On the Struggle of Finding Your Place in the World.

Hello dear readers, and welcome to many new faces. Today's post is for those who are struggling to find their place in the world. I see so many wonderful, talented, smart, and kind people struggle with what it is they are doing and want to be doing in their lives and who seem incapable of finding the right place. It is also a personal story.

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My deepest care in the world is to create a regenerative future in which every being - human and non-human can thrive, in which pigeons are respected beings, in which streets are blooming with wild flowers in the spring and house walls covered in edible greens. I want turtles to swim in crystal clear oceans and wolves having the same rights that people have. Lush cities and landscapes. Generosity and equality in diverse co-mingling, multispecies communities.

I see my work as being dedicated to this vision.

How then do I end up writing and researching about ^ekophilosophical health (and recently magic)?

The struggle to fit

There are no easy solutions to the complex, interrelated challenges of the metacrisis. The metacrisis encompasses multiple challenges such as global warming, social inequalities, scarcity of resources, species extinction, ocean acidification, increasing rates of depression, unpredictable technologies, post-truth rivalries, as well as an increasing divide within society. All these crises are characterized by volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity and can be understood as wicked problems.

When I started out in the field of sustainability, I wanted to find out how to deal with this wickedness and felt a similar sense as

green dreamer kamea

describes in her recent newsletter

“I have never really felt like I belonged in the “environmental movement” because I don’t see issues of “ecology” being neatly about “nature” (which is also a colonial framing that by definition binaries and separates humans vs. all else other than humans and what humans create). And I have never really felt like I belonged in the “climate” movement because I do not resonate with reducing it to energy topics or equations of emissions and sequestration.”

I shared similar sentiments regarding the animals rights movement, energy transition, zero-waste practices, or veganism. While recognizing their importance, they also didn’t speak to me and didn’t seem to get to the core of what I cared about. They felt more like pure mechanics, and being a mechanical engineer, I held minimal interest in mechanics. The result was that I struggled for years to find my place within the sustainability movement (a term I use loosely).

When I was asked what I am doing - which is usually one of the first questions that comes to the table when meeting new people - I’d either give a 10-second pitch plainly saying that I work in sustainability. However, when pressed for further details, I felt lost explaining what it is I am doing. I didn’t know myself what I was doing. It felt easier in times when I was working for prestigious institutions or universities - at least people (and I) then had a frame and place to locate my work - it was deeply challenging when I was fully self-employed.

And when I say deeply challenging, I mean existentially unravelling. I often felt lost, misunderstood and incapable of belonging anywhere. What made it worse was my inability to explain even to myself what it was I was doing. I sensed it, but I wasn’t able to articulate it.

Language is a way of worlding. It defines how we think and perceive reality, shaping our understanding of ourselves, others, and the world around us. Through language, we construct meaning, communicate ideas, and navigate our social and cultural landscapes. Things come into existence through words.

Lacking the right words,  I felt like I wasn’t fully able to exist.

Parts and wholes

Looking back now, I see that the reason why I couldn’t find my place in the environmental, climate, or animals rights movement (or similar) was all about parts and the whole.

While our dominant mechanistic paradigm trains us to focus on the parts, it was my inability to do just that.

This incapacity to concentrate on specific parts is often disrespected in our Western, industrialized society. Or at least penalised, for example through unemployment or neglect by others.

Something many of us experience.

We tend to view this lack of focus negatively, despite attempts to reframe it as a positive trait, like being a generalist or a Renaissance person, to encompass our multifaceted interests. However, we live in a society that encourages specialization over diversification.

I read books like “The One Thing” by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan to realign my focus. I tried to narrow down my pursuits to one singular focus. The result was that it was the one thing this week and another one thing the week after. I became a collector of domain names.

I never quite found that I am at the right place.

Place making, I now understand, is not only something we do physically in co-creation with other beings, but it is also something we do within ourselves - finding our place in the world.

And just as physical place making, this requires being in relation with others (human and non-human) and figuring out which piece we are within the whole.

Perceiving the whole

I have talked to many people who find it similarly challenging to find their part in the whole. I also found that those people are gifted with a very good sense of the systematic, relational nature of the world. They intuitively grasp the whole and are overwhelmed by the immensity and in-graspable nature of this hyperobject, that is the meta-crisis. They get lost in how they can come in good relationship with “it”.

Hyperobjects are entities or phenomena that are massively distributed in time and space, exceeding the capacity of human perception and comprehension. They include complex systems such as climate change, global capitalism, nuclear radiation, and ecological degradation. They exist across vast spatial and temporal scales, making them ubiquitous and difficult to localize or pin down to a specific location or time frame. They also involve entangled webs of intra-connected processes, feedback loops, and emergent properties that defy simple reduction or understanding. For most of us, this surpasses our cognitive capacity, making them inherently elusive and resistant to complete comprehension.

Yet, what I am seeing is that many of us  do possess a deep comprehension of hyperobjects but struggle to articulate this understanding due to a lack of appropriate vocabulary and analytical skills. Ian McGillchrist comes to mind. He argues that our society's heavy emphasis on left-brain cognition - which focuses on the parts - and is untrained and often incapable of accessing the right side - which perceives the whole, the Gestalt.

