3: About Geoff (longer version)
14/04/25
I have spent much of my adult life thinking and talking about the state of human civilisation and Western society. I'm uncomfortable calling it my society, because I've never felt like I was anywhere but its edge. I effectively disowned it in 1989, at the age of 20, having been forced to conclude that there would be no effective response to the threat of climate change, because the politics is impossible, which led to me to deep depression and psychological collapse. After that I became nihilist.
For 15 years I was a software engineer by trade and a doomwatcher as a way of life. At the age of 33 I experienced an extreme change in worldview. Until that point I had been an evangelical atheist, skeptic and materialist, but within the space of a few months I went from thinking like Richard Dawkins to being deeply embroiled in mysticism. My old worldview has seemed one-dimensional ever since – science is of critical importance, but it has limits I had previously been unable to recognise, and beyond those limits it has nothing to say.
In 2005 I took voluntary redundancy and decided that instead of searching for another job I would study for a degree in Philosophy and Cognitive Science at Sussex University. The purpose of this was to sort out my own belief system and worldview, which by that point was something of a mess. It was certainly not a career move – At this point I still did not care about my own future, and had no long term plans.
After completing my degree in 2008 I found it impossible to return to software engineering – my heart just wasn't in it, I could not compete with ambitious young graduates, and my answers to the question “Why did you take three years off work to study philosophy?” did not impress prospective employers. I also applied for a variety of low paid jobs, including supermarkets, but nobody would employ me. One of them literally laughed in my face.
When I saw the financial crash of 2008 coming, I sold my house because I feared a major collapse in property prices. In the autumn of that year, with time on my hands and money in the bank, I set myself a challenge of finding every species of edible wild fungus which I ought to have found and identified, but hadn't. Foraging had been my hobby ever since I'd gone searching for magic mushrooms as a teenager and become fascinated by all the other fungi I had previously failed to pay any attention to. That autumn I went out every day, and honed my identification skills by trying to identify other people's finds on a foraging website. The owner of that website, impressed with the level of my knowledge, offered to promote me as a foraging teacher in exchange for me writing him some articles. Since I had no other way of earning money, I decided to give it a go.
Teaching foraging then became my main source of income, and I began collecting photos with a vague plan of one day writing the really comprehensive book on fungi foraging which I was well aware that nobody else had written. In 2016 this became a reality. Edible Mushrooms has now sold in excess of 25,000 copies. A companion volume on plants and seaweeds (Edible Plants) came out in 2022.
My life changed again later that year. When my mother died I inherited enough money to allow a housing upgrade, and my wife and I decided to move our family (our daughter was born in 2018) away from overpopulated south-east England and aim for as much self-sufficiency as possible. We bought a smallholding in Ceredigion, and now, when not writing, I spend most of my time learning how to run it as sustainably, efficiently and self-sufficiently as possible.