Day 37 - 6th Feb
THE PRESENCE OF NOTHING
Gold and ghosts
Crunch and sip
Kiss and drop
This place never stops
Subtle drops within and without
The spinifex never took me
But white
creamy white
Ghost gums
Did
Holding up flutes of green
Cheersing the warm blue sky
And a wind too
High up
Constant through the pines
Clear-toned and different
Shows me softness
Where there isn't supposed to be
Girt and sea
It’s harsh country
Until it isn't
Amplifies what is in the knots
around your heart
Works them out
Thinks nothing of them
Knows what it's doin’
And the only home
My children have ever known
Homegrown
Sunkissed
Windblown
Little Aussies
Good nights and long days
Tuckered out
Forever
And what of the gold?
Not mine to take
Or rake up
Off the beach
I lie awake and wonder
Is this giant feeling
The lack of something
Or the presence of nothing?
Australia, Protopia, and the Search for Meaning
Australian national identity is like traditional folk music—simple on the surface, but layered with nuance. The longer you live here, the more you see that the internationally packaged version—beaches, bronzed bodies, the laid-back she’ll be right attitude—is real, but it’s not the full story. It’s a major chord in the composition, but not the defining melody.
From a lifestyle perspective, especially for young families, Australia is unbeatable. At almost every level of society, life here offers an ease and fairness unmatched anywhere else. In fact, I see Australia as the most viable real-world model of what I call protopia—a term coined by futurist Kevin Kelly to describe incremental, sustainable progress. Protopia isn’t a utopian dream but a practical path forward, where things get slightly better over time through deliberate action.
The Four Life Trajectories
Protopia is central to my approach in therapy. It represents one of four deviations from the normative life trajectory. At the extreme negative end is hell or catastrophe—often what brings people to therapy in the first place. They arrive convinced they are doomed, consumed by an inarticulate but persistent existential dread. Even those who come in for a narrowly defined issue often carry a deeply buried belief that something beyond-terrible is looming.
Modern, codified psychology—particularly the cookie-cutter CBT model—doesn’t adequately account for this. It treats mental illness as something distinct from mental health, as if some people are simply sick while the rest of us maintain wellness through self-care and five top tips for mental hygiene. But in my work, I’ve found that even the most outwardly balanced individuals harbour some small, unexamined corner of their psyche where doom resides. It’s often preverbal, pre-rational—just a sense that things could collapse at any moment.
Therapy involves tugging at that thread, exposing the fear to daylight. And in most cases, once it’s articulated and confronted, it doesn’t survive contact with reality. That realisation can be an immense relief.
But conventional psychology often fails to go there. It ignores the existential and spiritual dimensions of suffering, pretending you can promote genuine well-being while avoiding the deeper questions. That’s nonsense. Even in the rare cases where someone truly has no lurking catastrophic fear, they still need to prepare for life’s inevitable difficulties—including the certainty of death.
Many people find me after engaging in therapy that was expedient rather than true. They’ve done the mental hygiene work, but the deeper project remains unfinished.
From Catastrophe to Personal Dystopia
Once we eliminate the catastrophic worldview, what remains is not happiness—but personal dystopia. Not a world-ending disaster, but a slow, steady decline into a deeply unsatisfying life.
At this point, therapy forces an honest look at what will happen if nothing changes. World War III is not about to break out. The seas will not swallow your house in exactly 3.5 years. The latest apocalyptic doomsday prediction can be dismissed. But that doesn’t mean your personal future isn’t bleak.
When even the most well-adjusted person maps their life trajectory over the next decade—considering the stupid things they keep doing and the wise things they claim they’ll start but never do—they often see a future that is depressing as hell. But this realisation is useful. You don’t need the world to end for your life to become a disaster. Your own personal version of hell is already on the cards if you don’t course-correct.
On the other side of the spectrum is utopia—but this is a fantasy, often a trauma response. Psychoanalyst Donald Kalsched calls it the "bright angel" of the self-care system: an illusion of perfection. We all indulge in utopian thinking, but it never survives reality.
So, dystopia is possible in a way utopia is not. Why? Because personal dystopia is entirely within your control. All it requires is disengagement—cutting yourself off from meaningful relationships, making bad choices, and letting entropy take its course.
Personal utopia, on the other hand, is impossible because it relies on external factors. You can’t engineer it in a vacuum. True fulfilment requires interpersonal connection, and relationships involve other people—who are unpredictable.
That’s why the best realistic outcome is protopia.
Protopia: The Most Achievable Good Life
Protopia is a percentage play. It’s about putting in the right inputs daily for ten years, knowing that the probable net outcome will be significantly better than if you don’t. Through sheer inertia, this might even encourage others around you to do the same. And collectively, we inch towards something resembling utopia—not as a fixed state, but as a moving horizon.
From a secular and lifestyle perspective, I believe Australia is as close to real-world protopia as you can get without the wheels coming off. People complain about aspects of Australian infrastructure or the economy, but I struggle to take these grievances seriously—often, they come from those who haven’t lived elsewhere.
That’s not to say Australia is perfect. But when considered in the round, it outperforms other Western nations in almost every tangible way. At some point, we’re just gilding the lily.
The Spiritual Void
Where Australia does underperform is in the spiritual and cultural domain. You can see it in the communities we build.
I won’t name specific suburbs—that’s crass—but there are high-end developments with no shortage of wealth that feel spiritually barren. This isn’t just an aesthetic critique; it’s a reflection of something deeper. Developers are simply building what people want.
Even megachurches fail in this regard. If your pastor doesn’t grasp why a cathedral should be built with an ancient sensibility—why it should feel sacred—then something vital has been lost. The children of immigrant boomers have an opportunity to restore some of this cultural and spiritual depth, but few seem interested.
Many of their parents came to Australia chasing opportunity or fleeing hardship. They left. No matter how deeply patriotic or connected they were to their homeland, something about it was problematic enough to make them walk away. That means Australia has always had a Neverland quality—an escape from history, a place to reinvent oneself.
And in that reinvention, something has been lost.
This isn’t the same conversation as the erasure of First Nations people. That’s a separate, more profound issue. But even setting aside Indigenous culture, Australia’s modern identity feels hollow. Oversized Aboriginal artworks in corporate foyers, Welcome to Country speeches at business conferences, and NAIDOC Week performances might create a fleeting sense of connection, but they’re not the real thing. They are to culture what porn is to love—what social media likes are to friendship.
Why Do Australians Keep Leaving?
I used to wonder why I met so many Australians in England and Ireland—people who weren’t particularly adventurous, who didn’t need to be overseas, yet were still working in pubs and clubs, often not even enjoying it.
I now think of this as a kind of Rumspringa—an unconscious response to living in a country that prioritises lifestyle but resists deeper conversations about meaning.
If lifestyle alone were enough, our mental health statistics would reflect that we are one of the happiest, most well-adjusted nations on earth. But they don’t.
I love Australian life. To swim at dawn in perfect sunlight at Cottesloe Beach, from the groyne to the buoy, then have a flat white and banana bread at Il Lido, surrounded by energised, happy people—that, to me, is the good life.
But if we want more than just the good life—if we want a meaningful life—then maybe we need to swim beyond the shark nets, into deeper waters, where we can’t see the bottom.