THE YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY

How culture breaks before institutions, how trust collapses, and how life-affirming solutions arise from the ground up.

We are living through a year that feels dangerous not because of a single crisis, but because ordinary life itself has become precarious. Not dramatic or cinematic. Precarious in the quiet, administrative sense.

Dangerous to drink water without checking it first. Dangerous to grow food in soils saturated with chemicals presented as “preventative”. Dangerous to raise children inside institutions that no longer agree on what education is meant to produce, or what a healthy adult even looks like. Dangerous to speak plainly when plain speech is increasingly treated as disruption.

None of this arrived overnight. It crept in through policy language, through biosecurity frameworks that treat life as a liability, through councils that have gone rogue fining the smallest movements of private life, through surveillance sold as safety and compliance sold as care. Life has not been outlawed, but it has been metered. Measured. Managed. Billed.

This is not paranoia. It is the late stage of a very old pattern. Through time we have this in documentations.

Civilisations do not fall because people suddenly become wicked. They falter when institutions grow so large, so abstract, and so insulated from consequence that they stop serving life and start serving themselves.

Medicine becomes an industry of maintenance rather than healing. Education becomes credential production rather than formation. Media becomes narrative management rather than truth-telling. Politics becomes theatre designed to preserve the status quo just long enough to avoid accountability.

We are told there are two sides to choose from, red and blue, left and right, but there is not a cigarette paper between them. Different language, same machinery. Different branding, same outcomes.

Meanwhile, ordinary people feel the ground slipping beneath them and are told the problem is personal resilience, mindset, or misinformation.

The most obvious fracture shows up in mental health. Australia is not short on diagnoses, funding announcements, or agencies. What it is short on is coherence. Young people are anxious, isolated, medicated, monitored, and still deeply unwell. This is not because they are weak. It is because we have tried to solve a collective, cultural problem at the level of the individual.

We have medicalised loneliness, therapised dislocation, and treated fractured identity as a private pathology rather than the predictable outcome of a society that has hollowed out belonging.

Humans are not individuals first. That is a convenient fiction. We are relational beings, formed by parents, peers, work, place, responsibility, and contribution.

When those are stripped away, when life is lived through screens in bedrooms and synthetic environments, no amount of counselling can replace what has been lost. A damaged liver will recover. Chronic social isolation corrodes from the inside out.

We told young people that screens would connect them. They did not. We told them safety was the highest value. It isn’t.

We warned them endlessly about danger and then wondered why they were afraid of the world. There is a generation now that approaches nature itself as a threat, stepping into a stream and panicking because they cannot see what lives beneath the surface. That is not ignorance but conditioning. Daily seen.

At the same time, the foundational stories that once held nations together are fraying. Australia’s post-war myth (WW2) was one of shared sacrifice and collective purpose. You can feel that story weakening in public life. Flags avoided, especially by politicians at a Press Conference[!].

Symbols treated with embarrassment. History reframed as something to apologies for rather than understand.

Thirty-two members of the extended Holm family fought for this country, defended its constitution, and believed in the idea of a common good, from the Light Horsemen to ANZACS.

Today, the national flag can be burned by some in public without consequence, while other symbols are fiercely protected.

People are starting to ask uncomfortable questions about who decides what is sacred and what is disposable.

This is not about nostalgia. It is about orientation. In the middle of the twentieth century, people disagreed fiercely, but they still belonged to something larger than themselves.

Today, we have elevated the individual to the point of exhaustion and starved the demos, the people together. Individual democracy without shared culture becomes fragmentation. Over-solve the individual and you dissolve the nation.

Institutions cannot fix this, because institutions are downstream of culture. Culture is the operating system. Policy merely runs on top of it.

This is why the most powerful changes in history rarely come from legislation alone. Steve Jobs did not win because Apple had better specifications. He won because he created a culture, initially for nerds and engineers, that bled into society and reshaped how people related to technology itself.

