I’m writing a pragmatic ‘field manual’ companion to Deep Response. I’m publishing it a section at a time online, over at patternsofdeepresponse.com.
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Do you know what the difference between a preface and an introduction is? Neither did I. A preface explains why the book you’re about to read exists. An introduction is about the actual content of the book.
The following is the preface for Patterns of Deep Response Volume 1: Your Crowbar Era. It’s an explanation of why I’m writing it.
(By the way, I don’t use LLMs for any part of my writing process. I enjoy the process of writing. I don’t enjoy the process of writing with the assistance of an LLM. Simple. That is my reason.
…well, that, and I’m worried that if start letting LLMs help with creative stuff my brain will turn into sawdust. So those are my two reasons.
…
Actually also, I’m just generally uncomfortable with a synthetic intelligence that I don’t really understand that needs careful tuning and guardrails to not be a grimdark nazi sociopath being embedded in my life in an inextricable way, so I’m still keeping LLMs at arm’s length.
That’s three. Three reasons I don’t write with LLMs.)
In late 2024 I released a book titled Deep Response: An Emergency Education in Post-Consumer Praxis.
It was a lightly fictional conversation between my 38 year old self and my 25 year old self. My younger self was really worked up about climate change, resource depletion, and biodiversity loss. He was hoovering up books like Overshoot and Limits to Growth and inspired by books like The Ecotechnic Future and Entropia. He understood much about the dysfunctions of the world and wanted to be involved in making the world function better.
And in fact he worked as an engineer to help decarbonize the built environment, so on paper his career was well aligned with his understanding of the world. But he struggled with the ambivalence and disillusion that so often afflicts young, naive, idealistic people trying to make their dent in the universe. He perceived at varying levels of awareness misalignments and inconsistencies between his own life, his work, his understanding of the world, and his place in it. These inconsistencies and paradoxes, and his inability to resolve them, haunted him and caused a fair amount of internal tension.
I wish someone had handed 25 year old me a book explaining my misunderstandings and laying out a structure for approaching my life which would increase coherence and not make me feel so lost and frustrated. I couldn’t find that book anywhere, so I wrote it.
In Deep Response I had to convince my younger self that pursuing personal autonomy was not only a worthwhile goal but a strategic imperative particularly for people who wanted to make an impact in the world. I had to convince him that he was actually being selfish by refusing to be a good steward of his own resources in a way that would lead towards increased personal autonomy.
I had to point out the ridiculous hypocrisy of trying to get society to function within ecological and resource limits in my professional life while carrying significant consumer debt in my personal life.
I had to make the case that if what was called for was no less than a paradigm shift, a different kind of thinking, then not only the most pragmatic but the most moral place to start was at the scale of our own households. (Pragmatic because we have more control over our own households and can learn faster with a smaller scale sandbox, and more moral because we aren’t inflicting the consequences of our inevitable beginner mistakes on anyone else.)
I had to make the case to my younger self that one of the reasons for his disillusionment had to do with his suspicion that he was playing engineer on the Titanic.
“…new systems will emerge from the dissolution of the old system, and those are the systems that deserve your attention and effort.”
“What new systems?” he asks.
“I mean the successor cultures that are emerging from the dissolution of this one,” I gesture around us. “Cultures that operate based on rules aligned to biophysical reality. The cultures that are growing in the cracks of the old system.
“You need to understand that you can’t work on these successor cultures if you’re still running the programming from the old system. If you’re still trying to brute force everything and operating in a state of overshoot, unable to think in systems, fragile to disruption, enmeshed in dysfunctional psychological patterns, unable to carve out time to think and respond to the future as it arrives. In a very technical sense of the word, right now you don’t deserve to work on these new cultures. You will damage them if you try to. This is why you have to collapse your scope to your personal life, to the scale of your household, and build a functional system at that scale before you expand back outwards again. You have to become the kind of person who can contribute meaningfully to these successor cultures.”
I know this is hard for him to hear. He’s got so much effort already invested in his current way of thinking.
