A personal account by Peter
Founder's Journey
I've spent parts of my life escaping it, parts of it rebuilding it, and now a ridiculous amount of it trying to build something better.
New Earth didn't start with some grand plan to redesign civilisation.
My life was a mess for a long time.
There were good parts, but there was also trauma, drink, drugs, anger, prison, people I shouldn't have been around and years where I didn't really know who I was or where I belonged.
I'm not putting that here for sympathy.
And I'm definitely not pretending every bad thing that happened to me excuses the bad choices I made myself.
It's here because if you want to understand why I keep going on about dignity, second chances, community, responsibility and rebuilding people instead of just writing them off, then you need to know where some of that came from.
Before I knew what I was carrying
I knew I felt different. I didn't know why.
I was quiet when I was young. Loud people and loud environments frightened me, and I was very sensitive to whatever was happening around me. I seemed to absorb the atmosphere in a room and carry other people's emotions with me.
My parents had both grown up within the care system, and mental-health difficulties existed throughout the wider family.
I was always thinking. I was drawn to stories about good overcoming bad, people saving others, music with meaning and the story of Jesus. Even then, I looked at the world and thought people were struggling and things could somehow be better. Peace mattered to me before I had any idea what I could do about it.
I also experienced abuse as a child.
For a long time, I was mostly left trying to deal with what happened inside my own head. I didn't have the language, understanding or tools for it. I just knew I wanted somebody to understand me, and most of the time I felt as if I didn't belong anywhere.
Escaping instead of dealing with it
For a while, anything that quietened things felt useful.
Drink and drugs became a way of medicating things I couldn't explain. They could quiet it all for a few hours. They couldn't fix what was underneath. Eventually they stopped working anyway.
I wanted conversations that went deeper than the surface, but I increasingly felt alone. I spent years around unhealthy relationships, friendships and environments tied up with drink, drugs and unresolved trauma.
I people-pleased. I carried everybody else's problems. I took responsibility for things that weren't mine and confused helping people with losing myself inside their lives.
Meanwhile the anger was still there. I wasn't dealing with it. I was just adding more on top.
I was a mess for a long time. That doesn't mean everybody around me was to blame. A lot of my choices were mine.
Consequences
Eventually my anger came out.
Years of pain, confusion, drink and drugs caught up with me. There were consequences, including prison.
I take responsibility for ending up there. Full stop.
Prison gave me something I'd spent years avoiding: time with myself. No drink. No drugs fixing the feeling for a few hours. Nowhere really to run from your own head.
I also started looking at some of the lads around me differently. Plenty had done bad things. So had I. But I could also see frightened people, addicted people, angry people and people who had spent half their lives being written off.
I came away believing two things can be true at once.
Consequences matter. And rebuilding people matters too.
Nothing left, then starting again
Rebuilding wasn't one big moment.
One of the major turning points came after my shoulder accident. By then I felt as though I had very little left.
Around that time, Hayley came back into my life after seven years.
She didn't save me. Rebuilding my life was still my responsibility. But reconnecting with her became part of creating something very different from the environments I had known before. Our home became calmer. Life became more peaceful.
I started looking after myself properly: training, eating better, working on my self-talk, reading, listening, learning and getting much stricter about my boundaries.
I began choosing relationships based on whether there was mutual growth, not simply history or obligation. I had to learn that love, loyalty or friendship shouldn't require destroying yourself to prove you care. Not everyone gets unlimited access to you just because you've known them for a long time.
Rebuilding happened through hundreds of smaller choices: how I spoke to myself, what I ate, whether I moved my body, who I allowed around me, what I consumed mentally, what I was no longer willing to tolerate, and whether I could believe another version of my life was still possible.
Hayley was building her own direction too. There is a practical engineering and technology side to what I do, and a more human, reflective and Conscious Living side that she brings into the wider picture. We aren't identical people doing identical things. That's the point.
Something changed in me
I started questioning nearly everything.
There was a spiritual side to this period too.
I began noticing synchronicities and becoming more conscious of intuition, tarot and experiences that I interpreted as part of an awakening.
I started questioning things I had previously accepted without thinking very deeply about them: society, success, work, money, technology, community, health, relationships, what we're actually doing here and what kind of world we're leaving behind.
