’s length.

The latest President is the political expression of the same logic. Not its cause. Its symptom and its accelerant simultaneously — the figure the system produced when it had sufficiently hollowed out the institutions that would previously have made him impossible.

The architects didn’t plan for that part. Remove enough structural constraints and eventually someone arrives who doesn’t share your assumptions about what the constraints were for — or your agreement about how far you were willing to go.

The original architects built the mouth of the snake.
They just didn’t expect it to bite the tail.

III- A Crime with no Name

This is where the story stops being a political story.

Everything above — the wealth concentration, the institutional capture, the democratic erosion — is in principle recoverable. You can reverse Citizens United with a constitutional amendment. You can rebuild unions. You can restructure the tax code. Damaged institutions can be repaired given enough time and political will.

You cannot un-release the carbon.

The specific cruelty of the timing is almost too precise to look at directly. The fifty-year window of the neoliberal project — 1971 to now — is almost exactly the fifty-year window during which decisive action on climate was both scientifically understood and physically possible. Those are not unrelated facts.

Exxon’s own scientists knew in 1977. They ran the models. They understood the trajectory with an accuracy that would later surpass NASA's own public projections.

The company’s response was to bury the findings and spend the next four decades funding doubt — financing a $30 million systematic campaign to make the public uncertain about what their own scientists had already confirmed internally.

This was the intended consequence of pursuing profit. It was a knowing choice to load an existential cost onto everyone else — every living thing, every future generation — and call it business.

There are legal frameworks for “Crime Against Humanity”. There are other legal definitions in the making for long term damage to the environment.

But nothing to define crime against life itself. No legal or philosophical tradition has named that yet, because the crime of that magnitude has not been possible before. It is even hard to conceive that someone would commit such a crime.

The same institutional capture that defunded environmental regulation, installed fossil fuel executives in regulatory agencies, and withdrew the US from every meaningful international climate agreement also happened to occupy the precise historical window when the physics of the situation required the opposite.

The system that was built to concentrate wealth was the same system that made collective response to climate impossible. Not coincidentally. Structurally.

The middle class lost its economic footing.
Democracy lost its functional integrity.
The planet lost the window of opportunity.

These are not three separate crises. They are one crisis at three different scales.

And at the largest scale, the question is no longer about recovery. It is about the framework itself. We keep asking how do we survive this. It may not even be the right question.

What kind of transformation are we actually entering. Every framework we have is built around human survival as the central value. That assumption may simply be the last bastion of denial.

IV- The Return of Dharma

The Mahabharata is not a morality tale. It is not a story about good defeating evil. Almost everyone in it is compromised. The violations of dharma that make the war inevitable are accumulated over decades, by nearly everyone, through small corruptions and large ones, through cowardice and calculation and genuine tragedy. By the time the armies face each other on the field of Kurukshetra, there is no surgical option. No negotiation that hasn’t already failed. No reform that can reach the scale of what has been broken.

The field has to be emptied.

Notice when Krishna appears. Not before to offer alternative. Not after to offer solace. He appears on the battlefield, between the two armies, in the moment of Arjuna’s paralysis, when the man most troubled by the consequences of what is about to happen, the one most qualified precisely because of his reluctance, cannot lift his bow.

The Gita is not a text about avoiding destruction. It is instruction on how to navigate it, without the ownership of outcome that turns action into grasping, without the paralysis that mistakes attachment for conscience.

What we are watching in the world today has the structure and flavor of Kurukshetra. This is not a metaphor any longer. It is a description.

Dharma, the principle of right order, the intelligence that guides each thing to function according to its nature, has been violated so comprehensively, at so many levels simultaneously, that no partial repair is adequate.

The financial system extracts rather than circulates. The political system represents capital rather than citizens. The media system manufactures confusion rather than clarity. The ecological system is being consumed by the economic system that depends on it for survival.

These are not policy failures. They are structural violations that have compounded across decades until the field itself demands clearing.

The destruction is not here to punish. It is consequence. It is karma.
There is a difference, though it offers only cold comfort.

V- The Last Illusion

There is a blind spot beyond all blind spots.

Every analysis of civilizational collapse, including this one up to this point, is still conducted from inside a human-centric frame. The implicit assumption is that this is a human crisis requiring a human solution, the measure of catastrophe is human suffering and the measure of recovery is human flourishing.

That assumption is the same ownership logic that produced the crisis.

We did not create consciousness. We are a temporary experiment inside it, one that developed remarkable facility with manipulating matter and almost total blindness in understanding what it actually is. The belief that our disappearance, partial or total, would constitute a cosmic tragedy is itself the problem restated at the deepest level.

We couldn’t stop owning even the ground of our own awareness.

Kashmir Shaivism is not a human-centric system. Consciousness, Shiva/Shakti, is the ground, not the product. Humans are one of its temporary expressions. The Vijnanabhairava Tantra is not a manual for human flourishing. It is an invitation to recognize what was already present before the human form arose and will remain after it dissolves.

The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao. The ten thousand things arise from it and return to it. The arising and the returning are equally Tao. There is no preference in the system for the continuation of any particular form, including the one currently reading this sentence.

This is not nihilism. The grief is real. The beauty of what is being lost is real. Grief and beauty don’t require permanence to be true.

What they require is presence, which is exactly what the ownership illusion prevents.

The men dismantling the guardrails believe they are building something. The men who built the guardrails believed they were protecting something. Both were operating inside the same illusion: that the game belongs to whoever is currently playing it.

It doesn’t. It never did.

VI- What the Old Ones Knew

The wisdom traditions that have lasted long enough to be worth consulting were not offering comfort. They were making an observation about the nature of reality that the modern world, in both its progressive and conservative forms, has systematically refused.

Shiva dances. The dance is creation and destruction simultaneously, not sequentially. The universe is not built and then torn down. It is continuously both. The Nataraja image that has sat in temples for a thousand years is not a metaphor for impermanence. It is a description of the actual structure of existence.
Form arises. Form dissolves. The dancing continues.

The Tao Te Ching opens with the observation that whatever can be fully grasped and named has already lost the thing it was pointing at. The sage leads by not leading, acts by not forcing, and when the work is done the people say: we did this ourselves.

Power that announces itself has already begun its dissolution.

The Gita’s central instruction, act without attachment to the fruits of action, is not spiritual bypassing. It is the most precise description available of what it looks like to operate inside a collapsing system without being destroyed by it or contributing to the collapse through desperate grasping. You do what the moment requires. You release the outcome. Not because outcomes don’t matter but because the attachment to them is what distorts the action.

Plato saw it in the fourth century BC: the people most fit to govern, are precisely those who would prefer not to. The hunger for power is the disqualifying diagnostic.

Twenty-five centuries later we handed the world to the hungriest people we could find.

None of these traditions predicted our specific moment. All of them described its structure.

The cycle is not a failure of the cycle. The mouth of the serpent finding the tail is not a malfunction. It is the form the pattern takes when a particular configuration has exhausted its possibilities.

Something ends. The ground it arose from does not.

VII- The Ground of Being

For 3 decades I have watched systems collapse. Not from a distance, not through screens, up close, in places where the distance between order and chaos turns out to be a single afternoon.

What I know from that proximity is this: the people who navigate collapse most cleanly are not the ones with the best escape plan. They are the ones who stopped pretending the collapse wasn’t happening while everyone else was still maintaining appearances. The clarity itself becomes a kind of ground.

We are in the maintenance-of-appearances phase. It will not last.

The Ouroboros doesn’t need our permission to complete the circle. The mouth is already biting. The men who think they are driving this, the demolition agents who call it construction, the extractors who call it growth, the mouth that doesn’t know it’s the serpent’s own tail, they are not in control of what they’ve set in motion. Nobody is.

