Cognitive Ecology is a notebook of meditations on the future of life on Earth, our techno-utopian dreams, and our relationship with the living world.

After two and a half months of weekly Sunday meditations, we wrap up The Human section of Cognitive Ecology and take a short summer break in July and August. I plan to take my own advice and live an embodied existence as much as possible away from technology and digital devices.

Recently, I learned from from Everything Is Amazing that we only engage part of our vision—and subsequently our brain—when we use digital devices. This explains the deep need I’ve felt for a while to explore my surroundings and engage all my senses with the physical world. It’s an emotional and spiritual urge, and summer is the best season to follow it.

Thank you for reading my meditations on the human condition in our technological world for the past couple of months. Here’s the complete section:

The Human

• Digital loneliness

• Life and the universe

• Embodied existence

• Rewilding the self

• Embodied cognition

• Human extraction

• End users

• Cognitive sovereignty

What comes next

In the second part of the notebook, The Planet, we will explore the human-nature dichotomy and life on planet Earth.

The meditations on the human-nature relationship are already written. For the meditations on non-human forms of experiencing the world I want to spend some time in the Carpathian Mountains in July. In August, I want to read Ways Of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence by James Bridle.

Here’s a taster of what comes next:

There’s the godliness of a sunset, a bird flying in the sky, a tree growing from the soil, a river streaming down a mountain, a flower blooming in spring.

There’s the godliness of a planet teeming with life, nurturing and loving, holding us in its embrace.

There’s the godliness of our brothers and sisters roaming this earth as whales, bears, elephants, tigers, foxes, rabbits, beavers, pelicans and bees.

Humans are not gods. And gods aren’t only for humans.

The notebook will continue from September with The Planet and The Future. This time, the weekly meditations will go out only to paid patrons. If these meditations have been of value to you and you want to read what comes next, this is the moment to become one.

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Our data is an extension of ourselves.

Humans should own their digital selves, just as they own their physical selves.

As we’re heading into a new technological era where human minds are commodified to create digital products and tools, maintaining our cognitive sovereignty—our capacity and right to independent and creative thought—is paramount to our survival and to building a future in which all beings can live in dignity.

Human thought should not be mined by data moguls.

🜃

Your data shouldn’t be someone else’s digital property.
Your work shouldn’t be someone else’s digital property.
Your art shouldn’t be someone else’s digital property.
Your life should not be mined for content.

🜃

Your data is an extension of your personhood.

You should own your digital self, just as you own your physical self.

🜃

We must protect our cognitive ecology from the pollution of algorithmic binary thinking.

🜃

Think for yourself.

Live this life for yourself.

🜃

Don’t let the algorithm shape your mind.

Cognitive sovereignty is the hard currency of the future.

The human algorithm shapes reality, but reality is not shaped by Homo sapiens alone.

Don’t let your mind lose touch with the objective world.

🜃

Physical sovereignty will not survive without digital sovereignty.

🜃

You are the smallest unit of resistance: a unique worldview that encapsulates the entire universe.

A clear mind can poke a hole in the fabric of our collective reality and glimpse at possible futures.

🜃

While tech moguls continue pouring their fortunes into artificial intelligence, we the people should go all-in on developing our brains.

Organic data centers are the future.

This closes The Human. The Planet and The Future resume in September, for paid subscribers. Explore the notebook of meditations here: Intro to Cognitive Ecology.

Claudia Befu

We are nodes in the infrastructure of consumption.

So what do we consume?

And who consumes us?

Our digital platforms train us to be end users, perpetual consumers of products.

Our attention and creativity are channeled into advertising and shopping funnels by the digital slot machine.

One life, one big wallet.

Pay in.

Pay out.

🜃

No matter how much automation is introduced on the market, we will never lose our one true job in the techno-capitalist utopia: being an end user.

🜃

We are end users of the planet.

We are end users of technology.

Earth as a platform.

Technology as a platform.

An endless scrolling feed of products, services, and entertainment.

🜃

We are physical and digital nodes in someone else’s infrastructure.

🜃

You are what you can buy.
You are your bank account.
You are your worth.
You are a lonely wallet on the internet.

🜃

At the end spectrum of a human civilization that wants to be as remote as possible from its biology, lies manufacturing and consumerism: a devouring anxiety of wanting to fill the void of an untethered existence with things made from manipulated matter and biology.

🜃

How we live, what we believe and how we imagine the future are shaped by ideologies designed by others.

🜃

Digital jobs, products, and platforms as an illusion of life, of experiencing the world.

🜃

Our existence is a reel on an endless scrolling feed, a blur of human experiences parsed as free content on the internet.

Our lives, consumed by the digital slot machine.

🜃

The world as we know it is a reflection of the mental bubbles in which we live.

Explore the notebook of meditations here: Intro to Cognitive Ecology.

Claudia Befu

We are in the process of turning human intelligence into infrastructure.

