I've had this on my mind for quite some time now...
Does it also seem to other people here that we, as a species, have wandered past the point of no return and have begun the unfolding of a process that will ultimately turn hideously violent and grotesque? I have a suspicion that this is just me, and that there have always been people at every point in history that think the eschaton is just around the corner, but it seems like conditions are different now enough compared to any age before that such concerns may finally be warranted. Take, for example, the state of the climate, or the blossoming of the internet (particularly social media), and the unsettling realities about ourselves that it has revealed to anyone paying enough attention...

This came up recently during a mushroom trip and the immediate intuition was that: yes, the thing is so hopelessly out of control, and after the crunch comes, whatever it turns out to be will have happened so quickly and violently that most won't even be able to comprehend what has just happened to them, those around them, the land they live on, their planet...

I hope it isn't so, and that I've just been gripped by some inner horror and pessimism... and if so, sorry for unleashing it here. But I can't shake the feeling that something is deeply wrong with the way our culture is now operating, and I'd like to hear what anyone else has to say about it.

Thanks

These fears are completely normal. I am also plagued by thoughts like this sometimes.

You haven't even mentioned the threat of a carrington event, wich is at least as big a threat to us as climate change, and is hardly ever adressed by politics or the media.

Or the many other issues looming in the distance: out of controll population growth, a shift of power from the west towards the east (such shifts of power have always been paired with instability and turmoil), unheard of monetary experiments, the rise of antibiotic resistant bacteria, the socio economic impact of aging populations, even more virus outbreaks as a result of rapid urbanisation and globalisation...i probably missed a few things even.

I personally believe that our situation is not completely hopeless.

But i also believe that our old ways of thinking, no longer suffice.
We've always been looking for simple answers to simple questions.

But the times we live in, and the world as we know it now, require us to realise the complexity of it all.
We have to incorporate the issue of complexity itself, into our way of looking at the world, and into our way of thinking, or we simply will not be able to make sense of it all.

Not that appreciation of "complexity" will automatically help us solve all these issues.
But we are like a ship in the middle of the ocean, with a lot of stormy weather ahead of us.
And stormy wheather requires a lot more from the entire crew aboard. It is much more complex.
A crew that cannot handle the complexity of a storm, is not going to be successfull.

It is possible; but is it more possible than not? Who knows. "The thing being so hopelessly out of control" is definitely true, and one of the implications of that is that we have no way of knowing what is going to happen. Terrence McKenna mentions something like this when talking about how he doesn't believe in conspiracy theories, because the whole thing is too big, messy and mysterious, and we lacking the intelligence to have any sort of control over it at all. If we think we have control (and by extension; think we can know the outcome) then we are fooling ourselves.

So, I think it's best to keep an open mind when thinking about this, and not come to any quick conclusions. That doesn't mean that you there aren't proximate answers, and that you can't form any conclusions, but there is always a bigger picture. For example, social media has, on a whole, become quite detrimental, and I feel fairly safe and entitled to reach (and profess) that conclusion. This certainly doesn't mean the internet is bad however, and the internet could be the very thing that truly helps pulls out of whatever funks our species has happened to get itself in. It has the ability (obviously) to connect a huge number of people, and distribute a vase amount of information in a very short time. Our world looks nothing like it did just a few decades ago.

I hesitate to be too optimistic, but it seems that the proper access to and distribution of information could be what ultimately enables the bootstrapping up of our species. The internet is a conduit for this, and social media is a clog in the pipes.

make the most you can out of every day, focus on the now, and keep long term goals to a minimum.. protect and provide for those closest to you, and if you grow bigger and stronger, and are able to incorporate more people into that group, then do so. be happy and optimistic, you cant feed the kids in ethiopia, nor will they be able to feed you if they grow strong and we weak. extinction is an absolute certainty. by what means we cannot know. nor when. the internet is here to stay, make the most of it.

Empires become old and die. This too shall pass.

I think Daniel Schmactenberger has interesting insights on this topic. There is a series about how to make sense of the world you can find on youtube, and he also did a number of interviews worth listening to, including with Lex Friedman and Bret & Eric Weinstein.

I think Bisy's advice is very cogent: do the best you can, first for yourself, and then for anyone else that you are able to. The only thing I would disagree with is not setting long term goals. I would say, instead of that, to form long term goals, but realize they are tentative and allow for change. If you take care of most of the proximate problems and goals then you can venture out into the longer term. There is a clear correlation between outward and space and outward in time here.


tango I'm going to check out Daniel Schmactenberger. I love Lex's podcast and Brett always has an interesting view on things. Thanks for that.

I think the collapse of civilization is inevitable at this point, it's so thoroughly sick and fingers are being pointed in all but the right directions as to what's the root of sickness.

The earth will recover though, humans that act accordingly to the threat we face may survive if they play their cards right.

I too can feel something coming and it's coming soon, It's definitely going to be a dramatic event but I'm optimistic as to where this process will ultimately lead us (those who survive)

You're definitely not alone in this feeling at this time, I've spoken with 100s of people who feel the same and there's large communities forming in response to the feeling like never before.

The human condition has always been difficult and fraught with trials that seem to come in waves. Humanity is already been plagued by one thing or another. It's as though things have always been screwed up, it only appears worse in this moment because the population only grows, and with it the issues we as humans proliferate. Sooner or later, as a species, we won't exist, whether that's due to evolution or extinction. It's up to us.

