Nate Hagens

get status by shows of conspicuous consumption and display, but they're not healthy for us or for our culture.

I mean, there's a lot of ways that you could unpack your summary statement there.

I'm curious about that transition.

I still am a macro guy, but I feel like this is what we need to figure out en masse, starting with individuals, then larger groups, and then society.

Sorry to interrupt you.

I'm going to throw one more geeky, nerdy quote, and then we'll get back to the...

Well, yeah, I mean, our friend probably knew that we would geek out on this stuff.

So you mentioned Alfred North Whitehead.

Here's a quote that a viewer sent me after a recent podcast from Whitehead.

The truth is that the brain is continuous with the body.

And the body is continuous with the rest of the natural world.

Human experience is an act of self-origination, including the whole of nature, but limited to the perspective of the focal region.

High five.

Yeah.

So explain that to me using slightly less obtuse language, because that feels right to me.

So the label, The Great Simplification, has multiple meanings, but the main meaning is it's a play on Joseph Tainer's The Collapse of Complex Civilizations observation that we solve problems by adding complexity to a system, and adding complexity builds more nodes, and it has more energy and material needs.

And at some point you can no longer build complexity at the macro scale because there aren't enough energy and resources.

That's right.

But what you're saying is...

Coincident, hopefully, with a macro great simplification, we would do well to pair it with a micro writ large population scale simplification of our experience and awareness and consciousness of the world.