The opposite of sustainability is boredom

There is a form of deprivation that rarely registers as such, because it does not belong to the categories through which we have learned to recognise lack. It doesn’t present itself as material scarcity or as emotional deficiency in any straightforward sense. It appears more like a subtle thinning of existence – an erosion of intensity, a sense that one’s life is happening without oneself ever really being there.

Jacob Needleman describes this as a kind of unrecognised hunger: a need that is neither named nor cultivated within modern culture, and which, when it does surface, is often misinterpreted or suppressed. Without the nourishment it requires, he suggests, something essential in us begins to die.

What is at stake, he argues, is not dissatisfaction in the ordinary psychological sense, but the gradual withdrawal of a deeper human possibility: the capacity to encounter reality in a way that is transformative.

This capacity, which I am calling experientia, cannot be reduced to “having experiences”. It names a movement in which experience and experiment are not separate activities but aspects of a single gesture. To ex-periri – to go through, to risk, to try – is not two activities but one. You don’t have experiences and also conduct experiments. The act of genuinely encountering reality is the experiment. And the experiment is the way you experience.

[Experientia] names a movement in which experience and experiment are not separate activities but aspects of a single gesture.

The difficulty is that this mode of being is neither recognised nor supported by the dominant structures of contemporary life. When it appears – often as a fleeting sense of wonder or disruption – it is quickly instrumentalised or dismissed.

Over time, it recedes.

What remains is a form of life that can be efficient, productive, even meaningful by conventional standards, but which lacks a certain density – a certain aliveness that arises only in conditions of real contact.

And this helps explain why so many forms of our efforts – intellectual, ethical, even spiritual – fail to produce the transformations they intend. One can know what is true, feel committed to it, and yet remain unchanged.

Because ideas, on their own, do not penetrate the structure of our being.

What is lost is aliveness.

Aliveness arises from contact.

Exploration as a logic of life

To understand why this loss is so consequential, it helps to look at how living systems actually persist, which is not through stability.

In ecology, an adaptive cycle describes how complex systems move through phases of growth, conservation, release, and reorganisation. The phase most crucial for long-term viability is also the least controlled, least efficient, and least predictable. The reorganisation phase is literally a phase of experimentation: the system loosens its existing configurations and begins, in a distributed and uncertain manner, to probe alternative possibilities. Without this capacity, systems become brittle. And brittleness invariably leads to collapse.

Stuart Kauffman, a theoretical biologist, gives this dynamic an additional dimension through what he calls the adjacent possible: the set of new configurations that become reachable once something novel exists. Each genuinely new thing does not merely solve a problem within a fixed space of options, it transforms the space itself, opening pathways that were previously inconceivable.

Each genuinely new thing does not merely solve a problem within a fixed space of options, it transforms the space itself, opening pathways that were previously inconceivable.

Life, in this sense, evolves by exploring.

Curiosity, then, is not a personality trait. It is the psychological expression of a deeper biological and ecological logic. It is how systems – whether organisms or cultures – probe the boundaries of what is given, allowing new patterns to emerge.

So, a life of experimentation is the condition under which stability remains viable over time.

Without this movement, the opposite tendency takes hold. Patterns repeat. Perception narrows. The world becomes familiar in a diminished sense: not intimate, but exhausted.

What disappears is not simply novelty, but possibility itself.

Transformative encounters

Yet the significance of experientia is not exhausted by its role in adaptation.

It also conditions how the world appears to us in the first place.

Phenomenological traditions have long insisted that perception is not a neutral representation of an external reality, but a form of participation in it. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, for instance, argued that perception is not a mental act performed upon a passive world but a bodily participation in the world’s own self-showing.

What this means is that the quality of our attention shapes the reality we inhabit.

We do not stand before reality and represent it.

We are of it, and in moments of genuine contact, that belonging becomes tangible.

