I’ve been watching Stephen Bartlett interview author, journalist and thinker Graham Hancock on his podcast ‘Diary of a CEO’ about a lost episode of history and the evidence of a Lost Civilisation that could better explain where we are today, and what may be in store for us if we don’t ‘course-correct’.
I find the world is undergoing a phase of ‘unsettlement’, from individuals being displaced to a more general fear that things are not as they should be. Our leaders define everything in material terms, they display little positive consciousness, lack spirituality, and act unwholesomely. Our societies are less curious, less tolerant, more withdrawn, numbed by hardship—or perhaps greed. We behave differently, full of anger, hatred, and suspicion. As Graham Hancock puts it, “We’re not a mature species, we’re a childish species, and leading us are leaders who have the mentality of deranged teenagers.”
When a feeling of unrest or discomfort aches in our bones, troubles our thoughts, or catches us off guard in our dreams, we describe all these separate emotions as a sense of being ‘unsettled’. No matter how reflective that sense of the ground beneath our feet being unreliable can make us, collectively being unsettled is deeply isolating. It pushes people toward irrational behaviour, as if we’re all bracing for something we can’t quite see.
Here in the United Kingdom we have seen riots in response to a growing division between the government and those who feel victimised by rising immigration and acts of violence.
Hancock says we need to move away from nationalism and tribalism, and re-learn tolerance—learning to deal with difference without resorting to violence. Violence feeds ignorance. It bypasses the one thing we are all born with: a brain. A centre of consciousness with endless potential and the capability to achieve extraordinary things, such as the ancient civilisations he speaks of.
He also suggests that hatred is a kind of psychic force, and the way it is being generated and focused around the world has to be harmful—for us and for nature. I agree. In the aftermath of Brexit here in the UK, I watched politician Boris Johnson present himself as a likeable buffoon on the one hand, while publicly encouraging division on the other. It felt as though he was giving people permission to hate. He isn’t alone. It’s a familiar political tool: stir emotion, deflect attention, and push through weak ideas.
Hancock explores the idea that humans may have existed much earlier than we think, and that a lost civilisation may once have held a deeper kind of knowledge—something now overlooked and undervalued. If he is right, then perhaps what we are experiencing is not new at all, but an echo of an earlier history.
If our civilisation is once again descending from wisdom into noise, from curiosity into certainty, from deep connection into division, then perhaps the “lost civilisation” is not something buried beneath sand or sea, but something we are in the process of losing again: a way of thinking, of being, of relating to one another that requires more patience, more humility, more awareness than we currently seem willing to give.
The feeling of being unsettled may not just be fear of what is coming, but a dim recognition of what is slipping away. A subconscious awareness that something is out of alignment—not just politically or socially, but fundamentally, in how we choose to exist alongside one another. If that is true, then the question is not whether we are on the brink of collapse, but whether we are capable of recognising the pattern before it completes itself.
So if there is anything worth holding onto from the idea of a lost civilisation, maybe it isn’t what they built, but how they thought—or how they understood their place in the world, and with each other.
I don’t know if we are at the beginning of that kind of decline, or somewhere further along. But that sense of being unsettled feels like more than anxiety. It feels like a warning—or at the very least, a recognition that something important is shifting, whether we choose to see it or not.