Sarah Wilson on I Eat the Stars: how to live fully and beautifully in a collapsing world

0:00 [music] Sarah, it's I'm so happy that we get the chance to talk about your book. >> Yeah, it's funny, isn't it, doing it over a over a Zoom call with a whole heap of other people. >> Yeah. Well, I will dive right in. My first question for you is, you know, this is a book that grapples with a big topic. It's grappling with the idea of civilizational collapse that our world as we know it is in the process of collapse. Was there a specific experience or moment that made you want to explore this idea?

0:44 I don't think anyone wants to explore this idea if they've got their their sense about them. It was really I mean it's such a big topic and it's a really difficult topic. My dad calls it Sarah's book of absolutely everything and as you know Amy as my as my publisher and editor it it it really does encompass pretty much everything that's happening in the world today. what I was observing. I have a large social media community across Substack, Facebook, Instagram of about half a million people and as well as a podcast. And so I was having all these conversations about what's happening in the world. And I've been a climate activist for a long time.

1:23 My most recent book, this one wild and precious life, covered the climate crisis and provided a philosophical and spiritual kind of lens through it all. But there was AI happening. There was political fragmentation. There was talk of fascism arriving. The tech bros were causing havoc. But then of course there was fertility collapse. And there was all these things happening at once and people were feeling rightly overwhelmed and really didn't know how to fathom why all of this was happening right now and all at the same time. And you know I was sort of burying down into kind of meta crisis discussions. I was talking to energy futurists. I was talking to various philosophers, neuroscientists and what I was realizing is that this topic, this idea of there being a meta crisis, a a crisis of all the things happening at once, which is also the crisis of our inability to solve it, but also is the the mentality that caused all of this in the first place. It was being discussed in academic circles, right? You know, and it really made a lot of sense and provided a lot of comfort to me because nothing was making sense in the rest of the world. But nobody was finding a way to talk about it to the everyday person with kids and a mortgage and you know a job that they've got to get to. And so this is what I've done all my life Amy as you know is take complex subjects that are generally talked about in rarified you know academic circles and try to bring them to the everyday reader the everyday person who's so busy and doesn't have the time to investigate it themselves.

2:56 So that's how I came about it was just observing what was happening in the world, feeling into the felt experience of everyone's overwhelm. And I knew that if people could understand that there is actually a singular phenomenon behind the whole lot, then we can start to piece our way through it and forgive ourselves, forgive each other, and calm down and find a rational, sane, but also heartfelt way to navigate our way through all of this. So yeah, that that's the background to it. No singular event, but that's the point, isn't it?

3:33 It was everything all at once that kind of prompted the writing of this book. >> Yeah, I love that. And I saw someone asked in the chat too if we could hold up the book. We don't have gallies yet, but we do have a beautiful cover. I will just explain the title. I eat the stars. It comes from a Rebecca poem. She was a NASA astronomer and also a poet and she developed non-hodgins since nymphoma and at the age of 37 and as she was sort of dying from this cancer she wrote a book of poetry called a responsibility to awe and I'm sure given that most of you are book people you've probably heard of this book it's a beautiful book of poetry and one of the poems starts with you know as an antidote to fear of death I eat the stars and I'm sure most of you can work out the sort of the the meaning and the sense behind that when we're faced with something so overwhelmingly fearful. The best antidote is to eat up life to live now. And of course, philosophers and spiritualists throughout the ages have advised this.

4:40 And so that is really the theme of the book overall. >> I love that. And so the other another question I wanted to ask you about was sort of the writing process for this book because it came about in a really unusual way. You wrote it originally chapter by chapter in real time as a serialization on Substack and it wasn't until you finished the whole series that you sought a traditional publisher. And so I think what I've been curious about is, you know, do you think the manuscript would be the same if you had written it in a more traditional way or do you feel like this process of writing it in community with others shaped how the book ultimately turned out?

