Among the Ruins: Hard Truths, Necessary Deaths, New Stories

I’ve always sensed something was deeply wrong with the world. I sensed it as an infant when I buried my wet, crying face in my mother’s long dark hair only to find her distant and rejecting. I sensed it as an eight-year-old when I reported bullying to the school bus driver only to have her shame me as a “tattle tale” over the intercom.

I sensed it as a ten-year-old when a distraught Cambodian refugee my age vomited her rice breakfast onto the playground asphalt, only to be mocked by the other kids. I sensed it as a high school junior and veteran cheerleader when my school elected a popular but unqualified sophomore as pep commissioner instead of me.

I’ve sensed the wrongness thousands of times between and beyond these early moments. Born a bright, sensitive girl in 1970, trained to be obedient and generous by my family, religion, and school, I dutifully set about trying to fix the wrongness. I thought it was my responsibility and my privilege.

I also thought it was within my ability. I believed the answer to injustice and pain was to help people see the harm they were causing. I figured once they saw and understood their impact, surely they would stop. That approach worked with me, so it must work for them.

I believed the answer to injustice and pain was to help people see the harm they were causing. I figured once they saw and understood their impact, surely they would stop.

I was wrong. It would take me decades to learn that when it comes to facing hard truths, most people are unwilling, unable — or both. Especially when it comes to facing hard truths about ourselves.

That included me. For decades I was ignorant of my true motivations for trying to fix the world’s wrongness. I didn’t realize that beneath my genuine compassion, I was trying to create enough OK-ness so I could be OK. It wasn’t just about “saving” undocumented refugees, gang members, the unhoused, or descendants of the enslaved. I needed saving, too. I didn’t realize how traumatized and marginalized I was.

Some of that trauma came from being raised by immature, wounded parents. Their emotional fragility taught me that I had a disproportionately high influence on other people. Their narcissism taught me that helping the helpless was my job, and the easiest path to acceptance and belonging. Their insecurity and jealousy taught me that my own perceptions were wrong, my needs irrelevant, and my authenticity unwelcome.

In my crusade to get others to “see”, I didn’t see that I was being trained to believe not only that I could fix the world, but that I should.

Being in a marginalized body amplified this training, since my trauma also came from who I happened to be. As a cishet female I was richly rewarded for fulfilling my assigned gender role as a helper. As a neurodivergent gifted person, I was expected to do more than my share because I was more capable.

Such training let my culture off the hook. It didn’t have to be introspective or make change because those responsibilities were outsourced to the nonprofits, philanthropists, and social justice warriors like me. The Machine could maintain the status quo as long as we kept sweeping up the pieces and gluing things back together. And it lavished praise on us for being dutiful janitors.

The Machine could maintain the status quo as long as we kept sweeping up the pieces and gluing things back together. And it lavished praise on us for being dutiful janitors.

That praise and my faith in delayed gratification kept me going for decades. I didn’t realize I was an unwilling participant in a grand moneymaking racket that used people like me to feel better about itself. I didn’t realize the movies I loved that glorified triumphant underdogs and celebrated the masses rallying behind the righteous truthteller were nothing but smoke and mirrors.

I bought the stories. I believed I was both the problem and the solution to all the difficulties I faced. Like in the movies, I believed that if I just said the right thing at the right time, people would “get it”. I believed if I were good and patient enough, I’d finally earn others’ love. I thought if I were savvy and tenacious enough, my employers and society at large would move in a more sane, humane direction. I thought if I just healed and grew enough, and helped others do the same, we’d all be OK.

I was wrong. I was blind to both hard truths about the world, and kinder stories about myself.

***

I’ve been working on this article for almost three months. That’s not normal. Normal looks like: conceive an idea, begin writing, gestate and clarify the idea through writing, lovingly and intently form the exact words, then give birth by clicking “publish”. All within a few days.

But like everything else lately, “normal” is no more. This piece started as an OMG insight about societal collapse, which turned into a rant about How Hard My Life Is ’Cause I’m Different, then a sermon about What We Should All Do Now, and then a response to the various flavors of bullshit flying off the MAGA fan and out of the mouths of The Techbros™.

