MEET AKHIL PURI. One of the primary functions of Emerge is to make the Field aware of the people who populate it. This article is a brief introduction to the thought & work of the technology entrepreneur Akhil Puri who runs the How Shall We Live? substack. It tells the tale of his migration into liminal spaces and metacrisis concerns -- and presents the questions that he invites us to grapple with together.
Although it is written in the third person, the words are his own...
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If you had told
Akhil 10 years ago that he would be working to drive the cultural momentum required to solve the Metacrisis, he would have asked you to pass on whatever you were smoking.
After numerous ill-considered career decisions that had him stumbling from computer science to consumer goods marketing to product management, Akhil first came face to face with climate change and environmental catastrophe in 2016. The Indian city he lived in experienced a record-breaking heatwave, and in unrelated incidents, the level of pollution in the city's lakes got so bad that they started catching on fire.
His immediate response was to try to escape—either become super rich or move to another country. Further reading made him realize there was no escape. So backed into a corner, he decided to start a climate tech start-up. There, he tried multiple ideas, ranging from crowdfunding for green projects to developing solar rooftop projects to building a solar energy marketplace.
All of this came to an end in the middle of Covid. By this time, Akhil had realized that climate change was a symptom of the problem and not the problem itself. He realized, too, that what was probably needed was a spiritual revolution. But thinking who the hell knows how to do something like that, he decided to keep that realization aside. He continued to work on climate change—this time from Toronto, working with a carbon accounting start-up. But the problems in the world kept multiplying, and the ever-growing AI and authoritarianism risk made him realize that he couldn’t put off working on the underlying systemic issues any longer.
So he now writes a newsletter on Substack called “How shall we live?” where he unpacks the root drivers of the Metacrisis and potential solutions. To his dismay, he is also now expanding to raising awareness on Instagram and TikTok. His aim is to get a critical mass of humanity moving in the right direction by getting them to think critically about our challenges and believing something different is possible. In some ways, he is in search of a theory of everything. He doesn’t believe we will have a stable society unless we can figure out a system whose metaphysics, values, culture, and economic, political, educational, and social institutions are in alignment.
It is best to understand his work by looking at some of the questions he is trying to grapple with:
- How many people can the planet support and at what levels of lifestyles? Can we create a complex world simulation that can answer this question based on various configurations of infrastructure, policies, resources, climate etc?
- How might our ways of living–infrastructure, jobs, communities etc be re-organized such that we can meet fundamental human needs while reducing our energy and material footprint? How do we test and build out multiple ways of doing this and scale the best approaches? How do we make these ways of being desirable?
- How do we avoid a cataclysmic future where AI and robotics entrench an Orwellian surveillance state/all-powerful mega corporations? With just AI, dependency on humans for physical labour and fear of unrest might have forced the adoption of UBI, but with robotics vast majority of humans might become redundant and dispensable. This is not even accounting for the million other ways in which AI can and is already going wrong
- Does evil exist? And how does any long-term stable system deal with this? His current working definition of evil is a combination of psychopathy and sadism. He does not consider trauma/ignorance-driven anti-social behaviour as evil because the root causes of that can theoretically be addressed. But cases where psychopathy and sadism intersect might continue to pose problems in any system.
- Where does the desire for power/control come from? What metaphysical narrative can help curb that? And why have we failed in curbing it so far? This is an especially intriguing question for him because surely the most powerful people in the world are very smart (even if not wise) and have access to the best therapeutic resources. Why is it that they haven’t been able to root this out of themselves? Do they not see it as a problem? If not, why not? Molochian dynamics alone seems to him an unsatisfactory answer because clearly, many people working on solving the Metacrisis are resisting those forces in some capacity.
- How can a new metaphysical framework be scaled to a planetary level?
- How do we ensure new systems don’t recreate the same old power/control dynamics in different forms? The desire to come up with a planetary-scale metaphysical framework is itself a manifestation of an old way of thinking. Even if that framework is correct, it can’t/should not be imposed top down. If a plurality of frameworks have to exist, how do we ensure they exist in harmony?
- How does any new system integrate potentially problematic human tendencies (desire for power, greed, lust etc) rather than drive them underground through suppression tactics like moral judgments? He believes that the failure to integrate these desires in a healthy way is one of the key drivers of the Metacrisis
- Are people espousing a different way of doing things ready to lead the lower energy/material footprint lifestyles themselves? Right now, many of us are talking about ideals while still leading privileged lifestyles. Will we be able to walk the talk when it is time?
- How can investment in research on nuclear fusion or superconducting, or other such tech be ramped up exponentially?
- Assuming people can be convinced to lead lower energy & material footprint lifestyles long term, how do we start the shift to this system? What does the bridging system look like? How does a system doing full cost accounting outcompete the existing extractive system and put pressure on it to adapt?
- Where does value (in the economic sense) come from? How can it be measured (in order to do full cost accounting)? And what is the best way to allocate it/give people a fair share? Can this question even be addressed satisfactorily, given the subjectivity of how we value things
- What causes people and systems to change? How can the conditions for change be accelerated?
* BONUS *
