The Age of Separation is 📝Charles Eisenstein's name, in 📝The Ascent of Humanity, for the long era of human history organized around the 📝separate self — the sense of the individual as fundamentally divided from nature, from other people, and from the divine.
It is less a date than a worldview. The Age of Separation is built from the cultural technologies traced across the book — language, number, time, money, science, and control — each deepening the conviction that we are discrete beings in a world of other, separate things. Its signature is the 📝Age of Fire: a civilization that burns through stored natural and cultural wealth to liberate energy, producing heat and progress alongside mounting waste.
Eisenstein's argument is that this age is ending — not in catastrophe but in transition. The crises it has produced are dissolving its founding certainties and pressing humanity toward an 📝Age of Reunion, a return to connection at a higher order of complexity.