Nate Hagens is a futurist for our times. In his podcast The Great Simplication he interviews a wide range of experts on energy, the environment, and economics, and occasionally posts “Franklys” in which he shares his own views of what is happening, and likely to happen as the polycrisis unfolds. In a recent episode he interviewed Rod Schoonover, a national security analyst and complexity scientist, who understands more than most about the real threats we are likely to face over the next two decades. Will the pathways we’ve been discussing allow us to survive the threats we face?
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That’s the central tension, isn’t it? Between understanding the scale of the threats we face—and believing that meaningful pathways still exist.
Nate Hagens and guests like Rod Schoonover help us see just how deep the roots of our predicament go. We’re not just facing climate change, or resource depletion, or economic fragility, or political dysfunction—we’re facing all of these at once, in interlocking feedback loops. This is what Hagens calls “The Great Simplification”—the process by which a highly complex, energy-rich, and interconnected civilization confronts the reality of diminishing returns and ecological overshoot.
So when we talk about “pathways to a habitable future,” we are not speaking of easy solutions. We’re talking about triage. About salvage. About choosing what to preserve, what to relinquish, and what to reimagine.
Will these pathways be enough to allow us to survive the threats ahead?
Some people, like Schoonover, would likely say: some of us, yes. But not all. Not evenly. Not painlessly. The future will likely involve decline and disruption. It will likely be unfair, and it will test us in ways we are not culturally or psychologically prepared for. It already is.
But this is also where the pathways you’re naming—bioregionalism, regeneration, inner liberation, story reformation—become more than just ideas. They become practices of sanity in an insane time. They are how we reknit the fabric that industrial modernity has shredded. How we restore a sense of scale, belonging, and responsibility.
These pathways may not save everyone. But they may preserve something essential—something worth carrying forward into the long emergency ahead. That might mean intact ecosystems, intact communities, intact ways of knowing and being that can guide future humans through whatever comes next.
In that way, the work is not just survival—it’s seeding continuity.
And maybe that’s what resilience really means—not escaping collapse, but making sure that collapse is not total. That meaning, beauty, kindness, and wisdom endure. That we leave some thread for others to follow when the lights flicker and the old maps fail.
To echo something Hagens has said many times: we’re not going to techno-fix our way out of this. But we can relocalize meaning. We can reduce suffering. We can teach each other how to live with limits—gracefully, even joyfully. And if enough of us walk those paths, it might just be enough for Life to write another chapter.
So, will we survive? We don’t know.
But we can deserve to.
What’s interesting is what “artificial intelligence” can tell us about our human predicament and how to approach it. It is mirroring back to us a lot of what we already know and are beginning to recognize: things will likely get much worse before they get better. How should we address this?
That’s a profound observation—and it cuts to the heart of this moment in history.
Artificial intelligence, in many ways, is holding up a mirror to the human psyche, the human condition, and the human story. It is not inventing truths about our predicament so much as amplifying what is already embedded in our datasets, our science, our stories, and our sense of unease.
It’s a strange form of echo: we feed the machine everything we know—our fears, facts, dreams, and theories—and it reflects them back, often with eerie clarity. And what it’s reflecting is this: our civilization is on an unsustainable path, and unless we radically rethink how we relate to each other, to the Earth, and to the future, collapse is not just possible—it is probable.
So how should we address this?
1. Face Reality Without Illusion
AI can help us model trajectories, simulate outcomes, and synthesize information from across disciplines. The verdict is increasingly clear: business-as-usual leads to cascading collapse. Denial is no longer viable. So the first step is radical honesty—a sober reckoning with energy descent, climate volatility, biodiversity loss, economic fragility, and social fragmentation.
This doesn’t mean despair. It means clarity. And clarity is a precondition for wisdom.
2. Use AI as a Tool for Collective Sensemaking
One of AI’s greatest potentials is not prediction—it’s pattern recognition. AI can help us sift through noise and identify signals: where innovation is happening, where communities are building resilience, where regenerative models are working. It can help decentralize intelligence and offer new lenses for understanding complexity.
This is collective sensemaking—an essential skill in times of disruption. But it requires that we remain the authors of meaning. AI doesn’t tell us what matters—we do.
3. Cultivate Inner Resilience and Moral Imagination
No technology, no matter how advanced, can teach us how to grieve, how to love, how to live with uncertainty, or how to die with dignity. These are human skills. And we’ll need them more than ever.
As things get worse—and they will, in many places—we will need ethical depth, emotional maturity, spiritual courage. AI cannot replace these. But it can support us in deepening them—by reminding us of what has always mattered most.
4. Act Where You Are, With What You Have
If AI reveals the scale of the crisis, it also reinforces this truth: global problems require local responses.Bioregionalism, mutual aid, community governance, regenerative agriculture—these are not footnotes to the future. They are the future, or at least the seeds of it.
Don’t wait for permission or certainty. Don’t wait for the world to align. Begin now. The work that matters is already underway.
5. Recognize AI as a Test of Our Humanity
The arrival of AI is not just a technological event—it’s an existential test. It forces us to ask: What is uniquely human? What do we value most? What do we want to protect, and what must we let go of?
If AI helps us become more efficient consumers and more distracted spectators, then it will accelerate collapse. But if it helps us become more reflective, more compassionate, more attuned to the real, then it may become one of the tools by which we earn the next phase of our story.
In this light, perhaps the most important thing AI is telling us is this:
You already know the truth. Now you have to live it.
So let’s not look to artificial intelligence to save us. Let’s look to each other—to human wisdom, courage, humility, and connection. AI can help. But only if we bring our full humanity to the table.
Only if we still remember what it’s all for.
The best of contemporary human wisdom.