Ford did not just make cars; he built an industrial culture that valued competence and scale.

Tesla is not selling vehicles so much as exporting a culture of design, engineering, and future orientation that has spawned an entire new industry, including people who now design, build, and rethink what transport can be.

Culture sells because it answers meaning questions. People do not migrate for laws. They migrate for functioning cultures: order, dignity, opportunity, coherence.

Migration is not the cause of collapse; it is a symptom. When cultures fail to reproduce themselves, importing people into them does not save them. It accelerates the strain.

We are also approaching a monetary reckoning. History is unambiguous on this point. When money detaches too far from reality, trust breaks. When trust breaks, people reorganise.

Whether the date is 2029 or near enough does not matter. What matters is that this is the phase in which elites overreach, systems harden, and ordinary people are left carrying the cost. This is the 1930s with better branding and worse attention spans.

The question is not whether things will change, but how. Violently through collapse, or intelligently through replacement.

This is where Earthfood enters the picture, not as a lifestyle brand or a protest movement, but as a working model of how repair actually happens.

Earthfood begins with soil because soil is the smallest complete living system we know. Diverse. Cooperative. Responsive to feedback. Capable of regeneration in all kinds conditions to be right. Soil does not respond to force. It responds to coherence. The same is true of people, communities, and cultures.

"Earthfood is not Monsanto, Yates, Scotts, or any

other extractive model dressed up as care.

It does the job properly so that life can

function again. It restores biology to the ground and,

in doing so, restores agency to the people working with it.

This is not about yield at any cost. It is about duration.

Incremental improvement over time".

Bronwyn Holm Founder Earthfood.

The same principle that transformed cycling through tiny, cumulative gains rather than one grand revolution. Shave the legs. Change the fabric. Adjust the posture. Five percent here, five percent there, and suddenly the impossible becomes normal.

Life is not built through repetition. It is built through duration.

Universal income will not fix what has been hollowed out. Purpose cannot be handed out. Morgan Housel is right when he says happiness is independence and purpose.

Remove both and you get compliance without meaning. Restore them and people begin to rebuild on their own.

Earthfood stands for something older than policy and newer than ideology. The recognition of natural law. Water. Sun. Food. These are not privileges granted by institutions. They are God-given rights that institutions are meant to protect, not ration.

This is not a call to burn anything down. It is a call to build while others argue. To restore coherence where it has been lost. To lead without waiting for permission. To accept that institutions may not survive this phase intact, but life will, if we give it the conditions it requires.

Bronwyn Holm and Earthfood are not asking people to follow blindly. They are inviting people to participate. To put skin in the game. To rebuild from the ground up in ways that are calm, practical, and deeply human.

This is the year of living dangerously, not because life must be fought, but because it must be reclaimed.

A Crisis of Trust

Trust in institutions, government, media, business, and the like is declining across the developed world. Long-running surveys like the Edelman Trust Barometer reveal that institutional failures over the last quarter-century have produced deep grievances within Australian society, stifling innovation, social cohesion, and optimism about the future.

People are not simply dissatisfied; they are disconnected. They no longer feel that the systems around them are reliable, responsive, or oriented toward long-term wellbeing. In some measures, trust in political institutions has fallen significantly, and dissatisfaction with the system’s responsiveness is widespread.

Let that sink in: institutions once seen as stabilising anchors are no longer experienced that way.

Mental Health: A System Unable to Heal

Australian mental health statistics are stark. Almost 39% of young Australians aged 16–24 experience a diagnosable mental disorder, and around 21% of adults have met criteria for a mental health condition in the last year, even as the system that is supposed to treat them struggles with access, equity, and fragmentation.

Research highlights that young adults face systemic barriers in accessing care, with inefficiencies and inequities making support hard to navigate.

Public systems continue to produce annual National Report Cards affirming that prevalence of mental illness remains high and that system effectiveness in prevention and support is not improving.

