An Earnestly Incomplete Non-Guide for the Disillusioned, the Lost and the Totally Bewildered

Oh there you are! Good. Come sit with me a minute

Mar 29, 2025

Oh hello. You're here. Yay.

If you feel lost, far from home, ungrounded, disoriented, bewildered, suspicious, weary, like something’s fraying, like your old stories don't fit, like you're drowning while a shark eats your head... I totally know how all of that feels. Welcome. Let's keep each other company.

I've been through (still going through) a fairly spectacular, wildly destabilising, and wholly inconvenient reorientation of how the world looks and I've spoken to enough people about this now to know….it's a thing.

Maybe you resonate with one or some or all of these —

—WAIT. Hold it. That sounds like the beginning of one of those pitches where I try and sell you something at the end, once I have you nodding along in recognition. That is a bajillion percent not happening here. No sales whatsoever. You can exhale and carry on.

Ok so, maybe you are:

Kinda spinning from your growing realisation that the world is deeply, systemically, dangerously off-course

Awkwardly aware that capitalism, colonialism, and climate collapse are touching all the things, but unsure what that means for...your work and social life and future and identity and stuff?

Trying to unlearn grind, guilt, productivity addiction and perfectionism, knowing (or suspecting) it's all related to an ecocidal, extractive system...but it's really bloody hard to do all this unlearning and also your job demands grind and you need to pay rent, so...

Burnt out from trying to fix yourself, optimise your routine/dopamine/mindset or whatever you're supposed to do these days to at least keep up (never mind fumble toward something like happiness) when you're just very, very tired.

Curious about a deeper, slower, kinder, gentler way to live—but also kinda cringing at how everything is being called ‘sacred’ now… and we are supposed to be ‘rewilding’ everything… and doesn't it all still reek of sales?

Secretly wondering if it’s you that’s wrong or mad (or are you actually already dead and this is hell?) as people rush around you scrolling, shopping and doing normal things that feel distorted and weird and leave you feeling slimy and alone

All of this might be especially excruciating if you sometimes identify with experiences of anxiety, ‘extreme’ sensitivity (oh, sorry I’m shedding tears about genocide) or expressions of neurodiversity of many kinds…all for reasons which are totally connected

You feel all alone on the vast mountain plateau, the looming jagged ridgeline worryingly close, and the fog is heavy.

I'm here too and I have been for a while. What follows is most definitely not a programme, a promise, a fix, a curriculum, an answer.

They are rock cairns.

where I talk about rock cairns, skip ahead if you don't like metaphors or rocks

Rock cairns— if you aren't familiar with them (like I wasn't for the first nearly 3 decades of my life on account of spending very little time outside in the natural world, and way more time in dark, smoke-filled parties trying to anaesthetise, with drugs and alcohol, my experience of being a human in a world which felt very excruciating to me) —are piles of rocks and stones, used to mark a trail. Not necessarily to provide direction (although sometimes), but more to say: You are not lost. Someone was here too, on foot, like you. This is doable.

I spend a lot of time in the backcountry of Aotearoa New Zealand these days (and very minimal time at the smoke-filled parties) and I love finding a rock cairn. There's been many a time I've thought I've been lost and I see a reassuring rock cairn and feel that whooshing of relief.

Rock cairns say: You are not totally lost (although it might feel like it)

Rock cairns say: Someone was here too, where you are now. This is navigable with care.

Rock cairns are also markers of burial grounds in some place. Places of death. We'll talk about that later. It will be fun.

If you prefer a different metaphor, you might think of the little segments below as handfuls of breadcrumbs, hastily flung as I round another corner in the deep, dark forest.

The stars are so bright at night from here.

Another metaphor is this is a nest for you and others to rest in, and get your strength back, but I am still feathering it myself.

If you actually don't like metaphors and just wish I would speak plainly: I am not wise enough, mature enough or experienced enough to guide you. But I can tell you that you're not alone up here on the foggy plateau and share what I have seen so far for you to take lightly.

a note on the necessary incompleteness of this page

This page has just been born (the very end of March 2025, coincidentally on a new moon). As a newborn, it can't keep it's head up yet and it spitting up a lot. But it is looking at you lovingly.

This page is alive. Like me. And you.

Also like us, it’s unfinished, evolving, and makes mistakes.

Where you see mentions of stuff, I often have a resource or recommendation on that, I just need to get it in shape.

But the page had to be posted incomplete and insufficient because I just had another conversation with someone about .....all this.....and just knowing you're not alone does a lot for someone in the fog. Also: my own internalised stories of individualism, success, perfectionism, mastery and other nonsense that stops one from doing a lot of things.

Below will be the rock cairns as they look at the moment, starting with the first. Small pile of rocks that have marked my time on the foggy mountain plateau, so far. If you're like me, you'll stumble between them and over them all in a nonlinear way. That’s supposed to happen, I think.

If you have a pebble to add to any of the cairns, you can email me or leave a comment.