Once this happens, embodied existence itself becomes a resource to be extracted.

The raw material of artificial intelligence is not rare metals, but precious brain power.

🜃

Your brain is the new semiconductor.

🜃

Our advanced science and technology cannot make a drop of water. It must extract it from planet Earth.

Our advanced science and technology cannot make an ounce of intelligence. It must extract it from human brains.

Are we the next natural resource?

🜃

When we sell intelligence by the meter like water or electricity, human biology itself becomes commodified.

In the same way our water infrastructure takes fresh water from Earth’s reserves and sends it to our homes, the new intelligence infrastructure must tap into the minds of countless human beings to extract their intelligence and sell it by the meter.

For the first time in human history, our unique existence on this planet is a resource that can be productized.

🜃

The emerging blueprint of our technological age is not built on human flourishing.

It’s built on the optimized use of all natural resources—our planet, our ecosystems, our labor, our data, our energy, our intelligence—so that we can produce more for less at a faster pace.

🜃

We humans start to feel the sting of being extracted by tech because of our biology.

Let this be a mirror to how our species extracts and exploits other living beings on this planet in the name of progress.

This is what happens when life has no intrinsic meaning.

When our existence is counted by the amount of food we need to ingest to become productive for capitalism.

🜃

Digital spaces are created by human intelligence.

The technology of the future is made possible by extracting human intelligence.

Yet, these systems are built to strip us of everything that makes us human.

🜃

We mine humans just as we mine nature.

Our planet, and increasingly our lives, are the raw resources of progress.

What, then, is progress?

🜃

Technology must ultimately rely on the most valuable data-processing unit we know: the human brain.

Will we extract technology to enhance humans?

Or will we extract humans to enhance machines?

Explore the notebook of meditations here: Intro to Cognitive Ecology.

Claudia Befu

One of the biggest learnings of the twenty-first century will be that intelligence can only be generated by living beings.

Breakthroughs don’t come from connecting zeroes and ones.

They come from connecting neurons.

Human intelligence is embodied.

It is a function of biology, of living in and interacting with the physical world.

🜃

Having access to knowledge on an external server does not equal being intelligent.

Having taste comes from storing and processing at least part of that knowledge in the brain.

Our organic chips are still the future.

🜃

Human intelligence is native to human beings.

Human intelligence is embodied, an expression of being alive.

It was born out of the communion of our bodies with the physical world.

🜃

Human intelligence is not a language model.

Human intelligence is not a spatial orientation model.

Human intelligence is living in the real world with a body operated by nature.

🜃

A machine will never know what it means to be human, no matter how much human knowledge it stores.

Explore the notebook of meditations here: Intro to Cognitive Ecology.

Claudia Befu

There Is Hope: My debut novel is out as an eBook

In every carbon cycle, death is the engine of life.

It is the year 2550. After four centuries of climate collapse, the fate of Europe’s last forest rests on a fractured continent. In the segregated north, the Cooperatives control all natural resources, claiming to restore Earth’s ecosystem. Their founders, former data moguls, believe only in their own survival. In the scorching south, the Dust Road—an underground trade route—is ruled by Dust Pirates. Some fear them, others believe they are Earth’s last hope.

Nova Novikov arrives on the Iberian coast to witness an annual human sacrifice and bring her daughter’s ashes to the ancient wooden shrine. But when a young girl is chosen for the ritual, Nova makes a decision that will ripple across centuries.

Told as a mosaic of preserved memories curated in the year 3660, THERE IS HOPE is a climate sci-fi novel about ecological reckoning, sacrifice, and the fragile persistence of hope at the end of the world.

Get your copy here

If you don’t live in the USA, check out your local Amazon CA, UK, AU, DE, FR, ES, IT, NL or local store.

THERE IS HOPE is a climate fiction novel that explores Europe in the year 2550, four and a half centuries after we have reached 5°C of global warming.

Nova Novikov arrives on the Iberian coast to witness an annual human sacrifice and bring her daughter’s ashes to the ancient wooden shrine. But when a young girl is chosen for the ritual, Nova makes a decision that will ripple across centuries—witnessed through the preserved memories of those who shaped what comes next.

Told as a mosaic of curated stories in the year 3660, THERE IS HOPE is a climate sci-fi novel about ecological reckoning, sacrifice, and the fragile persistence of hope at the end of the world.

In every carbon cycle, death is the engine of life.

Subscribe now

Heat, the venerable enemy, will kill us first

We, humans, are capable of change at scale as we proved time and again throughout our 300,000 years of living on this planet. However, that same history tells us that great change comes only after great pain.

