Drill, Baby, Drill – Waking Up in the Age of Absurdity

Disconnected from nature and addicted to comfort, humanity clings to a collapsing, unsustainable system.

“If we don’t change our direction, we are likely to wind up where we are headed”

So where are we headed? We all know the answer: straight into the shitshow of catastrophic climate change, the collapse of global industrial civilization, and mass extinction, a result of our full-blown overshoot and ecocidal culture.

Isn’t it strange that humanity never had a real, long-term plan for the future? No vision for how we’d sustain ourselves for the next 10,000 years, or even 1,000 years. If there was a memo, I must have missed it.

Okay fine, we had the fantasy of Net Zero by 2050. Our grand vision for the future. Well, that’s pretty much abandoned now, not that it was ever realistic or remotely sufficient. It only addressed one of several existential threats, while actually worsening the others in the process. But at least we used to pretend we cared about climate change, at least there was some lip service to the idea. Now, we’re doubling down on fossil fuels and environmental destruction with plans like Project 2025. It’s not a plan, it’s a death sentence. It’s a tragedy. It's a stunning, heartbreaking failure of leadership and humanity itself.

We’re hurtling full-speed into a post-truth world, where science and facts are nothing more than inconvenient obstacles. Climate change? A hoax! CO₂? The more the better! Woke hurricane machines, Jewish space lasers, and let’s not forget the lizard people pulling the strings. What the fuck is happening? It’s not just ignorance anymore, it’s willful, dangerous delusion.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Denial of reality is a defense mechanism as old as humanity itself. Our culture has always been built on stories and myths, the narratives we tell ourselves to make sense of the world. Even today, billions of people follow religions like Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, entire systems of belief rooted in pure fiction.

We like to think of ourselves as highly intelligent beings with big brains and a deep understanding of science and the world around us. What happened to actually following the science? What was the point of it all, if we just ignore it? Because the science has been clear for decades. Was it too inconvenient when it clashed with our absurd belief in endless growth? Did it challenge our culture, values and beliefs?

We’ve handed over control to new, destructive technologies without a second thought, letting them steer us wherever they please. We never stop to question where that path leads. Instead, we’re just swept along by the current, oblivious, cheering all the way. Woohoo!

In this article, I want to discuss how we got here, starting with our disconnection from nature through technology, our addiction to exploiting energy, and how our culture, values, and beliefs became so misguided and delusional.

This isn’t going to be a very science-heavy article. Science can measure a lot, but some things can’t be explained with data or numbers, only clear thinking is required.

Disclaimer! These are just my views, I may have overlooked something critical, and you may disagree with much of it.

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Disconnection from nature through technology

Let’s go back to the beginning, starting with how we get our food (energy) with the use of technology, and how our connection to nature was lost over time, because I believe this is critical in understanding our failure as a species in the balance of nature.

Living in balance with nature

Living in nature teaches you something agriculture, and especially civilization, has made us forget: limits.

Imagine spending your entire life in nature, say an area of 50 square kilometers, as humans once did. Over time, you’d learn how much of each resource exists and the natural cycles that sustain them.

You’d see with your own eyes how many deer, rabbits, squirrels or other animals live in the area and at what rate they reproduce. You’d watch plants and trees grow slowly, understanding their role in the ecosystem. This wouldn’t just be knowledge, it would be instinct, a deep sense of balance. You’d know more or less how much you could take before throwing the whole system out of balance.

You’d have some understanding of how many humans the land could support, keeping population growth in check. Sure, extra hands might help with hunting and gathering, but there’s a limit you’d instinctively respect. Cross that limit, and nature wouldn’t hesitate to remind you. Only a certain amount of food grows every year, that’s your limit.

For one reason or another we crossed the limit. Probably out of necessity (survival).

Agriculture – Losing the balance

Now think about agriculture. First, you clear the land, or actually, no, that’s too gentle. You obliterate an ecosystem. Before you got there, it was alive with plants, animals, nutrient cycles, the whole thing. You kill the plants outright, ripping them out, burning them, chopping them down. The animals get displaced if they’re lucky. Dead, if they’re not.

And what’s it all for? The soil. That precious soil, built over centuries by trees falling and decomposing, leaves feeding the earth, animals recycling nutrients with every bite and every poop, decomposers doing their quiet, vital work. All of it, gone.

