The Next Generation’s Dilemma: Confronting the Metacrisis

A Nate Hagens’ podcast with transcript posted June 9th 2024

57 min readJun 14, 2024

What does an elder who has been paying attention for fifty years and three young'uns think about the future three of them may have to endeavor to live in?

As the human predicament continues to accelerate, the conversations regarding the future are still dominated by older generations — yet it is their younger successors who will face the brunt of these issues throughout their lives. Today’s Reality Roundtable with Priscilla Trịnh, James Branagan, and Natasha Linhart, focuses on Generation Z’s perspective of the metacrisis, how learning the reality of the human predicament has affected their worldview, and what they see as viable future paths for themselves and the world. How might we approach intergenerational relationships to encourage the transfer of knowledge in both directions, without blame or resentment? What are the unique challenges that young people face when addressing the layers of complexity and risk in the world, and thinking about how to respond? Could fostering community, empathy, and personal responsibility act as a bridge across generational divides, steering us towards a more unified and compassionate future?
About Nate Hagens
Nate Hagens is the Director of The Institute for the Study of Energy & Our Future (ISEOF) an organization focused on educating and preparing society for the coming cultural transition. Allied with leading ecologists, energy experts, politicians and systems thinkers, ISEOF assembles road-maps and off-ramps for how human societies can adapt to lower throughput lifestyles.
Nate holds a Masters Degree in Finance with Honors from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in Natural Resources from the University of Vermont. He teaches an Honors course, Reality 101, at the University of Minnesota.
About Priscilla Trịnh
Priscilla Trịnh currently serves as Director of Communications at the Post Growth Institute and co-coordinator of the Minnesota Youth Institute. She is also the creator of the #postgrowth jobs board and a founding member of The Overstory Alliance. Additionally, Priscilla is an editor at the Blue Marble Review, and contributor to the Minnesota Women’s Press. Priscilla holds a B.S. in Sustainable Systems Management and resides on Očhéthi Šakówiŋ lands (Minnesota, USA) and when not working, can be found near a body of water or in the kitchen.
About James Branagan
James Branagan is a content creator and video editor, posting content on slow living and philosophy from his channel, The New Naturalist. At a young age, he became disillusioned with many different components of society, becoming fascinated by the prospect of humans figuring out how to live in an ecologically compatible way. He’s committed to the task of addressing some of the many facets of Our Human Predicament, particularly education and food production systems.
About Natasha Linhart
Natasha Linhart graduated from the University of Amsterdam in 2023 with a degree in BSc in Politics, Psychology, Law and Economics with a focus in Economics and Business, and electives in Degrowth and Critical Theory [“Critical theory” refers to a family of theories that aim at a critique and transformation of society by integrating normative perspectives with empirically informed analysis of society’s conflicts, contradictions, and tendencies]. For the last year, she has been working as a Research Associate with the Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future. Natasha is also a passionate educator, founding her own tutoring company with a holistic approach to high-school education (IBCompanions).

The transcript was AI generated. I corrected obvious errors but as I didn’t listen the the audio, I did not check the text against the audio except for the few times I needed to.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Natasha Linhart: At the end of the day, we’re all in this situation together, and it’s no individual’s fault that we got here, but it’s everyone’s responsibility, regardless of what decade you were born in, to contribute towards responding. So, I would love to see older generations, ﬁrstly, stop saying that it’s down to our generation.

Secondly, it stops having conversations about these topics in closed rooms amongst academic elite and instead actively engaging in the intergenerational transfer of knowledge and expertise and skills so that our generation and younger generations can be equipped as best as possible to face the challenges ahead.

[00:00:42] Nate Hagens: Today, I am joined by three humans in their early twenties who have found themselves immersed in the work and scholarship surrounding The Great Simpliﬁcation. as you might be aware, the viewers of this channel and this content in the world, tend to skew older, but it’s my belief that bringing young voices to the table, getting their perspectives on the future, Platforming their ideas is essential for us to navigate the coming decades, especially those young humans who have a systems understanding of the complexity and the risk that we face.

As such, this reality roundtable is focused on the perspectives of youth today, how they feel about the current state of the world, What their hopes are for the future, what their ideas are for the future of society. Joining me today are Priscilla Trinh, who currently serves as the director of communications at the Post Growth Institute and co coordinator of the Minnesota Youth Institute.

She’s the creator of the Post Growth Jobs Board, editor at the Blue Marble Review and contributor to the Minnesota Women’s Press. Also joining me is James Branigan, a writer, philosopher, and content creator with a YouTube channel of his own. James is committed to the task of addressing some of the many facets of the human predicament with education and food production systems being two of the more appealing ones for him.

He is Irish and currently lives in Spain. Last but not least is Natasha Linhart, who is a recent graduate of the University of Amsterdam with degrees in economics and business and electives in degrowth and critical theory. Natasha has been a volunteer for our organization for the past year, and she will be starting full time as a research associate this summer.

I hope this is the ﬁrst of, many round table discussions with young humans. I hope you enjoy it. Welcome, young humans, to reality roundtable number nine. Priscilla Natasha James. Great for you to be here.

[00:02:54] Natasha Linhart: Nice to be here, too. Thank you. Thanks for having us.

[00:02:57] Nate Hagens: Thanks for having us. Oh, you’re welcome. you’re very welcome.

I would like to have more young humans on the show because you are going to be living long lives during The Great Simpliﬁcation and, what’s ahead. So let me, let me set the stage for this. I know all three of you. Priscilla was one of my students. Priscilla, I’ve known you since you were 17 or, such.

And you were my teaching assistant for my class, Reality 101. James and Natasha I’ve met online through the podcast. So I have various hats especially for Priscilla. I was a professor and a mentor and a coach and a friend for the next hour plus though, I am just a podcast host. I want you each to speak your authentic selves about what you believe and feel and think about our world and our future. And before we get to that, if you could maybe each of you give a brief introduction of who you are and what you’re doing right now you know, brief bio Natasha, we’ll start with you.

[00:04:13] Natasha Linhart: Yeah. So hi, I’m Natasha. I’m 23 years old and I usually live in France, but I’m currently in the British Virgin Islands in the Caribbean because I’m doing a few months of backpacking and traveling before starting work full time with Nate and his organization.

And yeah, it feels very surreal to be here cause I’ve learned so much from this podcast. So thanks for having us.

[00:04:37] Nate Hagens: Priscilla.

[00:04:38] Priscilla Trinh: Hey everyone, Priscilla Trinh here, she her pronouns. I am also 23 and calling in from Oceti Shikohan lands, also known as Minnesota, United States, and I do communications work in the realm of alternative economics and food systems, and that’s my job and energy right now.

[00:04:56] James Branagan: James. Hey, I’m James. I’m 25. I’m Irish, but currently in Granada. I just love biology and environmental science. And as with Natasha, I came across The Great Simpliﬁcation and it’s pretty surreal to be here. But right now I’m studying regenerative agriculture. And how to work the land that way.

[00:05:19] Nate Hagens: Excellent. Well, thank you all for being here. as is usually the format, I’m going to have a framing question and you’ll each have ﬁve plus or minus minutes. and then we’ll, carry on and have a conversation after that. So I would love each of you to respond. and describe your, own personal journey learning about the various economic and environmental risks and crises in the world around us, and how has that shaped the way you see the future and your own place in it?

Understanding the Metacrisis Journey

[00:05:56] Natasha Linhart: So my journey, understanding about the metacrisis speciﬁcally and how the diﬀerent environmental and economic risks and crises are related and interconnected. That journey was life changing. it was deﬁnitely a rollercoaster and I’d say it was made up of a few diﬀerent phases.

The ﬁrst being a sort of awareness phase, which started about two years ago and that was triggered by a few diﬀerent events and circumstances that maybe we can dive into later. But it was basically a six month period in which I exposed myself to a lot of information about the various crises we face at the moment, both environmentally and socially and economically.

