My Year Leaving the Matrix

It’s ok to feel sad at work.

Exactly a year before Covid-19 or Black Lives Matter shook the world to its core, I was a visual designer at a successful fashion-tech startup in San Francisco. I remember the sunshine pouring through the floor-to-ceiling windows and the shade of millennial pepto-bismol pink they painted on all the accent walls. (It probably worked since I don’t remember throwing up even once.) There was kombucha on tap and subsidized lunch delivery, and we all pretended that it was the best thing ever when all we actually wanted were livable Bay Area salaries. I remember office gossip, the rampant online shopping during lunch breaks, and all the unboxing rituals that happened on a daily basis. These were simple and useful distractions that helped people avoid talking about their actual fears, such as “how are we all so good at pretending the world isn’t on fire right now?” or “how many more years do we have left until the global food supply breaks completely?”

On many afternoons that March, I would walk outside on my lunch breaks to the park across the street. I wanted to feel the sunshine on my face and listen to the birds talk to each other for even just 5 minutes because it just felt so much more real than anything else I was doing. It was a suitable antidote for days filled with what I felt was so much unnecessary human enterprise. I would sit at a little wooden bench with my overpriced cappuccino and catch wafts of jasmine floating in the air while shadows from the nearby trees played with the sunlight on the newly paved concrete, and I would cry. There was such incredible sadness and grief everywhere…oceans acidifying, whole species becoming extinct, and dictators sprouting up in every corner of the globe…while inside the office my team was debating Pantone colors. And yet there I was, somehow able to sit in complete stillness and wonderment at the birds, savoring one more exquisite piece of beauty before it was gone.

There comes a time in some designers’ careers when they realize that a lot of design jobs are mostly contributing to the status quo of consumerism and addiction to things — and therefore, a lot of the world’s ills. Inconveniently, this happened to me around the same time I finally began to feel more settled as a creative. It was at this moment that I felt both gratitude for having made something of myself, and also deep regret for how it all fit into the great web of life. Consequently, a huge paradigm disruption was developing inside me. I started asking myself some important questions about how my work was impacting the world around me and the sentient beings in it. Questions such as: “Am I helping design a world I want my future children to inherit?” Or “Am I helping to design a world based in inadequacy, isolation, addiction, fear, consumerism, and/or separation from nature and each other?” The answers I found within myself were quite disturbing, and I uncovered bit by bit how estranged I felt from the path I had previously chosen. Deep down, I knew I didn’t want to steal hundreds of thousands of minutes of people’s attention merely to sell more products. Deep down, I stopped wanting to design anything that made people want to buy anything at all.

So I just stopped.

Leaving the Matrix

In April of 2019, I left the matrix. I use the term “matrix” here to describe the societal narrative that most of us are indoctrinated into through our educational, economic, medical and political systems that is founded upon the delusion of exponential industrial and market growth. While in the matrix, we learn that the purpose of our planet is to be dug up and sold into goods as well as to be a bottomless sink for all our waste. While in the matrix, we learn that success depends on our numbness to the exploitation of people and planet as well as the real consequences of our actions and purchases. While in the matrix, we fall ill to the disease of institutionalized greed as we feel more and more separate from the world and everyone in it. We feed the matrix by feeding our addiction to things, and we are rewarded for our active participation in that addiction.

And so, I left. While no person is ever completely free of the matrix (since we all create it together) we certainly can try. My version looked a lot like an anticlimactic staycation which involved quitting my job and trading my lunch breaks in the park for hours and hours of sitting in my own backyard. But internally, I was going through a transformational initiation as the old story I bought into suddenly started dissolving. My numbness started melting. My heart felt very tender as I felt into the pain of the world, and I allowed this pain to linger for many, many days.

I let myself abide in this tenderness for a while by immediately doing, well, nothing. Coincidentally, Jenny Odell brought the act of “doing nothing” to the modern psyche exactly a week later through her April 2019 book, How to do Nothing. A manifesto of sorts, the book suggests that taking the time out of one’s day to just “be” — without considering if it’s productive or not (ahh, there’s the rub) — is a revolutionary social and political act that re-situates ourselves within the physical environment that we have found ourselves estranged to as a result of technology addiction and consumption. Through this practice, we “resist the attention economy” and develop a deeper relationship to both the natural world and the inner life that beckons within us.

Perhaps the freest and most accessible version of therapy out there so far, a good dose of “doing nothing” may be something we could all use a little more of to heal ourselves and this world. For me, quitting my job to do nothing was indeed a huge intentional disruption that ultimately served to let me feel my shadows more fully and deeply. And as I turned the giant inner telescope around on myself, I also felt into humanity’s shadows as a whole. My/our addiction to control, power, efficiency and money over people and planet for instance — even via seemingly innocuous choices, ranging from buying every unnecessary product on Amazon imaginable to the more obvious and abhorrent. Granted, stepping away from one’s job is absolutely a privilege that not everyone has, but “doing nothing” can take many forms (i.e. five minutes a day staring at jasmine flowers), and each act of resistance, whether big or small, can work to disrupt the collective matrix that we are all affected by, and essentially create, together.