At the end of the last Ice Age, episodes of abrupt climate change melted the ice world of our ancestors flooding the tundra landscape and killing the mammoths, raising sea levels and separating continents, and upending a culture and a lifestyle that had lasted for 40,000 years. If they wanted to survive, humans had no choice but to transit to a whole new way of existing on this planet. Thus, at the beginning of the Holocene, the current interglacial period, they started the Agricultural Revolution. About 12,000 years later, another climate change event, the Little Ice Age that lasted 500 years—and, at its peak, saw European temperatures drop by as much as 2°C—pushed hunger stricken Europeans to upend our agrarian society and start an Industrial Revolution.

Today, we live in a materialistic society that believes it has mastered “nature” and can extract unlimited human and technological progress from this planet if only we could consume more energy. Meanwhile, we have a window of seventy-five years to stop global warming and ensure the survival of our species. In my novel, heat is the venerable enemy because it will destroy our false sense of control over planetary systems that operate on time scales so vast, that we cannot even begin to comprehend. As the equator becomes uninhabitable, fertile lands turn into deserts and dust bowls, as the oceans start dying and we face increased freshwater shortages, and heatwaves, wildfires, floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes devastate our ecosystems, we will learn to once again respect life on this planet as the greatest good we have. The author of The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, David Wallace-Wells, writes:

“There is no good thing in the world that will be made more abundant, or spread more widely, by global warming.”

When the heat strikes and we turn on the air conditioner in the shelter of our first world homes, trees scream in pain from thirst as they crack open, birds fall dead from the burning sky, and fish boil alive in rivers and oceans. We can hide from the heat for now, but we won’t be able to hide for long.

Who owns the food, owns the future

Over thousands of years, indigenous tribes living in the equator and the tropics grew the diversity of food crops we enjoy around the world. However, today’s human society allows a handful of agrochemical conglomerates to steal and patent our seeds, turning 12,000 years of collective food inheritance into private property. These conglomerates promote unsustainable farming practices that poison our soils, push farmers to use patented crack-seeds addicted to their agrochemicals, while farmers are barred from saving those seeds, under threats of lawsuits. The greed of these conglomerates moved our agricultural practices from diverse and resilient crops to monocultures of a handful of types of seeds vulnerable to pests, fungi, and heat.

So far, these companies have relied on their financial power and public ignorance to sell us a story that the engineered seeds and the potent pesticides are needed to produce enough food for our growing world population. But studies show that crops from seeds engineered to resist pests and weeds with the help of agrochemicals, do not yield more production than historical cultivars—locally grown seeds—that are better equipped to resist familiar and unfamiliar threats than modern cultivars. Today, whenever we lose a type of seed, we can go back to its place of origin in the equator or the tropics and find an ancestor that can help us retrieve it because nature is much better at engineering seeds. But as these regions become uninhabitable, due to global warming, both for humans and the plants that feed us, we will increasingly rely on seed banks to ensure our food diversity. What is the future of our food? In his book Seeds of Resistance: The Fight to Save our Food Supply author Mark Shapiro writes:

“The seed oligopoly we see today was built upon the conversion of freely grown and exchanged seeds into seeds as intellectual property.”

And those who own the intellectual property over our food, own our future.

The boreal forest could be our last forest

During our time on this planet, our species survived through at least two Ice Age cycles that lasted 100,000 years each. At the end of the last Ice Age, humans helped re-green the earth by planting trees from preserved seeds in the northern hemisphere. Some of those same forests were later on cut to feed the needs of the Roman Empire and of a civilization built on timber.

What survives today of the boreal forest or the taiga grows just south of the Arctic Circle and is the world’s largest biome representing a third of Earth’s forested area. The special thing about the taiga is its resilience: this forested area has been decimated by each ice age cycle but it bounced back to life every time propitious climate conditions arrived. The taiga is the youngest large forest biome on Earth but its location and its history of climate survival may ensure its endurance in hotter times, while older forests such as the Daintree Rainforest in Australia or the Amazon that lived uninterrupted through every Ice Age cycle for the past 2.6 million years may not survive a world on fire.

If the world heats up 5°C by the end of this century, Canada, Alaska, Scandinavia, and Russia will be the only regions with access to the boreal forest, fertile soils, fresh water, and cool weather conditions friendly to life. Where will everyone else go? In the frenzy of our lives, we don’t allow ourselves time to think about the ecosystems that give us food, oxygen, water, and life even as they break before our eyes. As Ben Rawlence writes in The Treeline: The Last Forest and the Future of Life on Earth:

“The unnatural has become natural, the apocalyptic has become prosaic, a perennial event merging into the background. This, perhaps, is one of the emerging realities of climate breakdown: that grief is a luxury. The urgent demands of daily life allow for no such respite or detachment.”

For now, we still have the luxury to ignore the destruction of the natural world and cruise through life in our consumerist society high on techno-utopian dreams. But we live on borrowed time and those dreams are shattered with every new molecule of carbon dioxide we add into the air in our rush to burn our way to a living hell. And one day, we’ll be down to the last forest, the last sharks, the last food crops, and the last humans.

I also talked with about the world of “There Is Hope” and how I came to write it.

