Tag: HUMANITY

  • The Meta‑Crisis — And the World That Could Come After

    The Meta‑Crisis — And the World That Could Come After

    We hear the word crisis so often that it has almost lost its meaning.

    Climate crisis. Economic crisis. Political crisis. Mental‑health crisis. Energy crisis. Trust crisis.

    But what we are actually facing is something deeper and bigger — a meta‑crisis.

    A meta‑crisis is not one problem. It is a web of problems, all feeding each other. Climate breakdown accelerates economic instability. Economic insecurity fuels political polarization. Polarization erodes trust. Loss of trust paralyzes collective action — which in turn worsens climate breakdown.

    Each crisis amplifies the others.

    This is why so many solutions feel ineffective. We keep treating symptoms in isolation, while the underlying system continues to generate the same outcomes.

    ⸻

    A System Under Strain

    Our global system was built for a world that no longer exists.

    It assumes endless growth on a finite planet.

    It rewards competition over cooperation.

    It measures success in money rather than wellbeing.

    For a long time, this system appeared to work. Supermarkets were full. Technology advanced. Comfort increased — for some.

    But the costs were externalized.

    Onto other people.

    Onto future generations.

    Onto nature itself.

    Now the bill is coming due.

    The meta‑crisis is not an accident. It is the predictable result of a system designed without regard for ecological limits, psychological health, or long‑term resilience.

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    A Question We Rarely Ask

    Most discussions stop here — with warnings, statistics, and projections of collapse.

    But there is another question worth asking:

    What if humanity acted in time?

    What if we recognized the pattern early enough?

    What if cooperation replaced competition as our default?

    What if technology was used to restore nature and free humans — not to extract more from them?

    What if we acknowledged something even more uncomfortable:

    That the problem was never a lack of solutions — but a lack of alignment.

    Because the truth is this:

    We already have the tools.

    We already have the science.

    We already have the productive capacity to meet everyone’s basic needs.

    We know how to generate abundant renewable energy.

    We know how to automate dangerous and repetitive labor.

    We know how to design cities around people instead of profit.

    We know how to produce more than enough food — sustainably.

    What stands in the way is not technology.

    It is the system we organize ourselves by.

    A system that requires scarcity to function.

    A system that turns necessities into commodities.

    A system that measures success in money rather than human and ecological wellbeing.

    Some visionary projects — such as those exploring resource‑based economies, like The Venus Project — have long argued that a resilient society would require something radical:

    Not reforming the monetary system — but replacing it.

    In such a model, resources are treated as the shared inheritance of humanity.

    Production is guided by real needs and ecological limits, not profit.

    Technology becomes a tool for coordination, not control.

    This is not science fiction.

    It is a different set of rules applied to capabilities we already possess.

    So the real question becomes:

    If the solutions exist — what would the future look like if we actually used them?

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    A Thought Experiment

    So what would the world actually look like if we implemented all of this?

    If we treated the planet’s resources as a shared inheritance.

    If production was guided by real human needs and ecological limits.

    If a global, coordinated, resource-based economy replaced the monetary system.

    If technology was used to liberate time and creativity, not monetize it.

    What would daily life feel like?

    How would cities function?

    What would people do with their lives when survival was no longer the primary concern?

    One way to explore that question is through story.

    That is exactly what Waking Up – A journey towards a new dawn for humanity does — through the eyes of Benjamin Michaels.

    Benjamin comes from our world, at its peak – 2015.

    He was not a rebel or an outsider.

    He was a billionaire — someone who had mastered the old system. But suffered from incurable cancer. He chooses cryogenic preservation of his body in the hopes of waking up again to being healed and continue expanding his empire.

    When he wakes up one hundred years into the future, he is shocked to learn about the new moneyless world and expects collapse, chaos, or authoritarian control — the futures our imagination keeps returning to.

    Instead, he finds something else entirely.

    A world where people are thriving.

    A world where basic needs and wants are guaranteed.

    A world where cities are designed around human wellbeing and ecological harmony.

    A world where cooperation is not idealism, but infrastructure.

