My Perception is my Reality
“Matter flows from place to place, and momentarily comes together to be you. Some people find that thought disturbing; I find the reality thrilling.”
― Richard Dawkins
Recently, I have found myself intrigued with the urge to document my reflections on our society’s predicament, here I present you a mere collection of thoughts and findings. Feel free to join me on a journey through my discoveries. Before continuing, be advised that some parts of this article may be depressing and hard to swallow, but by no means are they something groundbreaking and new. It rather is something that lies in front of us all. I will write this as it comes to my mind; I am no special nor extraordinary writer or researcher, I am as normal as you can be. I gathered my insights through various books I have read in my life, and recently from a lot of studies, papers and articles. The information I gather from these sources contribute to the shaping of my evolving perception of the world. It is an ongoing process of learning and discovery that unfolds with each new piece of knowledge.
During my journey I found guidance in a simple yet profound axiom that has become my credo:
„ My perception is my reality. “
One of my earlier or earliest childhood memories is me being lost on a camping ground during one of my family’s holiday trips, sitting there on a crossroad crying, and not knowing where I need to go. My recollection of this memory is so distant, the memories became hazy, not easy to touch, in fact; maybe it never happened, maybe it is something that I dreamt, a figment of a thought or a dream that I have convinced myself had happened. The feeling of being lost has been with me my entire life. I think that this feeling is rather common for a lot of us, or at least many can relate to.
I grew up with a lot of freedom and privileges, and I used most of these to flee into gaming or virtual reality. I was lazy at school, never had the ambition to study for the greater good, but nonetheless I had an easy and warm upbringing. My parents taught me the values that still stand in my life, but with the ever-small touch of my own perception. I was just swimming in my flow of time when three things greatly altered my perception.
For one I found my beautiful wife, who has been part of my reality for a while. A reality in which we both have changed our life and transformed it into something together, we have created and formed our own perception, the reality we live in. I will always be thankful to her for having a positive influence on my life. Which doesn’t mean I fundamentally changed how I live, rather meeting her has given my life a foundation that I always know I can return to. We were still young when we met, and we are even still young today, but nonetheless this experience of gaining something made me clear that there is always the underlying fear of loss.
The fear of death is something that is ingrained into us, if there is danger we run or fight for our own survival. Through history of mankind, we always turned to religion to help us combat the fear of death and loss. I think a lot of the values religion stands for are good and can help people ease their pain of loss, but throughout history religion has been cruel to ethnics, races, and children, losing more and more of its credibility. In my eyes religion should be done more naturally, a worship to life itself. Nature should be treated with the respect it deserves but we should also treat our neighbors, friends, families, strangers and every other living species with equality.
The second thing is me learning about ecological overshoot, and what that means for us, and our civilization.
Ecological overshoot basically means that we as mankind exceed the regenerative capacity of our ecosystem. We surpass the carrying capacity of our planet earth. The same principle applies to every other species in our ecosystem, that suddenly realizes it’s full potential. For human civilization our full potential was awakened by consumption of fossil fuels. A good example for this is the St. Matthew Island Reindeer Population, which realized their full potential on a remote island.
After the 2nd World war a few reindeer, immigrated as a source of “backup food”, were left alone. After the remote island station was vacated, the left alone reindeer population with no natural enemies present, thrived and boomed, and soon fell victim to the end of natural resources and seemingly degrading reproducing capabilities.
I could end this right here, since these 2 figures are already telling enough, showing us that at some point in history our population will cap and then plummet down into oblivion. When will it happen, and how harsh will it be? I think that it is on us all to decide. For a matter of fact, exponential growth and the exploding need for more and more resources on a finite planet was never possible from the beginning.
The “End of the world” or the apocalypse have been part of many speculations in distant and recent civilizations, as we are not the first civilization to cease. There are numerous of, at their respective times, far advanced civilization that fell victim to their sudden population boom, or to their crashing finance systems. Religion eased people’s minds during these times. People believed if they die, they will get send to heaven, this though being a calming one. But these harsh times also gave rise to blaming everyone’s misery on other ethnics or gender, these patterns have repeated in history again and again, yet we don’t learn from our past’s mistakes.
I don’t want this article to be a prophecy, rather I want to lay down a few pieces of knowledge I found to be intriguing.
