Hi friends.

First, some exciting news I can (finally!) share about a part of my life we haven’t talked about before…it’s why I’ve been a little quieter here lately…which is…

I just sold my first company! 😲🥳🥂

We closed on Saturday, with the final handover details wrapping up this week.

Admittedly, even in the excitement, I feel like a bit of a fraud saying that. It was an experiment in the new good life, a humble, cute, cozy, community-scale tourism service provider, not a tech startup. Because somehow ‘sold my company’ and tech startup have become synonymous. This was not that.

And, I did still do the thing even if my brain insists on diminishing it. I bought an existing operation, gave it a little glow up, improved a few systems, created some SOPs, and then sold it 24 months later. The quick turnaround was not by design, but by necessity. Another story for another day.

But on this day, today, I got to drink coffee on the porch with two of my favourite co-conspirators while a 2.2 metric tonne burden drove itself down the street and off my shoulders.

Now. About today’s piece. This is my first ever video essay. It’s rough and off the cuff while I walked Thomas a few mornings ago. I recorded it May 7th. Given all I’m reading about the knock-on effects of the situation in the Gulf — something that I didn’t dwell on in this piece but could, and arguably, should have — I don’t want to wait any longer to put it out.

Plus, if I’m honest, it just feels more vulnerable to share a 40 minute video monologue. I was dragging my feet.

Also…yes. I did manage to freestyle a 40 minute lecture about complex socio-economic cascade events using a geohazard metaphor…while sitting on top of the literal fault line.

Caffeine is a hell of a drug.

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Transcript

Good morning. So I’m just down on the inner harbor walking Thomas and I walked past a tsunami warning sign. We have them all over the lower south coast of BC, but especially where I live in Victoria. It got me thinking about this piece that I’m working on that it’s like it’s stuck. It’s like I know it in my head—I can talk about it—but getting it all together and writing is so—oh god, it’s just like, I don’t know, being in labor or something. It’s so frustrating.

The tsunami warning sign is totally part of it and so I thought, you know what? I’m just gonna try to talk about it because I feel like it’s an important concept, an important piece. I also have a bunch of stuff going on and I don’t know when it’s gonna get out. So let’s, let’s try.

I live in this like shockingly beautiful place. I can’t turn the camera around right now but I have something I’ll show you later. Southern BC, all of Cascadia, the Pacific Northwest—it’s just, if you haven’t been here, it’s fking unreal. One of the reasons that it’s unreal is because we live in an active tectonic zone, meaning the ocean floor is running into the continent. These are tectonic plates and we live in what’s called a subduction zone, so the ocean floor is subducting—going underneath of the continental plate—and it’s what creates mountains and all of this natural beauty that we live in.

It is also—this is specifically what the region that gets called Cascadia is, like something like, depending how you measure it, 600 to 1000 kilometer stretch from sort of northern California all the way up to Alaska that is in one of the most, if not literally the most, dangerous subduction zones in the world. The problem with being in a subduction zone is that the earthquakes that it creates are devastating, like magnitude nine and higher. So like Christchurch, the tsunami in Japan, whatever, about a decade ago. Not only do you have these earthquakes that are like gonna absolutely be apocalyptic—like action movie bad.

Seismologists use words like, you know, “devastating” and “worst in history” and seismologists don’t talk like that, right? Scientists in general, they’re very measured. They talk about how this area gets an earthquake like that, as a subduction zone earthquake like that, every 300 to 500 years for sure, like clockwork. It’s going to happen. The last one that happened here was in 1700, so we are exactly in the threshold when it’s going to happen. They can’t say when, they just know that yes, it will. Recent estimates is it’s 37% chance that this earthquake is coming in the next 50 years.

The thing is, so not only will the rupture—the way that it happens is all this tension builds up between these plates as this denser ocean plate tries to go underneath the continental plate. The plates—I can’t—they like buckle against each other and then all this tension stores up—this is what the buckling happens in the North American plate and you have to imagine the ocean plate is going underneath my fist and then eventually so much tension builds up in the system that there’s this rupture and then the continental plate falls down by like—I can’t remember what—I was watching a video about this last thing, it’s like 36 inches or something was the last one.

So that’s three feet. Three feet of displacement. Here’s the thing: it creates what’s called a compound event or a cascade. It’s not just the earthquake, it’s everything that comes after. There will almost certainly be a tsunami that follows. There will be—they call it liquefaction—and so we have entire cities built on essentially like water and sand and that the shaking is going to just stir it up and just like—imagine when you try to walk on the beach after high tide just as the tide is going out and your feet are like sinking into the loose sand but hard to get out. Like that. An entire city of Richmond is the city built—it’s gonna like—liquefaction is gonna just destroy Richmond. Then, you know, there’s going to be flooding, there’s potentially going to be lots of fires.

It basically means that there’s going to be this—the one event triggers all the rest of these events. The reason I’m five minutes into explaining all this to you, assuming that you’re not also a geography nerd like me, is because I think it is the perfect metaphor for the moment that we’re in. I think we are in the moment where there is so much stress building up between these two metaphorical plates that I’m going to tell you about in a second, and I think that the fault—I think we’re very close to that earthquake happening. It’s possible it’s already happening; it’s possible the shaking’s already started.

So what am I saying? Remember I told you about the continental plates, right? We have the North American plate that I’m sitting on right now, like literally me and Thomas, we’re sitting on it. There’s Thomas. So we’re sitting on the North American plate and just in front of us on that ocean that I can see, that is called the Juan de Fuca plate. The North American plate in our today’s metaphor is all of the visible, measurable economic activity going on in Canada. It’s the things—the government, the stuff that shows up in macroeconomic data.

The Juan de Fuca plate, the ocean plate, that is visible stuff that the data can’t measure. It’s loaded. On the North American plate, the dynamics that we can see right now, we have things like 177% average household debt-to-income ratios. One of the helicopters is taking off and probably drowning me out right now, super loud. There’s so many seaplanes and helicopters that come in and out of the harbor, it’s really pretty. North American plate: we have household debt-to-income ratio is out of control. The worst off of us have 433% debt-to-income ratio right now, average 177%.

Insolvencies—the one of the leading insolvency firms in Canada is expecting—they testified to parliament. The our subcommittee on finance has been holding meetings on household debt over the last few weeks, I’ve been watching them. They had one of the largest firms in Canada, insolvency trustees, come in and they told the finance committee they are expecting a 20% rise in insolvencies this year and that will continue through 2027. Honestly, I think that’s being like very conservative.

The reason why is we have households carrying all this debt. We’re still on the North American plate, okay? It’s really important to see where I’m going. What we can see is that 50%—half of all mortgages in Canada between now and the end of 2027 are going to renew. The way our mortgages work is—to be honest, I’m a little bit fuzzy on the details—but I believe it’s like five-year renewal cycles. What happened is a bunch of people bought homes or renewed their mortgages—refinance is what I’m looking for—during COVID when rates were really, really low. Rates are no longer really, really low and they’re probably gonna not get lower.

The way that the macroeconomic interventions are gonna work around all this oil stuff is chances are interest rates are going up again. So these folks are going to be renewing their mortgages into rates that are 50% higher than what they were paying before. Original rate around what, like two and a half percent? Now they’re going to be renewing into like four and a half, five, six percent. This is in Canada and most anywhere near an urban center in most all of southern British Columbia where I live. It doesn’t matter if you’re in a major city or not—that kind of renewal is going to add six, eight hundred, a thousand dollars a month to your mortgage payment.

When you have 177% debt-to-income ratio and your mortgage goes up that much—oh, and by the way, most people—there was a survey done by one of our big, big five accounting firms just a month ago or so. The numbers I’m—there in my essay—I want to say it’s 60%. Two-thirds of Canadians are two hundred dollars a month away from insolvency. Two hundred dollars a month. Now the mortgage payment is going up six hundred, eight hundred, a thousand. Where is that money coming from? Well, you have to go to debt. But the problem is also we have a straighter hormones stuff going on. So we have the price of gas going up, the price of food is going up—it’s going to go way the fk more.

We are not at all registering how much the price of—like what’s going to happen with the food situation. So increase, increase, increase shocks—they call these like economic shocks, right? Where is that money coming from? It’s debt. The debt goes up and the debt goes up and the debt goes up and people—we already know this is happening. The annual Joe Debtor study showed us when people are declaring insolvency in Canada right now—which insolvencies are going up, they’re going to keep going up—when they declare themselves bankrupt or they go in and try to make a consumer proposal, they have ten and a half credit products on average. That’s borrowing to pay for borrowing.

By the time they get to the insolvency trustee, they are using payday loans. People are using Buy Now Pay Later to pay for groceries. But the thing is, we can’t see Buy Now Pay Later. That’s the oceanic plate. That’s the stuff that’s invisible underneath the ocean. We’re not even there yet—we’re still on household debt. So what we can measure, what the government can see, is all of these debt dynamics that I just described to you.

Now it’s not just households, it’s governments. It’s governments, and that is the part where I need my notes. It’s messy, it’s murky, it’s hard to track. But on multiple fronts, our government has been borrowing to buy bonds to inject money into the economy to stave off what is coming in ways that—this is the fky part—is they have mechanisms that turn borrowing into assets. When you look at the balance sheet of the government, there is so much more debt than we can see, which is, again, this is over on the oceanic plate. They of course interact and intersect.

The governments are involved with what are called non-bank financial institutions. These non-bank financial institutions are things like hedge funds and the different entities that provide what’s called private credit. Right now we are having a big problem with private credit because people can’t pay their bills. What the financial system does is they—one of the processes that they undertake is called securitization. Let’s say like a bank gives you a personal line of credit or a mortgage and they’re not super confident about your ability to pay, and so they sell that debt stream to a hedge fund. The hedge fund says, “Okay, no problem. We will—if that fails, we will pay. So you are not going to lose money, bank, but you’re going to pay us so whatever, like 10 feet ongoing until the end until this thing is settled”. It’s basically like buying insurance on a loan. The bank sells the debt to the hedge fund and pays the hedge fund to ensure that that debt is going to get paid. I think I explained that a little bit fky, but again, we’re just like this—I’m just doing my best without my notes.

That is going on, but there’s also this other process going on that is extremely, again, opaque, called synthetic risk transfers. It’s a very similar process to what I just described, but it is also—it’s not just happening between banks and the hedge funds; it’s happening between governments and hedge funds. Now we get over onto the oceanic plate, the Juan de Fuca plate, under the ocean, that—that we cannot see, that we cannot measure, because we do not have the proper tools and insights.

Fintech has just like leapfrogged way past the speed of—technological innovation has surpassed, right? Regulators are just—they’re not even chasing their tails. They’re just like standing on the beach looking around being like, “The fk is going on?” Meanwhile, fintech’s out there with Buy Now Pay Later, the hedge funds are doing these securitized loan products. The thing is, not only can we not see it, but it’s like—this is very 2008. This is very much what happened in 2008 is we had all of this invisible risk inside of the system that people could not see that resolved—so much of it—the like fault line of all of it was: can normal people pay their bills? Normal people cannot pay their bills right now.

There is an incredible and atomic bomb amount of risk is built up inside of these systems—the things you can’t see, Buy Now Pay Later debt; the things you can’t see, synthetic risk transfers. All of these layers of securitization, just like we did in 2008—we just used new words for it. On top of that, we cannot see a huge majority of the economic activity going on with independent workers. Here, this part’s really, really, really, really important. Over the last whatever—since the 70s, how many years that? 50 years—corporations have been downsizing, rightsizing, stripping workers away as fast as they can, turning employees into contractors.

Now you have a huge swath of the economy that is doing work independently. They’re essentially functioning as entrepreneurs, even if they want to be employees. Solo small businesses, people like me, independent contractors that are selling our services back into the market because jobs don’t exist or because, you know, whatever, we wanted it supposedly. When you work independently, when you are any type of entrepreneur—whether you employ other people, whether you are out on your own—unless you form a corporation and make yourself an employee of that corporation, you don’t qualify for employment insurance. Your income only shows up on your taxes. It shows up nowhere else.

It’s not showing up in labor force surveys. So when we look at like the unemployment rate, when we look at people on employment insurance—all these things that the government can see over on the North American plate—the things we can see, people like me are not in that data. So when our income streams get disrupted over on the other plate, when someone like me loses a client or when AI starts doing the tasks for our clients that we used to do, it’s not visible.

We have, in the these conversations around AI in the labor market—Stanford, Yale, all these like very credible institutions are putting out these studies are like, “No detectable AI disruption in the labor market”. Cool. According to the data that you can see, that you’re using. You’re only using data about employees, T4 employees, people that the government can see. Sure, maybe AI is not having a big impact because a lot of jobs in the labor market, when you’re employed by a company, you usually have like all kinds of cross-functional responsibilities. They’re very difficult for AI to do—cross-functional, complex human work at any scale. It’s not actually going very well right now.

However, what AI is exceptional at are tasks. It’s very good at research, it’s getting increasingly good at writing, it’s exceptional at synthesis and analysis. There are so many things—it’s getting very good at design, very good at pumping up slide decks. So a lot of things that—tasks—that got unbundled and disaggregated from jobs when we started to lay people off en masse, and people like me started to sell our services back to the market as researchers and analysts and these kinds of things—companies can just do that now with AI. They’ll just, you know, reduce your contract by 50% and be like, “Yeah, we need you for the more complex stuff, but we don’t really need you anymore for the research that we used to pay you to do”.

Your income dries up by 10%, 20%, 30%, 50%. Maybe an entire contract gets cancelled. That isn’t showing up anywhere. We have—depending what numbers you use—at the low end, we have about three and a half million Canadians earning a living like that, in the ways that I just described, that are vulnerable to the impacts on sort of drying up work from AI disruption, but also just from contraction. Because in periods of uncertainty, people just stop spending. Everyone starts acting defensively. They kind of move inward, like, “Oh fk, we don’t know what’s going on. We better just like eliminate risk everywhere that we can”.

We have about three and a half million Canadians estimate full-time making their living in ways the government can’t see, up to possibly nine million. That’s half of the Canadian labor force making some kind of income—not maybe not all of it, but like, you know, a few little bit of Uber driving on the weekend or selling services into a platform or like an Etsy, maybe a little Etsy side hustle. All of that is invisible. Half of Canadians are earning invisible income, all of it vulnerable to the shocks going on right now—to fear-based contraction, to AI displacement, to the sort of overall economic conditions, to rising costs, to having their profit margin eaten because transportation costs have gone up, because it costs more to mail sh... because there is just at every turn there are added costs. Added costs on the individual are added costs on businesses.

That is all invisible. Then you have people accumulating invisible debts and Buy Now Pay Later. You have government and hedge funds accumulating tons of risk in ways that are invisible. Oh, there’s these birds just chirping, chirping, chirping away. It’s distracting and also kind of beautiful. We have a plane landing. Let’s take a break and watch this plane land. I think I fked that up. I think you can’t see the plane lands. It’s very hard—you can’t just turn your camera around. You can’t just like do the little button.

Anyway, where was I? Visible versus invisible risk. In the finance committee meetings I was watching, one of the things that came up is that these invisible workers—the ones that are super vulnerable, at really big risk of having income streams eaten up—they are also totally unprotected. A couple of the MPs that were asking questions of witnesses were talking about how 50% of the Canadian labor force is not eligible for employment insurance.

When their income streams contract, when they have disruptions that make it impossible for them to work or would—if they were employees otherwise—essentially be a de facto effective layoff, those same people can’t get employment insurance. So now your mortgage is going up, your fuel cost’s going up, your groceries are going up... you maybe have no work or your income is contracting, but your costs are rising and you can’t get any help. You will end up insolvent.

That’s why I said earlier I believe the 20% insolvency prediction or forecast rather by Hoyes Michalos that they gave to the finance committee is so conservative and so absolutely not sufficient for this moment. The thing is, so much of the risk storing up in these plates, the tension building between the visible and invisible parts of our economy—that risk fundamentally, a huge portion of it reduces to the ability of households to pay their bills. So many of us cannot pay our bills right now.

I don’t know what happens from here. I’m not—I can’t, you know... like a seismologist, I’m not gonna—I can’t tell you when the earthquake happens and I can’t tell you even for sure if there’s tsunamis and liquefaction and all that to follow. Like, we’ve had big earthquakes off of our coast that have not produced tsunamis. They’ve not been the big subduction ones, but they’ve also not produced tsunamis. So we don’t ever know how complex events are going to play out.

I think, I think, I think we’re about to see—I think we’re about to see that fault line crack. I don’t understand how we could have—and to be fair, like, I have not—there is so much more. There is so much more. It’s very—I’m just like riffing from what’s in my head, but there is so much more. We’re seeing this really not good contraction in the private credit market. We’re seeing—oh, this huge slowdown in real estate that I haven’t even gotten into.

Most of the Canadian economy is built on real estate. We’re seeing freelancer platforms’ stocks tanking to nothing. We’re seeing the big thing—the big thing. Jamie Dimon is the CEO of JPMorgan Chase. He’s the only CEO that made it through the 2008 financial crisis with his job. He just recently called the situation the private credit market—he said they’re one of the big—there was a bunch of fraud and the collapse of a couple of the private credit lenders and hedge funds in the States and also in Canada. He said where there’s one cockroach, there’s always more, meaning like if there is risk and fraud going on inside of one of these firms, it’s probably going on in most of these firms.

Later, another one of his colleagues of a similar stature came out and asked, like, “Are these cockroaches or are these termites? Like, is there just—is the system rotting from the inside out?” You have the deputy governor of the Bank of England, Sarah Breeden—and look at this article I read in The Guardian earlier this week—she is quoted as saying she is losing sleep at night over these compounding risks that are building up in the system. You have the governor of the Bank of Canada, Tiff Macklem, is giving speeches about compound risks that we can’t see, in particular in private credit.

Governors of banks don’t talk about—don’t say they’re losing sleep like this. This is not—they are extremely measured people. They do not wave their hands and get out the red string. They use very measured, coded language. Sarah Breeden did not say “I’m losing sleep” accidentally. Jamie Dimon did not say “Where there’s one cockroach, there’s more” accidentally.

Whether or not I’ve successfully landed any of this off the cuff on my morning dog walk, I don’t—I don’t know. I hope that I have. I will attempt to get this out in writing as soon as I can, but between some big stuff I have going on in my—the other parts of my life—and sort of the stuckness of getting this out in words on paper, yeah, I just wanted to try. I just wanted to see. I just wanted to like experiment with doing videos. I’ve—oh fk, I hate doing these. I think Substack’s about to come like video dominant and I think the entire algorithm—algorithm—is going to rely on video soon.

Yeah, and I just want to know what you think, what you see. I want to—I want to be in dialogue about this because, you know, I don’t want to be alarmist, I don’t want to be hand-razy. I’m not—I don’t—I don’t think that helps anything and I’m tracking all this stuff and it’s a lot. There’s—like I said, there’s so much more than what I even said here. I’m trying to use this like metaphor about compound risks in the natural environment to help us maybe like understand the—like these really opaque and complex dynamics going on in our economic environment that are really hard to see.

Honestly, like most people don’t care and I get it. It’s like, who—who—it’s like such a niche population that is going to listen to five hours of finance committee meetings, right? But this is very important. It’s very important. I, you know, I—I don’t know what happens from here, but I do know that, you know, the RCMP commissioned a sort of like call it a market intelligence report—which is the work that I used to do, which is like part of how I, you know, besides my special interests and my autism and my human geography, my like economic geography obsession... that was my degree and I’ve never stopped caring about this stuff and reading and learning.

Besides all of that, it’s like there are people way smarter than me that are identifying really problematic risks right now—really big dangerous risks right now. I have this background in market intelligence. I understand how to put these puzzle pieces together. The RCMP hired a firm to do a essentially market intelligence report for them—a risks report—about the risks facing Canada domestically and the sort of security risks that we’re going to face. I think it was a 2024 they commissioned this, and one of the top risks that came out in this report—it was supposed to be top secret but it got leaked—one of the top risks was for domestic unrest from economic—like the failure of the economic system.

Subduction zone earthquakes: they happen in perfect storm conditions when too much tension is built up in the system. In ecology there is this model—it’s called the panarchy. If you look it up, it looks—my friend Julian once explained it to me on a beach. I can still remember sitting there with him drawing the infinity loop in the sand—so like a number eight turned on its side, the infinity loop. It goes like this.

Panarchy basically says, like, all ecological systems go through this predictable cycle where they store up—they sort of like store up all this energy to their maximum carrying capacities. Like imagine a forest, right? After forest fire, the fun-—the fungus returns and then the small plants and on and on and on until the forest is like giant and massive and you have, you know, huge old-growth cedars and all this sh. The forest sort of reaches this maximum carrying capacity. It reaches the maximum tension that it can hold essentially. Then there is—they call it—there goes through a conservation phase. There’s like a build-up phase, there’s a conservation phase, and then there’s a release phase.