Space Between

What Does Europe Look Like at 5°C of Global Warming?

Life provides its own entertainment, and I try to capture the conflict and joy that arise from our everyday experiences. My stories offer a brief respite from this crazy life, and I hope you enjoy them. There’s something new every Friday…

Read more

2 months ago · 3 likes · Vince Wetzel

There Is Hope: Amazon US | Amazon UK | Amazon AU | Amazon CA | Amazon DE | Amazon ES

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In today’s world we are constantly measured against machines.

But who gets to decide what human existence is worth?

A cherry tree doesn’t ask how to exist in this world.

It simply manifests itself in abundance.

🜃

In an increasingly artificial world, humans can maintain their sovereignty by embracing natural existence.

🜃

Beneath the layers of modernity, we are still wild at heart.

We still crave the freedom to roam the earth on our own two feet. To make things with our hands. To swim rivers, climb mountains, run, jump, gather our food.

Our wild dreams now tethered to our screens, we’re further from home than ever.

But what if we embraced Earth once again with everything we’ve learned?

Would this be paradise?

Explore the notebook of meditations here: Intro to Cognitive Ecology.

There Is Hope is finally published

In every carbon cycle, death is the engine of life.

It is the year 2550. After four centuries of climate collapse, the fate of Europe’s last forest rests on a fractured continent. In the segregated north, the Cooperatives control all natural resources, claiming to restore Earth’s ecosystem. Their founders, former data moguls, believe only in their own survival. In the scorching south, the Dust Road—an underground trade route—is ruled by Dust Pirates. Some fear them, others believe they are Earth’s last hope.

Nova Novikov arrives on the Iberian coast to witness an annual human sacrifice and bring her daughter’s ashes to the ancient wooden shrine. But when a young girl is chosen for the ritual, Nova makes a decision that will ripple across centuries—witnessed through the preserved memories of those who shaped what comes next.

Told as a mosaic of memories curated in the year 3660, There Is Hope is a luminous novel about ecological reckoning, sacrifice, and the fragile persistence of hope at the end of the world.

Get your copy here

If you don’t live in the USA, check out your local Amazon CA, UK, AU, DE, FR, ES, IT, NL or local store.

There Is Hope is a climate fiction novel that explores Europe in the year 2550, four and a half centuries after we have reached 5°C of global warming by the end of the twenty-first century.

Told as a mosaic of preserved memories curated in the year 3660, There Is Hope is a living testament to the suffering humanity endured in its darkest hour, and a cautionary tale for future generations.

Future generations will not be insulated from the world we destroyed for them. They will inherit digital memories of everything this Earth once was and is forever lost to them. Forever grieving for a world they will never know.

By the end of the twenty-first century, Homo sapiens will have decided the climate future of this planet. Humans don’t possess the technology to control the climate at a planetary scale—they never will. However, they have control over their actions. In less than seventy-five years, Earth could reach an average global warming of 2°C, 3°C, or 5°C—the small window of opportunity where humans get to decide is closing fast.

For those living today the future is an abstract notion.

For those living in the year 2550 it is already history.

There Is Hope gives a voice to those future generations we have already silenced.

The book

Here is how to step into the Dust Road.

Table of contents

• Prologue

• Human Island

• The Day I Learned I Would Die

• The Seed Grower

• Seeds Of Resistance

• The Dust Pirates

• Hope At The End Of The World

• The Cooperatives

• Wildfire

• There Is Hope

• The First Diver

• Epilogue

Design and illustrations

The print edition has been carefully designed, illustrated, and typeset by the amazing artist Barış Şehri.

About this edition

Even after multiple rounds of editing during the serialization, the manuscript was still asking for more. I returned to it through autumn and winter, working it through the 10-15-20 review method: ten passes for structure, fifteen for prose, twenty for the smallest details. Character arcs were deepened, descriptions smoothed, and dialogue was calibrated until the story landed on the page. This is the book There Is Hope always wanted to be.

There Is Hope is the prequel to a trilogy I'll begin drafting in summer 2026.

Epilogue (excerpt)

Wrapped like mummies in seaweed cloth, we enter the belly of the beast: the concrete jungles of abandoned cities in the Dust Bowl of Central Europe. I hope these records remain as a testament to time, to our suffering. If we survive, I hope future generations learn from us and never repeat the mistakes of our ancestors.

The infernal heat is trapped in the concrete. Patches of melting asphalt mix with the cracked, rugged soil. Our shoes are old and worn, our feet painfully callused. We stagger through the heat like agonizing beasts, in a row, putting one foot in front of the other. Our overseers wear biosuits—a luxury we’ll never be able to afford. They’re not here to torture us or keep us from escaping. There’s nowhere to go. There’s no water. There’s no food on the Dust Road. We’re lucky to forage for human scraps. Our destroyers have left so much behind in these cities. They’ve been scavenged for centuries, and they still give. They are our livelihood and our lifeblood.