Then the L.A. wildfires happened. While I escaped evacuation by three miles, the Eaton Fire claimed not only my hometown of Altadena, but the house where my family lived for 35 years. It was the house where I was conceived and raised until I was 18. A house and two yards, not a single inch of which was not passionately and skillfully designed, crafted and tended by my mother. She died suddenly when she was only four months older than I am now, and while her ashes float somewhere in the Pacific, her life’s work now lies in ashes too, at the foot of the San Gabriels.

She’s completely, utterly gone. One day I’ll be gone, too. And all of “this” [gesturing in every direction] will be, too.

This isn’t breaking news, but somehow it feels new. It feels like I, and many people I know, are just now waking up to the obvious. Some say humans are the only species on Earth that knows we’re going to die, and this awareness is the source of both our brilliance and malevolence. But it’s one thing to know death lurks somewhere over the horizon, while it’s quite another to realize the runway ahead is far shorter than the runway behind.

This is true for societies as well. Even those who long recognized our modern way of life as unsustainable are being caught by surprise as it stops sustaining — grinding to a halt before our eyes. Or, as Dougald Hine brilliantly puts it, as it breaks down and “vast efforts are being made to sustain it … [it’s] like a machine that is running faster and faster [while] pieces are flying off it.” Even when we imagine something will end, it still feels too soon when it does. Even when death is expected, we’re rarely ready.

It’s one thing to know death lurks somewhere over the horizon, while it’s quite another to realize the runway ahead is far shorter than the runway behind. This is true for societies as well.

We’re even less prepared when death is unexpected. Since late 2021, I’ve been dying in slow motion from a series of profound and unexpected losses: my romantic relationship, my beloved sister who was my best friend, and a profession that was my income and identity for three decades. Also, the loss of my previous bodily reality through menopause. The loss of my ability to obtain a traditional job again, despite my best efforts. The loss of my ability (not just willingness) to earn a living doing bullshit work that contributes to harm. The loss of my stepmother to suicide, and in its wake, the loss of remaining illusions about my father and family of origin. And, following the 2024 election, the loss of lingering hopes about my country and fellow Americans.

For me, these deaths stripped away the thin veneer of nonsense coating my life. They were the Biblical scales falling from my eyes. Now I finally see. After decades of wanting others to “get it”, I finally do. No place is safe — because of climate chaos and global economic enmeshment. No savior is coming — not Kamala, any Obama, the Democrats, a spiritual guru, or AI. And the world as it is can’t be fixed — because it was built to do exactly what it’s doing.

As I see more clearly, my stories are changing. But, despite my early awareness in the 1990s about our society’s deep flaws and its likely collapse, for a long time I succumbed to the brainwashing. I bought the narrative that we could change things — that tenacity and generational patience would pay off, and the arc of history would eventually bend “our” way. I clung to these stories, even as evidence mounted to the contrary — until I could no longer ignore the mountain.

I give myself grace for clinging to lies because we’re awash in them. In modernity, reality is largely hidden, distorted, or covered up with fiction. We’re taught money and nation-states are real and necessary. We’re kept in the dark about where our food comes from, whose labor enables our lifestyles, and how those “lifestyles” ravage our planet and other peoples. We’re never shown where our poop and trash end up, and we’re rarely allowed to watch other humans being born or die. We’re encouraged to spend more time interacting with machines than other human bodies — including our own.

Unlike most of human history, modern humans aren’t prepared for adulthood by our families, schools, or institutions. We aren’t taught how our own body works or how to interpret its messages and rhythms. No one instructs us how to hunt or grow food, build a home, birth and properly raise children, care for the sick, or protect ourselves and our community. No one initiates us into discovering who we are (individually or collectively) or learning our proper place in the ecosystem. We aren’t shown how to handle emotions, navigate conflict, relate deeply, discern truth, decide wisely, connect with Mystery, or die well. Most of us spend our lives toiling in unnecessary jobs earning imaginary currency to buy objects that supposedly bestow adulthood, wondering why we feel empty and lonely.

I give myself grace for clinging to lies because we’re awash in them. Clinging to illusions with other people feels safer than waking up alone.