Now, you’re trying to grow food on what’s left. But you’re fighting natural forces. This isn’t what would naturally grow here if left to its own devices, and this isn’t an ecosystem anymore. And you’re siphoning water from elsewhere, depriving other ecosystems to force life into this stripped-down patch of land. And it works, for a while. But soon, the soil’s nutrients are depleted. Erosion kicks in. The land is tired, dead. So what do you do? Clear more land.

And then there’s the domestication of animals. You capture them, breed them, and make them your tools. Animals that once roamed freely are now fenced in, forced to plow your fields, and provide your food. Entire species reshaped to suit your needs, their lives reduced to cycles of labor, reproduction, and slaughter.

With agriculture the focus shifts entirely to your crops and livestock. Not nature. Not balance. Squeezing out as much as possible. After a few generations you’ve completely lost touch with the balance of nature.

If you were born into that way of living, you’d defend it with your life. Why wouldn’t you? Your survival depends on it. You wouldn’t see the system as the problem, it would be your way of life, the only reality you’ve ever known. It’s just how things are.

More people? No problem. Clear more land. There are no limits!

From an individual’s perspective, the world feels unlimited, or at least it did at the time. Sure, if it were just a few plots of land, agriculture wouldn’t be a problem. But when you have 8 billion people relying on this system, it becomes a massive issue. 19. billion acres or 38% of the world’s land area is dedicated to agriculture. That’s the scale of the ecosystems we’ve obliterated just to feed ourselves.

The same applies to everything we do and consume. It’s about the aggregate.

There are better, more sustainable ways to farm, such as regenerative agriculture, where you try to mimic natural processes, things like rotating crops, keeping soil covered, and letting animals play their part. Or permaculture, where you aim to create an actual ecosystem, where it’s not about squeezing out every last calorie from the land but building a balanced, resilient environment that happens to produce food.

The reality is that these ways of farming could never scale to feed 8 billion people, and it would be vastly more “expensive”. And we know what the people want. The people want cheap eggs. The people want fast, low-cost food, no matter the environmental cost. Well, we’ll see how that works out for us.

Industrial agriculture

Here’s the way we do much of our agriculture today:

1. Pump degraded soil full of fertilizers to force out crops.

2. Drown them in herbicides to kill the weeds and pesticides to kill the bugs, making sure nothing else but our food survives.

These chemicals don’t stay where we spray them. Herbicides and pesticides leach into the soil and runoff into rivers, destroying ecosystems, killing life and creating dead zones in oceans. Some break down into toxic byproducts, others persist, building up in the food chain. And they don’t stop there, they end up in us, contaminating our bodies and contributing to chronic health issues.

This whole chemical-intensive system we’ve been relying on is barely 70 years old. It’s a massive, uncontrolled experiment with our environment and ourselves, and we have no idea how devastating the fallout will be. Well, we have some idea, and it’s not good.

And let’s not forget about water because crops don’t grow without it. To meet our massive demand for food, we’re draining rivers, lakes, and aquifers at completely unsustainable rates (because of course we are). Agriculture alone sucks up about 70% of the world’s freshwater, and water scarcity is already here. This isn’t going to work much longer.

It doesn’t end there. Our current food system is entirely dependent on cheap and abundant fossil fuels. They power the machines that plow the fields, plant the seeds, and harvest the crops. They’re the basis of the fertilizers that force production from degraded soil. They fuel the trucks, ships, and planes that transport food across vast distances to keep shelves stocked. Without this constant energy input, the entire house of cards will collapse.

And that’s just the crops. What we do for meat and dairy is so disgusting, I don’t even want to get into it.

Modernity – Complete disconnect from nature and ourselves

Today, everything is out of sight and out of mind. Products come from faceless supply chains, neatly packaged and shipped from who-knows-where. We don’t see the forests clear-cut for our furniture, the rivers poisoned for our electronics, or the factory farms churning out our meals. The destruction is hidden behind a wall of convenience and consumerism.

And then there’s the waste. The amount of waste we produce is staggering. We extract, consume, and discard without a second thought about where it all ends up. “Two guys in a garbage truck pick it up on Wednesdays and Sundays”, and that’s the last we think about it. Our garbage piles up in landfills, chokes rivers, and poisons oceans. Every day, we produce around 6,000,000,000 kg of waste. If you lined up garbage trucks, each 8 meters long, the line would stretch roughly 5,000 kilometers, longer than the distance from New York to London. Every day. That’s mind-blowing.

