Maybe This Is What Deep Change Feels Like

It’s a feeling in our bones.

A feeling that the world is coming apart at the seams. That we’re living through an ending.

But there’s something else here too. Something quieter, harder to name. A whisper that maybe, just maybe, there could be some great possibility hidden within this reckoning.

Maybe this is what deep change actually feels like.

The Problem with the Polycrisis

I’ve spent the last two decades, as a journalist, aid worker and campaigner with a front row seat to how people and systems respond - or don’t - to crises. Revolutions, famines, wars, tsunamis, streets alive with protest, halls of historic diplomacy, and the despair of democratic collapse. Through it all, I’ve seen first hand the power that imagination, purpose, story, and community can have in shaping how people respond.

It all starts with how we make sense of what we are living through. There are many different ways of making sense of this moment. But one of the ideas I hear most in progressive circles is that we’re facing a ‘polycrisis’ - a collection of massive, complex, and mutually reinforcing global crises, from climate, ecology, democracy, conflict, technology and mental health.

The term has been splashed across mainstream media, and spawned a catalogue of papers from think tanks and universities. But there’s a problem with this idea. How do we respond to something too big and complex to even understand? What the hell are we supposed to do in a polycrisis?

Most people react in two broad ways. There’s despair (‘We’re doomed’) and denial (‘It’ll be back to normal soon’). Neither help in actually meeting the challenges we’re facing. We’re not going back to normal. We’re stepping into some very profound (and probably painful) changes. But we’re not doomed either, not yet. We haven’t reached the end of our story. Unfashionable as it is, I still believe there is a future worth fighting for.

Finding Thrutopia

And fight for it we must. The shape of our future is being decided by the choices we make now. I, for one, am not willing to leave those choices to the billionaire tech bros planning to live on Mars. I know the future won’t be a utopia. But it doesn’t have to be a dystopia either.

Instead, it could be what philosopher and climate activist Rupert Reade calls a “thrutopia” - a way through the long emergency of our time to a future that is better, despite - or maybe even because of - its brokenness. Reade calls it “visioning the politics and ecology of getting through.” The task of creating thrutopias invites us into the story of the polycrisis as active participants, not helpless spectators.

The Other Side of the End of the World is my way of exploring what this participation might look like, of wondering aloud what the unravelling we’re living through might be inviting us to become.

A world is ending, and a new one is being born. But I don’t claim to know what this future looks like, and I am suspicious of anyone who does. What I do know is that the world we leave to our children will be decided, in part, by what we believe is possible now. So I’m doing my best to make sense of this moment, in all its confusing, heartbreaking fullness, to find the possibilities hidden within it.

What we’ll explore

To do this, I’ll be drawing on some of the following ideas:

• The truth of our interconnection with each other and the Earth

• The need for community to navigate the instability ahead

• How deep stories shape everything from politics to identity

• How a crisis in imagination, dreaming and vision is threatening our future

• How human psychology shapes the world we live in

• The wisdom of myth in a time of trouble

• The power of relational ways of knowing and being

• The new forms of change-making emerging to meet this moment

Think of this as imaginative activism, a reclamation of a world yet to be born. I’ll be sure to signpost to some of the thinkers and writers who have influenced me most along the way.

What to expect

For now, I’ll be posting a couple of times a month. I’ll share a mixture of essays, notes, and reflections. Some of the writing will lean philosophical and reflective, some more strategic or practical. I believe both are necessary in these wild times we’re living through.

While I’ll definitely refer to the important things happening in the world, you won’t be getting hot-takes or breathless punditry on the latest breaking news. As Nigerian ‘post-activist’ writer Bayo Akomalafe says, “Times are urgent. We must slow down.”

So that’s it. I’d love to hear your reactions and ideas for future posts. How are you seeing the world right now? What questions, dreams and fears are you carrying about the future?

Thank you for being part of this journey with me. And if there’s anyone you think would appreciate this project, please share it using the button below.

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See you soon,

Bert