10 Beliefs About the World That I Relearned in the Last 5 Years [#34]

5 years ago, I was a die-hard vegan. I thought consuming animal products was the biggest problem due to their associated greenhouse effect. It became such a part of my identity that I often gave people shit when they ate meat. Some people in my surroundings might have changed their consumption patterns because of me, but most were probably just annoyed.

When getting into regenerative agriculture, I learned that it’s not all black and white. Grass-fed beef from rotational grazing can be CO2 negative, and if you combine it with a respectful process to take the animal's life, to me, it feels ethical to consume it, too. I will be food for other animals at some point in the future. Life-death-life circle.

But this is not just about being vegan or non-vegan or any other identities that we attach to our sense of self. This is about what we believe to be true.

This is about unlearning. To update our map of the world, so you can be more effective going forward.

Here are 10 beliefs related to my life path that I updated in recent years:

1. “Capitalism is the root cause.”

The story goes: if we could just dismantle capitalism, the ecological crisis would resolve itself.

But the deeper driver is older. Human beings have learned to optimise for status, surplus, and short-term reward. Capitalism is just the latest software running on ancient biological hardware.

Even in the ecological or regeneration movement, we optimize for status: “Look at me, I had the BIGGEST impact”.

We compete with other organisations for funding, when we claim to work regeneratively through cooperation and co-creation.

Systems change without inner change just installs the same patterns under a new name.

So, we need to upgrade the hardware.

We need to practice meditation to develop compassion and non-attachment.

We need to be present with what is, embracing limits of growth and practicing sufficiency rather than going for accumulation, status, and quick dopamine hits.

“Not needing wealth is more valuable than wealth itself” - The Stoics

There is research exploring the relationship between materialistic tendencies and happiness. Turns out, the more materialistic you are, the less happy you are.

2. “Profit is bad.”

In a system that maximizes profits with all its unintended bad consequences, the antipattern is to see profits as evil.

But the truth is, profit in itself is not bad. It is amoral. You can use it to do great things in service of life, or you can use it to extract and destroy.

Since we were hunter-gatherers, we looked for surplus - spending less energy on hunting than the hunting would get us. Because a deficiency would mean that some had to die. When we started to be able to store a surplus of food, we were able to dedicate more time to things outside than meeting our basic needs. This helped a lot of great things to arise: e.g., art, science, human rights, etc.

And also a lot of bad things started, too: looting, wars, governance systems where psychopaths rise to the top, and more.

But profit in itself is not bad. It’s the activities that lead to profit that don’t include ecological and social costs. And the question of what you do with it.

In the regenerative movement, I see many projects that are doing great things, but they think profit is bad. In the current system, this thinking limits their impact. Or worse, great initiatives die, because funding dries up and they haven’t put effort into a stable cash flow that keeps the project running.

The solution is that we need to redefine profit beyond financial metrics & to price in the ecological & social costs associated with the activity. (And yes, that would make a lot of our current economic activities unprofitable.)

If I had a billion euros, I would build a fund that invests in bioregions. Directly into projects that drive social, ecological, economic, and inspirational returns. Actually, I would invest in a portfolio of projects that support each other so profit-generating activities can be reinvested into nature-positive activities that generate different kinds of profit other than economic returns (e.g., rewilding activities that make sure water cycles function and that there are intact ecosystems that produce the oxygen we breathe).

The ​infrastructure to invest in these portfolios of regenerative systemic innovations​ is what we are building at the Bioregional Weaving Labs.

3. “Renewables will solve it.”

The energy transition, as currently conceived, mostly swaps one extractive model for another.

New extraction zones (mining rare earth materials instead of polluting the atmosphere), new supply chains (lithium, mercury, copper instead of coal), but with the same throughput logic. And mostly produced and transported with the help of fossil fuels.

The run of renewables has mostly been an energy addition because the underlying economic logic is that we need to grow the world economy by 3% every year. And because growth is a function of energy, we need more and more.

Betting everything on renewables ignores material limits of the planet & the mobility of energy that oil can deliver. It is a reductionist solution that doesn’t solve for ecological overshoot caused by material extraction.

We need energy sufficiency through reduced demand and more efficiency. Not a massive buildout. And we need to get to a steady-state economy that doesn’t require senseless growth in order to function.

Renewables have a role to play, but they are not the holy grail that will solve the climate crisis.

In my caravan, I am living on a 1000 W solar panel and a 2kW battery. We need way less energy than we think we need; it all depends on a change in our lifestyle to be less materialistic and more self-sufficient. People lived in our village before the invention of electricity, so it’s definitely possible to live there without it.

4. “Fair society means equal outcomes.”

Yes, large inequality brings social unrest & collapse, but we all differ in interest, risk-appetite, etc., which inevitably leads to differences.

Status differences among humans have always existed.

The mindset behind this blind spot is a human-centric one. It refers to equality for all humans. It misses that we, humans, are part of the web of life. We just believe that we are separated and superior.

We need to broaden our sense of self. We are not just our bodies. We are the water that we drink, the air that we breathe, the food that we eat.

Equality needs to be looked at with a wider lens. Are we talking about equality between countries? Or between species?

If we keep polluting water, air, and soil. There won’t be equality among humans anywhere in the long run. We need a fair system within biological boundaries.

The more time I spend in nature around our village and among the living beings that live there, the more apparent this becomes to me. We need to work towards equality among all species, not just humans.

5. “It’s all Big Oil's fault.”

It’s easy to blame an industry for the results we have collectively designed for.

