Finding the middle way

Post-Growth in Practice (Part 4)

Samhain celebrations at our kid’s school this week. Sitting around the fire with our lanterns singing to the earth.

There is a certain kind of madness pulsating through our culture now. We can all feel it. Men in glass towers speak in tongues of abstraction, invest in islands and bunkers, and imagine uploading consciousness into machines while the seas rise around them. They call it progress, but it tastes of forgetting: of soil unfelt, children unfed, gods uninvited. This is the old Earth in its final costume, garish, loud, numinously grotesque. It is dying in a scream that drowns out birdsong and lullabies, a scream rendered in code and profit margins, in curated lives posted at the edge of annihilation.

But there is another Earth too... Do you feel it? Enduring, older, and yet still being born. You won’t find it in headlines or software updates. It lives in the untelevised tenderness of neighbours cooking for each other. In the decision to homeschool not just because we've lost faith in the system because we want to reclaim our agency and time together as a family. In gardens built not to stockpile or ensure survival in times of crisis, but to practise what we value: slowness and belonging. This Earth doesn’t market itself. It grows through conversation, creativity and refusal to relent; through a re-imagining of what a life is for. It is a revolt that smells of rosemary and woodsmoke.

Across cultures and centuries, there have been stories that told of this duality. Of a fork in the road, a split in the world. The Hopi spoke of two paths: one of balance with the Earth, the other of disconnection and collapse. The Gnostics described a false world layered over the real, with liberation coming only through deep inner seeing. Christian mystics warned of a narrow way that few would walk. And more recently, voices in ecology, philosophy, new age spirituality and fiction have echoed the same motif: that we are choosing, consciously or not, between participating in a dying system and the humble work of tending something older, slower, and not yet fully formed.

We are not the first to face such a moment. But we may be among the last to face it at this scale.

We see it. Most of us do. The absurdity isn’t lost on anyone. The emperor is half-naked in a rocket suit. The spectacle is obvious. What’s harder is knowing what to do about it. What’s harder still is not laughing or crying or simply scrolling on.

The ground is shifting beneath us. And as tempting as it is to rail against the old world, to scream for something better, to raise our pitchforks and our angry voices, there is something far more powerful available to us: we can turn away. Not in denial or as bypassing, but as an act of choice and clarity. We can stop waiting for them to change and start doing the work ourselves. In our homes, our kitchens, our communities, and our hearts. We don’t need to have the answers. We only need to begin, and to keep showing up with enough determination to tend what is still good and what could yet be beautiful.

Maybe the path forward isn’t about tearing it all down or retreating into the past. Maybe there’s a middle way, one that honours the Earth without discarding the genuine progress we’ve made. A way that doesn’t ask us to live like it’s 1600, but doesn’t sell our souls to a silicon future either. It might look like choosing which technologies we carry forward, and which we relinquish. Keeping the tools that serve connection, healing, and collective resilience, and walking away from those that hollow us out and leave us empty. The question is not whether we can go back. The question is whether we’re willing to go deeper.

Hubby and youngest enjoying a late autumn sunrise over our valley this week.

This essay has been sitting in my drafts for a while, slowly forming in parallel with a growing wave of similar reflections.

Stephanie C. Bell’s In Search of the Middle Path begins with a garden she planted along the edges, unintentionally leaving the centre bare. She uses that image to reflect on how we tend to avoid places of paradox and complexity. Her piece grounds the middle path in daily life, as a practice of holding two opposing truths in relationship. It led me to consider how we might apply that same discipline to collapse. This is the heart of what I’ve been trying to name in this series: the work of staying in the middle, holding both, and learning to live from that place.

In search of the middle path.

Jo Hanlon-Moores, in her piece Being human, writes from inside the digital world rather than outside it. She scrolls, emails, listens to audiobooks. But she also lights candles in the evening, walks barefoot through grass, and speaks to blooming trees. Her piece is a reminder that connection doesn’t require us to be anti-modern or off-grid. It only asks for attention, and for small, everyday gestures that help us stay in relationship with the world around us.

Being human

Alix Klingenberg introduces us to solarpunk as “a vision of the future that embraces technology in ways that are life-giving and nature-affirming”. She writes about how her own imagination, if left unchecked, spirals into apocalyptic thinking. She’s learned to steer it elsewhere, toward futures that feel exciting and hopeful rather than dystopian. Her reflections echo what I explored in Part 3 of this series: the imagination needs nurturing, especially in a time when fear has become the dominant pattern.

Are You Solarpunk Without Knowing It?

Sally Gillespie’s piece Rage, Rebel, Reclaim stays with the grief and the fury that come from seeing clearly. Her writing names the structures doing the damage, colonialism, neoliberalism, fossil fuel empires, then pulls the focus back to her daily life. She joins working bees, picks up rubbish, moves her money, chooses not to replace the broken TV. Her rebellion is embodied, local, and deliberate.

Rage, rebel, reclaim

Each of these writers engages with the idea of a middle way as a steady refusal to collapse into either hopelessness or denial. Their work reminded me that we don’t have to surrender to worst-case thinking or pretend nothing is worth holding on to. Some things will fall apart. Some may endure. The middle path, as I understand it, is staying with that uncertainty, choosing what to tend, and refusing to abandon the possibility of a sane and just future entirely.

Let the tech moguls keep building their empires in the cloud. Let them chase eternity through servers and code. We’re doing something else. We’re baking bread, teaching our kids, growing herbs, showing up to council meetings, telling the truth in small rooms and around campfires. We’re building the world we want to live in, quietly, collectively, without waiting for permission.

No one is coming to save us. But we’re not waiting to be saved.

This way of living doesn’t always look impressive from the outside. It can be messy and repetitive and sometimes lonely. But it has rhythm. It makes room for relationship. It allows time for rest. And it leaves space for doubt, for hope and for figuring it out as we go.

The middle way doesn’t ask us to reject everything or go live in the woods with no electricity. It simply asks us to be more in touch with what matters to ourselves. To live in a way that makes sense in our bodies, in our homes and in our neighbourhoods.

It’s not perfect, but it’s real. And it’s enough to begin.

✦ For Paid Subscribers: The Middle Path Toolkit ✦

I've gathered some practical tools to accompany this piece, available to paid subscribers. Here you’ll find:

• PDF: Post-Growth Self-Assessment – a series of reflective questions or prompts to help you locate yourself on the “middle path”

• Practice Guide: Six Ways to Walk the Middle Way – tangible actions for grounding post-growth values in daily life

• Recommended Reading: Five Books That Imagine Earth-Honouring Futures Without Regression

This is Part 4 in an ongoing series on building everyday resilience in the face of ecological, systemic, and cultural collapse – what I sometimes call “soft-prepping.”

• Part 1 explored digital resilience – how to stay grounded and discerning in an accelerating information landscape.

• Part 2 looked at nervous system literacy – learning to recognise and regulate our internal states as a form of resistance and repair.

• Part 3 turned toward resilient imagination – how to think about the future without collapsing, and why vision is a vital part of staying steady in times of contraction.

If you're following this series and want to go deeper, I’m offering 50% off paid subscriptions this month for new readers. And if cost is a barrier, send me a message – we’ll figure something out.

Thank you for walking this with me,

Gabrielle