I had forgotten what it’s like.
What it’s like to be woken by the alarm clock in the morning. To shower quickly and rush to the train. To commute for an hour. To do something all day that has no meaning to me. To have lunch break. To check my bank account. To continue working. To commute another hour. To prepare dinner. To scroll on the phone. To sleep. To do this five days in a row, and then have something called a ‘weekend’, where I’m exhausted and empty.
Day after day, week after week, for three months, I’ve watched myself get number and number.
After six years, I had returned to ‘make money’ in the country that I grew up in.
And I had forgotten what it’s like.
The conversations I overhear in the train. All about last weekend’s gossip or logistics or how much money one could make with that education. Most of the time a complete lack of them, strangers sharing space with nothing but dead silence in between them.
The billboards advertising pension funds “feel safe in old age,” and an all inclusive vacation in Costa Rica, and an online part time bachelor in business administration which says, I kid you not: “make your dream come true!” Imagine a life where that is your dream.
The people dressed in designer clothes, twisting their faces into smiles, wearing the same headphones, all busily going to work and busily going to eat and busily going home. On the ‘weekend’, its ‘fun’ time, drinking and partying or just ‘relaxing’ and watching some Netflix. The homeless and drug addicts at the train station — the most real of all.
The black block of flats they built at the lakefront, where people enslave themselves for generations to come to live in that one million euro 120 square meter chicken coop, hearing the flushing toilet and low drama and blaring television of their neighbours below, above, and to either side. The balcony is decked out with fake plants and a grill, and the view of the next block 15 meters across with 10 balconies of people staring back provides ample opportunity for all kinds of gremlin food.
The perfectly manicured, perfectly dead lawn, with a slide for children and a swing so sterile my partner — after having lived in a ‘third world’ country for many years — genuinely starts to cry when she visits and says: “people live like this…” Yes. And these are the people living the dream, mind you.
The dream that people in ‘third world’ countries are aspiring to. The people that have some humanity left, all so focused on selling it for… for what?
My parents either alone or riddled with resentment and actually both. My old friends numb, unable to have any real connection, completely hooked into a linear life plan. The ones that are ‘happy’ are so because they have a job that feeds their gremlin well, or they have lots of sex, or both.
And the smartphone. Everywhere. Everyone. All the time. Sucking out every last bit of presence and life energy. Where does it go? Seriously. Where does it go?
A society of and for gremlin. The ubiquitous gremlin feeding and addiction to cover up the fact that in one of the most ‘developed’ countries in the world, a country that has ranked top 5 in most of the modern culture lists of best whatever, there is such an unfathomable amount of pain brewing in people that I want to scream.
***
I didn’t go back and hold my own culture. I became modern culture again.
I experienced, from the inside, how the thoughtware of modern culture prevents any healing and connection from happening, instead fostering a kind of… hell on earth. I became number and number. Old gremlin addiction patterns came back, covering the void within me.
Addiction comes from a lack of connection.
Most of the behaviour enacted by people living in modern culture is a kind of addiction: Smiling, worrying about money, gossiping, speaking from knowing, trying to understand, constantly thinking, going to ‘work,’ shopping for clothes, going to the gym, learning a new language on duolingo, eating processed foods (bread is processed food), having a glass of wine some evenings, planning, scheduling, ‘catching up’ with friends and spending most time talking about the past.
Most of what people do is a way to avoid being present, to not have to face into the ever present layer of pain that is right there, pressing to come up.
The online calls kept me alive, kept reminding me of what is possible, of what I was living just before this nightmare, until I grew even colder, and my Gremlin, sneaky, so damn sneaky behind the charming smile and sophisticated manner, started to weave itself all over me, around me, within me. He helped me do the sales job, after all. Saying whatever it took, in whatever manner it took, to close. And I let him take over.
I started becoming more ‘generous’ with my sales pitches, even outright lying to people instead of just pressuring them, partly for the money, more so out of sheer boredom and need for a bigger kick, doing wilder and wilder things to keep stocking the fire of gremlin ecstasy.
The justifications “it’s not that much money, it’s for charity after all” (not that I believed in the charity at all) unable to quench the pain of regret coming up over my 90% numbness bar after work, but finally stuffed down with some porn.
It is not a pretty sight, the underworld, my underworld. Women became things to look at and play with. The only source of aliveness when I’m cut off from my heart.