And I came to realize that they were all just symptoms of something more complex going on beneath the surface. And that was the time period where I came across your work, Nate, and across this podcast. And that awareness phase really taught me, ﬁrstly, that we have this, socioeconomic reality or this economic superorganism as you call it that’s the outcome of institutions and behavior being oriented around proﬁt maximization and the expectation of continued growth and the dynamics embedded in that socioeconomic system are driving the crises that we face and are fundamentally incompatible with the long term well being of the planet and of people, and that realisation for me was really hard to take because I’m a part of that system, right we all are to lesser and greater extents.

So I had to come to terms with the fact that I was part of something that was driving the crisis that I cared about and that I cared about addressing. And then it didn’t get much better because during the awareness phase I also learnt about energy and about ecology. And I learned that this economic superorganism and this version of humanity was coming to an end and was self terminating because it could only function by continually destroying the things which its survival depends upon.

So that meant I had to throw all the expectations I had about my future out the window. And at that stage, I entered a phase of grief. I suppose I was grieving for the death of an illusion that I’d had about reality, but also about my future. And that period really sucked. I don’t want to sugarcoat it.

I would cry a lot whenever I was by myself. I felt really lonely. And at that stage, I felt very powerless. It wasn’t very fun, but I will say that it was 100 percent necessary because only by going through that and feeling those things could I then get to a phase of acceptance. and that phase of acceptance really meant for me internalizing and really fundamentally accepting inside myself that the future was going to look very diﬀerent from the present, that the future was going to look diﬀerent to what I’d been taught to expect it to look like, and that version of humanity that I’d come to consider the norm and which had characterized my life up until that point was, well, it had passed its sell by date and was going to have to come to an end if we didn’t want the biosphere to come to an end ﬁrst.

And for me, realizing those things and internalizing them meant that now there was no way that I could have a career or a role in the world, which actively contributed towards maintaining and perpetuating the status quo. So I had to totally redeﬁne the role I saw for myself in the future and moving forward.

And now I very much see that role as twofold. ﬁrstly, we need to be putting in place safety nets, we need as many people as possible going into the future with our eyes wide open and planning and putting in place structures so that the transition to a lower energy throughput future can be accompanied by the least suﬀering possible, because I think there will be a lot of suﬀering, especially in terms of material wealth.

And I really fear that if we carry on going blindly into the future, then when shit hits the fan, we will turn to the worst versions of what humanity is capable of. And we know that humanity is capable of some really horriﬁc stuﬀ. But we’re also capable of some great things. So I think the second task is to actively sow the seeds and create an alternative socioeconomic [political] reality.

And I think that’s quite an exciting task that everyone can play a role in because we need as many ideas and skills as possible to create a version of humanity that can not only outlive this one, but also which gives the biosphere and society the best possible chance of thriving long into the future.

So I see those as the roles I can contribute to moving forward in the short term. I think we need to be raising awareness and bringing this stuﬀ into the mainstream so that as many people as possible can be contributing to those tasks. So that’s what I want to be focusing on energy on in the near future.

But yeah, that’s sort of where I’m at now. And to be honest, since reaching the acceptance phase, I’m very content and very happy, and the lifestyle changes I’ve implemented as a result of becoming aware of all this depressing content have actually had a hugely positive impact on my well being and happiness.

So yes, the grief sucks, but it’s necessary and it’s worth it. And yeah, at the end of the day, we still have life and that’s amazing. So I try to enjoy it. as much as possible.

Phases of Awareness, Grief, and Acceptance

[00:11:26] Priscilla Trinh: I resonate with Natasha’s grief period, but I would say the metaphor I would use to describe my journey is a happy tumble down a hill.

I was rolling down into these rabbit holes, picking up ﬂowers and rocks along the way. This clarity that’s exhilarating, like when you’re rolling down a hill, right? But you’re also, as you are tumbling along, gaining all this knowledge. There’s also this back of the mind fear, like, what if I bump into something that I don’t like and I don’t want to hear and it’s scary to really internalize that information and then ﬁnally get to the bottom of the hill and I have to look up and I’m breathless by all that clarity, but also exhilarated because now I’m looking up at an amazing valley and knowing that even though the road ahead is very long and uphill, It’s beautiful, because I’m not doing it alone.

I think when people have asked this question in the past, how did you get to where you are, it’s always been explaining it as, oh, you know, we did the canon event of going to college and becoming radicalized, but it’s a lot longer than that, having reﬂected on my positionality, how I’ve come here, growing up in an immigrant family, but I’ll get back to that later.

I really think your class, Nate, was kind of the catalyst for connecting all the dots, right? You realize that. It’s not money that makes the world go around, it’s energy. And then when you combine that with an understanding of evolutionary psychology, it really undoes the whole monolith of human nature, and it really made me appreciate the plasticity of culture, and that gives me a lot of hope.

As I learned about the biophysical limits of our world, I was also moving more in the direction of activism. Intersectional feminism was a huge part of the lens in which I view the world, and it was a mixture of what I learned in class, but also the communities and spaces I entered during my organizing years.

Understanding that energy privilege is tied to class, race, gender, sexuality. All struggles are connected. And moving into how I understand about the existential risk and crises, really from a place of collective liberation, we’re all in this together. It’s liberation for all, and that includes interspecies liberation as well.

And again, undoing the whole binary and notion of tree huggers versus realists because everyone is aﬀected, albeit diﬀerently. And everyone is subject to being oppressed or becoming the oppressor, right? It’s not just an identity politics thing. It is decolonization for everyone, and it looks very diﬀerent for the individual.

And as I got more into food sovereignty spaces, I have a background in food systems, speciﬁcally organic agriculture, horticulture, did hydroponics research for two years, and through direct action, through organizing, I came to really, day by day, I’m more convinced that local community power building is where I want to be.

It’s about channeling the big picture understanding into my corner of the world, right? We think about how it’s not eﬀective to be perfect. It’s not about being the perfect activist, the perfect vegetarian, the perfect, you know, bike-your-way-to-work type of person in the U. S., I feel like, given where I’m at, and along, in addition to my full time job, it’s also a job to be embodied and authentic and slow and intentional, like Natasha said, to really cultivate yourself so that you can be self sufficient, but also community sufficient.

Whatever you learn can be regifted to everyone around you. And I always come back to this quote by Audre Lorde about how caring for myself is not self indulgence, it is self preservation. And that is an act of political warfare. And I think now that we see everyone converging on this narrative of connecting these levels and systems at play on a planetary level, on a political level.

It’s really cool to be here and alive during this time. And I know the word unprecedented was really ruined for me during the peak pandemic era, but I think it’s really cool that we’re alive in this really unique time in history and knowing that every generation before us has had to deal with their own risk.

For me, I’m going to die before, you know, probably peak climate crisis hits, but knowing that I can do something about it is ﬁne. The allure of being the charismatic speaker with a huge megaphone convincing people does not hold the same weight anymore. For me, it’s really about seeing how I ﬁt into community and learning how to then cultivate myself to be a part of that community.

That’s how I see it.

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

[00:16:13] Nate Hagens: Thank you, Priscilla. And it feels odd for me to call you Priscilla because for the last four or ﬁve years, I’ve called you Trintab, which I will share publicly Jeﬀ Bridges movie ‘Living in the Future’s Past’, he talked about trim tabs, which is the little thing behind the rudder of a ship that inﬂuences the direction and your senior project was so colorful that I sent it to Jeﬀ and he loved it.

And since then I’ve been calling you Trin-tap. so we’ll put, that, I think there’s a hyperlink to it. We’ll put it in the show notes of this episode. thank you, James Branigan.

Impact of Intersectional Feminism and Activism

[00:16:54] James Branagan: Yeah. Hi, just to touch on Priscilla’s point that she made just there about the reduction of these complex issues into what I consider to be nonsensical binaries, I think to overcome the allure of that because so many people fall prey to that accepting one of the two ends of the extreme and to overcome that I think you have to be fairly critical in your thinking and so one thing for me that I think about when I think about this metacrisis, or ecological issue that we’re facing is that it is calling forth the best of us as individuals, because it has to.

We can’t continue doing what we’ve been doing for the past however many years, you could say since the agricultural revolution, to your point about surplus accumulation and how that self organizing around proﬁts is one of the key generator functions driving the problems that we face. This has to change somehow.

