Dear Hopestars,

So here it is, the early (very early!) draft first chapter of the Hope Book. I would really appreciate your feedback – does it land, does it make you feel hopeful, give you a sense of agency and wanting to keep reading on? Or perhaps you switch off? Maybe sharing chapters of a book into this newsletter isn’t the format you need. All and any feedback is welcome. It’s not perfect. I realised I am still writing for a blog instead of a book. I will fix those things as I go. I hope you can find spaces and places to rest and recover your nervous system this week, let me know if it makes any difference to you.

Lots of love, Megan

2 years ago I was walking through the cobbled and lush laneways of Ubud in Bali with some friends. One of them had a novel take on AI.  They said “The world won’t be recognisable in 3 years time”.  My other friend glanced at me, and I sensed the flicker of an eyeroll.  

They were specifically referring to the vast changes that we would witness in the world of work as AI interjects into most domains of work. It was a little hard to comprehend, as the most I had really done at that point was to get a recommendation on how to fix an issue on my computer, get it to do some messaging for me or had big belly laughs at how it couldn’t work out how many fingers or thumbs humans had.

But taking stock over the last month of my uses of AI alone, I was able to get an accurate medical diagnosis (ChatGPT diagnosed shingles for me, enabling me to get my doctor to prescribe antivirals within the window of efficacy), provided legal advice (It wrote a legally defensible will, but with my own bubbly personality infused into it) It supported me with some illustration (generated scene options), gave me enough financial information that I could make my own investment decisions with confidence. It gave me enough information and step by step guidance to repair my own espresso machine. It supported me with insights into ADHD parenting, and it has helped me generate visual assets and storyboards to create an animated film. It has given me personal ‘coaching’ and helped me to learn cognitive behavioural therapy. The upshot is there are so many professions that are touched by AI, and no solution in sight for what will happen when we no longer go to each other to contract these services. This could mean mass unemployment across the professional class.

We have one year to go before we can judge the accuracy of my friend's dramatic assertion that they made in Bali.  But I suspect that this year will be when the fallout starts to be felt. Suffice to say this is just one metric of societal change that is giving us whiplash with the speed that it is affecting livelihoods and the structure of the economy.

But more than that, things feel harder than they did even just 5 years ago.

It feels harder in my body; it has a distinct heaviness. When I pause and bodyscan I frequently discover a constriction in my throat (what is yearning to be spoken?)  or a dead weight in my  belly (sick to my stomach of this way of being), a dullness in my head (dizzy with all the speed of change), concrete in my shoulders (what can one person do?). 

But even in my yoga I mostly don’t listen that deeply to my body. It’s inconvenient to connect with myself at that level of honesty. 

And we gotta know that it will not be lightening up soon. Where is the hope in that thought?

If you are like me, a flicker of fear might come over you - how much more can I personally hold?  

To cope, my body imperceptibly tightens before I open the news. I scroll past an image of suffering and my coping mechanisms cover over the sense of pain and guilt with a numbness. 

There is a sense of time speeding up as the stakes and the problems ratchet up. It feels like we are collectively exhausted. I don’t think it is because we are weak or because we lack resilience. It is not because we are failing to keep up. It is because we are living inside something unprecedented, and it is pressing directly on our nervous systems. 

We often talk about the polycrisis as if it is an abstract idea, a collection of difficult events that have piled on top of one another.  Rising costs. Climate change. War. Disinformation. Ecological breakdown. AI acceleration. Political instability. Social fragmentation.

But the polycrisis is not merely a phenomenon. It is a felt experience. It is a full-body event. It is a collective dysregulation loop. 

Our minds register stories. Our bodies register threat. Long before we consciously understand what is happening in the world, our nervous systems have already absorbed it. 

We are the world's feeling system. We are the ones who experience it through our feeling and emotional body. This is our guidance system.  We process, digest… or cover and cope. 

There are few spaces and hardly time in this world for the experiencing.   Keep calm and carry on.  The world is speeding up but our bodies are not. It is hard to hold hope in a constant onslaught. 

There is a moment I keep coming back to. I was scrolling late at night, an  image of a starving child in Gaza filled my screen. Dust on his face. His father’s arms wrapped around him. His eyes wide with something I can only describe as ancient fear. I felt the familiar ache in my chest, the sting behind my eyes.

And then, with almost no conscious decision, I looked away. The scroll reflex took over; Protect. Avoid. Move on.

But my body did not move on, something stayed lodged inside me. A numbness that felt like a weighted blanket over my heart. It was the cost of exposure without the capacity to hold what I saw. It was my body saying enough. 