As the weeks went on, my resistance to having online calls with people living next culture grew: “Ahh, fuck that… I don’t need them anymore. Let’s just scroll more. I don’t want to feel. What’s the point of that anyway.”
The bubble of isolation started to become thicker and thicker. Here, my gremlin could reign. Choosing between working one more day or having the three cell? “Whatever, let’s make money.”
I could rationalize it all to myself. And I was abusing myself. I started getting sick often, after having been in good physical health for all my life.
I had forgotten how different this life was. How different to the life that I was living before. The exploration, the healing, transformation, the distinctions, the new culture.
***
I had coaching clients that live this life. I had no idea.
I had no idea about the incredible amount of value that I could generate for them. Only after having gone back and having experienced that life myself can I truly value what I can hold space for. The doors I can open for a person.
How precious it is to simply have a space to feel for somebody living in modern culture.
I often had stories that I wasn’t doing enough. That not enough was happening for my clients. Now, I see that the steps they took were huge and tremendously valuable. I don’t need to have done ten labs to hold space for life changing transformation within others. What seems like small steps for me are huge steps for people living in modern culture. And I underestimated their importance for the bigger picture.
“I used to think that the top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, and climate change. I thought that with 30 years of good science, we could address those problems. But I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed, and apathy and to deal with those we need a cultural and spiritual transformation. And we scientists don’t know how to do that.” –Gus Speth
Holding space for people to feel and make their next step on the path to take more responsibility is a direct and powerful agent of change for the big issues of this time.
It gives people that want to face it a chance to wake up out of their numb half-sleep, to face into the crushing loneliness, the despair and rage and grief, and experience something else than gremlin feeding.
To uncover the longing for something else. For real communion with others, for meaningful action, for a closer contact with nature.
The work I do, the work you most probably are doing if you’re reading this, is valuable not only for me and you, but for something larger.
Even if you don’t directly hold space for EHP’s or Rage Club or whatever, every time you differentiate between an emotion and a feeling you feed the morphogenetic field with that particular information — with possibility, healing and transformation, etching a groove into the universe, so it the same action becomes easier for somebody somewhere else.
Equally so, every time I allow myself to worry about money, I feed separation, scarcity, and isolation. Here and everywhere.
***
In every moment, my action (or inaction) is either regenerative or not. The feedback is clear and immediate. Do I have more energy or less? Am I closer to myself or farther away?
Any action that is not regenerative is ultimately insane. What brings me to hurt myself? To abuse myself? “I have to bring in money for my partner and my son,” is a great justification for me. Which do you have?
What if the state of humanity and its incredibly violent impact on itself and all life on earth comes from within? From thoughtware? What if my thought of “I have to make money” and the experience in all my bodies that comes with it is a micro example within me of the macro circumstances in this world.
And what if the result of the macro circumstances outside are caused by this micro example on the inside. And that by doing what I did, by listening to that thought, I actively co-create modern culture’s madness.
You’ve seen what is about to follow before. I recommend you lower your numbness bar right now and read slowly. Let it really sink in.
Let’s examine some facts:
We are in a mass extinction event — the sixth in Earth’s history. It is human made.
We’re now at 1.6C global temperature warming compared to pre-industrial times. The Paris agreement aims at 1.5–2C by 2100. We’re now at 1.6C.
An additional 1.3 million humans and 0.5 million livestock are added weekly to the global population.
In 2024, fossil fuel energy consumption hit a record high, with coal, oil, and gas all at peak levels.
Direct subsidies for fossil fuels corporations totalled 500 billion in 2023. This means governments fund these companies in one way or another, which really means the taxpayer funds these companies.
If you pay taxes, your taxes directly support companies like Shell and Exxon. The effect of all this is that fossil fuel prices are kept artificially low, encouraging consumption, making shareholders and CEO’s rich. Some countries still spend hundreds of billions per year subsidizing fossil fuels while claiming net-zero commitments.
So far, in 2025, atmospheric carbon dioxide is at a record level.
Global fire-related tree cover loss reached an all-time high, with fires in tropical primary forest up 370% over 2023, fueling rising emissions and biodiversity loss.
Ocean heat content reached a record high, contributing to the largest coral bleaching event ever recorded, affecting 84% of reef area. Coral bleaching used to be a once-a-decade event. Now mass bleaching happens yearly in huge regions. Reefs feed or support 1 billion people.
So far, in 2025, Greenland and Antarctic ice mass are at record lows. The Arctic is warming four times faster than the rest of the planet. The Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets may be passing tipping points, potentially committing the planet to meters of sea-level rise.