    Benjamin doesn’t just hear about this world.

    He walks through it.

    Questions it.

    Resists it and almost helps destroying it.

    But slowly begins to understand how humanity stepped back from the brink and started prospering.

    ⸻

    Not Utopia — But Maturity

    This future is not perfect.

    Nature still has momentum.

    Old damage still needs healing.

    Human emotions are still human.

    But the underlying rules have changed.

    Fear is no longer the operating system.

    Scarcity is no longer artificially enforced.

    Survival is no longer the primary driver of human behavior.

    The story does not ask us to believe that humans became saints.

    It asks a simpler question:

    What happens when humanity grows up?

    ⸻

    Why Stories Matter

    Facts inform.

    Stories transform.

    We already know the data.

    We already know the risks.

    What we lack is a shared image of a future worth moving toward.

    That is what the novel,Waking Up – A Journey Towards a New Dawn for Humanity explores — not as prediction, but as possibility.

    Not as ideology, but as a thought experiment and inspiration grounded in existing technology, systems thinking, and human values.

    ⸻

    The Quiet Invitation

    The meta‑crisis is real.

    But collapse is not the only ending available.

    Another path exists — one that does not begin with revolution or force, but with understanding, imagination, and cooperation.

    The question is not whether such a future is guaranteed.

    The question is whether we dare to imagine it — and then start acting as if it were possible.

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    If this article resonates, please share it.

    Because the more people start to imagine this future the bigger chance we have of actually getting there.

    And if you want to explore one possible answer to the meta‑crisis through story rather than theory, Waking Up is available now.

  • The Great Unveiling – Awakening to the Real World

    The Great Unveiling – Awakening to the Real World

    What would actually happen if the world erased all debt overnight?

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    1. The Starting Point

    Let’s start with a fact, not an opinion.

    As of 2025, total global debt is about $340 trillion — every mortgage, every student loan, every government bond, every corporate IOU combined.

    It is, quite literally, the sum of what humanity owes to itself.

    Let that sink in.

    To itself.

    How can a species owe itself money?

    How can the left hand be in debt to the right?

    The numbers are real enough on paper — but the logic behind them is absurd.

    We’ve built a global system in which humanity as a whole is perpetually indebted to… humanity as a whole.

    Meanwhile, the world’s annual GGP, Gross Global Product— the total value of everything we actually create and produce — is about $110 trillion.

    So globally we owe more than three times what we make in a year.

    We are, in effect, trying to pay ourselves with our own promises, and calling the shortfall “growth.”

    ⸻

    2. The Paradox of Debt-Money

    Here’s the strange truth of modern economics:

    Money isn’t printed first and then lent — it’s created by lending.

    When a bank issues a loan, it simply types numbers into an account.

    Those digits are new money, but they exist only because someone has agreed to owe them back.

    For every dollar of money, there’s a dollar of debt somewhere else. So of course, since we are constantly creating new money mostly by loans that needs to be repaid with interest which is not created, we constantly need to create new debt perpetually. If everyone repaid their loans tomorrow, almost every dollar in existence would vanish.

    The economy wouldn’t just slow down — it would cease to exist. Because money = debt.

    Debt isn’t a flaw in the system.

    Debt is the system.

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    3. The Absurd Scale

    Three hundred and forty trillion dollars.

    A number so large it almost loses meaning.

    To “repay” it, we’d need about three more Earth-sized economies operating at today’s output — three planets producing, mining, farming, shipping, and consuming at full speed just to settle our existing balance sheet.

    But we have only one planet, and it’s already showing the strain: melting ice caps, depleting soils, rising seas.

    We’ve mortgaged the future to pay for the present, and even the collateral — the planet itself — is running out.

    The debt can never be repaid, because repayment would destroy the very money supply that makes repayment possible. The paradox is profound

    It’s a snake eating its own tail.

    ⸻

    4. The Thought Experiment

    So what if, instead of running faster on the treadmill, we simply stopped?

    What if: every government, bank, and individual agreed to wipe the slate clean — erase all debt at once?