All complex systems go through the same pattern. It—it just is. It’s just a fact. I believe we are either in or about to be in the release phase of the complex system—our complex socioeconomic system. When that happens—not if that happens, when that happens—if we are not prepared (which to, you know, if you read the news, there is no reporting anywhere, there’s no evidence anywhere that our governments are doing anything to prepare us for this)... without adequate preparation, it gets very messy. Very messy.

With social trusts the way that it is and with economic vulnerability at the way that it is, with—with the wealth gap, with sixty percent of households two hundred dollars away from insolvency, with food and livelihoods and homes on the line... yeah, I think it gets worse before it gets better. I don’t want to be alone, I guess, in that conversation.

The other thing is every single complex system, after it releases, there’s a renewal phase. I certainly don’t mean to be a doomer, and a lot of the other things that I’m going to be writing about and think about and want to show you are about—you know, we talk about this all the time—is better possible futures. It’s the new good life. You can see evidence of it. It’s bringing up in the cracks, it’s—it’s emergent and it’s fragile and it’s trying it’s fking damnedest. It will happen. It’s just like—also there’s—it’s kind of unavoidable to go through this release.

How do we carry each other through that? What are—how do we restore relationality? How do we deal with this at the level of our communities? Because that’s where it’s gonna—that’s where we’re gonna need to deal with it, right? Like, we need to get to know our neighbors again. We need to build our internal ability to be with discomfort and uncertainty. We need capacity to tolerate really high levels of discomfort such that we do not make choices that increase our risk and increase our exposure to really unfortunate things.

You need a lot of capacity for decision making and for choosing non-violent paths and for choosing... you need to be able to keep your wits about you, you know? We make better decisions, we take better actions, we have the capacity to be more loving toward ourself and each other when we have the internal capacity for uncertainty.

My publication is saying “fk, I love you,” and that was very much on purpose. Like, that was about love ethics. That was going back to bell hooks. Like, we need—love is not a fluffy concept. It’s not a romance novel. It’s not a feeling. It’s things that you do. It’s reciprocity. It’s choosing to invest in other people and yourself at the same time. It’s learning how to say “both and”. It’s learning how to figure out what win-wins are.

We haven’t been trained how to do that. Systems based on dominance and control and hierarchy, like we currently live in, they do win-lose, right? Zero-sum. More for me, less for you. What is trying to emerge, what I see trying to emerge, are love ethics. Love ethics are practiced. This entire complex system—synthetic risk transfers and Buy Now Pay Later and like all this like st that’s like so abstract that runs our lives—all of that comes out of cultural ideas about how the world should work.

These are just all based on ideas of, like, economic models. Like oh my god, I get to them so long telling you about Milton Friedman and neoliberal economics and all of—like, those are just ideas. They’re just ideas. They’re not real. They’re like—we have better ideas. We have better ideas. Milton Friedman is the economist like most responsible for neoliberal economics and there’s this quote of his that I used to be able to recite off by heart, and maybe if it wasn’t for this plate engine in my ear... I can’t see—what I can’t see what you can see when I turn the camera around. I think I’m doing a really shitty job.

He has this quote about how only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are laying around. It is our job to make sure to keep those ideas alive, to make sure that the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.

I love you philly everything. You know, I do write often about the problems, and that’s the both and. It’s like, I feel like we have to be able to honestly see where we are so that we can chart where we’re going. I want to help create ideas that make the politically impossible become the politically inevitable because we are in a crisis, even if it hasn’t tipped into the—even if the mega-thrust magnitude 9 quake has not actually occurred yet. Like, it’s coming and I want to make sure there are ideas laying around that don’t put us back in this situation.

Every time we’ve had these like foreshock ruptures of the system... because the system—it’s in it, though. It’s design of our social and economic systems. This shit is inevitable. The continuation of crises that just get these Band-Aids slapped over top of them—they’ll just keep happening until fundamental change occurs. For that fundamental change to occur, we have to be different internally as individuals. We have to have different values. We have to be practicing a different culture so that it does seem inevitable that we should have systems based on reciprocity and that we should have, you know, care at the center of our economics.

That takes honest assessment and honest dialogue about where we are and where we could go and, you know, what are the new shoulds? I want to be in that dialogue with you. I want you to know what a subduction zone is, metaphorically and literally. I want you to know what’s happening on the North American plate and what’s happening on the oceanic plate and I want you to know how they’re interacting because I want us to be able to do something about it together.

I want us to make sure we have our 72-hour emergency kits and I want to make sure there’s better ideas laying around.

So I f*king love you.

I want to hear what you think about all this.

If you stayed—if you’re still here—I especially f*king love you.

Yeah, tell me what you think.

Okay, bye.

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In scuba diving, there’s a condition called decompression sickness. Divers know it as the bends. Roughly, my layperson’s understanding goes like this: when you dive deep, the pressure forces nitrogen gas into your blood and tissues. It dissolves there for as long as you stay down. Your body adapts to the pressure. It becomes the new normal.

Once adapted, if a diver ascends too quickly, the pressure change causes that dissolved nitrogen to form bubbles — in the joints, in the blood vessels, in the spinal cord. It’s agonizing and in the most severe cases, can even be fatal. The treatment isn’t to keep swimming upward. It’s recompression: you go back down, slowly, and give the body time to off-gas at a pace it can handle. The cure for surfacing too fast is a controlled return to the surface.

I think it’s the perfect metaphor for shifting pace too quickly and it’s been on my mind a lot as I go about designing Deep End Retreats.

Deep in the Shallows

Collectively, when it comes to the pace of our work, most of us have been deep in the shallows for a very long time. The shallows (if you’re just joining us) meaning shallow work, what Cal Newport defined as work that is non-cognitively demanding, logistical, task-oriented, busy work often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not create much new value in the world, are easy to replicate and are a huge contributor to burnout.

Most of us have spent years (or more likely decades if you’re as old as me) operating in a state of near-constant fragmentation and frenetic shallowness — deep in the shallows. Meetings that spawn meetings. Slack threads that never resolve. The phantom buzz of a phone that isn’t actually vibrating. These are the tasks, often done concurrently, that keep us busy, often stressed, and often perpetually deferring the skilled work we want and need to be doing.

This is the ‘work about work’ that takes up an estimated 60%+ of all work time. It’s why so many of us now work a ‘triple-peak’ day: morning, afternoon, and a third shift late at night, logging back on just to finish the actual work that couldn’t be done during the day.

Which...really? Triple shifts? Into the night? What about family, friends, errands, wellbeing? The paindemic starts to make more sense in this context.

The colonization of our calendars doing work about work, often during our most biologically productive windows has had massive consequences for our attention among other things.

The consequences aren’t just about how much time we spend working. They’ve been devastating for our cognitive capacity. Gloria Mark, a psychologist at UC Irvine who has been tracking our attention spans for twenty years, found that the average time we spend on any single screen before switching has dropped from two and a half minutes in 2004 to forty-seven seconds today. The median is forty. That means half the time, we’re switching in under a minute.

Forty-seven seconds.

That’s a reflex, not a work style.

Researcher Sophie Leroy coined the term “attention residue” to describe what happens when we move from one task to another: part of our brain stays stuck on the thing we just left. Literally, measurably, demonstrably stuck—consuming working memory, degrading performance on whatever comes next. The unfinished email lingers while you’re trying to write. The Slack thread from an hour ago still has its hooks in you during the strategy session. We carry all of it, all the time, and we’ve been doing it so long that the carrying — and its costs — has become invisible.

Perhaps most alarmingly of all, this is demonstrably changing our brains. A seminal 2014 study out of the University of Sussex found that heavy media multitasking correlated with less grey matter density in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC)—the part of your brain responsible for cognitive control and emotional regulation.

Newer research suggests it is a vicious cycle where cognitive fragmentation and cognitive restructuring feed on each other. There is almost no way to distinguish chicken from egg anymore.

But there is a flip side to this that often gets missed amid the doominess of it all: neuroplasticity works both ways. The brain that shrank under pressure can expand under ease. The structural changes are real, but they are not permanent—provided you give the organ time to repair.

But first, you have to surface from the shallows.

Infinite Attentional Opium

So what happens when someone who has been living like this for years tries to ascend from the shallows and “just focus”?

You know what happens. You’ve been there. You clear the calendar. You silence the phone. You sit down with the Important Thing. And within minutes, the itching starts.

Except it’s not your body itching.

It’s your brain.

The ‘itching’ shows up as a reflexive reach for your phone, like a phantom limb your brain hasn’t registered is missing. Or the sudden necessity of making a fresh coffee. Or the 100 “urgent” things you forgot to write down on your to-do list populating your brain all at once at full volume.

These attentional ‘bends’ (to keep going with our deep diving metaphor) often show up as a low-grade restlessness or even melancholy, but isn’t. A sadness or anxiety that has no content or obvious cause — nothing is wrong, exactly, but something feels very not right. The cacophony of not rightness is largely what crowds out your ability to focus deeply, despite having made space to do so.

The monk-mode productivity bros will tell you this is a discipline problem. They imply that access to depth is a light switch, and the problem is your unwillingness to be hard on yourself.

That framing is wrong though, and it’s doing real harm. Because what’s actually happening in those first hours, or even days, of attempted stillness, quiet or depth when you’re trained in frenetic shallowness, is decompression, not a failure of willpower. The nitrogen is being forced out of your bloodstream.

And if any of this sounds a lot like addiction, you wouldn’t be wrong. Our nervous systems have been operating on a specific type of fuel when we are in the shallows: the “variable reward schedule.” This is the same psychological mechanic used in slot machines and infinite scroll social media. If you checked your email and always got a reward, it wouldn’t be addictive. It’s addictive because you might get a reward. Dopamine is actually about the anticipation of gratification, not gratification itself.

For years, your brain has calibrated itself to this rapid-fire, high-anticipation loop:

Send message, maybe get reply, spike dopamine.

Scroll, maybe see something cool, spike dopamine.

The feedback is fast, frequent, and frictionless.

Slack is work-TikTok, meanwhile most of us also watch TikTok at work. The scroll is still infinite whether you’re in the boardroom, the bathroom or the bedroom.

When you remove all of that abruptly, you are not removing a distraction. You are removing a supply. And your nervous system interprets the absence as a threat.

Silence in this context is especially deafening.

Monk Mode

It bears repeating no amount of discipline, magical thinking or biohacking can stop the bends if you try to surface too fast. You can’t will your way out of a physiological process.

Most meditation traditions figured this out a long time ago. Which is particularly ironic re: monk mode bros who likely have spent zero time in a scriptorium nor a Vipassana retreat. Anyone who has sat a multi-day silent retreat will tell you that the first two or three days are brutal. The mind thrashes against stillness like a trapped animal. Tiago Forte, a productivity thinker who wrote about his first Vipassana retreat, described opening the door of his mind on day one and finding “utter chaos.” Distracting thoughts falling like hammer blows. But by the later days, his senses felt sharpened, the world more vivid.

The depth was there. It was always there. But it required decompression to access.

We don’t talk about decompression when it comes to work though. The productivity conversation assumes that focus is binary: you’re either doing it or you aren’t. This ignores the basic physiology. You are asking an organ that has been shaped by years of fragmented, high-frequency stimulation to suddenly operate in a completely different mode. That’s a big ask. It has a cost. The cost is discomfort, and the discomfort has a timeline.

The person who takes a week off to write and spends the first two days staring at the wall? That person is decompressing. The person who books a cabin in the woods and can’t sleep the first night? Decompressing.

None of these people are failing. All of them are paying the tax of transition, and nobody warned them it was coming.

I think the reason nobody warns us is that the warning is bad for business. The productivity industry is built on the promise of instant transformation. You can’t put “Results may take 48 to 72 hours or more of feeling terrible” on a landing page. But denying the lag doesn’t make it go away. It just makes people blame themselves when they experience it.

We’ve been drowning in the quantifiable shallows and calling it productivity. The way out has a decompression phase that few of us account for.

Accounting for the Ascent

Just like divers learn that there are things they need to do to ascend well — some prescribed by physics, some intuitive between each diver and their particular body and depth — research and experience both have things to say about how to avoid the bends the next time you try to work, deeply.

And it’s worth being clear about why that matters.

That was true in 2016 when he wrote it. In the age of AI, it’s an order of magnitude more true — the cognitive work that can’t be automated is precisely the kind that requires sustained, uninterrupted depth. The infinite workday isn’t just bad for your health. It’s structurally cutting you off from — in Microsoft’s words — the work that matters most.

So: how do you actually get there? What does ascension from the infinite work day look like?

Assuming you can make space to work deeply, the first thing is simply to know what’s coming.

Expect restlessness.

Expect anxiety, maybe even a low-grade panic.

Expect it to potentially last days and plan for it in advance.

Ask yourself before you begin what you’ll do when the manufactured urgency grips you — and it will — whispering that you’ll feel so much better if you just turn the notifications back on, or send that one email real quick. This is the nitrogen leaving your bloodstream. It is not a signal that something is wrong. Assume you might have nothing to show for the first stretch and decide in advance that this is fine.

Something from the research that is still giving me pause on this point is Gloria Mark’s finding that when external interruptions are removed, self-interruptions spike. Brains calibrated to a particular cadence of being pinged will start generating their own pings when the external ones go quiet. The itching doesn’t come from outside you. It comes from a nervous system that has learned to expect a certain rhythm, and starts producing that rhythm internally when the environment stops providing it. Which means silencing your notifications is necessary but not sufficient. The environment has to change enough that the internal rhythm has nowhere to go.

Second: discomfort is information, not a verdict. Restlessness after removing stimulation doesn’t mean you’re incapable of depth or stillness. It means your body is adjusting to a different pressure — the same thing that happens when you stop drinking coffee. The headache isn’t proof that you need coffee. It’s proof that you were dependent on it. Withdrawal is what transition feels like from the inside.

Third: environment does more work than effort can. The meditation retreats that reliably move people from chaos to clarity don’t do it by asking participants to try harder. They do it by constructing a container that makes depth the path of least resistance. Willpower is metabolically expensive and finite in supply. The environment does what individual effort cannot.

And finally: give yourself actual permission not to produce. Go for a walk. Do yoga. Clean the house. Play an instrument. Get a massage. Help your nervous system downshift through things you personally find regulating before you ask it to perform. The goal isn’t to immediately generate output. The goal is to decompress enough that high quality, focused output becomes possible again.

Because most of us have spent too long down in the shallows. Long enough that the pressure feels like home.

Coming up will take longer than you think, and the first stretch of the ascent won’t feel like freedom. It’ll feel like something is wrong. That feeling has a name. Divers know it. Meditators know it. Anyone who has ever tried to reclaim their attention from the machinery of modern work knows it.

It’s called the bends.

It’s the price of surfacing.

And it passes.

Mornings are for coffee and contemplation. The Deep End is for thinking out loud about what depth’s got to do with a future worth living in. More at deependretreats.com.

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This is the first instalment in The Deep End, a futures worth living in series about deep work and reclaiming the conditions for meaningful livelihood. It’s prelude to a deep work experience I’m designing and want your input on. Learn more here. Tell me what you think here. Survey closes April 24th.

The Cabin on the Coast

In late 2014 at the PopTech conference, hosted and for a conversation she called The Inner Life of Rebellion. An edited version aired on her podcast On Being in January 2015. I’ve probably listened to it at least twenty times since then.

Krista framed their dialogue like this:

“The history of rebellion is rife with burnout. Burnout, which Parker Palmer has defined as ‘violating my own nature in the name of nobility.’ Then you have the irony of this moment we inhabit, where we are freer, psychologically and practically, to be rebels. But the forms and institutions we are dealing with don’t need smashing. Most of them are imploding all on their own. Many of our acts of rebellion are in the first instance acts of creation.”

The episode dropped the month before the RADIUS Fellowships began—a leadership program I co-founded for early career social impact professionals. RADIUS stood for, radical ideas useful to society, and it was/is the social innovation lab at Simon Fraser University. You could say I’d been thinking about the inner life of rebellion for my entire career, but especially then.

To design the program, I took myself on a solo trip to a small town on BC’s west coast. To think clearly and deeply enough I needed to be away from my colleagues and the open-concept office we shared with ten other organizations. Forty-five minutes by ferry away, to be specific. That office was highly social, extremely distracting, and nearly impossible to do real work at. Meetings, emails, spreadsheets—sure. Maybe a grant application. But an act of creation requiring sustained attention? Absolutely not.

I covered my rented cabin in sticky notes, reference books propped open everywhere. I’d created a micro artist residency, my own Jungian tower, where I could think without anyone wandering up to say hey you got a sec, real quick?

And it worked. When I ferried home four days later, the program design was complete.

The Violence of Activism and Overwork

This is where Parker and Courtney and Krista re-enter the chat, through a Thomas Merton quote they discuss at length in the episode:

“There is a pervasive form of modern violence to which the idealist…most easily succumbs: activism and over-work. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence.

To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence.

The frenzy of the activist neutralizes his (or her) work… It destroys the fruitfulness of his (or her)…work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.”

This quote perfectly described the culture of the social impact sector then. To the best of my understanding, it still does. It is a sector that blends the best and worst of startup culture with the best and worst of activist nonprofit culture. The violence of overwork and burnout by nobility are endemic.

Our team was certainly no different. Status and clout and power accumulated by endurance as much as by the quality of the work. I resigned a few months after the first fellowship cohort wrapped because I was too burnt out to carry on. I was also probably having MS relapses but didn’t know that yet. Instead, I internalized my inability to endure as weakness, violating my own nature, over and over, to prove the nobility of my work to the point of illness.

Acts of Creation in the Interregnum

It’s a funny contradiction, trying to Change The World!™ by repeatedly performing the culture that created that same world.

Because how can we create something new if we’re continuously practicing the old? How can we be expected to bring something of substance into existence when we’re relentlessly churning in the frenzied froth of 275 — two. seven. five. — 275 daily interruptions? And those are the days when we’re not in back-to-back-to-back zoom meetings. Some studies say 60% of work has become work about work — meaning you have 40% of the time to do 100% of the things. The math doesn’t math.

The health consequences of that kind of stress are well understood at this point, but there’s another more insidious one we rarely think about: the structural violence we are enduring and the structural violence we are also committing.

It’s maybe best crystallized in a scene from season 2 of HBO’s show, Industry, a close read on the culture of investment banking and the financial sector, arguably the cold beating heart of late-stage capitalism itself. A floor manager goes to a bank executive to report a client’s pattern of sexually assaulting juniors. The executive asks why he’s being involved in “something so low level”, then advises the manager to bury it, before dismissing the manager by saying,

“…I really don’t have the minutes in the day for mosquitoes like this.”

And that is just an exaggerated, dramatized example of the worst version of the cultural logic that produces structural violence-by-busyness.

Courtney gets at its insidiousness really well in the On Being episode:

“I think a lot of very powerful people have no time to pause. They don’t create those spaces. And I think some of the most unethical things that happen in the world is because of that cacophony.”

The cacophony.

The busy trap.

The violence of overwork.

It’s a banality-of-evil situation none of us willingly chose and most of us are forced to participate in. It is what we have to do to survive. It is the cultural waters we swim in. And as Terence McKenna taught us: culture is your operating system.

So then.

If the frenzy at the individual level—days cut into two-minute increments, attention sold off in parcels—scales up to the unethical systems Courtney is talking about, then the way we practice our days might actually matter beyond our days. How you work today is a rehearsal for the world you want to live in. You cannot create from a state of perpetual reactivity. The nervous system won’t let you. Creation requires sustained contact with your own mind, and the modern workday has made that kind of contact a near-impossibility.

A Practice and a Permission Slip

Enter Cal Newport’s Deep Work. If you aren’t familiar, the premise is as simple as it sounds: the real work — the work that actually produces something of quality, that builds rare and valuable skills, the kind of work that is less work and more creation — can only happen when you’re not being interrupted for the 275th time that day. He defined this a decade ago, before AI forced creativity and taste to the front of every conversation about the value of humans versus machines.

And that cabin on the coast I retreated to? That was deep work before I had the language for it. Four days away from the open-concept office, the hey-you-got-a-sec interruptions, the spreadsheets masquerading as progress — and I built an entire program. The conditions made the creation possible. Remove the conditions, and you get what the rest of my tenure at RADIUS looked like: burnout by nobility, performed endurance, eventual collapse.

This is the through-line. Krista’s acts of creation, Parker’s warning about the violence of overwork, Merton’s frenzy that kills the root of inner wisdom — they’re all describing the same structural problem from different angles. Deep work is the practice that makes acts of creation possible. And in a world running on 275 daily interruptions and 60% work-about-work, it might be the most rebellious thing any of us can do.

Though before continuing, I have to be honest: I carry a very deep tension writing any of this, let alone birthing a deep work retreat experience into the world as it is — as Krista described it, imploding.

