This Extraordinary Rock This Extraordinary Rock

Do you remember what normal felt like? I want to tell you that you can feel normal again. You might be suspicious. I understand this. It's hard to know who you can trust. But please: give me just a few minutes. Let me tell you about this extraordinary rock.

I know how you feel. Your mind is trapped by its habits. You rehearse the same arguments over and over. Your thinking is continuously foggy and unfocused and you cannot concentrate at work, and other people start to notice. You are exhausted when you return home. The house gradually falls apart. Unwashed dishes pile up in the sink. Old food rots in the pantry. A dampness spreads through the basement.

You cannot sleep. You sleep too much. You become furious at the smallest obstacles. You cannot stop playing games on your phone. You refresh the stock prices long after the markets have closed. You stream too much television. You eat pre-packaged meals from the minimart. You are anxious about the weather. You look out the window at the yellowing grass and dying trees and you start crying or you don't cry as much as you should.

Will it always be this way? You want to go back to how things were, before. I am with you. I would like to feel normal again. I think we all would.

This is not easily done. It is not easy to feel normal today. Life on Earth stopped being normal some time ago. It happened gradually. You may not have noticed it. As I have come to believe, things began to fall out of equilibrium in 1973. But there are others who think 1973 was merely the year when longstanding tendencies became explicit. They see signs of global abnormality sprayed on the walls as early as 1971, or 1965, or 1944, or even earlier. They differ as to whether it started in New Hampshire, or Jakarta, or Tripoli.

However you date it, the world has gone off kilter. Some of us pushed it out of balance. Some of us sent it off-course. We launched it on an erratic trajectory. Our intentions were good. Or at least they weren't more malevolent than was usual in those years. Yet, in important respects, we didn't know what we were doing. We didn't understand the forces we were setting into motion. We didn't understand the scale at which we had begun to act. And now there is such turbulence. There is such volatility. A profound unease spreads out through the metropoles. The system feels nervous. Our whole collective enterprise feels burnt out. Depleted. You can read the dismal situation off the faces of people in the streets. You feel it when you pace circles in your room, not knowing what to do next.

Maybe you don't even remember what normal felt like. Maybe you think I am selling you a "before" that never actually existed. Maybe you are agnostic about the very possibility of a world that isn't just one crisis after another. But there can be no doubt that today, something feels out of joint - even if you cannot say precisely how, or why.

Under these conditions, after the end of the normal, when you can't recall what normal was, normality takes effort. Normal used to be the flow of things. You went with the flow. Now you have to resist the flow. Normal and natural parted ways. Normal is now a memory you recover by working against the nature of the world. Normal means reversing a natural history of disorder. Normal now means continuously charging yourself in a world that will drain you of every last watt.

Under these conditions, people talk of mindfulness. They enrol themselves in courses on meditation. Others are taking possession of themselves with the advice of dieticians, life coaches, personal trainers, mentors, gurus in exile. Some people talk with psychoanalysts, something I no longer recommend. After years of study - after 10,000 hours reading medical journals and exchanging letters with leading minds in California, Afghanistan, and Bolivia - I have come to recommend this.

Please allow me to tell you about this. I am not merely a salesman. I am like you. I feel the need to become normal again. What would push back against everything that is happening? The only thing that has worked for me is this extraordinary rock.

This is not a drug. There is no prescription required. You do not have to involve your doctor.

It is a rock. Better than that. It is an element. A few protons, a few neutrons, and nothing more. It wasn't fabricated in a laboratory. No human made it. It is not made up of anything else.

It comes from the Earth. It comes from the environment. It was placed here at the birth of the universe. That fact should claim our attention.

I have been to the mines. I have flown across the Atacama. I have to tell you: they are unexpectedly beautiful. These are not the same mines where we found seams of coal and gold, and dug our way into the present crisis. The evaporation pits are a patchwork of brilliant greens, teals and golds. From the air, the mines look like a chain of gemstones arranged across porcelain skin.

The very sight of it can change your waking life. Look at the men who make it flow from the deserts into ports, freighters, factories, storefronts, and ultimately, your pocket. The statesmen and moguls. They are spectacular. They seem like strangers to fatigue and boredom. They are not like you and me - not as we are, for now. Their bodies have not forgotten action and passion. They have declined to suffer, the way you and I suffer. Against the enervating demands of a world out of order, their lives concentrate an impossible energy.

Think of Morales, who had the kind of lungs that could breathe new life into dead political projects. Consider Musk, who launches cars into space. He might remove us from the face of the Earth, forever.

Where does their energy come from? I cannot say with certainty that they consume this rock every day. Perhaps they thrive on mere contemplation of the rock. Their methods remain secretive, of course. But the results are unambiguous.

I won't pretend that I know how it works. But I know that it works. I know that this rock works. What else is there to know? What is left is to try. What is left is to act.

These days I sleep better than ever. Every night. I thank my mother. She introduced me to it. When no one could say what, precisely, was wrong with me, when the methods on offer made the problem worse, she went online. And it was online that she found out about this rock. That is how my research, my seminars, my Foundation got their start. That is how I began.