I don't expect everybody reading this to interpret those experiences the way I do. They are simply part of my journey.
What mattered was what they made me do next. I started changing my life.
I started building instead of escaping
Somewhere along the way, questions became projects.
Technology and engineering had always interested me, but gradually they stopped being things I merely kept up with.
I started learning software, working with electronics, developing systems and experimenting with local AI. Breaking things. Fixing them. Breaking the fixes.
Then wondering why something that worked perfectly yesterday had apparently developed a personal vendetta against me overnight.
Apparently I don't do small projects.
Somewhere in the middle of all that came MicroGrow. It began with a practical problem: how could technology help manage a growing environment locally, intelligently and in a way the person using it could still understand and control?
That led into software, hardware, ESP32 systems, sensor testing, diagnostics, interfaces, local networking, automation and eventually AI-assisted development.
But MicroGrow also raised a bigger question.
What if technology was designed around helping people become more capable, rather than making them more dependent?
That question started escaping the grow tent.
Why New Earth exists
The pieces started connecting. Slowly, not magically.
MicroGrow wasn't just about growing plants. Local AI wasn't just about running a model on a computer. A Command Centre wasn't just another dashboard. The website wasn't just somewhere to advertise things.
I started thinking about technology that could strengthen the person, the home, the workshop, the grow, the small business and eventually the community. Technology that could retain knowledge locally, help people understand what was happening around them, support decisions and connect useful systems without requiring everything to be controlled from somewhere far away.
- Person
- Home / Place
- Community
- Local capability
- Connected communities
- Wider New Earth
The principle underneath it became local first, community first and stewardship first.
The technology I'm building today — MicroGrow, engineering systems, local AI, NEOS, GAIA, Command Centre and the wider New Earth architecture — is still development work. We haven't built some finished alternative civilisation. Far from it. We're building pieces, testing them and trying to make them coherent while keeping human authority in the middle of it.
Technology should serve life. Not the other way around.
What my past left me believing
I believe in responsibility because I've had to take responsibility for my own choices.
I believe in second chances because I know a person's worst period does not necessarily define the rest of their life.
I believe in dignity because taking it away rarely teaches somebody how to rebuild it.
I believe in community because isolation can quietly destroy people.
I believe in boundaries because helping without boundaries can destroy the helper too.
I believe addiction needs understanding as well as consequences because I know what it is to numb something you don't know how to face.
And I believe technology matters only when it leaves human beings with more agency, understanding and capability rather than less.
I know people can do terrible things. I know because I've made choices I regret myself.
Responsibility matters. Protecting people matters. Consequences matter.
But I don't believe the worst thing somebody has done should automatically become the only thing they're allowed to be for the rest of their life.
I needed the chance to become somebody different. I think other people deserve a real chance at that too.
I'm still rebuilding. There isn't a neat ending where everything became perfect and I turned into some flawless enlightened bloke with all the answers. I haven't.
Some days I'm designing software architecture or working on electronics. Some days I'm trying to work out how a local AI system should operate. Some days I'm thinking about governance, food, health, communities or what technology might look like ten or twenty years from now.
And some days I'm staring at a computer wondering why I've somehow created seventeen programmes, several operating systems and enough documentation to frighten a small government department.
Hayley is developing her own Conscious Living direction within the wider New Earth picture. We're also trying to build our own lives according to the principles we talk about rather than just publishing those principles for everybody else.
I can't separate New Earth entirely from my past: the childhood that made me sensitive to other people's pain, the trauma I didn't know how to deal with, the substances I used to escape, the choices I made, the consequences, prison, the people I tried to save while losing myself, meeting Hayley again, learning boundaries, looking after myself, learning, building, questioning and starting again.
That's why dignity, responsibility, community, stewardship, peace, resilience and second chances aren't just nice words on a manifesto. They mean something to me.
Knowing what we know now, what could we build differently?
I don't know where all of this ultimately leads.
But I know what I'm trying to do now.
Build something that helps rather than harms.
Create rather than escape.
Take responsibility rather than hide from it.
Use technology to strengthen life rather than dominate it.
And leave behind something better than the world I once thought I didn't belong in.
That's my Founder's Journey.
And, in many ways, that's where New Earth began.