Living Purposefully within Metacrisis and Collapse

Last year I was dancing in a field with hundreds of people from countries across Asia. We were singing, holding hands, and moving in the ways we had just been taught. Most of the songs used mantric phrases, taken from different religions. But a couple of songs were in English, and at one point, I found myself singing…

“Why have you come to Earth? 

Why have you taken birth? 

Why have you come? 

To love, serve and remember…”

The melody and simple message stuck with me. Subsequently I discovered it was written by John Astin. He was inspired by the words of Maharaji, who had told one of his famous pupils to “love everyone, serve everyone, and remember God.” 

The song offers an answer to something really deep. Like many people, at times I have struggled with the matter of the “meaning of life”, and its related rabbit holes on the nature and meaning (or many meanings), of the cosmos, Life, evolution, humanity, or my own life. How such meanings might inform my own life’s purpose, here onwards, can also be a confusing question. Clearly, our means to understand such matters through our senses, cognition, conceptualisation, and language, is fundamentally limited. But that doesn’t mean we either dismiss the matter altogether, or adopt a pre-packed story from our culture (and defensively dismiss curiosity as lacking humility). As our old assumptions and aspirations weaken in the face of metacrisis and collapse, many of us have been returning to these deeper questions of life. Many of us are doing that as part of finding a new direction in life after ditching the old. In this essay, I want to speak more fully to that issue than before, to help you reconsider, or reconfirm, your own sense of meaning and purpose in the midst of metacrisis, or whilst considering societal collapse. It’s also because currently I am doing the same.

Talking with people who have participated in the salons and peer mentoring of the Metacrisis Initiative, I am reminded of the range of views on how to live in response to our predicament. Some are primarily focused on emotional stability, inner peace, and learning how to cope, personally, with difficult realities. Others are focused on doing whatever remains possible to reduce harm and generate possibilities for the future, without any certainty that such efforts will succeed. Many of us have been trying to find some balance between these impulses.

These conversations led me to adopt the strapline “living purposefully within metacrisis and collapse” for both my website and the Metacrisis Initiative. I will come back to the concept of ‘purpose’ in a moment. When I use the term Metacrisis I am referring to the interacting worldwide crises of our time and their deeper causes and implications. Those include ecological overshoot, climate disruption, biodiversity loss, wealth inequality, economic fragility, political dysfunction, technological acceleration, and cultural fragmentation, and the deeper crisis of meaning that shapes our responses to such changes, while being implicated in their cause. When I speak of societal collapse, I mean a significant and enduring reduction in the complexity, capacity, and reliability of systems that people depend upon for everyday life. 

Neither term is a prediction of imminent armageddon and human extinction. Rather, they are ways of describing a predicament that is unfolding and will shape our lives in unpredictable ways for years to come. In my book Breaking Together, I laid out the data that suggests we are already within a process of the creeping collapse of industrial consumer societies. In such circumstances, it is only normal, and right, that people question the meaning and purpose of their lives. That is a powerful implication of collapse-awareness, which is so often overlooked by people who want us to remain positive and hopeful. 

The concept of ‘meaning’ concerns how we understand our lives and experiences. It involves ideas of coherence, significance, identity and belonging. I’ve been experiencing my own ‘meaning crisis’ since 2017, as my personal sense of self-worth before then was bound up with the idea of contributing boldly to a managed global transition to a sustainable way of life. Without that, I have recognised there’s meaning for me in being more present to life in all its dimensions, with an open heart and mind. That is associated with my realisation that the meaning of life could be to simply live it more fully. What does that mean? Currently, I see it means I don’t let my fears, wounds, culture, and egoic drives push me too far from the possibilities for love, wonder, gratitude, connection and creativity. I’ll return to that later, but for now, I want to look closer at the idea of ‘purpose’. 

When the concept of life’s meaning has an application and direction, we are in the realm of life’s purpose. What do we orient ourselves towards, and seek to embody or contribute through our lives? That question of our purpose is asking us what we do about our sense of the meaningfulness of life (in general, and of our own lives). 

Some collapse-aware people don’t like the concept of purpose, as it seems, for them, to involve both ego and attachment to outcome. The most resilient people in terrible situations have been observed to be those who can find meaning in the smallest of things, rather than retaining a story of their activities contributing to a wider purpose. However, I wonder if they also have a sense of purpose, or underlying orientation. To devote oneself to presence is a purpose. To cultivate non-attachment is a purpose. To embody compassion is a purpose. So the distinction between being and doing is often less clear than it first appears. People commit to, and practice, ways of being present and kind in the world. Thus, we are orienting towards something, even when that something is a deeper quality of being.