We are already crossing 6 planetary boundaries, far beyond what our planet can renew. Pollution that is already killing millions of people yearly. Chemicals are dumped into our drinking water, causing cancer, birth defects and more around the world. A recent Bloomberg Investigation revealed that they have found residence of forever chemicals in 99% of thousands of thousands of blood samples all around the world, some of them, taking forever to degrade to nothing. I could continue to talk about peak oil, topsoil degradation, imminent wars that are fought and about to be fought, mass migration of all living species, water scarcity and so forth, which all are symptoms of our ecological overshoot.
A boundary not yet crossed is the Ocean Acidification, which according to the IPCC, is projected to turn to 7,95 PH as late as of 2095. Reaching this threshold of acidification would mean the loss of up to 90% of the marine life, resulting in a rapid growth of harmful dinoflagellates like the A. minutum, which might reduce the oxygen in our air to harmful levels. These harmful algal blooms are already happening wherever nutrient rich water is dumped, especially in areas where fertilizers for agriculture are heavily used. They release toxins harmful for living beings around the algae, they reduce the oxygen levels of the water and thus lead to dying marine life. Of course, it is estimated, though not peer-reviewed, that this could happen as early as 2045 if we continue with Business-As-Usual or RCP8.5 projections of burning fossil fuels. Imagine a child born today, will turn 72 years old when the ocean is projected to turn too acid for our marine ecosystem at the latest. Which basically means they would experience an era of a nearly lifeless ocean.
For me the main driver of our ecological overshoot though, remains being climate change, with the unpredictable extreme weather events and the destruction of our ecosystem that comes along with it.
According to a recently released study, with the soon to end year of 2023, we are about to enter “Uncharted territory”.
But what does “Uncharted territory” exactly mean? It means we are leaving the Holocene, as the Anthropocene becomes reality. What this implies is, that the weather is about to change, the predictability will be gone, as we can’t look at past data, to exactly know what lies in front of us.
First let’s look at the past 160.000 years. We can clearly see the fluctuations between Glacial- and Interglacial periods. There are some theories of why this pattern has repeated itself for around 800.000 years. The Milankovitch Cycle is one of them, which basically explains a cycle in which earth tilts for a small amount over time. During this process more and more sunlight reaches the poles, and this kickstarts positive feedbacks which increases the solar irradiance, and thus the Earth’s energy is imbalanced. The truth is probably more nuanced, as there might be feedback not quantifiable by past datasets. During the emergence of the Holocene over the last 10.000 years, several civilizations rose due to new possibilities in agriculture enabled by stabilized weather patterns, and finally once we started to consume fossil fuels, we could outsource labor work to machines, which increased our economic output manifold. Recent archaeological findings reveal that half a million years ago we were intelligent enough to build wood structures for better transportation and we supposedly had the intelligence to form our civilizations 300.000 years ago.
The figure above plots the Earth’s Energy Imbalance that occurred over the last 150.000 years. EEI basically means that the Earth, depending on different factors like GHG; Albedos; etc., reflected more or less of solar irradiance. The climate tries to reach a new equilibrium, glaciers expand or recede. Notice how abnormal the last 3 years have been according to the data. Leon Simons describes this as “… like evidence of a large comet heading towards Earth.” This EEI means, of averaged +1,4 W/m² for the last 3 years, that our atmosphere receives extra amount of heat, worth of 11 Hiroshima bombs per second. This implies that the drastically increasing EEI pushes our climate equilibrium into “uncharted territory”, the resulting spike of temperature looks like an error when brought into the broader picture of geological timeframes.
The above figure for example, shows the temperatures of the past 15.000 years and for the next 10.000 years. Because the timeframe it shows can’t be connected to the short lifespan of humans it might be a bit misleading. Yet it does show though how abnormal this uptick is, in geological terms. Usually, we should be headed for a full-fledged glacial, which we will most likely skip.