The planet is now drowning in plastic, toxic runoff, and e-waste. But we don’t see it. Out of sight, out of mind.

We’ve completely lost the plot.

Here’s a question: has civilization ever done anything genuinely beneficial for nature or the biosphere?

I can’t think of a single thing. Can you? As I’ve outlined, civilization is built entirely on disturbance and extraction, thriving on the destruction of the very systems it depends on. There’s no benefit for nature in the way we live because our entire way of life is rooted in tearing it apart.

From stone tools to skyscrapers, everything we build takes from nature, and nothing lasts forever. Buildings deteriorate, roads erode, tools break, batteries die, screens shatter, and fixing or replacing them always demands more materials. Wood, metal, sand, lithium, whatever. Even those “green” solar panels, wind turbines and electric vehicles rely on massive amounts of mining and manufacturing that destroy ecosystems. And they need to be constantly replaced. This endless demand for materials makes civilization fundamentally unsustainable.

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Fire Apes – Energy exploitation

What enabled all of this to happen? Was it just our ingenuity? Are we really that clever? It started with energy exploitation, and it started a long time ago. Without energy, nothing happens.

Like all forms of life, we need energy to survive, but we've taken it far beyond necessity. We've used it not just for survival, but for comfort, convenience, power, control, and to fuel our addictions and distractions.

In nature, animals hunt or forage, using energy to find more energy (food). If an animal burns 500 kcal per day while looking for food, it must find more than 500 kcal to avoid long-term starvation. This is called Energy Returned on Investment (EROI). If you invest 500 kcal and get 500 kcal, this is an EROI of 1. An EROI under 1 means starvation, an EROI of 1–2 is typical for animals, giving them enough surplus energy to rest and focus on essentials like food, water, shelter, and reproduction.

Fire apes burning biomass for energy – EROI 1.5-2

Humans and our ancestors began harnessing fire a long time ago, using it for heating, cooking, and tool-making. Fire enabled us to extract more energy from our environment and quickly became essential to our survival. This reliance on burning external energy sources, like wood and biomass, was our first major leap in energy exploitation. It allowed us to survive in different climates and expand the human enterprise.

Exploiting plants, animals and humans for energy – EROI 4-6

Then came agriculture (a technology), where we started exploiting renewable resources for our own growth. Domesticating plants and animals gave us an energy advantage. Early technology like plows and irrigation systems boosted food production, while domesticating animals, like using oxen to plow fields, let us harness the energy of other species. We also began farming animals for food, tapping into their stored energy by eating them. Hunting became less necessary, reducing effort and increasing our energy return on investment (EROI).

This combination of plant and animal domestication created food surpluses, which allowed tribes to expand, specialize, and accumulate power. Surpluses led to wealth, as resources could now be stored, traded, and controlled, giving rise to ownership and hierarchies.

Land, animals, and goods became property, and with property came inequality, some had more, while most labored to maintain it. To manage this growing complexity, money emerged as a way to exchange value and facilitate trade.

As societies grew, they became targets, triggering the need for protection, organized defense, and centralized authority, laying the foundation for governments, armies, empires and religions. What started as a way to feed ourselves evolved into systems of control, inequality, and expansion.

Slavery was the foundation of powerful empires like Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece, the Roman Empire, and the empires of Mesopotamia (Sumer, Akkad, Babylonia and Assyria). Millions of enslaved people powered these societies, providing the backbreaking work behind agricultural systems, construction of architectural feats like the pyramids and aqueducts, and military logistics.

And let’s not forget European colonialism and slavery in the U.S., which persisted less than two centuries ago.

Global industrial civilization – EROI 15-20, and declining rapidly

The discovery and widespread use of fossil fuels marked a monumental shift. Cheap, energy-dense, and easy to extract, fossil fuels rendered human labor inefficient by comparison. A human produces work of roughly 0.7 kWh per day, while a single liter of oil contains 10 kWh of stored energy and costs around a dollar. Feeding, clothing, and maintaining a slave became expensive compared to fossil fuels.

The fossil fuel revolution built and powered modernity, propelling us into a world of consumption and energy dependence. But this energy bonanza won’t last forever, fossil fuels are nonrenewable, and their end is inevitable.

