Radical Simplicity: The Opportunities of a World in Collapse with Sarah Wilson

Sarah Wilson (0:00)

This is actually a period of opportunity. We're straddling an old world that's collapsing and a new world which is yet to be born. And so the opportunity that we have in this moment is to get the better ideas, the more life-generating ideas that we want going into the future. We need them lying around so that as this crisis really comes to a head, they're ready to go. And that is actually something we can all do now. We don't have to wait.

Nate Hagens (0:34)

You're listening to The Great Simplification. I'm Nate Hagens. On this show, we describe how energy, the economy, the environment and human behavior all fit together and what it might mean for our future. By sharing insights from global thinkers, we hope to inform and inspire more humans to play emergent roles in the coming Great Simplification.

Today, I'm joined by philosopher and writer Sarah Wilson to discuss how to live well through the unfolding more than human predicament, and more specifically, how to remain as engaged, pro-social and loving humans even as an uncertain world puts pressure on us to act otherwise. Sarah Wilson is a multi-New York Times bestselling author and philanthropist. She edited Cosmopolitan magazine Australia, founded the global I Quit Sugar movement, and hosted Masterchef Australia. She also wrote the bestselling book First We Make the Beast Beautiful, and her book This One Wild and Precious Life won the US Gold Nautilus Literary Prize. Sarah lives nomadically, leading dynamic global conversations about modern philosophy, creativity, existential risk, and climate change via her Wild podcast as well as her Substack community. Her latest book, I Eat the Stars, How to Live Fully and Beautifully in a Collapsing World takes us through her journey learning about and then learning to live with the unfolding collapse of complex civilization happening around us. She and I discuss just that in today's episode, including her journey through letting go of the hope that if we only act now, we might save the current system we live in and that letting go of that system might not actually be the worst thing humanity could do in this moment. A small caveat on this episode. I unfortunately had quite a bit of a cold while recording this conversation and I was feeling a bit lower in energy and luckily Sarah and I are friends and she brought enough energy and stories to balance our conversation. With that, please welcome Sarah Wilson.

Welcome to The Great Simplification. You have had one of those careers that is kind of hard to define and put in a single box. You edited Cosmopolitan Australia. You founded the global I Quit Sugar movement.

You hosted Masterchef Australia. And I understand you became multiple New York Times bestselling author a bunch of times. And now you've turned your attention to this story, Existential Risks, Societal Collapse, with your new book, I Eat the Stars. So this episode could probably go a million ways.

But I would like to start with a speed round challenge of sorts. For anyone tuning in who isn't familiar with the term or might want a refresher, especially in different words, can you lay out the meta crisis for us in five minutes or less?

Sarah Wilson (4:15)

Nice, easy start to this conversation, Nate. Okay.

So the meta crisis is basically all the crises that we are observing in the world today. So we're talking nuclear crisis, AI singularity, you know, sort of at our doorstep, the climate crisis, food and water scarcity, crises.

We're talking about financial trade route crises, everything that we're kind of being bombarded with as we open up our social media or our newspapers. It's all of those things happening at once. But it's even more than that because it's the crisis of all of these crises, the fact that there's so many crises happening at once. And so it's the crisis of our consciousness or the mindset behind why we have landed in this position with so much going on at once. So, you know, to my mind, and I think you probably share the same thinking, Nate, it's the mindset we're talking about here is the growth mindset, the infinite growth on a finite planet mindset and individualism. But on top of all of that, it is also the fact that we, with our limited consciousness, we can't get on top of it all to be able to get a bird's eye view and be able to fix what's going on. Right. So it's gone beyond that. It's so complex. It's so interconnected. Plus we're in it and implicated in it. And that's what makes the whole thing matter. Does that make sense? That was under five minutes, I think.