Not to say I know how, but somehow that has to change. And just to be aware of that at ﬁrst is of course the ﬁrst step. But to your question about becoming aware of the ecological and economic issues, I suppose it’s just a combination of, like, intellectual honesty and curiosity about the world because when I was younger, obviously, I loved nature.

Well, that’s not so obvious, but I really loved nature. I loved playing out in the ﬁelds in Ireland. I loved being among the trees. I loved being by the river. I loved making ﬁres. I loved making slingshots. I loved these sort of things, of outdoorsy activities as a kid. And so I sort of continued to follow that thread.

I was interested in biology in school. So then I followed that on and I wanted to remain as broad as possible in my study of the world because this is so complex. And I suppose as a young kid, I was thinking, all right, how do I learn as much about this as possible and not like specialized down into something too narrow.

So then I went on to study general science in college or university, and then environmental science, just because they’re so broad, but yeah, so I suppose it was just a combination of that, intellectual honesty and curiosity, and then also the internet. The internet is a huge thing here, and the proper or appropriate use of the internet instead of falling into the trap of just being caught by the algorithm with the short term stuﬀ and losing your attention or losing time by having your attention grabbed by that algorithm.

We can, I think, ﬁgure out a way to wield the internet to our own advantage as individuals and then hopefully collectively. And I think that, that’s going to be one of the key tricks to ﬁgure out. And I suppose I heard that actually, that sentiment echoed in an episode you did, Nate, with Thomas Bjorkman.

And he said about the Scandinavian secret, one of the keys there to modernize the Scandinavian countries rapidly, was the implementation of these schools where people could go and learn not only about the external world and what’s going on, technologies, so on and so forth, but also inner, sort of spiritual or emotional development and how the two relate to one another.

So, yeah, I guess that’s it. It’s the internet, curiosity and just not falling prey to many of the pitfalls and traps that people who think about the ecological crisis tend to fall prey to.

Curiosity and Intellectual Honesty in Learning

[00:20:35] Nate Hagens: Thank you. Thank you. I have a bunch of questions for the three of you. Are there any thoughts that bubbled up after those, the three of you spoke that anyone would like to follow with?

[00:20:47] Natasha Linhart: Yeah, I just want to echo what James said about curiosity because I think that’s what’s so special about this ﬁeld is that there are so many diﬀerent ways of getting into it. But for me yes, I always cared about nature growing up and especially about social issues, but no more so than any other sort of environmentally and socially aware average human.

So for me, the reason that I’m here is purely driven by this curiosity and this sort of craving to understand. reality and the world around me as much as possible and to get as close as possible to the truth rather than holding to any set of beliefs. and I think that’s, yeah, also what really motivates me in this ﬁeld is that it is, it’s based on science and it’s based on fact.

And if you’re curious enough to go there Yeah, this is what we get.

[00:21:42] Priscilla Trinh: In addition to that, curiosity has also helped me navigate triggers. You have to protect your energy and pick your battles online, especially when you’re trying to be a communicator like myself. It’s not about being this missionary convincing people that they should care about ecological collapse.

It’s really leading with questions. If someone disagrees with you, I try to remind myself, why do they think this way? And then lead with questions rather than falling into arguments or that. Divide that we see so present across geographies and cultures right now. So I love that curiosity framing

[00:22:16] Nate Hagens: Talking about binaries, let’s go to the one about intergenerational, relationships with the climate and energy and economic situation. I’m about 30 years older than the three of you. And so, you know, I’ve, Got 30 years of living in a world that was largely functional and amazing under my belt, now educating younger people on these things.

How do the three of you and I’ll let each of you speak, feel about the seemingly perpetual intergenerational conﬂict and blaming in our current culture? And from your perspective is it possible that we could move past such a phenomenon and how?

[00:23:06] Priscilla Trinh: In one word, heal. Everyone needs to heal. Intergenerational trauma has been a big topic on my mind a good chunk of my life and I think it’s really important to unpack when talking about conﬂict and blaming. I come from a family of immigrants who ﬂed the Vietnam War. I’m Vietnamese. My parents are immigrants, immigrants and refugees, and outside of their story universally, there’s conﬂict, militarism, war, PTSD.

Everyone experiences trauma to some diﬀerent degree, and that really aﬀects parenting, manifests in money trauma, how we relate to the economy, and that aﬀects how we relate to each other as people, and so to address intergenerational conﬂict and blaming, I think we have to then recognize intergenerational value.

For those of us who are lucky to have elders in our lives, you know, I had my grandma, my maternal grandma, and I think about how in the U. S. there’s such a sad attitude about people. older folks. There’s ageism in the workplace, there’s ageism when it comes to political social values, but we have to know that all these movements that we’re a part of now, the environmental movement, the economic movement, they were all founded by people who came before us, right?

So elders have wisdom and value, and, Nate, I don’t think you’re an elder quite yet, but in some ways you are like our community elder, right? You have lots of ideas and experience to share, right? And it comes back to the whole constraint of our economy because capitalism in the U. S. means that we’re bound to our day jobs, we have time constraints, and then we don’t have the time privilege to then invest in relationships.

And I think investing in relationships, healing, recognizing when our emotions get the best of us is really key to then unlocking very generative conversations and having intergenerational movements because it’s not young people versus old people at all. You need all of us. involved. And one book I read recently, there’s an author, a local author here in the state, she wrote a book called Can We Please Give the Police Department to the Grandmothers?

And I think it was a beautiful exercise of imagination and how we can then rethink the way we relate to one another, rethink what it means to be safe. Because At the end of the day, we’re very emotional beings and everyone is really just seeking to be heard, seen, understood. And that airmation is important if we’re really trying to build safety nets.

Safety nets for whom? Who, is beneﬁting from these safety nets? We think it’s good for us, but maybe someone else doesn’t feel safe from that safety net. So when we begin to heal and talk about mental health and really holistic health, I think it’s, I think it’s going to be a big part in moving forward to, to bridge these gaps.

[00:25:57] James Branagan: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. Healing is important. And I remember, in my mind, I thought of it this way. I considered there are sort of four key elements in, like, the individual human’s life. And I call them the most basic basics. It’s like food, Make sure you get your food right, make sure you get your exercise right, make sure you get your sleep right, but also make sure you get your social relationships right.

So that speaks to, Nate, I think you formulated it by saying something like, become a fully stacked, behaviorally stacked human being. And you, yeah, you pointed the same thing, sleep, food, exercise, because how can we expect to face these issues and overcome them if we’re in any way ill in terms of our health?

That’s not to say it’s impossible, but why not optimize for these elements of human life? Because we can. But to this point about blaming, to be honest, I don’t really, I don’t really see it. I don’t see my generation blaming the older generation. One thing that annoys me is this, the fact that it’s the older generations who have all the resources and money, but it’s the younger generation who has all the energy, but missing the resources and money.

So there’s a clear sort of niche there for collaboration. And why it’s not happening, I’m not sure. So I wouldn’t really blame, I actually, I don’t even think blaming is productive. What’s the use? It gets us nowhere. So why not, instead of blaming, seek to collaborate and seek to somehow create the mechanisms that can funnel resources from the older generations to the younger generations in a collaborative sort of agreement between all of us.

Intergenerational Relationships and Collaboration

[00:27:43] Natasha Linhart: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more with that. I think it’s about collaboration rather than blaming. I really see intergenerational blaming as a huge waste of time and waste of energy, because at the end of the day, we’re all in this situation together and it’s no individual’s fault that we got here, but it’s everyone’s responsibility, regardless of what decades you were born in, to contribute towards responding.

And yeah, as James said, maybe we have, our generation has more. energy or time, hopefully, over which to enact those responses. But there is no way that we can do it without the experience and also, importantly, the leverage of older generations. So, I would love to see older generations, ﬁrstly, stop saying that it’s down to our generation.

Secondly, stop having conversations about these topics in closed rooms amongst academic elite, and instead actively engaging. in the intergenerational transfer of knowledge and expertise and skills so that our generation and younger generations can be equipped as best as possible to face the challenges ahead.

And also I’d like to see the older generation engaging themselves in facing those challenges, and many are already but we need more people in all generations doing that. In terms of moving past the intergenerational blaming, what I would love to see is if somehow we could adopt a collective mentality which saw this current version of humanity not as a ﬁnal product that either has to be defended by older generations or destroyed by younger generations, but rather as a work in progress and within that having the collective maturity to acknowledge and accept human fallibility.