    Technically, it would be easy.

    After all, when a bank issues a loan, it simply types numbers into an account.

    Those digits appear from nowhere, authorized by nothing more than confidence in the story.

    And just as easily as they’re created, they can be erased.

    The same keyboard that made them has another key — 

    backspace.

    Press it once for a typo.

    Press it a few more times, and the world is debt-free.

    Thus: the so-called global “debt crisis” is nothing more than a collection of keystrokes. 

    The difficulty isn’t technical. 

    It’s psychological.

    The moment those numbers disappear, the story humanity believes about itself — the story of credit, ownership, and fake obligation — vanishes with them.

    For a few hours, maybe days, the world would panic.

    Markets would freeze. Banks would have no assets. Governments would have no bonds.

    It would look like collapse.

    But collapse of what, exactly?

    ⸻

    5. What Would Still Exist

    Would the roads disappear?

    Would the houses crumble?

    Would the hospitals and schools evaporate?

    Would the oceans stop moving or the sun fail to shine?

    No.

    Every physical thing humanity has built and nature has created would still be there:

    every bridge, every farm, every power plant, every tool, every ship.

    The forests, the animals, the wind and rain — all still exactly as before.

    The real world would remain completely intact.

    The only thing missing would be the numbers we used to measure it.

    That’s the realization: the “economy” we thought sustained us was only a layer of code floating above what was real.

    When the code is erased, the world itself doesn’t vanish

    — it appears.

    ⸻

    6. The Great Unveiling

    That’s the unveiling — the moment when the illusion drops and we see what was always there.

    The money world was never the world.

    It was a veil — a story of ownership drawn over nature, over work, over life itself.

    When that story ends, nothing real is lost.

    In fact, reality becomes visible again.

    The forests keep breathing.

    The clouds still drift and drop rain.

    Birds still fly, insects still hum, whales still cross the oceans.

    People still wake up, stretch, laugh, argue, cook, and create.

    All of it continues as if nothing happened — because to the real world, nothing did.

    ⸻

    7. Seeing the Illusion for What It Was

    Imagine standing in a field the morning after the Great Erasure.

    The banks are silent, the stock tickers blank, but the sun still warms your skin.

    You realize how strange it was to think that this — sunlight, air, grass, breath — could ever be “priced.”

    The absurdity becomes obvious: we built a system that claims ownership over everything that already belongs to life.

    We invented scarcity in the middle of abundance. Saying only those with enough numbers in their accounts would have an abundance of time to really enjoy life.

    We called debt wealth and competition progress.

    We covered the real world with a mirage of money — and then forgot it was a mirage.

    And yet, beneath that mirage, everything real has been patiently waiting.

    ⸻

    8. What Happens Next

    At first, confusion.

    If no one owns anything, who decides?

    But slowly, reason returns.

    People realize they don’t need permission to use what already exists. 

    Food still grows. Tools still work. Knowledge still lives in every mind. We can peacefully agree to create abundance for all.

    Communities reorganize — not around money, but around contribution, skill, and trust.

    Value shifts from possession to participation.

    Humanity begins to live again as nature does — through exchange without debt, through cycles of giving and renewal.

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    9. The Realization

    The true catastrophe isn’t the collapse of the money world — it’s that we mistook it for the real one.

    The true awakening is realizing the world doesn’t need to be rebuilt — only remembered.

    Everything that matters survives the erasure:

    the land, the oceans, the people, the animals, the insects, the sky, the sun.

    When the numbers vanish, what remains is life — unpriced, unowned, unending.

    ⸻

    10. The Invitation

    This is the Great Unveiling: not the end of civilization, but the end of its disguise.

    A collective seeing — that the wealth of the world was never in banks, but in being.

    Step outside.

    Feel the ground.

    Everything real is still here.

    The world is Waking Up.

    Are you?

    Follow the former billionaire Benjamin Michaels as he wakes up in a world where this has already happened. Shaken and shocked he staggers out of the hospital where he has been sleeping for a century, only to find his old world of money and numbers completely vanished… Only the real world remains.

    order the book here