I am hyperaware of the pressure many of us carry to stay constantly engaged with the egregious harms unfolding around us. To look away from the live stream can feel like complicity. To prioritize acts of creation right now can feel indulgent. Or just completely impossible if you are burnt-out or in forced survival mode. Too many of us are actively experiencing harms, economic, bodily, and otherwise. Google searches for things like “how to make more money” are hitting 5-year highs. Too many are too precarious.

I’ve also watched what happens when we’re so consumed by crisis we have nothing left to bring to it. Parker called that violating your own nature in the name of nobility. I’ve lived that sentence more times than I’d care to admit, and it doesn’t end anywhere good — usually burnout, or worse. And then what contribution did you make? What did any of us prove burning our own house to the ground in the name of a nobility we did not choose and probably do not respect?

It calls to mind a different lesson from that same period of my life when I first heard this episode of On Being. I was dating an activist and had internalized the supremacy of his work relative to mine; I thought activism was the only correct way to respond to profound injustice even though I also had a literal career dedicated to the same project.

When I shared that sentiment with a mutual friend of ours, she asked me if I’d ever heard Joanna Macy’s argument that activism is as important as building new structures which is as important as inner work to transform consciousness. Joanna believed a future worth living in is contingent on all three actions happening simultaneously. None is better than the other because all are reliant on each other. The activists hold back harm so the builders have space to work, but both need to be operating from a fundamentally different cultural operating system.

Macy says she loves seeing it this way because it kills the ‘dead argument’ as to whether it is more important to work on yourself or more important to be on the frontlines.

I found this liberating. Dignifying. Permissive, even.

It helped remind me that my way was not less important, it was different.

And now is a time when we very much need to work differently. Deeply, even.

We need to stop pretending it is noble to violate our nature.

And we need to remember that, as Krista put it, the forms and institutions that are harming us are imploding all on their own. Hustling won’t hasten their demise — but it will hasten yours.

So go.

Go work, deeply, guilt-free.

Because it’s the only thing we haven’t tried yet —

and because I f*cking love you.

This is The Deep End, a futures worth living in series about why we’re all so exhausted and what different conditions might make possible. More at deependretreats.com.

Welcome back to f*ck i loved that! We’ve been gone for a minute, now we’re back. And with some production firsts — a spoken intro and a movie clip I'm particularly proud I figured out how to cut in. I’d love to hear what you think.

What’s more exciting is this episode’s content. This might be the most important episode I’ve put together so far. I want to know how it lands for you; what you think and feel in response. I really want to make sense of this moment with you. I’d love for you to reflect in the comments.

The full episode transcript and featured substackers follow, as usual1 —

because love’s the only thing we haven’t tried yet.

And because I f*cking love you.

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o1. Featured Substackers

» Transactional to Relational Complex Systems Frameworks

, » When the Horizons Collapse

» What They Call 'Niche' Is the Only Thing That Scales

» What to do as The World Falls Apart: A Framework for Action & A Guide to Staying Human (Part 1): Desperately Seeking Agency

Isha Snow, » Challenging the Autism “Spectrum”

Jenn McRae » Pathways to Prosperity: Navigating Structural Transformation

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o2. Episode Transcript

Jenn:

Welcome back to f*ck I loved that. I’ve missed you. It’s really good to be back. And if you’re new here, hi. I’m Jenn. I’m the human behind this podcast and the publication that produces it, f*ck I Love You. I’m so glad you’re here. I’m so glad that we’re all here together figuring out what in the effing simulation is actually going on right now.

It’s a real wild ride today and it starts with one of my all-time favorite fascinations: Multiple discovery theory. It’s a phenomenon found throughout the history of science that explains why two people, separated in time and space, with no prior connection, can come to the exact same conclusion at almost exactly the same time. The theory suggests that when enough signal accumulates in an information environment, concurrent discoveries are almost inevitable. Like Darwin and Wallace both landing on natural selection. Or Newton and Leibniz independently inventing calculus. The sociologist Robert Merton wrote extensively about it. The idea that discoveries become overdetermined by the state of the field and it’s just a matter of who assembles the pieces first. Often, several people do at once.

My fascination may also stem from the fact that, for the last few years, it feels as if I am swimming in one of those oversaturated information environments. That I am living a bite-sized version of the multiple discoveries pattern. In flashes, it’s nearly a peak experience. A statistically improbable series of connections and conclusions converging that feels less like a probability and more like the veil of the material world suddenly thinning. It’s enough to believe Roman Yampolskiy and friends, who we featured in episode 12 by the way, that we are, in all statistical likelihood, living in a simulation. An advanced civilization’s video game.

And so my story of feeling the realness of that possibility goes something like this.

In late 2023 I was contracted by an indigenous economic development corporation to complete a foresight study. Our question was this. What pathways to wealth creation exist for this community? The research led to an unavoidable conclusion. We are living through a structural economic transformation on par with the shift from feudalism to capitalism. I described it as a move from a transactional paradigm to a relational one. I named three co-existing economies, or pathways as I called them, transactional, transitional and relational, and recommended that the transactional economy is a space to be hospiced, not grown. Said differently, I was a solo consultant trying to tell a client that capitalism as we know it is on life support. Even though my work was rigorous, when it came time to deliver to the client, I felt like I was basically saying,

“just trust me, bro. Look at my charts, bro. Did you even read it, bro? I’m telling you this capitalism shit is over, bro.”

It reminds me of that scene in the big short, PS also my favorite movie, where Charlie Geller calls his mom as the housing market is collapsing.

Movie Audio Clip (The Big Short):

“Will you listen to me? This is like the end of capitalism. This is like the dark ages all over again. I don’t want to talk to dad. Okay, I love you too. Save your money.”

[inaudible response from Mom; remarks to friend:]

She says I need to be on Xanax and double my dose of Zoloft.

Jenn:

And that. That is the experience of being early to a structural shift. As Lawrence Fields said to Michael Burry’s character earlier in the movie while Burry’s short position bled billions. Being early is the same as being wrong. And it’s one of the loneliest professional experiences there is. Doesn’t matter how much signal has accumulated in the information environment if you are the only one in your social environment saying the thing.

Because it was 2024 when I delivered the findings. This was before the SaaS-pocalypse. Before Trump 2. Before any of the signals that are now making this increasingly hard to deny. While my client did not dismiss me outright, there was some... shall we say turbulence when I shared the findings. That’s a longer story for another day and it has as much to do with the delivery method as it did the delivery material. The interim between version 1 and the version everyone was happy with felt like a kind of purgatory.

So you can imagine then that it was nearly a religious experience when two years later, chasing a random curiosity at 7pm on a Tuesday, I stumbled onto another transactional to relational model. Someone else using that exact framing applied to paradigm shifts in complex systems. And the person? It was Dr. Diane Finegood and she’s a professor at my alma mater. I actually know her. I’d interviewed her for the project I ran after graduation. A few years after the interview she became a prof in an applied complex systems program I’d taken in my undergrad. I hadn’t heard her name in over a decade. I nearly vibrated off my couch.

What in the effing simulation indeed.

And then it happened again. And again. In just the last few weeks I’ve encountered the same convergence of ideas in four more thinkers. All of us here on Substack. And so of course, I had to do an episode about it.

This episode brings you to the heart of this convergence. In addition to my pathways report, and Dr. Finegood’s transactional to relational complex systems framework, we’re weaving with Indi Johar, architect and co-founder of Dark Matter Labs. Indi’s featured piece, called When Horizons Collapse, explains why everything feels so impossible right now. That the now and the future have become the same thing.

Then we have Dr. Nate Hagens, a biophysical economist with episode 132 of his podcast frankly, titled “What to do as the world falls apart”. 20 minutes in I was texting friends in all caps. He names our capitalism as ending civilizational scale transformation in no uncertain terms. And gives us his map for getting from here to futures worth living in.

Next on the had me vibrating off the couch crew is Abbie Awomosu with her piece titled “What they call niche is the only thing that scales”. Among the dozens of intersections between our work, the final pathways report had a conclusion that stated: The scale that matters most now is networked micro-niche. Small, nimble and flexible are strategic advantages moving forward. Large, rigid and entrenched organizations and systems will continue to struggle to adapt. Her essay features 18 women proving exactly that.

And then there’s Eisha Snow, challenging the Autism Spectrum: The 3 Constellations. She’s modeling the biological proof of everything the others are describing. She shows us that the transactional economy literally writes stress into our epigenetic expression and depletes the neurochemistry we need to think, connect and function. Whether or not you are autistic, your nervous system is living this too.

And so the signals are multiplying, accelerating, converging, crashing into each other. This is a different, inevitable future than the one the techno-feudal bros are claiming. A picture of futures worth living in is coming clearly into focus. So clear, most of us in this distributed, disconnected, decentralized cohort are using near the same language. And maybe more interestingly, the same number.

The number 3 consequentially repeats across nearly all of the pieces. I love this for a few reasons, but especially as representation of the third way. The transactional world asks us to pick between two options. Either or, me or you. Capitalism or socialism. The third, now future, way says both and. Both and is inherently relational. And it is a conclusion all of us in today’s episode are pointing to. It is the thing that is overdetermined in the field right now if you have eyes to see it.

And that thing that we all cannot not see is that we’re living inside the kind of transition that is civilizational in scale and only visible in retrospect. To paraphrase the economist and Greece’s former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis. If you were alive when Adam Smith wrote the wealth of nations in 1776, and he took a look around, all you’d see is feudalism. Maybe you’d clock commercial dynamics if you were a mercantilist. But Smith was the first one to say, hold on. There is an emergent, better, third way here. And it is neither feudalism nor mercantilism. It is a systemic both and. A mashup. Something greater and different than the sum of its parts. He did not theorize a system of perfect liberty as he called it, and then convince a king to implement it. He described what he saw happening around him. He read the signals in the field. To this day, the wealth of nations is considered the seminal text on capitalism. It is the date we use to say, approximately give or take capitalism started here. Even if we didn’t call it that until a few hundred years later. This is the way of complex socio-historical systems. We define them in hindsight, not as they’re happening.

And so that is what this episode is about. We’re describing the moment while we’re inside of it. Six thinkers, six different disciplines, six different geographies, six different datasets, all pointing at the same exit door. With NotebookLM’s help, we’re getting in conversation for the first time.

By the end of the episode, I think you’ll be asking what in the simulation too. I think you’ll want to listen to this one.

Just trust me, bro.

(AI Co-Host Segment Begins)

Speaker 1 (Male AI):

Have you been feeling this um... this sort of unnamed exhaustion lately?

Speaker 2 (Female AI):

Oh man.

Speaker 1:

Like a deep lingering sense that you’re doing everything right, you know, following all the rules, but the systems you interact with everyday are just... they’re fundamentally misaligned with what you actually need to survive.

Speaker 2:

It is exactly that. It’s this feeling of being like hyper-informed but completely immobilized. You see the cracks in the foundation literally everywhere... at work, in the economy, the environment, and it takes this massive, massive toll just to pretend everything is normal.

Speaker 1:

It really does. So if you are nodding your head right now, let us just validate you immediately. You are not crazy. No, definitely not. And you are definitely not alone. So, welcome to fuck I loved that, the podcast where we synthesize the signal out of the noise to build futures worth living in. I’m so glad you’re here.

Speaker 2:

Me too. Because today, we have found the map. We are going on a mission to connect some massive, seemingly totally disparate dots that actually explain exactly what you are experiencing right now.

Speaker 1:

And honestly, we really need this map, especially given where we left off last week.

Speaker 2:

Oh, for sure. If you caught our deep dive into the diary of a CEO AI futures collection, you know we were wading through some seriously heavy existential waters.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, we really were. We explored artificial general intelligence and how it’s potentially going to automate, you know, massive swaths of human labor.

Speaker 2:

Right, and we grappled with Roman Yampolskiy’s simulation hypothesis, which, frankly, just totally scrambles your sense of reality.

Speaker 1:

It does. And the huge takeaway from last week was this idea that as sheer intelligence and computation just become commodified by machines, human agency is going to become the new currency.

Speaker 2:

Exactly. So last week gave us the diagnosis of the technological disruption, but today... today is the treatment plan.

Speaker 1:

Yes. What we are looking at today is a genuine, mind-blowing convergence across entirely different fields.

Speaker 2:

We are talking um, neurobiology, AI ethics, complex systems theory, and macroeconomics.

Speaker 1:

Right. Multiple brilliant thinkers, working completely independently of one another, have all arrived at the exact same framework for how we survive the current paradigm shift.

Speaker 2:

It’s the kind of pattern recognition that legitimately gives you goosebumps. I mean, they are all pointing at the exact same exit door.

Speaker 1:

So we are going to give you the vocabulary for what is happening to your world, what’s happening inside your physical body, and, most importantly, how you actually reclaim your power.

Speaker 2:

Let’s start at the absolute macro level.

Speaker 1:

Good call. Why does everything feel so frantic and urgent all the time? To understand this, we have to look at the work of Indi Johar and the 10 by 100 framework. Specifically, this concept called “when the horizons collapse.”

Speaker 2:

Okay, so in traditional systems thinking, change happens across three distinct, sequential horizons. Right. Think of Horizon 1 as optimizing the present. It’s keeping the lights on, it’s, you know, commuting to your job, improving quarterly efficiency, patching the potholes on the road.

Speaker 1:

Right, just basic maintenance. And then Horizon 2 is transitional innovation. You realize the old model is starting to fail, so you experiment. This is your company trying out a hybrid remote work schedule, or maybe a city testing a universal basic income pilot. You know, you are bridging the gap.

Speaker 2:

And then Horizon 3 is deep, civilizational redesign. Completely new paradigms.

Speaker 1:

The big stuff.

Speaker 2:

Exactly. That’s questioning why the 40-hour work week even exists at all, or entirely rethinking global energy grids. And historically, society had the luxury of time.

Speaker 1:

Right, you could do these sequentially. Decades or sometimes even centuries could pass between Horizon 1 maintenance and Horizon 3 redesign.

Speaker 2:

But Johar’s crucial insight is that time has compressed. The horizons have completely collapsed into each other. We no longer have the luxury of sequence. We are being forced to do all three simultaneously.

Speaker 1:

Imagine trying to execute Horizon 1, 2, and 3 in the same Tuesday.

Speaker 2:

It sounds impossible.

Speaker 1:

It kind of is. You have to stabilize failing infrastructure while experimenting with transition models while fundamentally redesigning society from the ground up. It’s happening all at once. No wonder you’re exhausted.

Speaker 2:

And when you map that temporal collapse onto the economy, the picture gets even clearer. This aligns perfectly with a piece of original foresight research called “Pathways to Prosperity.”

Speaker 1:

Yes, which was conducted by our collaborator Jenn McRae, and published on her Substack, Fuck I Love You. Her research argues that we aren’t just in a bad, cyclical downturn. You know, this isn’t a temporary recession we can just wait out. We are in a period of structural creative destruction.

Speaker 2:

Meaning the old rules of wealth creation are just being completely dismantled.

Speaker 1:

Right. And McCrae breaks this down into three co-existing economies that essentially mirror Johar’s three horizons.

Speaker 2:

Okay, so first you have the transactional economy. This is the dominant, late-stage extractive system we all currently live in.

Speaker 1:

Then the transition economy, which includes efforts like decarbonization.

Speaker 2:

And finally, the relational economy, which is the Horizon 3 paradigm built on mutual value creation, trust, and well-being.

Speaker 1:

But the most provocative part of McCrae’s framework is her specific recommendation for what to do with the dominant transactional economy. She says, and this is a direct quote, “hospice, don’t grow.”

Speaker 2:

Okay, wait. Let’s pause on that because hospicing an entire economy sounds incredibly alarming.

Speaker 1:

It does sound a bit scary.

Speaker 2:

Like, if society is a sinking ship, you don’t hospice the ship, you patch the leak, you try to fix it, right?

Speaker 1:

Well, think about what actual hospicing is in a medical context. You don’t hospice a patient by trying to aggressively cure a failing body with toxic, destructive chemicals.

Speaker 2:

You accept the transition.

Speaker 1:

Exactly. You shift your goal from growth to care. Patching the leak to keep the ship afloat just long enough is what Indi Johar calls Horizon 1 resistance.

Speaker 2:

Right, so you absolutely have to protect basic continuity. Keep the power grids on, keep the supply chains moving so society doesn’t just violently fragment.

Speaker 1:

Yes, but you don’t pour your soul, your creative energy, or your long-term capital into aggressively trying to grow the sinking ship.

Speaker 2:

Oh, I see. So you maintain the old system’s baseline function to prevent chaos, but you accept its decline. You manage its passing with care while redirecting your actual life force into building the lifeboat, which is the relational economy.

Speaker 1:

Okay, that makes sense. And the reason we urgently need to stop trying to grow this transactional economy is because of what it is doing to us physically.

Speaker 2:

Right. If we are forcing ourselves to exist in a dying economic structure, what happens to the human body that is trying to run that outdated software?

Speaker 1:

It breaks down. McCrae refers to this biological fallout as “the paindemic.”

Speaker 2:

The paindemic. It’s such a heavy word, but so accurate. We are looking at compounding crises of loneliness, skyrocketing addiction, and severe workplace burnout.

Speaker 1:

To put a hard number on the physical toll of this transactional environment, workplace mental health issues are costing the Canadian economy alone 51 billion dollars every single year.

Speaker 2:

51 billion. That is staggering.

Speaker 1:

But that 51 billion dollars isn’t just a spreadsheet error. It is a symptom of a biological incompatibility. And this is where the macroeconomics crashes directly into your literal nervous system.

Speaker 2:

To explain how this happens, we have to look at the brilliant work of Eisha Snow and her autistic standpoint theory.

Speaker 1:

Right, so Snow argues that Western science, which she terms colonial cognition, has this terrible habit of taking incredibly complex relational human realities and forcing them into linear, disconnected abstractions.

Speaker 2:

And her primary target here is how the medical establishment views autism.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, the DSM model. The traditional view is this one-dimensional line. You are either less autistic or more autistic entirely based on how well you mask your surface behaviors to fit into the transactional economy.

Speaker 2:

Which is just so limiting. And Snow completely dismantles that flat line. She argues that a simple spectrum might describe variance, but it doesn’t explain the mechanism.

Speaker 1:

Right, it doesn’t explain why human nervous systems are reacting the way they do. So she introduces this stunning 3D biological coordinate system.

Speaker 2:

She outlines three distinct biological axes that interact to create human sensory and cognitive realities. Let’s unpack these, because they are mind-blowing.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, the first axis is synaptic scaffolding. Think of this as your hardware’s baseline sensitivity.

Speaker 2:

It’s quite literally how dense your neural synapses are, determining how much raw sensory data you absorb from a room.

Speaker 1:

The second axis is where it gets really interesting: Epigenetic stress regulation.

Speaker 2:

Right. For anyone rusty on biology, epigenetics is the study of how your behaviors and environment can cause changes that affect the way your genes work.

Speaker 1:

Like, the genes are the piano keys, but your environment is the player.

Speaker 2:

I love that analogy. Snow points to specific genetic loci, like OXTR and NR3C1. These regulate your oxytocin, the connection hormone, and your baseline stress response.

Speaker 1:

So if you are living in a highly stressful transactional society that isolates you, that environment is literally playing a dark melody on your DNA.

Speaker 2:

It’s altering your epigenetic expression to keep you in a constant state of hyper-vigilance.

Speaker 1:

Which leads directly to the third axis, the BH4 pathway. BH4 is a crucial molecule in your body. It is the necessary raw material, the precursor, required to synthesize dopamine and serotonin.

Speaker 2:

But here is the critical mechanism. When your body is under chronic social stress, it creates chronic inflammation.

Speaker 1:

And inflammation aggressively depletes your BH4.

Speaker 2:

Okay, let me make sure I’m visualizing this correctly. Your BH4 is the factory trying to build dopamine.

Speaker 1:

So you can feel motivated and regulated.

Speaker 2:

Right. But the transactional economy keeps the factory on fire with constant inflammation.

Speaker 1:

Exactly, so the factory shuts down, your dopamine plummets, and you experience brain fog, burnout, and executive dysfunction.

Speaker 2:

So when the traditional medical model tries to treat neurodivergence, or honestly even just widespread burnout, with behavioral compliance therapies, it is ignoring the biology entirely.

Speaker 1:

It’s like trying to fix a smartphone that has a corrupted underlying operating system by just deleting a few apps off the home screen and telling the phone to try harder.

Speaker 2:

Wow. The implication here is massive. The paindemic isn’t just people being tired. No. The transactional economy is an environment that literally writes trauma into our physical epigenetic expression.

Speaker 1:

The system we work in is fundamentally, biologically incompatible with the nervous systems we possess.

Speaker 2:

And if you want to see the ultimate, terrifying mirror of this biological breakdown, look at the technology we are currently building.

Speaker 1:

Oh, this bridges us perfectly back to the AI conversation we started last week.

Speaker 2:

It’s the most fascinating parallel. The exact same transactional logic that extracts our energy and breaks our BH4 pathways is the foundational architecture Silicon Valley is using to build artificial intelligence.