Like, we’re not perfect, we’re very far from being perfect, we make mistakes and we get things wrong and that’s okay, but it means that we have to be learning from those mistakes. We have to constantly be trying to improve. And I think if somehow we could get to that collective mentality, it would go a long way to moving past these cycles of blame, because it would mean that we could, on the one hand, be grateful for what older generations and prior generations have given us and the experiences they’ve given us access to, while simultaneously acknowledging that mistakes were made and there was incomplete understanding of reality, which means that from today we can’t make those same mistakes and all of us in all generations have to do things diﬀerently and do things better.

And we still won’t be perfect but at least we can work towards creating something that we can be proud to pass on to future generations.

[00:30:27] Priscilla Trinh: I’m with Natasha that there needs to be shared values, and I think it comes down to a rebranding issue, right? I think many of us are disillusioned with ESGs [Environmental, social and governance] and the Global North framework of environmentalism, activism, and, Systems change.

It’s a very Global North Eurocentric approach and recognizing there’s a plurality of work that’s been done over the years is important in bridging the narrative, right? Caring about our crisis is not a trend. It’s not something new. Solidarity is not a trend. you know, something that you do now because everyone else is doing it.

And I think it’s really ﬂipping the narrative of how these conversations are not just happening on podcasts for people who have time to listen to them. They’re happening on the ground. And it really does come back to what James was saying. It’s about this lack of resources, how many of us do not have time, especially in the Global North, where we have day jobs that keep us from advocating for things we want to do, and then you gotta wait until retirement when you have time to advocate and lobby, so it’s this mismatch between what we’re bound to ﬁnancially and our well being, because everyone needs a paycheck to survive in parts of the world now, and then how can we then cultivate time and space to do that, and that’s going to take a bit of help, outside of the typical, at least in the U. S., nuclear family or young adult living by themselves in an apartment.

[00:31:54] James Branagan: Yeah, so that is such a great point. The fact that most of us don’t even have the time to engage these topics. Most of us are too concerned with, yeah, how to put food on the table or pay the rent to have time to consider these topics.

And so, This is actually one of the main reasons why I’m doing what I’m doing, trying to ﬁgure out, I hesitate to call it like an alternative lifestyle because it sort of has hippie connotations, but I’m trying to ﬁgure out how to live a life where I can fully study these topics and also pay the rent, so I don’t know how to do that, but also then, Natasha, to your point about like, looking to the older generation to try and teach us better about the world is, I wonder, of course, the older generation, there’s value in what they have to say, but I wonder if that impulse to, you know, ﬁnd an authority, an authoritative ﬁgure from which we can be conﬁdent about their teachings and how we learn about the world is itself sort of preventing us from understanding these problems more deeply because I’m not sure the older generation even knows about how to deal with these problems because they’re so novel.

Again, it’s not to say there’s no use in deriving knowledge from the older generations. Like Nate, for example, The Great Simpliﬁcation thesis is hugely explanatory and it helped me put the right words to the thoughts I had sort of intuited about the world. Then again, I can’t just rely on Nate to do the work that we need to do.

We need to sort of relocate the locus of authority in each of ourselves as individuals and then work in collaboration with each other. Everybody having done that towards solutions, or long term management plans that can actually address the novelty of the problems we face.

Engagement in Ecological and Economic Crises

[00:33:49] Nate Hagens: Is that changing? Like Priscilla from ﬁve or six years ago when I met you, these things, climate change was known then.

But energy depletion and polarization and addiction and AI and some of the other biodiversity ecological crises like PFAS and plastics and ocean issues and all these things, they weren’t really on a lot of people’s radar. Are these things commonly discussed with age, in age groups of 23 to 27, like, like you all are?

Or it, is it somewhat rare? And, and second part of that. That question is is it because of ignorance and, and energy blindness or systems lack of systems knowledge? Or is it because I don’t want to talk about this stuﬀ. I just want to enjoy my weekend and the beautiful day and not have to think about these things.

Do you have any thoughts on that?

[00:34:46] Priscilla Trinh: I think it really depends where you’re coming from, where you are located geographically and culturally. I feel like when you’re talking to us, it’s a bit skewed, right? We already give a damn, but I think in the Palestinian lands that that would be a dumb question for me to ask, but I think it’s becoming a bit more apparent.

I am very much sensing in the U. S. and in the left bubbles that there’s this convergence on connecting the dots between economies, environments, and social issues. And while there is still a huge spectrum of nihilism to paralyzing fear, most people don’t. probably fall somewhere within the middle, right?

Some people are like, I’m just here to make bank, do my job, retire and die. Some people are, it’s out of my control. It’s too big. I don’t know what to do. Let’s retreat into the woods, which is also just another form of dissociation. And I think the narrative happening elsewhere, global south and other parts of the world, maybe they don’t use the same words that we do.

But they are thinking about it, because they have no choice but to think about it. In the U. S., there’s still quite a bit of a buﬀer for some folks, and most folks in the U. S. still live paycheck to paycheck, so we’re very much closer to being houseless than billionaires, and I think that squeeze economically is really forcing people to think about more than just what’s hurting their wallet, what’s hurting their relationships and the future.

So I think it’s becoming more and more people’s radars, but they might be doing diﬀerent things to address it or using diﬀerent words. They might be advocating parts of the system, which I think is important. It’s hard to tackle big picture always. I think it’s okay if it’s a little fragmented and then politically, the vocabulary is catching on, but is being so quickly co opted.

That’s why it’s so diicult to have these conversations because you don’t know who you’re in the room with anymore. Someone could say the word sustainable or regenerative and you don’t know if they mean green growth. Are they a techno optimist or are they an anarchist? Like it doesn’t, it’s not clear anymore.

So that’s kind of, the nice thing about it is that with this digital ampliﬁcation, you don’t feel as alone sometimes because people are using a shared language, but it’s also very quickly co opted and misinterpreted. So it’s a mix of both, I would say.

[00:37:04] Nate Hagens: Thank you. James, you wanted to say something and then Natasha.

[00:37:07] James Branagan: Yeah, sure, but just to the point about the shared language thing, it’s just so important to understand each other and use the same language, not, yeah, the same language and understand that here’s actually what I mean by this, but that’s so difficult to ﬂesh all of that out, it takes a lot of time, like, the perfect example for me is the idea of organic farming.

To the naive layperson, he or she thinks that, yeah, this is like no chemical, this is pretty natural and all, but it turns out that in the industry, it just means something like less chemicals than the industrial agricultural model, but so, yeah, to the question, I think for me anyway, my friend group would be a misrepresentative sample because obviously, I gravitate towards these topics, and so I tend to talk about them too, and so I’m surrounded by people who also tend to talk about them, but not very many.

[00:37:58] Nate Hagens: Does that make it easier, though? I mean, I would imagine you strongly value such a group.

[00:38:06] James Branagan: Oh my God, I can’t tell you how much I love the people, the two people I talk about this stuﬀ with. I love them so much. Two of my best friends, Sean and my brother, Patrick. But does it make it easier? What you mean, does it make it easier?

Having less people to talk about it with, or how do you mean easier?

[00:38:24] Nate Hagens: Well, if it was just you in Granada reading this stuﬀ online and thinking about it is not the healthiest, um trajectory. So if you have other people to share, even if you don’t come up with answers, Just a community, I think, is really important, which is why my class worked, cause we had 23 people in a circle talking about these things and sharing, cause this is heavy stuﬀ to take on just as an individual person.

[00:38:53] James Branagan: Yeah, no doubt, it makes it easier, and that’s why I love that we can have this conversation now because I wonder if it will work like an attractor and attract other people through the interweb cyberspace to be able to have these conversations.

[00:39:08] Nate Hagens: By the time this episode airs our Great Simpliﬁcation discord channel will be live and people can ﬁnd out where people are in the world and, and have conversations either online or in person, because I think that’s important. Natasha, what, do you think?