That is not despair. Despair is still a form of ownership, the insistence that it should have gone differently, that the right intervention at the right moment could have saved it, that someone is to blame in a way that makes the tragedy avoidable in retrospect.

It wasn’t avoidable. The death was foretold. Not because humans are irredeemably corrupt but because the configuration had run its course and the systems built to correct it had been methodically dismantled by the people who found correction inconvenient.

The planet is not dying. It is changing into something that will not require us in the same way. Consciousness is not threatened by the end of this particular experiment. It was here before the experiment began.

What remains, when the ownership illusion dissolves completely, is not nothing.

It is the ground that was always there.

The serpent will finish its meal.

Something will come that we don’t have a name for yet.

We were never the owners of what that will be.

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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.

For nearly thirty years I have sat with people in conflict zones, in collapsing states, in communities in the grip of violence, dysfunction, collapse. And what I have witnessed, with a consistency that stopped surprising me long ago, is this: something in them already knew. Not consciously perhaps. But the body knew. The silence at the dinner tables knew. The nervous jokes knew.

And still — the story held. It won’t come to that. Things will work out. They always do.

Denial is not stupidity. Denial is a story we construct to protect a more comfortable story underneath. It is, in its own way, a sophisticated act. A protective act. The mind’s way of managing what the body already knows but cannot yet bear.

I have watched it precede every tragedy I’ve witnessed in thirty years of fieldwork. It is the most reliable leading indicator I know.

I am watching it now. At civilizational scale.

The mental health crisis is the most visible symptom. Rates of anxiety, depression, and despair have tracked the Great Acceleration almost perfectly.

The body knows what the story refuses to see.

The data is clear. The story is not.

The data is not ambiguous. It hasn’t been for fifty years.

The original Limits to Growth was published in 1972. The first IPCC report in 1990. The Great Acceleration — the moment when every ecological indicator bends sharply and simultaneously upward — began around 1950. CO2, species extinction, deforestation, ocean acidification, aquifer depletion, topsoil loss.

Not projections. Measurements.

The scientific consensus is not a debate. It is a verdict.

What has been debated — loudly, expensively, strategically — is the story we tell about it. Humans are resilient and ingenuous. Technology is accelerating. Miracles have happened before. This is the age of spiritual evolution. These are not data points. They are incantations. Comfort stories dressed in optimism.

And of course there is the most aggressive form of denial. The one that is manufactured with interest in mind. The idea that climate change is an hoax. That story burned the only window we had for action. So it's not just denial: it's engineered denial. Possibly the most consequential disinformation campaign in human history.

Climate denial has no data. It has hope. It has manipulation.
But as a substitute for reality, is one of the most dangerous stories available.

Humanity’s greatest invention

Story is humanity’s greatest invention. It is what allowed us to cooperate at scale, to build cathedrals and constitutions, to transmit hard-won knowledge across generations.

No other species does this. It is the root of everything we call civilization.

It is also what allowed us to lie to ourselves collectively, and to do so with extraordinary sophistication.

The economic story of the last two hundred years — that growth is not just possible but mandatory, that an economy not expanding is an economy failing — required us to treat the natural world as an externality. A resource with no cost beyond extraction. The atmosphere, the oceans, the topsoil, the aquifers: all of it available, all of it free, none of it on the balance sheet.

We didn’t stumble into ecological collapse.
We narrated our way into it. The story preceded the disaster.

And seventy-five years ago, the disaster began showing up in the data.
We had the numbers. We had the models. We chose the story instead.

The story is not holding anymore

I am not writing this to assign blame.
Blame is another story, another form of avoidance.

I am writing this because we have passed the point where the story holds.

The cascade is underway. Not coming — underway. The sixth mass extinction is not a forecast. Military budgets have exploded globally as states sense what is coming and begin positioning. The Iran conflict alone carries the potential to compress timelines in ways no model can fully account for, because models are built on rational resource allocation and panicking civilizations don’t optimize — they accelerate.

The question of whether it is happening is closed.
The only open variable is timeline.

(you can also check this related post: “The Death of the Shared Story”)

The models, however imperfect, suggest 5 to 15 years before disruption cascades faster than any system can absorb. A phase where food stability, water availability, and political coherence begin failing simultaneously and visibly. Some variables could shorten that window: a regional war, a financial collapse, a bad harvest across multiple continents due to increase in oil prices, these triggers are no longer hypothetical.

Timeline

Here is what thirty years of watching people face the unthinkable has taught me.

There is a moment — it comes differently for each person — when the story breaks. When the gap between what we’ve been telling ourselves and what is actually happening becomes too wide to ignore. That moment is brutal. I have seen it destroy people who had no framework for it.

After denial comes anger — at the system, at the generation that burned the window, at the ones still pretending. Then bargaining. Then the grief finally lands. And on the other side of grief, if you can get there, is something that looks nothing like despair. Acceptance. Not resignation. Acceptance. Arguing with reality never ends well.

And from acceptance comes new possibilities. Not despair. Not frantic activity. A strange and new clarity

The analogy I keep returning to is the person given a serious prognosis.
Three months, maybe six, the doctor says. What do you do with that?

Some people spend those months in denial — chasing treatments, bargaining, refusing to let the knowledge land. Some collapse. And some, eventually, ask a different question entirely: given this, how do I want to live?

That question — given this, how do I want to live — is the one I think our civilization is being asked right now. Collectively, and each of us individually.

The denial response is to keep optimizing within the existing story. To reposition, to hedge, to find the right bunker or the right investment or the right narrative that makes it manageable.

The other response is harder and, I think, more honest: to let the story break, to sit in what that feels like, and then to ask what actually matters in the time that remains.

What are the relationships worth tending?
What is worth making, sharing, celebrating?
Where is there water? Community?
What does a human life look like without the growth imperative?

No hopium

I don’t have a redemption arc to offer. I have watched too many tragedies to manufacture one. Sitting with the discomfort is the cure.

Modern western societies have been insulated from consequence long enough that discomfort itself has become the enemy. We treat the price of gas as an outrage and the loss of convenience as injustice — while remaining remarkably incurious about the cost of our comfort to everything outside our immediate sight.

What I have is this: the end of denial, however brutal, is also the beginning of something more honest. And in my experience, honesty — even terrible honesty — creates more room for genuine living than the most elaborate story ever constructed to avoid it.

The story served us. For a long time, it served us well.

It is breaking now. Possibly the end of everything human.
And possibly the beginning of something we have no name for.

Not literally. But the distance between us and the men in those flight logs is shorter than anyone wants to admit.

Three and a half million pages released by the Department of Justice. The guts of a sex trafficking operation that serviced the most powerful people on earth. Girls recruited from vulnerable backgrounds, turned into a supply chain. Flight logs, financial records, emails connecting private islands to global capitals.

Epstein was a pimp. A sophisticated one, but a pimp. I don’t condemn prostitution between consenting adults. That’s not the crime here. The crime is coercion. The crime is age. The crime is power wielded over people who cannot say no.

The demand came from the top. The protection came from the institutions. The whole thing worked because powerful people needed it to work.

And everyone is shocked.

I’m not.

The outrage stops at the island

Every one of Epstein’s victims deserves justice. But who will give justice to the 165 schoolgirls of Minab?

On February 28, 2026, the first day of the war on Iran, a missile hit a girls’ elementary school during class hours. Triple-tapped. The roof collapsed on children. Most of the dead were between seven and twelve. Multiple investigations concluded the United States was responsible.

One hundred and sixty-five little girls. In a classroom. With our bombs.
Where are the 3.5 million pages for them?

Girls trafficked in Palm Beach. Girls buried in Minab. Different crimes, same impunity. The powerful take what they want and the world looks away. The only difference is that Epstein's operation required secrecy. Ours doesn't even bother.

