In this episode, Sarah Wilson explores how to live fully in an uncertain world by asking one of life’s most important questions: Who do you want to be when everything around you feels unstable? Drawing on philosophy, psychology, history, and her new book, I Eat the Stars: How ot Live Fully and Beautifully in a Collapsing World, Sarah shares why facing difficult truths doesn’t have to lead to despair—and how accepting uncertainty can actually bring greater clarity, meaning, and aliveness. Together, she and Eric discuss resilience, hope, community, and what it means to become an “island of sanity” in challenging times.
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Key Takeaways:
- Why uncertainty can become a source of meaning rather than fear.
- The difference between false hope and a deeper, more resilient hope.
- How facing difficult truths can reduce anxiety and inner conflict.
- Why asking “Who do I want to be?” matters more than trying to control the future.
- The power of becoming an “island of sanity” for yourself and others.
- How community, service, and caring for others help us navigate difficult times.
- Why humans are more resilient than we often believe.
- What history and ancient wisdom can teach us about flourishing during periods of upheaval.
Sarah Wilson is a multi-New York Times bestselling author, journalist, social philosopher, international keynote speaker and philanthropist. Sarah leads dynamic, global conversations about modern philosophy, creativity, existential risk, and climate change via her keynote speaking, Wild podcast, and her Substack and social communities. She lives nomadically, but is based between Paris and Sydney, and is a compulsive hiker and adventurer.
Connect with Sarah Wilson: Website | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter
If you enjoyed this conversation with Sarah Wilson, check out these other episodes:
How to Find Peace and Balance in Managing Anxiety with Sarah Wilson
Embracing Uncertainty: The Key to True Intimacy and Connection in a Chaotic World with Prince EA
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Episode Transcript:
Sarah Wilson 00:00:00 Great moments of human flourishing have emerged from dark times. Art movements, poetry, scientific advances. The Axial Age, which was a dark, liminal time that went for several thousand years, produced Buddhism, Judaism. It produced incredible ideas. And so that’s another thing to bear in mind with all of this. We are actually built for difficult times.
Chris Forbes 00:00:33 Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.
Eric Zimmer 00:01:18 There’s a question that I put at the very front of my book. Not only what is it I want to do, but who do I want to be? Sarah Wilson arrives at that same question from a different direction. Looking at a world she believes is coming apart, she asks who she wants to be inside of it, and her answer is what she calls an island of sanity. Someone who has faced the hard facts and chosen to stay steady so the people around her have somewhere to turn. Sarah’s new book is I Eat the Stars How to Live Fully and Beautifully in a Collapsing World. I’m Eric Zimmer, and this is the one you feed. Hi, Sarah. Welcome back to the show.
Sarah Wilson 00:02:01 It is great to be back. I’ve lost all track of time as to how long ago it was that we last spoke.
Eric Zimmer 00:02:08 I have to. It’s been a while.
Sarah Wilson 00:02:11 So a couple of years. A couple of years?
Eric Zimmer 00:02:13 Yeah, at least a couple of years. Yep. We’re going to be discussing your latest book, which is called I Eat the Stars How to Live Fully and Beautifully in a Collapsing World.
Eric Zimmer 00:02:26 But before we get into that, we’ll start like we always do with the parable. And in the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild, and they say, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and they think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in your work.
Sarah Wilson 00:03:11 It means pretty much everything to me, because I have created a life where I feed what I believe is the only thing that we should be doing now, which is working to shift humanity to where it needs to go next. So I guess I see a lot of things through that lens, and a lot of my decisions are made through that lens.
Sarah Wilson 00:03:33 But I’m very mindful at the same time. And this is kind of the balancing point of the book I’ve just published is that while I’m talking about pretty heavy stuff going on at the same time, I’ve actually got to ensure that I live my message, which is to live fully and beautifully, per the subtitle In a Collapsing World. And that’s the message I try to feed with everything that I do and all the choices that I make.
Eric Zimmer 00:03:55 So let’s start with the collapse part of your book, and I want to start with a concept that you discussed, which is that thinking about and discussing collapse is not for everyone. So you could consider this the pre warning to this episode that we may discuss a lot of disturbing different things that are happening in the world, but I want to talk about why this isn’t for everyone.
Sarah Wilson 00:04:25 Yes, because it’s heavy information. I kicked the book off with this idea that we’ve got to let go of, you know, what has been termed opium, this addiction to hope, this idea that everything’s going to turn out, that someone magically is going to come and fix our scenario.
Sarah Wilson 00:04:40 We are at a juncture in history where that is no longer possible. And when we say things are going to turn out, we’re talking really about things going back to the way they were. That somehow if we can green economy our way out of this, you know, we’ve unfortunately gone beyond that. And so that involves facing a pretty radical truth. And it involves putting our big person pants on our big girl, our big boy pants on, and not everybody psychologically ready for that. Some people are caught up in their own trauma. Some people are very caught up in raising children and just trying to get through a day. And I very much believe that we have to arrive at this kind of awakening if we can use that word ourselves when we’re ready, when we’re psychologically, physically and so on, viscerally ready for it. It’s not like the climate crisis. The climate crisis really involved everybody making the big switch to a more green economy all at once. You know, as a climate activist, we’re all trying to get our neighbors to recycle and switch to solar panels and switch out their car for an EV and all of this kind of thing, and we could only make it if we all did it at once.
