How to Act When Every Action Causes Harm
Hello and welcome to wild:philosophy.
If I were to say what these essays are about I’d say they are about one of two things:
how to use, live-with and think-of philosophy as a tool for self-transformation especially to address philosophical or existential health and the metacrisis.
how to live philosophically—what philosophy actually looks like as an art of living, a way of life, a lifestyle, as life-ing.
Today’s essay is about the second one—about life-ing.
And, both of these stem from my own eko-philosophy-ing, which relies heavily on relationality, post-humanism, metamodernism, indigeneity, multispecies approaches, developmental approaches, process philosophy, new materialism, 4E cognition, interbeing, quantum physics and biosemiotics (among others).
I have written a comparatively popular essay before about the challenges of people who perceive the whole—how it might lead to a form of paralysis, how critical complexity might help.
The other day in the PhilosophyGym, while I was explaining how philosophy helps us perceive and gain perspective on the whole and how—especially in times of the metacrisis—we need that perspective of our inherent entanglement with all of it and of the negative consequences our actions often imply, the same question came up: How can we continue to do something, anything, once we become aware that every action has potentially negative consequences and we never fully know what those consequences might be?
I have trouble answering this question verbally—with all its nuances.
Rutger Bregman, in his latest book Moral Ambitions, is encouraging us to take action on basically any major problem that we see and that seems clear how to tackle. His approach is highly pragmatic. He doesn’t ask about changing the underlying philosophies that have caused the problem in the first place. There is something to that simplicity. And there is definitely a need in the world for that. Listening to people like him sometimes makes me question all of my work and wonder whether I should just start gardening.
At the same time, once we perceive the whole and want to take complex relationalities into account, it becomes increasingly difficult to figure out what to do: simple actions like drinking coffee can feel like a major life decision. It’s impossible to unsee the harm that such a seemingly mundane decision can cause.
Today, I want to share a few further perspectives that have helped me to live with this. I am someone who preferably gets lost in the whole and often finds the parts, the details, the everyday, down-to-earth aspect too mundane to deal with (I highly recommend reading this if you can identify with that). At the same time, seeing the harm my actions were and are causing, I was forced (in a good way) to align the wholeness that I mentally perceived with the very physical reality of my life. My first reaction to that was dogmatism. I was deeply inspired by
’s No Impact Man—I found his way of going about life as an experiment to serve the greater good fascinating. It’s stuck with me ever since. So that was my aspiration: to decrease my negative impact significantly (of course, there is so much more to us than our negative impact that comes mostly from consumption, but this is where I started). I experimented with wearing just one dress for a year, then attempted to do that for life, I went vegan, and stopped flying. I also tried to forage all my food for one month and not take any motorized transportation… The list is long. Most of it failed.So this mismatch between how I think I ought to live and how I actually do is big.
Typically, when I face a dissonance that won’t resolve, I see it as an invitation to deconstruct the underlying assumptions causing the conflict. The challenge here, however, was the undeniable physical reality of environmental and social harm. No mental deconstruction felt genuine when confronted with what felt like an ultimate, unshakable material reality.
That in itself - of course - can be deconstructed and is one of the reasons I am drawn to analytic idealism, which basically assumes that consciousness is primary. But I don’t want to go there today.
Mostly, I align with the description that
shares here:“There is a world ‘out there’ - an objective exterior world of processes and events that can (in principle) operate entirely independently of human perception and is mostly the concern of natural science. There is a world ‘in here’ - a subjective interior world of consciousness, thoughts and feelings, full of emotion, meaning, and mattering; the concern of philosophy, religions, and psychology. There is (in most contexts) a shared world ‘between us’ and/or ‘for us’, an inter-subjective and inter-objective life of culture and ideas and institutions that forms a socially constructed reality and patterns of collective psychology; that world is of interest to social scientists and is the domain of politics broadly conceived. The world is comprised of the relationship between these three worlds, and the world changes as that relationship changes.”
So, I want to share a few ideas that suggest changes “in here,” so they might transform your relationship to “out there” and thus, the world changes. It also might help you with the simple question of whether it’s okay to drink coffee.
1. Aesthetic Richness
For Whitehead, a process philosopher, reality is not made of static things but of dynamic, unfolding events he called "actual occasions." You can think of actual occasions as momentary pulses of experience. You are not a fixed self but a continuous succession of these experiential moments. The universe, in his view, is driven by a creative advance into novelty.
From this perspective, the dissonance we have, like whether to drink that coffee, is not a moral problem to be solved, but an aesthetic composition to be created, a picture we can paint.