We starve 11 million people in Cuba and call it foreign policy. We deny 29 million Venezuelans their right to self-determination through sanctions and interference, and we call it democracy promotion. We watch 2 million people in Gaza get obliterated and call it self-defense.

No files. No transparency act. No outrage. Because those aren’t Epstein’s crimes. Those are ours.

The supply chain

We fill our tanks with cheap gas that flows through pipelines laid over broken countries. We wear clothes stitched in buildings that collapse because safety costs money. We eat food picked by people we’d call trafficked if they looked like us. We carry phones assembled in factories with suicide nets outside the windows.

The supply chain of our comfort runs through the same logic as Epstein’s operation.

Exploitation is tolerable as long as the victims are far enough away that we don’t have to watch.

We are all Epstein’s clients. We just don’t fly private to get our fix.

We get it delivered.

The 405

For weeks I drove the 405 freeway in Los Angeles. Giant letters above the highway: WAR. A billboard for the latest Planet of the Apes. Millions of commuters driving under it every day. Nobody said a word.

Three different letters — SEX — and the city would have burned.

We sell war to children as entertainment. We name military operations “Shock and Awe” and cheer from our living rooms. But a naked body? That’s where we draw the line.

The Epstein files shock people because sex is involved. If he’d been an arms dealer who funneled weapons to conflicts that killed hundreds of thousands of children, he’d have a foundation and a seat at the UN.

Our society isn’t broken. It’s working exactly as designed.

It knows what it finds acceptable and what it finds obscene. And it has those two things backwards.

What I know

I write this from Los Angeles. I spent thirty years in the places this system chews up — conflict zones, refugee camps, countries on the receiving end of our foreign policy. Now I live inside the machine that does the chewing. I’ve seen it from both ends. The view is the same.

The Epstein files are not a revelation to me. They are a confirmation. The only people shocked are the ones who still believed the system was something other than what it is.

People’s memory is short. Within months, the Epstein files will be a Netflix documentary and the names in the flight logs will have new PR teams. The architecture will remain untouched.

If this system collapses, it will reinvent itself with better branding.
If it survives, it will reproduce exactly this.

That’s not cynicism. That’s pattern recognition from three decades of watching it happen.

So now what

There is no clean position from which to read this. There is no ethical distance. You are inside the system that produced Epstein, that protected his clients, that bombed a classroom full of seven-year-olds and then accused their country of doing it to themselves.

You paid for it. I paid for it. Every tank of gas, every tax return, every election we voted in or didn’t. Every morning we woke up and went about our lives while the machinery ran.

The Epstein files didn’t change reality. They made it harder to pretend. It’s not justice. Justice would require looking at the whole ledger, not just the pages with sex on them. And nobody wants to open that book.

There is no action item at the end of this piece. No petition to sign. No call to your representative. Those things exist inside the system, and the system is what produced the problem. I’m not going to pretend a toolkit exists for this.

What I will say is that the discomfort you may feel right now is not a problem to solve. It’s not something to process, reframe, or move past. It is the appropriate response to what is actually happening in the world we participate in.

Let’s sit with it.

Pain is inevitable. Growth is optional.

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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—with the intention to help us shape better stories, both personally and collectively.

Because the stories we tell are the reality we live.

This is not a trend. It is an acceleration.

And the question I want to raise is not why we are watching more dark futures. It is what happens to a civilization that spends an increasing share of its creative energy rehearsing its own collapse.

There was a time when dystopian movies were warnings.

Metropolis, 1927. Fritz Lang built a vertical city out of miniatures and painted backdrops to tell us about the separation between rich and poor. You could see the craft. You could see the sets. The distance between you and the image was the space where the message lived: pay attention, this is where we could go.

Soylent Green, 1973. A world of overpopulation and ecological collapse set in 2022 (!), where the poor survive on processed wafers that turn out to be made from human corpses. The sets looked like dressed-up soundstages because they were dressed-up soundstages. But the idea landed like a punch. You didn’t need photorealism. The metaphor did the work.

Tarkovsky’s Stalker, 1979. Three men walking through an industrial wasteland toward a room that grants your deepest desires. No explosions, no battles. Just decaying concrete and long silences and a camera that refuses to look away. A Russian philosophical poem disguised as science fiction, shot on film stock that had to be thrown out and reshot because the Soviet processing lab ruined it. The limitations were part of the language.

These films were cautionary tales.

They functioned as cautionary tales precisely because they looked like cautionary tales. The gap between the image and reality was where the warning could be heard. You watched 1984 or A Clockwork Orange or Logan’s Run knowing you were watching a construction. And that knowledge is what allowed you to step back and think.

Then something changed.

Compare David Lynch’s Dune, 1984, with Denis Villeneuve’s Dune, 2021. Same source material. Forty years apart. Lynch was working with physical sets, practical effects, and limited compositing. Whatever you thought of his film, you knew you were watching a fabricated thing. The seams were showing. Villeneuve’s Dune drops you into the desert of Arrakis and you cannot tell where the real sand ends and the digital sand begins. The craft has become invisible. The construction has disappeared.

Or take the film that started this reflection for me. I saw the original Blade Runner when it came out. 1982, I was 21. I loved science fiction. It was fun. The rain-soaked streets, the neon, the flying cars. It was clearly a movie. A beautiful one, but a movie.

Then I watched Blade Runner 2049. And I had chills down my spine.

Not only because the story was darker. Because the image was real. The vast, empty landscapes. The managed desolation. The human beings who aren’t fighting the system but metabolized by it. The original had noir romance to it. The sequel is just bleak infrastructure. And it doesn’t feel like cinema.

It feels like you’re looking through a window at something just about to happen.

Here is the pivot.

When visual technology crosses the threshold of photorealism, the cautionary tale becomes a preview.

In the 1970s, Soylent Green felt like a parable. In 2017, Blade Runner 2049 felt like a premonition. The image had become indistinguishable from footage. The viewer’s nervous system does not differentiate between a real wasteland and a perfectly rendered one. The brain rehearses what it sees.

We know this at the individual level.
Sports visualization works.
Therapeutic imagery works.
Guided meditation works.
The mind does not fully distinguish between a vividly imagined experience and a lived one. This is the basis of every practice from cognitive behavioral therapy to shamanic journeying.

Now scale it to billions of viewers, all immersed in the same photorealistic collapse, the same surveillance states, the same empty cities, the same managed despair.

What you get is collective visualization operating at industrial scale. We are not being warned about a future. We are being trained to expect it.
The story we tell is the story we live.
And we are telling the same story, louder and more convincingly, every year.

Imagination itself is captured, look at Avatar.

James Cameron had a premise that could have broken the pattern: first contact with an alien civilization, a chance to imagine what it looks like when two radically different species meet and find a way to coexist. The technology to render anything he could dream of. A global audience ready to follow him wherever he went.

And where does he take it? Straight to the military battle. The indigenous people fight the colonizers with bows and arrows and flying creatures, and somehow they win, and the humans are sent packing. It’s the same story humanity has been telling since the Iliad. Three films deep, it just keeps doubling down on the battle. Each sequel more militarized than the last.

This is not a failure of resources. It is a failure of imagination.

And I’d argue the resources are part of the problem. When you can render anything, when every technological constraint has been removed, you lose the friction that forces artists to be inventive. Real talent is the ability to spin art despite constraints, to find something new precisely because the obvious path is blocked. Cameron’s situation was the opposite.

Every path was open, and he walked the oldest one.

But there is something deeper going on here. Cameron isn’t just failing to imagine a different ending. He’s writing for the audience he has. And the audience wants what it knows: the enemy defeated, order restored through force. Violence as resolution.