Sarah Wilson 00:05:54 Where we’re at now, we are no longer in a problem that has a fix. We’re in a predicament that requires an adult response, and we can’t bludgeon people over the head with this messaging. People have got to come to it themselves. And so at the beginning of the book, I framed things with with that very kind of point and say, you know, give the first three chapters a go and see how you feel like I really do want this to be an invitation rather than a draconian, you know, sort of edict, because it’s just not going to work otherwise.
Eric Zimmer 00:06:27 So consider this listener your opportunity to take the off ramp. If you don’t want to talk about exactly what people call the meta crisis, the poly crisis, the anything so off ramps available if you want, I guess you know that you’re an adult. You can turn off a podcast anytime you want. You don’t need my permission, however. Okay. Now we’re going to get into it.
Sarah Wilson 00:06:48 Yeah, because I’m going to frame that.
Sarah Wilson 00:06:50 Just add a little bit to that. For anyone who’s just sort of, you know, wondering if they should take the off ramp. Is that at the beginning of the book, I also, you know, I also say me personally realizing what’s going on, coming to this situation with my eyes fully open has actually been one of the most what’s been the most enlivening thing I’ve ever gone through. And, you know, I’ve just returned to Australia, my home country, where I’ve been promoting my book and friends and family have said to me, you seem happier than you’ve ever been, and it is because I have a full understanding of what’s going on now, and I’m living fully and beautifully as a result of that. So if you’re thinking of getting off the off ramp for this conversation, maybe stay a little longer to hear a bit more about that.
Eric Zimmer 00:07:34 Yeah. How terrible of a marketer am I actually like, okay folks, it’s time to turn on this podcast off. Yep. Okay. Well, I don’t think it’s a surprise to anybody that marketing is maybe not my strongest strength.
Eric Zimmer 00:07:48 Okay. Talk to me about how you parse that. What’s the hope that you’ve felt like you’ve had to let go of? And what’s the hope that remains for you?
Sarah Wilson 00:07:59 Well, as I say, it’s this hope that particularly as a climate activist, we clung to, it’s the hope that we could somehow get through this, that we would make it. You know, and I really had to pull that apart at one point a couple of years ago, as I was embarking on this book, as things were starting to get agitated in my been that’s generally what sets me off on writing a book. I get an itchy sense that something’s not right, and what wasn’t right was this idea. Well, what was the answer to what is it that we actually think turning out is going to look like? Well, if this idea that we can go back to business as usual, which is in a neoliberal global society or post-industrial society that we live in, is consuming and consuming and adhering to this mythology of infinite growth on finite planet.
Sarah Wilson 00:08:48 Its run, its course. It was never meant to be able to run a full course, because it’s actually an insane logic. It never stacked up, and so there’s no going back. And so that’s the hope that I realized I had to let go of, you know, as a climate activist, that’s what we had to promise. That was the carrot that dangled. It was no longer there. We are not going to halve emissions by 2030, nor get to zero emissions by 2050. On current projections, we’ve already gone past that 1.5°C temperature above pre-industrial levels that we were meant to stay under. That sort of, you know, came and went last year and we have surpassed seven of the nine planetary boundaries. And, you know, it’s really not looking good. And then I started to look at more of the systems beyond the climate system. And that’s when I started to realize We’re in a very different realm here. This is not just about climate change. This is complex systems collapse. And so therefore, talking about the hope that we can return to business as usual the way things were is absolutely ridiculous.
Sarah Wilson 00:09:58 So as you say, it’s not that I let go of all hope. I remain hopeful about a whole range of things that humans are capable of going through the reckoning that’s ahead. Yes, I’m absolutely hopeful about that, that we might actually be on to something that we’ve ached for for a very long time. So this letting go of the post-industrial society might actually be something that we’re craving. Yeah, I’m hopeful of that. So there’s a whole range of other things I’m hopeful for. But that hope that dangled, I really needed to get rid of that to be able to go on this journey. So that’s sort of what opens the book.
Eric Zimmer 00:10:32 In the book, you talk about despair, you talk about grief, you talk about a lot of the reactions we might have if we see that indeed all these complex systems are collapsing. But you didn’t talk as much to what I mainly feel, which is scared.
Sarah Wilson 00:10:53 I guess. Interesting. Yeah, you’re probably right there. I almost take it as a given that we’re scared and.
Sarah Wilson 00:11:00 And what are we going to do? You know, like, this is scary stuff. I mean, I think I’d really talk more about, like, I describe it as unholy. You know, I describe it as disgraceful. I describe it as so overwhelming. The biggest thing that humanity has had to go through. It’s almost like being scared, a take as a given. And there’s other stuff that’s going on. The grief, there’s grief that I think we’re all feeling. We’re grieving the fact that, you know, the old normal is dying. We’re grieving the sense of safety and this idea that we were going to keep kind of moving forward into more and more comfort, more and more ease. There’s also a lot of shame. I think we’re feeling very much ashamed that we’ve got ourselves into this predicament with our human greed and selfishness and overloading over nature, and it is absolutely frightening. It is absolutely frightening. I guess I probably cover it off pretty early, don’t I? With that chapter, which is enticingly titled death, you know, and it’s a chapter in which I actually talk, you know, straight to the point.
