The time for tiny tweaks to the status quo is over. We've run out of time for that. The only thing that will save us is massive buy-in to a major paradigm shift, a different way of living and loving on planet Earth. A lighter, looser, sparer one. More, because less.

Here's how people typically change their minds. They do it the way a climber scales a rock face, inching out beyond the last point of protection — so that if they fall, they fall only as far as what they last believed.

Our rethinks are not big stretches, in other words. Just variations on what we think right now.

So it's worth asking: in the year 2024, are humans actually able to throw over the side a lifestyle we've been raised to think is somehow our birthright? Are we capable of making a leap like that?

"It's just the way things are."

There are lots of things in life we never really give a second thought to. We do it this way because, well, that's all we've ever known. We assume that wiser heads than ours put it all in place.

Of course that's often bullshit.

A corporation has no heart, no soul, no morals. It cannot feel pain. You cannot argue with it. That’s because a corporation is not a living thing but a process — an efficient way of generating revenue.

It takes energy from the outside (capital, labor, raw materials) and transforms it in various ways. In order to continue “living” it need meet only one condition: its income must equal its expenditures over the long term. As long as that happens it can exist indefinitely.

When a corporation hurts people or damages the environment, it will feel no sorrow or remorse because it is intrinsically unable to do so. (It may sometimes apologize, but that’s not remorse — that’s public relations.) Buddhist scholar David Loy put it this way: “A corporation cannot laugh or cry; it cannot enjoy the world or suffer with it. Most of all a corporation cannot love.” That’s because corporations are legal fictions. Their “bodies” are just judicial constructs, and that is why they are so dangerous.

As a once-and-future free-range human, I’ve been thinking about how to shake off the commercial algorithms that have hacked into my life and are now driving it. The key, I’ve concluded, is novelty. Whether it’s true, as the ethobotanist and psychonaut Terence McKenna claimed, that the pursuit of novelty is “the only one way to live a truly progressive life,” it’s a mighty tempting strategy to air out. “From a species perspective, the job of each individual is to be unlike anyone who’s living or who ever lived,” McKenna wrote. “To do things, and react to things, in a way no one has quite done before.”

This is of course pretty much an act of cultural treason. There’s a reason Atomic Habits was a #1 world bestseller and nobody has written Atomic Novelty. Habits are safe. Flout them and people in charge start furrowing their brows, because now you’re likely to start breaking rules, too. Even the rules of the universe? Many smart people claim we don’t actually have free will, even though it feels like we do. I decided to engineer a day that tests that discouraging premise — a day where you chase free will around, trying to outfox it. The experiment wouldn’t really prove anything one way or the other. But it might yield some ... unexpected returns.