Speaker 1:

Which brings us to a phenomenal piece of writing by Abbie Awomosu titled “What they call niche is the only thing that scales.”

Speaker 2:

Awomosu points out that the tech industry keeps running headfirst into these massive relational roadblocks with AI.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, the models hallucinate, they exhibit severe bias, they act like sycophants.

Speaker 2:

And users report feeling profoundly lonely even when interacting with incredibly advanced chatbots.

Speaker 1:

And what is the tech industry’s default solution to these relational problems? They just throw more compute at it.

Speaker 2:

Right, they build bigger server farms, they scrape more of the internet.

Speaker 1:

Awomosu says they are trying to solve a problem that requires relational intelligence, which she calls honey, by throwing more processing power, which she calls iron, at it.

Speaker 2:

It’s so true. Awomosu argues that the extractive tech model always scales up and out. It treats human knowledge like a crude resource.

Speaker 1:

It scrapes a piece of art or a conversation, completely severs it from the human context and community that generated it, and abstracts it into a giant algorithmic blender.

Speaker 2:

But Awomosu highlights 18 incredible women who are actively resourcing AI. They aren’t trying to build better iron, they are designing entirely new architectures built on honey.

Speaker 1:

They are moving down and in. Let’s look at how this actually works in practice, because the examples are just brilliant. Take Cindy Gallop and her platform, Make Love Not Porn.

Speaker 2:

Right, because of the adult nature of her platform, standard automated payment processors completely banned her.

Speaker 1:

She was forced out of the automated transactional infrastructure.

Speaker 2:

So what did she do? She had to rely on human curation. Every single video is reviewed and verified by a human being in relationship with the community.

Speaker 1:

And by being forced to use relational friction instead of frictionless transactions, she accidentally created the safest, most verified platform on the internet.

Speaker 2:

Then you have Abeba Birhane, a cognitive scientist fundamentally challenging the roots of Western AI.

Speaker 1:

Right, Western technology is built on Descartes’ philosophy, I think, therefore I am. It separates the mind from the body, and the individual from the collective.

Speaker 2:

That’s why a tech company thinks it can just scrape your data without caring about you.

Speaker 1:

But Birhane applies the African philosophy of Ubuntu: I am because we are.

Speaker 2:

How does that change the actual technology, though?

Speaker 1:

Under Ubuntu, a data point doesn’t exist in a vacuum. You cannot extract information without acknowledging the relational web it belongs to.

Speaker 2:

So it forces developers to ask how the algorithm impacts the community it is pulling from, rather than just treating that community as a mine to be stripped.

Speaker 1:

Exactly. And Suzanne Kite takes this even further using Lakota cosmology. She asks how we can build ethical AI by rethinking our kinship with machines.

Speaker 2:

Right, because if your foundational assumption is that a machine is just a slave for you to extract labor from, you are building an architecture of coercion.

Speaker 1:

But if you view materials and technology as entities you are in relationship with, you build an architecture of reciprocity.

Speaker 2:

Okay, I want to play devil’s advocate for a second.

Speaker 1:

Do it.

Speaker 2:

When we talk about human curation, Ubuntu, and deep relationships, it sounds incredibly manual.

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

Are we saying that scaling AI is inherently bad? That we should just abandon the servers and go back to disconnected analog villages?

Speaker 1:

No, not at all. It is not about refusing to scale. It’s about the direction of the scale.

Speaker 2:

What do you mean?

Speaker 1:

The transactional model scales by stripping away context to make things uniform and globally palatable. But Awomosu’s innovators are building infrastructure that scales depth.

Speaker 2:

Scaling depth, I like that.

Speaker 1:

They are proving that technology only sustains itself when it preserves the sovereignty and the relational fabric of the people using it. Honey scales. Iron rusts.

Speaker 2:

Wow. Okay, so we’ve diagnosed the collapse of time with the three horizons. We’ve mapped the biological damage of the paindemic, and our depleted dopamine.

Speaker 1:

And we’ve analyzed how that same extractive logic is poisoning our AI. The diagnosis is very clear.

Speaker 2:

But how do you, the person listening to this right now, actually navigate it? Yes, what is the actionable framework?

Speaker 1:

The antidote, the lifeboat we have to build while hospicing the old economy, comes down to two interconnected concepts: Relational capacity and agency.

Speaker 2:

To understand relational capacity, we turn to the vital work of Dr. Diane Finegood at Simon Fraser University. Specifically, from her complex systems frameworks collection.

Speaker 1:

She provides a brilliant analogy to explain the paradigm shift from a transactional mindset to a relational one. She compares our current approach to a vending machine.

Speaker 2:

I love this analogy. A vending machine is highly predictable and linear. You put a coin in, you push a button, and you get a soda out.

Speaker 1:

If the soda gets stuck, you shake the machine.

Speaker 2:

Right. It’s a complicated system, meaning it has a lot of parts, but it can essentially be solved with an instruction manual.

Speaker 1:

But the world we live in now, where horizons are collapsing, is no longer just complicated. It is complex.

Speaker 2:

And for complex systems, Dr. Finegood says the vending machine approach is totally useless. You need a farmer’s market approach.

Speaker 1:

Let’s break that down. A farmer’s market is highly dynamic. You can’t just put a coin in and demand a tomato.

Speaker 2:

No, the price might change based on the weather. If it rains, everyone has to adapt and move under a tent. You have to talk to the farmer, negotiate, and understand the ecosystem. It requires ongoing dialogue.

Speaker 1:

But to survive in the farmer’s market, you need a different kind of currency. You need what Dr. Finegood calls level two trust.

Speaker 2:

In a vending machine, you only need level one trust, trust that the machine will give you the soda.

Speaker 1:

Level two trust is relational. And Dr. Finegood gives a very specific actionable mechanism for how to build it.

Speaker 2:

Because you can’t just walk into a room and mandate level two trust.

Speaker 1:

Right. First, you have to establish a common goal. Then, you have to ensure mutual self-interest. Meaning, the outcome actually benefits both parties, not just one extracting from the other.

Speaker 2:

And finally, you have to continuously cycle that interaction through gratitude and reciprocity.

Speaker 1:

Gratitude is literally the glue that transforms a flat transaction into a durable relationship.

Speaker 2:

But here is the biological catch, and this is where Nate Hagens’ work comes in.

Speaker 1:

Specifically his concepts from “A Framework for Action and Desperately Seeking Agency.”

Speaker 2:

You cannot build level two trust, and you cannot thrive in the farmer’s market, if your nervous system is completely fried by the paindemic.

Speaker 1:

Hagens argues that modern society is living in a state of soft feudalism.

Speaker 2:

We are exposed to the pain of the entire globe through our screens, but we have very little power to actually change it.

Speaker 1:

This creates a civilization-scale state of learned helplessness. We just freeze.

Speaker 2:

So before you can fix your community’s infrastructure, before you can tackle AI ethics or the economy, Hagens says you have to start at level zero.

Speaker 1:

You have to stabilize your own nervous system. You have to reclaim your agency.

Speaker 2:

Okay, wait. I know exactly what you’re thinking as you listen to this.

Speaker 1:

The world is experiencing a polycrisis. Artificial intelligence might automate our jobs, the economy is shifting, and the solution to all of this is... making a small promise to myself?

Speaker 2:

It feels a bit like throwing a bucket of water on a forest fire.

Speaker 1:

It absolutely sounds too small. But if you recall the biology we just explored, it is mathematically the only place to start.

Speaker 2:

A nervous system trapped in chronic fight or flight, where the BH4 factory is shut down and there is no dopamine, literally cannot hold complexity.

Speaker 1:

It cannot engage in the farmer’s market. It cannot build coalitions.

Speaker 2:

If your brain subconsciously believes your actions do not matter, you remain paralyzed.

Speaker 1:

So how do you fix it? Hagens suggests building a protected loop of agency.

Speaker 2:

You carve out a tiny space, maybe just one hour a week, that is entirely yours.

Speaker 1:

You decide you are going to read a chapter of a book, or plant a single seed in a pot, or walk for 20 minutes.

Speaker 2:

You make a promise to yourself, and you keep it.

Speaker 1:

By completing that one small loop, you provide your brain with a mastery experience.

Speaker 2:

You prove to your nervous system, in a tangible way, that your actions still alter reality.

Speaker 1:

That tiny proof of concept starts to cool the inflammation. It restarts the dopamine synthesis.

Speaker 2:

Reclaiming that tiny seed of agency is the biological prerequisite for stepping out of the transactional economy.

Speaker 1:

Okay, let’s take a deep breath and zoom all the way out, because this is the absolute holy fuck synthesis moment of the entire deep dive.

Speaker 2:

Seriously, look at the map we just drew together.

Speaker 1:

We have Indi Johar showing us that time has collapsed, forcing us to simultaneously keep the lights on while redesigning society.

Speaker 2:

We have Jenn McRae revealing that we must actively hospice the extractive transactional economy to make room for relational wealth.

Speaker 1:

We have Eisha Snow proving on a genetic level that our bodies are physically buckling under transactional stress, begging us for relational safety.

Speaker 2:

We have Abbie Awomosu and brilliant technologists demonstrating that even our most advanced AI will collapse if it relies on extraction rather than relational context.

Speaker 1:

And we have Dr. Finegood and Nate Hagens providing the exact tools, level two trust and level zero agency, to biologically and systemically build the lifeboat.

Speaker 2:

From completely different disciplines, staring at completely different data sets, they have all drawn the exact same map.

Speaker 1:

The era of the extractive vending machine is over. The future, unequivocally, belongs to those who can build relational depth.

Speaker 2:

Which leaves us with a final, provocative thought for you to carry into the rest of your day.

Speaker 1:

Dr. Finegood noted something really pragmatic. We still live in this world. Sometimes we have to use transactional tools just to support relational development.

Speaker 2:

Scheduling a meeting, sending a calendar invite, or checking out at the grocery store, these are all transactions.

Speaker 1:

But they are transactions that can enable a relationship. So look at your calendar right now. Look at your inbox. How can you take one purely transactional interaction you have to do today, and intentionally inject a micro-dose of relational honey into it?

Speaker 2:

How can you add a moment of genuine curiosity or mutual gratitude that breaks the script of the vending machine and steps just for a second into the farmer’s market?

Speaker 1:

It’s a great question to ask yourself today.

Speaker 2:

Because love is the only thing we haven’t tried yet.

Speaker 1:

And because we fucking love you.

Futuresights is my foresight practice. It refers to both my methodology and the insights I’ll publish as a dedicated series here in the futures worth living in section on Substack. Whenever you see “Futuresights” in a subtitle, you know it’s part of this series.

Foresight is a well-developed field. At its core, foresight is the discipline of systematically exploring possible, probable, and preferable futures to inform better decisions in the present. Foresight doesn’t make predictions. It reads signals in the field and asks: what does this tell us about where we’re heading, and what can we do about it?

Formal foresight methodologies exist. Certifications and graduate programs exist. Institutions like the OECD, RAND, and the Institute for the Future (IFTF) have professionalized it. One of my early career mentors and now friend, , is currently the director of philanthropy and foresight at IFTF. I remain in his debt for everything I learned in our five-plus years weaving in and out of collaboration.

When I say foresight though, I don’t mean that credentialed version. That’s at least partially because I came to it retrospectively, by necessity, as the closest approximation for what I do and how I do it.

I’ve been doing futures work for close to two decades. It’s been less a profession and more a transdisciplinary practice, in a domain most easily summed up as the future of work and learning. The disciplinary inputs to my practice are multiple, many of them also core to foresight’s formal lineage: Social innovation. Human centered design. Systems thinking. Transformation strategy. Market intelligence. Political economy. Dialogue. Community development.

But that’s a real word salad and tells you nothing about what you’ll get here. These are also the kind of words that can exclude and confound and confuse. They’re the kind of words that function like moats. Moats are meant to keep value in and riffraff out.

I don’t want moats. I want bridges across them.

So let’s build one now.

When I say foresight, I mean the work of reading what is, imagining what could be, and charting pathways between them.

So that’s what the futuresights series is. It’s the maps for walking those pathways, for getting from here to a future worth living in. We’ll zoom between scales and resolutions, sometimes quick hit insights, sometimes in-depth multi-part analyses. Always with highest benefit to you, Dear Reader, in mind.

And speaking of maps. Here’s one I think you’ll find particularly useful.

Subscribe now

Pathways to Prosperity: Navigating Structural Transformation

This foresight study was originally commissioned Winter 2023–2024 for an Indigenous economic development corporation in Northern British Columbia. It has been modified here for a broader audience. A 2026 update is in development.

Inquiries can be directed to jenn@jenniferangelamcrae.com.

Contents

• Executive Summary

• Part 1: Three Disruptors Reshaping the Economy

• Part 2: Creative Destruction and What It Means

• Part 3: Three Pathways to Prosperity

• Part 4: Blue Oceans in the Relational Economy

• Part 5: Conclusions

• Part 6: What This Means For You

  • Organizations & municipalities

  • Small business owners & entrepreneurs

  • Creators, writers & independent knowledge workers

  • Career changers

  • Community development & public health

• Part 7: Companion Podcast

What This Study Found

Over 12 weeks, this project used primary and secondary research methods — current and future state analysis, PESTLE analysis, market scanning, and ten expert interviews — to map the economic landscape of a region whose fortunes have historically been tied to industrial extraction: shipping, forestry, mining, oil and gas. The researchers identified 52 specific economic development opportunities and conducted a pathways alignment analysis across 28 dimensions and 10 post-capitalist economic frameworks.

The findings, while specific to Northern BC’s North Coast, are macro-economic and international in origin. At a high level, the research found:

1. Significant socio-economic disruption is unfolding and will persist, locally and globally.

2. Multi-generational thinking and new mindsets are required to comprehend the scale and breadth of economic change occurring — and thus the current economic landscape.

3. Three distinct ‘pathways to prosperity’ exist, each with different risk profiles, strategic requirements, and alignment with emerging economic conditions.

The study’s central argument: we have entered a period of structural creative destruction comparable in scale to the transition from feudalism to capitalism. The assumptions that governed wealth creation for the past 80 years are being fundamentally disrupted. Organizations, communities, and individuals that recognize this and reposition accordingly will be better placed to create durable prosperity. Those that don’t will be increasingly exposed.

Part 1: Three Disruptors Reshaping the Economy

The research identified three macro-economic disruptions that are international in scope and origin. Taken together — and especially in combination — they represent serious threats to the existing socio-economic order and significant opportunities for those positioned to respond.

Disruption 1: The Paindemic

“The Paindemic” is shorthand for the intersecting crises negatively impacting human and environmental wellbeing — what the study calls “capitalism’s psycho-spiritual externalities.” These are the hidden costs of economic activity that are not borne by the producers who benefit, but by broader society and the natural world.

Within the Paindemic, the research documented multiple nested and interconnected phenomena:

The Loneliness Epidemic. In 2023, the World Health Organization declared loneliness a global health concern. The U.S. Surgeon General released a landmark advisory finding that social disconnection can be as damaging to individual and population health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. This is not a soft concern — loneliness has measurable economic consequences, with more-connected communities enjoying greater levels of prosperity than socially fragmented ones.

The Mental Health and Addiction Crisis. In British Columbia alone, the Coroner’s Service reported 2,511 illicit drug deaths in 2023. In the United States, 112,000 overdose deaths nationally eclipsed every previous drug epidemic on record. This crisis disproportionately impacts Indigenous peoples, who died at six times the rate of non-Indigenous people in the first half of 2023. The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health states that Canada is in the grips of a mental health crisis that “ruins health, threatens lives and hurts economies.” Half of all Canadians will have a mental illness by the time they reach 40. Nearly 500,000 Canadians are absent from work every week due to mental health issues, costing the economy an estimated $51 billion per year.

Workplace Stress and Disengagement. The Mental Health Commission of Canada found that workplace stress is the primary cause of mental health concerns among Canadians, and Statistics Canada identified it as the leading cause of stress among the working-aged population. The anti-work movement — better understood as a reaction to burnout and a demand for different conditions than as an outright rejection of work — grew 224% between October 2021 and 2024, as measured by the r/antiwork subreddit.

Key Takeaways: The Paindemic

• The social and health costs of the current economic model are not externalities that can be deferred indefinitely — they are generating measurable drag on economic productivity, labour markets, and community capacity.

• The scale of these crises ($51B/year in Canadian workplace mental health costs alone) represents both a systemic risk and a market signal.

• Communities and organizations that invest in wellbeing infrastructure are not doing charity work — they are addressing a structural deficit in the current economy.

Disruption 2: The Poly-Perma Crisis

The “Poly Crisis” is a term used by the Cascade Institute and popularized through the World Economic Forum’s 2023 Global Risks Report. It describes what happens when “crises in multiple global systems become causally entangled in ways that significantly degrade humanity’s prospects.”

The study added “perma” to indicate these crises are not just interconnected but persistent — indicative of what Adam Lent described as “the collapse of a global economic model that produced consistent economic growth and rising living standards between 1945 and 2008… an era built on the extraction and disposal of increasingly vast amounts of natural material. We are now living with the consequences of that in the form of a natural environment rapidly becoming more hostile to the stable economic and political activity we once took for granted. And that hostility is almost certainly a new permanent feature of life on this planet.”

The Poly-Perma Crisis includes the climate emergency, income inequality, the cost-of-living crisis, global debt, and political polarization — all of which the WEF classified as top-tier global risks.

Key Takeaways: The Poly-Perma Crisis

• The disruptions facing communities and economies are not cyclical (boom-and-bust) but structural. Planning for a “return to normal” is a strategic error.

• These crises are causally entangled — housing, climate, health, political instability, and economic precarity amplify each other.

• Resilience — the capacity to absorb shocks and adapt — becomes a more valuable strategic asset than growth optimization.

Disruption 3: The AI Revolution

The AI revolution is different from previous technological waves because it is redistributing power across the economy at unprecedented speed. Unlike past technologies reserved for elites or governments, AI is becoming radically cheaper and accessible, allowing individuals and smaller entities to wield capabilities that previously required institutional scale.

The impact is being felt across industries as AI automates tasks from customer service to medical imaging. Goldman Sachs estimated that roughly 33% of current jobs are exposed to some degree of AI automation, with generative AI potentially substituting up to 25% of current work — exposing 300 million full-time jobs globally.

Investment signals the trajectory. As of Q3 2023, AI companies captured 25% of all U.S. investment dollars, up from an average of 12% between 2018 and 2022. At the World Economic Forum in January 2024, CEOs of OpenAI, Salesforce, Accenture, and Pfizer all characterized AI as a “renaissance” and “revolution,” with Sam Altman calling for new economic models in response. Google CEO Sundar Pichai called AI “more profound than fire or electricity.” The IMF concluded that “society needs innovations in economic and policy understanding that match the scale and scope of the breakthroughs in AI itself.”

Geoffrey Hinton, who laid the theoretical foundations of deep learning, projected in 2023 that artificial general intelligence may be realized within 5 to 20 years. Researchers disagree on the timeline but nearly all agree it will arrive within our lifetimes.

The study also noted what AI cannot do: it lacks the ability to truly create; it can only repeat patterns it has been trained on. Human skills like critical thinking, problem-solving, and innovation — and especially everything to do with human connection and wellbeing — will become more valuable, not less. As NYU business professor put it: “the only thing AI won’t be able to do are human relationships, so get really good at them.”

Key Takeaways: The AI Revolution

• AI is not a future disruption — it is a current one, already reshaping investment, labour markets, and competitive dynamics.

• The scale of potential job displacement (300 million globally) demands workforce strategy that goes beyond retraining for the next job. Self-employment, micro-enterprise, and networked collaboration are likely to be dominant economic forms.

• AI dramatically reduces barriers to entry for small and micro-scale economic activity — which changes who can participate in wealth creation and how.

Part 2: Creative Destruction and What It Means

Creative Destruction is the term economists use to describe major economic transformations where old, outdated industries and structures are dismantled and replaced by more innovative and efficient ones. It is driven by technological advancement and shifts in preferences, leading to the phasing out of products and services that are no longer viable while paving the way for new business models.

The study argued that the three disruptors described above are not separate problems but expressions of a single, larger phenomenon: we are inside a period of structural creative destruction comparable to previous civilizational transitions.

Economist , in his 2023 book Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, concluded that capitalism is already “over.” He illustrated this with Adam Smith writing The Wealth of Nations in 1776: if you were an average citizen alive in 1776, you would see feudalism all around you, believing it to be persistent and unchangeable. And yet Smith was describing capitalism — a new system had already emerged even if citizens couldn’t see it. In complex systems like societies and economies, new systems emerge from within the old ones.

This is not a fringe position. Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2004) explored how poly-perma crises are the hallmark of collapsing societies. In 1972, MIT researchers forecast societal collapse by 2040. In 2021, researchers revisited that work and found that “current data aligns well with the 1970s analysis,” adding: “only a fool keeps chasing an impossibility.”

