Modern Malaise

The Collapse of the West and the Remembering of Wholeness

Dear friends,

Thank you for being here.

At the end of this essay, you’ll find a few updates on upcoming offerings: two psilocybin retreats and a father-son canoe expedition designed to rekindle the sacred bond between father and son—a connection our culture too often neglects.

But first and foremost, I invite you into a reflection on the strange sickness of our age and the ancient medicine beginning to stir beneath it. I’ve been writing this for a while.

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It’s clearly a crisis of two things: of consciousness and conditioning. We have the technological power, the engineering skills to save and sustain our planet, to cure disease, to feed the hungry, to end war; But we lack the intellectual vision, the ability to change our minds. We must decondition ourselves from 10,000 years of bad behaviour. And, it’s not easy.

— Terence McKenna

A Prelude by Bach by Simeon Solomon, 1868.

Many people sense it. Something is wrong.

I’m seeing it everywhere. Partially because the algorithm has picked up on the fact that a sad part of me enjoys this modern malaise, so it’s showing me more of it.

But also because it really is becoming part of normal cultural conversation.

Some people call it collapse, some call it an awakening. Some, the metacrisis.

Joanna Macy calls it The Great Unraveling—and more optimisially—The Great Turning.

I call it The Disconnection Crisis.

It’s not just political division, global conflict, economic precarity, cultural meaninglessness or ecological collapse. Those are the symptoms—the material and existential manifestations of a core disease at the heart of the modern predicament.

The root of it all is a soul-level, spiritual, psychological, ontological sickness.

A quiet, transcendent ache humming beneath our material abundance, geopolitical absurdity, and the techno-optimist delusion that funnels obscene energy and wealth into building artificial intelligence that may annihilate us, while blasting semi-useless rockets toward lifeless planets all while systematically destroying the planet that birthed us, and sustains us. Basically, it’s a sense that we’ve lost our way.

Like, really lost our way.

The Western mind has been uprooted and is completely disconnected from a fundamental evolutionary intelligence that pervades and animates all life.

And that is the intelligence of Nature. We are disconnected from the whole.

Over centuries, we’ve made Nature other—object, resource, background.

But Nature is not outside us. It is us. Its intelligence is our inheritance.

It is us. And it holds the medicine we need to reroot the mind.

We’ve become intellectually arrogant, materially addicted, and spiritually malnourished. We’ve built entire civilizations around control, extraction, technology and consumption—systems that feed an invented economy but starve the soul.

We’ve forgotten that we are not separate from Nature, but expressions of it.

This disconnection breeds fragmentation: human vs. nature, self vs. other, mind vs. body, us vs. them, left vs. right, etc. This split can be traced back through centuries of Western thought—Descartes’ mind-body dualism, Bacon’s dominion over nature, the Industrial Revolution’s worship of mechanized efficiency, etc. The result is the tangled catastrophe we now inhabit: ecological collapse, mass psychological distress, cultural and spiritual emptiness, and widespread social unraveling—all feeding each other.

Sometimes I feel it most clearly in the grocery store. Fluorescent lights buzzing overhead, faces bathed in smartphone glow, each person drifting silently through an invisible algorithm, those little glass rectangles once promised to uplift humanity but now mostly mediating our disconnection, replacing eye contact with ads, presence with pings, human touch with taps, conversation with comments, until we’re all just disembodied beings chasing something we can’t name beneath the shiny screen.

Make no mistake, the disconnection crisis is an ontological crisis—a crisis of consciousness. We’ve forgotten our most primordial and essential identity.

In turn, we've lost a shared sense of meaning, purpose, and belonging to something more fundamental and real than the ideological differences that have led us here.

The old stories no longer hold. But beneath the chaos, something is stirring.

Nature is calling us home, to ourselves as one with the whole.

Philosophical Roots of the Disconnection

To understand the sickness of modern society, we have to examine its philosophical roots—the ideas that shaped how we think, feel, and relate to the world.

In the 17th century, René Descartes split the universe in two with a deceptively simple proposition: Cogito, ergo sum—I think, therefore I am. With this declaration, the self was severed from the world. The body became machine. Nature became backdrop. And consciousness was privatized, locked behind the skull of the solitary subject.

This Cartesian dualism of dividing mind from matter, subject from object, laid the groundwork for a worldview of disconnection. No longer were humans embedded co-participants in a living cosmos on an animate planet; we were observers, outsiders, and as a result, extractors and dominators.

