Six Phase Map

Where are you on the Six Phase Map? Continues after this notice…

The World Is Run by Monsters:

Choose your move!

Monday morning I woke up exhausted.

Like I spent Sunday night climbing every mountain, swimming every sea, trekking every continent, solving every problem the world has ever produced, and still somehow squeezing in a side quest where I define the meaning of life and why I exist. All before breakfast. Ready to move on to whatever comes next.

Planetary alignment, written in the stars, destiny, or whatever the cosmic group chat is on this month… it is landing hard. And I am feeling it in every part of my body.

But also, sure, it might be that on the weekend I once again saw in a new year of my own life, celebrating my birthday with friends. Which always comes with the annual greatest hits. “Can you believe it’s another year?” “How fast time goes…” “Do you remember when…” And then my mother recounting the filthy hot summer night in the early seventies, giving birth in the wee hours, and the nurses being surprised that the baby arrived with a full head of hair. Like it was a plot twist.

“

My friends joke about my ever evolving projects, the ones that shapeshift every year and never quite ‘stick’… but maybe that is not a flaw. Maybe it is me rehearsing.

Gregg the Artivist

Or maybe it was friends poking at my routine from the last years. The one they now apparently look forward to, like it is seasonal programming. Winter arrives, and I spontaneously announce a new project. November, I declare it. May, I wrap it up. Like clockwork.

And then I do what I always do right before bed. I reflect. I replay. I mentally reorganise my entire life. Because of course I do.

But if I am honest, the exhaustion is not just birthday feelings and cosmic weather.

It is the news cycle doing its usual thing. The daily bombardment of shock and horror. And now the Epstein files, sitting there like a bleak little confirmation: the rich, famous, powerful, influential people running the so called West, are not just broken. They are evil, sadistic monsters with no moral legitimacy.

And yet again we find ourselves doing that thing where we think we have finally found our footing… and then the floor gets ripped out from under us. Like we only just recovered from the last drama a few days ago, and now here we are again, watching fresh outrage unfold in real time.

So… how is any of this related?

That is what I kept circling back to. Where am I in all of it?

And maybe, just maybe, being exhausted was not a glitch. Maybe it is part of the process. Maybe my friends joking about my ever evolving projects, the ones that shapeshift every year and never quite “stick”… maybe that is not a flaw. Maybe it is me rehearsing. Clearing space and preparing for what is coming.

Because I can see a path I have been on. I'm calling it the Six Phase Map (for now). And the weird part is… I am noticing it is not unique to me. From what people tell me, I can place others on it too. Like we are all moving through the same messy map, just at different speeds.

“

The rich, famous, powerful, influential people running the so called West are not just broken. They are evil, sadistic monsters with no moral legitimacy.

Gregg the Artivist

The Six Phase Map

Currently, I find myself at phase 6, hence the name Six Phase Map (for lack of a better name at the moment). If this feels familiar, where are you on the map right now? And what do you think or have experienced, comes next?

Phase 1: WTF?!

It started with shock after my burnout. A real WTF moment where I realised the world was not what I thought it was.

My thoughts were not entirely my own. Patterns and behaviours were taught. Downloaded. Rewarded. The things I once believed were fundamental to “success” and a “good life”… started to repel me.

So I did what any emotionally stable person would do. I went on a research frenzy. Trying to understand. Trying to widen my knowledge. Trying to step away from what I had been told was reality, toward what felt authentic and right to me. What was actually mine… and what I was carrying for other people.

And honestly, I am glad I did that before waking up to the release of the Epstein files and confirmation the world being run by psychopathic, human trafficking, lawless paedophiles. Timing wise, that would have been… a lot.

This was where 'Gregg the ARTist' was born. Or reborn. I left my career, hit the wall, and in the rubble I picked up the thing I loved before I learned to measure my value in productivity. Art came back, but less as a hobby, and more as a life raft.

---

Six Phase Map - 2: Time to take action

Then came the phase where I saw the role I played in the world. My naivety. The way I had been participating in systems built on exploitation and abuse while thinking I was just… living life.

And I wanted to fight it.

Protest. Shout. Wake people up. Shake them by the shoulders. This was anger. Proper anger. Bubbling, hot, sharp, clarifying. And I can admit it now: it was necessary. Not forever, but necessary. It was the ignition that kick started action.

This is where 'Gregg the ACTivist' emerged. Activism wasn’t new, but something shifted. It stopped being something I 'dabbled' with throughout my life, and became urgent. Like my nervous system had finally caught up with what my values had been trying to say for years. I wasn’t just angry at the world. I was trying to cope with it.

Six Phase Map - 3: A need to escape

After that came a different instinct. Escape.

I was disillusioned. Not just at the state of the world, but at how normalised it all was. I watched people keep moving, keep consuming, keep obeying the same tired scripts, like nothing was happening. And I get it, because I used to do it too. But once I’d seen behind the curtain, I couldn’t go back. So instead of fighting, I started fantasising about disappearing.