All the same, I feel something coming as well...

One love

One time I woke up late at night and I realized... we can still f*** this up. We can ruin everything. Or everything can just end suddenly, without any human intervention at all. Atomic bombs, asteroids, solar flares, volcanic eruptions, disease, and war are all vying for a piece of us.

All of our history, past present and future, would be wiped clean from this earth.

In the end, I have taken a sort of "it is what it is" attitude. We can't save everybody; all we can do is love and care for the people close to us.

So many people around me seem wrapped up in all the world's problems. They criticize me for my lack of interest in BLM, covid, societal trends, and whatever other sick muses we create for ourselves. And they're miserable! And they call me ignorant for not being miserable alongside them!

But I don't think it's selfish to focus on your local environment. It's what we're evolved for, and where our minds work more effectively. If we all cared for our little worlds the cumulative effect would lift up the whole of mankind.

Um, perhaps ignorance is bliss...

Awareness to available information breeds action. Emotional turmoil breeds action.

That said, while most of us have very little power individually to instill change, like feeding starving people around the world, groups can effect great change and even influence individuals with greater power to take individual action. This is one of the reasons why caring about the world in its entirety seems important. We are all connected in some way, regardless of distance.

Also, swathes of people not caring in, say, a single country, creates animosity the world of from those in countries that are struggling. How much we care impacts how we're treated...

Again, we're all interconnected. I think sometimes we try to shrug off and disregard certain world issues because it's hard to handle. But that position just shows off the privilege one may have.

One love

I think most people care.

But sometimes there just isn't a simple answer available to any of the problems mentioned.

If you just don't know what to do, doing nothing can seem a favorable option.
Fight, flight, or freeze.
Those are still the ways we will respond to most of the very big and threatening things thrown at us.

The trick is to become aware of it, and to tap into the energy of those responses. Easier said than done, but not impossible.

Most people in the world are addicted to drama. Drama includes TV, politics, sporting events, intense debate, social media, fake news, etc. Being stimulated by drama causes the release of dopamine, cortisol, adrenaline, endorphins, etc. And so most people are literally addicted to the release of these chemicals in the brain. It's how most of us have been conditioned since childhood. Pulling you into a dramatic discussion feeds their chemical addiction. They're like junkies trying to get a fix.

If you don't engage in those discussions, either to agree with them or to defend your "lack of concern", they will eventually leave you alone because you're not interesting to them. You don't satisfy their craving for the mind chemicals. They will prefer to engage with others who are addicted to drama and who will provide the chemical release they need.

I think a great many do, and would like to think that it's most, but am weary about if that's wishful thinking or not. Probably just the nihilist in me I strive to keep under wraps

And yes tapping into them through self-awareness is the key, I agree.



Yup! We could extend this to shopping, checking social media, watching sports, etc, in that they are all desired because of the chemical response in the brain.

I think Dennis Mckenna made a comment to the effect of, "it's all a drug interaction."

One love

Edit: to be clear, I mentioned some of the things that shroombee did, but meant it in a different way outside of the drama facet.

Also, apologies if I seemed combative. Definitely wasn't trying to. Going through it personally right now, so am off my game, but wanted to interact with all of you.

This! Our economy and politics are dependent on these mechanisms.

The good news is that you can jump off the wagon once you see through the veil.

I used to feel depressed because of the current state of the world. I have somewhat recently had a shift in perspective which allowed me to identify what I consider to be the 3 main issues and see that a solution to most of the world's problems is not only possible but very likely. I'm honestly very hopeful.

I wrote an article on it here , I had posted about it at some point but can't find the thread.

Just read it, great! Highly recommend.

Somehow, the threat of these have never scared me particularly much; I think that with the technology we have now and our with experience in large-scale organisation of people, a society of sane heads could manage through a number of crisis, albeit with great difficulty. However, we are not a society of sane heads... This is the thing that terrifies me more than anything else; I understand that just basing this on my own personal experience may not be casting the net wide enough, but I'm always taken aback by the lack of a kind of fundamental awareness in most of the people that I know well enough to make that kind of judgement about. An awareness of what they actually are, and what they are capable of (good and bad). I think this lack of consciousness makes itself very well felt during a crisis, and I feel like the kind of lunacy that has been going on very publicly in America over the last year is a testament to this (although, of course, this has been going on all over the world). Social media has undoubtedly played a big role in perpetuating and deepening this unconsciousness. One can only imagine what might happen if war or famine become a serious and threatening concern to the west.

I think this is the main source of my pessimism; I don't think the challenges that we face are insurmountable by any stretch, but I fear that the momentum of our destructive cultural habits is too great, and that we have started the turn too late. My great hope is that things from here on out will get so weird and absurd that all kinds of new avenues will open up, ones that we couldn't even have considered before. A musing of McKenna's about the future of humanity being in shrinking ourselves to the size of honeybees and living inside the earth comes to mind...

Here's the thread.
I shall recommend your article to my friends

Exactly. The general mindset has to change.

I am, like endlesness, quite optimistic about this, because change is entirely possible.

But it's not going to be easy.
Our ways of thinking and looking at the world need to get a lot more sophisticated, because we have manouvred ourselves into a corner, by the kind of society we've been building, the technologies we've created, and the science we've developed, where simple mindedness is bound to fail.

That's the price of having a highly advanced civilization. We need to become a little more advanced ourselves, in how we think and act as well.