Tending Inner Ecology

Ironically — or quite expectedly — all this “non-doing” inspired me to do a whole lot of “somethings.” After a couple weeks, I enrolled in and started attending an Ecopsychology program at Holos Institute with the help and guidance of a dear friend who was also experiencing a similar paradigm shift. Together in this program we found a community of like-minded seekers who, like us, needed to find refuge amidst the disruption to the status quo and incongruences arising from within.

We learned and felt and envisioned a lot together. For instance, we learned about the importance of a sit spot as well as other ways to deepen our own personal relationship to nature as a living, breathing organism. We practiced waking up with the dawn and sitting in circle to tend to our dreams just like our ancestors did. We discovered that there is indeed a clinical term for the kind of grief we were all experiencing and it’s called “Eco Grief,” a psychological response to the environmental destruction caused from climate change. We learned that there is a recognized pathology which explains the eroding human-nature relationship over time as it correlates to industrial growth and the maximization of efficiency and profits, as written about by ecopsychologists such as Paul Shepherd and Metzner. We read books by Charles Eisenstein and Joanna Macy and listened to the stories of Martin Shaw and learned that shifting humanity towards environmental and economic sustainability could be as simple and as complicated as igniting our imaginations and changing the collective story we tell ourselves. We learned that the best way to move through stuck feelings of helplessness with the world’s pain is to sit in solidarity and friendship with our shared grief and welcome the tears.

But perhaps the most valuable thing I learned from that program is that grief isn’t solitary and is best experienced when shared in the loving witnessing of community. We experienced poignant moments together that moved us beyond any intellectual pursuit ever could, like when a Pomo and a Miwok women opened an Ecopsychology conference with the sorrowful telling of the erasure and annihilation of their ancestors from the land we were physically sitting on, and then how a white woman stood in the nakedness of her tears in response to that telling in order to honor and openly apologize to the indigenous women and their ancestors. The stark rawness of many moments like these felt like drinking from the divine cup of grace that our world so desperately needs in order to heal and transmute the wounds of separation, denial, and shame.

Tending Outer Ecology

As I tended the fragile human-nature relationship within me, an outer transformation began to take shape, and I grew more and more interested in how to walk in right relationship with the physical earth. I bookmarked learning what corporations and governments could do better for another time, and instead zoomed in on what the average human being could do. How could a meager hobbit like me, someone with no prior understanding of gardening or land stewardship whatsoever, become an informed and engaged citizen of the earth?

Naturally, this lead me to study permaculture, which is a design method used for creating ecologically regenerative and socially just human systems which are modeled after nature’s systems. While many people think that permaculture is a gardening technique, it’s so much more than that. It’s more a philosophy and way of seeing than it is any specific technique. It’s founded in the ethical triad of earth care, people care and fair share. It’s a set of principles that looks at minimizing waste and human labor, while maximizing yields based on the right relationship of elements rather than any single element alone. In essence, it’s about learning to design with the web of life we are all inherently connected to, instead of imposing upon it. Applying any of the specific principles of permaculture can radically transform any aspect of personal or communal living.

Curious to understand the applications of permaculture in a tangible way, I enrolled in a two week PDC (Permaculture Design Certificate) at the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center in northern California. Oh how humbled I was to discover that while I felt grounded in the right intention to learn, I still had a long way to go. There I stood, face to face with my own egregious lack of understanding about nature’s relationships all around me as I learned how our native ancestors naturally met all their needs for food, clothing, and shelter and I couldn’t even name three native trees in my bioregion. I realized that this most likely describes the majority of urban people in general, but it was also simply heartbreaking to internalize how far we had veered away from this foundational sense of sovereignty by foolishly replacing it with the outsourcing of all our basic needs to corporations (and thereby, creating the pernicious cycle of waste we are on a tight timeline to correct.)

Fortunately, the PDC was a fast-track route to returning to our cellular wisdom and ancestral inheritance. We blazed through permaculture principles, ethics, water harvesting, biointensive gardening techniques, group decision making, soil cultivation, building houses out of clay, fire-making, and even creating a permaculture design for a local non-profit. In two weeks time I felt the most competent and knowledgeable about human and earth systems than I ever had. (And I’m still going). The most important thing I gleaned from this program was the embodied knowing that I was indeed a part of this great web of life. In my bones I came into contact with the unique and common gifts that the earth was calling for, and understood that just like everyone else, I was indeed part of the solution. It just required a little bit of awareness, effort, and right action to get there.