Each moment, you prehend or feel the data of the universe: the memory of the coffee's taste, the ache of the metacrisis, the pull of habit, the colour of the cup, the morning light. The challenge is to synthesize these disparate feelings into a new actual occasion—the next moment of your experience—that has the greatest possible "intensity of feeling." This intensity is a blend of harmony (how well the parts fit together) and novelty (the introduction of something new).
While the yes/no question seeks a simple, singular, morally correct answer, Whitehead might say this is an aesthetic failure. It tries to suppress data—either the ethical pang or the bodily craving—to achieve a thin, simplistic harmony. The result is a moment of experience that is impoverished and low in intensity.
The goal is therefore to ask: "How can I compose this moment into the richest, most vivid experience possible?"
Drinking the coffee could be an act of great aesthetic richness if you consciously prehend all of its facets at once: the pleasure, the bitterness, the tragic beauty of its global journey, the warmth in your hands, your own complicity. It becomes a complex, multi-textured, and therefore intense, experience.
Not drinking the coffee, at the same time, could be equally rich if it’s a conscious choice to prehend the feeling of refusal, the quiet power of the pause, the sharp clarity of an unmet desire, and the novelty of what you do instead.
For Whitehead, the tragedy would be to make the choice automatically or to suppress part of the experience out of guilt or habit. The "right" action is the one that heightens the creative intensity of your becoming. Whether you drink the coffee is secondary to how fully you experience the act of choosing and its aftermath.
2. Creative Chaos
Order emerges from chaos in dissipative structures. These are open systems that exchange energy and matter with their environment—like a living cell, an ecosystem, or a human consciousness. Our world is a dissipative structure.
Prigogine, a Nobel laureate in chemistry, discovered that when these systems are pushed far from equilibrium by an influx of energy or information, they reach a bifurcation point. At this point, the old structure becomes unstable, chaos and fluctuations increase, and the system must either collapse or make a spontaneous leap to a higher, more complex, and more coherent level of organization. Many say we are at such bifurcation point. Crisis - in its original meaning - meant such a bifurcation point.
Your dissonances and indecisions then are not a personal failing; they are the predictable, scientific signature of a system at a bifurcation point.
When you are trying to use the old, equilibrium-based logic (I drink coffee because I like it) to solve a new, far-from-equilibrium problem. The influx of new information (about the metacrisis) has made the old logic unstable. The anxiety and paralysis we feel is the necessary chaotic state before a leap. Trying to suppress this anxiety to get back to the old, comfortable equilibrium is to resist our own evolution.
The question then becomes: How can you facilitate your own self-reorganization into a more complex and coherent state?
The choice to drink or not drink is your movement down one path of the bifurcation. Neither is inherently correct. The key is to see the choice not as an end, but as the beginning of a new structure. If you drink the coffee while holding the dissonance, you might be reorganizing into a self that is more capable of holding complexity. If you don't drink the coffee and build a new ritual, you are experimenting with a new stable structure for your mornings.
I find this way of thinking about it a way to trust the chaos.
3. Radical Liberation
The mind can be seen as a storehouse of the known—memories, experiences, conditioning, and knowledge passed down by others. The dissonance you feel is a battle within this field of the known: the conditioned desire for coffee is clashing with the conditioned guilt about its entanglements. Seeking an answer, a solution, a better question—like I am sharing here—or a new framework is just another attempt to use thought to solve a problem created by thought.
As Bayo Akomolafe says, “the way we address the problem is the problem.” Maybe using thought to change how we think is a problem in the first place, maybe we can let go of thought altogether.
From that perspective, the question "What should I do?" seems like the ultimate trap. The I who asks is the I of memory and conditioning. Any action born from this I will be a reaction, not a truly free action. It will perpetuate the dissonance.
Radical liberation would be being free of thought.
Can you observe the entire phenomenon without judgment, without choice, without naming? Can you watch the arising of the desire for the coffee—the memory of the taste—as pure sensation, without labeling it good or bad? Can you watch the arising of the guilt and anxiety—the images of planetary harm, the feeling of responsibility—as pure thought-forms, without identifying with them?
In this state of total, silent, choiceless attention, the conflict can be seen as mere movement of thought. When it is seen completely, without resistance, it dissolves. There is no longer a dissonant I trying to make a decision. There is only perception.
From that silence and clarity, an action may or may not occur. You might drink the coffee. You might not. But the action will be whole, effortless, and free of the friction of dissonance. It will not be a decision in the classical sense. It will simply be what happens.
Admittedly, this way of thinking about it can potentially cause quite a lot of harm and just turn into carelessness. It requires trust that the nature of the universe is different from the mere material reality most of us have grown up in. Coming back to analytic idealism: while I love the concept and the possibility of it being true often seems likely to me, the risks also still seem to big for me—the harm I may cause to severe—to leave thought out of it.