Control as the answer to chaos.

We try to resolve problems using the same level of consciousness that created them, and cinema reflects that loop with total fidelity. The mess was made by force. The resolution is more force. The story never actually moves.

The real artist writes from a place the audience hasn’t reached yet, and pulls them there through the work. That requires a willingness to risk the audience not following. Cameron can’t afford that risk. The investment won’t allow it. And so the most technologically advanced films ever made deliver the oldest, most primitive resolution available: we win, they lose, roll credits.

The structural dimension that goes beyond any filmmaker.

Drama needs conflict. Narrative runs on tension. A story about a couple at the brink of divorce has something. A story about a couple living harmoniously has nothing. No one makes a movie about a cop who has no problems and lives beautifully. It would be unwatchable. This has been true since Homer. The engine of narrative is trouble.

But a conflict in a story does not mean the story must end in destruction.

Joseph Campbell mapped this a long time ago. The hero’s journey descends into the underworld. It passes through crisis, loss, confrontation with death. The tension is real. But the arc completes. The hero returns, transformed, carrying something back for the community. The descent is not the destination. It is the passage.

What we see in contemporary dystopian cinema is something different. The stories descend and stay down. Or they resolve through violence and rebuild from ashes, which is just another way of staying down. The arc collapses into the abyss instead of passing through it. The consciousness that created the problem is the same consciousness that attempts the resolution, and so nothing actually shifts.

The world burns, is rebuilt with the same blueprints, and we call it a story.

I explore this pattern in depth in my upcoming book Locked In (lockedinthebook.com, March 2026).

But the short version is this: a civilization that cannot imagine resolution beyond control will keep producing stories that end in control.

The cinema is not the cause.
It is the mirror. And right now, the mirror is showing us exactly where we are.

You can make a gripping film that takes us through the full catastrophe and arrives somewhere we haven’t been before. That is what a real story arc does. The fact that almost nobody in cinema is even attempting that landing is the actual problem. Not that conflict exists in the story, but that the story never completes its own journey.

We have become very good at the descent. We have forgotten how to come back with the elixir.

Question of scale.

The experiences that actually shift consciousness, ceremony, embodied practice, direct encounter between humans in a room, these do not need narrative tension to be profound. But they don’t scale. They don’t film. A ceremony reaches twelve people. A movie reaches twelve million. And if you try to scale the ceremony to a stadium, it stops being a ceremony.

So we have built an enormous beast of communication that feeds on drama and dark futures, that has been growing for a century, and that now reaches billions. And on the other side, we have small, local, embodied practices that actually work on consciousness but cannot compete. Not even close. It is not David and Goliath. The asymmetry is much bigger than that.

One more layer.

The same technology that makes dystopian cinema indistinguishable from reality is the same technology now producing deepfakes, AI-generated media, and synthetic news.

The visualization machine and the disinformation machine are the same machine.

The tools that allow Villeneuve to make Arrakis look real are the tools that allow anyone to make anything look real.

We can no longer reliably tell whether we are watching the news or watching a movie. And this is not a glitch. This is the environment we now live in. Fiction and reality have merged at the level of the image, and once the image becomes indistinguishable, the distinction between warning and blueprint collapses too.

We are not making movies that pretend to be separate from reality. We are making movies that look like reality. And reality is starting to look like the movies.

I won’t offer a resolution for this.

I know people want the last paragraph. The one that says, here’s what we can do, here are three steps, here’s the hopeful turn. I’m not going to write it. Not because I’m a pessimist. Because I think the honesty of the observation matters more than the comfort of a premature answer.

We have spent the last hundred years building the most powerful storytelling infrastructure in human history. We have refined it, funded it, globalized it, and now supercharged it with technology that erases the line between fiction and reality. And what does this machine produce? Dark futures. Surveillance states. Ecological collapse. Military resolution to every conflict. Over and over and over, with increasing realism and accelerating frequency.

The story we tell is the story we live.
We’ve been telling the same one for a while now.
And the tools we’re using to tell it have never been more convincing.

So I wonder: What future are we designing?

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• Engage (free and powerful!) — Visit the website, find the post you enjoyed most, and leave a comment at the end. Extra karma point if your comment is impertinent, sassy or even contains a question!

PS: “Change Your Story, Change The World” is a storytelling endeavor that looks deeply into the psyche that creates the stories we live by—with the intention to help us shape better stories, both personally and collectively.

Because the stories we tell are the reality we live.

I hired a designer to build a proper landing page and set up the infrastructure right. I hired a coach to learn the platform’s best practices. I subscribed to the experts, studied their strategies, followed their playbooks.

I even burned out trying to keep up with their advice.

I published weekly. Every post took anywhere from six hours to several days. I wasn’t filling space. I was writing pieces I believed could genuinely serve my readers.

Thirteen months later, here are the numbers.

The investment

13 months. 90 posts. Approximately 110,000 words. A designer, a coach, subscriptions to learn the game. $2,800 in revenue. More than that in expenses. Net negative.

The growth

800 subscribers. 600 came from my existing mailing list. That leaves roughly 200 organic subscribers gained through the platform in over a year of consistent, invested work.

For context, Substack has 35 million active subscriptions and 20 million monthly active users. I gained 200 in thirteen months.

Meanwhile, the platform itself grew from 35 million to over 50 million active subscriptions in 2025. Paid subscribers jumped from 3 million to 5 million. Substack raised $100 million at a billion-dollar valuation.

Multiple writers reported organic discovery dropping 80-90% as the algorithm shifted toward promoting big names. The platform grew. Small writers got buried deeper. That's not a bug. That's the model.

The engagement

Average likes on Notes: between 2 and 10. When it’s two, I can give you their names, they are my besties.

Average comments on a post: 4. Half are my replies. So 2 real comments per post.

Best post ever for comments: 23. Which means 12 from actual readers.

Best Note ever for comments: 15.

Average comments on Notes when I treated it as a full-time job, several hours a day: 5.

The Notes strategy

From April to July, before I even imported my mailing list, I joined a group led by a self-described leading Substack strategist with 40,000+ subscribers. Private sessions at $450 for 40 minutes. Paid subscription at $15 a month with thousands of paying subscribers. I’ll let you do the math on her revenue. In her videos you could see the flat she lives in, the clothes she wears. It all showed. The platform was working beautifully for her. Her product was teaching people how to use it.

The group strategy: read, like, comment, and restack 10 Notes from other participants daily. I grew from 150 to 300 subscribers in four months. But I refused to write empty notes. I placed valuable content in each one and in my replies too. This meant sometimes four hours of work daily. That’s a half-time job.

Add a day of work for each weekly post and writing a book on top, and that’s a full-time job as a writer. Just not paid.

After four months the growth stalled, then backfired. Manufactured engagement doesn’t build an audience. It builds a hall of mirrors.

What Substack did deliver

Writing discipline. I wrote a book during this same period. It comes out in March. The weekly cadence forced a rigor that served the deeper work. Substack didn’t cause the book, but the practice it demanded contributed to it.

A handful of genuine human connections. Not many. But a few people outside my existing circles found me here, and the conversations that followed were real and valuable.

What it didn’t deliver

Discovery. The engine that Substack markets as its core differentiator simply did not work. Almost every subscriber I gained came from my own efforts in my own community. The platform added almost nothing.

Engagement on the platform itself. People read my posts in their email. They don’t come to Substack. They don’t comment. They don’t engage here. It has become an expensive newsletter service.

Notes was a waste of time. Hours of daily engagement for single-digit interactions.

What I’ve come to see

Substack positions itself as a writer’s platform. A place for depth, quality, long-form thinking. That framing is increasingly dishonest. It is social media. More so every month. It rewards the same dopamine patterns, the same addiction loops, the same performance metrics as every other platform.