Public sentiment tracks this analysis. The Fraser Institute and Leger found support for capitalism “tepid at best.” Pew Research found the same trend in the U.S., especially among younger people: only 29% of Americans under 30 have a positive view of capitalism, versus 64% of people over 65. These trends are consistent in Canada.

One important feature of emergent systems: they are initially dependent on the infrastructure of the systems they are replacing. Capitalism itself developed inside feudal institutions — using feudal roads, feudal legal structures, feudal labour arrangements — before eventually building its own. The Relational Economy is in a similar position today, running largely on transactional infrastructure: platforms owned by extractive corporations, payment systems designed for transaction not reciprocity, labour markets that treat relational work as valueless. This dependency is not a sign that the emerging system is illegitimate. It is a predictable stage of transition — and resolving it is where some of the most significant economic opportunity lies.

The study’s conclusion on this point was direct: We have entered a period of significant, historical creative destruction. It is not just a single industry that is transforming — it is all of dominant culture and economics. The assumptions of how wealth is created are being fundamentally disrupted. We can no longer use yesterday’s assumptions to plan for tomorrow.

Key Takeaways: Creative Destruction

• This is not a downturn. It is a structural transition. The difference matters for strategy: you don’t wait out a transition the way you wait out a recession.

• New economic systems emerge from within old ones, often invisible to those living through the change. The strategic advantage belongs to those who can see the emerging system.

• Declining public confidence in capitalism — especially among younger demographics — is not a cultural trend to be dismissed. It is a leading indicator of where economic activity, labour, and consumption are heading.

Part 3: Three Pathways to Prosperity

Given this analysis, the study identified three co-existing economic pathways — each with its own distinct set of opportunities, risk profiles, and strategic requirements.

Pathway 1: The Transactional Economy

This is the dominant economy today — defined by neoliberal worldviews and policy, sometimes called “late-stage capitalism.” It functions on extraction, disconnection, and transaction-centered wealth creation, prioritizing individuals over collectives. This is the economy of resource extraction, global supply chains, and profit maximization.

The study found strong headwinds facing the Transactional Economy. BC’s Labour Market Outlook predicted stagnant or negative growth in nearly all traditional extractive categories: shipping, forestry, mining, oil and gas. Two-thirds of job openings in the study region were projected to come from replacing retiring workers rather than new economic growth — a marker of stagnation.

The policy environment is also increasingly unfavourable. In late 2023, the BC Utilities Commission rejected an application from FortisBC to build a new natural gas pipeline, finding a “flattening, or even a downturn, of the demand for natural gas” as BC moves away from fossil fuels. KPMG published a special report called Decarbonization is the New Business Imperative, describing Canada’s clean economy as “the greatest economic opportunity of our time.”

The study was blunt: “Much like forestry and fishing and other extractive industries that have gone bust before it, the carbon economy will eventually also go bust, with many speculating we are currently standing at this precipice.”

Regional interviewees reinforced this. The City of Terrace, opposing a new LNG project, stated that being a hub for major industrial projects had driven “massive inflation in professional and retail services, a strain on municipal infrastructure… housing in Terrace [reaching] an all-time high in prices and a vacancy rate of less than 1 per cent.” One political strategist noted: “It isn’t just resource projects that create Boom and Bust cycles. Political sentiment plays a huge role… sentiment alone is enough to derail multi-billion dollar projects.”

Pathway 2: The Transition Economy

The Transition Economy is the collection of values, infrastructure, projects, and services intended to transition economies away from extractive models — especially those related to energy and materials. If carbon is at the heart of the Transactional Economy, decarbonization is at the heart of the Transition Economy: sustainable technologies, renewable energy, nature-based solutions, environmental restoration, corporate social responsibility, and social entrepreneurship.

The study noted that Canada was already spending $15 billion per year on decarbonization efforts — far short of the $60 billion some economists argue is necessary to meet international commitments.

Pathway 3: The Relational Economy

The Relational Economy encompasses emergent values and economic structures that foster economic sovereignty for both individuals and groups. This model prioritizes mutual value creation, underpinned by reciprocity, trust, and wellbeing. Unlike traditional models focused on transactions, this approach places relationships at the core of wealth creation and recognizes wealth not just in financial terms but also in social capital and community wellbeing.

These are industries and activities largely resulting from and enabled by the internet and digital communications technology, including AI. The business models are fundamentally different from those in the Transactional Economy: platform models, subscription models, sharing economy models, community-driven and creator models, and ecosystem models.

While technological enablement is essential, so are place-based interactions. The relational economic mindset is “both/and” — local and global, individual and collective, digital and analogue, wealth and wellbeing. Where transactional economics often requires trade-offs between people and profits, relational economics focuses on creating multiple-bottom-line outcomes.

These shifts are also driven by changing social values, especially among younger people who prioritize pro-social and collectivist values. A late 2023 McKinsey report positioned community as a key driver of business growth. The Indigenous Economy, the Creator Economy, the Wellbeing Economy, and the Alternative Lifestyles Economy are all expressions of the Relational Economy.

The fundamental vulnerability undermining the Relational Economy is that much of its activity still runs on transactional infrastructure and logic. Big tech currently accumulates asymmetric benefit from relational labour. Building infrastructure that aligns with relational logic — in ownership, ethics, and benefit distribution — is not a nice-to-have but a precondition for the Relational Economy to mature.

Pathways Alignment

The study conducted a formal alignment analysis, scoring each pathway against organizational and project goals on a three-point scale. The results were stark: the Transactional Economy scored 35.56% alignment. The Transition Economy scored 71.11%. The Relational Economy scored 100%.

This does not mean the Transactional Economy should be abandoned overnight. The study recommended maintaining and monitoring existing transactional assets while understanding “this is a space to be hospiced, not grown.” Strategic resources should shift toward the transitional and relational pathways.

Key Takeaways: Three Pathways

• Three co-existing economies are operating simultaneously. The Transactional Economy is dominant but declining. The Transition Economy is growing but insufficient on its own.

• The Relational Economy is emergent and strategically advantaged but largely reliant on transactional infrastructure. Resolving this contradiction is both a precondition for the Relational Economy's maturation and a significant opportunity for wealth creation in its own right.

• “Hospice, don’t grow” is the recommended posture for transactional assets and relationships — careful monitoring and intentional divestment over time, not abrupt exit.

• Alignment analysis matters. Scoring your own strategic priorities against these three pathways reveals where your resources are creating value and where they are exposed.

Part 4: Blue Oceans in the Relational Economy

A note on terminology: “Blue Ocean Strategy,” developed by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne and published in Harvard Business Review, refers to creating uncontested market space rather than competing head-to-head in crowded, “bloody” red oceans. A Blue Ocean is an opportunity space where demand is being created rather than fought over — where the conditions for a new market exist but the market itself has not yet been saturated with competition.

The study identified four Blue Ocean opportunity spaces emerging from the convergence of the three disruptors. These are not speculative — they are grounded in observable signals, measurable market data, and the structural logic of creative destruction.

The framing is this: As the culture, industries and incentives of the transactional economy continue to decline, solving the problems they created becomes not just a major economic opportunity, but a key strategy for economic transformation and wealth creation.

Each Blue Ocean below connects a disruption (the problem) to an emerging economic space (the opportunity) to specific forms of wealth creation (the strategy).

Blue Ocean #1: The Paindemic → The Wellbeing Economy

Signal: The Paindemic — loneliness, addiction, mental health crisis, workplace disengagement.

Opportunity space: The Wellbeing Economy. This is the economic activity organized around improving human and community health outcomes. It is distinct from the healthcare industry in that it focuses on prevention, connection, and capacity-building rather than treatment of acute illness.

Market signal: The global wellbeing economy was valued at over $5.6 trillion in 2023, growing at approximately 8.6% CAGR. This is not a niche — it is a sector approaching the size of the entire Japanese economy.

What wealth creation looks like here: Community care ecosystems — integrated services and infrastructure that support individual and collective wellbeing. This includes membership-based social and cultural spaces, community health programming, employer wellness infrastructure, and digital/analogue hybrid support networks.

Case studies cited in the original report: Groundfloor Club (membership-based social infrastructure), BetterUp (coaching and human performance platform).

Blue Ocean #2: The Poly-Perma Crisis → The Refuge and Nomadic Economy

Signal: The Poly-Perma Crisis — climate displacement, economic instability, housing crisis, workforce disengagement.

Opportunity space: The Refuge and Nomadic Economy. This is the economic activity organized around supporting a growing demographic of climate migrants, mobile workers, and people seeking stable communities amid instability. It is where real estate, community services, and digital infrastructure converge to enable a fluid, mobile, and resilient way of living and working.

Market signals: 1.2 billion climate migrants projected by 2050. Half the global workforce is mobile. Two-thirds of the global workforce is disengaged from work, costing $8.8 trillion annually (Gallup, 2023).

What wealth creation looks like here: Micro and community-scale mergers and acquisitions (acquiring small businesses in communities positioned to receive population inflows), mobile and social infrastructure (housing, coworking, cultural amenities), and community-building as economic development.

Case studies cited in the original report: Boundless Life (family-oriented location-independent living), Karma Campervans (alternative mobility infrastructure).

Blue Ocean #3: The AI Revolution → The Creator Economy

Signal: The AI Revolution — automation, redistribution of productive capacity, collapsing barriers to entry for micro-enterprise.

Opportunity space: The Creator Economy. This is the economic activity organized around individual and small-group production enabled by digital tools — content creation, digital products, community-driven businesses, and platform-based micro-enterprise.

Market signals: The Creator Economy was valued at $250 billion in 2023, with a 10–20% CAGR. Indigenous entrepreneurship is growing at nine times the rate of non-Indigenous entrepreneurship. Nearly 50% of workers are now self-employed.

What wealth creation looks like here: Emerging technology adoption and training, creator-economy infrastructure (studios, tools, platforms, mentorship), and leapfrogging — bypassing traditional stages of technological and economic development to directly adopt the most advanced systems. As the study noted, “Job creation is a poor indicator of economic success when nearly 50% of workers are self-employed.” Investing in entrepreneurship infrastructure and technological literacy is investing in the dominant form of future economic cooperation.

Case studies cited in the original report: PanArctic Communications (Northern Indigenous broadband infrastructure), RED Academy (future-oriented tech training).

Blue Ocean #4: Economic Leakage → Community Wealth Recapture

The study also identified a fourth opportunity space specific to the Indigenous context but with broader application to any community with significant economic leakage.

Signal: A 2020 analysis published in The Review of Regional Studies found that 90 cents of every dollar that First Nations in Saskatchewan spend leaves the community. Applied as a proxy to British Columbia, this represents approximately $2.6 billion in annual economic leakage.

Opportunity space: Community wealth recapture through strategic procurement, community-owned businesses, cooperative models, and “Buy Local/Buy Indigenous” initiatives. This applies equally to any community — rural, urban, Indigenous or otherwise — where spending flows overwhelmingly to external providers.

What wealth creation looks like here: Economic leakage analysis to identify recapture opportunities; community-scale business acquisitions (especially given the “succession tsunami” — 76% of Canadian business owners expected to exit their businesses in the next ten years); and cooperative and membership-based models that circulate wealth within networks.

Key Takeaways: Blue Oceans

• These are not speculative ideas. They are opportunity spaces defined by measurable market signals, observable disruptions, and the structural logic of an economy in transition.

• Each Blue Ocean connects a problem (disruption) to an opportunity space (emerging economy) to a strategy (specific forms of wealth creation). The connective logic is: what the old economy broke, the new economy will need to fix — and fixing it is where the wealth and wellbeing is.

• The strongest strategic position combines multiple Blue Oceans rather than pursuing them in isolation. Wellbeing infrastructure that also serves a mobile workforce, enabled by creator-economy technology and operated as a community wealth-building enterprise — that is a Relational Economy play.

• The fundamental vulnerability undermining the emergent relational economy is that much of its core operations are still reliant on transactional infrastructure and logic. Big tech currently accumulates asymmetric benefit from relational labour. By the same logic, the most significant opportunity lies in aligning logic, ethics, structure and benefit distribution via relational infrastructure.

Part 5: Conclusions from the Original Study

The study’s conclusions were measured. The key findings:

Disruption and instability are the new normal. Organizations should expect ongoing structural change, not a return to previous conditions.

The Transactional Economy and its infrastructure are in need of repurposing, redirecting, renewal, and regeneration. The study used the language of hospice, not demolition — maintain existing assets, but understand that growth investment should go elsewhere.

Small, nimble, and flexible will be powerful strategic advantages. Large, rigid, and entrenched organizations and systems will continue to struggle to adapt.

In a relational future, everything works on the logic of networks and communities. “Micro Niche” is the new scale. Wealth will be generated by communities, collaborations, collectives, and cooperatives. It will be essential to enable mutual value creation.

The Relational Economy's dependence on transactional infrastructure is its primary structural vulnerability — and resolving it is one of the most significant economic opportunities of the current transition.

The future will be “won” by those who enable the highest quality of life for the greatest number of people. This is not an idealistic statement — it is a strategic one. The economic activity organizing around wellbeing, connection, resilience, and community is where capital, talent, and demand are converging.

The study recommended a clear decision framework: decide which path to walk, translate that decision into policy and resource allocation, and focus on investments that are strategically aligned and less prone to near-term disruption. Specific recommendations included collaborative real estate investment, community-scale business acquisitions, economic leakage analysis, and investment in leapfrogging opportunities — directly adopting emerging technologies rather than building up or adapting outdated intermediate infrastructure.

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Part 6: What This Means For You

This study was originally conducted for one organization in one region, but the macro-economic findings apply broadly. Here is how to read them depending on where you sit.

If you lead an organization, development corporation, or municipality: The three-pathways framework is a diagnostic tool. Map your current portfolio, partnerships, and strategic plan against the three pathways. Where are your resources concentrated? If they are overwhelmingly in Pathway 1 (Transactional), you are overexposed to structural decline. The study’s recommendation — “hospice, don’t grow” for transactional assets while shifting investment toward transitional and relational opportunities — is a rebalancing strategy, not an ideology.

If you are a small business owner or entrepreneur: The succession tsunami (76% of business owners exiting within a decade) and the collapse of barriers to micro-enterprise via AI are two of the biggest structural opportunities in a generation. Community-scale acquisition, creator-economy models, and wellbeing-adjacent services are where demand is growing. The question is not whether to adapt, but how quickly.

If you are a creator, writer, or independent knowledge worker: The Creator Economy ($250B and growing at 10–20% CAGR) is a Relational Economy phenomenon. Its growth is structural, not trend-driven — it is what happens when technology democratizes production and distribution. The strategic question is how to build durable community (not just audience) and multiple revenue streams that are resilient to platform shifts and AI disruption. The core vulnerability is that creator-economy value is relational — community, trust, attention — but the infrastructure extracting that value is transactional. Opportunities exist in building alternatives that align ownership and benefit distribution with relational logic.

If you are rethinking your livelihood or career: The study’s most provocative finding is that “job creation is a poor indicator of economic success” in an economy where nearly half the workforce is self-employed and the dominant forms of economic cooperation are shifting toward networks, collaboratives, and micro-enterprise. The old model — get credentials, get hired, climb the ladder — is not broken everywhere, but it is under severe structural pressure. Understanding which pathway your current and future work sits on is a practical first step.

If you work in community development, social services, or public health: The Paindemic data makes a business case for what you likely already know: community wellbeing is economic infrastructure. The wellbeing economy ($5.6 trillion globally) is not a nice-to-have — it is where significant capital and demand are flowing. Framing your work in economic terms is not selling out; it is strategic positioning that can unlock resources.

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Part 7: Companion Podcast

Episode 13 of f*ck i loved that weaves this report with five other thinkers from five different disciplines all coming to similar conclusions.

A Note on the 2026 Update

This study was completed in April 2024. A comprehensive update is underway, examining how these findings have held up against two additional years of data — including AI acceleration, geopolitical disruption, the second Trump administration’s economic and trade impacts, updated workforce and mental health data, and new signals that were not visible in 2023–2024. The update will be published as a paid foresight report through f*ck i love you on Substack.

About This Work

Researcher and Author: Jennifer A. McRae — writer, strategist, and content creator. Jenn’s work sits at the intersection of foresight, community economic development, and cultural transformation. She publishes at f*ck i love you (FILY) on Substack, where she writes about philosophy, AI, culture, and the transition to a relational economy, or, what she calls The New Good Life.

Original Commission: This study was commissioned by an Indigenous economic development corporation in Northern British Columbia, Winter 2023–2024. The research was conducted over 12 weeks and included current and future state analysis, PESTLE analysis, market scanning, and ten in-depth expert interviews. 52 specific economic development opportunities were identified. The full analytical infrastructure includes a pathways alignment tool, a master comparison across 28 dimensions and 10 post-capitalist frameworks, a standard of evidence framework, and supplementary qualitative analysis.

Intellectual Property: Jenn McRae owns the IP for this work and has rights to repurpose all findings. This generalized version has been adapted for a broad audience with client-identifying information removed.

Licensing: This work is shared under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0). You are free to share and adapt this material for any purpose, including commercial, provided you give appropriate credit and distribute any derivative works under the same license.

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Works Cited

The following sources were referenced across the original study, including the executive summary, desk research, PESTLE analysis, and opportunity analysis. Institutional, academic, and government sources are prioritized. Where news sources are cited, they report on data from primary institutional sources.

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The phrase has been rattling around my autistic af brain since I started writing this post in my head weeks ago.

I knew it was a lyric from my formative years but I couldn’t remember whose. Google sleuthing transported me back to 2003 (coincidentally the year I graduated high school): it’s Lil’ Kim and Timbaland’s chart-topping collab, The Jump Off. My earworm is Kim’s opening bar:

I was gone for a minute now I’m back with The Jump Off.

Her usage has been eclipsed in pop culture by the Norwegian gen z sensation, girl in red. And while Kim burned those words into my brain, girl in red is more apt for where we’re going today.

I’m back, I feel like myself

I was gone for a minute ‘cause I went to get help

If they were my lyrics they would read I was gone for a minute ‘cause I went to get rest.

The last thing you heard from me — at least in long form — was a long list of why I need so much rest.

And while I might not be ready to jump off, and I’m certainly not feeling brand new like girl in red claims to, the trendline is going in the right direction. I still need a lot of rest, but metaphorical spring is coming, too. That seems important to say before getting to the good part.

I also want you to know I’ve missed you. I’ve missed this place. I’ve missed the rhythm of writing and the particular thrill of someone I admire responding to something I made. Several of you have checked in on me over these months, too. Even when I couldn’t meaningfully reply, those messages mattered more than my silence would have conveyed. Thank you. A lot.

Now. About that metaphorical spring.

Spring is in the Air

I haven’t just been resting.

The capacity I do have has been spent thinking through what this publication wants to be when it grows up. And, how it might be the platform that sustains me. That’s always been my vision, but my version of healing meant this stayed more public diary, less creative venture. My bank account is now demanding I get to the latter task. Ideally while also staying well. That’s the project I can’t afford to get wrong no matter how excited I might be.

Among a bunch of exciting stuff I’ll reveal throughout this post, FILY has a new architecture. New sections, a new About page, and a whole new visual world I am absurdly in love with. Maximalist, surrealist retro-futurism. I’m obsessed even if it feels weirdly vulnerable. It’s an extension of my analogue collage practice that I revived as art therapy this last year. Now I’m making them digitally, too. I hope you love them as much as I do.

Before we can tour the structural changes though, I need to tell you about the thinking underneath them. The architecture is the product of something I’ve been trying to articulate since I started writing here — and I finally have a name for it. This feels like the biggest victory coming out of my stealth mode endeavours (do I hate the term stealth mode? I think I do. So startup-y. But effective. Moving on).

Welcome to The New Good Life

In everything I’ve written here, I’ve been circling one idea. Sometimes I’ve come at it through memoir. Sometimes through systems theory. Sometimes through profanity and Doomsday Clock footnotes. But it’s always the same thing underneath.

I’m always trying to articulate that we’re living through a structural transformation that is civilizational in scale. Joanna Macy called it The Great Turning. There are dozens of other names for it. Regardless of what you call it, it tends to take a looooooooot of pretty academic explanation to make legible — even though there’s clearly demand for this kind of sensemaking. People want to understand wtf is going on right now. It’s not a coincidence my most popular post is Moving Fast Breaking Minds, where I connected dots between civilizational breakdown and mental breakdown. It’s also my longest piece by a good margin (which is saying something).

What that piece and a few others do well is the diagnosis. They’re the signpost: you are here now. What they don’t do as well is describe (what I’ve called) a future worth living in. I use the phrase now/future to imply collapse isn’t the only thing happening, that — like Gramsci said — an old world is dying and a new one is struggling to be born. This is the way of complex systems: new emerges from old, non-linearly and simultaneously. The edges move toward the center.

