ABOUT THIS BOOK
Sims is my name. I don't belong anywhere in particular, nor do I identify with any specific culture. An outcast harvested from the underworld of academic and creative strangeness in the great Brazilian metropolis of São Paulo — and subsequently matured in the soul-enriching vastness of the Pacific Isles of Aotearoa — I presently write from the ancient western shores of Ireland, where I have my mainstay in the heart of the artistic melting pot of An Gaillimh.
My first written language was not one of words, but that of photography — and by the time I was taught to express myself with calligraphy I was far more taken to showing rather than saying. I was naturally washed by the currents of life towards working with wildlife documentaries, whereupon I took notions to further qualify for the job with a postgraduate diploma in Natural History Filmmaking from one of the world’s foremost centres for Science Communication, at the University of Otago (Dunedin, New Zealand). Alas, my promising prelude to a brilliant career was poorly timed at the verge of the Covid-19 Pandemic — which put an end to my dreams of being paid to travel and show the world how stunning our nature is. Locked down and resigned between four walls, the only kind of travel I could fathom was within, and so it was that this book was born.
It started with a few raging manuscripts on the uncanny phenomenon of science denial that sadly prevented so many of our fellow bipedal Earth-dwellers from being treated, vaccinated and ultimately surviving Covid — in a strikingly similar way to how the denial of climate change, sprouting from the most intangible whims of human imagination, is largely deflecting our species from ensuring its own long-term survival — and indeed not unlike the way we seem to have built a culture around indiscriminately draining the natural resources of our minds in the name of an allegedly happy life, ironically resulting in a rising epidemic of anxiety, depression and addiction. So in an effort to comprehend the nature of such bizarre and contradictory workings of the human mind, I turned to the records that our species has compiled of scientific and traditional knowledge, of philosophical and artistic expression — and my friends, O my friends, what a journey this was! I couldn’t actually bring myself to publish this work for five years — not until I had revised and re-revised it dozens of times, making sure every last bit of information here reproduced had solid sourcing and backing to sustain and legitimise it — and most certainly not indeed until I had meditated on it long enough and allowed for my own mind to change and mature over time and test these words and concepts, bouncing them off the very experience of a rootless life moving around with no sense of truth or belonging.
I called my book The Dizziness of Freedom in reference to philosopher Søren Kierkegaard's argument that "anxiety is the dizziness of freedom" . An attractively counterintuitive idea that serves as the backbone that guides a dynamic and fluid train of thought on the counterintuitive convergence of human minds around very current and urgent matters. This work overlaps climate change and mental health in an attempt to contemplate the issue from a fresh, outside-the-box and strangely optimistic perspective. It is a time of post-truth, hazy identities and absurd relativism, and we face a growing shortage of meanings and identities — could it be that our oh-so-powerful brains will ultimately lead humanity to extinction while aching for inner peace? Or will our deafening existential crisis be exactly what Earth’s nature needs to find balance once again?
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