Any way of life that relies on nonrenewable resources is going to end when those resources run out. It's simple logic, a no-brainer, yet too many people fail to see this inevitable outcome. Our entire civilization depends on several finite resources, and the result is inevitable: it’s all going to end.

I’m not only talking about fossil fuels. We are consuming sand, gravel, metal ores, limestone, phosphate rock, copper, lithium, cobalt, and rare earth elements (not a complete list) at unsustainable and accelerating rates. All of these resources are finite and will eventually run out. Permanently.

Additionally, the unsustainable exploitation of renewable resources like freshwater, soil, forests, and fish, faster than they can regenerate leads to their depletion and the eventual collapse of the systems that sustain them. In other words, even the way we lived thousands of years ago would have been unsustainable if scaled to today’s levels, and the history of collapsed civilizations stand as a testament to this.

More energy is not the solution. Now, we’re scrambling to replace fossil fuels with renewables to keep these massive energy flows going. Why? Just look at the damage we’ve already done. It’s clear we can’t be trusted with limitless energy.

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Domination – Global culture, values, and beliefs

How did this system and worldview come to dominate? Why have we chosen such a self-destructive and ecocidal path?

Most people were likely forced into it at first. Conquered, coerced, or manipulated. But after a few generations of captivity, having been born in to it, it became ingrained, and now it’s the framework we all live by. It takes a lot to challenge the assumptions you’ve been surrounded by your entire life, especially when the system rewards compliance and punishes dissent.

For example, imagine a peaceful tribe living in balance with nature. But one day, a violent, expansionist civilization decides it must take their land, needing more resources to fuel its endless growth.

The peaceful tribe has three choices:

1. Abandon their land and allow the violent civilization to expand.

2. Submit to the demands and let the violent civilization expand.

3. Fight back and most likely get slaughtered, allowing the violent civilization to expand.

This is one way the culture of empire, expansion, colonization, and the pursuit of power, slowly spread across the world.

Then there’s religion, which played a big role in shaping the exploitative worldview we see today. It often justified conquest and colonization with ideas like the Christian civilizing mission and the divine right of kings, which provided moral excuses for expansion and reinforced hierarchies. Many monotheistic religions also taught that humans are separate from nature, encouraging its domination and exploitation. By replacing nature-focused beliefs with ones centered on control and growth, religion severed humanity’s connection to the environment.

Genesis 1:28:

"Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth."

For the last 500 years, Europeans have perfected a culture of domination, and behaved like an invasive species, colonizing lands, exploiting people, and stealing resources. First, through direct violence and colonization, later, through systemic oppression. Just read the history. It's all there, in plain sight. The expansion, the exploitation, and the unchecked thirst for power and wealth. The patterns are undeniable, and they’ve shaped the world we live in today.

Aboriginal men in chains at Wyndham prison in Australia c 1901

To be clear, this isn’t the first or only violent culture to seek world domination, there have been many throughout history. But European colonialism stands out as the most successful. Whether we like it or not, we’re all part of it. Some have benefited immensely, enjoying wealth, power, and comfort, while others have endured unimaginable suffering, with their lands stolen, cultures erased, and freedoms stripped away.

When Europeans and North Americans discovered fossil fuels, they gained the power to supercharge exploitation, fueling not just their industries but also exporting toxic beliefs and values across the globe. World War II and the globalization that followed cemented this dominance. They didn’t just win the war, they set the cultural and economic rules for the entire planet.

This dominant culture has effectively brainwashed and trapped the world into believing its way of life isn’t just the right way, it’s the only way. Through debt, rigged economic systems, technology, and an unrelenting flood of propaganda via media, advertising, the educational system, pop culture, nearly every nation and every person has been swept up in this ideology. Now, most leaders speak only of economic growth, and the general public desires the same. As much as possible, as cheaply as possible. Growth is good. Greed is good.

Some will argue that this has been great for humanity, but that’s only because they’re idiots. In the very short term, it did seem to work; people made more money, consumed more, enjoyed better healthcare, and grew more comfortable. Sounds great! Any consequences to that?

Yes, the entire biosphere is on the brink of collapse.

