Part II: The Connecting ⚡️💡

The second part of The Earnestly Incomplete Non-Guide for the Disillusioned, the Lost and the Totally Bewildered

May 13, 2025

You're back. Thank goodness.

You’ve arrived at the second rock cairn, called The Connecting.

Rock Cairns. Small piles of stones and pebbles. Someone’s been here before. You are not alone. This terrain is navigable.

If you don’t know what I mean by rock cairn, you may have missed the introduction to the The Earnestly Incomplete Non-Guide for the Disillusioned, the Lost and the Totally Bewildered. Catch that here for context:

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

Mar 29

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And the first rock cairn (the first part of the non-guide) is here if you need that:

Part I: The Cracking 〰️ ⧷ ⧄

May 13

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…otherwise, come join me at The Connecting.

The Connecting ⚡️

Bright lightning illuminates the sky
Spider weaves
River delta
Murmuration of starlings
Mercury in Aquarius

what might be happening?

I'll just say it. People at the cairn that I'm calling The Connecting are not fun to hang out with.

(unless you, too, are at The Connecting... in which case it's going to be quite the riotous time of revelation together. Excited for you)

People at The Connecting (including you if you find yourself here) are not fun because they are tremendously preoccupied by whatever book or screen that their face is smushed up against, devouring, with a ravenous intensity, the past, the present, and the future of the world they were not taught at school and that which was distorted and obfuscated from them in various ways throughout their lives.

Until now.

Folks at The Connecting are seeing that everything is connected.

Everything.

Click click click, goes their brain.

click click click

It might have begun back at The Cracking (see above) with their realising just how serious the climate crisis is and just how little our global leaders are doing about it.

Or it might have been seeing the rise of authoritarianism.

Or it might have been seeing their daughter’s body image worries.

Or maybe it was frustration that their elderly parent now needs a smartphone and an app just to park the car....which requires way more than the myopic designers of these systems care to think about, including the requirement of at least 1) non-arthritic fingers and 2) various pairs of different glasses for driving and using a phone, as well as 3) having to remember all this when all they want to do is park in town so they can go to their local bank because online banking is hard too, but no, no one thinks of that... and on and on.

But it won't stop there, with the climate crisis / authoritarianism / daughter’s body image / frustration for elderly parent thing.

Our friends at The Connecting will see how those things are connected.

And then they will see how those things are connected to....
all
the
other
things.

Everything is connected.

click click click

Empire. Colonisation. Seeds. Enclosures. GDP. Religion. Agriculture. Bees. Cold wars. Hot wars. Literacy. Extraction. Prison. Media. Coffee. Therapy. Patriarchy. Big Tech. Shampoo. Indigenous language suppression. Big Oil. Algorithm. Chronic illness. Racism. Psychology. Police. Farmer suicides. Marijuana. Advertising. Burnout. Subsidies. Climate. The price of butter. Genocide. Fossil fuels. Mental health. Their diet. Their education. Their housing. Their heartbreak.

click click click

The Connecting may start suddenly and with a tremendous, almost manic, zeal, but it's likely to reach a terrifying crescendo and then recede somewhat, to then continue in pulses, in ebbs and flows or what we might call "weird blobs".

This is because the initial giddy intensity, the frenetic energy click click click cannot be maintained long-term in a living system such as a human being—
(Living systems! Human beings! Energy! click click click All nodes on the growing web of understanding for those at The Connecting)
— without said living system compensating in some way: like a tree shedding leaves or a human lying on a sofa for days staring at a tiny spider web in one corner of the room (possibly while a solitary tear tracks slowly down one cheek?).

Not only the not-being-able to-maintain-initial-pace-of-intensive-connecting thing, but the person at The Connecting will reach a point where they think they get it.

They have seen so much.
There can’t be much more to see.
There can’t be much more to connect.

So their ravenous reading and watching and listening and looking will fade a bit...