We orient ourselves in this life. So we tell stories, implicitly or explicitly, about what actions matter and why. That reflects a yearning for purpose that is a deep aspect of human nature, and such purpose can be found at many scales. It would be a mistake to consider the yearning for purpose as synonymous with setting external objectives on a large scale. For one person, purpose may involve raising children with love and integrity. For another, restoring a local river or forest. For others, it can be creating music, supporting neighbours, preserving wisdom, accompanying the dying, growing food regeneratively, strengthening community resilience, or helping future generations inherit something of value. Some purposes focus on collective outcomes. Others focus on ways of being. In my experience, most of us involve some combination of both, whether or not we are explicit about it. 

Before I gave up my career in academia, I was regularly interacting with people who were discussing purposes on the largest possible scales. For instance, they wanted their lives to contribute to goals such as the salvation of humanity, the flourishing of all species, or the healing of the planet. Such visions and aspirations can be beautiful and inspiring. They can also motivate extraordinary dedication and sacrifice. I inhabited such stories for decades (or they inhabited me). But in that time I also became aware of a paradox. As purposes become grander, they can become less authentic. Because they can drift away from lived reality into abstraction. They can become performative identities rather than genuine callings. Grand visions and purposes can sometimes distract us from what is immediately present and possible. We may become attached to stories about changing the world while neglecting the people, places, and responsibilities directly before us. Maybe that’s why there are many examples in history of people who were principled leaders while negligent with their families. 

Being aware of this paradox does not mean that large-scale visions and purposes are wrong. It means they require humility. The larger the scale of our aspirations, the greater the need to remain grounded in the reality of our own lives and relationships. We can also be vigilant about another risk of grand visions, that no matter how laudable, they can impose a way of thinking on other people and stimulate criticism of people who do not accept them. We see that in the field of religions, where people preach dogmatic interpretations of the future for us all, and how we should live. Similarly, in the field of environmental concern, some commentators tell us we must believe in a transition to an ecologically sustainable society, or that we would be partly to blame for future failure. This process is closely connected to policing of our emotions, which sadly serves authority not democratic dialogue. 

Visions can be useful at personal and collective scales. They can help us choose what to do, and what not to do. They can also help us find motivation and inspire motivation in others. However, psychological research demonstrates that such visions do not need to be grand, such as those describing the future of large organisations, whole nations, or the planet, for there to be a positive effect on clarity and motivation. Depending on the person and situation, visions can become delusional, enabling denial of circumstances and delaying difficult choices. 

My own positive vision is not primarily a vision of a future society. It is a vision of more people living purposefully within metacrisis and collapse. It is a vision of people becoming clearer about the importance of love and awareness, wonder and inquiry, and how they wish to live amidst uncertainty. Within that framework, it means my individual purpose can be found in helping more people to live like that, as well as orienting myself towards that. I’ve been summarising it to my friends as attempting to be well to help well.  

When I mention love, I mean universal and unconditional love. That is the quality of engaged benevolence towards all life, including one’s own. It is not naive or idealistic for that to be the foundation of personal or collective purpose, as precisely when outcomes become uncertain that returning to deeper and universal understandings and feelings can be our guide. For if, instead, our purpose were to depend upon achieving a particular collective outcome, then it would be fragile. Instead, when our purpose is grounded in love (for people, places, creatures, communities, future generations), then it can endure regardless of what happens.

To arrive at this view, I have been helped by the mystical strands of various world religions, and the people involved in them. I have also been shaped by moments of tragedy and grief, where the primacy of love cut through my daily preoccupations and social conditioning. I have also benefitted from some non-ordinary states of consciousness, which dissolved my sense of separate self, so I felt as if the most fundamental reality is itself universal unconditional love. That perspective on fundamental reality, in a physical and metaphysical sense, also provides a potential answer to the ‘meaning of life’ question – for all life, or one’s own. As universal unconditional love is the fundamental nature of being, then the meaning of life is simply that love, however it is being expressed through matter, energy and information. That is why so many mystics, from Christians, to Hindus, to Sufis, to Animists, say that the meaning and purpose of our lives is to wake up to our true natures as an aspect of the universal unconditional love which cultures label differently as sacred, divine, soul, spirit or God. 