Let me tell you, the Substack emperor has no clothes.

And the direction is clear. More live video. More content imported directly from Instagram and TikTok. The writer's platform is becoming another feed.

The writers who grow on Substack are the ones who already had audiences, or the ones who play the recommendation game, trade endorsements, stay visible on Notes, show up on podcasts. That’s social media labor. It has nothing to do with the quality of the writing.

And the people making real money? Many of them are selling Substack strategy to other Substack writers. The gold rush economics are familiar: the people who got rich weren’t the miners. They sold the pickaxes.

The irony

I knew the risks going in.
I teach presence. My job is helping people gather their attention back from the world that scatters it. I tried to use this platform without playing the attention economy game. I tried to dodge the shady social media dynamics. The algorithm won.

Spreading a little content very thin across a very large surface.
Like not enough jam on soggy toast.
It barely holds.
And nobody’s nourished.

What’s next

I’m not disappearing. I’m not deleting anything. But I’m done posting weekly.

I'm also making all posts free going forward. If the platform doesn't deliver discovery, I'm not giving it a cut of your support.

The experiment ran long enough and the data is clear. I will continue to write when something needs to be said. I will continue to be here. But the weekly obligation to feed a platform that doesn’t feed me back is over.

I’d rather put that energy into the work itself.
The coaching.
Another book.
Some conversations that actually matter.

If you’re reading this in your inbox, you already know where to find me.

Subscribe now

• Subscribe — or even better, become a paid subscriber. Once I reach 100 paid subscribers (I’m already halfway there!), Substack will add a tag that could help me gain more visibility.

• Engage (free and powerful!) — Visit the website, find the post you enjoyed most, and leave a comment at the end. Extra karma point if your comment is impertinent, sassy or even contains a question!

PS: “Change Your Story, Change The World” is a storytelling endeavor that looks deeply into the psyche that creates the stories we live by—with the intention to help us shape better stories, both personally and collectively.

Because the stories we tell are the reality we live.

Sharp eye. No flinching. Mostly accurate.

I’m not here to argue with her diagnosis. I want to take it somewhere else.

She names what’s moving. I want to talk about what keeps us stable within the movement.

Diagnosis is one thing. Staying upright another.

This is my response, or rather a follow-up, a different stance toward the same reality.

THE META-PATTERN

Something is happening. Obviously. It’s always happening.

But is it accelerating? Yes. And this isn’t mystical intuition - it’s measurable.

I was born in 1961. Thirty years before the internet, also lived thirty years after. I watched the population double. Saw species disappear faster than we can count them. Felt the texture of time compress.

I am not making assumptions.

Zoom out further and planetary timescales tell the same story.
Billions of years to single-celled life.
Millions to complex organisms.
Thousands to agriculture.
Hundreds to industry.
Decades to digital.
Now we measure transformation in years.

Epochs are compressing.

The question isn’t whether change is accelerating. It is.

The question is: what happens when the rate of change exceeds our adaptive capacity?

You get the twenty symptoms Mariah listed.

You get a mental health crisis that won’t respond to apps and affirmations. People fleeing cities without knowing why. Meaning collapse, trust collapse, attention collapse.

Humans are running ancient biological hardware inside conditions it was never designed for.

THE SHARED STORY IS ALREADY GONE

I wrote recently about “The death of the shared story” - how we’re no longer living inside the same narrative. The same event now produces different worlds. Not different opinions. Different realities.

For nearly a century, the West held a single myth of progress and stability. Whether it was accurate matters less than the fact that it held.

It no longer does.

When the collective frame cracks, coherence stops being a default. It becomes individual work.

We can no longer rely on external stability - shared meaning, trusted institutions, predictable ground.

Which means internal stability isn’t optional anymore.

MASTERY REDEFINED

This is what mastery looks like now:

Staying coherent in a world that loses its coherence.

Nothing is wrong - this is what is.
The universe moves from perfection to perfection, even when we can’t see it.
Plus honestly, the system was broken already, just not uncomfortable enough for us, the privileged, to complain.

The narratives we held are dissolving. The familiar ground is moving. And our nervous systems are signaling danger because that’s what they’re designed to do when the environment shifts faster than adaptation allows.

Coherence, surrender, trust, adaptability - these aren’t spiritual luxuries.

They’re survival tools for high-velocity reality.

THE TWENTY FIELD CONDITIONS

Here are Mariah’s twenty patterns - restated as field conditions.

1. Collective nervous systems are running beyond capacity. Chronic activation for decades. Baseline dysregulation is now normal. That’s why we see nervous regulation conversation everywhere.

2. Hyper-independence has become default armor. Trust collapsed, so people stopped reaching. Self-reliance feels like strength.

3. Economic reality is performed. Most are financially fragile while maintaining appearances. A collective theatre nobody agreed to. Wealth disparity has always been the #1 source of instability.

4. Identity is in constant revision. Without stable ground, people rebuild themselves repeatedly. Less growth, more troubleshooting.

5. Meaning structures dissolved faster than replacements formed. Religion, career, ideology - the old containers emptied. Nothing solid took their place. Good, holding on to a screwed up system is not sign of health.

6. High technical capacity, low practical competence. We can build AI but are failing at basic emotional management. Specialized knowledge, brittle humans. We teach our kids the wrong things to thrive. Not new either.

7. Algorithms shape emotional regulation. Attention systems now parent the psyche, especially for the young. Return the attention within to wake up. Stay outside if you wanna keep sleepwalking.

8. Numbness passes for equanimity. Overstimulation pushed people into functional shock. It looks like calm. Far from it, it is the calm before the storm.

9. Quiet preparedness is spreading. People are building resilience without announcing it. Not paranoid. Responsive. And probably useless.

10. Community exists as aesthetic. Togetherness without obligation or trust. The form without the function.

11. Middle class erosion is structural. Not a mystery. Not inflation. A managed squeeze. I felt it. You may feel it too. Or will soon.

12. Attention has been colonized. Engineered distraction. Paralysis is a feature, not a bug.

13. Trust collapsed in all directions. Institutions, media, each other. No shared foundation to stand on.

14. Supply chain fragility is now visible. Efficiency without redundancy. One disruption from chaos.

15. Cognition is increasingly outsourced. Thinking happens externally. Memory, navigation, analysis - borrowed, not earned.

16. Authoritarianism arrives without friction. No doors kicked in. Consent manufactured through convenience.

17. Mass relocation as somatic signal. People move before they understand why. The body knows first.

18. Entrepreneurship as economic triage. Side hustles aren’t passion projects. They’re survival responses dressed as ambition.

19. Spiritual seeking surges in the void. When meaning collapses, humans look up. Sometimes wisdom, sometimes compensation. And the market knows it, offering more and more junk to numb the seekers.

20. Universal intuition of transition. Across all camps, the same felt sense: something is shifting. No shared language for it yet.

WHAT COMES NEXT

In a next post, (if I survive the 20 conditions above 😂) I’ll take each of these field conditions and offer a practical response - a way to stay coherent inside them.

CLOSING: BEFORE THE STORM

One last thing.

Coherence is easier to build before pressure hits.

You don’t develop physical strength during the emergency. You train before. So when the moment comes, capacity is already there.

The storm isn’t theoretical. It’s here, and accelerating.

Inner stability isn’t luxury. It isn’t spiritual hobby. It’s the foundation for navigating whatever comes next.

Start now.

Not because the world is ending.

Because the world is moving faster than your nervous system was designed for - and the gap between those two speeds is where people break.

Or where they learn to stay whole.

Subscribe now

• Subscribe — or even better, become a paid subscriber. Once I reach 100 paid subscribers (I’m already halfway there!), Substack will add a tag that could help me gain more visibility.