Another architect of the modern worldview is Francis Bacon. He saw Nature not as sacred or intelligent, but as something to be subdued and mastered. In his Novum Organum, he famously wrote that science should “put nature on the rack,” forcing her to yield her secrets. This was not the ancient philosophy of learning from the Earth, but the beginning of extracting from it. Here, knowledge became conquest.

The Enlightenment inherited these ideas and made them gospel. Reason began to replace gnosis. Progress became linear. Mechanistic science replaced myth and mystery, reducing the cosmos to dead matter governed by predictable laws and the shared mythical imagination to to a relic best buried under the altar of logic. The world was no longer alive—it was a machine. And like any machine, it could be taken apart, optimized, and exploited for the needs and wants of the one’s made in God’s image.

Later, the Industrial Revolution institutionalized this rupture.

Fueled by the engines of Enlightenment thought, industrial society turned Nature into resource, time into money, and human beings into labor units. Forests? Now lumber. Rivers? Hydroelectricity. Bodies became interchangeable parts in the great machine of capital. Efficiency replaced intimacy. Factory bells replaced seasonal rhythms. The planet was no longer something to commune with. It was something to manage, extract, and profit from. This shift was not merely material, it was ontological.

This transformation extended into how societies viewed and regulated consciousness itself. As industrialization demanded discipline and productivity, cultures around the world increasingly sanctioned substances that enhanced work—caffeine, tea, sugar—while criminalizing those that opened the mind in unpredictable ways. Drug policy became a form of ideological control, promoting stimulants that served the machine and outlawing entheogens that might reveal its madness. The regulation of substances mirrored the regulation of perception: only that which sustained the system was permitted. Everything else became deviant, dangerous, or unproductive.

A worldview of interconnection was thus replaced with a worldview of separation and control. The sacred became supernatural, literally meaning beyond or above Nature. The Earth became property. Living beings such as trees and animals became resources. And the soul became irrelevant to the new systems now in charge of organizing human life. Today, we’re living in the shadow of these ideas.

But people want to see the sun again.

These shadows are insidious. They form the invisible architecture of modernity—the assumptions people rarely examine, but which shape everything from science and medicine to education, economics, and politics. And beneath it all runs a story: you are separate, the world is not alive, and meaning must be manufactured.

It’s an incomplete story that has brought us to the brink.

The Disconnection Crisis

The consequences of this worldview of separation are all around us. They are not isolated breakdowns, but interconnected symptoms of a deeper spiritual and ontological illness that disrupts our ability to make meaning in harmony with Nature.

Our collective story is out of tune with the way of things.

We see this in the ecological collapse unfolding around us. Forests are disappearing. Oceans are acidifying. Species are vanishing at rates not seen since the last mass extinction. The climate is destabilizing, and entire ecosystems are unraveling. Worst of all, we’ve managed to create a political and economic system that doesn’t care.

This isn’t just a technical failure, it’s a relational one. We’ve treated the Earth not as kin, but as commodity. And now, the planetary system is destablizing to re-stabilize.

We see it in the epidemic of mental illness. Anxiety, depression, loneliness, addiction—these are not biochemical glitches we can blame on the individual brain, these are existential symptoms of a culture that is misaligned with the way of the universe.

In a society that represses soul and separates self from the world, collapse becomes inevitable. It's not just digital overstimulation or the loss of meaningful community, it’s the alienation embedded in the very economies that now sustain and destroy us.

Millions spend most of their lives in fluorescent-lit factories, call centers, grocery stores, and corporate cubicles—laboring not for collective thriving, but for survival in systems that treat human beings like interchangeable parts in a machine. This isn’t metaphorical; it’s lived. The disconnection isn’t just philosophical. It’s Monday morning, it’s 9-to-5, it’s a nervous system locked in fight-or-flight for decades.

We see it in spiritual numbness. Organized religion has lost its vitality for many, yet secular society offers little in its place. Consumerism, nationalism, and productivity have become our surrogate gods. But they are hollow. While Bezo’s Amazon shares are rising, the myth that happiness can be purchased one click at a time is getting old.

Without shared cosmologies rooted in the universal and timeless wisdom of Nature, humanity splinters into tribalized identities and ideological battlefields. Dialogue collapses. Echo chambers gain momentum. Tech platforms that promise to connect us actually divide us. In the absence of common ground, we forget how to speak to one another, let alone remember that we are part of the same living system.

This is the disconnection crisis: not just climate or capitalism or culture wars, but the collapse of coherence itself. A tangled web of interlocking emergencies—ecological, psychological, spiritual, social—each pointing back to the same root error: the forgetting of our most fundamental identity as one with the sacred whole.

Until we address that, no solution will be enough.