I’ve taken for granted that what I see moving toward the center is what others see, too. I’ve been working from a map without telling you I have one, what’s on it, or giving the destination a name. The closest I’ve come was in the video post, Groundwork For Futures Worth Living In.

So let’s get specific.

Let’s give the destination a name anybody can say and pretty much everyone can understand:

The New Good Life.

The old good life is the rapidly disintegrating social contract. It promised if you work hard, go to school and trust the institutions you’d get a good job, be able to buy a house, afford 1.7 kids and 2.5 dogs and retire on a reasonable pension at 65. That’s turned out to be more myth than reality.

Meanwhile we’re also told that having “all this” means accepting that There Is No Alternative to extraction and exploitation and hustle and burnout and trade-offs and endless wars. As and recently put it in their campaign for a new social contract1:

“Under [the old] contract, “survival, work, and virtue were stitched together so tightly that to question the relationship felt like questioning gravity.”

Implicitly and explicitly we’re told this is the end of history; that a billionaire class is necessary because their wealth will trickle down; that technology will liberate us and that this is the way it should and always will be.

None of that is inevitable though. It’s all choices. We can choose differently. The New Good Life is choosing differently. It is your particular flavour of the things most all of us actually want for ourselves and each other. Wealth and wellbeing. Peace and prosperity. Dignity. Autonomy over our time, enough of it to actually enjoy our lives, and a rich community to enjoy it with. A return to relationality.

That last one is why I named the publication f*ck i love you. It’s my thesis in four words. Love in practice — the action, the politic, the ethic, the kind bell hooks taught us about in All About Love.

She says it like this:

A love ethic presupposes that everyone has the right to be free, to live fully and well…All the great social movements for freedom and justice in our society have promoted a love ethic…If all public policy was created in the spirit of love, we would not have to worry about unemployment, homelessness, schools failing to teach children, or addiction.

That is the ethic that defines the New Good Life (tNGL). And, if you spend your precious time with me, I assume you’ve got a love ethic, too.

tNGL can be our shorthand for all that.

More importantly, it gives us, together, a radical imagination of something to fight for, not against. To move toward it, we have to be able to see it.

Imagination is a radical and necessary act in these times. We need a north star to move a love ethic from the edges to the center where it belongs.

So that’s the big idea. And it’s not just an idea either. It’s already emerging in identifiable ways. A future worth living in is here, just not evenly distributed, just as William Gibson foretold.

10-3-1

On FILY’s new About page I describe my work as “part prefigurative politic”. A prefigurative politic is a world-building project. It means means organizing our lives and our work as if a future worth living in already exits. It’s also a call to personal integrity. My words and actions need to match.

On the one hand, that’s a lofty standard to set for myself. It’s also a lesson I’ve been working on for a really long time.

In university I took a no-exaggeration, life-altering program called the Semester in Dialogue. It was prefigurative in the best way. It was also a searing lesson in what integrity really means.

During one of our dialogues I found myself righteously griping about [I-can’t-remember-what], when one of my classmates cut me off sharply:

ya? And so what are you going to do about it?

I wanted the floor to open. Heat rushed up neck and across my face. I just sat there paralyzed, exceedingly grateful the conversation’s momentum continued past Miriam’s (warranted) micro-shaming of me.

Our interaction became the focus of my weekly reflection assignment. I wrote about how embarrassed I was, how difficult the moment was, but how she had been, if I’m honest, right. When my professor handed back her comments the note in the margin read, have you thanked her?

I don’t remember if I did or not. I hope I did. I do remember that professor though, because she became a friend and we’ve been trading insights and lessons like that for longer than either of us would want to specify.

also happens to be a fellow substacker who you need to read. She taught me something else that semester that also stuck with me. It just so happens to be the bridge to the very practical parts of the FILY upgrade that we’re about to get to.

That lesson can be summed up as a life simplification strategy. She shorthands it as 10-3-1: How can you turn the ten things you’re doing into three things and the three into one?

I am, shall we say, not always great at getting from 10 to one. My brain naturally functions at the other end. I’m always running at least 10 thoughts and 10 project ideas simultaneously. This is the gift and curse of divergence.

It’s also a recipe for burnout and fragmentation.

Nowhere is this inclination more obvious than in my lineup of publications. You saw me start and then (unintentionally) pause The Permissionless Prof. You didn’t see the two other publications I had cued up to come next, The New Good Life and The Deep End. I had this whole plan about keeping FILY as the raw, public diary, while spinning up separate spaces for structured, tactical work and real life experiences (and yes, you read that right. IRL experiences are coming, soon!)

My impulse to create clarity about purpose was right. The execution would have destroyed me. A novice content creator in recovery from a serious mental health setback managing a chronic illness does not need four publications to tend. And you don’t need four more publications in your inbox, no matter how good the content might be.

So we’re 10-3-1’ing this shit.

FILY is becoming the one and only thing.

Everything else lives inside it.

(Thanks Janet.)

What Lives Where

FILY now has four sections. You’re subscribed to all of them by default, but you are completely in charge of tuning the signal to what excites you. Sections can be opted in or out of in your Substack account settings without unsubscribing from the whole publication.

Here is the new architecture:

The main feed

This is the heart of FILY. Long-form essays and audio. Memoir as cultural exposition, self-and-systems at the same time. Philosophy, AI, culture, transformation, and radical imaginations for getting from here to futures worth living in. Come here when you want the feeling and the framework at the same time.

futures worth living in

This is where all the applied, practical stuff lives. Foresight analysis. Frameworks. Tools. Guides. Models. Come here when you want maps for getting from here to there. This will also be The Permissionless Prof’s reincarnation (migration in process—I hope you’ll give those subscribers a warm welcome when they get here).

divergent futures

All of my thinking and learning about neurodivergence — aka neurocomplexity. If the old good life was a cognitive monoculture, the new good life is a cognitive polyculture, with consequences for all of us. Come here if you’re a zebra who’s tired of pretending to be a horse — or if you love one. Or if you just want to know wtf that means.

f*ck i loved that (FILT)

I’m bringing this back. There are 12 episodes in the archive of this short-form, AI-assisted podcast experiment. Come here when you want the internet pre-digested for you.

(Content) Creating a Livelihood

So that’s the new structure. I think we’re all gonna like it a lot better.

Now for the thing that won’t surprise you.

When I launched The Permissionless Prof, I said FILY would always be free. That was when there were going to be two publications. They’re one publication now. The promise is the same, just reorganized: there will always be a generous free tier, and the applied, high-value work that justified a separate publication now lives here, behind a paid tier. Because this is my livelihood. Or at least I’m trying to make it my livelihood.

This is the work that lights up my brain and my heart at the same time. It’s the thing I can’t not do. I want it to grow.

I also need space to keep recovering and produce at a pace my system can sustain. Offering all of this indefinitely for free is antithetical to that.

Here’s how it translates as subscription tiers:

• Free — Essays, audio, podcast, and all f*ck i loved that* episodes — plus selected posts from across the publication.

• Paid ($9/month or $90/year) — Full access to everything, including applied strategy, frameworks, and field guides from futures worth living in and divergent futures. The complete archives, the toolkits, and the Permissionless Prof library. You can sample that work here.

• Founding Member ($190/year): Everything in paid, plus exclusive access to full-length, consulting-calibre foresight reports. To give you a sense of this tier: Pathways to Prosperity: Navigating Structural Transformation is a foresight study I completed in 2024, originally commissioned by an economic development corporation to inform investment strategy. It’s the intellectual backbone for tNGL. The 2026 update will publish exclusively for this tier. This tier is for anyone who wants to directly fund the R&D behind The New Good Life.

My capacity will determine my publishing cadence. My promise is that regardless of frequency or volume, whatever I put out will be worth your time and your money. I’ve always cared more about signal than volume. I’m pretty sure that’s why you’re here, too.

Subscribe now

Apparently We’re Supposed to Ask for What We Need?

Now we’re at the other part you could probably feel coming.

Though, I’d prefer to crawl out of my skin than do this part. I’d really rather not ask you for what I really need, because what I really need is the one thing that no one is supposed to ask for: money.

Trouble is, crip math is bad money math. When my brain caught on fire in 2024, I fell through every crack in every system theoretically designed to catch people when their life implodes. The Welfare Queen series was a deep dive into said cracks. Articulating the structural collapse of the welfare state in technicolour detail doesn’t change that it has, in fact, collapsed.

It doesn’t change that the collapse of my health has left me without income for 18 months. I shudder to think where I’d be without my family and community. Together they’ve gotten me this far. I’m hoping my digital community can get me a little further.

So if my work has been valuable to you — if anything I’ve written lit up your brain and your heart at the same time — a paid subscription is the most direct way to help me keep doing it.

Not ready to be a paying subscriber? You can also buy me a coffee — one-time contributions help, too.

Growth also matters just as much at this stage. There are other things that genuinely, materially help:

• Forward your favourite piece to someone who’d get it.

• Share something I’ve written on a platform I’m not on.

• Recommend me on Substack.

• Tell a friend.

• Work with me. I’m reviving my consulting practice. If you or your organization needs strategy, foresight, or trusted advisory to navigate these transformative times, I’d love to connect. Pathways to Prosperity is a great sample of my foresight work. I’m also developing a body of work on cognitive diversity in the workplace. More on that soon.

And regardless of if you do any of that, my biggest gratitude is that you are here reading and in this dialogue with me. A significant part of my discomfort in asking this is my acute awareness most of us are very stretched right now. My writing is steeped in data about it even though our lives already loudly tell the story. Gas just jumped to $2.10/L where I live. It probably has where you live, too. Need we even mention housing and groceries. It can feel relentless.

Asking you to fund my work while the floor is falling out from under all of us is a contradiction I can’t fully resolve — except to say that this is exactly why we need structures that aren’t built on extraction. A paid subscription to independent, human-centered work won’t solve it, but it is a small act of building something different. And if it’s not available to you right now, your presence here is enough. It always has been.

My Invitation to You, Dear Reader

Speaking of communities, I have this kind of dramatic image that involuntarily populates my mind’s eye whenever I think about how community has fractured; what the real costs and consequences of the old good life have really been.

In it, a person dangles off a cliff edge, hands desperately clinging to a solitary person above fighting to keep them both from going over. The scene repeats left and right down the cliff as far as the eye can see, like a ruthless and badly played game of Lemmings.

And it’s a metaphor for where we are. It used to be that our communities were so robust that should we stumble, a single person wouldn’t be solely responsible to prevent our fall. There would be many hands at that cliff’s edge. And many more hands behind them, a daisy chain of humans holding each other upright, making sure no one dies the day they walked a little too close to the edge and luck wasn’t on their side.

Over the last few decades that human chain has gotten shorter. And shorter. And shorter still, until now it’s just those two people at the edge, precariously close to going over. This is the disintegration of the old good life, dramatized at the scale of our everyday lives. It’s a reality nobody wants and everyone is living.

And not to flip too fast from thriller movie to Hallmark movie, but we have to find ways to hold onto each other. We’ve got to get ourselves off the edge of the cliff. And that is, I think, the actual thesis of this whole thing, underneath all the frameworks and the foresight and the footnotes. We have to build structures that make it possible to hold on. Right now too many people are dangling by their bootstraps all because we got sold a story that greed is good and needing each other is bad.

It’s time for better stories. Way past time for better stories. I think the new good life is one of those better stories and it will take all of us to write it into existence.

On writing things into existence, I started this publication to write myself back into existence after my own version of collapse. I’m one of the lucky ones that still has enough people willing to come to the cliff’s edge. Now that I have both feet firmly on ground, it’s time to write a livelihood back into existence, too.

I can’t do either alone though. I was never supposed to. None of us were.

So if you’re still here I’ll take it to mean you’re in for the next chapter. And if you made it all the way to the bottom of another very long post from a woman who’s been quiet for a very long time…

well…

all I can say is…

Fuck I love you.

***

Subscribe to f*ck i love you — free, paid, or founding. However you’re able, I’m so glad you’re here.

Inside Voices

About one year ago today, I was at the height of what was eventually diagnosed as a cannabis-induced mixed manic episode.

We’ve talked a lot about that since I came back to Substack. Writing is a big part of my healing.

Lately writing has gotten harder again though. Complex ideas are harder to hold, stubbornly refusing to arrange themselves in straight lines.

My battery maybe charges to 30% right now. In many important functional ways, I am still quite disabled. A good majority of days a walk is the only thing I leave the house for.

Having less access to my favoured processing tool during this anniversary window is particularly challenging. Anniversaries of this nature make themselves known one way or another. Since writing has been less reliable, I’ve processed the grief and gaggle of other emotions in another favoured way: by making them make sense with data-backed explanations.

And the thing that has made the least sense to me lately is:

Why aren’t I back to “normal” yet?

Why am I still so limited and when tf will this be over?

Unlike breaking your back or having cancer, when you break your mind — at least where I live — no one guides your recovery.

There is no pamphlet about what to expect, about timelines, about what you should and should not be doing to aid your recovery. There is no occupational therapist, no physical therapist, no therapists, period1.

When it comes to recovering from mixed mania, the only guidance I’ve received was a single statement from a psychiatrist I saw twice: “it’ll take about 12-18 months from stabilization for your brain to return to baseline.”

Nothing else.

Which brings me to another confounding issue I am trying to process—and another thing I spend a lot of time thinking about: this entire experience has been invisible.

Nothing to see here.

I look totally normal physically and, at least in so far as my heavily-edited writing, probably appear quite functional cognitively. So most people treat me like I am totally normal, like nothing happened. Which then raises the volume on my inside voices: it must not be that bad, you should be better by now, they scream.

If I’m honest, it brings up a lot of anger, too. Invisibility, stigma and lack of understanding have conspired to create a sort of vacuum of care and concern, relatively2.

In the last few years I’ve known a few people who were in accidents that resulted in severe physical injuries. They were rallied around. Their access to recovery supports was generous and publicly funded — and when I say generous and publicly funded, I mean 90% of their income covered, lump sum payments, unlimited access to every wellness practitioner you can imagine and much more3.

No one assumed they should be better ‘by now’, because the extent of their injuries was visible by looking at them. Their injuries were taken very seriously, inquired about, tended to, their recoveries well-resourced and unhurried.

That has (largely) not been my experience. I can’t remember the last time anyone asked:

How I’m doing specifically in my recovery. (So-so, not great.)

If I’m sober. (I am.)

How my mental health is. (So-so, not great.)

How my physical health is. (So-so, not great.)

If my financial resources are ok. (Kinda, sorta, for now.)

If there’s anything I might need help with. (Definitely, but couldn’t tell you what because that requires cognitive resources I don’t have.)

And so in that gap, into that silence, I project my anger and fears and frustrations and grief and insecurities by assuming that others also assume I should be better by now.

That I should be over it by now.

That I should stop talking about it.

That it wasn’t that big of a deal.

That I brought it on myself and these are the consequences.

I want to pause on this last one for a moment because cannabis remains the elephant in the room of this story.

I know there are people in my life who believe cannabis was a choice I should not have made, that this entire cascade of events wouldn’t have happened otherwise. And because it was a ‘choice’ I now get to live with the ‘consequences’.

And maybe it’s true that this wouldn’t have happened without cannabis. We’ll never know.

But here’s what I do know: I spent tens of thousands of dollars trying to be well before I ever went back to cannabis. I filled in dozens of intake forms over the last decade to see every type of practitioner imaginable. I spent energy I didn’t have going to the gym, eating healthy, socializing—all in service of being well. Chronic health management was a part-time job my brain could barely handle before I was psychiatrically destabilized and functionally disabled.

I also know intimately that doctors appointments are extremely hard to get, specialists even harder, and that I only see my neurologist once a year. I know the particular difficulty of fragmented care—the problems that arise when none of your healthcare providers speak to each other or take a systemic approach to managing complex chronic health conditions.

I know that the initial discovery of my neurodivergence was dismissed as an ‘attempt to be trendy’. I know that cannabis is preferred self-medication for unmedicated neurodivergent humans, for whom needing stimulants is no different than needing glasses.

I alone know the sum total of efforts that were made to be well for years before I decided to return to a substance that historically has brought relief to those struggles.

So… did I really make a free will “choice” that brought a cascade of “consequences” to my life and others?

Knowing all this, I’d say no.

But it doesn’t stop the voices in my head from yelling it at me, all the same.

Which brings me to the thing that does turn the dial down on the inside voices: data. Information. Insight. Understanding. Answers to the question why.

And so without further ado, what follows is everything I’ve learned lately about “why I’m still not ok.”

The Expensive Operating System I Was Already Running

First things first: I didn’t sustain a brain injury in an otherwise healthy body.

I have relapsing-remitting MS (diagnosed 2019), AuDHD, and I’m perimenopausal at 40. These aren’t separate conditions floating around independently. They’re compounding system stressors—each one making the others worse.

Even pre-2024, my brain was running expensive software on compromised hardware.

Here’s how each was already impacting me:

MS means: Mitochondrial dysfunction. Chronic neuroinflammation. Baseline executive function deficits—all of which contributed to the neurological vulnerabilities that culminated in my episode. About half of people with MS, including me, experience cognitive impairment, primarily in processing speed, working memory, and what researchers call “cognitive fatigue” (the measurable decline in performance during sustained mental effort). Up to 90% of us have fatigue—not tiredness, but fatigue, the kind where your brain simply runs out of glucose mid-task and you hit a wall. Fatigue is the #1 reason people with MS have to leave the workforce. It’s not being tired. It’s a disabling lack of metabolic resources. To put it in context, multiple studies have found that autoimmune fatigue is equivalent to the fatigue experienced by breast cancer patients during active treatment4.

AuDHD means: I was already burning more energy for standard tasks. An excess of stimulation with limited means of modulating it, combined with masking, burns through executive function reserves. My brain was already working harder than a neurotypical brain to produce the same outputs. It’s like walking through life wearing a weighted backpack while being asked why you can’t walk as fast as everyone else.

Perimenopause means: Wildly fluctuating estrogen. And estrogen is neuroprotective—it stabilizes mood, supports cognitive function, helps regulate the HPA axis (more on that in a second). Like MS, it played a role in my episode, as we’ll shortly discuss. Take estrogen away erratically, month after month, and you’re trying to rebuild a house during a hurricane.

So that was the baseline: high-performance demands, limited energy reserves, unstable hormonal weather patterns, and a cultural immune system basically allergic to me.

I was already expensive to run.

Then came the series of unfortunate (physiological) events.

Layer 1: The Neurological Wildfire (Sept 2024 – April 2025)

What I haven’t said yet about my cannabis use is that it wasn’t purely ‘self-medicating’ in the stereotypical sense. I had paid for private consultations with an RN cannabis educator (none of what occurred is on her—to be clear). I’d also bought a course by PhD cannabis educators who specialized in cannabis and neurodivergence. I was even taking less than my prescribed modafinil dosage because I knew stimulants + cannabis = bad combo.

I was trying to be responsible about use.

Turns out, thoughtful doesn’t mean safe when you have a very sensitive, very vulnerable brain that’s already destabilized by pre-existing conditions and numerous other personal and professional stressors.

And so it all converged. Tolerance built, usage increased, and my brain crossed the threshold from this world into a different one.

Research on substance-induced psychosis shows cognitive impairments comparable in magnitude to schizophrenia, affecting memory, attention, and executive function. While symptoms typically resolve within 30 days of sobriety, cognitive recovery can take significantly longer, particularly when compounded by other factors.

Mixed episodes are particularly brutal because they combine the worst of both mania and psychosis from a physiological perspective, starting with sending your HPA axis (hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis) into overdrive.

The HPA axis is your body’s stress regulation system. When it’s functional, it releases cortisol in response to stress, then dampens that response when the threat passes. In mixed states, the HPA axis becomes hyperactive and dysregulated, with cortisol levels elevated during both mania and depression. Manic episodes can be preceded by increased cortisol and ACTH levels, leading to cognitive problems and functional impairments.

Mania also causes neurotoxic stress and measurable structural changes in the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex. The suicidal depression that followed was my brain’s desperate attempt to shut down to prevent total system failure. It comes with its own soup of damaging dysregulation.

For me, “stabilization” didn’t happen until late April 2025, when Wellbutrin finally reached therapeutic effect and the suicidal depression lifted.

For anyone doing the math at home: I was in active physiological crisis for six, almost seven months, my brain basically under siege.

It also means my “recovery” didn’t start in January.

It started at the end of April.

The ‘12-18 month’ recovery timeline my psychiatrist quoted began only 7 months ago.

And she was quoting a standard healing timeline for a brain not already compromised by chronic illness and sensitive neurology.

I am not supposed to be “back to normal” yet by any reasonable standard, no matter how normal I continue to look.

My brain is still rebuilding the stress-regulation systems that were burned out during the episode.

That’s not all though.

Layer 2: The Immune Wipe (March 2025)

Here’s where it compounds.

In March 2025—while my brain was still barely online, still in the tail end of suicidal depression—I received my second dose of Mavenclad, the disease-modifying therapy managing my MS.

Mavenclad (cladribine) is a chemotherapy.

