What Matters to Me

As a child, I had a book about extinct and endangered animals. I remember reading it with a deep sense of sadness, wondering how anyone could let this happen. Thirty years later, I found myself working on global catastrophic risk. Oceans dying, climate changing, weapons stockpiling. The stakes were larger, but the pattern of accepting destruction was the same.

What struck me wasn't the facts. It was our relationship to them. Many would agree this was the defining challenge of our time. But then I would hear: "I don't know what to do about it, and I've got bills to pay." So the focus went elsewhere.

Whenever this happens, I feel bewilderment. If something is that important, why do we neglect it? If it isn't, why do we say it is? There is something profoundly absurd in that disconnect. Core to my work is a refusal to live with such a huge gap between what matters and what we do, without either trying to bridge it, or at least laugh in its face.

This is what I believe, and try to live by. Our current world operating system is leading to catastrophe. We must transition away from it, rapidly, on every layer: social, emotional, cultural, political, material. And it’s better if we don’t collapse in the process.

For this, many people must do many different things. It could be radical change. But it could also be finding better resonance between what we’re already doing and the broader context. We do need nurses, teachers, traders, farmers, artists – and yes, developers, managers, lawyers, accountants, and a myriad others – while we transition. What we cannot afford is disconnect: business as usual while we pretend nothing is happening, or that someone else will handle it.

So, this is what matters to me. I support realistic utopias that bridge the present and the future, the local and the global, each of them a bet against catastrophe. And, I look for ways to sense how this thing here actually shifts the dial on that thing over there, without pretending it's enough, or giving up because it isn't.

All of my work flows from this: my writing, my practice, the projects I support.

• If this resonates with you: read my writing, or bookmark it for later.

• If you know someone who might resonate with this: send it to them.

• If you're building something that might need this kind of approach: reach out.