Every intervention will be treating symptoms, not healing the source.

The Old Stories No Longer Hold

For centuries, Western culture was held together by grand narratives that offered meaning, identity, and purpose. Religion promised salvation and a moral order. The nation-state offered belonging and identity. Capitalism preached progress, efficiency, productivity, and perpetual growth. These were more than systems—they were stories about who we are, what matters, and where we’re going.

But these stories are crumbling because they were never harmonious with Nature. They were always misaligned and unsustainable. Today. fewer people believe in a God who micromanages the world from above. Nationalism feels hollow in a globalized and digitized world. And the capitalist promise—that endless growth will bring happiness—rings false amid rising inequality, burnout, and ecological devastation. The stories that once organized life are now riddled with contradiction, and many no longer resonate.

In their absence, we find ourselves in a kind of narrative freefall.

This is more than a crisis of belief, it’s a crisis of orientation.

Without a shared story, we don’t know who we are, what we’re here for, or how to live. The result is disorientation, anxiety, depression, addiction. We try to fill the void with distraction, identity performance, and hyper-individualism. But it doesn’t stick. Because deep down, we know: something essential is missing.

We’re in a liminal space, a cultural bardo. The old stories are collapsing, but the new ones have yet to pick up momentum. In this in-between, there is both danger and possibility. The question is not just what’s ending—but what wants to be born.

Remembering the Web of Life

Amid the unraveling of modernity, something ancient is being remembered.

As the old systems fracture and trust in institutions collapses, more people are seeking something more rooted, more real. We see it in the growing popularity of meditation, yoga, somatics, spiritual ecology and more as practices of reconnection.

These are ways of coming back into the human, planetary and cosmic body—into presence, into wholeness. They remind us that we are not separate minds floating above matter, but embodied beings deeply connected to a sacred and intelligent planet and universe. As more people confront the trauma passed down through generations, shaped by history and reinforced by culture, and as more awaken to their embeddedness in the sacred web of life, healing becomes not just a personal project, but a collective remembering—a return to the truth that we were never truly separate to begin with. A rediscovery of wholeness in symbiosis.

Psychedelics are a key component of this cultural rememebering. The growing popularity of psychedelics points to a growing interest in spirituality, healing, ecology and ancestral ways of being. For many, psychedelics are a portal into the sacred, an encounter with The Great Mystery, Creator, God, Nature. They offer a radical undoing of the perceptual habits that have kept us estranged from the animate, enchanted and spiritual cosmos, planet, and soul. These substances are not merely ”mental health treatments” created by Nature to return people to the very systems that caused their suffering—they’re catalysts for the most essential reconnection.

Psychedelics can shake loose the grip of modern conditioning, dissolve inherited stories, and open up new ways of being that feel more aligned, true and harmonious.

This movement toward reconnection is ecological too. There’s a growing return to deep ecology, animism, spiritual ecology, land-based living, permaculture, and Indigenous frameworks that understand the world as alive, sacred, and full of kin. Rather than seeing Nature as a resource to be dominated and extracted, people are remembering what it means to live in right relationship with the more-than-human world. The popularity of homesteading, off-grid living, animism and ecophilosophy reflects a hunger for belonging not just in community, but with Gaia herself.

We see it, too, in the revival of rites of passage—men’s circles, women’s circles, grief rituals, fasting, medicine ceremonies, sweat lodges. While these are still fringe for disconnected Boomers like my dad, they’re very normal for many. They’re real medicine for a civilization that has forgotten how to mark thresholds, how to grow through pain, how to grieve, and how to hold one another through transformation.

All of this is unfolding amidst a widening distrust in the very institutions that once claimed authority over life, death, health, and truth. Hate him or love him, Luigi’s killing of the healthcare CEO after years of being denied care struck a collective nerve—not because the act was justifiable, but because it revealed the rising despair beneath a collapsing system. It was a terrible act, but a deeply symbolic one too. Millions feel cheated by the institutions that once promised care. When life, health, and dignity are systematically denied to feed corporate bottome lines, rage becomes inevitable. The Luigi moment wasn’t just about one guy’s pain—it was about collective exhaustion. It was a civilization where the real violence often wears a suit and sits behind a desk.

Even our relationship with work and technology is being reevaluated. As trust in institutions erodes and the promises of progress fall flat, people are unplugging. Not just to escape, but to reclaim what’s essential. Digital sabbaths, tech minimalism, off-grid living, crypto, and dopamine fasts are all expressions of a deeper yearning: to reclaim attention, presence, sovereignty, and depth. The goal isn’t just disconnection from screens—it’s reconnection with what’s real. It’s a quiet rebellion against the algorithmic momentum of a system that profits from disconnection and distraction.

