This is not the end.

This is the beginning, the starting point.

The scum layer of artificiality is sluffing off of our understanding of the world as we come to experience our own precarity.

The increasing brutality of our world- and self-view is in a way a gift. We’re coming to understand that no one is coming to save us and we are going to die — just as it’s always been. This understanding presents us with an opportunity to get very clear-eyed about what exactly it is we’re doing here, now.

This opportunity is what interests me — the “okay, but what do I do about all this, as in actually, as in next Tuesday after I brush my teeth in the morning?”

The logistics of whatever-the-fuck is going on these days does come down to brass tacks. In the absence of any better ideas or pressing obligations, there is something you can do next Tuesday:

  • Learn how to live an amazing life off of very little money.

  • Develop a habit of Renaissance skill acquisition.

  • Internalize systems thinking and apply it to the operation of your own life and household.

Repeat these behaviors over a long enough period of time and certain desirable effects begin to emerge in your life:

  • Increased freedom-of-action.

  • Increased household resilience/ruggedness

  • Increased adaptability.

  • Increased alignment of behavior with values and core desires.

  • More equitable consumption of finite resources.

This practice is not the end, this is the beginning.

The point isn’t to become resilient, or to find that you’ve accidentally solved money forever and don’t need to earn more income if you don’t feel like it, or to make all your dreams come true.

Those are incidental yields - side effects of behavior aimed at the cultivation of individuals equipped to show up for and help construct the successor cultures that are even now arising out of the ruins of the current arrangement.

It’s how to navigate the current maelstrom in a way that enables you to deploy your gifts in the world, which is my current understanding of The Meaning Of Life.

I’ve been trying to figure this stuff out my whole life. Mostly I faffed around and got nowhere.

I finally caught a break in early 2020, connected some dots, figured out my own personal “what to do next Tuesday” list, and I was off to the races.

I’m still piecing it together as I go, exploring and iterating and growing. But I do now feel like I’m on the right path, and this conviction is new. Until 2020 I was fumbling around in the dark.

This website is my public notebook where I attempt to document what I learn, including mistakes and dead ends. I wish someone had handed me a book when I was 25 pointing me in the right direction, but as far as I can tell that book doesn’t exist.

So I wrote it.

I published Deep Response: An Emergency Education in Post-Consumer Praxis at the end of 2024. Here’s all of Chapter 1.

 
 

Twice a month I write a letter to my friends. I link to new content, but I also write about what I’m reading, projects I’m working on, trips and quests, and introspection that hasn’t yet (or might not ever) be turned into content on the main site. It’s the best way to follow along. You can subscribe here:

Start Here