This is not individual failure. This is institutional failure, health systems in many countries were built to manage acute conditions, not to nurture the wholeness of human life in a world that is increasingly isolated and mediated by screens.

Young People Between Systems and Screens

There is growing evidence that young Australians are squeezed by financial pressures, rising costs of living, and a changing job market, pressures that correlate with rising mental distress and declining confidence in political institutions.

Isolation, mediated by screens and virtual environments, is not connection, it is a poor substitute for embodied life, shared experience, and purpose. The human nervous system was not designed for endless scrolling, synthetic stimuli, or algorithmic attention competition. These conditions erode resilience and make life feel unanchored, not because individuals are weak, but because systems have become intangible and unrooted.

When Culture Breaks Before Institutions Do

Institutions, political, educational, agricultural and medical, do not collapse suddenly. They lose coherence first. Their internal logic fractures. People no longer see them as of the people, by the people, for the people, but rather as distant bureaucracies that manage complexity but fail to nurture life.

Australia is not exempt. The shared stories that once bound people, narratives of unity, sacrifice, collective purpose, have weakened. Trust in government hovered in the mid-range in recent data, but the satisfaction that people have a voice or agency in what government does has diverged along demographic lines and declined among those feeling excluded from decision-making.

We live in a world where the technology that promised connection now often deepens fragmentation; where social media can simultaneously spread misinformation and erode trust in traditional authorities; where even fundamental systems like food production and medicine are increasingly seen as commodities rather than life-affirming public goods.

Why Repair Begins From the Ground Up

You don’t fix fractured institutions from the top down. You repair from the smallest functional unit upward, from the soil, the body, the local community, and the culture that binds them.

Culture is the invisible operating system of any functioning society. It is not the slogans, nor the policies. It is the habits, practices, stories, and lived patterns that shape behaviour, identity, and collective meaning.

This is not an abstract point. Look at how cultures form around simple, coherent products or experiences.

Apple didn’t just sell technology: it sold a way of relating to technology, creativity, and identity.
Ford didn’t just sell cars: it created a culture of mobility and industrial confidence.
Tesla didn’t just sell electric vehicles: it created a culture of design, innovation, and environmental optimism.

Culture sells because it answers meaning questions.

We cannot fix institutions by repainting them. The Answer is we fix them by rewriting the cultures that underlie them.

Soil, Biology, and the Return to Life

Earthfood exists at the intersection of biological coherence and human culture. Soil is the smallest complete system of life we know: diverse, cooperative, responsive to feedback, generative, resilient. It is not a machine. It is a living network.

This matters because living systems don’t respond to force. They respond to coherence.

They respond to: diversity, relationship, time, feedback and consequence.

These principles are true in soil just as they are in human society.

Earthfood does what others claim and fail, it brings life back to the ground, literally and symbolically. This is not about selling a product. It is about modelling a functioning culture of life, one that:

restores soil
reduces dependency on extractive systems
builds resilience from the bottom up
reconnects farmers, gardeners, and communities to life

It is a practical answer to a deeper problem: how to re-establish systems that honour life, not just manage loads of data and policy.

The Change We Seek

This is not nostalgia, nor retreat. This is repair.

The systems around us will continue to strain. Some will break, others replaced. But the only way out of a broken cycle is not through loud rejection, it is through quiet re-creation of functional living systems.

People are not followers. We are leaders. We lead by rebuilding the conditions life actually knows how to thrive in, starting with the very ground beneath our feet.

This is culture restoration, not just a soil restoration.

Written by Bronwyn Holm, Founder, Earthfood™ Farmers' Friend • Gardeners' Guide • Soil Advocate • Growers’ Voice. Bronwyn Holm works alongside farmers, gardeners, land stewards and balcony pot legends to restore living soil through biology, not chemistry.

Earthfood™ was built to return microbial intelligence to the ground quietly, effectively, and without dependence on industrial inputs.

Shop living soil microbes at yourearthfood.com to feed your soil, let life do the work.

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