5:22 >> Oh, absolutely. And in the, you know, the acknowledgements I, you know, and my thank you at the front of the book, it's thank you to my Substack community. So, it really started as a conversation. I have always written books listening to where people are at. I come from mainstream media. I was the editor of Cosmopolitan. I hosted Masteref Australia. I worked for the Murdoch press. And I've always listened to where the mainstream is at. And so this book really informed me chapter by chapter where people were at, what they were struggling with, what they wanted to know more about, what was hurting them the most. And so it was a wonderful for making sure that I was on track and attending to exactly where people are at and what they're needing to know. And I was able to push the boundaries because they wanted to be pushed. They wanted to know about the deep science, the energy futurist perspective. They wanted to know all of this. There was that, but at the same time, I was also it was great as a writer because each week I had a deadline. It was, you know, I wrote this book faster than any other book I've written in my life. Now, I did research for for three years before I started writing. So, there was a lot of research done. I interviewed over 200 experts to, you know, sort of arrive at what I felt was a point and a thesis. But no, this would be a very different book. And just for people listening, which is everyone here, I essentially bring in the community, the Substack readers and subscribers thoughts and questions. So the book in its paper and font version of things also reads like a conversation. And I do that with all of my books. I write in a conversational way so that people feel that their their thoughts, they can see them recognized by other people. They feel less alone in their overwhelm. And as you know, Amy, you know, I've always with all of my books put margins, wide margins on all of my books. And they're designed for people to write in the margins their thoughts. And there's a bit of a legacy with my books where people then go and pass the book along to their friends. And there's this kind of, you know, legacy or or there's these sort of not these notations where people can feel less and less alone because it's like that's what I thought. That's the question I want to ask right now. So yes, the Substack experience is brought into the print version as well, which is a bit strange, but hopefully it'll work.

7:41 >> Yeah, I love I love the way that I think we've landed on kind of how to weave in those substack comments. And so the last question I have for you is about, you know, one of the in one of the earliest chapters in the book, you talk about how we need to let go of hope. And this is obviously a very hard pill to swallow for most of us. And so I wanted to ask you about what we can look forward to when we let go of hope. Are there things that we can look forward to as we navigate a collapsing world?

8:13 >> Yeah, this chapter took me months. It's the first chapter and it took me months and months to get it out of my heart cuz it broke my heart, you know, to write it and I'm tearary thinking about it now and I had to talk to my family about it. My family are a climate activist. Essentially, what I was seeing is that we were clinging to hope as though there was this idea of somebody out there who would magically come and save us. that especially with the climate crisis that you know the energy transition would work and we'd meet these you know IPCC deadlines and the fact of the matter is every year that was going past and as we watch more and more climate calamities come about it wasn't stacking up what people were telling us I you know like if we fight now we'll we we'll make it and yet a year and another year were going past and we weren't fighting and we weren't rallying together and the governments weren't doing what they promised to do and the situation was getting worse and we we overstepped planetary boundaries all kinds of limitations and it was looking ridiculous and what I was seeing is that it was creating a a cognitive dissonance in people that was making them very very it was making it very very hard for them to face what was going on and then prepare themselves and their children in particular for what was going on which is hard times ahead. Now humans do hard times but we need to have the truth laid out in front of us by leaders who then help us navigate these harsh realities.

9:45 So hope was holding us back from that. And I went back through history and found some wonderful quotes from various people that essentially said that true hope the hope where we let go of this kind of optimistic outlook but where we basically believe in a stunning possibility. We believe in the idea that this will make sense. And so I really explore all of this. And what I arrive at is that truth is I ultimately what we're needing right now. Once we have truth, we can rise into our best selves.

10:17 We can rise into our full maturity and we can do this kind of and I don't want to give away the ending and Amy will kill me if I give away the ending, but essentially there's this journey that I go on and we do a full circle. We come back around and you know I'm sort of holding the reader's hand as we go through these explanations of Mollik and game theory and the metacar crisis and all this kind of thing and exploration of life and death. And we come out at this idea that ultimately what collapse is doing as it has done with throughout history is bringing us back to our humanness. It's a homecoming. It's a journey or a story of a homecoming. And what we're coming home to is our full humanity and our full fired up adult selves. And that is what's going to be required for moving ahead. But it's also what we've been aching for as humans for so so long. So ultimately collapse is a gift that we didn't know we needed. So I know our time's up, but I figure I should probably end on that note.

11:16 >> I think that's the perfect note to end on. Thank you so much, Sarah, and thank you Buzz Books for having us. Yeah, thank you Buzz Books and thank you Amy for being my publisher. >> Thank you to both of you and I appreciate it. The book is called I Eat the Stars: How to Live Fully and Beautifully in a Collapsing World by Sarah Wilson. And it's of course published by Penguin Life on June 16th. And I also want to say I know that this began on Substack and in reading it, I saw that it weaves together the existential and the everyday. And you said some that it was a call to stay awake, to stay kind, to stay radically human as the world shifts around us. And I also did want to call out the poem because it really really I mean I don't know if you got the idea to do the book when you read the poem but it's it's very beautiful and it really I think >> does what you're asking it to do. So it's a I hope everyone gets a chance to read the book. It's really fantastic.

12:11 >> And I'll just add something small to that. Rebecca Elson's estate very kindly gave me permission to run the poem because they felt that the book and the subject matter was in line with her thinking. And I also the cover is a strange cover, but that would be because I designed it and I designed all of my covers. is [music] [music] [music]