Some explanations for these abnormal temperatures that this year occurred are:
“…The recent rise may also be linked to a regulatory change mandating the use of low-sulfur fuels in ocean shipping, because atmospheric sulfate aerosols directly scatter sunlight and cause reflective clouds to form. The sudden rise in temperatures is also likely contributed to by the onset of an El Niño event — a naturally occurring part of the climate system, which could, itself, be affected by climate change (Cai et al. 2021). In any case, as Earth’s climate system transitions away from conditions associated with human thriving, such anomalies may become more frequent and could have increasingly catastrophic impacts (Xu et al. 2020, Lenton et al. 2023).“
Delving into past El Nino events, we can learn about how sudden spikes in temperatures can lead to famines in effected areas. In 1876 a Super El Nino took place, hitting India, Asia and South Africa the hardest. Due to malpractice and droughts, these regions were hit by severe famines, leading to the death of estimated 20 to 50 million humans. The equivalent of today’s numbers would be 100 to 250 million humans. “Our World in Data puts it at 19 million, but excludes several countries. Either way, tens of millions died, putting the famine in the same ballpark as the 1918 influenza epidemic, the world wars, and perhaps even the Black Death of the 1300s.”
British missionary Timothy Richard visited China in 1878 when he became aware of conditions he described as “…people pull down their houses, sell their wives and daughters, eat roots and carrion, clay and leaves is news which nobody wonders at…The sight of men and women lying helpless on the roadside, or if dead, torn by hungry dogs and magpies [and] of children being boiled and eaten up is so fearful as to make one shudder.”
In 2018 a mass starvation occurred in the Bering Sea. The population of snow crabs dropped from sudden record high numbers down to only a fragment of its population. About 10 billion snow crabs died, in water hotter than usual. It was not the heat itself, but more the increased caloric need due to warmer waters and the lack of an even distribution of the sudden bloomed population. Due to warm and cold hotspots the crabs were most likely funneled into highly populated spots resulting in not enough food for most of them to survive.
In Brazil the Amazonas region is being hit by an unprecedented drought. An already small population of river dolphins lost around 10% of its population, on one day, 70 of them die, in a part of Lake Tefé where the sudden warming was too fast.
In an Interview from the “RiffReporter”, Oceanographer Miriam Marmontel described the event as follows:
“Perhaps the sudden rise in temperatures confused the animals. They experienced a temperature fluctuation of 8 to 14 degrees. The Maximum average temperature in the lake ranges between 26 and 32 degrees. But on that day, it reached 40 degrees! They felt it on their skin. We, too, repeatedly put our hands in the water. You feel it instantly. […] This naturally changes their physiology. […] That’s a lot of stress. And these animals cannot sweat. They regulate heat through the so-called “counter-current principle.” Superficial blood vessels release heat to the surface while retaining colder blood for the heat. However, at 40 degrees, the physiology of these animals has likely been completely disrupted. We could see them suffering. They were disoriented, swimming in circles, unable to dive. It was horrific scenes.”
It would’ve been possible for them to migrate to colder waters earlier, if they had had time to react. But the spike was so fast, that their bodies just couldn’t handle the extra amount of stress. They just died, swimming in circles engulfed by the never-ending heat.
What probably happened is the occurrence of a “wet bulb like event”. Wet bulb temperatures are life threatening, if effected by for too long. These events are not occurring often, but the occurrence is only going to increase.
In this graphic we can see what temperatures are still safe for humans. Heat combinations of humidity and temperature in red, are unsafe and will lead to death if exposed for too long. In addition, the heat resistance of our bodies sinks, as you are exposed to the heat more and more.
So, while I am writing this, Brazil is affected by one of their most severe spring heatwaves ever recorded. “The heat index — a combination of temperature and humidity [wet bulb] — hit 58.5 degrees Celsius (137 Fahrenheit) Tuesday morning in Rio, the highest index ever recorded there…”
Without cooling devices in their homes, the heat was nearly unbearable. Energy consumption has risen to unprecedented levels. It´s fortunate though that there were no reported blackouts caused by the surging heat.
In South Africa migrating birds were found dead after hit by a rare weather event. The weather changed from very hot to cold, rainy to windy very quickly, catching the bird recently migrated by surprise.
“It’s a very simple issue of whether they can gain enough energy from feeding to balance the energy requirements. Suddenly the weather turns cold [and] energy requirements go up, because they’ve got to produce heat to keep warm. But if your food availability has dropped off a cliff, it’s going to be that much more difficult to balance energy supply and demand.”
Though these weather events have happened before, the source of food for the birds to feed on were much greater in these times.
“How tragic to survive such an extensive journey only to succumb to an abnormal weather event.”
But it’s not the cold that harms birds the most. They suffer in hot conditions as well and are far less adaptable than us humans. Since birds provide vital ecosystem services, the loss of them might have ecological cascading effects, that are understudied.