Sarah Wilson 00:12:07 We actually need to face death. And we’ve got to look at what death we’re we’re looking at. Are we looking at the death of ourselves in this mix? Well, most people listening to a podcast, you know, you’ve got technology to listen to a podcast. I don’t think they’re going to be burnt to a crisp or inundated in a flood, you know, and arrive at their death anytime soon. That’s not what we’re talking about. Are we talking about the imminent death of humanity? So, you know, in the next couple of hundred years, possibly. That’s certainly on the cards, the real death that we’re talking about is the death of the system. And so I get that out of the way straight away and say, let’s be really frank about this. We’re talking about the death of a complex system of complex systems that actually has made up a global civilization, that global civilization is the post-industrial civilization that we find ourselves in that is going down. And as you know, I interviewed over 200 experts, many of whom are modelers in this space.
Sarah Wilson 00:13:06 So their economic modelers, their energy futurists and, you know, population modeling experts. And really, we are, as I say, in a predicament. We’re not in a problem that can be fixed. We’re in a predicament that is happening, and it’s just a matter of the speed at which it happens now. So when we face that and, you know, philosophers and spiritualists throughout the ages have talked about this phenomenon. When we face our death or death in general as a concept, there’s this incredible paradox that comes about. We actually go into a space where we fully feel into our aliveness and we actually live fully, Montagnier wrote. To live fully, we need to face our own death, you know? To die well is to live well. This is something that’s not new to, you know, to our humanity. But we are. So the last couple of generations, all of the spiritualists and philosophers that would teach this kind of thinking, they’ve disappeared. Neoliberalism got rid of the institutions that would guide us through these kinds of realities and into the light on the other side, in the main.
Sarah Wilson 00:14:12 That’s why I wrote this book, because I wanted to draw on some of those wisdoms and philosophies and spiritual ideas from our past that have guided us through these dark and liminal times. So, yes, the truth is dark. However, there’s light that comes on the other side. So yes, it’s scary. However, when we face it, there is so much more on the other side. So that’s what I guide readers into.
Eric Zimmer 00:14:56 When you say that you have given up certain types of hope, what you said has replaced it is truth. What can truth give us? You know my thought when I hear that the phrase that popped into my head is, you know, brutal honesty in certain cases, which sometimes you’re like, well, no, thank you, I don’t need that from you. But in general, you are talking about truth. So let’s move into truth for a moment.
Sarah Wilson 00:15:22 Yeah. Well, one of the things that it does is it actually resolves a cognitive dissonance that I think is actually widespread in our culture.
Sarah Wilson 00:15:32 And, you know, to go back to that hope point when we’re being told that planetary boundaries have been surpassed. You know, things are falling apart. The amok is about to collapse and so on. And then at the end of the article, the article that we read about your newspaper, you know, some climate scientist or expert says, oh, but we can still make it if we all rally together. Now, if we do something about it now and we activate. And this has been going on for years, we’ve been told that, you know, there’s these deadlines and, you know, we’ve only got a few years to really turn things around. And then ten years pass and we’re like, hang on. And I actually think that we’ve been walking around, the majority of us have been walking around with this cognitive dissonance where two ideas are not matching up. Psychologists show that kind of dissonance is incredibly crazy. Making it causes all kinds of anxiety, but it also creates a way of being that it’s really hard to maintain.
Sarah Wilson 00:16:23 And so when we actually do face the truth, when we line up those two dissonant ideas, or we get them in congruence, It creates a cognitive pattern in the head that is called congruent psychological congruence that makes us feel like we belong somewhere. You know, when things make sense, we can actually make far better decisions. We go into a paralysis when they don’t make sense. So that’s a really big part of this. And for ages, you know, climate activists, myself included, we felt that we had to keep giving people hope. Otherwise they would descend into inaction. Well, a bigger cause of inaction is cognitive dissonance. So you clear that up and it’s really interesting. You probably read this in the book. I wrote this book as a serialization on Substack to start with 65,000 subscribers who joined me on the journey. So as I wrote it, I got feedback, and I was able to respond to people’s response to feelings and emotions and cognitive feedback, and I was able to then work out where to head next.
Sarah Wilson 00:17:27 Now, when I started writing about all of this, the stuff we’ve been talking about so far in this chat, the overwhelming response from the readers was one of relief because people were saying, okay, this now makes sense. Now I know what kind of emotional response I can choose. Now I know how to work through the complex feelings that I have in my being. So that is the main benefit of facing the truth. And I then move on to explain a whole range of ideas, from game theory to breaking apart what complex systems actually look like and how they are resolved, and how we can be in them, and how emergence in and out of a problematic complex systems can occur. So when we have full understanding, we can make different types of decisions and we have more agency. So that’s the I think that’s the primary reason. And I think we’re aching for truth because we’re walking around in this weird befuddled fug, you know, we do not know which way to turn and leadership is missing.
Sarah Wilson 00:18:25 You know, of course, what that does is it leads to a collapse in truth, which leads to a collapse in democracy, which leads to an uprising in fascist tendencies, you know, and so on and so forth.