I concur with McGillchrist's observation that Western industrialized societies have developed a fragmentary approach, fixating on dissecting and understanding isolated parts, losing sight of the interconnected whole. Simultaneously, I observe numerous individuals within my circles who predominantly seem to be sensing the whole.

The curse of the whole

For individuals consistently attuned to perceiving the whole, the challenge often extends beyond feeling overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of global issues. There is a deeper challenge, which lies on a different logical level.

At the core of this challenge lies the struggle to be in right relationship. As philosopher and biologist Andreas Weber said

“reality is a relational system.”

We want to be in relation to the whole, yet we don’t know how to, because - as described above - the whole remains unattainable and we are never fully able to make real contact with the meta-crisis.

We long to relate to something, that seems to be unable to relate to.

This deep longing and drive to relate, is what various authors refer to as eros. Eros is our drive to connect.

According to Jeffrey Kripal in his work Superhumanities,

“Eros … is no simple biological instinct or natural force. It is inherently, metaphysically, cosmic and divine.”

Through forging new connections, novelty emerges.

Alfred North Whitehead asserts that the constant emergence of novelty is the very nature of Eros.

The experience of the erotic is the powerful drive for union, to make contact. As Marc Gafni articulates

“One succinct definition of Eros therefore might be: Eros is radical aliveness passionately seeking contact.”

For the American ecopsychologist David Abram, the foundational moment of every relationship to the world, based in an erotic bond, is established by the circumstance that my body is always pulled toward the larger body of the planet. Yet, as previously explored, we are never fully able to make contact with the meta-crisis.

And while Gafni also states that it is our drive to connect that makes us feel radically alive, for many of us, it becomes utterly frustrating and turns into the opposite - a feeling of frustration and for some even depression.

If Eros is our drive to connect to the whole and the world is made of relationships, it is only when we realize that our relationship is part of the grand cacophony of relationships at every level of the cosmos that we find our place.

What it needs then is a reorientation in the relation between the part and the whole.

Finding my part which is the whole

Jonathon Rowson suggests that

“While most developmental progress is about ‘the subject-object move’ in which we abstract from something so as to relate to it better, in the case of meta-themes in planetary problems we seem to need an ‘object-subject move’ as well, such that the disposition to abstract becomes immanent, familiar, and assimilated as second nature. The aim is to know the meta-crisis well enough that it ceases to be ‘meta’ and ceases to be a ‘crisis’, thereby freeing us to get back to living meaningfully and purposively, without getting entangled in strange loops.”…… “In practice that ‘subject to object to subject move’ will manifest in praxis of various kinds and could mean anything from activism, business or politics to contemplation to better parenting and even just friendship — it’s about living an embodied everyday existence, with civilisation as a whole in mind.”

When I took Nora Bateson’ course warm data lab, she showed us a picture of a woman nursing her baby stating that within this act, every aspect of the meta-crisis is comprehended. In her book combining she writes

“In the metaphor of the mother nursing her baby, every single one of the Sustainable Development Goals is there, not broken into a grid, but integrated into one of humankind’s: most life-giving images: intergenerational care and nourishment. The symbolic message of mother and child is biological, emotional, intellectual, ecological, economic, and cultural care. To continue our species, human beings, like all mammals, must ensure that the next generations are fed. The single image of a mother feeding her child includes the mandate for clean air, clean oceans, gender equality, education, and so on. While not everyone is or will be a parent, the future is held by the next generations. For all parents to feed their babies, the people who grow the food and make the clothes must live in a world where they can feed their babies, and their babies must be able to feed their babies for generations to come. Feeding the babies also addresses the crisis in more than a 1st-order direct response—it meets the future needs of humanity in the nth-order. A child who is cared for and loved can keep giving loving care to family, land, and community in many unforeseen ways. The polycrisis, a consequence of the consequences of so many double binds is best met (not matched), with support for and in the home, where all the crises and possibilities come together.”

For me, the challenge has always been to perceive the whole within individual parts, rather than the other way around: a too narrow focus on the parts, which is common in a world dominated by a mechanistic worldview.

Eventually - albeit with ongoing challenges - I found the whole in the part which is philosophy. As Hegel said in the Phenomenology of Spirit: philosophy is the discipline that cares about the whole of reality. To me, this is exactly why I am so drawn to it: it helps me come into better relationship with the whole and with that to find my place as a part.

I am not suggesting that philosophy is the ideal path for everyone. Rather, it matters that we see how the whole shows up in our part.

Philosophy connects me to the deeper layer of the whole, although what I do is of course just grappling with tiny pieces. I don’t believe a “theory of everything” exists - meaning that analytically I will never be able to touch the whole. I am also aware that I will likely never fully experience the whole  - though I think this is exactly what altered states of consciousness can do, but more about that another time -, for now though through living ^ekophilosophically and practicing ^ekophilosophy, I feel like I am moving towards getting in right relation to it.