Much of what we describe as ecological or social destruction is preceded by the reduction of beings to background, to resource, to abstraction. Val Plumwood traced this to what she called the “logic of colonisation” – a mode of perception that denies the agency and reality of the other by rendering it passive and interchangeable.

Destruction, in this sense, does not require cruelty. It requires only a certain kind of inattention. The same inattention that Heidegger diagnosed as the essence of modern technology, which he described as Gestell: the enframing that turns every being into Bestand, standing-reserve, material awaiting use.

Destruction, in this sense, does not require cruelty. It requires only a certain kind of inattention.

Against this, curiosity – understood not as a craving for novelty but as a disciplined openness – acts as an interruption. It allows things to appear as more than what they are already known to be.

And it is in such moments that care becomes possible.

Anna Tsing therefore says that just noticing the world – in a particular way – is an act of care for the world.

Because care does not primarily arise from obligation or information. It arises from encounter. From the experience of being addressed by something that is not reducible to a concept or a function.

We do not protect what we merely understand.

We protect what has entered into relation with us.

Experientia and the metacrisis

If this were only a matter of personal fulfilment, the argument for a life of experientia – which is a transformation through curiosity, experience, experimentation – would already be strong. But in the context of the metacrisis, it takes on a different urgency.

Many have argued that what makes the metacrisis meta is that it is not merely a set of crises but a crisis of the frameworks through which we apprehend crisis – a breakdown at the level of sense-making itself.

Gregory Bateson distinguished between “Learning I” (acquiring new information within a fixed frame), “Learning II” (revising the frame), and “Learning III” (becoming aware of the process of framing itself). It is the third level – learning to learn, adapting the way you adapt – that the metacrisis demands.

In such a context, the capacity that becomes decisive is not the possession of correct answers, but the ability to remain in active relationship with what exceeds one’s understanding.

And this brings us – surprise – to experientia.

The way I understand experientia, it does not accumulate knowledge but destabilises the structures that prevent knowledge from becoming transformative. It penetrates behind appearances – not only those of the external world, but those that constitute our own identity, beliefs, and emotional investments. It exposes us – again and again – to the limits of our own frameworks, and in doing so, creates the conditions under which those frameworks can shift.

The way I understand experientia, it does not accumulate knowledge but destabilises the structures that prevent knowledge from becoming transformative.

Experientia opens a channel between the surface of the mind and something deeper, something that our usual names for mental activity cannot quite reach.

To live a life of experientia, in this deeper sense, is to repeatedly submit oneself to this process. It is to allow one’s certainties to be unsettled, one’s patterns interrupted, one’s identity rendered provisional. It is to recognise that without such moments of reorganisation, neither individuals nor cultures can adapt to the conditions they face.

No curiosity, no learning.
No learning, no adaptation.
No adaptation, collapse.

Life as a lab

So I keep running experiments. Not because the experiments solve anything specific about the metacrisis. But because every experiment is a small act of reorganisation – a probe into the adjacent possible, a refusal to let the world become static.

Exploration is not a private indulgence that sits alongside care for the world. It is care. It is how care begins – in the encounter, in the moment of attention that lets a being appear. And it is how care sustains itself – through the willingness to keep going out into reality rather than retreating into the models we’ve already built of it.

Exploration is not a private indulgence that sits alongside care for the world. It is care.

Regenerative futures will not arise only from better technologies or better policies. They will arise from cultures that remain capable of experientia. From people who haven’t forgotten how to be curious.

Maybe the opposite of sustainability is not destruction. It is boredom. When the world becomes boring – when it flattens into resource, into data, into backdrop – it becomes disposable. If the metacrisis is a crisis of relationships, then maybe the core relationship we are missing is the contact with its aliveness.

To live experientia is to take responsibility for aliveness itself. To restore that contact.

Life is a lab. And love – the willingness to stay in contact with what’s real, even when it’s uncomfortable, even when it doesn’t resolve – is the method.