[00:39:28] Natasha Linhart: Yeah, I mean, like James and Priscilla, I do also gravitate towards people who do care about these issues. And I have an amazing group of friends we have really interesting discussions about these things. I would say that generally there is, you know, people in our generation do care.

I mean, it’s our future and there is general awareness about all these crises, but there are so many barriers. to diving deeper into the sort of root causes and the why of these crises and looking sort of beneath the surface. I think those conversations are happening as much as they, as I’d like to see them happening.

And, you know, a big part of it is time. As we’ve talked about, people have jobs and you’ve got to feed yourself and your family. And it takes a lot of time. I mean, for me, to be honest, I spent more time educating myself about this stuﬀ than I did focused on my university degree in the last year of study.

Like, it’s a lot of content to get through. and also there’s one thing having access to the content and the other thing is being in the mental space to be willing to take on this content and to really engage with it. And I spent A long time in my youth being aware of these crises, but not really caring about going any deeper than that.

And it wasn’t until I was in a mental space where I’d removed loads of distractions from my life, got oﬀ social media, was creating a lot of time and space for silence and reﬂection, that then, when the content hit me, I was willing to engage with it and get really deep into it. So I think there are a lot of barriers that we can work on removing.

[00:41:12] Nate Hagens: Thank you. excellent. So I will remind you all that I am not a teacher here. I’m just a podcast host. but I, just having this conversation, this is like the ﬁrst conversation I’ve had with more than one young person at a time since I taught, um last in 2019. and I do miss the, life and vitality and curiosity and emergence that, that comes from speaking with young people.

Let me ask you, put you on the spot, each of you, out of all the things that you’re learning about, some people call it the metacrisis, I usually call it the human predicament you’re, you’re well familiar with the diﬀerent buckets of, risks and crises we face, like what is one thing in coming decades that you’re most concerned about out of the whole universe?

If each of you could just speak to that for a minute or two.

Food Production and Resource Allocation Concerns

[00:42:15] James Branagan: Yeah. So for me, I just love my food. And one of the main things that I’m concerned about is no longer being able to produce food at the scale that we do currently, because the fertilizers, pesticides and whatnot won’t be available anymore.

Or if not, that the fuel for the tractors that we rely on now to produce this food will just, will be reallocated to other places or just, it just won’t be there for certain local areas. And that’s one of the reasons why I’m doing what I’m doing now is to relearn the old ways of agriculture, not to return to an old way, to understand how do we do this in the absence of oil and machinery.

I think that’s a, I just ﬁnd that intrinsically motivating to do that because, for the, you might call it selﬁsh reason, that I love food. Not that I think the food is going to disappear in my lifetime, but just as a silly example, that’s why one of those, that is one of my main concerns.

[00:43:16] Nate Hagens: It’s not silly, and I don’t consider it a selﬁsh interest. And I love food as much or more than you do James. Uh, Priscilla.

[00:43:26] Priscilla Trinh: Similar to James, that’s why I entered the ﬁeld I am in right now. I remember when I told my parents, Hey, I want to go to the College of Food, Agricultural, and Natural Resource Sciences at the University of Minnesota. And they looked at me, and they were like, we crossed the Paciﬁc to escape rice patties, and now you want to go back into food?

What are we going to tell your grandmother? And I told them, you tell her that as long as people eat, I will have a job and it’s really the basic currency of our societies because yes, we need energy to produce food, but without food there’s no peace. You can’t change the world on an empty stomach. And so I really am concerned about our food and water quality and the resource wars that are going to break out.

Militarism is on my mind a lot. Everyone jokes about World War III. We are living in the apocalypse already. And that’s one thing that gives me hope when you understand the planetary boundaries and the social boundaries of human patterns, right? All empires collapse eventually. And so thinking about it that way means that it really singles down a few of the things you should be actually caring about.

And I think food and water is one of them. And how are we going to set up governance models and frameworks at diﬀerent levels, neighborhoods, towns, cities, municipalities, what governance structures are in place so we can navigate these hard conversations about how to allocate resources, because we do have enough food in the world to feed everyone.

It’s a resource allocation problem and, you know, a corporate, you know, monopolization problem with big food, big ag controlling our food supply chains right now. And I feel like it’s doable. And I don’t think the answer is a million organic farms. That’s not sustainable or viable. It’s not about everyone becoming a farmer.

That’s not how society functions. We need all roles, all skills, all types of passions. But yeah, food and water is something I’m taking on myself to cultivate skills related to that because I think it’s fun. Like you all have said, I love food. And so that’s something I’m focused on both in my personal and professional life.

Response to Crises and Human Behavior

[00:45:28] Natasha Linhart: Yeah, it’s a difficult question because there’s so many risks and crises that we’re facing. To be honest, I think I’m more concerned with the way that we respond to those rather than the risks and crises happening because I think they will happen and I would love to be proven wrong on that. I think that we will have food shortages, and there will be problems with water, and there will be civil unrest.

What I’m, what scares me more is the way that we respond, because if we look through history, the times when the economy’s gone bad and we’ve had shortages in terms of resources, that has had really bad knock on eﬀects, and terms of the version of humanity that we become. I mean, we become really awful people.

So yeah, what I really fear is that, this, these conversations don’t translate to the things that Priscilla’s talking about. Us actually thinking about diﬀerent governance structures and thinking about how we’re going to distribute those scarce resources and how we educate people so that they have the skills to manage when we have to relocalize and can’t depend on these long supply chains.

Rather than just waiting for it to happen and then it turning really bad. So I guess that’s what scares me.

[00:46:58] James Branagan: Yeah, if I might just add also that’s also a motivation for me. It’s not just my own love of food. It’s an understanding that when human populations feel the squeeze and they see another human population over there who’s doing well, they, this human population who’s doing poorly understands also that they can just steal what they have.

And that gets nasty and that is sort of a pattern that you can read from history that tends to happen.

Maintaining Hope and Resilience

[00:47:25] Nate Hagens: So following up on that, each of you, how do you maintain hope and cultivate resilience in the face of what you know about the world? And I would be so bold as to say, you know more than the average 23 and 27 year olds about all these risks and systems, especially given reading the news every day of what’s going on in Israel and Palestine and Ukraine and it’s 45 degrees Celsius today in India which is like 110 or something like that [113F]. you get daily reminders of this stuﬀ. So how, do you maintain hope and, and practice resilience and healthy habits, knowing all this stuﬀ?

[00:48:18] Natasha Linhart: Yeah, I don’t think we can just magically have hope from some external source. I think we have to actively create hope. And yeah, I see so much beauty in the world in nature and in people and in relationships and communities, but also in art and knowledge and culture. And When I started realizing the extent to which we’re destroying that beauty in its various forms I would shift between two mindsets.

On the one hand, I’d think, well, it’s all fucked anyway, so there’s nothing I can do. Excuse my French. And on the other extreme, I think that I have to personally save the world. And neither of those are helpful because neither of them lead to action. So the mindset I’ve kind of developed instead, through which I ﬁnd a lot of resilience, is ﬁrstly to feel those things.

So, you know, I do get really sad when I hear the news and when I see nature suﬀering and people suﬀering. I’m really feeling that, but then also feeling the joy, but the beauty that’s still there. So, this is sort of the mantra I use to motivate myself, is how can I use what I have to do what I can to protect some of the beauty and bring it forward with me into the future?

And I think that if everyone does that, even if it’s in a really small way, like taking better care of your back garden or helping out an elderly neighbor, if we all use what we have to do what we can, then we’re creating hope.

[00:49:56] Priscilla Trinh: I would say deep time. Deep time gives me a lot of hope because when you zoom out and understand how we got here, you realize how recent the current order of things are dominant, global, north, white, capitalist, whatever you want to call it, society is so new. And back to what others have said before, when you understand that, it recalibrates your expectations. And that ironically gives me more positivity in the face of the polycrisis, because when you’ve, understood that there are material, ﬁnancial, and social limitations.

It recalibrates expectations, and yes, that comes with a period of grief, like was mentioned before. It also alleviates a lot of pressure. Yeah, we might have some sort of Mad Max guns defending farm period, but it’s not going to last forever, right? Nothing lasts forever in nature, and so nothing bad will last forever in human systems.