Our devices were never meant to funnel the world’s pain into our palms at the speed of a BBC news alert. Our nervous systems were never meant to metabolise an entire planet’s crises before morning tea.

The polycrisis is not just many things happening at once ‘out there’. It is many things happening inside us; inside our body, our corpus, individual and planetary all at once and this is the part we often miss.

So If you feel overwhelmed, you are not maladjusted. I would say you are attuned.

Your overwhelm is not a personal shortcoming. It is a physiological response to a world that has exceeded the built-in buffering capacity of the human nervous system. Think about how many times a day your system is asked to switch states.

We go from a message about a cyclone to a video about police violence to an ad for cookware to a graph of global democracy decline to our child asking what is for dinner to an article saying we have breached yet another planetary boundary. Each one asks your body to shift gears. From vigilance to empathy to problem-solving to suppression to planning to grief to numbness. All before you have finished your morning coffee.

This is not how humans evolved.

Our nervous systems were shaped by long arcs of slowness and seasonal rhythms. Cycles that you could feel in your bones. Danger might have arrived occasionally, not continually. We had anchors in the community (churches and neighbours). Anchors in land (deeper connection, relationship) and anchors in shared meaning (shared values and religion).

Now we are asked to carry multiple crises at once, in isolation, with a body that is constantly bracing.

Hope does not disappear because we lack character.

Hope disappears because we lose the physiological room or the human bandwidth to hold it.  This is the part almost no one talks about. The polycrisis is a nervous system event. It is happening inside us long before it happens in institutions or ecosystems.

The  erosion of trust, the collapse of truth. The diminishing sense of certainty.
The dissolution of shared reality, a departure of predictable norms. These are not merely political shifts to reckon with, they are somatic shocks.

I am experiencing this collapse in my  body as disorientation “this is too much, when will things be normal again?”. And here is where the danger lies. When we are living in a state of overwhelm, we move into survival mode. And the survival mode shrinks our imagination.  It narrows our time horizon,  pushing us toward the most basic impulses.

Fight, flight, Freeze. Numb out.
Opt out.

This is where cynicism takes root. It’s not because people don’t care, but because they can no longer afford the vulnerability of caring.

I don’t think cynicism deserves the platform of superior instinct as it is portrayed.  It is merely self-protection from getting hurt by caring too much.

And when enough people are protecting themselves instead of participating, that is when the social fabric frays.

So here is the first truth of this book. Hope is not an answer to the polycrisis. Hope is a practice that helps you stay human inside of it. And the first place of practice is your home on this earth, your body.

If we want to meet the world with courage, imagination and agency, we have to understand what is happening inside our bodies. We have to recognise our dysregulation as a political and emotional signal. If we want to ever trust each other and the world again, we have to learn how to restore our own capacity so that hope has somewhere to land.

We cannot engage with complexity if we cannot emotionally regulate. We cannot build futures if our bodies are stuck in emergency mode. How can we imagine alternatives when our systems are overloaded and the amygdala is running the show?

Every one of us carries a part of the polycrisis in our bodies. Some of us hold the ecological grief. Some hold the political exhaustion. Some hold the economic fear. Some hold the ancestral trauma. Some hold the grief of not knowing what to tell our children about the world they are inheriting.

There is no shame in that - the weight is real. But this is also our realm of greatest agency and responsibility. 

The question then moves to action and enquiry - how do we stay open when our instinct is to shut down? How do we stay connected when everything is pulling us apart?
How do we stay imaginative when fear keeps narrowing our focus? How do we stay in relationship with truth when truth keeps hurting? 

How do we keep our humanity intact?

I believe we can begin by better listening to our bodies and trusting its ability to process grief, trauma and hardship. By restoring our capacity to feel and digest experiences – we are  tending to the nervous system that carries our hope. And we used to do most of our experiencing and processing together, connected to our communities through church, shared rituals or caring for each other in difficult moments.  But modernity has changed all that. So we need to restore the places and spaces –inside and out – where our hope and humanity lives.  

Our hope is not separate from us. It is not something you summon in spite of your body. Hope is what becomes possible when your body is able to stay present in the world without collapsing under it. 

That is why I call the polycrisis a nervous system event. Hope is the skill that allows us to rise to what is being called from us without losing ourselves.

And the good news is - we can develop our capacity to respond. It’s not even hard, it takes will and commitment to develop a new orientation.Hope should be available to all of us, when we can develop our inner capacity to respond to these massive changes afoot for humanity and our world. And that is what this book is here to support you with.

(Next chapter will explore some ways to meet the nervous system, develop our capacity to digest experiences, and work on our sense of humanity.)