Welcome to the OtherWays, original essays and stories from the edges of modernity, written and curated by the otherWise team.

If you’ve ever wondered why the world feels increasingly unreal, this piece invites you to explore how we got here. Blending reflections on creativity, agency, conspiracies, and the algorithms shaping our lives, we explore how modern systems bend our perceptions, narrow our futures, and lure us into mirror worlds that feel real but aren’t. Drawing on thinkers like Naomi Klein, Shoshana Zuboff, Jaron Lanier, and Jean Baudrillard, the essay traces how surveillance capitalism, conspiracy culture, and digital simulacra quietly erode our autonomy and distort our sense of reality. Endless Possibilities of Choice A friend once told me that writing is a universe-ending act. There are infinite directions a person can take the moment they touch pen to paper (or fingertip to keyboard). Will they write a paragraph? A sentence? One that begins with ‘the’ or ‘an’? The entire paragraph, and all the writing after, will be informed by that decision. Or how about a poem? Will the poem evoke anger or…

Shaun Chamberlin is the founder of Dark Optimism and the facilitator for Surviving the Future: The Deeper Dive, an annual shared exploration of the crises of our times and how we might respond. Now in its 7th iteration, this winter’s journey welcomes guests including Rachel Donald, Nate Hagens, Leah Manaema Avene, and Mark Boyle. In this interview, Shaun talks about how a 1999 email from his dad began a slow journey of reckoning with modernity and of supporting others in finding real community as we navigate a collapsing civilization.

Within this blog, Nakasi reflects on the invisibility of care in our lives. It is noticed only when the absence of care emerges. By sharing her family’s intimate moments, Nakasi questions care not only as a personal virtue, but as a political, relational, and ecological aspect of life. Here, individual resilience is transcended by collective opening towards care-fullness towards each other.

The closer we look at the world, the more we realize just how impressive, expansive, even uncanny our reality truly is. Our human senses tend to limit us to only a few ways of viewing the world, but the more we welcome in the supernatural, the more clearly we can appreciate the magic — at times wondrous, at times menacing — that surrounds us.

Nissa explores what it means to grow up in a world that eschews all responsibility for what we consume and waste. After a summer of exploring the mythical world of Away, and discovering viscerally that there is no such place, she has decided to assume a new role of alternative living in our transitional ecosystem. Contributor bio At otherWise, Nissa stewards the Re-Villaging content pillar, guiding efforts to reclaim practical skills, place-based repair, and the material and energetic circulations that ground community life. She’s especially excited about bike mechanics, natural building, and appropriate technology – and about finding ways to live rooted, accountable, and alive. Chipped slabs of granite and bricks are frozen in time, no longer mixing and tumbling over each other. Peering over the steep chasm at the landslide of rubble, I wonder what must have precipitated this rocky deluge. What errors in judgement, what choices led to this gash in the landscape? What a waste of…

Matryoshka in Mythos is a poethic, imagined origin story – one that might hold truths we need to re-member in order to re-animate. This tale of nested becomings brings mythic, matristic resonance to the acts of holding and being held. It was put to words by otherWise founder Nicole Civita, who was captivated by Russian nesting dolls as a child, has long pondered their symbolism, and has always felt there was more to their story.

Our deepest humanity refuses to accept the conditions of genocide. This unsettling grief reminds us that this way of living is not sustainable for life itself. Choosing the actions that lead to more life is the only way through. Leading with love, keeping our hearts open to witness what our grief and love are telling us, through both joy and sorrow, is how we survive the end of this world.

In this viscerally bountiful essay, Nicole Civita, founder of otherWise, reflects on an intimate relationship to her home garden, the garden of her grandparents, and the cornucopial harvest shared between time. She invites us to lift every holy leaf, relish most ripe Jersey tomatoes, hang herbs on every possible hook, and most of all: to share with trust. Trust that more is coming through all possible avenues of care and reciprocity, not just of what we have given, but the returning of the cosmolocal laws – abundance trusts its destination. A warm invitation to provisioning dynamics for the Harvest Moon cycle.

In this first essay from otherWise director Nicole C, she tracks her own journey of disillusionment and reckoning with the modernity. She invites us into a different, more humble posture. To ask questions, not to “seek solution or salvation, but that deepened our inquiries”.

Some ideas shape into sharp strategies. Others, over time, wear into ways of being. Cosmolocalism is one of those rare concepts that stretches from the practical to the poetic, from open-source design to planetary ethics. In this article, we explore what Cosmolocalism means to us and why it matters.

When Emily Shaljian’s friend sent a photo of her newly registered car—an old black Volvo—with the words Pleasure Vehicle stamped across the license plate, she laughed. The label felt absurd for a car inherited after her father’s death, worn down by time and memory. But it also felt oddly true. This car, once her father’s, had carried her through grief, across state lines, and into unexpected moments of joy. In this piece, Shaljian reflects on how a stubborn, aging vehicle became more than just transportation—it became a quiet companion through loss, transition, and the slow return of pleasure.