Take this figure for example; We are losing species all over the world in an alarming speed. In Germany we lost 75% of our insect population in the last 27 years.
I could continue this but these events are just small occurrences, within the ongoing 6th mass extinction that is unraveling before our eyes. In 2023 there have been severe weather events such as massive flooding events in Libya, Greek, China and Turkey.
“On Wednesday, Oct. 25, Hurricane Otis made landfall near Acapulco, on Mexico’s southern Pacific coast, at 1:25 a.m. CDT as a Category 5 hurricane with sustained winds of 265 km/h. The storm had rapidly intensified off the coast, and according to the National Hurricane Center, Otis was the strongest hurricane in the Eastern Pacific to make landfall in the satellite era.
Because the storm intensified so quickly, with wind speeds increasing by 185 km/h within 24 hours, the more than one million people living in and around the city had very little time to prepare for the monster storm ahead of landfall.”
Imagine reading news in the morning about a storm that is forecast to be a usual tropical storm, just to come home from work to realize that a ground leveling Cat. 5 Hurricane is about to hit your city. With no time left to take precautions and prepare. Let’s leave it at that and continue. Coming up is a piece of my opinion, and I am upfront with this, because this is just my perception of reality.
Hypernormalization
The third great altering of my perception happened when I read about the term “Hypernormalisation”. Alexei Yurchak, a Russian anthropologist, described this term in his book “Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation.”
“Soviet socialism was based on paradoxes that were revealed by the peculiar experience of its collapse. To the people who lived in that system the collapse seemed both completely unexpected and completely unsurprising. At the moment of collapse it suddenly became obvious that Soviet life had always seemed simultaneously eternal and stagnating, vigorous and ailing, bleak and full of promise. Although these characteristics may appear mutually exclusive, in fact they were mutually constitutive.”
Adam Curtis described the “Hypernormalisation” as follows:
“Those who ran the Soviet Union had believed that they could plan and manage a new kind of socialist society. But they had discovered that it was impossible to control and predict everything and the plan had run out of control. But rather than reveal this, the technocrats began to pretend that everything was still going according to plan. And what emerged instead was a fake version of the society. The Soviet Union became a society where everyone knew that what their leaders said was not real because they could see with their own eyes that the economy was falling apart. But everybody had to play along and pretend that it WAS real because no-one could imagine any alternative. …You were so much a part of the system that it was impossible to see beyond it. The fakeness was Hypernormal. “
I think this term perfectly describes the world we live in. Without normalization how should we cope with what is reality? It is normal for most of us to work several hours daily and commute to these for hours; it is normal for us to have smartphones in our pockets with advanced computing which would have been science fiction just years ago; it is normal for must of us to collectively support the abuse of billions of animals, just for our own pleasure of taste; it is normal for us that everyday people are murdered for warped political and religious ideas; it is normal for us to pollute the environment; it is normal for us that the weather is changing right before our eyes and various animal species going extinct; it is normal for us that children are bombed and die because of it; it is normal for us that our technology has increased rapidly, without our brains keeping up.
This normalization probably occured for every civilization that has emerged and perceived the status quo as normal, so far. This perception of the status quo as optimal lead to most of their respective collapses, as leaders and citizen alike were not able to find solutions for complex problems that were imminent. Part of the problem was probably the inability to acknowledge what is going wrong, though in our times, it is as easy as ever, to get versed into something, still people don’t use this power to educate them, but rather prefer to delve into social media, extensive travels, consumerism and various other pursuits, often attributed to the effects of capitalism.
On the other hand, though, it is easier then ever to mislead people and drive them into conspiracy and to sway people away from the obvious or hidden through misinformation and opinions that are presented as facts, even though they remain opinions without evidence backing them up. This way people’s attention is diverted from critical issues that must be faced.
So why is it that the information I presented earlier is not widely discussed? There is only one reason for this, and it’s because most people don’t even know about it happening in the first place. And this fact is yet again normalized and thus it’s normal for us to not talk about what is going on.
I can safely assume that the collapse of our civilization, being a highly possible outcome in this century, is not a part of most people’s perception of reality, but sadly enough it is a reality that we have to face. It is crucial that we bring awareness of what is happening to our ecosphere, it is crucial that we can talk about it and have an open dialogue, on what we must change to advert the coming crisis.