It stopped being about just changing the world, and became about changing it from a safer place.

Maybe it was self preservation. Maybe it was fantasy. Maybe it was “I cannot look at this anymore so I will build a cabin and become a mushroom.” But I went through a stage of obsessing over living purely. Becoming self sufficient. Creating a space where people could reconnect to nature. Host workshops. Grow food. Prepare for collapse. Do it all away from the fragility of the city and its dependence on systems that feel… one bad week away from snapping.

I made plans. So many plans.

“

It stopped being about just changing the world, and became about changing it from a safer place.

Gregg the Artivist

And eventually I had to admit something that was not fun to admit.

This was not freedom.

This was fear.

This was where 'Gregg the Environmentalist' emerged. Self sufficiency became my solution. Not because I suddenly wanted to cosplay pioneer life, but because my body was craving nature like medicine. Reconnecting. Growing things. Working with nature instead of constantly extracting from myself, and everything else.

A need to live the truth of my activism and advocacy.

READ 'Radical Acceptance - Do You Dare Play?' here.

Six Phase Map - 4: Reality check

It dawned on me that there is no real way to live completely outside the system. Being totally self sufficient is not realistic with one or two people. It takes a village. A community. And the “freedom” I was chasing would have basically trapped me in nonstop labour of my own making. Working constantly just to maintain the illusion of independence… with no time left to do art, host workshops, or solve the world’s problems. (Because yes, apparently I still insist on keeping that last one on the list.)

So the reality check was blunt but useful.

I needed a different path.

And that is when I started turning toward community. What is it, actually? Who is mine? How do you build it? How do you show up in it without turning it into another performance of productivity? And how do I make it work in the cityscape where I actually live… not isolated in the countryside.

This is when 'Gregg the Artivist' showed up with more depth. The previous years snapped together like a weird little trilogy. Art, activism, environment. Not as separate identities, but as one question: how do we face the tragic, surreal reality we’re in, and still create awareness without becoming numb, cynical, or performative?

Six Phase Map - 5: The game

This was the turning point. A moment of clarity.

I realised “the system” is a game we are all playing, whether we are aware of it or not. And once you see that, you are not stuck in permanent shock, or permanent fighting, or permanent escaping, or permanent confusion.

You can choose your move.

Even if we are not in charge of the agenda, we can be in control of our response. How we play. What we focus on. The seeds we plant. The ways we actively participate. It became less about trying to win by burning the board down… and more about taking responsibility and playing with intelligence. With strategy. With intention. With other people.

And this is where it turned into community building. Not just me making art about the world, or shouting at the world, or trying to run away from the world. But building things with people in it. The LISTEN Rewrite Reality Podcast . These READ articles. My WATCH videos. Workshops. Events. Little spaces where we practice being humans together, instead of spectators in a collapsing theatre.

So when my friends say, “Here we go, Gregg’s got another winter project… will this one stick?” I get it. From the outside it looks like I’m just changing hobbies like outfits.

But from the inside, it’s the same project. Just getting more precise each year.

Phase 6: So what is next?

Honestly, waking up on Monday, in my exhaustion, I felt more reaffirmed than ever: this is a journey we all need to go on.

If we want real change, and a better world, we cannot do it as isolated little heroes. We need to do it together.

Build our networks. Our communities. Our support systems.

“

From the inside, it’s the same project. Just getting more precise each year.

Gregg the Artivist

READ 'The Give and Take Society' here.

And that’s what hit me after my birthday dinner.

We ate, we laughed, we walked up Westeinde, where the city street had turned into a film festival. Screens projected in shop windows, little pockets of story flickering against the glass. The Hague doing its thing. Cool. Magical. Slightly surreal.

Someone asked me if I felt inspired.

And then, of course, the follow up question. “So… what’s your project this winter?”

And I could feel the old version of me wanting to perform a neat answer. A catchy one. A new shiny thing. Something that sounds like progress.

But the truth is… it’s more of the same.

Not in a boring way. Just layer by layer, year by year. Hopefully pulling it a little tighter together each time.

Because if the world really is run by evil, sadistic monsters, then my quiet rebellion is this:

To keep making things that reconnect people to themselves and each other.

To keep choosing community.

To keep playing the game with intention.

And yes, apparently I’m still putting “solve the world’s problems” on the list. But maybe now I’m doing it the only way it actually works.

Together.

---

Six Phase Map - FAQ's

---

Additional off site Reading:

• Building Connection and Belonging: Public Health Guidelines for Social Connection - Evidence based guidelines and practical actions for strengthening social connection and community, framed like public health not self help.  
• Community as a health intervention in Europe: European perspective on social prescribing - A research overview of social prescribing in Europe, where healthcare links people into local community activities to reduce isolation and improve wellbeing.