Unordinary Interventions: How to Plant Seeds for a Better Future | Frankly 154

**Nate Hagens** (0:00)
Greetings.
Last year, last November, I think I laid out some big directional headings and policy prescriptions for solving the meta crisis. Today, I want to try something more practical and perhaps more insightful. I would like to highlight a group of small, specific, and slightly unordinary things that you and I can actually do in our own lives to respond to the more-than-human predicament, aka the meta crisis. So first, a bit of context on the meta crisis itself. The best way I can define the meta crisis is that our biggest challenges, it turns out, are not really separate problems. They are all symptoms of one large complex interconnected system. We've crossed seven of the nine planetary boundaries. The cheap high-quality energy that built all of what surrounds us is depleting. We're papering over the gap with more and more electronic claims, aka debt, and much more to come. Monitored wildlife populations are down something like three quarters just in my lifetime. More and more of us, especially young people, are anxious or lonely or hooked on supernormal stimuli that we carry in our pockets.
Our politics have hardened into these tribal signaling contest where the loudest ape tends to win, and the loudest ape, as we're discovering, often isn't the wisest or the kindest. Artificial intelligence is speeding all of this up, including the risks, and trust in our institutions, in the media, in each other is kind of draining away.
And underneath the whole thing, there's an increasing meaning crisis where a lot of people sense that somewhere down deep, the story we've been living inside just isn't true anymore. And even if it were true, it's turning out to not be so meaningful. So the painful part of laying this all out is that this is not going to be fixed. The meta-crisis is a predicament, not a problem. So it can be softened slightly quite a lot or not at all depending on what we humans do individually and collectively over the next decade or two.
But what I've come to believe based on 20 plus years of this work in complexity science, is that in complex systems, tiny differences in the starting conditions can lead to wildly different outcomes down the road. So in that sense, we're not really choosing the future. It's more like we're seeding it. And I'm increasingly leaning in to that frame. And what each of us does now shifts the initial conditions of the next stretch of time. And that in turn shifts what becomes possible in the stretch after that.
Okay, one more context thing. Most of these what can I do lists of responses and actions blur together protecting yourself and your family from what's coming and actually changing what's coming. But there is an important difference, I think. Some things will primarily just help you personally weather the storm. You grow and store some food and you improve your sleep and you find the others that you can lean on in these times. These things help you cope and even thrive. But they don't much change the storm itself. So everything I'm going to suggest today is aimed at cloud seeding the storm itself. And yes, these suggestions are at the scale of an individual human life.
But if enough of us do these same things, it might be enough to move something out there in the world that solves or ameliorates the meta crisis.
So to be explicit, nothing I offer here is primarily intended as just a coping skill. Every one of these suggestions is a seed of something our entire system actually needs. And if they make your own life better too, that's a nice bonus, but that really isn't the point. Or at least not the core point of this channel and our work. Okay, long winded intro. Here are some unordinary interventions for the meta crisis, in no particular order.
Measure your returns in something other than money. Okay, so try this. When you next invest or spend your time or your energy or your money on something, ask yourself what it actually gives you as a return. And don't denominate your answer only in dollars or in euros if you live in Europe or whatever. Maybe the return was an improvement in your health or a better friendship or a local ecosystem that you helped to recover or an animal that's still out there in today's world because of something you did or just something beautiful that exists now that didn't before. Money creates this nasty recursive feedback loop where more money tends to seek more money and it pulls everything into this monetary vortex until dollars are the only thing left on our scoreboard. We have almost completely financialized the human experience. So take one part of your life back and measure it in wide boundary capital instead.