These are not passing trends. They are the beginnings of a multigenerational civilizational course correction—a remembering of what it means to be human in right relationship with something much greater and more whole than our individual selves.

Towards the New Ancient Way

There’s something initiatory about this moment in history.

War everywhere. Climate records being shattered. Civilizational unrest.

Billionaires—one a ketamine addict—are racing to escape the planet their industries helped set on fire. An ill, traumatized, and broken man holds the presidency of the United States, cheered on by millions. People are celebrating the murder of CEOs. Illegal drugs are slowly being re-sanctified as sacred medicine. AI is advancing faster than ethics or regulation can keep up. Teenagers are rejecting the corporate dream, turning to AI companions for the connection technology once promised, then stole.

Burnout is the baseline. Loneliness, epidemic.

And still, amid the noise and collapse, something is stirring.

The systems are cracking, the myths are unraveling, and the stories we once believed in no longer hold. It feels like collapse, but collapse is what initiation always feels like from the inside. Like the hero’s descent into the underworld, we are being dismantled—not only for annihilation, but for eventual transformation. The sickness of the West is real, but so is the medicine hidden inside its unraveling. The breakdown of the old ways may be the fertile compost from which new lifeways grow.

In myth, initiation always requires death before rebirth.

Some part of the self, the identity, the culture, the world must dissolve so that something more whole can emerge. This moment—this global dark night—is not the end, but the end of the world as we know it. The end of a world built on domination, extraction, and disconnection. And maybe—if we’re willing to descend, to listen, to remember—it’s also the beginning of the world we actually need. One rooted in right relationship, in reverence for the sacred, and in the truth of who and what we are.

The way forward is not new. It’s ancient.

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Upcoming Offerings

Into the Wild Together: A Father & Son Canoe Expedition

This isn’t just a camping trip. It’s a five-day rite of passage for fathers and sons ready to reconnect in a meaningful, lasting way. It isn’t about escaping life for a few days either. Rather, it’s about returning to what matters most. Set deep in the backcountry of Algonquin Park, this trip uses wilderness, challenge, and shared presence to help fathers and sons rediscover one another beyond the noise of modern life. Through guided reflection, ceremony, and shared adventure, the forest becomes a mirror, the canoe a vessel for connection. This is a sacred container for those called to deepen their bond and carry that connection forward long after the last paddle stroke.

Key Details

Partner: Driftwood Paddle
Facilitators: Chris Kelly / Jack Bunce / Louis Belleau
Dates: October 20th to 24th, 2025
Location: Algonquin Park, Ontario
Group: Limited to 18 people

LEAR MORE

Mushroom Summer

Mushroom Summer isn’t a conventional retreat. It’s a three-month process for those ready to deepen their relationship to psilocybin in a mindful and intentional way. This isn’t a retreat where you leave your life behind for a week—it’s a weaving of your healing and growth into the fabric of your life. Unlike traditional retreats, Mushroom Summer grounds the ceremony in the realities of daily life, turning your routine, triggers, and challenges into fertile ground for exploration and transformation. This is a sacred container for those called to intentional exploration of psilocybin with guidance and support from experienced facilitators who honour the medicine.

Key Details

Partner: Dragon Medicine
Facilitators: Carly O’Rourke & Louis Belleau
Dates: June 27th to September 29th, 2025
Location: Vancouver, BC
Group: Limited to 7 people

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The Reconnect Retreat

The Reconnect Retreat is designed for men seeking to rediscover balance and connection in their lives. Set in a tranquil natural setting, this retreat offers an opportunity to step away from the noise of daily life and immerse yourself in practices that nurture personal healing and growth. Through mindfulness meditation, conscious connected breathwork, forest bathing, intentional psychedelic work, and daily council, participants will deepen their relationship with self, others, and the natural world.

Key Details

Partner: Woven Journeys
Facilitators: Jack Bunce & Louis Belleau
Dates: September 16th to 21st, 2025
Location: Pemberton, BC
Group: Limited to 8 men

LEARN MORE

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If you’ve made it this far—thank you.

If this essay stirred something in you—hope, grief, resonance, resistance—feel free to tap the little heart. It helps the algorithms know this stuff matters, and honestly, it means a lot to me too.

I always welcome thoughtful disagreement, questions, or stories of your own. The comments are open, and I do my best to respond to everyone. And if you’d like to connect more directly, my inbox is always open.

With gratitude and reverence for all life,

Lou