Eric Zimmer 00:18:37 That cognitive dissonance makes a lot of sense, because it’s a fair amount of effort for me to see all the different things that you’re talking about, and we’re going to go into that in a bit more in a minute, and then also keep telling myself it’s going to be okay. It’s going to be okay. Right. There is a cognitive dissonance there now. I believe it’s going to be okay, but in a radically different way than this is going to figure itself out in life. It’s going to go on looking like it looked right. Yeah. Realizing that there is a certain freedom. And I think you talk about denial in the book, and denial is largely always problematic ultimately. Right. Yeah. You know, it’s it’s almost it may be short term useful, but long term it’s powerful, isn’t it?
Sarah Wilson 00:19:25 There’s an evolutionary need for denial.
Sarah Wilson 00:19:27 And I actually cover this off in the book because I think some people are going crazy looking at their friends, their family, their husbands, who are just denying what’s going on. And I point out to people once again, because if you get the understanding, you can then make clearer types of decisions, truer and more important types of decisions. Denial has served an evolutionary purpose. When we are walking around aware that we could die at any moment, which is in fact a truth at any point in time, we are the only species.
Eric Zimmer 00:19:57 Which is.
Sarah Wilson 00:19:58 Exactly.
Eric Zimmer 00:19:58 What it calls it.
Sarah Wilson 00:19:59 Yep, that’s exactly it. And Camus and the existentialists tried to resolve this back in a similar time to our own, a liminal time between sort of an old world dying and new world yet to be born. You know, this is back in the 20s and 30s and 40s. There’s this sort of absurd situation that we find ourselves where we’re the only species aware of the fact that we will die one day. Other animals, when they’re presented with a threat, we’ll have this sense that they could die, but they don’t walk around just ruminating on the fact that, you know it is going to happen.
Sarah Wilson 00:20:30 Inevitably we do. And yet, you know, we then have to find a way to live our lives with that kind of fear hanging over us. And so, to a certain extent, we do need that cognitive process of denial to ensure that we still manage to get around having children and then feeding them. So there is a purpose to it. But when we actually live our entire lives based on this and we don’t move beyond it, yes, it’s problematic because we don’t defend ourselves properly and look at us, we get we fail to defend our planet and our species.
Eric Zimmer 00:21:02 Check in for a moment. Is your jaw tight? Breath shallow? Are your shoulders creeping up? Those little signals are invitations to slow down and listen. Every Wednesday I send weekly bites of wisdom, a short email that turns the big ideas we explore here in each show. Things like mental health, anxiety, relationships, purpose into bite size practices you can use the same day it’s free. It takes about a minute to read and thousands already swear by it.
Eric Zimmer 00:21:35 If you’d like extra fuel for the weekend, you also get a weekend podcast playlist. Join us at one you feed. That’s one you feed. Net newsletter and start receiving your next bite of wisdom. All right. Back to the show. There’s two types of truth you talk about in this chapter that I would love to just touch on real quick. The first is Vaclav Havel s true hope. Tell me about that.
Sarah Wilson 00:22:07 Yeah, he was the president of Czechoslovakia and a dissident in the end. And he wrote about how true hope. Isn’t this the belief that something will work out. It is the belief that something makes sense no matter how it works out. And I think that’s actually a really wonderful way to look at what true hope is. You know, it speaks to all that dissonant stuff and this idea of things stacking up in a congruent way that then enables us to make the decisions we need to make to get on with our lives.
Eric Zimmer 00:22:42 Then there’s Jonathan Lear’s Radical hope, which is something like moving through unbearable loss with no rational justification, only the hunch that we are on to something important about being human.
Sarah Wilson 00:22:56 Yeah, and that’s definitely where I think we’re at as a species. I think when we look around the world and we look at what’s happening with AI and the way that it’s able to race ahead without anyone capable of controlling it and putting boundaries on it and being able to have a moral discussion around it. When we look at what’s happening in the Middle East, when we look at what’s happening with the Trump administration and the insane decisions that get to be made, when we pull back and observe that what’s happening in much of the world now is fascism 2.0. We now live in a world where only 7% of the global population lives. In a democracy, a liberal democracy, I should say. And 72% of the world lives in an authoritarian regime. So how do we get there? And I do think that a lot of us are looking at it going, okay, there is something happening. There is something happening here. And to give away the ending of the book, what I say is happening is we’re going through a homecoming of sorts.
Sarah Wilson 00:24:03 We’ve got so far off piste, we’ve got so far removed from what it really, truly means to be human. And we miss it. We have a heartache for our humanity. And so I feel that one way of looking at collapse, we can call it a simplification. So we’ve gone through this complexity. And I should remind, you know, anyone listening who’s not aware of this sort of history is that every complex society has collapsed. So the Roman Empire, the Mayan empire, the Jin dynasty, every single one of them throughout history has collapsed precisely because of its complexity. So there’s this building up. There’s this complex affine. It becomes more and more sophisticated. It expands. There’s more cities that require more armies, require more horses, which require the farmers to produce more crops to pay the taxes for all of this and it complexities, complexities and complexities. And it gets to a point where all the fat of that civilization is going into keeping the complexity and going, that it only takes a small drought or a small incursion from a neighbor for the whole thing to tip, because there’s nothing left to to attend to the crisis, this relatively minor crisis.
