In late 2022 I sat down to write a lightly fictitious article about what I’d say to my 25 year-old self if given the chance.
I finished that ‘article’ in December 2024. It had grown to about 45,000 words and occupied the first couple hours of most of my mornings for most of two years.
It wasn’t supposed to be a book, but it became one, and now it exists in the world. You can buy it directly from me as an ebook, from Amazon, from not-Amazon, and as an audiobook (forthcoming). Here’s the first chapter (“You Are Walking Into A Trap”).
The title changed from “We Need to Talk” to “The Door Of Your Cage Hangs Open” to “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Metacrisis” before settling on Deep Response, to reflect a point I hammer on in the text that the metacrisis is not a problem to solve but a predicament to respond to.
If you’ve been hanging around for a while you know that Jacob Lund Fisker’s book Early Retirement Extreme had a profound impact on my life when I read it in 2020. You might not know that I’d previously read ERE in 2017 and it had bounced off of me. I wasn’t interested then in so-called ‘early retirement’ (I’m still not) and I thought the book was interested, but not very relevant to my desire to Do Something about the Metacrisis.
I was wrong about this! The principles of ERE are entirely relevant to the question of what to do about the metacrisis, but Jacob wrapped the message in a package designed to appeal to people who had no knowledge or concern about the metacrisis.
As a result, however, ERE can be a turn-off to those who might most benefit from its practices. It was to me!
The purpose of Deep Response is to unpack post-consumer praxis for people who are explicitly wrestling with the question of what to do about the metacrisis in their own lives, like I was. I spent years banging my head against a wall, trying to figure out how to align my actions with my understanding of the multivariate crises facing humanity and the planet. I span like a tire in sand until I dug into Jacob’s work.
This is the book I wish someone had handed to me when I was young and became metacrisis-aware. It is the result of my five years digesting post-consumer praxis and applying it to my own life.