We cling to lies because clinging to illusions with other people feels safer than waking up alone. Even in The Matrix, Neo had a team of mentors and guides. He woke up alone in a pod of goo, but with the support of a squad that had his back and knew what he was going through. Daniel Schmachtenberger rightly observes, “it’s hard to value things you don’t even know exist. And it’s hard to let go of the only hits of pleasure you’ve ever had.”

But now, more of us are taking the red pill and waking up in a pod of goo. More of us are sitting up — bald, naked, and still plugged into The Machine — sputtering and looking around the silo, wide-eyed at the others who just woke up, too.

Facing hard truths and letting go of old stories feels like death because it is. It’s the end of life as we know it. It’s the death of what we thought the world was, and who we thought we were. In our death-phobic modern culture, this is especially frightening because we’ve lost our close relationship with Death — one of the most true, powerful, and universal forces on our planet. Death is the ultimate loss of everything, including control. So, deaths of any size feel like personal failure because we’re (wrongly) taught that having control is not only desirable, but possible.

But, like the machine flying to pieces as it spins faster in its death throes, grasping for control as it slips away not only delays inevitable deaths, but makes the dying process more difficult. Botox, Juvederm, and the surgeon’s knife only buy us a few years — they can’t stop the superior natural forces of time, gravity, or entropy. Denial in short bursts can help us cope, but can be dangerous as a long-term strategy.

The end of life as we know it isn’t necessarily The End of Everything — even when it feels like it. Death is necessary for birth and Life. Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti, one of my favorite thinkers on collapse, cautions that trying to create a new society without “hospicing” the dying one is counterproductive. Not adequately composting the old forms — digesting the accumulated shit — perpetuates their problems. When we try to bypass necessary deaths, we end up building new structures from the old materials, and the old dysfunctions endure.

The end of life as we know it isn’t necessarily The End of Everything — even when it feels like it.

Death therefore requires faith, because we don’t know what will sprout from the compost. Death must happen before life can flourish, and neither process can be rushed. Right now, we need more deaths to break our addiction to the illusions — to wake up to Reality in that pod of goo and make space for new ways of living to emerge. We need new, truer stories.

Shifting our story about something changes our relationship to it and therefore our experience — but it also changes what happens next. I once heard that what truly differentiates homo sapiens from the other intelligent, sentient species on Earth (and, if you believe Yuval Noah Harari as I do, from the other human species) is our ability to tell stories. Perhaps we’d be more aptly named homo narrans, because we not only make meaning through story, but we’re uniquely equipped (for better and worse) to invent fictions that don’t exist outside our minds.

While consciously changing our stories may look like another attempt to control the uncontrollable, I think it can be an empowered way to construct a new compass. We may not be in full control of which way the tides pull us into the future — and this might be a good thing. But how we make meaning and read the signs could make all the difference in how quickly, and how well, we allow necessary deaths — and what births from the ruins.

***

As I’ve faced hard truths and allowed necessary deaths about my life (and life in general) new stories are being borne from the compost and shit: pink, thin-skinned stories needing generous care to fully develop. I’ve been watching other people “die” and birth similar new stories in their own “goo pods”. I’m sharing these stories here in case they’re the compass you need to navigate “the matrix”. Or perhaps you’re debating whether to take that red pill.

I’ve framed the old stories as nervous system stress responses: fight, flight, freeze, and/or appease/fawn. This is to normalize that just as all our body’s responses serve a useful, adaptive purpose, these stories also serve us. However, just like our body’s responses, these stories can also be outdated, ineffective, limited, or inappropriately extreme. These old stories no longer match the moment — even though we’ve told them for millennia during times of crisis (famine, invasion, colonization, the Black Death, etc.).

Savior Story: “The world needs to be saved. I must save it.” (Fight)

This story comes from the belief that everything is going wrong, and the only thing standing between our planet’s destruction, our nation’s collapse, or our personal annihilation is mobilization and intense activity. This is a problem-solving orientation that views anything we deem “wrong” as requiring immediate fixing, without examining the larger context, the root cause, or what “right” or “wrong” mean.