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The human zoo – trapped with no way out

When I take the blinders off and look at the world around me, what I see are animals, primates, that have lost their fucking minds. Mentally ill, caged animals, living in little bubbles, completely disconnected from the real world of animals, plants, soil, water, and the natural forces that produce everything that’s of any meaning whatsoever on this planet.

Conditioned and disconnected, the animals mindlessly follow values and beliefs they've been fed, with no understanding of how to survive outside the confines of the system. They don’t forage, hunt, or gather their own water. Their basic needs are fully provided by a few who set the rules of the zoo. Caged for so many generations, they no longer see the prison bars. Like a dog bound by its leash, they mistake their limited view for the entire world. They believe this is the only way to exist. And now, they have no idea how to survive without the system that sustains them.

The reality is that we’re now dependent on this system. Of course the majority of us will defend this system because our lives really do depend on it. Water on tap, food at the supermarket, electricity with the flick of a switch, these conveniences are our lifelines, and we’ll protect them at any cost. If the tap runs dry or the shelves are empty, we wouldn’t know where to begin. Without civilization, most of us would be dead in a week.

Everything we rely on is outsourced to corporations, to governments, to farmers, to factories, to global supply chains that stretch across continents. A handful of people now own and control most of it, wielding immense power and writing the rules to serve their interests. We’re not just living in an oligarchy anymore, I think we’ve reached the grand finale.

Not only are we trapped in this system because we lack the skills to live without it, but most of us cling to it because we’re addicted. Processed foods, sugary drinks, cigarettes, vapes, online shopping, gambling, work, alcohol, drugs, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Netflix, TikTok, porn, video games, reels, Tinder, Reddit, Substack. It’s endless. Deep down, we know it’s making us miserable. But we keep going back, unable to stop.

The vast majority, yes, even the self-proclaimed activists and environmentalists, don’t want to give up their comforts. Most people want cheap goods, free services, and convenience without considering the true cost. They’re willing to sacrifice nature itself to keep this machine running, because that’s what it takes to sustain this lifestyle, and most people are fine with it.

From what I can see, many of the people railing against the rich would gladly switch places with them if they were given the chance. Most people blaming oil executives don’t mind benefiting from the cheap energy and would hate to live without all the other essentials they provide, such as affordable food, pharmaceuticals, roads, clothing, and materials. Raise gas prices to $20 a gallon and watch society unravel.

People want to enjoy the perks of this system while criticizing it. It's the classic case of wanting their cake and eating it too, demanding change, but unwilling to give up the comforts and conveniences that sustain the very system they condemn. Imagine a government banning aviation, private cars, or cutting off cell phone service. There’d be riots within days.

No judgement here, I’m sitting here in my own cage, typing away on my overpriced Apple computer. I’m not about to ditch it all and head off to live in the jungle tomorrow. I’m addicted.

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Tick-tock, time’s up…

It’s too late to avoid catastrophic climate change. It’s already here, it’s accelerating, and it’s going to get much worse. It’s going to crush this civilization like a bug. We won’t stand a chance.

Even if we all came together, we did everything possible and we did everything right, it wouldn’t be enough to stop it, at best, we can delay. But here’s the problem: the things we could do to slow it down, radical reductions in consumption, halting fossil fuel use, practically ensures societal collapse and the death of billions. We can’t feed 8 billion people without fossil fuels. If we want to stop using fossil fuels now, we’re essentially calling for at least 3-4 billion people to die, probably more. Is that a good solution? I don’t think so.

But climate change isn’t the only problem we face. We have overshot the carrying capacity of the planet and we will collapse, no matter what. Even without climate change, resource depletion, pollution from novel entities and the destruction of the natural world would still push us toward complete disaster.

This is a predicament, not a problem. At this point, there are no solutions, only tradeoffs with severe consequences. Change is coming, and you can’t solve change. You can only adapt to it.

The sad truth is that this system has stripped us of our natural instincts and need for connection. We evolved to live in nature, move freely, and rely on close-knit communities. Now, we live isolated lives, surrounded by people but starved for real connection, hooked on technology instead of each other. We've lost the simple, vital ways that once made us human.

Part of truly seeing things as they are is feeling the deep isolation and alienation we've created, not just from each other, but from ourselves and the natural world. When you really take that in, when you truly experience it, the natural response is grief. Deep grief at the loss of connection. It’s the grief of realizing how far we've drifted from what truly matters.