Sarah Wilson 00:25:16 And so that’s that is what happens. And I think we get a sense that we’re at a similar juncture. And one way, as I say, of seeing complex systems collapse, we can see it as a unraveling of all the sort of upward trajectory of complexity. And when it goes back down the other side, what it essentially is a simplification, it’s a going back towards it’s a homecoming. This is the other way that we can view what we’re going through. You know, when I talked about this with the Substack subscriber community, we start up a conversation of all the things about post-industrial society. We will not miss that we will be happy to see collapse, to unravel. And we were talking about things like the LinkedIn version of ourselves, you know, golf courses, unboxing videos, the mad race to work, two jobs to send our kids to private schools. You know, when we live in an era where we can’t even promise that there’s going to be jobs for our kids when they get out of school, because, you know, AI is apparently going to take 50% of entry level jobs in the next year or so.
Sarah Wilson 00:26:21 So this idea of unraveling and simplifying, you know, it really is like a homecoming. And so I think that’s what Jonathan Lear is, is really speaking to that. We’re on to something about being human. That is true hope. You know, and I think it’s palpable. I think a lot of people are feeling that.
Eric Zimmer 00:27:04 So I want to spend just another minute or two on collapse and then move into really the being human part of all this. What that means, what we can do. I’m going to read one thing you wrote. I think that’s going to paint a fairly clear picture of what happens in the late stages of collapsing societies frivolity, aestheticism, hedonism, cynicism, pessimism, narcissism, consumerism, materialism, nihilism, fatalism, fanatics, and other negative behaviors and attitudes suffused the population. Politics is increasingly corrupt, life increasingly unjust. A cabal of insiders accrues wealth and power at the expense of the citizens, fostering a fatal opposition of interest between the haves and have nots. The majority lives for bread and circuses.
Eric Zimmer 00:27:56 They worship celebrities, shirk duties, but insist on entitlements. I mean, there’s an awful lot of that. That sounds very familiar. Only startlingly familiar. Yes.
Sarah Wilson 00:28:09 So I believe that was in the 1920s or 1930s. Glubb, who wrote that he was describing previous civilizations, the sixth stage that happens just before a civilization collapses. And so you can sort of hear the references to the Roman Empire, the bread and the circus is that kind of thing. Yeah, but you’re right. That is us right now, you know, and the stage is beforehand. The stage before is the age of intellect. So this idea of intellectual infighting, tuning and throwing on academic points, that kind of thing, and then it descends into this, this sixth stage, which is the age of decadence. And you can see how an age of decadence can tip over into chaos because people are so distracted. I write a lot about that in the book. Distraction and chaos is a tactic. It’s a tactic that takes us into a space of an age of decadence, where we’re really just not paying attention, and it enables bad faith operators.
Sarah Wilson 00:29:07 So fascists to come in to the vacuum that is being created and to take over Steve Bannon, who’s, you know, an advisor to the Trump administration, he said, flood the zone with shit. That’s how we’re going to do things. So just flood the zone with the bread and circuses, the distraction, the false information, the line, the absurdities. People will be so engrossed in that then also trying to distract themselves from it with frivolity and avoidance techniques that they will not see when things really start to go down and the elites and the privileged come in and sweep up the bounty. So yeah, history repeats itself, and a big part of why I wrote the book is so that I can call to attention what is actually being repeated, so that we can learn the lessons from the past.
Eric Zimmer 00:29:57 You talk about Moloch, you say it’s an invisible force that arises in competitive scenarios that sees us Give away or destroy what we hold dear in exchange for a short term gain that ultimately will leave us all categorically fucked.
Sarah Wilson 00:30:14 Yeah. Yeah, it’s actually comes from a Hebrew god that demanded the sacrifice of a child in exchange for a win on the battlefield, right? Which is a lose lose scenario because presumably you’re fighting wars to save children, to give children an opportunity at life. And yet you’ve got to sacrifice a child to get that. And look, the best way for me to describe how Molech works and extrapolates out to so much of what’s happening in our lives. Imagine you’re at a concert, and the person in the first row stands up because they want to get ahead of you, and then you know the people behind that person in rows two, three, and four need to stand up. Rows five, six, and seven have to do the same. Before you know it, the entire concert hall is standing for the entire concert. Now, if you’re in row 27 and you decide to sit down because you realize this is ridiculous, I want to sit. You know, it’s going to be far more comfortable sitting than you lose.
Sarah Wilson 00:31:09 But if nobody sits down, everybody loses. Now, that is exactly what is happening to you, to contemporary life. So you can take the nuclear arms race. You can take the AI race. You know, you often hear Sam Altman and so on saying, oh, listen, we can’t stop this mad race to create a technology that, in good probability, will kill humanity. We can’t stop because if we stop, well, the Russians and the Chinese will win, you know? So everybody stay stuck into this mad sort of race to the bottom, this zero sum scenario. And another example is beauty filters on social media. Once one person starts using it, everybody feels they’ve got to use it and everybody loses because you know, the beauty expectation shifts. There’s just example after example. And a civilization can fall into these. These kind of molecule death spirals when there’s fragmentation. Because what actually can get you out of a molecule, you know, sort of death spiral is when you can communicate.