Indonesia is literally moving its capital because its current capital city is sinking.
Global warming is accelerating. A dangerous hothouse Earth trajectory may now be more likely due to accelerated warming, self-reinforcing feedbacks, and tipping points. Most models predict a 2.7C increase by 2100. They are not taking an acceleration into account.
50% of the global population already experiences water scarcity. That’s nearly 4 billion people — today.
Thawing permafrost is releasing lots of methane into the atmosphere. Methane is 80 times more potent than CO₂ over a time span of 20 years. The effect of this on global warming does not show up in data yet. It is not accounted for in the models.
The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation is at its weakest state in at least 1,000+ years. This system regulates weather for North America, Europe, West Africa and the Amazon. If it collapses, the consequences are nothing short of disastrous.
About 17% of the Amazon is already gone. Scientists estimate the tipping point is somewhere between 20–25%. If it tips, the forest starts drying out, burning more, losing moisture recycling… then collapses. It would release hundreds of billions of tons of carbon.
Insect populations have dropped by 70% in some regions. Insects hold up the food web — pollination, soil health, birds, everything. In places like Germany and Puerto Rico, long-term monitoring shows 70–80% declines. No insects means no food.
One-third of all food produced is wasted — while the climate warms from producing it. Food waste emits more greenhouse gases than the entire airline industry. We grow food, ship it, cool it, package it… then toss 30–40% of it.
Let’s examine what this might mean for the future:
Even if emissions magically hit zero tomorrow, the ice sheets will keep melting for centuries. Greenland alone stores enough ice to raise sea levels by 7 meters.
Tropical and subtropical areas could become uninhabitable in the near future due to ‘wet bulb events,’ where temperature and humidity rise to a point that even a healthy 20 year old cannot survive in the shade. 2 billion people might be displaced.
Global economy could face 50% loss in GDP between 2070 and 2090 from climate shocks, say actuaries. Note: Not the scientist, but the math people calculating risk for the financial sector say this.
Germany could see summers of up to 50C within 25 years.
At 3C or more of heating by 2050 (which is possible given recent data), there could be more than 4 billion deaths, significant socio-political fragmentation worldwide, failure of states (with resulting rapid, enduring, and significant loss of capital), and extinction events.
***
What if I could live in my own cob house, made of the earth instead of concrete that is poisonous to life while paying rent to a corporation? What if I could spend most time in a round room instead of square one, within nature? What if I could be planting my own food, living in harmony with the seasons, rising with the sun and retiring when it sets? What if I could live in a community of people sharing the same context, living the same values, exploring endless, ecstatic spaces of non-material co-creation and intimacy?
Why isn’t this real? What stops me from making this a reality? What stops you from making it a reality?
What stops you from downsizing your things to a carry on backpack? What stops you from committing to do 2 EHP’s per week? What stops you from holding space for what you care about? What stops you from collaborating with men and women? What stops you from speaking out and taking a stand for the culture you love in everyday life? What stops you from lowering your numbness bar to what you’re gremlin is committed to creating moment to moment in your life? What stops you feeling the pain that 240 species go extinct every single day (extinction is not death, it is no new birth), that you can’t drink straight out of a river, that you’re walking on concrete all day, that human beings all over the world are literally going out to kill one another for figments of imagination such as ‘Israel,’ ‘Muslim,’ and ‘Russia,’ and to the state of enslavement most human beings choose to spend their whole life in, struggling to rise up in a system so that they can have running water or a mortgage or a luxury cruise, while all of that is killing life on earth? What for? What for?!
I’m sure you have a very good reason. Very plausible and reasonable and rational stories. So do I.
After all, I have to take care of myself. I have to survive. My survival and the survival of my family is paramount. I just simply have to do. I have to take that job and participate in that madness. There is no other possibility. Surviving is more important than actually living, and surely more important than all the abstract thoughts I have just listed. And, god forbid, because I could die.
Not like I, and everybody else, is already dying. Not like it’s the only absolute about life, that everybody’s going to die. I can use the survival story as an excuse to create hell on earth, moment to moment, time and time again.
***
On the last day of my job, an hour before finishing, I was sitting on a bench, looking at people hurrying to the train station. Worn out by a full of day of talking to people that didn’t want to be talked to, convincing them to do something they didn’t want to do, some dim realization started to set in, a feeling of weird joy and sadness beneath the numbness.
