Watch With Both Eyes Open: The Beauty and the Horror of Our Moment

**Nate Hagens** (0:00)
Good morning. I took most of the last two weeks to travel to one destination and stay with a friend. And I had an experience there that I decided to share because it might be relevant and helpful to some of you, many of you. My friend's organization is working adjacently to the more-than-human predicament. Many on his team follow the podcast or, I think, at least watch the Frankleys. And as such, I felt completely at home at our dinners and on our hikes. I felt especially at home in that I didn't need to have low EROI conversations, where I had to spend a long on-ramp discussing what I do and why and how the pieces fit together. It was all implied and understood, even though, surprisingly to me, we didn't speak about it, or at least very little, and not at dinner. One night we went out for Chinese food, and it was one of the funniest dinners that I've had in years. I kind of felt like a stand-up comic, and I had forgotten aspects of myself that had not shown up in a long time. It wasn't until I got home that night and reflected on what was different. We didn't talk about climate or AI or energy depletion or the geopolitical cluster we're currently hip-deep in. But we all knew that each of us knew all these things. And it took such an experience for me to realize that usually I'm in a room that's too hot, talking about all the systemic risk and the gory details, or too cold, talking about football or fireworks or this or that politician, without any deep analysis or awareness or nuance or recognition of the times we're alive in. And it struck me that it took such a group of humans who knew all these things, but were being their best human selves regardless, that I could fully be myself, and I had missed that person. I mean, I think we're doing good work here with the podcast, but it is a tiny, well, not a tiny, but a mid-sized sliver of the totality of Nate, because these are not funny topics.
But when I was with this group of 10 or 11 people, these were people who could see and sit with both the beauty of the world and the horror of the world, and show up with joy and meaning and presence, and still get up in the morning and work on things that matter, even given our approaching cultural cul-de-sac. And for me, it was like breathing pure oxygen, which was especially poignant after coming home and being with all the wildfires. And the last few months of the Art of the Hormuz deal madness and all the flip-flopping and the societal aircraft carrier hitting an iceberg with respect to what's going on in Iran and all the things.
Reality depth perception requires both eyes open at the same time. I think some people have the horror eye closed for good reasons. And some people have the beauty eye closed. And in both of those cases, the world kind of goes two-dimensional and gray. These were ten people with both eyes open. And for pretty much a week, my social world had full 3D depth again.
All right. So why did this hit me as hard as it did? Two years ago, after spending six weeks in India with 30 people for a month, I said on one of the subsequent Franklies that I had been naive about community, that I had thought it was about borrowing your neighbor's lawnmower or trading garlic for potatoes, but that the real benefit showed up in my physiology, the oxytocin, the serotonin of close, repetitive daily interaction with other humans and dogs in India's case. Last week was a booster shot of that lesson, which I had gradually over the last two years forgotten. I got a shot of oxytocin I didn't know that I was low on, kind of like discovering a deficiency at the exact moment someone hands you a vitamin.
My mammalian body did some accounting that my analyst brain would not or could not. We are homo sapiens, we are herd animals, and we evolved in small bands where everyone saw and reacted to the same world outside.
And for a couple of decades now, I've been seeing a different world than most of the people in whatever room I happen to be in. And I don't think I had really internalized what that costs me until the cost went away for a week. And despite the connections and relationships around the world from this podcast and my networks, I realized that oftentimes I paradoxically find myself lonely. None of this is to complain about online community. I have a big online community. I'm grateful for every single day, my systems ecology folks who I've been exchanging ideas with for going on 20 years, and the thousands of you who see what I see, write to me who are doing remarkable things where you live.