4. A Sacred Invitation
Whether to drink coffee could also be seen not as a problem to be solved, but as a sacred invitation. Our obsession with finding solutions and taking the right action—solutionism and moralism—is part of a colonial, modern-capitalist mindset that created the crisis in the first place.
The impulse to resolve dissonances—to make the correct choice and move on—is the trap.
What if instead you stay with the trouble? As Donna Haraway would say.
To see your paralysis not as a bug but as a feature of a system starting to fray.
What is this paralysis trying to teach you? What assumptions about yourself, your agency, and the world is it calling into question?
The paralysis is a teacher. The desire for a clear path forward is the desire to remain in control. But real transformation happens when we have the courage to get lost, when we are in a state of “aporia”—a state of puzzlement, doubt, or impasse in reasoning or understanding. Follow the anxiety. Where does it lead? What other questions does it open up?
Instead of transcending the problem with a pure, ethical choice, what if you come down into the messy entanglement of it all. Feel the soil the coffee grew in, feel the hands that picked it, feel the complex web of desire and guilt in your own body. How can you deepen your intimacy with the complexity?
The choice whether to drink or not drink the coffee than becomes almost meaningless. The real work is to inhabit the space of the question itself, to let the dilemma compost your certainty and make you strange to yourself. The most potent action might be to do nothing but sit with the troubling beauty of the question until it changes you in ways you could not have predicted.
5. Ken Wilber’s Model
One other way to approach such questions is Ken Wilber’s four quadrant model. His Integral Theory attempts to create the most comprehensive map of reality possible. For him, paralysis arises when we are looking at a problem from only one partial perspective, ignoring the others. For example, you might be trapped because you are privileging one or two quadrants, like focusing only on your internal feelings of guilt (Upper-Left quadrant) and the external systems of trade (Lower-Right quadrant), while ignoring your actual, physical health (Upper-Right) and the cultural worldviews that shape your beliefs (Lower-Left). His solution is to touch all the bases by looking at the dilemma through the four quadrants of his model.
Mapping the entire territory of the problem may look something like this:
Upper-Left (I - Intentional): What are my true intentions? What are my values? What level of consciousness am I bringing to this choice? Am I operating from an egocentric need for pleasure, a rational desire for efficiency, or a worldcentric care for the whole?
Upper-Right (It - Behavioral): What is the actual physical reality? What are the effects of caffeine on my body? What is the observable action of buying vs. not buying? What are the calories, the chemicals, the biological facts?
Lower-Left (We - Cultural): What are the shared cultural meanings at play? How has my green or postmodern worldview shaped my feelings of guilt? How does consumer culture tell me that this choice defines my identity?
Lower-Right (Its - Social): What are the social, political, and economic systems that bring this coffee to me? What are the realities of global trade, agriculture, and labour laws?
For Wilber, a healthy choice is one that is integrally informed—one that takes all four quadrants into account. The paralysis is a growing pain, a signal that your consciousness is expanding to include more of reality. You don't negate your desire for a warm, tasty beverage, you include it within a larger, more compassionate, worldcentric framework. The right action is the one that is most aligned with all four realities, chosen from the highest developmental level you can stably access.
And this is just the beginning. There are so many more ways to think about these issues. So whenever you get asked again whether you are stuck in paralysis because the whole is too immense to grasp and act upon, while at the same time, simplistic solutions seem to short sighted, you can forward this essay 🙂. In the meantime, enjoy your coffee. Or not.
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When it comes to challenges and problem solving, I created an effective simple model that only requires asking two questions:
1. How does the natural world solve or address the problem?
2. What would a reasonably smart group of 6th graders do?
It has never failed me…
It’s beautiful—and necessary—to perceive the whole. But wholeness is not paralysis. It’s a sacred weight, not meant to be solved but felt through. The tension between action and consequence isn’t a trap—it’s the evolutionary stretch of a consciousness learning how to care without collapse.
What I’ve witnessed in thousands of journeys through the unconscious is this: we don’t wake up by perfecting every decision. We wake up when we stop using our intellect to outrun the ache of coherence. When we stop needing clean outcomes to feel like good people.
The real work is not to drink the coffee without guilt, or to refuse it in moral clarity. The real work is to see that our longing to do “less harm” is a message from the soul, reminding the ego it was never meant to lead alone. This isn’t an escape from the world. It’s a call to re-enter it differently—heart forward, eyes open, and spirit intact.
So yes, stay with the trouble. But know this too: complexity doesn’t ask for purity. It asks for presence. The signal isn’t found in the answer. It’s found in how fully you inhabit the question.