• Engage (free and powerful!) — Visit the website, find the post you enjoyed most, and leave a comment at the end. Extra karma point if your comment is impertinent, sassy or even contains a question!

PS: “Change Your Story, Change The World” is a storytelling endeavor that looks deeply into the psyche that creates the stories we live by—with the intention to help us shape better stories, both personally and collectively.

Because the stories we tell are the reality we live.

Done with the soft meaningless voices. Done with the fairy dust and the unicorns farting rainbows. Done pretending that using Sanskrit for emptiness gives it more fullness. Sorry, empty is empty. That is the point.
But 'Come Experience Nothing' is a tough sell.

Have you ever sat in circles where people charged hundreds to tell you what your spirit animal was. (A wolf. An eagle. A lion. Nobody ever gets a dung beetle or a tadpole). I’ve watched 25 year old coaches with six months of training explain the universe to people twice their age. I’ve read Instagram captions so vague they could apply to literally anyone, which is the point:

You can’t be wrong if you don’t say anything.

There is a gap between earned wisdom and borrowed wisdom.
The latter is the one that uses empty words.
The first sits with you in the tragedy.

The other day, I read something like this.
You know the genre: World Consciousness Expo at the LAX Hilton.

✨ Beautiful Soul ✨ Your journey begins here. Join us in the sacred jungles of Costa Rica where we will hold space for your deepest unfolding. Honor your process as you lean into the profound wisdom that awaits. Trust the unfolding. Surrender to what wants to emerge. In this sacred container, surrounded by fellow seekers, you will finally show up for yourself and step into your highest alignment. The universe is calling. Are you ready to say yes to YOU? 🦋🌿💫

$4,500. Ayahuasca not included.

Let me translate: Give us your rent money to sit in a circle, cry and vomit your guts open, while a white lady named River burns sage she bought on Amazon (you read well, on Amazon, not in the Amazon). We’ll use words that sound meaningful but commit us to nothing. If you don’t have a breakthrough, it’s because you didn’t “trust the process” enough. Your fault. No refunds. We take Venmo, Zelle, and your dignity.

The worst part? I’ve written this crap. I’ve “held space.” I’ve “honored processes.” I’ve “trusted the unfolding” and for a while I thought I knew what that meant. I did. Until these words were emptied of content, milked by thousands Instagram memes on algorithm steroids. I thought being agreeable was compassionate.

I don’t think that way anymore.
So I made a list. A dictionary for the spiritually suspicious. A field guide to the words that mean nothing. Use it freely. Protect yourself.

Hold space
What they say it means: Create sacred presence for transformation.
What it actually means: I will sit there, nod and look concerned.
Say instead: “I’ll listen.”

Your journey
What they say it means: Your unique soul path.
What it actually means: Your life, but make it sound like a Netflix limited series, FOMO included.
Say instead: “Your life.”

Lean into
What they say it means: Embrace with courage.
What it actually means: Just do the damn uncomfortable thing.
Say instead: “Face it.”

Honor your process
What they say it means: Respect where you are.
What it actually means: I have absolutely nothing useful to tell you right now.
Say instead: “Take your time.” Or just stay silent

Trust the unfolding
What they say it means: Surrender to divine timing.
What it actually means: I have no idea what's happening either, but this sounds wise.
Say instead: “I don’t know. Neither do you. Let’s see.”

Sacred container
What they say it means: A held space for transformation.
What it actually means: A room with floor cushions and dirty yoga mat we're charging a lot for.
Say instead: “A safe place to talk.”

Show up for yourself
What they say it means: Prioritize your growth.
What it actually means: Buy this thing, the upsell, and the mastermind. And the retreat.
Say instead: “Pay attention to what you really need. It might not cost you $4,500.”

Deep wisdom
What they say it means: Profound truth.
What it actually means: Something that sounds good on a mug or a bumper sticker.
Say instead: Just say the thing. If it’s wise, we’ll notice. If it needs a sunset background and a cursive font, it's not.

What wants to emerge
What they say it means: The soul’s calling.
What it actually means: I don’t want to give you direct advice and risk being wrong.
Say instead: “What do you actually want? Be specific.”

Activation
What they say: Energetic awakening of dormant potential.
What it means: You’ll feel something. Might be transcendence. Might be the edibles kicking in.
Say instead: Nothing. Just stop using this word.

Embodiment
What they say: Integration of wisdom into the physical form.
What it means: We ran out of ways to say “feel your feelings”
Say instead: “Get out of your f* head.”

Look. I’m not against retreats. I’ve done more ceremonies than most. I’ve sat and held circles myself. I’ve cried with strangers. Most of it I’m grateful for.

But the industry has become a parody. A costume contest where everyone’s dressed as Rumi but nobody’s actually read him (No, Instagram does not count!). Where “healer” or “teacher” is a job title you can claim after a weekend workshop and a logo from Fiverr.

If we truly want to make a difference we need to serve the people who need the most help, the skeptics, the burned-out, the ones who smell bullshit from a mile away because they’ve been down that path before.
Yet they stopped listening years ago. And I don’t blame them. I stopped too.

Here’s my test now:
Would a smart, skeptical friend roll their eyes at this sentence?
If yes, then delete.

If you need sparkle emojis to sell enlightenment, you’re using enlightenment to sell sparkle emojis.

Say it plain. Say it simple. Say it like you’d say it to a friend at midnight who just asked you what the hell they should do with their life when they are at their darkest.
From there they cannot tolerate bullshit.

That’s the voice people will trust.

And that’s the only conversation worth having.

This list is not over, I just started. What’s on your list?
Drop the words that make you cringe in the comments.
Let’s build this dictionary together.

Subscribe now

• Subscribe — or even better, become a paid subscriber. Once I reach 100 paid subscribers (I’m already halfway there!), Substack will add a tag that could help me gain more visibility.

• Engage (free and powerful!) — Visit the website, find the post you enjoyed most, and leave a comment at the end. Extra karma point if your comment is impertinent, sassy or even contains a question!

PS: “Change Your Story, Change The World” is a storytelling endeavor that looks deeply into the psyche that creates the stories we live by—with the intention to help us shape better stories, both personally and collectively.

Because the stories we tell are the reality we live.

Sunday morning, over coffee, I read a post by historian Heather Cox Richardson simply called "December 5". The analysis was unsettling, but something beneath it reached deeper: it touched something in me I’ve felt in the collective field for years.

My chest tightened, and whenever that happens, I share the story with a few friends for resonance. I trust my perception, but I check it against other nervous systems.

The replies came quickly and they could not have been more different.
Some mentioned collapse and others awakening. Some talked of danger, others of destiny and opportunities.

Four separate worlds reading the same words.

But it was not disagreement that startled me, it was the degree of divergence, the sense that we were no longer standing on the same ground.
As if the shared picture had already shattered, and only now were we noticing the pieces on the floor.

In that moment something became clear.
We are not merely debating interpretations.
We are no longer living inside the same story.

II. When the World No Longer Holds One Story

For nearly a century, the West lived inside a single myth of progress and stability.
A world where institutions were predictable, truth was accessible, and democracy formed a common foundation.
Whether the story was accurate matters less than the fact that it held.

Today it no longer does.

The same event now produces different worlds.
Not simply different opinions: different realities.

The old coherence has dissolved.
The center that once held the narrative together has thinned into mist.

I know this place well: it is the threshold before a paradigm shift.
Not chaos, but a field too fragmented to hold the weight of the world.

III. Why Data Cannot Guide Us Through This Moment

We grew up believing that more data would bring us closer to truth.
Yet data only works inside a stable frame.
Once the frame changes, data becomes a record of a world that is already disappearing.