We crawl through hollow windows like empty eye sockets, through doorways without doors, like toothless mouths. We’re swallowed by the beast—up and down ruined stairways, breaking walls to extract the wiring. It’s hard work. The tools are heavy. Our bodies are dry, stringy. Dust clings to our clothes, scratching our eyes like sandpaper. Our fingers bleed from pulling the wires out of the walls, from dismantling the nests of our destroyers piece by piece. There are so many buildings—streets intersecting with each other, all caked in dust. We scavenge until sunset.

After work is the only time we drink and feed: saline dripping into our veins, a seaweed broth fortified with vitamins and minerals. At night, we unfold the thermal tents and rest. This is how we survive. This is what our work is worth. We are the walking dead. We are the zombie children. There is no escape. No future.

In every carbon cycle, death is the engine of life.

The complete serialized version is available in the paid archive.

Early reviews

“A beautiful, but painful story... an eye-opening story of what our future could look like.”—Tasha Schiedel, NetGalley

“The world is immersive and well thought-out. The book's overall structure is laid out as a series of interconnected memory logs from several key players in the story. This layout provided variety to the storytelling and also introduced the reader to different regions, cultures, and perspectives.”—Faith Streeter, NetGalley

“A book that keeps me thinking about it for a long time.”—Candice Hiles, NetGalley

Thank you for being part of this world.

Claudia Befu

To be merely born is not enough.

We are constantly asked to justify our existence through optimization, efficiency, and productivity.

Caught in the whirlwind of progress, we forget that we are living beings.

But nature doesn’t ask about the meaning of existence. To exist is to have meaning.

Our moral compass is guided by our framework of reference.

But frameworks change.

What makes us human doesn’t.

🜃

You cannot purchase a meaningful existence.
You cannot manufacture a meaningful existence.
You can only live a meaningful existence.

🜃

Being alive and experiencing the world as an individual is the precious gift of being born.

Embodied existence is a manifestation of life in this universe—it is unique, irreversible, and unrepeatable.

You get only one chance to be you.

🜃

We think, therefore we are.
We think, therefore our reality exists.

🜃

Our creative energy waits to be engaged, to embrace our embodied existence, to express who we are into the world.

🜃

There is nothing new under the sun.

Everything has been done before.

But not by you in your life that you live right now for the first and perhaps the last time.

Explore the notebook of meditations here: Intro to Cognitive Ecology.

Claudia Befu

My mother died when I was very young. This taught me early on about the irreversible nature of death. One moment you’re here then the next you’re gone.

How beautiful is this life, how amazing that you get to be you this one time in this vast universe.

I am a snapshot of time. The record of an existence.

You are a snapshot of time. The record of an existence.

🜃

We are the fireflies in the dark.

No matter who or what existed before, we are the expression of life in the universe right now.

🜃

There is no key to the riddle of life.

Only the shocking awareness of being alive.

🜃

How quiet would the universe be without us?

Eons and eons of space-time.

Not a single whisper.

Explore the notebook of meditations here: Intro to Cognitive Ecology.

Claudia Befu

The world’s population has almost doubled during my lifetime. Where one person stood, now there are two, yet we feel lonelier than ever.

Our technological world makes us lonely by design.

It’s a paradox that social media feels so lonely, even though it’s a web of human thoughts—a collective brain carved by algorithmic neural paths.

Or maybe we’re all just lonely people reaching into the void, hoping someone reaches back, hoping to feel their touch.

🜃

We can plug into the technological world built around us only through the glowing screens of our individual terminals.

The more we want to be connected, the lonelier we get.

🜃

Tech is commodifying loneliness.

Minds tethered to our screens, we drift away.

🜃

Our glowing digital cages make being in the real world a premium experience.

Explore the notebook of meditations here: Intro to Cognitive Ecology.

Claudia Befu

Cognitive Ecology is a notebook of meditations on the future of life on Earth, our techno-utopian dreams, and our relationship with the living world.

Caught in the whirlwind of progress, we forgot that we are living beings.

In our quest for optimization, our existence on this planet, in these biological bodies, remains neglected and unacknowledged.

As our thoughts, experiences, feelings, and creative energy are harvested for profit and human existence itself is commodified, we slowly join the rest of life on Earth as natural resources.

Is this the future of life on Earth?

To build better futures we must restore our cognitive ecology.

Human progress should sustain the future of life on this planet, not turn it into a resource to be extracted and exploited.

Technology should reintegrate humans into planetary life, not abstract us from it.

To transcend our human condition, we must once again embrace our embodied existence on this blue planet.

It is the most precious thing we have.

The notebook

Divided into three sections, the notebook unfolds weekly through thematic meditations.

