I really enjoy your work Umair, and I think you are pointing to some important trends. It reminds me of the discussion in "Slowdown" by Danny Dorling https://g.co/kgs/S8QzhQm. I think it's a good thing that economic growth has hit its natural peak and is now starting to naturally reverse; while it won't provide the economic panacea everyone is used to, this makes sense since we are already deep into ecological overshoot, so although the sacred cow of GDP growth remains unassailable in many people's minds, the world is starting to turn. And GDP growth hasn't been benefiting most ordinary people for a long time anyway.

I think that in one stroke conflating that with "human progress reversing" is where I find this discussion problematic. What do we mean by human progress? I think you are seeing the forest for the trees but not taking time to see the trees in the forest. Representative democracy, which is deeply out of sync with the current moment, being from an era when communication was so slow that you literally needed to pick your representative to ride off on a horse to the capital to represent you in the congress of a nation state(another outmoded institution perhaps? How about bioregions instead of nation states?) But experiments with participatory democracy and participation culture seem to be growing in a lot of places. See for example Barcelona En Comu, Participatory City (including my work adapting the approach in Aotearoa NZ and the Mii'kmaw Native Friendship Centre's work with Everyone Every Day Halifax, to name a couple of e.g.'s). So human progress in reverse? If you mean progress as in further industrialisation and pillaging of natural resources yes probably. If you mean evolution, learning, gradual opening to greater wisdom, I can see a lot of data "on the ground" in places all over the world that don't accord with that notion. I'm pretty sure we are all learning something from experience by continuing to be alive, even if that's not a linear process.

One thing I've been reflecting on is that like Otto Scharmer says, there are always "presencing" (connecting, loving, reconciling) currents and "absencing" (disconnecting, defending, attacking, etc) currents in the world, I can certainly see both at play. But maybe the presencing currents are quieter, more invisible, like rhizome networks; do we need to be able to see and sense the forest, the trees, and the rhizome networks to understand more of what's going on? Something I've noticed lately is how crisis, and even more so polycrisis, seems to make both of these currents more intense, and make human learning deeper.

I watched a documentary a while ago about how because the world is so complex, and with our global scope of communications we can see more and more of it, it overwhelms our human sensibilities, and so we turn to storytellers like Trump "make America great again", to give us a simple story to make us feel in control, and give us a chance to shut out the true complexity, mystery, unknowability or always unfolding part-knowability of the situation. When I read your story and you said that "human progress has gone into decline and that's facts not opinions" you started to sound like one of those guys. But I've seen you process so much complexity in the past in other articles. I hope that we can all continue to make sense of the world collaboratively, humanly, incompletely, often times mistakenly, together, my friend :)