Possibilities emerging: Grace Rachmany on sensory relationships and the emotional foundations for change
Grace Rachmany is one of the leaders in the areas of tokenomics, blockchain governance and distributed technology. She is the founder of Voice of Humanity and Priceless DAO, and is also a member of the Foundations Earth Steering Group. Her current work involves experimentation in infrastructure for human collaboration, governance, living environments, and non-monetary economic systems.
In this interview Grace reflects on some of the emotional, spiritual and structural foundations needed to navigate the transitions ahead. The conversation touches on grief, courage and the need to be in right relationship with the planet.
This is the first in a series of possibility-oriented interviews published by Foundations Earth. We are currently engaging with active members of communities responding to our core inquiry: ‘What if we could respond inclusively and effectively to planetary-scale problems?’ To learn more about our work, you can visit our website or read more about our inquiry.
Photo of the Niger River, from USGS (available here)
At what crossroads do we find ourselves at this moment in time?
Isn’t that a funny question? You know, as if there's only four directions we could be going. We're always evolving and growing, and we're always faced with choices. If you really think about where we are, at this moment: what is the best possible use I could make of my time? It might be five minutes, and it might be an hour, and it might be the rest of my life. No matter where you are in history, or who you are, that's always the question.
Just diving a bit deeper into that – what is the best use of your time?
So this actually is the answer to the crossroads question. Firstly, I just want to say I really don't blame anyone, particularly young people, if they go towards shitcoins and drug addiction. Look, drug addiction is a very reasonable response to the current meta-crisis. Things are about to get worse. I look at my mom and my dad – and my dad’s quite at the edge of his life – and I think, thank God. He lived the 80 years of humanity that you could possibly live in modern life with no really big wars in his life, always going up on an economic scale. And it's not going to be like that for any of the rest of us in the next decade. For almost everybody, things will get significantly worse.
Now, if you're living in the rainforest, you know that. Maybe your people have been completely decimated and your forest has been decimated. So it's a very personal question, and I feel that as a human being, I was completely blind to all of that for 50 years. A lot of my peers are into the environmental movement, and have been so since I was young. I remember the 70s, the oil crisis and whatever. I've just been absolutely numb about that, almost all my life. I have an MBA, I went to a fancy school, I worked in business, I worked in tech, I worked in some of the first telecom companies. Absolute, complete blindness to [the fact] that I was living inside this mythology, and that I was destroying the environment with all my work, and that the monetary system I was living within has an end. You can't just keep always getting a better and better life. It's just… people live such a short amount of time and they aren't born wise - at least I wasn't.
So for me, the best use of my life right now is trying to leave something that isn't a complete embarrassment to my children.
What is it that enlivens you, that you see hatching or growing wildly in the commons?
Well, shockingly, a lot of young people haven't chosen drug addiction. My son said to me the other day… We were talking about where he wants to live. He's figured what he's going to do is he's going to trade stocks until there's enough money to buy a nice place outside of the city and play his music and do what he wants for the rest of his life. And that gives me hope. Young people are asking that question when their lives are ahead of them: “Wait a second, is this all there is? TikTok and bath bombs?” When I see people at that age, when they have their whole life ahead of them, really recognising the value of the living planet, the value of community and just seeing the emptiness but not giving up, doing something about it, it gives me a tremendous amount of hope in life. And it's a movement. The other thing that I would say is, you can have this conversation with more and more people.
The thing that enlivens me is death, and it's the thing that should enliven everybody. I only have this much time on the earth. I think it was James Altucher, who's an investor, [who] said, “What if you didn't live your life as if this was your last day, but if it was the last day of the people around you?” All of that would be really different. You would treat everybody different if it was their last day and you'd have a really satisfying life. So death is really the most enlivening thing and I think in the West, in this weird culture, we've lost the right relationship with death. Being in right relationship with death is being in right relationship with life. And it also gives me hope, because I don't know about you, but I'm 55 – I only have to go through this a certain number of more years.
