Charles Eisenstein is an American 🏷️#author and public 🏷️#speaker whose work spans economics, ecology, spirituality, and the history of civilization. Born in 1967 and educated at Yale in mathematics and philosophy, he is best known for a sequence of books — 📝The Ascent of Humanity (2007), Sacred Economics (2011), and The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible (2013) — that diagnose a modern culture gripped by a destructive "story of separation" and propose, in its place, a "story of interbeing." He works largely outside academic and institutional channels, and in keeping with his ideas about the gift, has often made his books freely available online and asked no professional fee for speaking.
Eisenstein's central claim is that the converging crises of our time — ecological, economic, and personal — share a single root in the illusion of the 📝separate self, and that their resolution is less a set of fixes than a change of the underlying story. His later books carry the argument into specific domains: Climate: A New Story (2018) reframes ecological action around love of the living world rather than fear, and The Coronation (2023) gathers his essays from the pandemic years. Running through all of it is a fascination with myth and narrative as the deep infrastructure of culture. His vision of an 📝Age of Reunion, and his economics of the gift, directly shaped the 📝Types of Capital framework and much of the thinking collected in this library.
I've never met Charles Eisenstein; he is in this library as the mind behind the single book that has shaped it most. The Ascent of Humanity reached me through a 📝High Existence newsletter years ago, and its vocabulary — separation and reunion, gift and capital — still runs underneath a great deal of my own work.