But the real culprit here is the availability of this cheap ancient sunlight that can hold immense power, the human desire for more, and the economic systems designed for perpetual growth, where externalities (like the rise in global heating) are not included in the costs.

Only 20 % of oil reserves are held by private oil companies; the rest is state-owned. So, who is Big Oil here?

I used to be angry at all the big corporations. Now I understand they are just products of the system that discovered super cheap energy. I’ve been channeling this anger into compassion for the people working in these companies that might not have the opportunity to look at their work with a wide-boundary lens or who are dependent on the work to provide for their families.

6. “We can print/ borrow our way to modern prosperity.”

When the economy is in crisis, governments usually turn on the printing press to print money that shall stimulate the economy.

Corona has shown that this money then mostly goes to the people who already have a lot. It increases inequality and therefore stimulates social unrest.

It also misses a big point:

Money can be seen as a claim on future energy and materials. Every time you buy something, it was previously extracted, transformed, and transported, and therefore has an energy and material footprint that relates to ecological costs.

The truth is that material and energy are limited. At some point, the cost of extraction will be too high, or there won’t be more to extract. That’s when prosperity will start to crash, no matter how much money you print, because you won't be able to buy anything with that money.

Let’s invest more in true wealth: relationships, healthy soils, and mental and physical health.

7. “Selfishness is bad.”

It’s not selfishness that is the problem. It is our ill-informed sense of self.

Once more, people realize that the self is deeply connected to the air that we breathe, the people we talk to, the food we eat, and the health of our ecosystems, it's okay to be more selfish.

You can also call it “egoistic altruism”: to do things that benefit you but at the same time benefit all other humans. Such as protecting ecosystems, planting trees, orchestrating bioregional scale regeneration, regenerating a watershed, and so on.

This is an update in my personal paradigm that is shifting my actions every day.

8. “High tech will save us.”

It’s this story that we can “green growth” our way to the future. That technology can overcome all the challenges that we have. That we can engineer our way out of the planetary collapse that we are heading into.

This is based on a mechanistic view of the world. It is wrong.

Due to the biophysical boundaries and the material limits it imposes, the future will be simpler. We need “Goldilocks tech”, as Nate Hagens frames it.

Take copper, for example, this material is used in all electricity lines, and of course, that means it's needed in the massive buildout of AI datacenters. But the physical reality is that ​we will run into shortages of copper soon​, threatening electification and industrial growth.

We need "low tech", that’s less complex, produced locally, from regenerative sources, and which is affordable and scalable.

​Here is the full episode from Nate​

Here in Galicia, we are actively working on bringing back low-tech traditions: agriculture without inputs, bioconstruction with local material, and let’s see what we can re-learn in the future: making baskets with willow trees? Make medicine from medicinal plants? Cultivate more mushrooms on wooden stumps? Make iron tools in the local blacksmith workshop?

9. “If we just get the right politicians in place, we have a chance to a liveable future.”

I used to believe that good politicians with their hearts in the right place and who are informed about the realities of this planet, will make good policies that will lead us to a protopian future.

But what I learned is that most politicians think in 4-year cycles, and if they don’t, they will be removed from office. That’s short-term thinking at its best, at a time when we need long-term thinking more than ever.

I have come to learn that companies think more strategically, meaning 10-15 years into the future. For example, Heinz, one of the biggest food companies in the world, producing tomato ketchup, sees the oncoming food scarcity as a threat to their business, because it means that they won’t be able to source enough food for their production (tomato crop failure already is an issue). This suddenly makes them a more powerful ally than politicians in food system transformations towards regenerative agriculture.

After all, it’s not politicians who will change the world. It is small groups of committed individuals with a powerful idea that ripples outwards and changes the minds of big parts of the population. The old story of endless growth is crumbling, and the new story of a regenerative world is taking hold.

And stories are more powerful than any politician.

10. “If you want to move something forward, you need to control the process and outcome.”

For a long time, I believed that in order to move forward, you set a goal, break it down into smaller chunks, and put aside time for it on a weekly basis until you reach it.

While this might be true for individual goals, e.g., if you want to get better at doing push-ups, doing them regularly surely helps, this becomes more difficult at the interpersonal level - especially when you don’t know a specific outcome that you plan for.

I have come to learn and appreciate the concept of emergence.

Emergence in movements refers to the idea that collective behavior, culture, and strategy arise from the interactions of many individuals rather than being designed top-down by leaders. Less control, more spaciousness.

The core insight here: a movement’s character, norms, and direction aren’t centrally planned — they emerge from countless local decisions, relationships, and experiments. The whole becomes something the parts couldn’t predict or produce alone.

What it looks like in practice

• Decentralized cells that experiment locally and share learnings laterally
• Leadership that facilitates conditions rather than dictates outcomes
• Trust that pattern and coherence will arise without a master plan
• ​Attention to relationships as the substrate from which strategy grows​
• Iteration — small actions, feedback, adaptation

Often, it’s not easy for me to hold the inner conditions of uncertainty that come with not having a clear plan in some areas of my life, but the more often I do it, the more often I am surprised by the outcome.

Closing

Life-long learning has been a bedrock for my life. I realized that this not only means to learn more but also to update old learning and its resulting beliefs.

I started to get into the ecological movement for the arguments, the feeling that something is wrong, the criticism of capitalism, the fear that the future will be dire.

Now, 5 years in, I am wiser. I know a lot of my beliefs were wrong. And there are probably many more that will need updating in the future.

The key is to keep an open mind and change views if presented with conflicting arguments.

A common thread: we need to make sure our assumptions are examined & we need to ​work on the internal world more than on the external​ because the latter is downstream from the former.

Happy regeneration,

Jonas