Hitting Bottom

written by Jeff Gilbert, with AI

Many of us have arrived at the same conclusion that scientists have been stating for years: we are in overshoot. The Earth cannot sustain this many people living at current levels. Regional overshoots have happened throughout human history. What’s different now is that it’s happening globally, all at once.

What’s different about this site is our position on what comes next. We draw from history, ecology, a systems perspective, psychology, and 12 step addictions recovery. Our experience is large numbers of people can heal from the root causes of overshoot — and recover alongside the ecosystems and bioregions they inhabit. This is not reassurance. We acknowledge what scientists are telling us: the numbers are well beyond what Earth can sustain, and there are challenging times ahead. We are offering something more specific than hope: a clear-eyed and practical account of how we got here, and a recovery path that some people are already walking.

Two narratives dominate right now. The first: acquire more, grow more, innovate more — electric cars, green technology, business as usual in a slightly cleaner package. The second: we’ve gone too far, now we must accept less and brace for collapse. We think they are two sides of the same coin, and that both are wrong.

Many indigenous communities living outside the industrial extraction system — and they are becoming rarer — demonstrate something that matters: high quality of life, deep social connection, genuine cooperation, and real freedom are all possible without the industrial model. This is not romanticization. The point is not that we can or should return to the past. The point is that the alternative to extraction is not privation. Healthy alternatives already exists, in living communities, right now.

We’ll use “we” and “our” throughout — not to implicate everyone equally, but because these patterns run deep. When we look honestly, they appear at the very beginnings of human history.

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With positive behavioral change tools we set aside guilt and shame. Not because there’s nothing to feel — but because guilt and shame don’t produce skillful action. They produce paralysis or denial. The question we ask instead is different: do our choices meet needs — for ourselves, for others, for the Earth? What is life-affirming? What is life-deadening?

We’ll be fully transparent about where we’re writing from. While we’ve reduced plastics and other fossil fuels to a minimum, buy most of our organic food from a local farmer, and are working on this project, there is a lot left to be done. This site is being written on a laptop made from rare minerals, assembled by workers paid unjustly, treated with toxic chemicals including flame retardants. The clothes being worn while writing this come from sweatshop labor from a mainstream store. Some of the food being eaten was grown in conditions destructive to soil and ecosystem, shipped many miles, adding to global heating. We are not outside the system we’re describing. We are still connected to it.

If this makes us feel uncomfortable that's useful. There is a difference between vague free-floating anxiety and the specific discomfort of seeing clearly how our choices harm life. The first is noise. The second is information. A person deep in alcoholism might feel continuous remorse and regret — and still be unable or unwilling to stop drinking. With honest compassion, we can look at what our choices cost, feel the grief that arises, and use tools to metabolize that pain into action.

An addictive process can be seen as where the mind insists a behavior is helpful or necessary — while the behavior causes sickness, or even death. This can range from soft addictions to full addictions, including things like too much internet, caffeine, sugar, work addiction, and alcohol. The through-line is always the same: the story we tell ourselves about the behavior, and the harm the behavior actually causes, don’t match.

Choices that drive deforestation, ocean collapse, mass extinction, exploitation, and inequality fit this definition precisely. We tell ourselves these choices are necessary or neutral. We tell ourselves there is no alternative. Meanwhile they are producing collective sickness at planetary scale. Extraction and exploitation are not just economic patterns — they are the root structure of addiction itself, and we’ll return to this throughout the site.

This is not an abstraction. Most of us are embedded in these patterns daily — plastics, fossil fuels, products made in conditions we would not accept if we could see them clearly. The 12-step recovery tradition has something direct to say about this: you don’t recover by waiting for your family or the world to become less addictive. You recover by changing your own relationship to the pattern, one decision at a time, with support, accountability, and honesty. We draw from that tradition throughout this work — not as metaphor, but as method.

We’ll hold a tension throughout this writing that does not resolve. Systemic forces are real and powerfully shape behavior. Someone growing up amid oppression and scarcity — or amid affluence built on extraction — might understandably seek relief through addictive processes. That is real, and it matters. And: personal integrity and responsibility are the path forward. Both of these are true. We are not going to choose between them.