Thanks, Mom.

When I sleep, I often dream that I am her child again. I am always sitting at the kitchen table, and she is always standing over the counter. Her back is to me. She is shaking something on top of the breakfast she'll soon bring.

Now, I was never going to be a genius. I never had the potential.

But there are kids with that kind of potential. And I worry about them. I see them when I ride buses, when I do my shopping.

I see their necks craned over screens. I see their fingers swiping and scrolling across the very devices powered by a few neutrons and a few protons from the desert. I see their vital energy dissipating into a world of images that always demands more scrolling and swiping. It only ever grows larger and denser. It never slows down.

It is not their own fault. The kids are fine. It is an environmentalcrisis. Your kid might have been a genius. Your kid might still become a genius, if you know what to do. But every day their environment is draining them of something that isn't being replaced. Imagine everything they aren't becoming.

Of course, we are not just individual women and men and families. We are a society. A species. A way of life. So imagine what we aren't becoming, all of us together, when your kids aren't becoming what they could. Imagine how we may in fact be devolving together.

In my dream, my mother brings over my breakfast and when I look into the bowl I know, somehow, that my suffering will soon be over. I look in the bowl and I see our entire predicament laid out before me.

I see the mechanised farms of the plains. I see the industrial laboratories in New Jersey. The trading pits in Chicago. I see the bankers in the City of London and the private equity firms in Shenzhen. I see these places converging and colluding, whether by intention or some grander design. I see a world built to drain us of everything essential.

In my bowl I see the mines and the evaporation pits too. How many remain to be built. How the planet holds an endless supply of what we are missing. How bits of this extraordinary rock are spread out across deserts, and in every drop of the ocean, awaiting someone with the will to concentrate it.

It is not missing from the universe. It is simply missing from our lives.

It is a matter of concentration. I mean this literally. The problem is entropy - entropy, and the will to resist it. The will to pull something together that is constantly dissipating.

At some point, before things went awry, when there was no before, everything was compressed. Nothing was distinct from anything else. Everything was intimate. Everything touched. Nothing was missing.

It's a beautiful thought.

And then came the universal blowout. It scattered the elements. Distance was invented. Longing was invented. Our crisis-ridden life was invented. Missing was invented.

Now our problem is how to pull it all back together. To reverse entropy. It is a matter of concentration.

Some of it has been concentrated already. You can sprinkle it on their food. It replaces what's missing. It looks like salt. It's tasteless. You can help them. The way my mother helped me.

At the Foundation we are often asked why we should be trusted. There are so many Foundations. There are so many methodologies. Everyone is trying to make sense of the present crisis, how it follows upon the last crisis, what may be extrapolated about the next one. Everyone is offering a proprietary grip on our collective predicament. Confusion is rampant. The possibilities for fraud are infinite.

What recommends the Foundation, I believe, is the simple elegance of our diagnosis. And of our solution, too. A world that is no longer normal, a world erupting in system-wide disorder, a world we can no longer predict - as we see it, this is a variation on the only crisis. The eternal crisis. The original crisis. The way that every can of soda goes flat, the way every oil well ultimately runs dry, the way every star dies, the way the incredible vitality of the universe can only dissipate into cold stillness - so too is each and everyone one of us exhausting our personal reserves.

And rather than rage against the great dissipation, most of us have contributed to a global order that only rushes our common demise. The optimistic, hyperactive build-out of our world looks, in hindsight, like self-destruction. Like the stars and batteries exploding all around us. The pressure and the dissipation. You know what I mean. It burns us up, like "white dwarfs."

At the Foundation, our diagnosis is fundamental. We see the resonance of your life with the life of the stars. No other account will do. Every other description of our predicament misses the essence of things.

And just as our diagnosis is fundamental, our solution is elemental. We have placed our faith in an element: a few protons, a few neutrons, and nothing more. Something pure and irreducible, born in the earliest moments of the universe and distributed throughout it. There is enough of it everywhere but inside you. And we can do something about it. We know what we need. We know where to find it. What remains is a matter of concentration. What remains is to act.

You don't need to take it from me. You can read the studies yourself. From Texas, to Japan, to Greece, after the last great crisis. The experts say the same thing. Where there is enough of this in public waterways - small doses distributed throughout the environment - we stop rushing toward the end. Suicide rates are lower.

Happiness is environmental. People seem to flourish when they draw nearer to this element.

In my dream, I look up from my breakfast and the kitchen is replaced by the night skies arching over the Atacama. I am in the desert, where astronomers from across the world cluster to look through telescopes at the stars. What do they see at the edge of the visible? Is everything falling apart, or is it winding back together?

In the quiet of the desert, I hear the salts crusting up, coming together. It is the sound of concentration. It is the sound of dissipation in reverse. It is the sound of "normal" entwining itself with natural, once again. The sound transports me back, to the before.

It is the sound of this extraordinary rock.