Toward Life
Reclaiming aliveness in an increasingly unreal, lifeless, and abstracted world
It’s time for another deep dive, and this one gets a bit meta. While browsing over all the things I’ve shared with you, I came across a key underlying throughline.
I’ve already shared broader, more overarching narratives and themes with you. But this one isn’t really another narrative shift. It’s rather a shift in momentum.
Let me cut to the chase: The underlying direction that humanity seems to be moving toward is one in which we are increasingly moving away from life and into evermore abstractions of it.
recently described it this way:“Our metrics of progress have continuously abstracted: from the tangible bushels of wheat in agricultural economies (with natural physical limits), to industrial-era efficiency metrics (units/hour, machine uptime), to the nebulous productivity measures of knowledge work. Each evolution has moved us further from human-scaled, naturally bounded metrics toward increasingly arbitrary optimizations without clear stopping points.”
In short: Abstraction is the fundamental momentum of the modern industrialized and digitalized world.
And it shows up everywhere:
The demoralized employee chasing meaningless KPIs.
The lonely teenager scrolling endless feeds and building parasocial relationships.
The voter who struggles with financial anxiety, while “the economy” looks healthy on paper.
The patient whose official diagnosis falls short of the deeper pain and issues she feels and struggles with.
The student who can solve complex math equations, but can’t cook a meal for herself.
The newly minted multi-millionaire who has everything he ever wanted and still feels empty.
The hiker decked out in the latest outdoor gear and tech, but disconnected from the land under his feet and the nature around him…
What all of them have in common is this: A drift into abstraction and a quiet, aching hunger for realness, for life.
What I see happening now, particularly with the developments around AI but also with how deeply intertwined our digital and offline worlds have become, is a further acceleration of that drift away from life.
My main concern? The faster the train toward abstraction runs, the harder it becomes to escape it or hit the brakes and change its direction.
When I look at alternative movements, indigenous cultures, and experience people’s lives far away from modernity (as I did two years ago in West Papua), I see a different pattern though. Basically, they’re all “attempting” to go in the opposite direction.
A movement toward life!
Whether it’s rewilding, regeneration, biomimicry, care economies, co-ops, co-living, homesteading, slow tech, nature stewardship, slow travel, or walking cities – the common direction is clear – and it’s not really a move back to the past – but one deeper into life.
So, in this month’s deep dive, we’ll explore just how abstracted our world has become. And, more importantly, how we can build lives, systems, and futures that move us back toward life, and cultivate resonance and aliveness.
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