Choosing Eros in a Time of Collapse

Why staying in relationship with life may be the most radical act of all

“Eros whispers. Thanatos waits. But Pan? Pan shouts.”

We are living in a time of unraveling. Institutions once thought to be stable are coming undone. Trust in governments, media, science, and education is fraying. Geopolitical alliances shift like sand beneath our feet. What once organized meaning no longer holds, and in its place, new and often volatile energies are rising.

In moments like this, something ancient stirs beneath the surface. Fear of chaos often gives way to a powerful impulse: the desire to impose order. Not creative order, but control. Not shared vision, but purity.

We see this most clearly in movements that aim to cleanse and dominate administratively, culturally, morally, and spiritually. In recent years, this has surfaced most overtly in authoritarian turns and hardline policies that appeal to nationalism, repression, and mythic restoration. In the U.S. and abroad, we witness administrations particularly explicit in this regard, executing ideologies that seek not just political victory, but symbolic purification.

This posture toward life isn’t confined to a single figure or party. It shows up wherever fear eclipses presence. Wherever uncertainty is met with rigidity. Wherever the unknown is no longer welcomed, but treated as a threat to be eliminated.

Carl Jung called its opposite Eros. This is not merely romantic longing, but the principle of relatedness and deep, even visceral engagement with one’s life, with one’s reality. It means becoming a live player, claiming authorship of life.

Eros is what keeps us in relationship with life, even when it’s uncertain. It invites us to lean in, to listen, to stay curious. It connects rather than separates. It’s intimate, creative, and alive.

Its counterpart is Thanatos—not simply death, but the psychological movement toward stasis, domination, and the elimination of unpredictability. Thanatos desires safety through finality. It fears the wildness of life and seeks to encase it in something it can control.

These are not good versus evil. They are archetypal currents that live in each of us, in our institutions, our politics, our classrooms, and our relationships. The danger is not in Thanatos per se, but in letting it take over unchecked, disguising itself as order while extinguishing the conditions for life.

What follows is an exploration of how these two postures—Eros and Thanatos—play out across culture, education, leadership, and love. Not as abstract theory, but as real choices we’re all being asked to make.

Culture: When Chronos Replaces Kairos

The modern world is obsessed with time—but not with the right kind.

The time we inherited from the Industrial Revolution is Chronos: mechanical, measurable, efficient. It serves the clock, the calendar, the bottom line. It governs factories, corporations, governments, and to-do lists. Chronos is useful. But when it becomes dominant, it begins to strip life of its sacred rhythms.

What gets lost is Kairos: the time of ripeness, intuition, and emergence. Kairos doesn’t obey the clock. It speaks in symbols, seasons, and subtle timing. It’s the time of storytelling, of love, of birth and death, of sacred encounter.

In much of the Global South, time is still polychronic: relational, flexible, alive. Things happen when they’re ready. A gathering starts when it starts. Time follows the mood, not the market.

But modern institutions, built on Chronos, value predictability. Control. Efficiency. Monochronic time is managed, scheduled, guarded.

Eros is inefficient by design. It meanders. It surprises. It invites presence, not planning.

And so, in our culture, we see the triumph of Chronos over Kairos, of productivity over poetry, of schedule over soul. The result is a quiet suffocation of the erotic dimension of life, not in the sexual sense, but in the sense of life lived in flow, relationship, and embodied mystery.

Education: From Discovery to Discipline

Nowhere is this more evident than in how we educate.

Education, in its deepest form, should be a practice of wonder. A child encounters the unknown. A question blooms. A spark catches. Real learning is erotic in the Jungian sense; it binds the learner to the world through curiosity, intimacy, and awe.

But modern education often does the opposite. It programs rather than provokes. It disciplines rather than delights. Standardized tests replace questions that matter. The teacher becomes an enforcer of benchmarks, not a guide through the wild terrain of thought.

This was not accidental. The design of public education, particularly in the United States, was shaped by the needs of an industrial society. Predictable workers. Obedient citizens. As one Nixon-era advisor bluntly put it, “We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat.”

That danger has long passed. What we face now is the opposite: a society full of technically trained individuals who have never been encouraged to trust their own wisdom. Students are taught to defer to authority, suppress original thought, and fear failure. All in the name of success.

