The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens20 Mar

What to Do as the World Falls Apart: A Framework for Action | Frankly 132

This week's Frankly marks a turning point in the work of The Great Simplification. Having spent twenty years articulating the more-than-human predicament, Nate shifts from diagnosis to direction as current events – including conflict in the Strait of Hormuz – accelerate the timeline. Today Nate shares a first-pass framework for action and response that's organized around what to do now, which could be applied to various places and at multiple scales.

The framework begins with a personal foundation of inner work: stabilizing the nervous system, recapturing a sense of agency, doing grief work, and cultivating inner calmness as a precondition for effective action. Nate also emphasizes the need to build trusted networks and shared language so that when disruptions arrive, communities aren't starting conversations from scratch. These two layers set the foundation for six broad fronts of intervention: infrastructure and physical stock-and-flow planning, poverty and displacement, ecological defense and regeneration, civic resilience and governance, culture and meaning, and economic transition toward commons-based and post-growth models. Nate stresses that these fronts are interdependent and not contingent on a single scenario – they hold across various possible scenarios for the future.

Nate also introduces a timeline axis of three overlapping phases, which build upon each other to shape the conditions of our future: the current stability window where building is still possible, the period of triage and "bend not break," and the stable attractor that gives direction to the work of the first two. Nate closes with an observation about leadership: that modern systems select for dark triad traits, and that reluctance to lead may itself be a signal worth heeding.

What do you currently do with your time? Which of these six areas of engagement feels the most accessible to you right now? And where in your networks do you see the beginnings of shared language and trust that could support coordinated response?

(Recorded March 17th, 2026)

Show Notes and More

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