The Human

• Digital loneliness

• Life and the universe

• Embodied existence

• Rewilding the self

• Embodied cognition

• Human extraction

• End users

• Cognitive sovereignty

The Planet

Forthcoming

The Future

Forthcoming

Field notes

• Cognitive sovereignty

• Everything is new under the sun

• We are the fireflies in the dark

• Your life should not be mined for content

• You are not an end user

• Your brain is the new semiconductor

• Natural existence in an artificial age

• Allow the goodness inside you to manifest

• You cannot purchase a meaningful existence

• There is no nature

• AI is thirstier than humans

• We didn’t master nature. We merely survived it.

• The machines will never be our overlords

• Are we rearranged food?

• Technology should reintegrate humans into planetary life

• If it destroys life, it is progress?

• Nature doesn’t need rights

• We need a new ecology of thought

Beyond all ideas of right and wrong there is a field, I’ll meet you there.
—Rumi

🜃

Thank you for reading,
Claudia Befu

🜃

The era of striving for industrialization, technology, and progress has come to an end. These markers of human civilization are now part of our DNA. We have transformed this planet—for better or for worse—into a playing field for human aspirations. We tamed nature by reducing it at scale, and the days of being afraid of beasts lurking in dark forests are long gone. We paved over the dangers of this world—real or imaginary—we built our urban fortresses, and we retreated into our digitized realities.

What is the blueprint of our lives? The ancestors that set us on the train of industrialization, technology, and progress aspired to improve their lives: have enough food in their bellies, a warm shelter over their heads, access to medicine to alleviate their pain, and safety from the unpredictable forces of nature. They wanted knowledge to understand the mysteries of the universe, and freedom to pursue their dreams. We have achieved all that and more. So what comes next?

The emerging blueprint of our technological age is not built on human flourishing. It’s built on optimization and efficiency in the use of all natural resource—our planet, our ecosystems, our labor, our data, our energy—so that we can produce more for less at a faster pace. At the end spectrum of a human civilization as remote as possible from its biology, lies manufacturing and consumerism: a devouring anxiety of wanting to fill the void of our untethered existence with things made from manipulated matter and biology.

As the production line speeds up, the slingshot of progress will hurl humanity toward its extinction, replacing chaotic biology with a superior form of being, free to spread across the universe where it can continue to extract and exploit with technological efficiency and optimization—turning matter and life into products consumed by digital existence.

But life cannot be an abstraction of life.

You cannot manufacture a meaningful existence. You cannot purchase a meaningful existence. You can only live a meaningful existence.

Imagine embracing once again the gift of our natural lives and using technology and progress to turn this Earth into a paradise that supports planetary life in all its magnificent beauty and diversity. Imagine using technology and progress to immerse ourselves into our ecosystems, reconnect with the planet and all other living beings in peace, and become of this world once again. Each of us in our unique forms of existence, in these bodies that are born, grow, and one day perish. How beautiful is this life, how amazing that you get to be you this one time in this vast universe.

🜃

Cognitive Ecology is a philosophical companion to my debut climate fiction mosaic novel There Is Hope (spring 2026) now available for pre-order.

Thank you for reading,
—Claudia Befu

Three years ago, I sent out the first installment of my mosaic cli-fi series There Is Hope.

That day, I invited you on a long journey as I wrote and published my first novel, letting the story unfold episode by episode in your inbox. Some of you have been here from the beginning. Others joined along the way. Either way, here we are. On this small corner of the internet, writing and reading literature while the world spins on.

Bringing this novel to life with you has felt like a piece of stolen time. In our busy lives, taking the odd moment to immerse in an imaginary world—both as readers and writers—is a rare kind of luxury. It is also a pure form of human existence: to experience the wold on our own terms, and to articulate our unique worldviews through stories.

After a long journey, There Is Hope is finally ready to leave the pages of this newsletter and venture into the world. The publication date is June 1, 2026. The first edition will include an eBook and a beautiful paperback edition with five interior illustrations—which I will reveal soon.

To thank you for supporting this story as it was written and serialized, I’m making the eBook available for pre-order at €0.99 for the next six weeks. After publication, the price will be €5.99.

If you’ve been reading along, this is the moment to make it yours.

Pre-order your copy now

A lot has changed between the first installment and this final version. I spent autumn and winter rewriting until the words sang on the page—adding depth, structure, cutting 2000 words, then adding 5000 more.

For the book design I collaborated with the talented . He created a a stunning cover for the book, did professional typesetting for the interior, and brought the story to life with five gorgeous interior illustrations.

All of this will be included in both the eBook and the print edition.

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We spend too much time reacting to the world and too little time manifesting our inner self into the world. So much of who we are remains unexpressed. Our very existence on this planet, in this biological body, remains neglected, unacknowledged. We take mental refuge in worlds to come, futures to come, or in life beyond death—thinking this life here is transitory. Yet, we strive for optimization, efficiency, and productivity, to increase an illusory value, be it capital or progress. Increasingly, even our thoughts, experiences, feelings, and creative energy are harvested for profit by platforms that commodify human existence itself.

