We can’t fix the future with the mindset that broke the world — but humanity’s story holds other paths.
Things are not great. Global industrial society is failing us, and all life on earth. We become increasingly aware of its ‘side effects', the design flaws at its core. Extraction leading to destruction, violence and oppression on a planetary scale. How painful that despite our hard work and best intentions, this is the system that we hold up, together.
How do we break free?
The change we need is deep, and all-encompassing. Many of us grew up as consumers in our capitalistic culture. It shaped the way we look at the world. We live and breathe its values, and reinforce them everyday in the way we eat, learn, care, rest, create, and work together.
How can we possibly change a global system, that is so deeply engrained in us?
Where do we even begin? Where do we find the energy, in a system that is designed to exhaust? That makes us believe our only power lies in our role as consumers? And that creates the illusion that we need to solve it all on our own?
What if we could choose from four distinct ways of being?
Humanity’s story holds incredible wisdom - alternative ways of living that prioritize balance, fulfillment, and sustainability. Our ancestors -whether hunters, herders, or farmers- lived closer to their communities, their bodies, and the land, cultivating interdependent and reciprocal relationships.
These ways of life haven’t disappeared. They’re preserved in stories, museums, traditions, and hobbies. They continue to evolve in the lives of people outside the Global North — and in the growing movement of people reclaiming alternative lifestyles today.
We call these alternatives ways of being; “modes” and we’ve identified four that offer a framework for imagining new paths forward. Each mode carries its own values, technologies, and rhythms, ways to step outside the logic of the global industrial system.
For many in the global north it's extremely hard to acknowledge these alternatives because they are overshadowed by the dominant global industrial system that thrives on displacing these alternatives through commodification.
One egg, four modes
Let’s make it concrete. Think of the egg you had for breakfast:
In Wild Mode, the egg is a gift from nature. No coop, no feed. You find it if you’re lucky, whoever is hungriest gets it.
In Domestic Mode, it comes from your own chickens. Fed with scraps, roosting in the backyard. Each chicken has a name, not a barcode.
In Local Mode, it’s from a farm collective. Shared land, shared care, shared yield.
In Global Mode, it’s a subsidized product of the industrial food system, handled by robots and information technology, fed with imported soy and stabilized with antibiotics. The production involves every imaginable industry from transport and packaging to medical and finance.
These modes aren’t just about eggs. They’re four distinct relationships to the world, and they’re all available to us, even if we’ve been conditioned to believe otherwise.
We need to flip our idea of civilization, to move forward.
The dominant story tells us that “civilization” means progress — more growth, more tech, more control. But this path is eroding both natural and human systems. The global economy externalizes its costs, consumes more than it restores, and depends on endless extraction from other modes of life.
Uncivilize is a framework that re-examines what civilization could mean. It traces how different societies adopted the modes available to them, and how each mode creates its own kind of wealth, its own demands on energy, and its own way of being human. These modes aren’t just historical, they’re alive, and they can be applied to any task, community, business, or way of life.
Here’s how they shape our world:
Wild Mode:
Restores ecosystems and people’s ability to continue to live with the land.
Domestic Mode:
Supports self-sufficiency and creates value in households
at 4x the energy use of wild mode.
Local Mode:
Builds resilience and relationships at the community level
using about 10x more energy.
Global Mode:
Maximizes convenience, drives economic growth
but uses over 100x more energy than wild mode.
energy
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local
domestic
wild
Our material view of civilization
Our current view of civilization where progress is measured in material wealth. Each bar here represents energy usage per person which can be used as a proxy for both material wealth and impact.
wellbeing
global
local
domestic
wild
Actual wellbeing & Happiness
Looking at the wellbeing we experience rather than material wealth. Paleo archeology and research with tribes and alternative lifestyles shows wellbeing is more evenly distributed across modes and doesn't favor modern life.
wellbeing
energy
global
local
domestic
wild
Uncivilize view of civilization
A completely inverted image appears when we look at how much wellbeing and happiness can be generated per amount of energy spend. This reveals the flaw of global mode in producing wellbeing and happiness.
Back to our eggs
Our four eggs come from four different worlds. But in our modern world Global Mode dominates. It exploits the others modes, erodes them, and presents itself as the only viable option.
In places like the Netherlands, global mode makes it impossible to safely eat eggs from local, domestic, or wild modes due to soil pollution causing buildup of harmful chemical in worms that chickens feed on. The very system promising food security is making alternatives unsafe.
Our instinct is to double down — to solve this with more tech, more control. But this only increases our dependence on commerce, technology and fragile supply chains while it undermines our ability to choose, to understand an do it for ourselves. If the other modes collapse, Global Mode collapses too.
The food industry makes it impossible for us to grow food
The entertainment industry makes us lethargic
The health industry makes us sick
…
Resilience and wellbeing lie in balancing all modes.
This isn’t a story about banning supermarket eggs or romanticizing backyard chickens. The egg is a metaphor for all the things we consume, where we no longer have a hand in the production, where we can’t tell how they magically appeared, or what was lost to make them.
Every product we consume takes something. Often, it replaces something richer: care, rhythm, understanding, connection. Commodities cut us off from experiences that nourish life.
The egg is also a symbol of possibility. In the right context, it can bring new meaning: a relationship with food, the care of animals, a slower pace, a chance to share. These opportunities don’t disappear, but the way we live now makes them harder to see, harder to choose.
We invite you to ask: Can I meet this need differently? Could I turn to my community? Could I do it myself? Is nature already offering it?
You don’t have to live in one mode. In fact, you can’t. But you can compose a life that draws from each, depending on your values, your capacity, your moment in time.
Each egg offers something different: Global Mode is convenient. Local Mode helps your community thrive. Domestic Mode brings chickens, and joy to your backyard. Wild Mode invites you into the forest.
You don’t have to pick just one. But the moment you realize you can choose — is when everything starts to change.
You start to trade a narrow lifestyle as a consumer for a richer lifestyle where you're both consumer, producer and regenerator, where your impact shrinks dramatically with every little shift you make, where you put your imagination and creativity to work and inspire others to shift with you.
Simple food example
The wisdom we build on
Uncivilize stands on a wide landscape of insight: the convivial tools of Ivan Illich and E.F. Schumacher’s call for “small is beautiful”; Kate Raworth’s Doughnut and Elinor Ostrom’s commons; the low-tech pragmatism of Kris De Decker and Michael Greer; Bayo Akomolafe’s invitation to “slow down in urgent times”; yoga’s yamas and niyamas; indigenous teachings like the Wendigo and the seventh-generation principle. Together they remind us that thriving within limits is an old, shared idea — Uncivilize simply offers a language and practice for our moment.
Curious to see how you can apply these four modes?
We are developing a set of tools that support you in applying these modes to explore how you can cultivate greater wellbeing by pursuing a more balanced mix of modes.