Recently, I had the opportunity to observe our planet through VR glasses — an experience I can recommend to anyone. Suspended in black space, the Earth appeared as a fragile blue and green bead, turning quietly in the vast silence of the cosmos. From this distance, there were no borders, no nations, no conflicts — only one living organism, breathing as one.
It struck me how, at this distance, externalities don’t seem to exist. Everything is visibly connected. The clouds that form over the oceans drift seamlessly over forests and cities, feeding rivers that sustain life across continents. No separation. No “elsewhere.”
Yet, once you come back down to Earth, you realize the truth is quite different. On this small planet, someone, somewhere, always pays the price.
The hidden arithmetic of progress
Having worked at Shell for 23 years, I’ve seen how business and economics are built on a peculiar form of selective accounting. We measure profit and loss but not the true costs our activities impose on the planet or society. These are the externalities — the unseen side-effects that don’t show up on balance sheets.
Take the hydrocarbon industry. The cost of extracting and refining oil is fully accounted for in the price of a barrel, but the true costs — climate pressures, rising sea levels, biodiversity loss, and social instability — are paid elsewhere, and often much later. The atmosphere and oceans have become the dumping ground for carbon, the future the debtor.
Paradoxically, in Iran – one of the world’s major oil producers – the climate crisis has deepened to such an extent that severe droughts have left reservoirs near Tehran nearly empty. The government has even discussed the possibility of having to evacuate the city if water supplies collapse. An oil-rich nation facing depopulation because of heat and thirst — a grim irony of externalities unpaid.
The same hidden costs appear in other sectors. The food industry delivers cheap calories by exhausting soils, polluting waterways, and degrading ecosystems. Fast fashion gives consumers affordable self-expression, yet leaves behind rivers laced with dye and mountains of discarded clothes in the Global South. Mining and electronics fuel our digital convenience but leave behind toxic tailings, water scarcity, and child labour.
We praise efficiency and productivity, yet both often rest on the quiet transfer of cost from the visible to the invisible — from the present to the future, from the powerful to the powerless.
The inner externalities
But not all externalities are external. Some of them live inside us.
The human brain’s primary function is to filter — to simplify overwhelming information into a manageable story that keeps us feeling safe. This filtering helps us survive, but it also hides from us the deeper consequences of our choices. We pursue what feels good and convenient now, while pushing discomfort, uncertainty, and pain into the future.
Modern life has perfected this art. We have built entire systems around the pursuit of comfort and convenience — in our food, our homes, our transport, even our relationships. Yet comfort comes with a hidden cost. By avoiding friction, we weaken our capacity for resilience. By insulating ourselves from discomfort, we lose touch with growth.
When I reflect on the people who have inspired me most – Thich Nhat Hanh, Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa, Mahatma Gandhi – none of them lived comfortable lives. Each endured deep suffering, injustice, and hardship. Yet it was precisely these experiences that forged their compassion, courage, and clarity.
It seems that the price tag of excess comfort and convenience is simply deferred suffering.
- Our overconsumption of food manifests later as obesity, heart disease, and stress.
- Our dependence on cheap energy destabilizes the climate, causing floods and droughts for future generations.
- Our obsession with speed, growth, and stimulation numbs us now but leaves us anxious, disconnected, and fatigued later.
As with the planet, so within us: the chicken always comes home to roost.
As within, so without
The patterns that govern our economies mirror those that govern our psyches.
When I suppress an uncomfortable emotion to keep peace in the moment, I am performing an internal version of the same act that a corporation does when it hides environmental harm for quarterly stability. Both defer cost to the future in exchange for short-term comfort.
- Inner: I eat processed food for ease today → Cost: future health problems.
Outer: Food industry sells cheap calories → Cost: public health crises and ecological damage. - Inner: I avoid a difficult conversation to maintain comfort → Cost: strained relationships, unresolved pain.
- Outer: Governments or companies avoid hard reforms → Cost: societal breakdown later.
- Inner: I seek distraction to escape discomfort → Cost: diminished presence and purpose.
- Outer: Society seeks constant growth → Cost: environmental overshoot and resource depletion.
The same psychological mechanism – the avoidance of pain – plays out in both worlds. We push costs away, hoping they’ll disappear, but they never do. They just migrate.
Reintegrating what we’ve separated
What would it mean to stop externalising, in our systems and in ourselves? It would mean facing reality whole. Acknowledging the costs we’ve outsourced. Redefining “success” to include not just what we gain, but what we sustain.
At a personal level, it might mean sitting with discomfort rather than fleeing it, consuming less but feeling more alive. At a business or societal level, it means integrating long-term planetary health into our economic calculus — aligning profitability with regeneration, not depletion.
From space, Earth looks complete — one living, breathing organism with no outside. And that, perhaps, is the truth we most need to remember. There are no real externalities. Every cost comes back, every action reverberates, every imbalance seeks correction.
When we stop outsourcing our discomfort, our waste, our responsibility — when we learn to hold the whole — we begin to heal our relationship with ourselves, with others, and with the planet.
From that vantage point, high above the Earth, it’s clear: there is no “out there.”
Only one shared home, and the invitation to take care of it, together.
In your life, your work, your choices — where might you still be externalising your costs? And what would it look like, starting today, to bring them home?
I invite you to ask yourself whether your thoughts and actions truly serve all life on Earth — including the generations yet to come. I try to ask myself this question every day. It’s often an unsettling and humbling experience at first, but also deeply energising when you realise how much opportunity there is to restore balance through many small, conscious choices.
Please let us know what you think, we would love to hear from you via sendlove at heartwork dot earth.