The 7 Things That Scare Me Most | Frankly 38

In this week’s Frankly, Nate expands upon something he finds himself saying more frequently these days; ”what scares me the most is…”. From the likelihood of nuclear war to how our human in/action harms innocent animals, Nate opens up about his personal list of deepest fears. Contrasting his childhood fear of [harmless] spiders against his current fear of humans’ propensity towards [what is now existential] apathy as we face the metacrisis, Nate reminds us how much more complex our lives are in 2023. Can we be courageous and face our own fears head on, rather than feeling paralyzed by them?

#natehagens #thegreatsimplification #frankly

[lacusrengoku]

Wow, your discussion of your fears is so honest. Nate, you are a man of genuine kindness! It is so refreshing to hear someone like you who shares a deep understanding and deep grief for our planet's ongoing eco tragedy.

[kristen_rose]

Greetings, Nate. Waking up to a Frankly is the highlight of my day. Thank you for these. I feel less alone in my thoughts. Most people I know don’t want to hear about these things since they’re still stuck in denial and bargaining. Much love to you and yours.

[alexanderleuchte]

What scares me most is the "unlimitlessness" of human stupidity and the resulting ignorance and complacency.
And on the risk of sounding clichè i actually feel like we have indeed moved sigificantly towards "Idiocracy" over the course of the last decades

[zekeabercrombie]

Summer 1976, on a fishing trip, I asked my grandfather if he thought the end of the world would be quick like an asteroid strike, or a long, slow slide like the Romans. His answer was a long, slow slide followed by a sudden stop. That's exactly where we are right now. It can't be fixed.

[emceegreen]

Thanks Nate. We need more of this openness. The fear and frustration of our apparent inability to control our consumption and the systems inability to balance the biosphere’s needs are truly troubling.

[Zanderzan]

The last one is something ive experienced a number of times. On multiple occasions ive had completely sane, ethical people say to me "what do i care, ill be long gone before the shit hits the fan". How so people can say this, with a perfectly straight face, scares me.

[mrrecluse]

Simply being truthful, (even about the most ugly things), is a beautiful thing to behold, when it comes from the heart. Many of us here, pretty much know how you feel, regarding your heartfelt list, not the least of which included dogs, in particular, and other more complex animals, an abundance of which are no strangers to suffering, thanks to us.
Thank you, Nate Hagans.

[pts]

You are the voice of our thoughts and fears Nate, but you are not alone. I know these, as you say are your fears, but I and many others are right there with you. Without your discourse I'm pretty sure I would be left to think that I was crazy, indeed that would be an easier perspective. Look after yourself Nate, you are too important to us.

[Lyra]

Your mention of our collective intellectual and educational capacities, and the possibility that ultimately they will not be sufficient to save humanity from catastrophe, correlates deeply with my lived experience of friends and family. So many people to whom I have been and continue to be close, including my mother - a highly educated and stupendously well read person - have demonstrated a frustratingly high degree of irrationality and obtuseness when confronted by uncomfortable facts and realities that do not correspond with their conception of the world or their perception of themselves.

I was raised with the belief that education was a 'good in itself', and for most of my life I believed this mantra without question. However, events both personal and at the international/global level have over recent years caused me to reconsider this blind faith in education.

I now believe that ONLY education that encourages people, particularly children, to think for themselves - that is, teaches children how to think rather than what to think - and which demands of all students that they learn to question in order to interrogate the 'truth' of any matter, is ultimately the only worthwhile form of pedagogy.

Millions die in pointless wars which are almost always justified on the basis of lies or unrealities, our entire economic paradigm is based on fallacy and favouritism, and governance across the planet is almost exclusively characterised by charlatanism, sociopathy, ineptitude and corruption, which is now placing the entire planetary biosphere in jeopardy. And yet majorities of people in all countries accept the status quo and do not question the fundamental assumptions that underpin the demontrably inadequate and increasingly dangerous systems within which they live, and which will determine the future prospects of their families and the wider global community.

[DanA-nluo]

The only big fear I would put above some things on that list is crop failure and global food supply issues. I just read that India is not exporting rice this year and they export something like 40% of the global supply. It seems to me that the droughts and floods are rapidly overwhelming our modern farming industry and that we need desperately to push for the victory gardens of WWII. But as you point out no one is driving the bus.

[PiaBros]

Dear Nate this has me loving your podcasts and you as a person even more if this is possible. Thank you for your talks, all of them and thank you for being you and sharing you. From New Zealand.

[dalewolver]

Rise in fascism is my #1. That will permeate into so many other nasty human behaviors that will prevent anything else from being helpful.. Thanks Nate for you dedication to truth.

[frankwhite]

Thank you so much for sharing, Brother Nate. I feel ya. You and Brother Daniel (of Schmachtenberger fame) are, in my opinion, the best in the space right now. I mean, in terms of a holistic and honest approach to our shared predicament. I'm afraid there's no getting around a transitional period, if we are to survive at all. However, the sooner we begin to think holistically about these issues the sooner we can begin to think, speak, act and live in a more regenerative and holistic way. There is a real chance, albeit small in my estimation, that we can make it through the Polycrisis. We just need to keep doing what you're doing - spread the word, think about solutions, care about each other, about all life and about the shared environment upon which everything depends. There's no more rest days now, every second counts, every day we have to be thinking and doing things that help move us away from the Polycrisis. The more agents we can involve in the solution space, the quicker we can fix this. Mahalo!