Sarah Wilson 00:32:16 Because if somebody stood up at the front of the concert hall and went, hey, everyone, this is not working out, let’s all agree to sit. Right? So cooperation and communication can get around monarch. But we live in a fragmented society where social media and other technologies are separating us further. And there are so many reasons for why we are not able to communicate and collaborate anymore. And so it’s making this malarkey situation even worse. And so that’s a really big part of the complex systems collapse scenario that we’re in. And once we know that one of the things that it does is it enables us to actually take the foot off the blame pedal. It makes us realize that, you know what? No one’s to blame, and yet everyone’s to blame. We’re in a systemic scenario. This is a systems problem. And so a really big part of what I tried to do in the book is to get people aware of this so that we can actually have more compassion for each other, and we can start once again to solve some of these situations.
Sarah Wilson 00:33:17 And she’s better paths through it.
Eric Zimmer 00:33:20 Yeah, I really loved that because I think it is so true in all the ways you said. I mean, I feel it in just in the work that I do. I’m not really interested in short form content that is inflammatory and grabs people’s attention and overstates things, but that’s what tends to win. Yeah. I mean, I guess I’m lucky that I don’t fully buy into it, but I am losing to a certain degree because of that factor. But ultimately, to your point, everybody is losing because I think if we talk to a lot of people who are, I don’t know, I don’t love this word, but who are creators of different sorts? There’s a very collective feeling of wanting to step away from constantly having to document our lives and put down every thought and to do that, but nobody feels they can.
Sarah Wilson 00:34:17 That’s exactly right. And so we’re in this sort of race to the bottom, and it’s crazy making. It’s absolutely crazy making. And we didn’t have as many malarkey scenarios in the past because we did have these sort of social and moral checks and balances that would keep us from falling into those traps, you know? We had community.
Sarah Wilson 00:34:39 We are a very selfish species, and we’re incredible at cooperating. That is essentially what saw us. And I hate this phrase, rise to the top of the food chain. You know, we don’t run particularly fast. We don’t have fangs. We don’t have a sting in our tail. What we do have as a species is an ability to cooperate and communicate and collaborate and create mythologies and sort of, you know, get together and on mass solve our issues. Now that’s, you know, what we’ve needed to ensure that we’ve we’re able to do that is we’ve had structures like churches and the scouts. And, you know, we were smart enough to set up structures that would ensure we didn’t get too selfish and that we did communicate and collaborate and come together as a species. Neoliberalism got rid of all of those things. Neoliberalism told us, no, we don’t need those structures. We don’t need community. You know, there’s no such thing as society. As Thatcher said, we are on our own and we’ve got to go hard out there getting what we need, fighting, competing against our neighbors to get ahead, et cetera, etc. and so that’s a really big part of why we are in this predicament.
Eric Zimmer 00:35:48 So now let’s pivot to how do we live well in this because let’s talk about you in your own life. Your last book was very much a climate activist book. It was getting out there and doing things to try and prevent a sort of collapse. You’ve now kind of gone on to say, well, I don’t know. That’s I don’t know that a lot of that is preventable. So let’s just take something like climate activism. I assume that what you have not done is go, oh, who cares, and move on. So how do you engage if you know that it’s a little bit of a losing battle?
Sarah Wilson 00:36:26 You’re asking, what do I tell climate activists?
Eric Zimmer 00:36:29 What do you tell yourself, given that you realize, like, hey, the climate is past the things we thought it was going to be, these little things that I thought, you know, recycling would do aren’t going to fix it. It’s a problem. I know you’re not the sort of person. It’s like, oh, f it, right.
Sarah Wilson 00:36:44 Well, it’s really interesting. Nora Bateson, who’s a systems thinker, she often gets asked this question and her response to that is it’s almost the wrong question. What we really need to be asking ourselves is, who do I want to be in this moment? That’s where I’ve arrived in all of this. We are in this, you know, and there’s no point trying to sugarcoat or pretend there are solutions that are not there. And so what it actually demands of us is a stepping up into a full fledged adulthood. Toby Ord, who works out at the Existential Risk Center at the University of Cambridge. He’s actually another Australian, and he does a lot of work in sort of the risk that particularly AI presents to humanity. And a lot of work in the probability of complete wipe out by the end of this century. He did some work, and he actually tracked the sort of the average life of a mammalian species like the human species. It should be around about a million years now at 300,000 odd years into this, We track if we live to 80 or so.
Sarah Wilson 00:37:52 We track as a 16 year old in the development of our species and that kind of tracks for me. You know, he sort of makes the point. We are, in fact, behaving like teenagers, where we’ve kind of mucked things up, we’ve made a bit of a mess of things. We galloped ahead of our capacity to keep things in check, and now we’re turning around and we’d like someone to come and solve things for us. We’d like there to be an easy solution. Well, unfortunately we are now stepping into adulthood, right? We’re at that juncture. We’re at that critical sort of flipping point where we are moving into a new stage of our development, and that requires not thinking that things are just going to turn out, not thinking that we can fix things when they can’t. We basically saw the stop sign we failed to break, and now we’ve hit it, right? We’ve hit the stop sign and we’ve got to accept this. I mean, this is the harsh reality. And so there’s a reckoning that we have to go through now in terms of the climate work that I’ve been doing for 2 to 3 decades now.