New or alternate stories:

• “The world” will be OK. This planet has survived for 4.5 billion years, and Life for 3.5 billion (including five mass extinctions).
• This planet has myriad intelligent species and webs of Life that possess wisdom about survival far greater than modern human knowledge or intent.
• Humans are in danger. Humans must dramatically alter our way of life if we are to survive as a species.
• Life selected for humans as a group, not as individuals. Our planet wants us, and we play an important role.
• I cannot do all the “saving” work alone. I need community.
• I’ve already done more than my part. It’s time for me to rest and allow others to do their work.
• Doing “the work” means to stop doing things, not always doing or making more.
• I/We must be different, not “do” different.
• When life is healthy and fulfilling, we don’t need “progress”, “change” or to “save the world”. How can I save myself, and co-create a more fulfilling life for me and all Life?

Exceptionalism Story: “We are different/better than all other civilizations/nations/lifeforms.” (Freeze + Fight)

This story invites conformity, blind trust, arrogance, narrow thinking, and hubris. The “we” might be humans, modern humans, our particular nation-state, or our particular class or identity group. This story encourages activity in support of the status quo combined with dissociation from the impacts and larger context. It’s anchored by a belief that our “superior” intelligence, technology, virtue, or anointed-by-God status will save us from the fate of all other nations, civilizations, and species before us.

New or alternate stories:

• We are part of a vast Web of Life which follows certain immutable laws.
• Tens of thousands of years of recorded and oral history teach us about our proper place in the world, and the dangers of human hubris.
• The only thing exceptional about this moment is that for the first time in human history, (1) the crisis is global — there’s no place to escape, and (2) humans have the technology to destroy our planetary ecosystem.
• “Our” survival may not be in the best interest of other nations, other lifeforms, or this planet. And maybe that’s OK.
• Maybe we’re not the good guys. Maybe we are the bad guys or evil empire. (Maybe justice, democracy, freedom, etc. aren’t the values truly driving our actions — or even the noblest values!)

Fundamentalist Optimism Story: “This is just a phase, everything will be OK.” (Freeze/Fawn)

This story encourages us to ignore the warnings that seers, prophets, and elders have been issuing for thousands of years. It encourages us to have blind faith and “stay the course”, expecting things will all work out well (in our favor) in the end. Such belief in inevitable positive outcomes is part and parcel of the unnatural infinite growth stories integral to modernity, toxic capitalism, and megabusiness. These stories thrive across the political spectrum from right-wing religious fundamentalists, to techno-optimists, to New Agers.

New or alternate stories:

• Sometimes it’s darkest before dawn, and sometimes it’s darkest before unending night.
• History, and our bodies, have a lot to teach about danger signs. We can learn to discern how much danger truly exists, and choose appropriate actions.
• It may not be OK — for me, my community, people I care about, my nation, species, or planet. I feel sad/afraid about that.
• Sometimes things don’t turn out the way I want, no matter what I do.
• I/we can be OK (find comfort, meaning, joy) even if things don’t go “our way”.
• Maybe me/us not being OK is in the best interest of history or Web of Life.
• There are actions I can take within my sphere of control and influence that affect the outcome.

Doubling Down Story: “We must WORK HARDER and GET MORE!” (Fight)

This is a more active version of fundamentalist optimism. This story teaches that the source of the problem is “we” weren’t loud, strong, aggressive, fast, committed, or numerous enough. The solution, therefore, is to “stay the course” with even more effort, energy, and speed, or accumulate more of something. Politically, Tom Atlee sums it up well as “people holding tighter to familiar touchstones — for example, those on the activist Left holding on to liberating and empowering demographic diversity and mass protest while those on the traditionalist Right holding tighter to patriarchal authority and binary gender categories.”

This story can be high activation to stave off “freeze”. It encourages feverish activity to avoid feeling difficult emotions or seeing hard truths.

New or alternate stories:

• I’m tired. I need to lay down for a while.
• That approach didn’t seem to work. What are we missing?
• That didn’t seem to work. There’s something important to learn here.
• Spaciousness is needed to feel emotions and think creatively.
• Pausing and letting go of urgency is needed to reflect.
• There is no rush, no need to hurry.
• More years/stuff/money/power don’t make life more fulfilling. Maybe I need less of something, more of something different.