[KvikDeVries]

I especially love the "there is no cabal unfortunately" part - I've been saying this for years to my more.. tinfoil-hat-inclined friends, that I so wish that there actually was someone to blame, some New World Order Shadow Emperor... actually some serious Darth Vader-like character to fight. It would be so much easier than the current situation. And imagine the hero journey against some worthy opponent. Some real villain, instead of pathetic Klaus, Bill or some other clown.
And animals being our collateral victims.. there is a song by Cradle of Filth (their last album being surprisingly existential), that speaks exactly about this: "Inhumankind now drives mass extinction
No escape from an enemy of billions, Pity the poor creatures that suffer our dominion"...What we do to ourselves is one thing, but the suffering we as a species bring to all life on this planet is... There are no sufficiently descriptive words for it.

And, lastly, I've been wondering about the topic of global awakening. What if everyone is educated, but it doesn't cause lots of people to actually be awakened? It would be the case. There is a gap between knowledge, understanding and groking - if a person is informed about, say, meat factories, it doesn't make them give up meat. But when they start to understand and empathically understand situation of animals there, there is this click happening in their brains and from that point onwards they can't look at or smell meat without feeling the history of where that meat came from. That's awakening to me, and it won't happen, initially, on mass scale. But it doesn't have to - it is enough if people en mass did not, through their inertia, ignorance, apathy and ill will, undermine efforts of those who work on fixing the world. And that's a different problem from shrugging :)

[erikolsen]

Lively video, really needed!!!! Keep the informative videos up

[Sanulay]

Excellent points, and I would have included many of the same things in my own equivalent list. Personally, I'm incredibly disturbed by the notion that industrial society as a whole, in any shape or form, (everything from infrastructure to the whole damn working life and all our everyday consumption habits) may be inherently unsustainable. If my suspicions are true, then things like electric cars are a temporary band-aid at best. I try to make the best out of a bad situation but if this is true, it's difficult to even say what kind of life choices are meaningful.

I share your fear that it may be already too late. For example, I'm under the impression that the 1.5 degree target may be physically impossible by now even if we suddenly stopped using fossil fuels altogether regardless of the consequences. The time pressure means that even if there are great partial solutions, they need to be implemented really quickly and there's great potential for major fuck-ups.

One of the worst things about collapse awareness, IMO, is the loss of trust in people, whether they're being selfish, ignorant, incompetent or intentionally malicious. It would be one thing if people widely discussed the topic of social and ecological breakdown and tried to achieve relatively positive outcomes through collective action. That wouldn't feel so isolating and living meaningfully in these tough times would be much easier. There are no solutions to our predicament, exactly, but there are better and worse ways of living with the situation. I fear that we won't even choose good ways of living with the situation. This year, my country (Finland) elected a new right-wing government with some god-awful plans: cutting welfare, tax cuts for the rich, relaxing environmental targets, pursuing economic growth and so forth. If they completely threw their plans out the window and did the exact opposite, that would probably have far better results. Some of the ministers are/were basically Nazis or something very close to it. Sure, you can talk about politicians being corrupt or the political system favoring rich people and corporations but the fact is that people still voted for these psychopaths. I can't even tell whether they're being colossally stupid or intentionally malicious or both.

[BetterAncestors]

Warren’s Number One
Thank you. Your way of communicating helps enormously. You and your guests are feeding me knowledge and new language to communicate what I know but often struggle to communicate, as I try to fight the good fight.
My current number one fear is something so subtle that it’s manifest everywhere I look – here in post pandemic New Zealand.
The Superorganism is waking from the pandemic experience more powerful than ever.
As you and Daniel Schmachtenberger crystallized out in TGS#71, the two attractors, catastrophe and dystopia, the power of our Systems, with AI already driving phenomenal gains in capacity and efficiency, consumption is getting easier and easier.
The acute symptoms of the harm, of exceeding Planetary Boundaries, are being replaced by chronic sanitised, over the horizon harm, harm so subtle and so pervasive that people can’t and won’t see it.
It’s Saturday morning, I watch two gulls soaring seemingly for the joy of flight, as the bitter Southerly drives across the port harbour. The same port harbour where Urea from the Middle East, and PKE from what were Asia’s great rainforests and Soybean Hulls from South America and Phosphate from Nauru or Morocco arrive in 25, 000 tonne bulk carriers to feed insatiable industry, our soils already contaminated with heavy metals our rivers and aquifers ruined forever with nitrate contamination.

My friends and acquaintances are all on the move, flying, to concerts, to FIFA football games, to see new born grandchildren. Record numbers of new cars arrive every month, 23, 000 in June. Our people increasingly oblivious to the harm they cannot see, over the horizon.
I watch two gulls soaring as the bitter Southerly drives in, and the Saturday paper headlines the Auckland shootings and the Letters to the Editor call for AI assisted surveillance to prevent ram raids and shootings?

Catastrophe or Dystopia? We need to find the third attractor, Nate. Cheers for your work!

[qMartink]

Nate, you are a gift. Thanks for sharing.

[davehendricks]

My brother from another mother! One of my biggest fears has always been spiders. Your list for the present is spot on with my own fears. My way of coping? After hearing you talk about bike rides, I thought of how much fun it was as a kid. I bought an e-bike Memorial Day weekend. Already have almost 800 miles on it. The anxiety disappears while I’m out riding. ( I’m 70!)

[paulopl]

What scares me is not that no one is in control, it is those that are in control!