The models we once used to understand society feel increasingly archaic.
They describe a world that no longer exists.

In moments like this, intellect looks backward.
It can explain what has happened, but cannot see what is coming.

IV. Intuition: The Quiet Compass That Still Works

When the collective story dissolves, the body becomes the last reliable guide.
Not as fantasy or wishful thinking, but as biological intelligence.

It is the same intelligence that moves flocks without hesitation, that allows forests to redistribute nutrients, that guides ecosystems toward balance.

Intuition works through sensing, through direct contact with the moment: short horizon, light grip, movement shaped by responsiveness rather than prediction.

To navigate a world without a shared story, we have to live the way nature lives:
in conversation with change, alive to the subtle signals that do not appear in data.

I learned this in large-scale emergency responses, where data was scarce, timelines were short, and thousands of lives depended on the ability to sense reality directly.

V. The Nervous System and the Fear of Groundlessness

Yet the human animal resists this shift.
We anchor ourselves in identity, nation, meaning, continuity.
These give the body a sense of ground.

When they dissolve, something deep in us panics.

I feel it in myself.
The tension, the fatigue, the longing for stability.
The unease that rises without a clear object.
Part personal, part collective.

It is raining in the world, so of course I am getting wet.
It does not mean I am dysfunctional, it means I am attuned to the field.

This is the landscape I help people navigate, finding stability inside instability, coherence inside turbulence.

VIII. After the Shared Story Dies

This is not the end of the world.
It is the end of a narrative.

Every metamorphosis begins with dissolution.
The caterpillar becomes something unrecognizable before it learns to fly.
Civilizations follow the same arc.

What emerges next will not be a continuation of what came before.
It will be born the way new ecosystems appear after fire.
Unexpected. Self-organizing. Alive in new ways we cannot yet imagine.

The age of a single story has passed.
What comes next will be plural, fluid, decentralized, relational: a coherence discovered moment by moment rather than imposed from above. And to us it may appear as chaotic, a new order we do not yet understand.

The shared story is dying.
But the world is not.
We are simply entering whatever waits on the other side of the old map.

VI. Where My Lens Was Forged

My worldview did not take shape in a California boogie café or in the stiffness of academic analysis.
It grew in places where the world had already cracked.
War zones, border conflicts, refugee camps, countries struggling to reclaim themselves after the tide of history retreated.

I studied political theory, but the real lessons came from walking inside systems while they were breaking. When maps no longer matched territory. When narratives no longer matched reality. Where people lived in a world the old story could no longer explain.

Those experiences leave an imprint.
Anyone who has lived through collapse develops a certain way of listening.
Not for drama or for headlines, but for the subtle fractures that appear long before the structures fall.

So if my tone sometimes carries a shadow of caution, it comes from memory, from recognition of the pattern. I can feel the fear but it does not forge my story anymore.

Because I trust life.
I have watched renewal rise in places where every rational metric declared it impossible. I saw nature reorder itself. I witnessed communities reweave.
Life always continues with quiet insistence.

Empires and ideologies do not share that resilience.
They are seasonal.
They bloom and fade.

VII. My Biases, Without Apology

Since clarity matters, I name my leanings openly.
My worldview bends toward democratic-social values.
I distrust any vision of society built on uniformity or on nostalgic fantasies of order.
I hold a deep aversion to force and the illusion that violence can create balance.
And my faith in the future rests in the intelligence of nature, not in political mythology.

But what shapes my analysis runs deeper than ideology.
It comes from a fusion of political understanding, spirituality, somatic awareness, psychology, myth, and the quiet patterns that reveal themselves beneath events.

I do not look for the correct story.
I look for the deeper architecture of meaning behind the stories we tell.

The wide spread of reactions to the article this morning showed me that something essential has already changed: the shared frame is gone.

What remains is our capacity to stay coherent while the story rewrites itself.

Subscribe now

• Subscribe — or even better, become a paid subscriber. Once I reach 100 paid subscribers (I’m already halfway there!), Substack will add a tag that could help me gain more visibility.

• Engage (free and powerful!) — Visit the website, find the post you enjoyed most, and leave a comment at the end. Extra karma point if your comment is impertinent, sassy or even contains a question!

PS: “Change Your Story, Change The World” is a storytelling endeavor that looks deeply into the psyche that creates the stories we live by—with the intention to help us shape better stories, both personally and collectively.

Because the stories we tell are the reality we live.

A Mirror Named Victoria

I had been in the U.S. for a year or two and kept in touch with a dear friend named Victoria. Not only we were both French, but we had shared home in Thailand and India in previous years, while immersed in a spiritual community. Our connection ran deep, we shared an intention not just to explore consciousness, but to truly wake up from the dream — not give the dream a more beautiful polish.

One day, on a call, I shared something I had recently experienced, and she responded with words I didn’t expect:

“Oh, so now you’re buying into U.S. spirituality.”

I was stunned. I didn’t even know what she meant. I’d never heard the term before. And yet, the irreverence in her voice and the sting in my gut, told me there was truth there. And like all things that sting the ego, it marked a blind spot.

This post is the result of the inquiry into “culture and spirituality” in the land of Christian capitalism.

Sometimes the only way to see clearly is from the outside.

Ego with Mala beads

It was Chögyam Trungpa (the founder Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado) who gave the world the phrase: spiritual materialism. His 1973 seminal book, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, was a response to what he saw unfolding in the U.S. — a culture where even the pursuit of enlightenment could become just another ego project. He warned that the spiritual path—meant to dissolve ego—could just as easily be co-opted to inflate it.

Years later, it is not hard to see: instead of letting go of self-importance, we made self importance a proof of spiritual achievement. The ego did not chose good old humility, but arrogance, a lot more convenient for the materially inclined.

The ego did not surrender from the practices of the spiritual path, it adapted by possessing the path. Now the path is another tool in the toolbox towards material success, it is accessorized, polished, and commodified.

Spiritual materialism is when the ego hijacks the path to transcendence and turns it into a tool of self-reinforcement.

When we use the path to build a stronger self-image instead of dismantling the illusion, we miss the point, and we might believe we’re awakening, when we’re just enjoying a spiritualized flavor of the dream.

The Invention of Material Spiritualism

Yet the ego did not stop at just using spirituality to look spiritual, it invented a new paradigm: material spiritualism, something even more insidious, we are now using spirituality to justify materialism.

This fusion didn’t arise in a vacuum. It came from two core currents in U.S. culture: the ego’s appetite for identity (spiritual materialism) and the Calvinist legacy of measuring spiritual worth through material success.

Spiritual Materialism + Material Success as Divine Favor → Material Spiritualism

In this model, money is energy, material success is spiritual alignment, and the divine is something you access through famous teacher workshops, high-ticket retreats in Costa Rica, and weekly uploads of Source on your favorite social media platform.

God is now a vibe you tune into for abundance. Enlightenment is a scalable business model. Spirituality has become performance. Awakening, a commodity.

Material Spiritualism: where wealth, luxury, and comfort are no longer obstacles to awakening—they are evidence of it.

The “Billionaires Saint” syndrome

Once we understand material spiritualism—this cultural myth where wealth is the evidence of spiritual alignment—then the rise of the billionaire-saint begins to make perfect sense.

In the U.S., wealth isn’t just admired. It is sanctified.

From Silicon Valley to Wall Street, billionaires are hailed as visionaries and spiritual icons. They are seen as proof that the system works, that prosperity is a form of divine favor. We quote Warren Buffet for his humility (while he quietly profits from a system designed to reward hoarding over fairness), Bill Gates for his philanthropy (while his Foundation reinforces dependency and influence) or Steve Job for quoting zen (while sending production to sweat shops).

