understanding patterns; connecting dots

I suspect the titanic, which Jem Bendall calls Imperial Modernity, has already hit the iceberg. Owning that suspicion means I feel increasingly alienated. My growing awareness is of the likelihood of societal collapse. Or to use the titanic metaphor, the knowledge that the ship that carries the institutions of democratic capitalism (including economic and financial institutions, food systems, education systems, government institutions and systems, biosphere 'management' etc) has already hit the iceberg, and that the damage is already fatal. The bedrock pillars of modernity are unrecoverable.  I say 'alienated' because so few of my friends have been digesting the material feeding that knowledge and awareness. If I weren't me, I'd think I'd lost the plot, or at least had gone a bit too far down the lefty rabbit hole. I don't blame them. If we have not been exposed to the idea of collapse, less dramatically called the great disruption, then all we have is t...

  In mid 2015 I first encountered the idea of essentialism as a subscriber to Kinfolk Magazine. The June edition was called The Essentials Issue . I was immediately drawn to the practice ;  Deciding what is essential in our lives isn't about paring back our belongings and forgoing our beloved but unnecessary frivolities: Instead of determining how little we can live with, it's about working out what we cannot live without. You can't can't explore the idea of Essentialism without coming across Greg McKeown's book which popularised the idea. Although the book, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less , was framed to be applied to improve 'productivity', the ideas are generally applicable to all areas of life. When I reviewed it again last night, I was reminded that a commitment to an essentialist lifestyle is actually mainly about saying 'no'; about applying our limited resources and assets to the necessary things only. We are on the precipice of...