Resisting the Great Retreat

Do you remember the idea of the Great Reset that swirled around in 2020? The World Economic Forum presented it, and a ton of conspiracy theories spawned.

I’m riffing off its name to claim another shift in the zeitgeist: the Great Retreat.

Everywhere I look I see people stepping back, hunkering down, and retiring. The causes are varied: anxiety, exhaustion, confusion, and even coercion.

Health crises, cost of living pressures, job insecurity, and a broader sense of uncertainty, nationally and internationally, politically and economically, are all contributing.

People are retreating from substantive engagement in public social media as governments (and contracted private companies) are mining social media as part of a broader surveillance agenda. What they’ll do with that data is open to conjecture.

People are retreating, often unwillingly and out of frustration, from engagement with government welfare programs. Dealing with bureaucracy (including private corporate sector bureaucracy) is increasingly frustrating. Some of this frustration is caused by legacy systems. Software is decades old and layered with inefficiencies. Regulations pile up. But it could be that there isn’t enough pie to go around and the more people who drop out, the longer the system can stagger on. In other words, pushing us into retreat could be a feature and not a bug.

People are retreating from public life as attacks against them increase. And I mean all people, not just celebrities. The use of AI to generate repulsive images is a new weapon of online violence.

The challenge is to determine where you draw the line. What will you surrender, where will you compromise, and when will you fight?

We don’t have the luxury of reserves anymore. Think of the human body. In good times, it adds a little fat. You grow comfortably pudgy. In hard times, the body draws on that reserve of energy. For many people, those reserves are gone. We drew on them hard in 2025, and now, we have to choose where we put our remaining energy.

I have a note on my computer. It says, “don’t step back”. I can’t resist everything. I can’t fight for all the social causes I support. But the core of my identity is where I can’t step back.

I’m an author. I write stories of hope. That is what I won’t compromise on.

Everything else, including supping with a long spoon with the devil that is Amazon, is negotiable.

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Speaking of Amazon. I am still trying to decide what to do regarding audio editions of the Caldryn Parliament series. If Amazon allowed Australians to access ACX (which supports voice actors and authors working together) I’d be all over it. But it doesn’t, despite years of promising that it was “coming soon”. For the moment, in the interests of accessibility, I’ve allowed Amazon to shove my books down the Virtual Voice path. As I discussed in an earlier post, I don’t consider these text-to-speech products audiobooks, but they do read the text aloud. As a stopgap they’re better than nothing, and since 2026 shows signs of being every bit as overwhelming as 2025, a stopgap is necessary while I take a breath. So, if you’re looking for audio editions of the Caldryn Parliament series they’re in Audible and clearly labelled as AI (i.e. Virtual Voice narration).

I am working on paperback editions of Caldryn Parliament. A proof copy of Stars Die is in the works and should arrive in early February. If it looks good, I’ll click publish and move onto Hexes Fly and Rogues Lie. I’ve enabled “expanded distribution” for these paperbacks, which means that if any other distributors choose to pick them up (something I can’t influence) then you’ll be able to buy them outside of Amazon (which still takes a massive cut of the sale price via production costs).

Finally with good news, my books are now available in all major digital library services. So, if you can convince your local library to buy a copy, they’re available for everyone. I am thrilled!