Yet we stay away from Jidu Krishnamurti who shows “how sick our society is”, we ignore David Graeber who “tell the world is a story we make”, or James Baldwin “who ask us tho face the lie within”. The ego conveniently cherry pick our references to justify our ways. We confuse financial dominance with clarity, and success with virtue, wealth as a form of divine alignment.

But let’s look more closely: these billionaires are not just icons—they are the very architects of the systems that deepen inequality, erode democracy, and exploit the earth. They are disconnected from the common man, their wealth insulating them from the consequences of the world they shape.

Wealth disparity is the root of most societal dysfunction. Yet spiritual communities still chant "abundance is my birthright" while living on stolen land, slave labor, and national privilege.

“Abundance is my birthright” sounds different when spoken from a Beverly Hills mansion—or your vacation home in Costa Rica.

The ultra-rich hoard what others need to survive, then point fingers at the poor, the migrant, the disenfranchised. In the myth of material spiritualism, billionaires became gods and being poor is divine retribution for lack of worth. But their temples are built on exclusion, and their gospel is greed.

What if we stopped projecting spiritual value onto material gain, and started measuring worth by presence, depth, and care?

Fame as Identity

National Fame

The U.S. doesn’t just want to belong—it wants to be chosen.

From the myth of the "city on a hill" to the doctrine of American exceptionalism, the U.S. has long cultivated its image as a beacon of freedom, a land of opportunity, a protector of democracy. It wants to be seen. To be admired. To be followed. Fame becomes national identity.

Like with personal fame, this identity is fragile and performative. To maintain the image, the country must always be winning, always right, always admired. It will project this even if it must do so through manipulation, propaganda, and military intervention.

Just like the individual ego builds a spiritual image to prove its superiority, the nation builds a moral brand to justify domination.

In the U.S. narrative, freedom is what we deliver, force is how we deliver it, and God is the why we use to justify ourselves.

The result is a self-righteous global ego that can’t tolerate dissent. The U.S. plays like the world’s spiritual teacher—offering democracy, moral superiority, and divine purpose—while ignoring the cost: toppled governments, drone warfare, corporate imperialism, and deep internal injustice.

What if true wisdom is not trendy? What if spiritual maturity means seeing clearly? What if being unseen is part of being awake?

Personal Fame

And fame has also entered the spiritual arena.
In this system, to be followed is to be trusted—a proof of one's awakening. To be seen is to be special. To be visible is to be chosen. Marketing skills are mistaken for spiritual gifts. Lead magnets and sales funnels are the new incense and prayer beads—tools of attraction in the temple of monetized transcendence.

Even in spiritual circles, visibility has become virtue.

The silent equation: the more followers, the more enlightened.

But what if the soul thrives in silence? What if it takes to leave the palace and the privileges to truly walk the path? Even if only to share space with the vast majority of humanity who have no privileges to leave behind.

Force as Sacred Duty

Let’s follow the logic all the way: if wealth is seen as proof of spiritual alignment, then protecting wealth becomes a sacred duty. The logic between wealth and force is simple:

Wealth enables force. Force protects wealth.

The obsession with dominance, military superiority, global control, the right to intervene, occupy, surveil, is fueled by a deep national insecurity born out of the trauma of rejection, and the derived belief that safety comes from power not justice; that peace comes from intimidation, not community.

Yet force is the voice of the weak for kindness is the voice of the strong.

A nation that doesn’t feel safe will seek strength not through collaboration, but through domination. The result isn’t safety—it’s oppression, control and its corollary: paranoia. It will build weapons instead of trust. Walls instead of bridges.

And when you believe your wealth is blessed by God, then force becomes holy. Violence becomes righteous. War becomes mission.

But spiritual force never looks like domination. It looks like surrender, compassion, humility, and presence. What we call "strength" is fear hiding behind a wall.

Awakening From the Nightmare

Now, years later, I understand what Victoria meant and I see Trungpa’s predicament came true. In the process, the ego dream has turned into ego nightmare. Wealth disparity leads to loss in democracy, justice, health and education, minority rights. The land of the free is now the land of the manipulated, free speech has become brainwashing. The ego is winning this battle, at the cost of almost everything valuable, freedom, peace, happiness and even safety.

“U.S. spirituality” is a mirror for all of us to look at. This land is not without incredible achievements yet certainly not in the spiritual realms. If I want a specialist of awakening, I would turn my gaze to the asian subcontinent, the source of most spiritual achievements and technology.

In the U.S. the sacred is being sold, awakening repurposed for ego convenience, the divine is now a commodity. When spirituality becomes performance, the soul goes silent and watches, waiting for its turn.
This is not awakening, this is sleepwalking at best, sycophancy at worst.

Awakening was never something to succeed, to be seen or to dominate.
It was something to surrender, to see, and to serve.

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This post is the result of much research and inquiries, not all of them could be reflected to keep my objective of “5 min read or less”. I just wanted to bring these final chapters, not needed to understand the logic above, but to clarify aspects of the enquiry.

Now what?

In many places, people sit with hard truths. They let the discomfort ripen. But here in the U.S. we're trained to seek resolution. Wrap it up. End on a high note. Expect the happy end. So let’s acknowledge the cultural reflex—without bending to it.

This isn’t a post about fixing the world. It’s about waking up inside it.

It starts with:

• Notice where the dream still seduces you.

• Where you measure your worth by what you produce.

• Where you conflate visibility with virtue.

• Where wealth feels like safety, and spirituality becomes a quality label.

Awakening starts by being honest. Radically and lovingly honest.

And if you need a compass:
Presence will never betray you.
Compassion will never mislead you.
And service to the whole is always the way.

Addendum: Seeking the Meta Stories Behind it All

In my post The Two Seed Stories Beneath Every Story I shared an inquiry about the two meta stories behind all stories, and how these two seeds shape the entire landscape of Western striving.

I am not safe. I am not worthy.

In a culture where the two seeds story are “I am not safe, I am not worthy” is it just coincidence that our addictions are wealth and fame? Or is it that wealth and fame are just the most extrovert expression of the two root beliefs? Is the constant pursuit of wealth as an attempt to feel safe and the never ending pursuit of fame as an attempt to feel worthy? I have worked with a large number of rich and famous people. I have my own answers, I’ll let you find yours.

Wealth may try to soothe the fear and fame may try to soothe shame. But no external pursuit can heal the internal wound.

———
I mention above “Christian Capitalism “ and the “Calvinist legacy of measuring spiritual worth through material success”, and wanted to dive a little deeper here.
The roots of Protestant Christianity in the U.S. is rooted in Puritan Calvinism, enhanced by the collective trauma of forced immigration.

The sociologist Max Weber coined the term Protestant Work Ethic in his 1905 book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. He showed how Christian thought—especially Calvinism—linked salvation to signs of worldly success.

The U.S. is a nation largely built by religious dissidents rejected by Europe. A people trying to prove they belonged, that they had value, that they were chosen. Hard work became more than virtue: it was salvation, an atonement. Work is worship. Hard work is spiritual zeal. Wealth is divine recognition.

The “American Dream”: anyone who works hard enough can rise. Shame on you if you haven’t risen, you didn’t work hard enough!

At its root is a psychological wound: I must earn love, safety, and belonging.

This is the source of burnout, spiritual bypassing and justifying injustice while believing in merit.

Work replaces presence and becomes disconnect. We exhaust ourselves trying to deserve what was never supposed to be earned. We focus on wealth at the cost of everything else.

And in the process, spiritual materialism became material spiritualism. We do not disconnect from the story, we do not wake up, we turn the dream into an excuse. And the dream is now turning into a nightmare.

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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—with the intention to help us shape better stories, both personally and collectively.

Because the stories we tell are not just stories—they are the reality we live.