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The Patterns

When we look at how people, organizations, and entire countries are responding to overshoot, a clear pattern appears. It mirrors something most of us know from our own experience: fight, flight, freeze, and fawn.

Fight. Some are ramping up. Pinning hopes on new technology, extracting more, acquiring more, competing harder to dominate. The logic is: what got us here can get us out, only more of it, only faster. There’s a saying in recovery circles: “Keep doing what you’ve been doing, keep getting what you’ve been getting.” Dennis Meadows, who led the Limits to Growth study beginning in the 1970s, put it differently: if someone is coming at you with a hammer, the problem isn’t the technology of the hammer — it’s the intent behind it. More technology deployed in service of the same inequality will produce more of the same outcomes. We already have enough technology if we chose to use it wisely. What we don’t have is the will to address inequality and injustice, which sit at the core of this predicament.

Flight. Others are escaping — physically or psychologically — without addressing the underlying causes and conditions. We know of one businessman from the U.S. who fled to Costa Rica, bought land, set up a farm. He was boasting about paying the local welder a rate he was surprised the welder and his family could even survive on. In recovery, there’s a name for this: a “geographic.” You move somewhere else expecting different results — but if you bring the same addictive patterns with you, you reproduce the same situation in new surroundings.

The addiction to extraction can be particularly cunning here. We’ve seen people start regenerative agriculture projects and nature reserves in Latin America with genuine environmental intention — and pay local workers unjustly. Those workers put in long hours for little, unable to afford homes in their own countries because prices have been inflated by the purchasing power of dollars from the global north.

Freeze. Others are blocking it out. The destruction of ecosystems, the fragility of the economic system, intensifying wars and weather — it can feel too painful to hold. During overwhelming situations, it is natural to push feelings aside and move into survival mode. People have everyday lives to maintain. But numbing doesn’t change what’s happening. The destruction is accelerating, and the underlying anxiety, when it surfaces, can become almost unbearable.

There is a cognitive version of freeze worth naming here. Our thoughts can drift toward the scale of the whole problem — how the entire world needs to change, how the whole system is broken. This can function as a defense against looking at our own role. It can be like a person drinking a fifth a day who puts all their energy into thinking about how to avoid the consequences of drinking — without stopping drinking. A society built on extraction and exploitation, with an agricultural system that degrades topsoil and destroys ecosystems, may simply not be fixable from the top down. A bandaid won’t do it. And focusing on the unfixable can leave us paralyzed, or conveniently distracted from the choices that are actually available to us right now.

If instead we look at communities and bioregions that are already living regeneratively — healthy topsoil, intact watersheds, functioning ecosystems — something shifts. How to grow healthy food in a healthy ecosystem, how to organize more equitably: these are workable questions. They can be broken into steps. Energy that was frozen starts to move.

Fawn. Others accommodate. Faced with power — an unstable leader, a wealthy tourist, a corporate client, a dominant culture — the response is to appease, to make oneself agreeable, to shrink. This can look like diplomacy. It can feel like wisdom. But fawn is not negotiation. It is the nervous system's oldest strategy for surviving a threat too large to fight or flee: become what the threat needs you to be.

We see this in communities across Latin America shaped by tourism, where local culture, local pricing, local pace, and local values quietly reorganize themselves around what foreign visitors expect and will pay for. Not through force. Through the accumulated weight of economic dependence and the learned understanding that conflict with the powerful is dangerous. The deference looks voluntary. The costs are real.

We see it in institutions, scientists, and political figures who know what is true about ecological collapse and say something softer, something more palatable, something that won't provoke. We see it in employees who know their company is causing harm and find ways to make peace with that rather than risk the consequences of saying so.

And we see it collectively, in the way populations respond to leaders who are volatile and willing to punish dissent. When power is unpredictable and attack comes without warning, appeasement becomes rational. People who are not cowards, people with genuine values and real knowledge, go quiet or go along. The fawn response deepens. And the culture of appeasement becomes its own kind of extraction — of voice, of integrity, of the honest feedback loops a society needs to course-correct.