What if success meant staying in relationship with mystery? What if education cultivated the capacity to live erotically with courage, curiosity, and reverence for the unknown?

Leadership: Holding the Archetypal Tension

Leadership today often mimics the same fear-based postures. The need to appear in control. To deliver certainty. To avoid risk. But this is not true leadership. It’s performance driven by Thanatos.

True leadership lives in tension. It draws from the full range of archetypes: the Lover, Warrior, Magician, and King. Each offers something essential.

• The Lover connects the leader to life. Without Eros, leadership becomes hollow, a performance of authority without soul.

• The Warrior defends values and boundaries. But without Eros, he becomes a rigid enforcer, reacting from fear.

• The Magician holds insight and transformation. But when Thanatos dominates, he manipulates rather than enlightens.

• The King, at his best, stewards wholeness. But cut off from Eros, he ossifies, clinging to structure, avoiding change.

Erotic leadership means being in relationship with people, with time, with mystery. It’s not chaos. It’s attunement. It’s presence. It’s the willingness to not know, and to lead anyway.

The systems we’ve built don’t make this easy. They reward the leader who controls, not the one who listens. But in this time of collapse, we don’t need more control. We need more capacity to hold what’s breaking open.

Love: Beyond Management and Safety

And finally, in the realm of the intimate, the tension is clearest of all. Modern relationships often try to do what modern institutions do: manage.

We over-explain, over-schedule, and over-function. We seek security through sameness. We collapse mystery into certainty.

Eros becomes something to survive, not something to sustain.

Attachment styles—anxious or avoidant—often replay Thanatos. Clinging or retreating. Controlling or disappearing. Overexplaining or stonewalling. But true intimacy doesn’t live in control. It lives in presence. In holding the unknown together.

Erotic love requires space. Requires polarity. Requires the courage to stay close without collapsing the mystery. We think safety means eliminating risk. But real safety is knowing the other will stay with us—through the not-knowing. Toeing the unknown together.

When we protect ourselves from heartbreak by numbing desire, we kill not just the pain, we kill the aliveness.

Thanatos lays the tracks. But it is Eros—and sometimes Pan—who steps into the clearing.. The tracks offer certainty. The deer (Pan) offers presence. One follows the known. The other enters the unknown. Photo by Chris F

Choosing Eros

Eros is not a mood. It’s a posture. A commitment to life as it unfolds, not as we demand it to be.

“There is a crack in everything. That’s how the wild god gets in.”

Sometimes, Eros doesn’t arrive as a gentle posture. Sometimes it erupts through the cracks. For me, it came in the form of Pan. My psyche was visited by his presence over eight months, and it changed everything. Pan didn’t soothe or instruct. He shocked. He warped time. He pulled me back into my body with wonder, music, and madness. He was raw, visceral, terrifying—undeniably alive. He tore through my identity structures and returned me to something primal and alive. If Eros whispers with mystery and Thanatos seduces with certainty, Pan howls unapologetically. He doesn't ask you to choose between life or death; he forces you to feel them both, at once, in the present moment. He is the wild god of rupture. And in a world addicted to safety and control, he might just be the one who saves us. And he is metasovereign, supremely so, a force that holds coherence in wildness, not despite it, but through it.

And so Eros asks more of us, not less.

It invites us to enter the fire, not extinguish it.

In a world that rewards control, choosing Eros is subversive.

In institutions that value certainty, staying curious is revolutionary.

In relationships that seek safety, welcoming mystery is radical.

We are living in the in-between—between collapse and emergence, between fear and freedom.

The forces of Thanatos are loud. But Eros doesn’t shout. It calls. Quietly. Persistently. Toward life.

---

This question of how we relate to uncertainty—whether we try to control it or learn to dance with it—sits at the heart of my work.

In coaching, in leadership development, and in my own ongoing practice, I keep returning to this threshold: how do we live from Eros in a world shaped by Thanatos? How do we choose presence over performance, relationship over rigidity, mystery over mastery?

My ikigai lives here, in helping others remember that leadership can be erotic—not in the sexual sense, but in the sense of being vibrantly alive, deeply connected, and awake to what’s unfolding.

If this speaks to something in you, I invite you to reach out, read more, or simply stay with the question. That’s where the transformation begins.