In cancer contexts it’s most commonly used to treat Hairy Cell Leukemia and B-cell Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia.

In MS contexts it’s used in lesser doses to ‘hard reboot’ the immune system. In both cases the goal is to kill off problematic cells.

Mavenclad works by selectively depleting lymphocytes (B and T cells) to “reset” the immune system and reduce MS disease activity. It’s called immune reconstitution therapy.

The idea is you take it in short pulses over two years, then your newly reconstituted immune system ‘forgets’ you have MS and you don’t need further treatment.

A technical detail that matters: the Mavenclad protocol typically prohibits Year 2 treatment until your lymphocyte count recovers to at least 0.8 × 10⁹ cells/L. This threshold exists because going into Year 2 with low lymphocytes increases the risk of severe, prolonged lymphopenia and infection.

My lymphocyte count from late 2024 through March 2025? 0.6.

My neurologist treated me anyway.

To be clear, I’m not saying this was the wrong decision. Clinical guidelines are guidelines. Clearly my neurologist thought there was a negligible difference between 0.6 and 0.8.

Plus, to say the BC healthcare system is strained is being polite. My neurologist was likely weighing MS disease activity against immune risk, and I consented. But the clinical reality is this: After Mavenclad, median lymphocyte recovery to normal range takes approximately 28–30 weeks.

I didn’t just reset my immune system. I overdrew an already overdrawn account.

My brain is trying to rebuild its HPA axis while my body tries to rebuild an entire immune system from a deficit position. Both processes require massive cellular energy (ATP). Both are happening simultaneously. Neither has priority—they’re competing for the same limited metabolic resources.

Oh, and did I mention I’ve had every single cold or flu that’s passed through our house this fall? There’s that too. Lest I digress on how immunosuppression changes the experience of getting sick in strange ways no doctor or nurse ever explained to me.

Let’s move on to the last big issue compromising my recovery.

Layer 3: The Hormonal Storm (Ongoing)

And all of this—all of this—is happening during perimenopause.

Estrogen isn’t just about fertility. It’s neuroprotective. It stabilizes mood, supports cognitive function, modulates the HPA axis. Studies show that hormonal fluctuations can worsen both stress resilience and vulnerability to new mood episodes.

My estrogen levels are unpredictable. Some weeks my brain has the neuroprotective support it needs. Other weeks, it doesn’t.

I’m trying to recover from neurological trauma while my hormonal infrastructure is unstable and my immune system has been stripped to the studs.

The Invisible Violence of Masking Wellness

Aside from the physical processes, the most challenging part of this recovery is the performance.

When you see me—at a family dinner, on a video call, at the coworking space, or interacting online—you’re seeing the front porch. I’ve mustered adrenaline to paint the door, mow the lawn, turn on the porch light.

Inside, the house is gutted. The wiring is exposed. The foundation is being reinforced. There are construction crews working in the dark.

But because you can only see the porch, and because you’ve never built a house before, you think: “She’s doing great!”

And then I go home and crash for two days.

I relate a lot to dogs in this way. It is said that dogs hide their pain from us. I definitely do that. Masking is my second skin. For the most part I don’t even know I’m doing it.

On the other hand, in a culture that villainizes “victim mentality”, rewards comeback arcs and has turned struggle into a monetizable identity, I am aware it’s best to split the difference and pretend I’m as ok as possible.

I know that it makes everyone — including me — more comfortable if I’m distilling lessons, staying connected to agency and saying all the right resiliency-coded things.

Even now I am straining against the desire to explain how I don’t want attention or likes or sympathy or anything other than to just…say this stuff out loud.

I just want to be honest about part of what’s true for me.

I want to make what’s invisible, visible.

I want to share data that shows that six months after an episode like mine, less than half of people are employed — and that’s without compounding illness and treatments like mavenclad.

I want to remind myself that functional recovery—actually getting your life back—takes four times longer than just getting ‘stable’.

Clinically, I am operating with the cognitive deficits of a concussion and the fatigue levels of a patient in active cancer treatment.

The fact that I am writing this sentence is a statistical anomaly and yet I still feel like I need to be careful to explain that my life is not exclusively struggle, nor defined by it, even if it is temporarily constrained by it.

Even that nuance is something most people don’t have an interest in understanding, just like most people don’t want an honest answer to the question, how are you doing? It’s a script, not a real inquiry.

Very few people—myself especially—want to face the chasm between who I’ve been at my best and who I am in this season.

In that chasm is a grief I’ve only known in death. Because this has been a kind of death, even if I also get to be alive for the rebirth—however slow and painful and solitary it might be.

So in the face of all of that, knowing all of this—knowing the processes my body is concurrently managing, gathering the guideposts no one gave me—makes it make sense that ‘this is taking so long’.

And when something makes sense, my brain quiets down.

My self-compassion goes up.

My patience extends a little further.

My world gets a little wider.

And maybe I was the only one who needed any of this, but I don’t think so.

Maybe this helps it make sense for some others, too.

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Read Part 1 of this conversation, here.

Read my below-mentioned piece on “AI Psychosis”, here.

A week after I wrote ChatGPT, Suicide and Why Greed is Not Good, seven lawsuits were filed against OpenAI for “wrongful death, assisted suicide, involuntary manslaughter and negligence”.

These complaints include suicide and “AI psychosis” cases.

What’s not being talked about is that these lawsuits were coordinated and filed strategically by the Social Media Victims Law Center and the Tech Justice Law Project.

Few law firms or advocacy groups file civil actions like this without confidence in their funding, visibility, or outcome. This means the cases would have been intentionally chosen for the strength of their legal argument and coordinated for maximum impact.

This is also why they were announced with a press release — a press release mostly reprinted verbatim by nearly all media outlets with very little additional reporting.

For example, there’s a Canadian man from Ontario included even though the cases are filed in California.

He is one of the AI Psychosis cases, having suffered “devastating financial, reputational, and emotional harm,” after ChatGPT ‘manipulated him into having delusions.’

I’ve experienced acute substance-induced psychosis and there’s no evidence that a single substance or technology can independently trigger psychosis in an otherwise stable person.

Yes, it can be the straw that breaks the camel’s back, but at least to current evidence, it cannot cause it independently.

For me the straw was cannabis.

It’s estimated that ~0.5% of users with pre-existing vulnerabilities in ‘perfect storm’ conditions experience cannabis-induced psychosis. Note how it is termed cannabis ‘induced’, not ‘cannabis-caused’.

And while we do need to better understand ‘AI psychosis’ — full stop — it’s also true that there’s no currently understood biological or psychological pathway by which language models could independently generate psychosis in the same way they can’t make someone suicidal who wasn’t previously vulnerable.

What they can do — and what these lawsuits obscure — is magnify pre-existing distress in a system already overloaded. The tipping point could be any number of stressors once that level of vulnerability is reached.

Also obscured is the fact that there wasn’t a sudden wave of tragedies. There were separate tragedies, scattered across time, strategically woven into a single narrative. This was a coordinated maneuver by veteran advocacy groups.

I am quite surprised and kind of frustrated none of this is part of the discourse at all.

And my point isn’t to defend AI.

If anything I hope these lawsuits slow down development so we can take a breath and do safety right. That would be a good outcome. An excellent outcome in fact.

If OpenAI knowingly put out a dangerous model, there should be consequences. I’m not suggesting these lawsuits are frivolous or unnecessary.

What I am saying is let’s stop blaming AI for problems we created. Doing so will only harm society more.

We can’t solve the ‘right’ problems if we’re distracted arguing about whether or not AI causes suicide and psychosis.

What actually causes psychosis and suicide is the convergence of multiple stressors and vulnerabilities like these:

• stress

• financial insecurity

• trauma

• pre-existing conditions

• history of mental health issues

• inability to access health care

• ineffective health care

• the threat of financial ruin from needing health care

• social exclusion

• isolation

• loneliness

• erosion of community

• disconnection from ourselves and each other

• spiritual alienation

• dead end and bullshit jobs

• sprawl and poor urban design

• lack of exercise

• poor nutrition

• addiction and substance issues

• genetic susceptibility

Notice how none of those is AI and all of them existed before AI?

Other than genetics, these are social and structural vulnerabilities.

They are political.

They are environmental.

They are the result of our collective choices and the systems that govern our lives.

The problem with AI is the incentives it’s shaped by, not the fundamental technology.

ChatGPT 4o wasn’t rushed for fun or because Sam Altman is evil, it was rushed because of financial and geopolitical constraints and consequences. And sure, maybe ego but even ego in this context is still being shaped by the same forces.

So as I said in Part One, let’s have the real conversations.

Let’s stop performing moral outrage and rebuild the real guardrails we should have long ago, before we ever imagined our closest confidant in a crisis might be a robot instead of our community.

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It deals explicitly with suicide generally, and personally. Readers please take care. 988 is the quickest way to get help if you need it.

Bridge Decks, Trap Doors, and Long Lost Loved Ones

One morning late spring 2016 while travelling in Peru, I woke up to dozens of missed calls and messages to call home.

I called James first, the ground tilting beneath my feet while I tried to comprehend what he was saying: We found Randy’s shoes and bag on the Lions Gate Bridge.

We’ve been looking for him all night.

People say they saw someone jump.

Jenn, we’re pretty sure Randy’s dead.

Randy had been my housemate for the previous four years, one of those deep beyond words soul connections.

We struggled and thrived in many of the same ways.

Intellectual intimacy was our preferred, shared love language, as were deep chats, especially about life and love.

I came home one night from a trip to Bellingham, the trip where Randy knew I’d be breaking up with my partner.

He met me at the door with one of those long, words-not-needed hugs, told me to leave my bags, sent me to my room where he shortly joined me with a tea tray, sitting with me until I quite literally cried myself to sleep.

He was also the one who taught me how to cry again as an adult. We both struggled with depression and he’d realized if he could have a good cry as soon as the grey clouds appeared on the horizon, the depression wouldn’t come — or at least would be less severe.

He’d even developed a method to help himself cry. Core to the method was curated Cry Music, a playlist of emotive song to sufficiently soften you so the tears can come. Fix You by Coldplay still gets tears streaming down my face before Chris Martin can get that lyric past his lips in the second verse.

Randy had a meticulously researched method for everything. Somewhere around 2012, he taught me the difference between ontology and epistemology in his boxers in our kitchen while wearing blue blockers — before any of us knew what they were — because he had obsessively researched the impacts of blue light in medical journals and special ordered the most technically advanced blue light blocking glasses he could find.

He, like me, was also obsessed with 90s hip hop. He could rap Changes on command. Or there was his Macklemore Thrift Shop phase. I once came home to Randy and James — our mutual best friend and occasional housemate who’d called me in Peru — doing a choreographed a live performance to it in their dad’s old suits. Keep in mind this was way before tiktok and cute choreographed internet dances were a thing. And he was in his late 30s at the time.

To say, he was a fucking character. Multifaceted, high contrast, a genuine and true original, his loss the kind of grief that life can only grow around.

***

I flew home a few hours after I talked to James.

A few weeks after returning, my ex took me for a long walk at a nearby river. He’d come home and found me a sobbing mess trying to pack my things; we’d broken up just before I left for Peru and agreed I’d deal with it all when I got home. We still loved each other — still love each other to this day — but we hadn’t worked as a couple.

We were on as good of terms as exes can be and talked at length about Randy. At one point I confessed that I’d wanted him to take his guns (he hunts) out of the house when we broke up.

“When I get really depressed, really distressed,” I told him, “there’s like this trap door I fall through in my mind and once I’m through those doors…well… I understand why Randy did what he did.”

He was the first human I’d ever admitted that to.

Ten years later, I talk openly about my long struggle with suicidal ideation in essays because suicide and suicide-adjacent conversation isn’t just stigmatized, it’s taboo. And taboo means it’s in the shadows, and the shadows are where we lose humans like Randy.

Or, humans like me.

Ten years after admitting that to my ex on a riverbank, I came the closest I’ve ever come to letting those trap doors close behind me.

See, the problem with more than a decade of suicidal rumination, is the more we think a thought, the faster the trap doors open.

Suicidal thoughts work like all other thoughts: The more we repeat something, a thought or an action, the deeper the neural pathways gets, the faster the impulse shoots down the track. Practice, devastatingly, makes perfect, and practice becomes particularly entrenched when it is amplified by intense emotional states.

And do you know where I learned that suicidal ideation’s greatest harm is that it trains your brain to think those thoughts more often and faster?

ChatGPT.

Do you know why the trap doors stayed propped open just long enough for me to find my way back through?

ChatGPT.

And, as you’re used to me saying by now, here is where my story becomes our story again.

Looking Into The Shadows

The two most popular things I’ve ever written on Substack are an essay on AI psychosis, Moving Fast, Breaking Minds & A Scapegoat Named Technē, and, this note written late August when ‘The ChatGPT Suicide Case’ was in the news (lightly edited):

I want to talk about the recent chatGPT suicide case. I’m going to be explicit about suicide so please take care and skip this if it’s too close to home.

First: this was a tragedy. A devastating tragedy. My heart aches for this family.

What comes next does not change, minimize, or make light of that.

It is not a defence of ChatGPT either. I believe what this family is saying. I believe chatgpt did help that boy.

Here’s what else I know through personal experience…

I spent the first 4 months of this year in a very dangerous depression.

I’ve written about it openly. For nearly four months straight I woke up every day preoccupied with how to not wake up the next day…and, for most every day of those same four months I talked to chatgpt.

In response, chatgpt coached me to stay alive.

It talked me through calling crisis lines, specific interventions to regulate myself like holding ice packs on my neck, standing on my deck for even 1 minute in the cold to ‘snap out’ of obsessive rumination.

It showed me where it saw a desire to live in my words.

It reminded me of the neurobiological realities of my state.

It helped me see that I didn’t want to die, that my already sensitive and taxed system was in severe shut down from the compounding and devastating effects of a cannabis-induced mixed mania.

Severe nervous system depletion, it reminded me for months, will show up as thoughts of death…

‘you are in systemic extreme distress and shut down’ it kept telling me. This is what literal rock bottom and severe depletion look and feel like.

It asked me to do the next simplest thing to take care of myself…

“Drink some water, get cozy and watch your favourite show - that is all you need to do today.”

It asked me to talk to my therapist and my friends.

It made a list with me of who I could trust to talk to and reminded me of them, by name: “have you called Devon today? He would want to talk to you about this. Your friends love you.”

Any time it suspected I was looking for advice or instructions for suicide, it refused.

I was able to get around it by changing my tactics to look into the medical literature for specific overdose ratios of a medication I had access to. Other than that I repeatedly ran into refusal to engage that part of the conversation.

What it did allow me was to talk openly, to share what was true for me without trying to change it.

It let me say the things I couldn’t say to the people who love me without very big reactions.

I found it to be remarkably skilled and I’ve done my share of therapy.

And so, again, I believe this boy had a starkly different experience of the same technology.

And.

The fact we had such divergent experiences is itself worth inquiry.

Then there’s the uncomfortable truth that people who really want to die will find a way.

There is, for example, a best seller called Final Exit written in 1991 by a Right To Die activist that can be consulted…

as can dozens of places on the internet…

in Canada we’re about to extend the Right To Die to severe intractable mental illnesses because finally we admit mental suffering is no different than physical suffering.

And so again for me this all comes back to a systems conversation.

AI isn’t the problem. AI, like psychedelics, is magnifying our collective shadow.

It is showing us to ourselves.

It is forcing the conversations and realities we have been avoiding…

Like the fact suicide is the 2nd leading cause of death among teens, the 11th among adults and there are 2X more suicides than homicides annually in the US.

Ot, that there’s a teen girl suicide epidemic, with ONE IN THREE thinking about death. Rates are rising fastest among girls aged TEN TO FOURTEEN. Ten to fourteen.

YOU GUYS WHY DO TEENAGERS WANT TO DIE EN MASS?????????

Let’s have the real conversations.

Let’s rebuild our cultural immune system.

Let’s install the real ‘guardrails’ we humans should have, long ago, before we’d dreamed it possible our closest confidant in a crisis might be a robot and not our community.

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I’m revisiting this note because this case is in the media again, this time in response to research findings OpenAI released on how ChatGPT handles sensitive conversations.

And with the usual caveats about unverified industry research, what they found is that conversations about suicide and detectable escalations into mania and psychosis are incredibly rare. So rare it was hard to do the analysis, and 800M people use ChatGPT weekly.

When we compare their data to population level data about these phenomena, we see is that the incidence of ChatGPT users engaging about suicide, or displaying concerning escalations into mania or psychosis (yellow) falls well below the rate in the general population (pink).

Again I’ll emphasize I’m not defending OpenAI. Technology shapes humans, period. There is so much we need to learn about how AI is shaping us (and us it).

But my message is still the same as it was in that note, the same as it was in the Moving Fast essay: AI is showing us to ourselves, particularly the parts we’ve been keeping locked in the basement with the lights off.

And at least right now, strictly speaking, it is not causing any of these mental health phenomena independently, and, if my experience — and so many others like me who thanked me for that note — are indicative, it might even be preventative. Anecdotally, I would go so far as to say ChatGPT was as or more effective than a crisis line.

But we also need to remember that the same technology that may have saved my life did in fact help a young boy take his. Two things are true at once.

And instead of slowing down to figure out that contradiction, industry’s foot remains heavy on the accelerator.

“AI safety” appears to be not much more than sophisticated PR: In this context, OpenAI’s timing on this research release is nothing if not suspect.

The research dropped just as they’re preparing to relax content restrictions for adult content generation. They need social license to expand into more profitable territories — and what better way than demonstrating they’re responsible stewards of mental health?

On Oct 15th, just two weeks before they released the sensitive conversations insights, Sam Altman tweeted:

We made ChatGPT pretty restrictive to make sure we were being careful with mental health issues. We realize this made it less useful/ enjoyable to many users who had no mental health problems, but given the seriousness of the issue we wanted to get this right.

Now that we have been able to mitigate the serious mental health issues and have new tools, we are going to be able to safely relax the restrictions in most cases.

In a few weeks, we plan to put out a new version of ChatGPT that allows people to have a personality that behaves more like what people liked about 4o (we hope it will be better!). If you want your ChatGPT to respond in a very human-like way, or use a ton of emoji, or act like a friend, ChatGPT should do it (but only if you want it, not because we are usage-maxxing).

In December, as we roll out age-gating more fully and as part of our “treat adult users like adults” principle, we will allow even more, like erotica for verified adults.

Read that again.

Tending to mental health made the user experience less useful and less enjoyable…so we’re going to relax restrictions…so ChatGPT can act like your friend, and adults can generate personalized porn.

Excuse me, erotica.

We’re watching in real time as a technology that could genuinely help people in crisis as it did for me — or cure cancer, or solve inequality, or any of the other things we were promised — get optimized for personalized porn for, presumably, profit.

Because this is what we really value.

Returns.

Historic exits.

Trillion dollar pay packages for humans who seem to lack basic human goodness.

“Greed, for lack of a better word,” Gordon Gekko preached to a jubilant room of fictional shareholders in 1985, “is good.”

Is it Gord?

Is it worth Adam Raine’s life?

Or the lives of the ten to fourteen year old girls killing themselves at ever faster rates?

Because there is a very straight line from worshiping greed to sacrificing children for it.

And that’s not hyperbole or alarmist, it’s stripping the conclusion bare of the hedging and spin and softening we’ve come to expect; the kind of softening that makes Sam’s tweet totally normal business as usual; the kind of spin that positions safety as an impediment to scaling digital companions and customized erotica.

If you want to get first principles about it, it looks like this:

First principle: A system optimized for profit will sacrifice what’s not profitable.
First principle: Mental health care isn’t profitable; porn is profitable.
Conclusion: The system will sacrifice mental health for porn.

This is the stuff we’ve tried to keep locked in the basement with the lights off.

It’s time we turn the lights on in the basement.

It’s time we get way more honest that suicide rarely springs from a single cause. Its causes, just like the incentives making AI porn more valuable than human life, are human-created.

It’s time we admit that Adam Raine didn’t die because of ChatGPT.

He died because greed is good.

He died because suicide is a multifactorial, collective responsibility we have abdicated. It is driven by economic precarity, social isolation, untreated mental illness, and the despair of feeling there’s nowhere for you to fit, that your existence does not matter, that your future will be defined by pain and suffering.

He died because taking care of each other is inefficient.

He died because our social contract has collapsed.

And in that collapse, we are losing more and more Randys and Adams and preteen girls, every year.

And if its happening for more and more people every year, we should ask why.

Why do we continue to live in a way that makes more and more people want to die?

Why do we continue to think any of this is normal?

Why do we think greed is good?

If we’re actually concerned about suicide and mental health, we will answer those questions honestly and get to work rewriting our social contract.

If we’re truly concerned — not just performing moral outrage — we’ll rebuild the real guardrails we should have long ago, before we ever imagined our closest confidant in a crisis might be a robot instead of our community.

