In the previous essay, I described the technological attunement—a preconscious orientation to encounter the world as a set of resources to be used or optimized—and the comfort class this has engendered. I argued that the extractive pattern is beginning to crack on its own, as the system fails to deliver the security it promises.
But is there something truly different to move toward, or is the technological attunement a hard-wired default, the only orientation available to us? Political reactions to the extractive pattern’s degeneration—such as authoritarianism and techno-utopianism—may look like departures, but they too treat the world as something to be acted upon, whether by force or by design.
The same orientation runs through conversations about systemic change focused on practices and policies such as economic incentives, regulatory reforms, and technological fixes. They’re the technological attunement applied to the problem of changing it.
I think there is another option. This essay is an attempt to describe it.
For the first part of my career, my academic work was technically competent but felt hollow, applying sophisticated tools to questions that didn’t feel meaningful to me. As I described in the first essay, I eventually came to see that the extractive framework I had been trained in was complicit in the breakdown of the systems that sustain life, and I found an intellectual path to regenerative economics. But that recognition was still analytical; it didn’t land anywhere deeper than thought.
An encounter with an expanded state of awareness changed that. It did not give me new knowledge; it shifted my relationship to what I already knew. What I experienced was a felt sense of belonging to something vastly larger than myself: a knowing that did not feel new or acquired, but revealed. The regenerative pattern I had been studying was not just something out there; it was what I was made of.
The technological attunement’s orienting question, operating below conscious thought, is how can I use this? My encounter helped me glimpse a different way of relating to the world, what I have come to call the symbiotic attunement: a felt knowing of inseparability from everything around me. Its orienting question: how can I live well with this?
Under the technological attunement, it is self-evident that you should optimize and accumulate. Under the symbiotic attunement, it is self-evident that the only way to thrive is together. This is not a matter of acquiring different values; it is a shift in the ground on which values form. You meet someone and sense not what they can offer you, but what you share. You look at a landscape and see not what it could become, but the life it already holds. You approach your own life not as a project to optimize, but as one strand of a weaving larger than you.
The symbiotic attunement might sound like a pleasant idea, a nicer way of perceiving. But it’s also a more accurate one: not a sensibility you bring to the world, but a recognition of what is already the case.
To encounter the world as a set of resources is to understand it as a collection of separate things, each severable from what surrounds it. The disconnection I described in the first essay is what this perceptual frame produces. Much of the mental distress that grips our society reflects the dissonance between this frame and the relational fabric of life.
Cells cooperate into organisms. Organisms cooperate into ecosystems. Mycorrhizal networks redistribute nutrients across forests. As the pathologist and complexity theorist Neil Theise observes in Notes on Complexity, even the human body is not a singular entity, but a living system arising from the interactions of roughly 37 trillion cells self-organizing into a coherent pattern. We are intrinsically relational beings.
The same relational logic repeats at every scale: flocks hold their shape through each bird’s responsiveness to the others; ecosystems regenerate through distributed reciprocity; phytoplankton produce half the planet’s oxygen, sustained by nutrients carried up from the deep. Even forms of relationship that look like rupture are part of the broader web of life: the wolf kills the elk and keeps the aspen groves alive; the fire burns the forest and makes room for what comes next.
We do not live inside this web; we are expressions of it. My encounter left me not just with this insight, but with the feeling. I felt safe. I felt held. What the comfort class tries to attain through accumulation and control was already there the moment I stopped standing apart. This is what genuine security feels like: not the quiet anxiety of having enough, but the release in remembering you are already woven in.
This recognition is not new; it is among the oldest and most widely shared orientations in human history. The African philosophy Ubuntu—"I am because we are"—holds that selfhood is relational at its core. The Andean buen vivir speaks of living well in right relationship with community and the living world. These are not outlier traditions. Buddhist, Daoist, and indigenous cosmologies across the world arrive independently at the same recognition: human well-being is inseparable from the well-being of the systems we inhabit. As Jeremy Lent notes in his new book Ecocivilization, humans spent roughly ninety-five percent of our species’ history in small, relatively egalitarian communities where identity was constituted through relationship—with each other and with the broader web of life—and accumulation at the expense of community was socially unthinkable. Our current way of being in the world is not a necessary expression of human nature. It is a development of the last five percent of our history, one we are not bound to continue.
The recognition spans not just different cultures but different kinds of knowing: the methods of complexity science, the lived insights of contemplative traditions, the inherited wisdom of indigenous cosmologies, and the direct experience of expanded states. To make the claim that experiential and relational knowing have something to add to what science alone can grasp is to stand at the boundary of what is considered credible in the academic world I inhabit. Why that boundary exists, and what it costs us, is something I will take up in a later essay.
Expanded states of awareness—temporary suspensions of our usual ways of orienting to reality—allow us to perceive what our habituated patterns of mind normally suppress. The clinical psychologist Rosalind Watts and colleagues at Imperial College London identified increases in felt connectedness to self, others, and the wider world as a central mechanism of psilocybin-assisted therapy for depression. Other researchers have documented increases in nature relatedness and psychological openness, as well as changes in beliefs about the fundamental nature of reality. Similar shifts may occur from experiences that don’t produce expanded states in the same dramatic way: contemplative practice, extended time in wild landscapes, regular somatic practice, encounters with profound grief or beauty. These shifts point in a consistent direction, regardless of how they are occasioned.
Expanded states can show us what is already there. But the systems we have built pull us back toward the technological attunement: the economic pressures, the social expectations, the demands for optimization.
The technological attunement doesn’t just sever us from the world; it severs us within ourselves. The same logic that breaks the world into resources breaks the self into parts to be managed. We become observers of our own performance, curating what we feel and what we let show. It’s a quiet surveillance we run on ourselves: am I being productive, am I making the most of this, am I falling behind? A self at low-level war with itself, present to its own life only intermittently. The disconnection we see in the world, we carry inside.
The symbiotic attunement is not only a different way of orienting to the world; it is a more coherent way of being a self. What we glimpse in the moments when separateness dissolves is not only our continuity with the living world, but our continuity with ourselves.
Staying in this attunement is not a matter of will or repeated insight; it is a question of what holds the integration in place when the pressures that fragment us return. I’ll take this question up in the next essay.