Yes, there will be ecological system impacts that will probably last forever in the Anthropocene, but I think going back to that social governance, like All the dire things we’re seeing in the news, those will stretch out for a relatively long period of time compared to our lifetimes, but I know that the Earth will rebound.

We will ﬁnd a place in the future to govern ourselves in a way that’s equitable and sustainable, and just understanding that no revolution has been peaceful, and I don’t mean just like the revolution on the streets, I mean the revolution inside, doing that healing work, that shadow work, that unlearning, the breaking and creating cycles in friend circles and families and communities.

It’s not just about that. It’s about your neighborhood, it’s about the regional impacts, and what gives me hope is cultivating myself. It’s about gardening, cooking at home, foraging, being a better biker, because right now we’re living in an information economy. data, knowledge, cells. In the future, that knowledge and data has to be uploaded into our brains.

It’s a very Fahrenheit 451 situation, but knowing skills and having less dependency on scary supply chains that are fragile gives me a lot of hope and empowerment. Make friends with people who know skills. That’s how you build community. It’s not about having a million people behind you. And honestly, you know, there’s that, often cited, number of like, you need two percent of the mass to have a critical mass to do something.

I think it’s even less than that now, considering we have relatively stable telecommunication systems, right? The message can be ampliﬁed so much quicker now, and so your community extends beyond that. beyond geographic boundaries. And then what also gives me hope is communications, really trying to use asset based communications, because that really ﬂips the narrative.

It goes from deﬁcit and scarcity, which is what is used in propaganda and news and media, to really feel like we don’t have what we need. But we do know what we need, and we do have what we need. And it’s just, again, trying to create narratives. Even the most well intentioned circles like charities will say, we need more volunteers because there’s too many poor, hungry, homeless folks.

And I, yes, but we could also state it in a diﬀerent way that really empowers people by saying, We have the resources to house, feed, and uplift everyone. Join us in this movement. It really, you know, lands emotionally diﬀerent in people, and it might instigate action no matter how big or small. I think it’s this weird world is small and big at the same time, and people don’t know how to ﬁt into it, but just pick something. If it’s safe enough to try, go for it. I think this, at least in the U. S., the academic system that many of us go through really kind of pushes for perfection. And if it’s not going to work, don’t do it at all. But I’m trying to push back against that myself and not be stuck in this cerebral space of just, like, despair.

So that’s my take on it.

[00:53:49] James Branagan: One of the things that really makes me study this and makes me like want to be a human at this time is the fact that there’s no guarantee that we make it through this bottleneck or these bottlenecks of the coming decades which is like there’s a sense of danger in that and it’s kind of scary but at the same time that’s what makes it exciting and then also there are like human experiences at an embodied level I’ve felt and I know like for example I love jiu jitsu I love training when obviously not when I’m traveling but when I’m back in a stable environment.

And there’s something about that combat and exerting yourself so strenuously that after it you’re steaming up and there’s just sweat pouring oﬀ you. And the endorphins that are released at the end of that and the conversations that are subsequently had with the friends that you have made in the gym.

There’s a comradeship there that is just a beautiful feeling. And so to maintain hope in this situation, I know That’s like intrinsically rewarding and valuable and there’s no amount of theory that’s going to refute that for me. I know that is valuable and so I say to myself, okay, this is worth preserving.

So, and then I bounce out and I, as Priscilla said, I tried to gain a perspective and I say, okay, across time, I would like to preserve this if that’s possible. How do I go about doing that? And then the how do I go about doing that is the challenge.

That’s the exciting part. And there’s no guarantee that we win, but. Why not give it our best shot, is how I’m thinking about it.

[00:55:30] Nate Hagens: So, so building on that, you mentioned jiu jitsu. Priscilla mentioned a couple things, maybe each of you could expand a little bit on the practices or meditations or skills. skills, or new behaviors that you’ve incorporated in your personal life as a response to your own understanding of the meta crisis, The Great Simpliﬁcation, and how all these things interrelate.

Practices and Behaviors for Resilience

[00:56:01] Natasha Linhart: yeah. So, yeah. For me, understanding the metacrisis, I had to realize that I had several behaviors and ways of thinking that I took for granted, but which were actively reinforcing the superorganism. So over the last year, I’ve tried to adopt lifestyle choices and behavior choices, which I can imagine as being more characteristic of a more sustainable system.

So, ﬁrstly, I really tried to move away from this constant craving for more and more, stuﬀ, more and more stimulation, and that’s a constant battle but I’ve tried very hard to actively slow down my pace of life. to value quality over quantity and to remove as many distractions as possible so that I can focus on the present and what we have.

And that’s been helped through meditation, through getting oﬀ social media and just actively creating space and time for silence and for silent reﬂection and learning to actually crave the silence rather than the stimulation. So I really enjoyed that. And then learning to take joy and pleasure out of stuﬀ that comes for free.

I realized that previously a lot of the stuﬀ I found fun was in some way associated with consumption. Whereas now I take a lot of pleasure out of things like time in nature. I love going on long walks, time with friends and family and interesting conversation and dancing and writing and trying to incorporate those things into my daily life.

And then in terms of mindset changes, I’ve had a big change related to nature, primarily through food, because like James, I also love food. And I’ve been putting a lot more intention and awareness behind what I’m putting in my body and where it comes from. And I’m so lucky that I live in an amazing part of the world with amazing local produce, but this sort of intention behind what I’m putting in my body has made me realize that my health is totally tethered to the health of nature and of Earth’s ecosystems and my actions are impacting that health.

And that has given me such a profound respect for nature and for all forms of life. Like now when I look out the window, I see life in the tree. I don’t just see a tree.

And that’s a very diﬀerent mindset to, oh, I should make the environmentally friendly choice because of climate change. So that’s been a mindset, a big mindset shift for me.

And then the other one I just want to touch on brieﬂy is moving away from closed minded, in group, out group thinking. So I really tried to actively seek out and engage in conversations with people who have opinions I disagree with and who come from diﬀerent backgrounds or beliefs and going into those conversations with the attitude that I want to learn as much as possible and I’m open to the idea that I’m wrong and I’m going to update my opinion based on that conversation and that also has been a big mindset shift for me.

And it’s really taught me to be a lot more open minded and to realize that I am basically wrong about everything. yeah, and I do think overall, the more I learn about the metacrisis and the more I develop sort of a nuanced understanding of it, I do think it comes down to a shift in consciousness.

So, yeah, I try to live the change I want to see in the world, and hopefully can inspire some people to do the same, because if we all collectively do that, then it triggers change higher up.

Changes in Mindset and Lifestyle Choices

[00:59:34] Nate Hagens: Let me ask you, put you on the spot, Natasha, do you think there’s something unique in your situation, or your genetics, or your upbringing?

Or are the changes you made that you just described easily adoptable by people watching this episode that are 23 and having similar thoughts?

[00:59:57] Natasha Linhart: I think that deﬁnitely these changes can be adopted by anyone. what I will say is, cause I’ve thought a lot about this What I think is unique in my upbringing is that I was exposed from a young age to very high level conversations.

My grandparents lived in this little town in the south of France which was like this hub of international academics and creatives and yeah, ﬁlm directors and artists. So from a young age, I’d be at dinner parties with like Nobel prize winners, and that was normal to me. And so I learned from a young age, like crave that learning and to want to be more interested in learning something new than in whatever I believed in.

I think that’s led me to where I am now because my involvement in this space and this work was in no way predicated by me being like a tree hugging hippie or a radical anarchist or whatever. it’s purely from that craving for knowledge and then when ﬁnding that knowledge that makes sense, being willing to incorporate that.

So I think anyone can make these changes but it’s about being willing and open to ﬁnding out something new and the idea that everything you might have taken for granted and believed up to that point, is wrong.

[01:01:25] Nate Hagens: Thank you. What, like, what are some practices or meditation or, new things that you have incorporated into your personal life after integrating this into your mental view of the future?