And paying attention to that, how does that affect you? So how are you being affected by that which you are paying attention to?
I think that when you're talking about your relationship with death, and your relationship with others – What if this person wouldn't be here tomorrow? What if this park wouldn't be here tomorrow? – We're dealing with grief.
I heard the best story yesterday [...] Basically, [this person was] on this council to try and stop the re-opening of a goldmine in California. And one of the town council members says, “There seems to be some faultline under here.” And the company, who has paid everybody off by then, is like, “Oh, well, we didn't think that was important.” And literally, the earth began to shake. Everybody's phone went off. A few minutes later, after they said, “Oh, it's not important.” The town council didn't pass [the motion]. …What was your question about?
I think you've answered it – it's how what you're paying attention to is affecting your own practice.
Oh, equanimity. Yeah. So I think for me, it really is about being able to deal with loss, grief. If an earthquake doesn't happen through your town council meeting, for example, and you do lose that land, how do you continue in a positive way? There'll be failures and there'll be successes. We're going to lose things. We're beyond the point where we're going to be able to retain our environment. So being able to deal with that, and being able to deal with other people being upset. After those three years of the pandemic, we are so emotionally disturbed because of our lack of connection to the earth. Many days, I just want to go outside and sit in my garden.
And do you think that there's courage required of you, in that tolerance, in that equanimity?
You can only have courage if you have fear. Mostly, I'm a pretty foolhardy person. But yeah, there's a lot… I found that there's more and more courage required of me.
Going up a notch on the conceptual ladder, towards where the Foundations Earth work really is situated, I'm interested to think about a declaration of possibility that you can make that has the power to transform our response to planetary-scale problems.
When you align with the planet, the planet aligns with you. That story about the earthquake… I believe that a lot of my writing work has completely dried up because the planet cannot afford for me to be writing SEO copy for some shitcoin. The planet has cut off that source of income for me. If you align with the planet, the planet will align with you. I have not had a problem… the planet has aligned other sources of income for me. The planet is on your side. And that's it. I like it. It's the place to live.
Yeah, and the faith in that, right? Or the belief in that, or whatever word you want to use. That feels tangible.
Okay, yeah. I mean, I know it sounds really funny when I say, “I've only got this many years to go, I could end up drug addicted on the street.” But when you really think, “What is the worst possible thing that could happen to me?”, none of them are worse than the planet having no future! So do what the planet is asking you to do. You're gonna be gone anyway.
How do you think about that interface, that relationship? How do you think about knowing what's right, or understanding what's right, in that relationship?
We're on a spiritual journey, right? You know that you're not your body. I'm sure you're quite aware that you're not your body. Whether you have a spiritual belief or faith, it doesn't really matter, you're still a spiritual being. You don't have to believe in it for it to be the case, that you're more than just this body. So the interface is through spirituality. I am very fortunate in that I happen to believe in the religion I was born into. This is very unusual among modern people these days. But I haven't found a path through my own religion towards a deeper spirituality and I just use basic meditation methods and other types of meditations that aren't part of my own personal tradition. That's the interface, the interface is through your own spirituality. And it's a sensitivity. I think there's two [aspects]. So one is the spirituality itself. If you just think about, from the Buddhist perspective, separating my thoughts, the negative thoughts I don't want and the constructive thoughts I do want. Sometimes that's called the ‘committee of the mind’. It's like a whole committee in there. That's why we talk to ourselves, separating the positive ones from the negative ones.
But another way you can think about that spiritual side for me is [...] eliminating resistance. Sometimes you have to push through and it feels hard, and you're pushing uphill to get some resistance, because that's your path. But sometimes there's no resistance. So it's very subtle work. Is that negative voice in my head my mother's voice saying I could never do it, or my father's voice saying nobody's ever done that before? Separating your own voice from all the other ones. I think it's what that is. So even if you don't believe in spirituality, you've probably noticed that you have committee members in the committee of the mind that you really ought to listen to.