With that in mind, the way ahead involves two dimensions. First, we must include in our normal lives whatever tunes us towards a more expansive consciousness. Second, we must notice whether it is from our moments of expansiveness or contractedness that we are assessing our options in life. Fully expansive, we can await guidance from beyond ourselves, whichever way we might conceive that which is ‘beyond’. That’s why many people feel like they have a ‘calling’ to do something in life. Just as long as we don’t get attached to that calling, as a new egoic identity, it can become a beautiful motivation in life. I believe the qualities or orientations for Deep Adaptation can be helpful for that, especially the ones I labelled ‘organic meaning’ and ‘numinous adaptability’ (outlined here). 

Our era of metacrisis and collapse involves finding ways of interpreting and applying ancient ideas on meaning and purpose in a novel context. Important aspects of our situation are both the certainty of material decline for the majority of humanity in the foreseeable future, and uncertainty around what could be useful to do to produce a slower, kinder, and more generative collapse. It is a time that asks us to be able to care without illusions, to remain open-hearted without reward, to act without guarantees, to be well enough to help well, and, ultimately, to love without end. 

I can’t say I have been living like this myself — but more so than before. I am currently struggling with what the core ideas I’ve described in this essay mean for my choices today, in new circumstances. Those include being older, living differently, earning less, and knowing different people. That’s why I am grateful to be part of a peer mentoring group within the Metacrisis Initiative, and to also have the benefit of guidance from spiritually reflective people, whether or not they have official roles. One teacher is Reverend Wright, who joins the August 2026 Metacrisis Salon. Information on that follows at the end of this essay, for members of initiative. 

Rather than share with you more ideas on how myself and other people are finding meaning and purpose in an era of metacrisis and collapse, it could be more useful to ask you some questions to reflect on. They are not as punchy as the way you’d be asked about the purpose of your life at a Business School. So I won’t be asking what you’d die for: any useful intensification from such a question can paradoxically shrink personal reflection into what might sound right according to a peer group. Instead, I have composed the questions to unpack some assumptions and open up some possibilities. I recommend making notes on them, and then sharing this essay with a collapse-aware friend of yours with a request to discuss your respective answers. If it happens, I hope you have fun! 

After publishing this, I’ll be learning ‘Love, Serve, Remember’ on guitar and how to teach the moves for us to sing it in our future circles of the Dances of Universal Peace.

Questions on the meanings and purposes of lives

So much of our thinking is influenced by deep stories of what is right and wrong, admirable or embarrassing, which we have learned from our culture, family and friends. So when you reflect on the following, try to sense whether there is any of that ‘social gaze’ on how you should think and feel; if it might be influencing your answers, try to answer them again as if that external judgement didn’t matter. 

1. Could I live fully without any sense of meaning or purpose in my life? 
2. Is finding the meaning or purpose of my life a basic need and/or central goal of my life?
3. Could meaning or purpose in my life be fixed and singular, or plural and changing?
4. Might any potential meanings and purposes of my life be discovered by me, chosen by me, given to me, or taught to me? Does that matter to their validity, in general, or to me?
5. Why might some meanings and purposes for my life be more valuable than others? 
6. Do I think (or sense) that there is a universal meaning and purpose for any human life, or Life in general? 
7. Is it important for me to understand such meaning and purpose? To be able to describe it myself? To be able to communicate it to others? If so, why?
8. How do the meanings and purposes of my own life relate to a broader sense of the meaning and purpose of Life in general, if at all? 
9. With all these ideas on general and personal meaning and purpose in my heart and mind: what might collapse be asking of me? 
10. What could be an additional question, or a better question, to guide your own inquiry on this matter?

If you answered any of these questions using the standard language of your (sub-)culture, such as “God teaches me…” or “Karma dictates that…” or “Being a responsible parent/child means…” or “The plant medicine revealed to me that…” then I’d ask you to reflect on these questions once more, without those words and concepts, to allow your insight into what might be underneath such labels for what is true and good. 

I invite you to share your thoughts on this essay, these questions, and any answers, on the relevant thread of the Facebook page of the Metacrisis Initiative. If you are a member of the Initiative please share them in the community chat, and also join the salon on this topic on August 3rd/4th. These questions also comprise the reflection exercise ahead of Meeting 5 of the Peer Mentoring. If you want to join a future cohort of peer mentors, please join the initiative.

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The image represents some Indian spiritual figures from different religions and periods, all of whom understood the joy of awakening to the oneness of reality (however we choose to label it). Over the years I’ve appreciated learning what each of them said and/or did. So the image is my celebration of the wisdom from a land which I am excited to be returning to for the Dances of Universal Peace. Do you recognise any of the people depicted here? From left to right: Anandamayi Ma, Ambedkhar, Mirra Alfassa, Vinoba Bhave, Inayat Khan, Kasturba, Maharaji, Sri Sarada Devi, Anthony de Mello, Hazrat Babajan.