[01:01:39] James Branagan: A very basic thing is something Daniel Schmachtenberger mentioned at the Norsken Foundation. He said, curate your social media feed so that the sorts of things that crop up are related to this, like the Stockholm Institute, planetary boundaries framework, that sort of a thing. And that’s actually, that really works because I ﬁnd myself going to my phone and then seeing this stuﬀ late at night and my head is like, no, I don’t want to study that anymore, I’m too tired, so then I’ll just put the phone down, but another thing that helps me, sometimes I think of this knowledge as like a burden, sometimes, I frame it in that sort of a way, and I say oh my god, why do I have to know all this, why do I have to be here in this time, when all…

[01:02:21] Nate Hagens: You and me both brother.

[01:02:22] James Branagan: Yeah, when the shit’s hitting the fan and it’s chaotic and it’s tumultuous, but then I say to myself, okay, useless, you’re here now, so let’s just be here and see what we can do about this, and I sort of recalibrate or reframe in my mind how I see it, and I say to myself, alright, this is probably one of the biggest the human predicament, the metacrisis, slaying the superorganism, whatever you want to say, is probably one of the biggest challenges that we humans, across the whole of our evolutionary history, have ever had to face.

Have to, have ever had to face. So, to me, that’s quite motivating, and I say to myself, okay, so, either you step up to this challenge, and make something of yourself so that you can address it in whatever way possible, and try to make that, addressing it as big as possible, because I remember Natasha, you mentioned something like doing the gardening and stuﬀ like this and don’t get me wrong, I love all that and I’m here doing the regenerative agriculture stuﬀ, but at the same time, I think there needs to be like agents of change who are so disproportionate in terms of the consequences of their decisions or choices or actions that they’re in a position of power that they can make those disproportionate changes happen. The, whatever decisions they make have highly, are highly consequential. We need to also ﬁgure out how to ﬁnd ourselves in those positions. And I guess there just a concern comes up. It’s like, okay, you’d want to know what you’re talking about and what you’re at when you’re doing that.

So that also is quite inspiring for me.

[01:04:04] Priscilla Trinh: Building oﬀ what others have said about phone use, I think it’s a very powerful tool. I myself have started to use social media more as I got older, and going back to that generational thing, sometimes I look at Gen Alpha because I’m Gen Z and I’m like, oh god, we’re fucked, because you’re iPad kids.

But I also have to think like, I don’t blame you for wanting to dissociate on your phone because the world’s a scary place. I dissociate on my phone too. I’m subject to that habit as well. But in my role as a communicator for my day job, as a friend, as a neighbor, I’m not going to post something unless there’s a sense of agency that you can gain from it.

Providing avenues and pathways to then take action. I think it’s good to affirm and put out some really emotionally charged content, but I don’t want to be a clicktivist. you know, where you become complacent and complicit just because you posted something online and think, yep, I’ve done my part. And I also don’t want to rage farm, you know, that’s a term, rage farming.

You’re just fueling the ﬁre without really directing people to any channel of action. So that’s one rule I’ve held myself accountable to. Yes, airm people, but also try to provide agency where you can when you’re doing your stuﬀ online. And I think it’s, funny, this ironic, momentum around re-indigenizing, right?

There’s the, sense that people want to go back to the land and live simpler lives and like really change the culture. And now, today, and throughout recent history, certain advocates of that, especially Indigenous folks, Global South folks, people of color, all other communities that have been socially disadvantaged or marginalized in the past, like, that’s stuﬀ they’ve been doing forever.

But also, you know, to counterbalance that with not painting a monolith, right. I don’t think we have to look too far. Many, from my observations, I’ve noticed many immigrant families in the U. S. who come here and fully embrace and get ensconced in the American dream. They are fully in survival mode. They are just trying to make as much money, climb the ladder.

And that’s a capitalist mindset. And then they give birth to children like me who are very against that. So it’s very complicated, depending where you live, the privileges you have. It’s a privilege to be having these types of conversations. But I think When I am in a space to have these conversations, I’m really trying to cultivate facilitation skills, how to hold eﬀective meetings, how to make everyone feel seen and heard in a conversation for eﬀective governance, decision, making models.

And I really think that’s scalable. I think that’s going to be pretty key to understanding the crises and how to address them. Because right now, No matter what type of enterprise you’re in or workplace you’re in, I think there’s room to improve for facilitating eﬀective, like, congregations of people to then come to consent or consensus around certain issues and values and then to move forward with that.

So, really, if I’m asking people to change, then I have to embody that change myself. And again, it’s not about being perfect, it’s just about being authentic and within your realms, within the privileges you hold.

Closing Thoughts and Final Remarks

[01:07:08] Nate Hagens: Thank you. and thank you to all three of you for putting in the time to, to learn this stuﬀ and be willing to be on camera to, to share some thoughts.

Is there, any question that you would have liked me to ask that you’d like to um, close with some comments or anything else that each of you would like to say to our viewers?

[01:07:35] Natasha Linhart: And I do just want to brieﬂy say that if there are young people watching this who are getting exposed to this content, it can be really scary and tough if you don’t have people to talk to about it.

So hopefully, as you said, Nate, there’s going to be like a discord channel by the time this is out. But speaking for me personally, I’d be very happy to chat to anyone who feels like going through this cognitive journey by themselves. So just putting that out there.

[01:08:06] Priscilla Trinh: Yes, I also want to plug the emotional container model.

You do really need to hold space for people to process this, and I’m proud of the work that I’ve done with my peers when we founded a non proﬁt called The Overstory Alliance, and out of that came Movement School, and it really was about educating, I think. And then providing a space for people to process, and then providing perhaps an avenue for then people to manifest whatever change they want, they’re interested in.

If you’re interested in chicken co op, go do that. If you’re interested in building furniture, go do that. If you’re interested in becoming part of the system, changing from within, that’s okay too. But yeah, really emphasizing the emotional container, key to preserving yourself and not burning out.

[01:08:55] James Branagan:Closing remarks, I can’t really say much to be honest. What I would say is, because I’m not sure what it was within me that made me realize — Oh no, that’s not quite true. Don’t believe that or don’t fall into that trap. Maybe there’s something sort of innate to humans that can guide us like that. And I would say, listen to that. inner voice that guides you in that way don’t betray it. Don’t betray it, not for money, nor for people in your life who would convince you that, no, this is the way to see the world. I’d just say, yeah, stay true to that inner voice.

[01:09:21] Nate Hagens: I, didn’t, Priscilla, I don’t even know if you know this, but I almost called my class at the University of Minnesota, Things You Always Knew But Never Knew You Knew, but it was too convoluted and long, so I called it Reality 101 instead.

[01:09:37] Priscilla Trinh: After you left, Nate, you know, a few of us adapted your course to become another seminar led by students for students, and we titled it, What to Do About a Fucked Up World, and we just led with humor. Like, humor does a great service to people in healing and navigating, and honestly, we live in the age of memes, so why not?

[01:09:54] Nate Hagens: Thank you all, young humans, friends of mine, to be continued, and thanks for being curious and, wanting to share and try. Thanks, Nate.

[01:10:08] Priscilla Trinh: Thanks everyone.

[01:10:10] Nate Hagens: If you enjoyed or learned from this episode of The Great Simpliﬁcation, please follow us on your favorite podcast platform and visit thegreatsimpliﬁcation.com for more information on future releases.

The End

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About Eric Lee (And My Metacrisis Journey)

I was exposed to nature centric thinking in high school when I took in ideas of modern science, e.g. evolution and cosmology, from books (not from classes taken I can recall) and for a required book review I had picked Walden to read, but utterly failed to take in the offering and had to pick a children’s book. But six months later I felt I had developed enough to read Walden, and my first reading was with all due attention and recognition and was fruitful — there was a ring of truth in the words.

I was aware the default culture was human centric, and that the two worldviews were not compatible. I read H.T. Odum’s Environment, Power, and Society as a new book at age 18 and The Limits to Growth the next year. After finishing it I realized I could still be alive at the climax of the world socioeconomic-political system and so reviewed the book’s highlights. My best guess based on the business-as-usual scenario was climax would be 2030–2070. I was paying attention and three decades later read the 30-Year Update, but still have no basis for changing the likely (P ≤ 0.05?) range.