Immediately following this PDC, I found myself living in the Sacred Valley of Peru for yet another permaculture intensive (more on that in another blog post). It has now been almost a year of hands-on study, travels, and backyard experiments in growing my own food. I have a modest but happy vegetable garden and compost system, and I am currently working on a water harvesting strategy. On most mornings I still get up with the dawn to send my gratitudes to Pachamama, go to my sit spot, and watch the monarch butterflies lay their eggs in the milkweed. The birds now know me by my walk, and I know them by their songs. I also know that while I still have a long way to go, the hardest part is over. I have begun the journey. I have felt the depths of my pain for the world and climbed through the niches of disconnection to find the ground again, and at least for now, the sense of direction is clear. Now as I start my descent and return journey back from this year of program disruption, I contemplate my work in the world. I stand on the soil it is grounded upon, now enriched with the seeds of ancestral wisdom and longings of the heart that I planted over the past year. And yet, one question remains: how do I design with integrity in a world that’s falling apart?

How to design with integrity in a world that’s falling apart

It is now May of 2020. I find myself on the brink of a new world once again, this time shared with everyone around me on a global scale. The whole world is exiting the matrix together as Covid-19 and Black Lives Matter shake the very foundations of our health, social, and political structures to their core. Business-as-usual is no longer, and we are being called to examine our shadows together at warp speed. As I knew from exiting the matrix the first time, a lot is going to feel like it’s going to get worse before it gets better. How else would we be able to disrupt the things that weren’t working before in the first place?

In a recent essay about Covid-19, “The Coronation,” Charles Eisenstein (2020) writes:

“Covid-19 is like a rehab intervention that breaks the addictive hold of normality. To interrupt a habit is to make it visible; it is to turn it from a compulsion to a choice. When the crisis subsides, we might have occasion to ask whether we want to return to normal, or whether there might be something we’ve seen during this break in the routines that we want to bring into the future.”

The time to envision and design the world we want to live in has arrived. After this year of truly being disrupted in all aspects of my life and career, I am certain that hidden within the suffering and chaos there lies the inheritance of a huge gift, and that is the gift of perspective. As I return to my design work, I honor my new eyes and the responsibility that comes with that gift with the following personal statements:

1. Design is a powerful and necessary tool. To understand the gravity of this statement one must understand the immense range of ways design is employed. For example, it can help you navigate a subway map in a new city. It can help you find your next Tinder date. When used for evil, design can be propaganda that convinces an army to annihilate a whole race of people. In the millennial pink office I worked in a year ago, it convinced women that they need at least seven bras in their drawers, so they should definitely buy another. Yes, so many things design can do. It is necessary, it is powerful, it isn’t going anywhere, and it IS everywhere.
2. Because design is powerful, necessary, and everywhere, it is inherently connected to all beings.
3. Because design is powerful and necessary and connected to all beings, designers themselves have a moral obligation to consider their impact. Designers either feed business as usual or they don’t, and so they must choose wisely the ideas they align with and how they create them. (We must stop blaming “technology” itself as the culprit behind our consumer habits and addictions and instead, look to the designers who designed it that way.)
4. As designers who deeply understand the moral obligation to consider our impact, we must

• Reject any notion of neutrality in design by continuously considering the impact of all design on all beings everywhere (nature, animals, and humans equally)
• question the industries which employ design to feed the status quo of consumerism, waste, the fictional narrative of exponential growth, and the fictional narrative of separateness from nature and each other
• Use technology to promote a healthy society — mentally, emotionally, socially, politically — instead of feeding algorithms, division, or wallets
• commit ourselves to designing a new world story with high-impact projects that seek to educate and promote real-world change with respect to the environment and social/economic systems within which we are nested

I am immensely grateful for this year of deep inner questioning and re-visioning of my life, and I especially owe a debt of gratitude to my life partner, Yakov, who graced me with his patience, funding, and a limitless supply of hugs and understanding. It is a gift to feel that when we are willing (or even forced) to stop and pause, we do not have to immediately know what to do. It is because of the pause that we can honestly take stock of where we are and choose wisely the direction we go next. We get to design how the story goes. What will it look like? As Joanna Macy envisions in her book Coming Back to Life, “when people of the future look back at this historical moment, they will see more clearly than we can now, how revolutionary our actions were. Perhaps they’ll call it the time of the Great Turning” (4).

I hope she is right.

Reference List

Eisenstein, C. (2020, March). The Coronation [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://charleseisenstein.org/essays/the-coronation/

Macy, J., & Brown, M. Y. (2014). Coming Back to Life. New Society Publishers.

Odell, J. (2019). How to Do Nothing. Melville House Publishing.