…only to be surprised by the next thing that couldn't possibly have been connected but totally was. This is the weird blob that I mentioned before.

(For me personally it was seeing the connection between the invention of the plough to an eating disorder that I struggled with for two decades. Seriously.)

Amongst all this click click clicking, our friend at The Connecting (is it you?) is seeing a truth, a truth so blindingly white, starting to emerge. They are seeing how, no matter which node you look at or which direction you go in, all of this....

….is fundamentally entirely, spectacularly unsustainable and has to, one way or another, collapse, break down, simplify.

It’s all unravelling.

recognising the signs in yourself or others:

People at The Connecting may be quite gleeful, in an odd way, particularly at first. This is likely due to their mammalian pattern-loving brain revelling in all the unexpected squirts of dopamine as they click click click their way through history, economics, sociology, ecology, psychology, geopolitics, systems science, biology, cosmology (and the rest)

But expect the glee to melt into something like:

shock (lots)
unbridled horror (lots)
rage (variable, depending on gender conditioning of the person, which will later be a thing they also see and connect )
guilt
sadness
bewilderment
the odd sharp laugh
existential despair

Our friends here at The Connecting will be so incredulous at how they could not have seen all this before. They will, in time, come to see that their inability to see was all part of……it.

(For me again, I saw how I could not possibly have seen “all this” before, as I was rather busy trying to starve myself into a body size that would unlock the health and happiness and love and success that I was told was available. This took up all my mental and physical energy and required a complex framework of lies, drugs, codependent behaviours and self-loathing. I had no spare capacity to notice things like how my disordered obsession with my weight was me unwittingly playing an assigned part in a culture that thrived on my disconnection from hunger, pleasure, and worthiness. Silly me)

Other signs of someone being at The Connecting:

You might find them muttering under their breath while staring out the window.

You might catch a lot of lights going on behind their eyes.

They might become fiercely and somewhat desperately attached to certain authors, speakers, or thinkers who seem to be telling the truth.

You might hear them gasp audibly while reading.

They might be picking up old photographs and peering at them. This is normal. They are recasting their past as their own stories look different.

people here might need:

A listening ear. They can't believe what they are learning and connecting. Let them share with you, it will help them process.
Patience. Lots.
LOVE. Ooodles and oodles of love.
Reassurance in many forms: reassurance that they couldn’t have known before….reassurance that they are not crazy, stupid, naïve, or bad for not knowing earlier….reassurance they are not a conspiracy theorist…..reassurance that although everything they thought they knew is now in tatters, something else will be seen and will take shape (in time)
Perhaps a small altar to those who are helping them connect the dots, witg old and new ideas from a spectrum of umans across time, cultures and contexts and geographies (e.g. Donella Meadows, Jason Hickel, Nate Hagens; bell hooks, James Baldwin, Vandana Shiva, Alnoor Ladha to name but just a teeny selection of people who personally helped me. Well, not *personally* helped me. You know what I mean, right?)
Cake in the mailbox: I said this at **The Cracking** as well because cake in the mailbox is just always a good idea whether someone is navigating the destruction of their conceptual reality or not.

a special note if you cohabit with someone at The Connecting

Be very, very cautious about what you buy, eat, endorse otherwise bring into the house.

Your person at *The Connecting may have only just realised, say, that Nestlé, Big Fruit, the Cold War, religious fundamentalism, fossil fuel subsidies, the murder of dissenters (and on and on and on) all fit together and are ......whoops! .... often found in our shopping carts.

You might want to just not buy anything, ever again. Just in case.

Our person at The Connecting has been irrevocably changed.

It's still unfolding.

Tread gently.

But stay close. Ish.

click click click

pebbles at this cairn

Here are some pebbles (just from me right now but more to come from others) that might be helpful here, mostly because they are inspired by, or even made from, my time at The Connecting. But those at The Connecting might not need another thing to listen to, do or read. You can decide. I’ll leave them here for now.