Sarah Wilson 00:39:02 I’m no less of a climate activist because every degree or percentage of a degree of warming that we can prevent is going to make a difference. It’ll slow down what we’re going through. It’ll probably save a whole bunch of other species and enable us to adjust and morph into the next world. That is going to have to come after this old world collapses. What it also does. And this is so important, and this is what I say all throughout the book, is that in some ways, I mean, nobody knows where this is going to hit anybody who tries to tell you that we’ve got two years before this happens and five years before this happens. Don’t believe them, because the entire point of all of this is the abject uncertainty. It is the discomfort of not knowing. Okay. And so what I say in the book and many times over, is that no matter what happens, the opportunity that presents itself is for us as a species, not to lose our shit because that is the ultimate threat to us.
Sarah Wilson 00:40:02 It’s not, as I say, been burnt to a crisp by a wildfire, although that could happen, and it does depend on where in the world you live as to how collapse will affect you. But the ultimate threat is mass civil unrest. It is humanity turning in on itself. It is humanity eating itself that is the ultimate threat that we make, that we face. So anything that we can do in terms of preventing, you know, super fast climate collapse will do us a favor. It will enable us not to lose our shit so fast. I invite everyone, readers, listeners, to become what Meg Wheatley calls an island of sanity. As we go through this transition, we’re going to need people who have faced the facts, are aware of what is ahead. Have asked themselves of the question, who do I want to be for this moment? And they’ve decided that, well, I’ve got a responsibility to calm my nervous system, to basically be a person that is an island of sanity, so that when others start to wake up to all of this and they start to go, oh my goodness, they’ve got somewhere to go to talk about this kind of thing.
Sarah Wilson 00:41:12 And I don’t know, pull on their big girl or big boy pants. So yeah, I’ve reframed those kinds of questions now. Having said that, once we start to go through this reckoning, there’s an incredible, as I said from the outset, aliveness that comes about. And, you know, I really do feel that it’s because we are doing the thing we feel we’re meant to be doing. We are going back to that, that homecoming, being of service to others, because that’s who we are as a species. For example, AI, the threat of AI taking our jobs and threatening us, you know, as a species, it actually does this incredibly strange thing. What it does is it forces us to confront what it means to be human. Because if AI can take our jobs and it can take our sense of what a relationship is, and it can take all these other things, what is left? What can it not take? What do we have a very deep sense, a visceral sense that it cannot take, that it will never be able to be? And really, the answer to that question is invariably going to be all the things that make us truly human, that we need to be preserving.
Sarah Wilson 00:42:23 So love, entanglement, art, creating art, having children. They are all the things that actually, when we’re confronted with all of these threats, we’re forced to return to. And again, that’s the homecoming. and we’ve been aching for it. So that’s how I get through all of this. That is the silver lining. That is the gift of all of this. But it comes about when we have our reckoning, when we say, who do I want to be in this?
Eric Zimmer 00:42:56 I love that question. It’s actually in the introduction in my book. It’s what I phrase is the two pivotal questions in life. You know, who do I want to be? You know, regardless of what circumstances are happening around me, who’s the person I want to be that that shows up. And I also love that Islands of Sanity idea. It’s a really beautiful phrase for what we need.
Sarah Wilson 00:43:21 Yeah. And another phrase that make Wheatley, I borrow from Meg Wheatley is being a warrior of the human spirit.
Sarah Wilson 00:43:28 And even those phrases, I mean, they get people excited when I use that terminology because I think there’s a sense of recognition. That is where we’re meant to be. We’re not meant to be. I don’t know the LinkedIn version of ourselves. We’re not meant to be scrolling on screens for 5 or 6 hours a day. We’re not meant to be consuming, consuming, consuming to no end. So yeah, I actually do think that this is what this is about. This reckoning is incredible and has the capacity to be exactly what we need to step up into that next realm to move beyond our adolescence.
Eric Zimmer 00:44:06 Yeah, I love that phrase. Also, what was it? A warrior of the human spirit.
Sarah Wilson 00:44:11 That’s right.
Eric Zimmer 00:44:12 Yeah, yeah. I can think back to a couple of other things that are like that. Like Trungpa Rinpoche talking about being a spiritual warrior. You know, the Buddhist bodhisattva manjusri kind of has like a flaming sword, right? It’s cutting through delusion. There’s a fierceness.
Sarah Wilson 00:44:32 Absolutely.
Sarah Wilson 00:44:32 There’s a fierceness. And there’s also, I think when I say that there’s a recognition in all of this. We need to remember that, in fact, we are built for hard times. There’s countless studies that have been shown. One that comes to mind right now is that during the London Blitz, when London was being bombed by the Germans. Winston Churchill thought that everyone was going to lose their mind. So he built these mental institutions on the outskirts of the city, expecting them to be filled. And in fact, the mental institutions that were in the city had to be used for casualties. What actually happened is that even those who were already in the mental institutions, they left and became ambulance drivers, and they stepped up into service. And Britain recorded its happiest and healthiest times ever because people felt a sense of camaraderie. They felt a sense of serving the times and serving their fellow Brits. Great moments of human flourishing have emerged from dark times, art movements, poetry, scientific advances, the Axial Age, which was a dark, liminal time that went for several thousand years produced Buddhism, Judaism.