An elderly woman made eye contact as she passed, slowed down to read what was written on my jacket, and stopped altogether. “Ahh, I like what you do!” she said with a gleam of recognition as she read the name of the charity I was working for. “How is it going getting donations in? Though job, huh?” I kept looking at her, not answering the question I had answered so many times. I was going liquid, the realization that this was it. No more of this. No more pretending, no more being something I’m not. A small smile came to my face.
She looked at me for a while, and her expecting an answer faded to something else. The space shifted. “You know, I think you can do it,” she said emphatically. “I think you young people can do it. You just need to come together.” My heart picked up a beat as she said the last thing. She wasn’t talking about the charity. She wasn’t preaching or trying to motivate me. She was speaking her heart. “Just not with violence. It won’t happen through violence. It’s not even about changing this screwed up system we’re in.”
I felt a deep ache in my heart, and had the thought “oh no.” I desperately stopped all story making machines from turning on, and redoubled my listening, anchoring deep within my body.
“It’s about creating something new. And, the young people I meet, especially, the kids… WOW. They bring something so new. It shows me it’s possible.”
Tears started coming to my eyes.
“As soon as I started to be here,” she gestured at reality, “I became so connected, so fulfilled. I stopped looking for things on the outside, and started living the life I actually want… after 75 years!” she chuckled.
She continued landing distinctions about scarcity and creation, about ECCO and becoming available for it, and she hit me deeply. At one point, she cut off, an emotional fear taking over, and she said: “Look at me, just talking…”
I hesitated for a moment, wanting to speak from my mind, explaining, then letting it come from within: “The better I listen, the better you can talk.”
She was speechless for a moment, and then we both started crying, the heart to heart connection so strong. She said more, and eventually left.
I stood up. The extraordinary space still strong, contrasting this other reality that everybody else was in. The survival reality. And I simply couldn’t partake in it anymore. I quit my job, an hour before the day was over, knowing I’d lose my bonus for the day.
On the way to the train station, I was wondering about what I had just done. Why throw that money away? Why not just pretend for another hour? Was I going insane?
Krishnamurti came to me then:
“It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
I looked at the faces of the people waiting for the evening train.
Perhaps going insane in an insane world is becoming sane?
With a bursting heart, I committed to never work a modern culture job again.
***
All the scientists in all these articles I listed above advocate for the same thing: Renewable energy. That, eating less meat, recycling and taking the bicycle more often, is the solution that modern culture offers.
You ever see these heart-warming articles like: Germany already produces 50% of its electricity from renewables! Good news, right?
While it does produce 50% of its electricity from renewables, it actually gets 20% of its total energy needs from renewables. And of those 20%, 4% is biomass, which means cutting down forests to burn later (after all, they grow back in a 100 hundred years…), leaving around 16% from wind and solar and hydro.
To dismantle this even more at its root, concrete and lithium doesn’t grow on trees. ‘Renewable energy’ isn’t for the earth’s wellbeing. It’s for post-industrial civilization’s wellbeing. If you’d like to disillusion yourself about the scam of ‘renewables’ and their incredibly damaging effects on the environment, I recommend Derrick Jensen’s “Bright Green Lies.”
To give you a short version: it’s consumption in the name of Gaia. More solar panel and electric cars, more consumption, rising stock prices. Shop green. Electric cars to save the environment, never mind the lithium mines. Millions of young people hooked into demonstrating for subsidies to solar companies. Millions are protesting so that corporations make more money.
The whole economic system is built on the following foundation: infinite growth based on the exploitation of finite resources. The modern day financial system is sheer insanity, meaning the backbone of modern culture is based on sheer insanity. Realizing what those numbers in my bank account actually mean sent a shiver down my spine. Exploring the madness of the financial system could easily fill another article this size.
To pull the rug out completely, these are not really new problems. While the industrial and technological revolution have sped up the problem, civilization itself never has been, is not, and can never be ‘sustainable.’ Even middle age peasants and kings were not living a ‘sustainable’ life.
“Topsoil on the North American prairie was 12 feet deep when the farmer-soldiers arrived in the early 1800s. In less than a century, it could only be measured in inches… The ‘Great Plowing’ was done … with only the power of oxen and horses.”
No topsoil = No food. “Sustainable agriculture is an oxymoron.” Having access to fossile fuels and machines and technology simply sped up and empowered humans in the rampage of destructions they were already on.
