The terrible idealist truth is that I would undo everything if the opportunity stood. I’d deconstruct the urbanities, peel the asphalt from the earthscape in chemical crumbs. Then unwrite the constitutions, unravel academia page by tedious page. I’m the unforgivable anarcho-primitivist in a 21st-century paradigm. I’d scrap the post-industrial, expansionist trade, the renaissance, colonialism, the old world civilizations. I’d put humanity on par with coexistent species. I cannot erase the tragic rapid succession of human beings into exploitation, denying ourselves spiritual consciousness or real-time connection with the land. For now, I can only suffocate suggesting compromises within systems that host us, and aspire to reinvent them in a post-grad fantasy.
Here, I write from sheepdom and the man-plan. Years suffering an education that markets with “liberation” but gears us to serve as valiant corporate soldiers, we’re misled with ideals of false prestige, networking and net worth. The malleable talented young person matriculates into the college system, is traumatized or integrated into rat-race ethics with concepts destitution, surface level failure, vanities and inability to afford indulgences. Limitless expression, revelation of spirit and soul, intimacy with natural spaces, and chasing catharsis are free pursuits. These are the intended pursuits of the youth population. Somehow we arrive at the age of technology turned off from them.
To be a conscious anarcho-primitivist at a modern academic institution, you’re damned to be a hypocrite. You resent materialistic advancement beyond survivalism, then you contribute to a repugnant cycle of degradation that shuffles wealth into different hands with a dime flip. The proliferation of machinery, the tragedy of the commons, displacement from the true human experience seeds at the collegiate level. The conscious primitivist is plagued with constant impulses to drop out.
But most of us exist as unconscious primitivists, passively exhibiting ideals of the philosophy while we dissociate in our conditioned predicaments. Already, the Gen Z and millennial populations choose self-employment, entrepreneurship and flexibility over corporate climbing. The generation-wide dissociation is apparent as workforce rookies prioritize autonomy, or invest a few years “soul selling” to generate savings for a comfortable lifestyle. A remarkable movement towards ancestral skills and rewilding is afoot: emphasis on sustainability and minimalism increases while students deprioritize status and income. All this is reflected twice over on media platforms that amplify content around off-the-grid and nomad living.
There are many caveats to the rising trend in unconscious anarcho-primitivism. Nihilism and escapism are generally disregarded by older generations: they are symptoms of the youth struggle to settle or take root in a fervent identity. Rejection of arbitrary hierarchies and conventional career paths are often perceived as phases, brief moments of rebellion that will inevitably be quelled by dissatisfaction. Over-romanticized notions of “running away to live off the land,” renting a camper van, joining an eco-village, or indefinite backpacking are shot down by Gen X realists. Glamorized simplistic living is physically demanding and, when honeymoon season expires, can feel like an isolation sentence. Not to mention, opting in and out has socio-economic constraints: sacrificing savings to so dramatically alter your lifestyle may have detrimental consequences.
Undergraduate life is described as a bubble, a precursor to the ultimate reality. Climate anxiety, political disillusionment, burnout, debt and financial frustrations at the undergraduate level will be exacerbated in the next post-graduate chapter of the human experience. When we catch common colds, we aren’t so inclined to stay close to the source of illness. I don’t believe my education as a primitivist was wasteful: I believe it was an awakening and a diagnosis. Here are the symptoms of dying slowly in a world that encourages numbness and confines its constituents to indoor holding spaces. Promises the burden of surviving through the system will cut its servants off from the “rob throb of existence.”
Anti-civilization ideologies are often stigmatized as too radical: the cynic wants to unrealistically scrap everything built. The extreme is not the purpose of the mentality: it’s looking back to a time when we weren’t dissociating forces of exploitation but rather uncontested citizens of the earth. I don’t think it's radical to advocate “regression” towards hunter-gatherer society. I think it's reactionary. Most of us don’t identify with a back to basics agenda, but the depravity of competing, starving in this unsustainable, unspiritual matrix begins to wear at our psyches. Our suppressed natural instincts. The unconscious anarcho-primitivist flowers in us all.
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Kira Walter '26 is an opinion columnist and former lifestyle editor. Her column Onion Theory addresses unsustainable aspects of modern systems from a Western Buddhist perspective, with an emphasis on neurodivergent narratives and spiritual reckonings. She can be reached at kwalter@cornellsun.com.