The reason why most of us don’t see our ecosphere collapsing right in front of us is, that most of us are forced into seemingly narrow bubbles. I live in a bubble, everyone does, the algorithm of what is brought into most of our smartphone’s feed is what leads us to our bubble, in which we are a part of a community and perceive this as our reality. These bubbles represent safe borders that we can use to navigate through difficult hurdles in our life and decisions. On the other hand, these bubbles often demonize or disrespect other bubbles or force their thinking on others including blatantly insulting them for it. You could argue that the same principles also apply for the scientific bubbles preaching about how important it so to act now to stop climate change, or vegans arguing about that eating animals is cruel and not essential for our survival.
So, what is right, what is wrong? Is this a question that must be answered at all? Isn’t it more likely a decision between what ensures chaos and what ensures order? Our morals and understandings have vastly changed in the last 75 to 80 years, and they will change in the future.
„I believe that we will increasingly understand good and evil, right and wrong, in scientific terms, because moral concerns translate into facts about how our thoughts and behaviors affect the wellbeing of conscious creatures like ourselves. If there are facts to be known about the wellbeing of such creatures — and there are — then there must be right and wrong answers to moral questions.”
The problem is that the way we live, ensures chaos. But our brains aren’t programmed to fix it. Compared to our planet and geographical time, our lifetime is just not comparable. We are programmed to fix problems that are right in front of us, not some problems whose results we will experience sometime in the future. Recent studies say that even the most informed people still won’t choose the most sustainable options, they rather opt for the ones that are most convenient, but don’t change their recent lifestyle. I know that every effort is a good effort, every tenth of degree we stop from happening is important.
Research shows that we perceive our future self as another person. This tendency creates the problem for us that concludes the inability to take action for our future selves. Why should we change ourself for a stranger? Wouldn’t it me more convenient to just embrace the status quo for as long as possible?
In a conversation with my future self, I would ask these two simple questions:
“What actions have you regretted? What actions did you not take that you regret?”
Picturing this conversation with your future self should help in making better decisions now.
Did you knew that mass extinctions roughly happen in 27 million years cycle. This might hint at the fact that at some point our planet might cross a meteor shower in the Milky Way, that will most likely wipe out most of the living species on earth. This extinction will probably occur over a very short period as the impacts will be severe. Right now, we are already experiencing a mass extinction that is on the same level as those mentioned above, but this time we are the meteor, and it happens slowly in front of us. Life roughly needs estimated of 5 million years to recover after such an extinction.
I want this piece to encourage you to do your own research, encourage you to look beyond the small surface of our perception of reality. There is so much to know, so much to gather and learn. It gets uncomfortable at times, and it hurts. But there is hope, as technology is constantly advancing. We are working towards a better future, but a lot of us haven’t understood the severance of our actions that we have to take now; we must end our thoughtless consumption, as it’s the sole reason for burning fossil fuels. I don’t want you to change your life fundamentally, but we should question every piece we buy.
We need to rapidly decarbonize now, and every action matters.
As you can see in the figure above, the pathway we must take is as steep as it can get, some might argue, that we must act even faster then this figure is presenting.
Another graph shows how far away we are from the pledges that were made. The Production Gap must be closed.
A recent study finds:
“We find a substantial reduction in the global environmental impacts by 2050 if globally 50% of the main animal products (pork, chicken, beef and milk) are substituted — net reduction of forest and natural land is almost fully halted and agriculture and land use GHG emissions decline by 31% in 2050 compared to 2020.”
Even a 50% substitution of animal products can have huge impact, even greater substitution would not only halt the biodiversity loss, but it would also even reverse it.
Technology is advancing as fast as it could get, the energy transition is steadily accelerating. In 2025 the new solar parks will have roughly 4 to 5 time the capacity solar had in 2022. And it’s easy to scale with the vast amount of land that we have.
In addition, the cost for solar energy is now roughly the cost of ¼ of nuclear energy. And it’s only getting better. As we can see in the figure below the share of renewable electricity is increasing exponentially.
This energy transition will take time. The need for traditional energy storage is overvalued. A recent simulation of the Australian grid revealed that if they overproduce their energy with 70% and use the excess to produce Hydrogen, this Hydrogen could be used to fill the gaps of renewables.
The research is done, people all around the globe work towards a sustainable future. But we all must take part in this transition; we must give technology the time it needs. Do your research, change your perception, as we all together must work towards a sustainable civilization, to make this perception of future, a reality.