In the book Ishmael by Daniel Quinn, Ishmael (A telepathic gorilla… the book is worth reading) holds space for his student, a human, to slowly hit bottom about civilization. In one chapter, he makes the following analogy of the Wright brothers testing out a plane:
When they built the first contraption they tried it out by pushing it over a cliff. The pilot had a pedal, not unlike a bicycle, and as soon as they pushed him over the cliff, he started pedalling, flapping the wings of this plane. Lo and behold! He was flying.
He would smile and pedal as he started gliding over the world. He did it! As the flight went on, he noticed he was losing altitude. No problem. He just pedalled harder. After all, he was flying! It was working! As he went on, no matter how hard he pedalled, he kept onlosing altitude, until, eventually, crashing completely.
It wasn’t his fault. The machine itself could never sustain flight. The design could never work, it was structurally predetermined. It was doomed from the beginning, even though it looked, for quite some time, that he was flying.
Patriarchacy, modern culture, civilization is the same. The whole structure of the gameworld, of coming together in cities, practicing agriculture and all the rest, is doomed from the beginning.
Planet earth can never, has never, and will never be able to sustain a civilization, let alone a post-industrial or technological civilization with its humongous energy consumption. The size of the human population could only increase to the point it is right now because we cheated.
In the book Sapiens by Noah Yuval Harari, he describes how the quality of life dramatically decreased for people as they started to shift from matriarchy to patriarchy, from hunting-gathering to agriculture.
Work hours increased, ‘jobs’ started to become a thing, sickness increased, social and mental and emotional health deteriorated, but food supply increased. Thus, population increased. But the average quality of life became absolutely miserable compared to before.
People would quickly forget that it was better before. And even if they wanted to go back, how would they do it? There were lots of people to feed now. So better plant more. A snowball had started rolling down hill.
***
People vote green and buy solar panels to feel good. But nobody wants to give up on… cities, cars, planes, concrete roads, smartphones, refrigerators and central heating. No matter how these are powered, they can never be sustainable. They are luxuries that will eventually come to an end, because they are born out of an inherently dysfunctional system that has no other option but to exhaust and destroy itself.
No politician will ever do what is really necessary to do because that would mean telling people to stop using electricity and go chop wood in the forest to light a fire when they’re cold. They would never get elected. No CEO will ever do something ‘sustainable,’ let alone something truly regenerative, because it would mean no more consumption, which would mean death to the corporation, because it solely exists to sell something and make money.
And no citizen, no consumer, will change something, will realize what is actually happening, because he is comfortably numb. He does not feel. He will not change something until it’s on his doorsteps. The first people are already hit, the Pakistani farmers, but nobody cares about some Pakistani farmer. Uninitiated people don’t care until they are on the chopping block themselves.
Modern culture is crashing. It is pedalling with all it’s got, deluding itself by thinking that wind turbines will save the day. It is about to crash hard. There can be no change from within this system. No political party, no technological breakthrough, no scientist, no corporation, no NGO, no charity, no AI, no protest movement can stop this. Because those things are in and of itself parts of the system, the system that is doomed to crash from it’s very beginning.
***
But this is just a story, right? Just see the big picture. Earth will be fine. Let’s meditate and bliss out, let’s go to the sound healing thing and enjoy, the physical realm in only an illusion anyway, everything is temporary. Why stress out?
And I am judging, right? People are inherently good. I am overly alarmist, cherry picking the articles. There is plenty of evidence to the contrary. Besides, it is not so bad to go work. We are really privileged. We have no reason to complain. Things always were fine. Thing are good today!
All of the bullshit I’m saying is bullshit, yes. And I become alive. It is useful bullshit. I want to do something, create something. Not to lecture the world how to do it right (parent ego), or rescue and save the world and show the stupid people how to do it (gremlin), or build my own ecovillage where I can be safe (child ego).
But because I feel the pain that something else is possible.
I find the spaces I hold to be newly inspired by all that has happened for me in regards to all that I’ve written. An archetypal force is starting to come through me. Because this is really not about me. It is bigger than myself. It is not about me anymore, my partner, or my family. It is about what I feed with every action. At the same time, it is ecstatic and enlivening and nourishing for me to be doing it. Winning happening.
I care deeply about humanity. I want humans to win. Humans have been long in the making by evolution. Lots of trial and error has shaped our structure, which has the capacity to experience intense and delightful ecstasy through adult and archetypal ego states. I don’t want us to get wiped out. I want us to grow up. I want us to play something else.
Love, Valentin
Leave a Reply