I remained in student mode for 42 years, i.e. I knew I didn’t know enough to have an opinion about anything that mattered and focused only on taking in vetted information and connecting dots as a autodidact generalist who included system science among his interests. Nate and all three young’uns are experts, know-a-lot thought leaders who apart from their focused expertise often look like idiot savants.

It was about nine years ago that I realized I was surrounded by humans who understood even less than I did about our condition as modern humans. So I was forced to transition towards giving out information more than taking it in.

I listen primarily to Nature who has all the answers (and such primate prattle as I cannot avoid), and such humans as also must endeavor to listen to the Gaian system, i.e. those humans almost all other humans ignore, ridicule, or cancel if they must to maintain their illusions (consensus narrative/mindset/worldview as modern techno-industrialized humans who mis-take their view of the world for the world).

I was mis-educated (schooled) by schoolers who were themselves schooled by schoolers going back to the 19th century who were schooled to turn children into wage earners who could serve the economy. Even religious schools produce experts able to earn a wage.

All major universities in India offer degrees (including PhD) in astrology (Vedic, of course), and all major universities worldwide offer degrees in neoclassical (conventional) economics some may get a Nobel Prize for advancing this pretend science (a Nobel Prize in astrology has yet to be funded — the first Nobel in economics was 1969, 68 years after the Nobel Prizes started when a mountain of money was used to get the Nobel Prize Committee to agree to add economics as if it were not a pretend science, easy as by 1969 all ‘educated’ humans thought it was a science).

About ten years ago I happened, for no good reason, to be on the campus of a major university and it occurred to me to ask (myself of course) why were all these students and schoolers here? To “become enlightened” did not make my short list. The answer was evident: to serve the economy (and learn to obfuscate what your salary depends upon your not understanding). How many amateur scientists, engineers, mathematicians, scholars have taught you? Who taught your teachers?

My conjecture is that the schoolers are paid to serve those who hope to be paid to do what they imagine they actually want to do. Yes, there are exceptions (I got BS degrees in soil and crop science, but never used them — was never employed), but all are considered failures (especially those who graduate Phi Kappa Phi with highest honors) who do not serve.

I was not expecting to be impressed by this gathering of four. Nate Hagens is a person of interest, but since becoming an academic (and public intellectual) he must travel within tighter constraints of social approbation and student tolerance. That he was so impressed by Daniel Schmachtenberger makes Nate’s loss of critical faculties of concern.

That one of the four was of evidently sound mind was inexplicable to me. That a product of the modern education system could be is disconfirming to my assessment that public/private education is a failed experiment, one in which each generation of teachers fail to exceed their teachers, a condition of steady decline from peak education (the peak year/decade varies with field, i.e. the time when graduate students were no longer expected to excel, to know more than their professors, by standing firmly on their shoulders and seeing further).

It is possible to learn from nature and one’s predecessors who endeavored with some success to listen and learn from Nature, the nature of things, who has all the answers.

Nature is all about us, always. Human teachers that have information about Nature are rarely contemporaries and if they are, there is rarely opportunity or space to sit at their feet, or discuss matters in an olive grove.

The initial “it is possible” claim above insofar as human teachers go, is is rare, but possible only by reading their books. Thoreau, Laozi, Spinoza, Wittgenstein, H.T. Odum, Donella Meadows are dead and turned to clay. They cannot be channeled other than via their books. Even those who are not dead are best considered via their written words, especially if they could reread and rewrite until the words/images seem to say what they intend.

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Education: that which reveals to the wise, and conceals from the stupid, the vast limits of their knowledge…. I have never let my schooling interfere with my education. — Mark Twain
Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is. — Isaac Asimov
The more he became truly wise, the more he distrusted everything he knew. — Voltaire
Knowing that you do not know is the best. Not knowing that you do not know is an illness…. True words are not pleasing. Pleasing words are not true. Those who are right do not argue. Those who argue are not right. Those who know are not learned. Those who are learned do not know. — Lao Tzu
Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language. — Ludwig Wittgenstein
Modern science should indeed arouse in all of us a humility before the immensity of the unexplored and a tolerance for crazy hypotheses. — Martin Gardner
To know that we know what we know, and to know that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge. — Nicolaus Copernicus
It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: “And this, too, shall pass away.” How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction! — Abraham Lincoln, 1859
I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever, in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in anything else, where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. — Thomas Jefferson: Letter to Francis Hopkinson, March 13, 1789

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That one young’un flew over the cuckoo's nest may be in spite of the cuckoo’s nest. Few children attend dinner parties and listen to Nobel prize winners, international academics, cultural creatives and think it normal. Some young’uns spend less than half their waking life doing screen time (8.6 hrs. screen time/16 hrs. waking time) and over half spend more than half their life doing screen time.

Time spent with Laozi or Donella may have a different outcome than time spent on social media (such as Medium). Today, 15- to 19-year-olds average 12 to 15 minutes of personal interest reading a day (adults: 14 minutes men, 19 minutes women).

Alternative to a schooling system would be learning resources (e.g. a library and craft/shop facilities) for autodidacts with occasional and optional gatherings in olive groves to fulltime learning communities where everyone, without exception, is both a student and teacher. Neophytes aged 15 or 50 would likely be more of one than the other, but there would be no formal distinctions and no one would be paid to be there.

Natasha Linhart is the youngest “person of interest” I know of. Consider her two-page poem: Message for the privileged minority. She graduated 10 months ago with a Bachelor of Science (Honours) in Politics, Psychology, Law and Economics as an Economics and Business Major. And posted the following on Linkedin, pasted here to be more readable:

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The reality is that the content taught in the Economics and Business track specifically has left me deeply frustrated and concerned. Rather than presenting the economy as embedded within society and reliant on a healthy planet, the economy is currently presented as operating in isolation. Rather than presenting the study of economics as a social science full of human (and thus fallible) constructs, its assumptions are currently presented as objective truths, with little support for critical questioning.

The crises gripping the world into which we graduate are many. Only if the teaching of economics starts to acknowledge the central role which our economy plays in creating and perpetuating these crises can we start to make economics part of the solution (because yes, it can be changed!). Below is a small (and definitely incomplete) diagram I made to visualise some of the ways in which our economy interacts with the social and natural world in which it exists. The red words represent how the specific relationship between the structure of our economy and its inputs/outputs combine to produce many of the crises we now face. Looking forward, I hope to dedicate my career towards addressing these crises by catalysing the conditions required to enable systemic socio-economic transition to occur.

Of course, I did not come to this understanding of our economic system alone and am so incredibly grateful for both the professors and the scholars who have taught and inspired me along the way. Thank you to Léla Mosemghvdlishvili for reminding me to continually reflect on that which is often taken for granted; to Crelis Rammelt and the UvA Degrowth course for exposing me to the literature which put words to and made sense of my frustrations; and to Annemarije Hagen for teaching me the approach of Critical Theory. Lastly, thank you to Nate Hagens and the many truly inspirational guests on ‘The Great Simplification’ podcast who have had a huge impact on my understanding of these complex issues (please listen to this podcast!).

A final reflection: PPLE aims to equip ‘leaders of the future’. But what, then, should this future look like? The economic approaches of the past have led us to the crises we face in the present. To create a future based on these same ideas is not only dangerous, but is profoundly irresponsible. Let’s reframe the teaching of economics to instead integrate more progressive theories and models. Only then can students be inspired to challenge the status quo and lead us into a future worth living in.

Okay, not quite there yet. Tomorrow, BioPhysical economics.

Then she’ll lead global campus protests demanding that the teaching of all forms of economics as a pretend science be merged into one department, and abolish the same.

The Next Generation’s Dilemma: Confronting the Metacrisis

A Nate Hagens’ podcast with transcript posted June 9th 2024

Transcript

Understanding the Metacrisis Journey

Phases of Awareness, Grief, and Acceptance

Impact of Intersectional Feminism and Activism

Curiosity and Intellectual Honesty in Learning

Intergenerational Relationships and Collaboration

Engagement in Ecological and Economic Crises

Food Production and Resource Allocation Concerns

Response to Crises and Human Behavior

Maintaining Hope and Resilience

Practices and Behaviors for Resilience

Changes in Mindset and Lifestyle Choices

Closing Thoughts and Final Remarks

The End

Thank you!

Written by Eric Lee