“Or,” I continue, “you can keep doing what you’re doing. Huck yourself at projects, pull overnighters, burn yourself out on projects that get canceled anyway, trash your relationships and your health, and drown in the uncertainty that any of your sacrifice is worth it. Along the way rack up five figures of consumer debt with nothing to show for it at the end. Your call.”
I do sincerely wish my younger self could have read something like Deep Response, and I wrote with exactly that person in mind. But of course time travel is not real, and who I actually wrote Deep Response for is people like younger Tyler. People who see the monstrous dysfunction of the world and want to Do Something About It and in fact probably are some number of years into full-scale professional effort towards that end, but are carrying a heavy load of uncertainty, cognitive dissonance, and internal-life-systems incoherence.
I did my best to explain where that uncertainty was coming from and one possible strategy for dealing with and resolving it, a strategy that does not involve capitulation, naive idealism, or magical thinking. Ultimately I built a case for an education in post-consumer praxis as a foundation for a purposeful life, a curriculum which would result in a lifestyle ‘rugged enough for dream chasing.’
“When you internalize systems thinking you decrease the amount of resources required to run your life, and you reduce the friction. This creates more space for you to think about your life, to simply be, without all of the running around, and to experiment with different activities. You tweak and tune as you go, observing the effect that different behaviors have on your overall experience of life. You remember, or discover, dreams and desires that you’d long forgotten about or didn’t even know you had, and have the space to pursue them. You stop doing things that block your dreams. Your stress levels comes down and you don’t need to use coping or numbing agents like alcohol as much, which improves the overall function of your life system because coping and numbing dissociates you from the experience of life and introduces other sources of friction. Over time your life activities converge on the imprint of interests, desires, and purpose that every human is born with, the grooves everyone has deep down. The closer you get to this imprint the stronger your attraction to it – it functions like a gravity well, the closer you get the stronger you feel it – and it eventually feels effortless to simply do the things you were made to do. Your life becomes consistently amazing.”
I spent a lot of words convincing my younger self that there was a better way to achieve the goals he thought he wanted, and that his then-current methods would lead him into a decade-long quagmire. That he was, in fact, walking into a trap.
I’m proud of what I wrote, but for people who are already on board with pursuing a curriculum of post-consumer praxis, Deep Response is unwieldy. In my opinion it doesn’t fall into the category of book that delivers a satisfyingly savage critique of The System but disappoints completely in terms of providing an alternative plan of action.
Deep Response isn’t in fact a critique of The System at all. It presupposes a certain critique of The System (laid out better than I possibly could by the books listed in my bibliography) and if you don’t agree with the broad outlines of that critique then Deep Response is not for you.
Deep Response is:
a critique of one certain kind of response to The System, the response that I embodied for about a decade in my 20’s and early 30’s and found to be ineffective, and
it is the outline of a response that I think is a much more practicable approach. It is a gesture in the correct direction and an encouraging pat on the shoulder.
For those interested in more than just an argument, an outline, and some encouragement, however, Deep Response is insufficient. It wants for a workbook, a DIY handbook, a how-to manual. So that’s what I’m working on now. I want it to be a brass tacks, useful, no fluff, field manual for people who want to unlearn consumerism, cultivate an uncommon amount of autonomy and resilience for themselves and their households, and bend the trajectory of their lives towards prefigurative work on the kinds of societies we actually want to live in rather than this ridiculous nonsense we’re being handed now.
I very much enjoyed the process of writing Deep Response, which I worked on from late 2022 through the end of 2024. But I missed sharing what I was writing on a more regular basis and feeling like I was part of a dialogue with other people out there in the world.
For this project I am going to experiment with writing in public. As I finish the ‘internet-grade draft’ of each section, I’ll post it here. Assuming I think it’s worthwhile to do so, when I finish I’ll bundle it all up, do a print-grade edit, and make it available as a book as well.
A major reason for doing this is that I want to expose this project to feedback as it develops, not just all at the end. I suspect this will make the overall project of more real use to people, which is the whole reason I’m doing this.
So please do leave a comment or send me a note with any thoughts or questions you have along the way. Thanks for reading.