A Guide to Staying Human (Part 3): Why Mindfulness Matters When the World Is Breaking Down
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
Nate Hagens
4.8 • 549 Ratings
🗓️ 22 May 2026
⏱️ 35 minutes
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Summary
In this week's Frankly, Nate offers the third episode in his series on staying human, this time focused on presence. Nate shares a personal reflection on presence, and its importance in a reality where we are constantly living in anticipation of the future. What begins as a missed moment of coffee and a birdsong unfolds into an examination of the brain's "default mode network" – one of the most studied structures in neuroscience, which supports functions like memory, future simulation, self-narrative, and wandering thought. Drawing from neuroscience, contemplative traditions, and his own decades spent modeling civilizational risk, Nate examines how the modern world – especially for those immersed in the metacrisis – pulls attention away from lived experience and into endless internal simulations about collapse, uncertainty, and what comes next.
He also reflects on the emotional burden carried by people who are deeply aware of ecological decline, social instability, and systemic fragility, while questioning the widely held assumption that constant preoccupation is equivalent to care. Through stories, research, and practical reflections, Nate offers five pathways back to embodied awareness through using sensory attention, taking pause, single-tasking, remaining open to beauty, and embracing the finitude of life itself. Ultimately, this episode asks whether protecting the future requires us to stop abandoning the present – and whether presence itself may be one of the most necessary forms of resilience in the years ahead.
How does the brain's default mode network shape our experience of dread, distraction, and time? What do we lose when awareness of the metacrisis becomes a form of absence from our own lives? And how can people engaged in difficult, world-facing work use strategies to remain emotionally present for the relationships and moments directly in front of them?
(Recorded May 18th, 2026)
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Something happened to me a few weeks ago that precipitated this frankly. |
| 0:05.0 | I sat down with a cup of coffee at around 5.30 in the morning. |
| 0:10.0 | I get up early so I can feed the animals and get a bike right in before it gets too hot. |
| 0:17.0 | The light was coming over the field behind the house and it was that gray pink that |
| 0:26.2 | last just a few minutes before it turns into an ordinary day. |
| 0:31.9 | I had my coffee in my hand and I was facing the window and at at some point, like five minutes later, I came back to myself and realized that I had not really seen any of it. |
| 0:47.6 | I had been somewhere else. |
| 0:50.1 | I had been specifically in late 2026. |
| 1:00.0 | I'd been imagining a scenario about diesel rationing due to refinery constraints. My coffee was gone and the beautiful morning dawn light was gone. |
| 1:07.0 | And the Baltimore Oriole that comes this time of year to eat the oranges I put out had come and gone. |
| 1:13.6 | And I'd been 10 feet away and somewhere else entirely. |
| 1:19.6 | So today I want to talk about presence, about actually being here in the now as a specific problem for those of us who have spent years |
| 1:32.1 | building an intellectual synthesis about where this civilization is going. |
| 1:40.2 | Because the work that has made me useful, I think, in some small way has also made me peculiarly absent from my own life. |
| 1:53.6 | And I would bet I'm not alone in this. |
| 2:12.6 | Music I have lived this kind of absence for a long time. You could say I have had a front row seat to this particular cost. And the work that I do has depended on it has probably cost me more than I have recognized |
| 2:25.3 | until recently and I'll come back to that later. |
| 2:29.3 | When you spend 20 years modeling futures, your mind develops habits and it drifts forward in time. |
| 2:39.7 | And my brain runs scenarios when it has nothing else to do. |
| 2:44.3 | It runs scenarios when it does have something else to do. |
| 2:48.2 | It runs them while you're eating, while you're on a hike, while you're watching |
| 2:52.0 | the dawn light come up. And the habit is probably what has allowed this work, but it has a cost. |
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