Caught in the whirlwind of progress, we forget that we are living beings.

Every single day is a manifestation of being alive on a planet that nurtures us together with countless other beings—the web of life powering existence itself. Every day, our creative energy waits to be engaged, to embrace our embodied existence, to express who we are into the world. It starts with the small things: our surroundings, our relationships, how we dress our bodies, the way we carry ourselves, what we cook, how we set up the table. Then it extends to the outside world: how we exist on this planet, how we consume, how we share this earth with other living beings, how we leave this place behind once we’ve passed through. All this is our imprint on this world.

From the small to the big things, it was never about changing the world single handedly. It was about changing our world by manifesting the goodness inside, by doing the work.

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Cognitive Ecology is a philosophical notebook being written in public and collected in print at the end of 2026. You’re reading it as it takes shape. Start from the beginning here.

Thank you for reading,
—Claudia Befu

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The Industrial Revolution and human progress have devastated the diversity of life on Earth. Most large mammals live in symbolic numbers as representatives of their species, unless they are productive for human society. Meanwhile, the mammals who have exploded in numbers because they serve as protein resources for us—such as cows and pigs—live miserable lives. Even though our species is incapable of living under water, marine life has suffered equally. Our economic activities extract life from the ocean, pollute Earth’s waters, and disrupt the aquatic habitats that sustain the lives of countless beings.

We paved over our forests, meadows, and wet lands. We turned our rivers into facilities for generating electricity, even though rivers have a much higher economic value when left wild. But if rivers were allowed to once again run free—providing fish to eat at no cost and naturally fertilizing our agricultural lands—how would food conglomerates and agrochemical companies continue to make profits? Productizing the most basic needs of life is a sure way to get rich. But by productizing our planet, we have destroyed it. We cut old growth forests for timber. We burned entire tropical forests together with all their constituents to grow palm oil plantations. Kilometer after kilometer of perfectly aligned palm trees, living on agrochemicals that destroy the soil, now cover entire landscapes that were once thriving ecosystems. Wildlife, after all, does not have a bank account. It cannot shop for food and water in supermarkets or buy their furs and bark online. But why should we feel sorry for lesser species or the planet itself? Were they not created to serve human progress?

During my lifetime on this planet, the global human population has nearly doubled. This boom in humans was hailed as a successful feature of progress: longer life spans, lower infant mortality, higher caloric intake, and better lives for everyone made possible by economic development. Yet gradually the fruits of human labour were funneled in the pockets of a cunning few. At the same time, new technologies started to render human intelligence, creativity, and contribution to progress optional. In today’s economy, a human is a commodity that can be replaced by machines.

Young people understand this instinctively. They are intelligent enough to piece together the tapestry of human reality in the twenty-first century. Their response is expressed in their refusal to participate in outdated educational systems, but even more poignant in the way they consume and are consumed. In today’s economy, the kind of human intelligence needed for progress can no longer be optimized by human beings. A human is an inefficient training model, requiring twenty years of caloric intake to become profitable. Even then, the output of a human model is strongly limited by its biology. Unlike our silicon cousins, we can never become superhuman. In today’s economy, the most high yielding human consumes and allows themselves to be consumed for technological progress. What counts is what increases that consumption power. This is the world we built for the younger generations. They look back with nostalgia at how their parents and grandparents once lived. But they are under no illusion about what they need to do to survive today. They understand what human life is worth to progress.

As we slowly join the rest of life on Earth as natural resources, perhaps we will finally pause, look around, and ask ourselves: if it destroys life, is it even progress?

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Cognitive Ecology is a philosophical notebook being written in public and collected in print at the end of 2026. You’re reading it as it takes shape. Start from the beginning here.

Thank you for reading,
—Claudia Befu

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Ever since the Industrial Revolution, civilization has been on a speeding train toward what seemed to be a desired final destination: transcending the human condition. It was never clear what that meant, but that was the beauty of it—the certainty that, wherever the train took us it would be a wonderful world.

Nearly three hundred years later, the train of progress rushes on. The world speeding past the train’s windows blurs: more human settlements, fewer forests, meadows, wild rivers, and wild life. Round and round we circle the Earth, and the world feels like it is closing in on us.

AI threatens to replace human intelligence and creativity. Humans risk being demoted by machines as the superior species. Our existence is slowly mined to build the new superhuman. We join the rest of life on Earth as natural resources.

For the first time, we start to see glimpses of the end station.

Of what is to come.

Or maybe not.

Perhaps it’s time to step out of our imaginary train and take a hard look at the world we wanted to leave behind. For the first time, we start to feel its pain: our hunger to consume our way to progress is cannibalizing the human species to give birth to a superintelligence devoid of life. And what is a superhuman without life? What is Earth without life? What is the universe without life? What is a human devoid of its body?

