Do any of the following describe your experience?
- Do you listen to Nate Hagen’s podcast The Great Simplification and struggle to figure out how to apply the information to your own life?
- Do you sometimes feel hopeless and/or helpless about the state of the world? Are you tired and/or bored of feeling that way?
- Do you find it difficult to relax into living your own life while humanity is facing such daunting challenges as climate destabilization, resource mismanagement, ecosystem destruction and biodiversity loss, inequality, economic insanity, etc?
- Do your own personal projects and traditional sources of joy fade to grey in your heart the more you read about how fucked we are?
If yes to any of the above, Patterns of Deep Response may be for you.
If you want deep insightful analysis of the metacrisis/Our Predicament, The Great Simplification podcast is the place for you, not here.
We will be doing no analysis or discussion of the particulars of Our Predicament here (except insofar as they’re relevant context to specific Patterning).
We only talk about what to do.
And, no, I don’t mean we talk about how to solve it all. This is Patterns of Deep Response, not Patterns of Deep Solutionist-Fantasies.
I mean we talk about how to integrate an understanding of the metacrisis into lifestyle design.
There, I said it: Lifestyle Design. Cringe, I know. Get over it, I’m re-appropriating the term for our own purposes.
Here’s the thing: almost none of the currently available lifestyle options are viable, reasonable, or ethical when considered in the context of Our Predicament.
The lifestyle I was born into doesn’t make sense anymore. Most of the alternative sub- or counter-cultural lifestyles we’re familiar with aren’t viable either. Your lifestyle probably isn’t viable over the long term either.
They’re too consumptive, too fragile, to tightly coupled on industrial infrastructure, too plugged in to the Matrix, to individualistic, not individualistic enough, not metacrisis-informed, too extractive.
We’re all living in a trap.
It’s the trap of an arrangement so insane that it is self-terminating. Our culture runs on the ideology of the cancer cell.
But you know this already. You don’t need me to tell you how hosed the current arrangement is. You’re here to figure out what to do about that fact.
That’s what the Patterns of Deep Response is all about.
Structurally, Patterns of Deep Response is patterned on Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language and on Niklas Luhmann’s zettelkasen method of note taking.
First we break down potential patterns of action, thinking, or behavior down to the scale of a single idea or thought. These are like lego bricks, or atoms.
Then, we use different patterns of composition – methods for arranging patterns together – to create strategies for living with certain desirable attributes (like ruggedness, adaptability, anti-fragility, etc).
We do this at the scale of our own personal lives and households.
By the way – do you have a career or a vocation having to do with addressing one or several of the crises of Our Predicament? That’s neat! Me too. That’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re not talking about the professionalization of disaster management, mitigation, or avoidance.
We’re talking about reasonable things normal people like you and I can do in our daily lives to adapt and respond to the unfolding environment we find ourselves in.
That’s it.
Where to go next
- Here’s an index of the patterns.
- Here’s a guide to pattern composition.
- Here’s the podcast.
- Here’s a list of articles that will serve as a good starting point (most of these are also podcasts, which you can access at the top of the article).
- Here’s the book Deep Response. You can also read or listen to the first chapter here.