One more question springs to my mind. How do you imagine the people who live on the planet, and the other beings that live on the planet, making decisions together on behalf of the planet, or with the planet?
Last night, I was on one of… Manda [Scott], the Accidental Gods podcaster, has a monthly ‘intention setting’ group. We were talking about the water rights, particularly in the UK, and returning those to the public, rather than being privatized. We were talking about, what would we want for the waters of the world? Well, why don't we spend some time with the water and come back next month and see what the water’s asking for? Ask the planet what it wants. We talk about regulatory systems and circulatory systems. Look at it that way.
I think that to work in harmony with the planet, we need to have an appropriate regulatory system, like we do for our bodies. If I drink something poisonous, I throw up. We need to start acting like animals. If an animal excretes something, another animal eats it. And we don't do that with our computers and our chairs and our own excrement, even. We've lost touch with what it means to be a part of the planet.
So I imagine that's coming up with regulatory systems, and there's some really hopeful work being done [with] taking certain parts of the garbage and being like, ‘Oh, we could make yarn from old t-shirts,’ or, ‘We could make t-shirts from certain types of plastics.’ ‘There's some stuff that we've thrown out – what could that stuff be [used for]?’ That's what nature does. I think that's how I imagined it… people communicating with each other on that level. We think of regulation as coming from these huge organizations that aren't in touch with us. We need to be touching it to regulate it.
Thank you. Yeah, that combination of those ideas around sensing and interfacing, combined with that regulatory body, is mimicking or operating under similar principles to the natural world itself…
There's a place for technology. If you think about it, this is the first time in human history that we can really instantaneously transmit so much sensory information to one another, everywhere. It's only really now that we're starting to understand that many of the famines in the 90s in Africa were caused by the Industrial Revolution in Europe, which polluted the air, which we didn't know. Now we know. And this evolutionary phase that we're in right now… this regulatory system, this global governance system that I just described, couldn't have happened 20 years ago. We couldn't have made decisions on behalf of the planet. You see heat maps with the red spots and the green spots and the blue spots. We can now look at that at any granularity, for any one of hundreds or thousands of measures right now. It's really possible now in a way that it wasn't for us to say – just like your body says, ‘I'm hungry’, when it's hungry – for us to say, that desert right there, that town right there…. And for us to – just as our body sends a lot of white blood cells right now to that location, or red blood cells or platelets – ‘We better send some platelets over there, it's bleeding.’
We now have the capacity to do that at a planetary level as human beings, and we never had that before. That's why people talk about ‘global governance’, but they're not talking about it that way. But if you think about it as lymph nodes and platelets, and that kind of healing system that we have, well… we have capacities we never had.
When you say, rightly, that we are at a unique time in terms of our technological power to do something different – what courage do you think is required of humans to do that?
I think there are two things that require a lot of courage, and both of them require more courage from modern people, probably, than people who still live a more traditional life. The courage to feel pain. This is not such a big deal, right? Being willing to be in pain, whether that's emotional or physical pain. You have to be willing to face the price [for] whatever it is you have to stand up for. That's the biggest courage, and it'll be different for everybody.
The one that is for me personally harder is the courage to actually physically touch other people, recapture the ability to hug one another. Do I have the right energetic pulse to actually give a hug, sit on the couch, or just watch a movie together with somebody who's not my boyfriend and not my family member? And we could just sit there, touching or holding hands. That is almost close to impossible for me to do. And it's essential… The more you do have that, the less meditations you need, the less other stuff you need. I think people don't talk about that [...] the courage to touch each other. It's so taboo. We're so separated.
Thank you, Grace.
This interview was conducted by James Lock, with editing support from Jack Becher and Sam Walby.
Learn more about Grace’s work at Voice of Humanity and PricelessDAO, or connect directly via Twitter and LinkedIn.
Find out more about Foundations Earth on our website, or check out our organisational summary and core inquiry.
