Deep Response: An Emergency Education in Post-Consumer Praxis

by Tyler Disney

You can't look away.You see the climate destabilization, biodiversity loss, resource scarcity, toxic bioaccumulation, and climate injustice happening all around us. You aren't the type to bury your head in the sand or shrug it off and so you roll up your sleeves.

But where to start? How to ensure your work doesn't inadvertently cause harm, a pattern as old as good intentions? How to ensure your efforts actually matter? You aren't interested in repair work on the post-iceberg Titanic.

I threw myself at these questions for over a decade. I thrashed and hammered at the problem of building a life relevant to the challenges of the 21st century and, mostly, got nowhere. Those were years of intense effort with nothing to show for it. My despair grew year by year.

Then, in a quiet moment late at night in early 2020, I found the foot of the path I'd been looking for in a place I never would have expected. What I learned would change the course of my life forever.

This is the book I wish I'd had at the beginning of my journey.

156 pages, Paperback

Published December 20, 2024

About the author

Tyler worked in the sustainable built environment as an engineer for a decade. He became disillusioned and left the industry to explore alternative responses to the various predicaments facing humanity. He reduced his annual expenses from ~$70,000/yr to less than $10,000/yr, traveled the world, joined a community of like-minded post-consumerists, and spends his time figuring out how to chase stoke a the end of the world. He splits his time between the Sierra Nevada mountains in California and interior Alaska, when not bikepacking the American Southwest.

Reviews

[Daniel]

Tremendously useful. This is a book about meta-preparation: about what it really means to be prepared when you don't know the future. It teaches readers how to think about skill development, optionality and flexibility--and by virtue of these meta-tools, how to earn true individual self-sovereignty.

Deep Response is a sop... [see the rest on my book review site.]

[James Quinlan]

It's phenomenal. An incredibly well-structured, concise, pragmatic introduction to post-consumer philosophy and what to do with it. It didn't hurt that the parallels of the author's experiences to my own are uncanny. The emphasis on continued reading at the end of each chapter is also a god send. In the end, it's an easy 5 stars and likely the best $5 I'll ever spend. It probably will be for you too, whoever is reading this.