Sarah Wilson 00:45:42 It produced incredible ideas. And so that’s another thing to bear in mind. With all of this, we are actually built for difficult times. It’s the neoliberal system that tried to tell us that we deserve increased ease and comfort. There’s too many studies to mention that show that it’s when we’re in friction that we become truly creative and curious, and we expand as humans. So that is really worth bearing in mind. Those religious ideas have been capturing that for eons, and they existed to remind us at times like this. Terrifying times like this, that keep going, keep going, keep pushing through this. We are warriors. We are at our best when we’re striving towards something bigger than ourselves. You know, I think of Viktor Frankl, who wrote Man’s Search for meaning, where he documents who survived Auschwitz. And it wasn’t the big macho man with the big muscles who were tough and stoic. It was the man in his case, he was obviously in a men’s encampment. It was the men who had something bigger than themselves to live for.
Sarah Wilson 00:46:52 It was either love, a loved one, or it was some kind of spiritual belief in a God larger than themselves. So yeah, I think often we feel like, oh my goodness, how on earth are we going to cope? This is not right. How is humanity going to be able to go backwards into deterioration, into crumbling? Well, that’s what we’ve done throughout history. These kind of last 70 to 270 years are an anomaly. Humanity hasn’t gone through such growth like this ever before.
Eric Zimmer 00:47:22 The other thing that is a real advantage of humanity, and we often in psychological circles, paint it as not a good thing, which is our ability to habituate to nearly anything. And so this normally. I’ve had a recent guest to the whole thing was like, that’s the cause of unhappiness. You habituate to the good things in your life. You don’t appreciate them. But that ability to habituate as life changes and to find our way into a place where we find a way to be okay, even as circumstances change.
Eric Zimmer 00:47:56 We’re kind of built for this. We’re really good at that.
Sarah Wilson 00:48:00 Yeah. And you know it’s interesting a question that comes up a lot when I’m talking about this. You know I’ve just completed a 26 event tour in Australia and obviously been writing about this in a way where people have been able to interact with me and ask questions as I go. And the question has come up over and over again is, well, should I be having children? You know, this is obviously younger readers. And I decided to look into this, and I found that Margaret Mead was once asked the same question by her sister. Her sister and her husband were deciding whether to have children as as war loomed, as the terror of war loomed and Margaret Mead wrote a letter, which I actually reproduce in the book, and she wrote to her sister and said, well, you know what? People have had children in all kinds of dark times. Children are never promised, you know, to have an easy life. And in fact, if you grew up in the Middle Ages, all you experienced was life getting worse and worse and worse.
Sarah Wilson 00:48:54 She writes this letter of comfort saying, no, this is precisely what we’re meant to do in such times because it is human. This is what we do. And as it turns out, Margaret Mead, sister, had two children, both of whom grew up to be. I think one was a very famous violinist and one was a very successful scientist. And, you know, this is something that we need to get rid of is this idea that, you know, life is meant to get better and better, and that is where we’re going to define our sense of well-being and worth. It’s simply not the case, and we can accustom ourselves to all different types of baselines and create meaning, in fact, often even deeper meaning from a lower baseline.
Eric Zimmer 00:49:41 Before you check out, pick one insight from today and ask, how will I practice this before bedtime? Need help turning ideas into action? My free weekly Bytes of Wisdom email lands every Wednesday with simple practices, reflection, and links to former guests who can guide you even on the tough stuff like anxiety, purpose and habit change.
Eric Zimmer 00:50:03 Feed your good wolf at one you feed. Net newsletter again when you feed your net. We all have to go through this in our own lives. Right there turns a point where physically things are not getting better. They are going to continue to get worse, right? And yet, humans for all of time have found ways to live within that we do know.
Sarah Wilson 00:50:29 And find deeper and deeper meaning. The shittier things get, you know, and to find more and more happiness. The older we get, the more that our body disintegrates. And all the things that we thought, you know, made for a wonderful life. As they start to leave us, we find kind of ourselves digging down deeper into who we really are. And Viktor Frankl said this we are a meaning seeking species. And we’ve lived in a time, an era in history which has taken us away from meaning making. Let’s put us on a hedonistic treadmill.
Eric Zimmer 00:51:05 So I’d love to end with you just reading one of my favorite lines from the book, and I think it’s a beautiful way to sum up everything that we’ve talked about here.
Sarah Wilson 00:51:15 Yeah, okay. You’ve preempted this one for me, so I’ve got it here in front of me. I write if all else fails or you lose focus. Just care. Care all over the place. When the world sees care in other people’s faces, it shifts. I think it’s true.
Eric Zimmer 00:51:34 I do too. What a beautiful place to wrap up. Sarah, thank you so much for coming on the show and good luck surviving the Paris heatwave.
Sarah Wilson 00:51:43 I absolutely appreciate these conversations, Eric. I hope we do it every couple of years.
Eric Zimmer 00:51:48 Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Share it from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity. But we have something even better. And that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app, or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it.
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