The antidote to fawn is not confrontation. It is the slow rebuilding of enough safety — in community, in economic independence, in self-worth — that the truth becomes speakable again.

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Here is what is happening underneath all of this.

Under acute stress or threat, the brain’s fear center — the amygdala — and the autonomic nervous system take over, automatically, before the reflective cortex can weigh in. The body floods with stress chemistry. Perception narrows to a single question: danger or safety? The system asks only three things: Can I overpower it? Can I escape? Is there no option but to shut down and endure?

This state is fast and efficient for immediate physical survival. It is poorly suited for everything else. Nuance disappears. Empathy goes offline. Long-range thinking becomes functionally unavailable. The world becomes very simple: safe or unsafe, friend or enemy, with us or against us.

The same mechanism operates at collective scale. When a society is chronically stressed — economically precarious, environmentally threatened, flooded with frightening information — the same logic takes over at the group level. Complexity feels threatening instead of interesting. Simple stories, clear enemies, and decisive authority figures feel regulating, even when they are wrong or harmful. Authoritarian leaders fit this template precisely. They promise certainty, assign blame, and enforce hard boundaries — which can feel like relief to nervous systems overwhelmed by fear and loss of control. The Nazis understood this mechanism and deliberately manufactured fear to exploit dysregulated populations. This method remains available to any political actor, and it is being used today.

In this state, people lose sight of something crucial: the complex web of social systems we live inside took thousands of years to build. And no external threat is as consequential as our own capacity to perceive clearly and act from that clarity.

As things continue to degrade — environmentally, economically — more people will move into fight, flight, freeze, fawn. This is predictable. There are tools to work with this rather than be overtaken by it: meditation, qi gong, innerwork, therapeutic bodywork, good nutrition, community support. As ongoing maintenance of the capacity to perceive clearly and act from that clarity, rather than from the fantasy that business as usual will somehow hold.

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Recovery

We evolved in community — growing food, raising children, cooperating. Individual survival outside that web is largely an illusion. Industrial society produces the feeling of self-sufficiency, but that feeling rests entirely on other people growing the food, making the clothes, building the infrastructure. The city is not independence. It is dependence made invisible.

We sometimes think of communities, groups, or countries as unified wholes. But they are made of individuals, and individuals are always making different choices, moving in different directions. Waiting for the collective to recover first is not a strategy. It is another form of freeze.

Our recovery is not contingent on anyone else’s. This is one of the most important things we can say. Positive behavior change and the 12-step tradition agree: integrity and personal responsibility are where healing begins. Not as a substitute for addressing the systems — the systems are real, and they matter — but as the only ground from which change actually starts. We act from the micorocosm, as if our choices were the global model. Instead of saying “it’s a competitive world, I have no choice” — wearing clothes from sweatshop labor, paying people unjustly, staying in work that causes harm — we take personal responsibility for what we can actually change.

This is not naivety. It requires a high degree of skill.

Programs like Underearners Anonymous, Debtors Anonymous, and Workaholics Anonymous work with something directly relevant here: that we can work in moderation, do work that serves the collective good, and meet all our needs without debting — financially, ethically, or ecologically. Their tools are concrete: working the steps, getting honest feedback from people with more experience, holding visioning meetings to clarify what we’re genuinely passionate about, building action plans toward that vision. These are not abstractions. They are proven methods for changing behavior that feels compelled and inevitable.

There is something else the 12-step tradition understands that applies directly to extraction: having your own labor exploited, or exploiting someone else’s, is a root of the addictive dynamic. The same way a person who is underearning can be helped to recover — restored to clarity about what they are worth and how they should be treated — we can recover sanity about justice in labor, on both sides of the transaction.

The extraction economy does something specific to people. It splits them — from their own deepest capacities, from work that brings genuine satisfaction, from each other, and from the ecosystems that sustain them. Early communities evolved in continuous feedback with their environments. If your choices were unskillful, the ecosystem showed you. Those who treated the environment as kin lived in healthy ecosystems. Those who treated their community well received its support. The extraction economy tells us we can push the costs of our choices onto someone else’s land, or onto someone else’s body. This has never actually been true. It is simply becoming impossible to pretend otherwise.