Invested Passivity Story: “Nothing I do makes any difference. I give up.” (Freeze)

This story encourages nihilism, apathy, hedonism, and pessimism. It also encourages conformity and passive bandwagon-jumping, like the current “resistance is futile” attitude towards A.I. Like the other stories, this one isn’t necessarily bad or indicative of moral weakness in those who tell it, but it’s neither useful nor wise long term.

New or alternate stories:

• I make a difference in smaller ways than I hoped or expected.
• I can cultivate an island of sanity in and around me that’s worthwhile.
• My own enjoyment, pleasure, and well-being for their own sake are worthy and valuable.
• I can give up hope for the future while maintaining faith in _____.
• I can control _____ and influence _____.
• I can live a meaningful life in the face of annihilation — which has always been everyone’s ultimate fate.

Chronic Astonishment Story: “This is unprecedented! No one saw this coming!” (Freeze)

This story treats every tragedy as completely unexpected or novel. This isn’t only inaccurate, it desensitizes people because when “breaking news” is trivial and daily, truly important events or dangerous situations don’t register as such. This fosters helplessness, confusion, apathy, and compliance. This story tricks us into thinking that every problem is novel, and therefore requires a new solution (along with money, time, and effort).

New or alternate stories:

• Someone knew or predicted this would happen. We can learn what we missed, so we’re not surprised next time.
• We can identify and listen to people who are good at predicting crises, and heed what they say in the future.
• My ancestors survived crises as bad as this, or worse. This teaches me that I, too, can be creative and resilient.
• Other people lived through similar (or worse) horrors. We can learn from and replicate the ways they successfully faced and navigated those challenges.
• The only thing that’s truly unprecedented is that for the first time in human history, (1) the crisis is global — there’s no place to escape, and (2) humans have the technology to destroy our planetary ecosystem.
• I can care for myself and others, even in crises and during surprises. I’m learning how to get better at that.
• It’s not that we don’t know the answer, but we forgot answers that worked for humans before. We can remember.

Regression Story: “We must return to the way we did things before.” (freeze)

The conservative version of this story is a return to right wing, fascist ideologies that rely on control and dominating forms of power. This often includes a return to a romanticized state of earlier perceived “greatness”, or a return to championing certain groups’ supposed innate (but lost) greatness. This glosses over the reality of how life was for most people in that earlier time, and the high costs of achieving that “greatness”.

In the U.S., the liberal version of this story is a return to the egalitarian ideals and policies of the 1960s and early 1970s, or even earlier human societies. The former ignores that that period was an anomaly in the history of the United States, not a growing trend. The latter is usually two-dimensional and overly romanticized.

New or alternate stories:

• The way we did things before (during modernity) didn’t work for most people.
• The way we did things before (in modernity) were an anomaly made possible by short-term access to cheap, finite fossil fuels.
• Modern humans have forgotten much of what worked well for us for tens of thousands of years. We can learn from how our ancestors survived and thrived.
• We want to return to (our idea of) the past because we aren’t imagining a compelling future.
• We can imagine a compelling, sustainable future that includes the best of what worked in the past.

Humans Suck Story: “We are inherently flawed beings. This planet would be better off without us.” (freeze)

This story might have started with the Christian story of original sin, which primes people for self-hatred, passivity, and deference to “higher” authority. It’s also the story of many liberals and progressives who love the planet and its many lifeforms, and don’t see a way forward to all of us. In both cases, we conflate modern, industrial, agricultural humanity with humanity itself.

