Last Week... Part 2

5 great articles and a few comments by me

My challenge continues to be the overwhelming volume of good reading material on Substack. Still writing mostly to myself, there were five articles last week that I would like to comment on. One felt special.

these five lines of obscure symbols encode a complete theory of reality... SERIOUSLY???

Project Omega Begins: The Theory, the Cipher, and the Challenge by Bobby Azarian

Why the radio silence? The short answer: I had to write a book, and it was really, really hard. Our Cosmic Purpose: A Practical Guide to Waking Up the Universe was due on the first day of the year though I didn’t get the full draft turned in until last month.

The list of books to be published in 2026 that I am interested in is growing longer.

A Theory of Everything (TOE), by virtue of being a theory of everything, should actually explain everything, at least in some basic sense. That is to say, the true TOE will be an EFE—an explanation for everything that includes emergent phenomena like life, mind, and culture. For this reason, the grand unified theories of physics we hear so much about, like String Theory, are not true TOEs, as they do not even attempt to explain consciousness or emergence, or any of the things we really care about.

I agree.

The theory is “completely incomplete” because it is complete in scope (covering reality from quantum to cosmic scales), yet necessarily incomplete because each attempt to finalize a comprehensive theory of reality reveals new implications that demand meta-theoretical extensions, adding new layers of complexity to the framework. This dynamic mirrors the growing architecture of an evolving reality…

Reality itself operates through this same recursive dynamic.

This incompleteness is a key metamodern insight. The metamodern worldview will always remain open, never complete. It seems to me that that reality, ultimate reality and the totality of reality will always remain a Mystery.

BUT, as much as I admire the work of Bobby Azarian…

The Challenge: Decode The Glaive

The Glaive will not resonate with average and ordinary people, all Galaxy Brain without a Galaxy Heart.

THE SECRET FEAR TRUMP CAN’T OUTRUN by Jack Hopkins

Why I Suspect the Epstein File Panic Isn’t About Girls…But About a Deep Masculinity Collapse

The Cult of the Hyper-Heterosexual Alpha Male.

But humiliation.
Identity death.
The collapse of the Alpha Myth.

That’s the fear…he can’t outrun.

All very interesting, to say the least.

Back to the future by Alex Evans

So how do we think this apocalyptic polycrisis of ours is going to turn out?

We argued that the world had entered a turbulent period defined by four different kinds of risk: sudden shocks, longer-term stresses, deliberate disruption by hostile actors, and our own failure to build resilience.

Scenario 1: Rise of the Oligarchs

Scenario 2: Big Mother

Scenario 3: Fragile Resilient

Scenario 4: Winning Ugly

Finally, Winning Ugly — which is distributed and collective — was our best case scenario.

Yes, with a radical hope that is slowly fading, let’s cheer for winning ugly.

Mother Mary Full of Shit by JoJoFromJerz and The Siren

Somebody I follow restacked this article. Thank you. At times I laughed out loud as I read this deadly serious rant about Karoline Leavitt, who isn’t a press secretary.

She slithers into that briefing room like it’s a drive-thru confessional for the spiritually bankrupt, clutching a binder stuffed with pre-chewed propaganda and wearing a smile so stretched it looks like it was stapled on by a drunk taxidermist. She speaks in a dialect that’s been laundered in cowardice, rinsed in a pawn shop Bible, buffed by interns with no soul, and spat back out like a hymnal rewritten by ChatGPT after a head injury. You ask her about a seventy-nine-year-old man calling a woman piggy, and she hands you that polished little turd she calls “frankness” — like it’s a sacrament, not the verbal equivalent of picking a scab with a dirty fork and calling it dermatology.

This, imo, is brilliant descriptive writing, a joy to read on that level.

But one article touched me deeply, another article I found only because someone I follow restacked it. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. This article goes far in describing who I am today, as I will explain.

THE TRUTH ABOUT COLLAPSE ACCEPTANCE by Adrian Lambert

There is a moment in collapse awareness that people rarely describe with clarity. It is not the moment you learn the facts… Acceptance is the psychological recognition that the worldview you lived inside no longer holds.

For me personally, collapse awareness and collapse acceptance came together in 2019. This was probably true because I had already experienced the collapse of my worldview at midlife when I lost my Christian faith. And in subsequent years, my confidence in my secular humanist worldview began declining soon after my retirement in 2012. So the third time for worldview collapse seemed easier psychologically.

This is the beginning of collapse acceptance. It begins with the death of a story, and with the loss of the inner self shaped by that story.

The story that has died is the story of Modernity and for me it began to die in 2015 when Trump came down the escalator.

Modern industrial civilisation is built on a cultural story that shapes almost everything. It assumes that progress is normal, that growth is natural, and that the future will be larger and more comfortable than the past. This story lives in education, economics, media, family life and even personal identity. It becomes so familiar that most people never recognise it as a story.

This is the part many collapse writers rarely describe. The worldview dies inside you before the civilisation dies around you… You begin to feel misaligned with people around you, not emotionally but existentially… You begin noticing the effects in your relationships.

Yes, and this is deeply personal as I increasingly felt misaligned with family and friends but finally accepting that it was I, not them, who had changed.

The symbolic self is the identity you construct within a worldview. It shapes your expectations of adulthood, your ambitions, your beliefs about success, your understanding of your place in the world. It is a self built on continuity and the assumption of an open future.

When the worldview collapses, the symbolic self begins to die.

This is not metaphorical, but a psychological structure. The death does not feel like liberation. It feels like contraction.

My Christian Self died at midlife. My Secular Humanist Self died early in retirement. But, for me, these deaths do feel like liberation. For me, it feels like expansion rather than contraction.

This death is permanent. You cannot return to the self who believed in continuity. The transformation is irreversible.

I agree. I can never again be who I once was. And I am grateful for the transformation.

To reach acceptance, you have to be prepared to do the work. You have to want to live honestly, no matter the cost.

In 2025, collapse acceptance has cost me two long-term friendships.

Collapse acceptance takes place inside a culture that has no room for it. Industrial societies depend on optimism for coherence. They depend on narratives of improvement to stabilise institutions and identities. They depend on technological salvation stories to maintain psychological continuity.

A culture built on progress cannot understand decline. A culture built on growth cannot understand limits. A culture built on death denial cannot understand contracting futures.

This is why collapse acceptance feels unspeakable. You begin to see the world through a lens that the culture cannot acknowledge.

This explains why others cannot see what we see.

Collapse acceptance changes how you relate to people. Not because you want distance, but because you no longer share the same underlying story. The cultural narrative that once connected you to others dissolves inside you, while it remains intact for them. You still care for the same people, but the interior world that shaped your conversations, expectations and shared meaning is no longer the one you live inside.

And this is why those of us who are collapse accepting need to gather together in a community that can scale.

Acceptance does not remove existential fear, but makes space for it. You stop trying to escape mortality through fantasies of progress. You stop trying to outsource meaning to institutions that are themselves disintegrating. You stop believing that the future will rescue the present.

You begin to live inside limits. You begin to live with proportion. You begin to live without needing the world to be different.

This is the truth about collapse acceptance. Awareness can be learned. Acceptance is lived.

I feel that I have lived this article and that only those others who have lived it too will understand. For me, collapse awareness comes with profound sadness. However, paradoxically, as Modernity dies, I feel ALIVE and I experience brief moments of what can best be described as weepy joy.