There is this process I’ve been going through and I wanted to write it down to put it all in context.

To be honest, my younger self has been here before. I do remember the 2008 period with a sense of frustration. I was landing into these jobs that didn’t pay well and would never allow a good life. Back then in my 20s life was about finding my place really, so the prospect of not finding it was deeply damaging.

Luckily I found a path that worked in the UK. It took time and effort, but eventually it paid off. Now I am somewhere, with a sense of family.

There have been a few broad bumps since I moved to the UK though:

  • In 2014 there was the Crimean peninsula anexation, signifying that war was likely coming to Europe
  • In 2016 we had brexit, byproduct of austerity and pointing towards populism
  • A 2020 pandemic that took a lot of the outdoors and prospects for a long time, and left us with a world that is more sick
  • A 2022 second episode of Russia vs Ukraine (still going)
  • A 2026 US aggression towards Iran that is still going that affects energy

And in reflection, each bump seems not to recover like they did in the past. There is no default to growth that the whole capital system goes into after one of these bumps. Instead it lands into a new degraded normal.

These rare events and lack of spring is part of what resilience describes. It is a useful tool to obserbe complicated systems. For example this paper studies the AMOC behaviour from that “lack of spring” perspective.

There are three ongoing things that worry me deeply and are not an event yet. One is the credit crisis, the excess capital in the form of debt that keeps acummulating in all parts of the financial system and keep making it more unstable over time.

The second one is the material crisis, reaching the limit of easy to access resources and everything getting more expensive over time. Combined with the credit crisis it means that capital will be able to do less and it will be misallocated more frequently because of how quickily value changes.

The last one, the big one, is the climate crisis. I don’t know where to start with that one, but I suspect it will look like damages and crop failures being more frequent every year, compounding the material and the credit crisis

The slump

I think around 2018, or maybe a bit later, my attitude started shifting. Instead of thinking on how to land in a good place for me and my family, I started to think in the longer term. I think becoming a parent was a big factor for this to happen.

All of the bumps I mentioned before increased my sense of fear. There was also the outing of surveillance capitalism as a bad thing, with the US corporations being more aggressive in their surveillance to the point I quit google, facebook and linkedin.

There was also a more subtle thing going on regarding the software industry: The open source movement has been losing ground over time. I speculate that this has to do with the amount of capital spent on it and the growth of cloud computing, shifting the balance towards hybrid licence models and companies favouring “big data” solutions.

Following the trend, LLMs are a continuation of centralisation and capital misallocation away from community software. I have been writing about this more from an energy perspective#llm , but the capital aspect is there too.

So all of these bumps, crisises and trends were and are big clouds that I did not know what to do about. My 20 year old self would have tried moving somewhere else, but I am not 20 and I have a family that can’t move that easily.

Not that it mattered, because all of these crisis are global. So I tried reading on it. I believe free gift was the most helpful book on diagnosing the situation:

[[2025-12-09-free-gifts-review]]

Because it is the ever expansive acummulation logic of capitalism that continues the trend of pillaging the earth is ultimately the cause of the 3 crisis, while surveillance capitalism and wars are a manifestation of the struggle for resources derived from that logic.

And while is true that wars for resources will always happen because we are living things that have to compete for them with other living things, the scale of it and the lack of resilience feel new and overwhelming.

The naive approach

I have been working in finance for a long time. I used to have a more positive way of thinking about capital and finance. An easy argument to make is that capital is an allocation of value device, so banks are, in essence, deciding where our efforts should go. Profits should guide all of us towards more prosperity. In that view of the world, money is neutral, a vehicle for human prosperity.

I believe that most people have this line of thought. Certainly in the finance world. In that view of the world, financial crisises correct themselves. And the climate change issue can be conquered through ingenuity. I call this green hope

I used to be there. But now I don’t. In a post green hope world there is no energy salvation to solve climate crisis. So the only real solution is to degrowth, by choice or not.

So I adopted a very degrowth like attitude about life in the sense of consuming as little as possible, and seeking to reduce complexity and increase resiliency at work.

This was damaging for my relationship with work because after the covid injection of money that most governments made, a lot of companies have become cancerous. This is to fight for the shrinking pool of value that more capital represents.

[[2026-06-17-capital-cancer]]

They are using more resources just to keep themselves where they are or grow at constant pace, like the red queen’s race .

Which is almost opposite with a degrowth attitude, at least short term. Which was causing me to distance myself further from work and people in my life.

It wasn’t sustainable.

The new approach

There was an element of not letting go to my attitude. I was hoping that in my degrowth and resilience seeking behavour things would change for the better.

Unfortunately, the world does not work like that. Trying to time resilience is an opening for next door competition to take over for what is available. You can only steer things within your scope.

[[2026-10-12-is-resilience-a-choice]]

It took me some years to see this. That I cannot control it and that there is a lot to grieve. Luckily I had the time to go through it without the pressure of work and with the help of my coach and the various people that I have found on internet and in my life.

It is that sense of scope that allows to see the giant human machine for what it is, and adopt a more resilient attitude to what seems like a civilisational collapse (as in loss of complexity because of lack of energy available).

For example, in my naive approach the guilt was a big factor in my decision making. Because I thought that every decision would have a tiny impact for the future, and that mattered the most. Now I think that the right decision at the right scope matters the most, and to carry the weight of what I can actually change.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serenity_Prayer

To get here I had to let go a lot of my old green hope techno optimist mindset. If we can change the world then be sure that we are responsible if it doesn’t go the way we want. The tyranny of merit talks about this same mindset that create hubris and losers.

https://nestorarocha.com/en/update/2021/07/31/the-tyranny-of-merit.html

I am not surprised that many books on the matter of collapse like hospicing modernity, buddhism texts, coaching sessions have a similar attitude towards the space we inhabit. After all our thoughts transcend ourselves, so when the world constructs are dying part of us is dying with it too. Grief is the answer to true loss.

I think in this new approach requires me to be more out there, fighting for what I think is right, not contributing to monopolies where I can, open to whatever comes next. But not rejecting outright the system that kept us alive so far, compromising gracefully on it.

*#essay