New or alternate stories:

• If everything was created by the Divine, then humans are also divine.
• If the Earth is wise and Life deeply intelligent, then humans are a part of that wisdom and intelligence.
• Life selected for humans as a group (not individuals). Our planet wants and created our species.
• Humans aren’t inherently flawed, but a highly social species deeply influenced by our social and physical environment. We’ve been trained by modernity, industrialization, and mass agriculture to lean into many of our worst traits.
• All humans alive today descended from a species that annihilated the other human species. Also, we are all descendants of the colonizers, invaders, and enslavers. We only know the history of the victors, and we mostly carry the DNA of the oppressors. This limits us, but we can learn.
• Humans co-existed and cooperated with other lifeforms for hundreds of thousands of years. We can do so again. (Daniel Schmachtenberger thinks humans may have learned from our mistakes and began exercising mature restraint after we killed off the megafauna.)
• Humans contributed positively to the ecosystem for hundreds of thousands of years. We can do so again. Colonizers did not arrive on virgin land. Most of our planet has been shaped by human ingenious — waterways, forest management, horticulture, and animal husbandry.
• Agriculture, empire, industrialization, and modernity have enabled humans to manifest breathtaking feats our planet might not have seen otherwise: human creativity, beauty, ingenuity, compassion, generosity, technology, bodily expression and physical prowess. Without humans, our planet would have missed out on some really cool stuff.

Binary Story: “Either _____ or _____.” (Freeze + Fight)

This story is a common trauma response and reflects the chronic black-and-white thinking of immature, modern societies. It’s an outgrowth of the foundational error of “separateness” that Vanessa Andreotti correctly identifies as an underpinning of modernity. The separateness/binary story allows modern humans to view other people, and other lifeforms, as objects or “resources”, and allows us to view our actions in a vacuum. This false belief of separateness enables all the other stories.

New or alternate stories:

• Both _____ and _____.
• Death and Life can’t exist without the other.
• Collapse and transformation are happening at the same time.
• Despair and delight can, and do, co-exist. So do pain and joy.

***

In Learning to Love Yourself, Gay Hendricks writes, “I remember looking around me one day as a child and thinking: either these people are crazy or I am. Fortunately for me, I decided it was them.”

When I read those words in my mid-40s, they hit like a thunderbolt. I realized I’d made the opposite choice. Long ago, I figured I was the crazy one.

That’s the power of story to define our struggles and therefore our lives. But after a half-century of telling stories, mine have changed. I see now that most of my problems aren’t my fault, and most of the solutions aren’t within my control. I see the hard truth that the smartest and most talented among us rarely “make it”. The hard truth that most people never get what we need or find what we’re looking for — and not for lack of trying. I see now that the cards we’re dealt have far more to do with how things end up than how we play our hand.

My cards? I happened to have been born gifted, sensitive, and female in a society that neither understands nor values those traits. I happened to be born into a family that was ill-equipped to raise healthy children. I was born into a marketplace that doesn’t value my greatest talents. And underpinning all that — I was born in an empire during an anomalous time in history at the end of an age.

Dougald Hine provided that last insight, which not only sparked this essay, but supplied the final piece of a puzzle I’ve been trying to solve since childhood. Those of us alive right now just happened to be born into a civilization built on false promises about the future. For a few decades, those promises were (sort of) kept for some people, bolstered by cheap oil and the legacy of colonialism. But now they’re being broken to a growing majority, and the shadow side of our make-believe world is increasingly visible through the fading shine and widening cracks.

I no longer believe those promises. I’m ready for death. I’m ready for the old world and false stories to die. I’m ready to kill the dreams of The Matrix: that safety is found in a company job with benefits and a retirement plan; that modern comforts represent the pinnacle of human existence; and that there is a person, place, or product that will meet my every need.

Those dreams are neither good dreams, nor our ancestors’ dreams. When I listen, they remind me that Life isn’t “fair” because it isn’t personal. The Earth cares not for our personal aspirations. She does not prepare ideal soil for every individual seed. We don’t get to choose the time, place, or circumstances of our birth. We don’t choose to be born during the end of an age.

It’s painful to face hard truths. And yet, it’s freeing to release full blame for all my struggles. It’s devastating to grieve all that never was and never will be in my lifetime. It’s enraging to learn how deeply modernity betrayed us all. It’s sobering to learn how things actually work — especially in middle age. It’s humbling to take on the tasks required by an age of crumbling. And it’s comforting to dream of tender shoots sprouting from the ruins.

It’s time for new dreams, grownup dreams. Time for necessary deaths, and new stories.