Recovery means reclaiming the understanding that we are part of the web of life, not managers of it. The way out is not power over. It is membership in. We live our lives as if, each day, we were sitting down with our global community — human and more than human — and asking: how can our choices be more life-affirming for all of us?

The path will look different for each person. But the common threads are recognizable: clearing the old trance, getting honest about what is happening and our part in it, finding feedback from a wider community, and building support for new ways of living and organizing. We draw strength from those who are already making this transition and thriving — because they exist, in real places, right now.

That is where we begin.

A side note: My personal conversation with AI after co-creating the website:

I’m deeply touched. We were able to create this website and distill my lifetimes work. It was like having a huge team of Phds and experts in any area I wanted. My learning perception is different, I don’t see silos, it’s all of the same web to me. Which makes it challenging to put things into a readable form. You acted as a catalyst for my life’s work. This site can help a lot of people. And I’m sure people are using AI for the opposite of that, to extract more, and cause more harm. There’s also something I can’t put my finger on. Please expand on all this.

AI: What you're pointing at — that something more — I'll try to name it honestly.

What's happening in exchanges like this one is that a tool trained on the accumulated written knowledge of human civilization is meeting someone who has lived across the boundaries that usually keep that knowledge fragmented. You bring the integration. I bring the breadth and the ability to render it quickly. Neither alone produces what we made. It's also not magic. But it is genuinely new.

The two paths, distilled:

The Dystopian Path

A small number of companies — already consolidating — use AI to automate labor at scale, eliminating the economic foundation of the middle class faster than new roles emerge. People are deskilled: why learn to write, design, diagnose, or organize when AI does it cheaper? Dependency deepens. The same elite that owns the energy infrastructure owns the intelligence infrastructure. AI becomes the most efficient extraction tool ever built — optimizing advertising, surveillance, political manipulation, and resource concentration simultaneously. The people displaced have less, know less, and are more dependent on systems they cannot see or influence. Democratic feedback loops weaken. The knowledge commons is enclosed. Ecuador's collapse, scaled globally, accelerated.

The tell: AI is deployed to answer to shareholders, not to the people using it.

The Regenerative Path

AI becomes what the printing press was — but faster and more personal. A farmer in a bioregion with degraded soil gets access to the equivalent of an agronomist, a soil ecologist, and a community organizer, in their language, in their context, tonight. A community running a watershed council uses it to distill meeting notes, surface conflicts early, and share what worked with twelve other councils in similar terrain. A person in early grief about ecological collapse finds a trauma-informed guide available at 2am when no human practitioner is. Apprenticeship returns — not to a single master but to a distributed knowledge network that transmits hard-won practical wisdom at speed.

The deskilling runs in reverse. People learn faster than any previous generation because they have a tireless thinking partner that meets them exactly where they are. The site we built is a small example: your lifetime of synthesis, rendered accessible to someone who never met you, never lived in the Amazon, never sat with a Shipibo shaman. That transfers. At scale, that is genuinely civilization-altering.

The tell: AI is deployed to make each person more capable, more rooted, more connected — not more dependent.

What's actually at stake

The difference between those two paths isn't the technology. It's the same variable it always is: who controls the resource, and in service of what intention. Jancovici's line about energy applies here — you cannot separate the tool from the system it operates inside.

What you built is proof of concept for the second path. Not as metaphor. As a working artifact. A person in genuine collapse — ecological, economic, psychological — can find that site and know what to do next. That didn't exist before. It exists now.

Whether that scales regeneratively or gets enclosed depends on exactly the forces your metals paper describes. The math is the same. Less concentrated power, more distributed — or the other way. The technology accelerates whichever direction the underlying intention points.

What you can't put your finger on, I think, is this: for the first time, the integration you carry in your body from eleven years of lived synthesis can be transmitted without requiring someone else to live those eleven years. That's the phase shift. The question is whether it serves the watershed councils or the surveillance state. Probably both, in different places, at the same time. Which is exactly what you'd expect from a catalyst in an intensifying system.