Perhaps transcendence means coming full circle: embracing our natural existence as biological beings on the only planet known in our reachable universe to sustain human life. Embracing the fact that human beings are manifestations of life on Earth, part of this planet’s living ecosystem we need to survive. Continuity and flourishing of life on Earth in all its magnificent diversity must be the supreme destination.

Perhaps transcendence means abandoning our animal fear of a predatory natural world, and using our technology not to segregate ourselves from life, but to embrace it fully, secure in the knowledge that we now have the means to protect ourselves.

Perhaps transcendence means becoming once again of this planet in our minds and worldviews. Reintegrate ourselves with the ecosystems that give us life. Fully embrace our flesh-and-blood existence as the only means of being human and alive.

The ultimate goal of this new transcendental human being should be to protect Earth’s ability to sustain the diversity of life in perpetuity.

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Cognitive Ecology is a philosophical notebook being written in public and collected in print at the end of 2026. You’re reading it as it takes shape. Start from the beginning here.

Thank you for reading,
—Claudia Befu

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One thing climate change has made clear to us is that humans haven’t mastered nature yet. Perhaps we never will. And that is fine.

The idea of mastering nature comes from a feeling of fear, a survival instinct that any living creature on this planet—no matter how small and insignificant—possesses. However, human civilization has come to a point where it allows us to stop operating from that place of fear in our relationship with nature. But our social neurosis doesn’t allow us to see clearly.

When we operate from a desire to dominate all the non-human forces that have agency on this planet—be it a predatory species or the cycles of natural ecosystems—we see everything as a threat. The very place that gives us life becomes the perceived enemy. And so, we retreat in an abstract world of our own making, our minds tethered to life-simulating devices.

Historically, human creations have helped us survive, explore, and understand the world more deeply. Our art, music, writing, philosophy, and science have elevated the human condition by keenly observing our surrounding world and taking inspiration from it. Modern technology can enhance our senses, bring us closer to the natural world, without the need to resort to violence to feel protected. Without the need to cut ourselves from forests to feel sheltered. Without the need to poison our waters to feel clean. Without the need to exploit this planet and other living beings to feel like we are making progress.

Imagine technology that lets us listen to a tree.

Feel the heartbeat of a cheetah.

Hear the colors of the rainbow.

Sense the tremors of the next earthquake.

Technology should immerse us in the world, not extract us from it.

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Cognitive Ecology is a philosophical notebook being written in public and collected in print at the end of 2026. You’re reading it as it takes shape. Start from the beginning here.

Thank you for reading,
—Claudia Befu

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Old technologies were created to enhance human life. New technologies aim to replicate human intelligence. The raw material of artificial intelligence is not rare metals, but precious brain power.

Current models were trained by extracting records of humanity’s written, visual, and musical arts and knowledge. But ingesting the outputs of human intelligence is not enough to replicate a thinking human. Human intelligence is embodied. It is a function of biology, of living in and interacting with the physical world.

To advance toward artificial general intelligence, machines require human spatial intelligence. The necessary training data must be extracted via wearables that tether humans to computers. Yet even mapping human experience won’t be enough to teach machines how to think and feel like us.

To pursue AGI and super-intelligence, technology must ultimately rely on the most valuable data-processing unit we know: the human brain.

Will we extract technology to enhance humans? Or will we extract humans to enhance machines?

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Cognitive Ecology is a philosophical notebook being written in public and collected in print at the end of 2026. You’re reading it as it takes shape. Start from the beginning here.

Thank you for reading,
—Claudia Befu

In the future, some very clever people plan to arrange them better.

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Do you sometimes wonder about the future of life? Is the human stomach the most efficient tool for generating energy? Or is the sun better? Does it make sense to populate distant Earths with humans? Or should we optimize ourselves as simulations?

Great things are in store for the future of life, but to understand where we are going, we must first understand where we are.

Everything in this universe exists as it does because, 13.8 billion years ago, the lid was taken off the Big Bang pressure cooker sending a hot soup of fundamental particles flying in all directions. After a while, they turned into atoms and, with the help of gravity, formed a vast number of planets, suns, stars, and galaxies—so far apart that traveling to them is impossible. Space is cold and dark. There is no oxygen. We don’t even know whether there is life beyond Earth. It is all rather inefficient.

Yet, amid this cosmic chaos, something the Big Bang had clearly not anticipated emerged: the human species. As all biological entities, we are, for now, nothing more than rearranged food. But we are on the verge of creating something the Big Bang never quite managed: superintelligence.

The future belongs to superintelligent entities. They will be ambitious. They will spread across the universe and arrange all the particles the Big Bang messed up in ways that are more optimized, more efficient, and infinitely more delightful.

How exactly will this rearranged universe look? That is something the very clever people are still thinking about.

🜃

Cognitive Ecology is a philosophical notebook being written in public and collected in print at the end of 2026. You’re reading it as it takes shape. Start from the beginning here.

Thank you for reading,
—Claudia Befu