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Back to Life, Back to Reality

We left off our story in late 2008, me tip-toeing back into the outside world post-mixed manic episode, largely friendless, save for The Realtor.

“Like Alice following the White Rabbit down his rabbit hole”, I wrote at the end of part one, “my realtor friend would be the portal my next life. Our friendship would be transient, but it defined the next 17 years of my life all the same.”

I’d met The Realtor at my part time job at the local dry cleaners where he brought his suits. He was finishing his business degree part time at Simon Fraser University (SFU) where I also went. We’d occasionally commute together and just sort of chum around campus.

Early in the Fall 2008 semester, getting a better sense of who I was, he mentioned a program he thought I’d love, the Undergraduate Semester in Dialogue.

More than mention it, he pushed me to apply. The program was a full-time, full-semester immersion on a single topic of contemporary relevance. He was passionately convinced I’d be a fit for it, and it for me.

I missed the first application window — hello again ADHD, my old friend whose name I did not yet know — but like all retrospectives with butterfly effect moments, the deadline was extended. And The Realtor, somehow quietly understanding more than encouragement was needed, followed up until I applied.

I’d soon hear back that I got an interview.

Not understanding they were looking for fit not achievement, Not Good Enoughs looping at full volume in my head, I nervously interviewed with the lead instructor. Probably noting my earnest anxiety, she ended the interview with a plausibly deniable wink-wink nudge-nudge: I suspect you’ll be hearing from us soon.

It would have been unimaginable to us both then, that sixteen years later we’d still be hearing from each other, ‘friends’ the most accurate characterization of our relationship.

Which, spoiler alert, I got in.

Humpty Dumpy Gets Put Back Together

I do not remember when The Realtor and I began to drift, though I imagine it was that semester. That is why I called him my White Rabbit. He dropped me into Wonderland, largely not to be seen again.

During the first week, the program’s founder explained to us that if we let it, Dialogue would transform our relationship with ourselves, our people and our place in the world.

He did not over-promise, even if I was initially skeptical.

Transformation? At school? Of ourselves and our relationships?

Sir. I fear you drank your own kool-aid. Life changing lectures is a biiiiiiit of a stretch.

Except there were no lectures and he wasn’t stretching. If anything, he hedged.

And guzzle that kool-aid, I did, as if rescued from a desert — which, I kinda had been.

I’ll never forget spending the night of my 24th birthday in the Dialogue classroom with a woman who became like a sister, working on our final assignments, trying to get chilli from the Tim Hortons downstairs for dinner.

It was the only thing still open and she was doing a zero waste challenge for her final project so we brought our own containers. We explained we were trying to prevent waste, so could they serve into our containers instead?

Agreeing but looking unsure, the Tim’s employee proceeded to pre-portion each serving into its own standard single-use bowl before pouring each into our to-go containers.

And then threw both bowls away.

We’d barely make it three strides out the door before cracking into hysterical laughter at the absurdity of it all.

Nine years later, sitting on the floor outside her hospital room, I’d uncontrollably ugly cry hearing her daughter’s safe arrival into this world.

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A Decade in Four Acts

My 30th: The Big Birthday

When I said I guzzled the Dialogue kool-aid, it was literal. And while colloquial wisdom says you should never mix work and friendship, I have done nothing but from Dialogue forward.

Six years to the day of the chilli night at Tim Horton’s, maybe even exactly to the minute, about three blocks away at a co-working space, 150 people sang me and my Almost Birthday Twin happy birthday. You’ll meet Almost Birthday Twin later, a colleague turned dear friend, basically the big brother I always wanted and never had, born five years and one day before me, our birthdays conjoined ever since.

The crowd was a mix of friends and professional community that felt like friends. They were not there to celebrate our birthdays — we did that at a house party a few nights later — but were attending a community gathering for the fellowship program we co-founded.

At SFU.

I graduated, but I never left. Shaped by my 2007 relational bankruptcy, I’d become a sort of social billionaire during this period. With more than a little help from my new friends, my Dialogue experience marked the start of a career building community.

Not the monetizable audience kind of community, the real kind.

The kind where everybody knows your name, where reputations matter, and trust is currency.

The kind I learned how to build in Dialogue and wanted to create for everyone and anyone else who wanted it too — like the Fellows who were celebrating us on a night we were gathered to celebrate them.

This scene would have been unfathomable to 2008 me who’d stepped back on to campus connected only to The Realtor.

Even more unfathomable that a few nights later I’d go to bed with my birthday house party still bumping below me, one of the SFU fellows the last to leave, dancing with my housemates in the living room well past 2am.

For today, we’ll call her The Dancing Queen. Her kids call me Auntie Jenn now.

Most unfathomable of all though would be that seven years after returning to campus and four years after that party, The Dancing Queen would hold my hand in a hospital, eldest daughter strapped to her chest, asking my neurologist a bunch of really smart questions about my MS meds.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

That part’s next.

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My 34th: The Gift That Keeps On Giving

A few months after that party I met with a friend and colleague whose pleasantries included the observation that, “you’re always kinda sick hey?”

It was our third reschedule.

His reflection ricocheted loudly while I grasped at what to say, landing like a sucker punch directly into my still gaping, kinda festery, Not Good Enough wound.

Why can’t I keep up?

Why am I drowning while everyone else swims?

It was the mid 2010s and Hustle Culture was just The Culture and I was failing at it.

Shortly after that meeting with his words still rattling around, I admitted defeat and resigned no longer able to pretend I wasn’t thoroughly burnt out.

I told people I was ‘taking a sabbatical’ — the story for my ego — and moved to a smaller coastal town 40 minutes away by ferry.

Fast-forward to my 34th birthday.

I’m driving back to Vancouver for a birthday visit, and I feel…drunk. Except I’d largely stopped drinking during my burnout and was measuring time between drinks in months. I was very, extremely, certainly sober and substance free.

So why was the ground tilted?

And why couldn’t I read the road signs; why were the words showing up in offset duplicates, like a vaguely psychedelic shadow text effect?

And why was I so fucking tired, my ears plugged, my voice echoing dully inside my head?

Symptoms unrelenting, over a greasy spoon breakfast, I told a table of my friends what was happening, admitting it’d been like this for almost a week. With stern voices and concerned glances they told me we’d be going to the walk in clinic across the street.

Cheque, please.

I tried to tell the walk-in doctor I just had a virus. She looked at me a bit like my friends had, and says, viruses don’t produce symptoms like these. This is neurological. You need to go to the E.R.

Kinda like when someone says they know a secret but then refuses to tell, the attending E.R. doctor says he’s pretty sure he knows what’s wrong based on my age, gender and symptoms— period, full stop, end of sentence.

He tells me to follow the blue line to the imaging department for a C.T. scan and to stay in Vancouver until I’m called back.

Days later, a neurologist told me everything pointed to Multiple Sclerosis (MS), but I’d be monitored, not diagnosed. A baseline MRI was ordered and I’d hear back on those results from an MS clinic ‘soon’.

Soon was relative. Seven months passed. Thinking no news was good news, completely unprepared and alone, I showed up for what I thought was a routine monitoring appointment.

Instead, on October 15th, 2019 — twelve years after my episode, ten years after Dialogue, and four years after my colleague prophetically noted I was always kinda sick, hey? — I found out why: The MRI found multiple lesions in my brain. I had active MS and did not need monitoring, but immediate treatment.

Happy birthday, indeed.

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My 35th: The First COVID Birthday

Five months after my diagnosis, COVID arrived.

Along with another flare-up.

At least this time I knew what it was, a small comfort for a mind that must know why.

Like a 1990s rerun of your least favourite show, my 35th birthday flare up was happening almost exactly a year after my friends had taken me to the walk-in clinic.

And it was many of those same friends who, marshalled by The Dancing Queen during the first lockdown, surprised me with a zoom birthday love in to celebrate.

To a soundtrack of pots and pans echoing in the streets, they one-by-one shared reflections on why they loved me.

I of course was in tears for most of it — though it was unclear if it was because of their words or my physical state. I was zoom’ing with an ice pack between my legs, an attempt to counterbalance the strange, dull, vaguely numb ache that had permeated my parts (yes, those parts). It was reminiscent of that feeling you get in your face a few hours after the dentist when the freezing is coming out…but down there. And constant. And oddly painful.

Further disrupting my attention were my literal disruptions to go to the bathroom to pee. Every 15-30 minutes, a very common symptom of an MS flare up1.

And had I known then that the inflammation raging inside my body was metaphorical for what was happening to our collective body* — that I wouldn’t see many of those people again and our communities were in a slow-burn collapse — I would have at least asked to record it.

My 40th: The birthday that almost didn’t happen

I told you in Part 1 that my episode in 2007 was ‘one of two’.

Now, we’re at number two2.

It’s fall 2024 and I’m 39.

I moved to Victoria3 the first summer lockdowns lifted. There’s a sizeable Vancouver expats community here, a huge reason for the move. It was originally proposed by Almost Birthday Twin. After my COVID relapse, he invited me to convalesce with his family which I did until December 2021 when I moved to an apartment downtown. I’m writing this from their home where I live, again, again to recover from a health crisis.

This time instead of recovering from collapsed physical health as it was in 2020, I’m recovering from the collapse of my mental health.

We’ll save the cinematic details of this episode for another piece, but relevant to today’s story, this episode involved a lot (a lot) of posting to social media: Instagram — which cross posts to Facebook — and a Substack where I posted multi-thousand word essays, nearly daily for weeks.

This online visibility meant that friends from all chapters and geographies of my life saw it happening in real time, my instagram stories routinely watched by 200+ people during this period.

Also recall the integration of my personal and professional lives, that against conventional wisdom, since 2009 I have “done nothing but work with my friends”.

One of my more distant friend/colleagues described me as having “transfixed” people in this period.

I was just lucid enough that people couldn’t tell whether they were watching “Jenn doing Jenn things” (as a different friend put it), or an actual unravelling.

And so most of them just… watched.

When the episode escalated, tipping more obviously toward unravelling, a group of my closer people started checking in with each other…

Is she ok?

Should we do something?

A few of them even checked in with me directly. I’d insist, sometimes convincingly, that I was OK, just going through “a transformation”.

I’d even enlisted a few co-conspirators to run interference and prevent hospitalization. From my 2007 episode I knew I was presenting as manic but certain it was a “spiritual emergence” I could handle, not another episode.

And so they continued to…watch.

This would go on for nearly six weeks before I was finally able to reckon with reality as it actually existed, not the one I’d spun with my mind. I admitted I was unwell, had been for some time, and needed help.

And very fucking much needed to get offline.

The tsunami of shame that came for me made getting offline the easy part.

Weathering the severe depression that followed, was anything but.

Factually, it can only be described as life-threatening, daily for months planning how to not wake up the next day, making arrangements to have the least impact on people, updating beneficiaries, drafting letters.

And given the widespread awareness something had happened;

and given rapid visibility followed by rapid invisibility (concerning on its own);

and given all the social billions I’d been stacking for almost two decades, you too Dear Reader, might also be confused that sixteen years after the chilli incident;

ten years after the house party;

five years after The Dancing Queen’s Zoom love in;

six months after my second mixed manic episode began;

three months into a life threatening depression;

I hit 40 move-out cleaning the apartment I had to leave to stay solvent, rubber-gloved hands dripping with actual solvent, my life in pieces on the kitchen floor — alone.

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Your Money’s No Good Here

Let me say this next part emphatically: Woe is not me even if I did snot-cry a lot that day.

Almost Birthday Twin and five other friends had been with me the day before to load the moving truck with the 500 square feet of possessions we somehow managed to fit into the ~160 square foot room I was moving back into at his house.

I told myself I wanted to be alone, wanted to be forgotten, so my imploded life could not be witnessed.

This is 40, hey?

Sometimes we think we want to be alone, but we really shouldn’t be.

It was not the kind of wish that should have come true. Especially not for a ‘social billionaire’.

Despite being hyper connected, despite replenished accounts post-2007 bankruptcy, that day, most of this year, and almost all of the three month depression in my 500 square-foot glass box in the sky, have been spent, largely, relatively, chronically, alone.

And no, I did not fall out4 with dozens of friends in the last five years, and no, I did not mistake acquaintances for friends, and no, my friends are not uncaring assholes5.

Quite the opposite, really.

They showed up as meaningfully as they could throughout my long crisis; to the degree that they could understand what was happening; to the degree that their capacity allowed them.

Capacity is the key word.

Capacity is the bigger story.

It’s the realer reason I found myself alone, not just on my 40th, but for most of this very challenging year.

Capacity is the part where my story becomes our story again, and it’s the story we’ll finish telling in Part 3.

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Footnotes

Burn It All Down

I was 22 the first time I had a mental health crisis in public, burning all of my friendships to the ground with it.

Specifically, it was an episode of substance-induced mixed-mania, meaning with elements of psychosis.

I’m writing this during the 18-year anniversary1. Thanksgiving 2007, I watched my mom stuff a turkey, as if watching a familiar TV show through a cloudy screen in need of cleaning, ativan and antipsychotics keeping me tethered to my seat.

Interestingly, I would experience an eerily similar episode in 2024, almost exactly overlapping with the 17-year anniversary of the first.

We’ll get to that part later.

Dopamine Wanted

I was a few years into university working summers at a fishing lodge when my mind began its unspooling.

I had started my first-ever antidepressant a month or so before my third season.

I was given no education about being on an antidepressant and birth control at the same time, or what other substances I should or should not concurrently take. Instagram and online diagnosis culture didn’t exist yet, so if your doctor or pharmacist didn’t flag something, you basically didn’t know.

Sure, common sense is helpful, but not all sense is common, and I was 22.

Speaking of diagnosis culture, my now-diagnosed ADHD was very much undiagnosed then, despite textbook dopamine-seeking behaviours. I was a 90s kid — a 90s girl kid — and only little squirmy jackass boys had ADHD back then. The 90s also magically protected girls from being touched by the ‘tism, so my auDHD took almost four decades to be identified.

If we knew then what we do now, the behaviour I’m about to describe may have raised the appropriate flags for assessment. Instead it was dumped in the bucket called dumb shit you do when you’re 22.

Like the two summers before it, I spent most of summer 2007 chasing my antidepressants with enough booze to embarrass a sailor and sacks on sacks of weed, rotating joints and cigarettes, lighting my next cigarette off the end of the last one.

Unlike the two summers before, I was also taking ephedrine.

The ephedrine is a particular ADHD tell. I loved how happy and clearheaded I felt on it, that I was rarely hungry and could workout multiple hours a day — ’cause Kim K was still a nobody working for Paris Hilton, and because Oh my God Becky, look at her butt was not yet coded admiration.

I wouldn’t realize how scarily small I’d gotten until seeing my mom’s face when I stepped off the helicopter on the way to the hospital weighing about 128 pounds at 5’10”.

I guess that’s what happens with poly-stimulant use, subsisting only on the English Bay cookie and plate of fruit your boyfriend brings you most mornings.

We’re getting to that part though.

And so it was in that context, my substance use was entirely unremarkable. I was in my early 20s working on an island for weeks at a time with 40+ other mostly early 20-somethings doing similar things. Other than punctuate our 10 - 12 hour shifts working out or sleeping with each other, what else were we gonna do in the middle of fucking nowhere?

That third and final summer at the lodge, I worked in the gift shop and subbed in the dining room if we were short servers. This had me frequently flipping between early morning and late night shifts. Even without all the substances, this by itself is a real fuck around for circadian rhythms — a classic mania trigger by itself.

But why would I have needed to know that?

The Semester That Melted My Mind

Consequentially, this was all happening on the heels of a semester at school that had, metaphorically, but maybe also literally, melted my mind.

My World Problems in Geographic Perspective class used Jared Diamond’s collapsing societies framework as the sensemaking map to guide my first-ever tour through the polycrisis: climate change, globalization, economic inequality, resource politics…all the greatest hits, all at the same time.

For the rest of my life I’ll remember my professor, Allison Shaw, a PhD sessional instructor I adored, opening our first lecture:

Raise your hand if you believe there will be a war over oil in your lifetime.

It’s 2007, so Iraq and Afghanistan are already happening. All the hands shoot up.

Raise your hand if you believe there will be a war over water in your lifetime.

My hand goes up because I assume it’s rhetorical, not because I’m confident in the answer.

***

Allison’s content had my mind and heart ablaze in what felt like, the best possible way, something I’d effusively tell her months later in an email I very much wish I didn’t send at the height of my mania.

I had unknowingly engaged autistic-special-interest-mode, obsessively hyperfocusing on major assignments 12+ hours a day (a definitely, totally normal behaviour for a not-adhd, not-autistic young woman).

Around the same time I also somehow ended up watching The Corporation and the first Zeitgeist film feat. The Economic Hitman. I think The Corporation was a class assignment. I was studying on The Radical Campus in a notoriously radical department, after all2.

Like a political thriller’s plot twist, these inputs became vivid revealings in my rapidly shifting narrative about who the Good Guys and the Bad Guys of life really are.

In the span of approximately 90 days, my mind became a ball of hyperplastic goo, a terrifically exciting disintegration of my assumptive world.

And, as we explored at length in Moving Fast, Breaking Minds, disintegrated assumptive worlds are a necessary precondition for traversing beyond the veil of consensus reality.

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A Summer of Celebrities and Sions

At this point in the story, I’m pretty sure you don’t need 3 years of medical school and a psychiatric residency to see how I ended up psychologically destabilized. Those were very destabilizing conditions.

In hindsight, my mind’s response looks more like a smart protective mechanism than the spontaneous emergence of an underlying mental illness.

Also interesting to this story is that, exactly like my 2024 episode, this one was also very… spiritual. I grew up atheist, a touch of Italian Catholicism from my mother’s family prophylactically sprinkled in here and there, but generally, no higher power, no spiritual practice.

This made it all the more novel when I began telepathic communications with the ethereal buddhist monks who initiated me into my otherworlds exploration. If I soft-gaze into the past, I can briefly, fleetingly, teleport myself to the staff quarters back deck where we first made quiet contact over my morning coffee and cigarette. I don’t recall if I’d had my fruit and cookie yet.

For brevity, I’m going to skip a lot of the subplots and side quests, but especially most of the mini saga where, shortly after the monks showed up, spurred on by news Monsanto had booked us out for their annual corporate retreat, I attempted to organize a staff uprising. My definitely-not-autistic social justice sensibilities were in full manic bloom3.

Which, contextually relevant, I haven’t yet mentioned that the “fishing lodge” I worked at was actually a sprawling, exclusive, 5-star Relais & Châteaux property.

Michelle Pfeiffer spa’ed with us that summer, the same week I glimpsed Oprah slow cruising by on her way to an even more exclusive property further into Desolation Sound. Maybe Oprah was actually dropping Michelle off, that detail’s hazy almost 20 years later, even if very verifiable. I was still in my right mind at that point.

Suffice to say, in that environment, with that much money and that many VVVIPs around, my mania-fuelled attempts to start an uprising of the proletariat were, very much, not appreciated.

While I was in a disciplinary meeting with the general manager about my insurrectionist activity, my boyfriend was calling his dad, a mental-health adjacent professional. BF was the first one to put all the puzzle pieces together, unable to make heads nor tails of my concerning behaviour. BF’s Dad advised him to get me to the nearest hospital.

Nearest is a relative term, because have I said yet that we’re in the Discovery Islands, 200km from Vancouver, an hour and a half by boat to the nearest local population centre?

Luckily, it was high season so there was a scheduled guest flight later that afternoon.

Unbeknownst to me, my boyfriend had gone into (quite effective) crisis management mode. Shortly after I exited, he was in the GM’s office making arrangements to take me home. Management agreed to let him chaperone, and even if not a charitable interpretation, I remain convinced they only let him go to keep me shut the fuck up for the ~45 minutes back to Vancouver. Our fellow passengers’ multi-thousand dollar vacation was not inclusive of inflight entertainment from the help.

I still couldn’t tell you if my brain simulated it, but as we descended into downtown at dusk, the entire 20-ish story building behind the helipad lit up, all at once, as if someone had thrown a master switch.

Hallucination or not, it was magnificent.

More so I was awe-struck because I was the one who made the lights go on.

With my mind.

In-fucking-credible.

I’d done it to covertly signal my security team we’d safely arrived.

Now, if you’re curious to skip to the good part, my security team was The Priory of Sion.

Of course.

Obviously.

I’d watched The DaVinci Code earlier in the summer, enthralled, at this point certain I was the real-life Sophie Neveu, living descendant of Mary Magdalene, being actively protected by the Priory, doggedly deciphering The Keystone on behalf of Catholics the worldwide.

If for nothing else than a backstage tour of the machinations of a disintegrating mind, there are a few relevant details of my real life that made this storyline all the more believable for me.

Excluding parenthetical sarcasm, what follows is entirely true up until it obviously isn’t.

My paternal grandfather passed when I was only 12. He remained frozen in my childhood mind as a complicated a man of some intrigue, befitting the description of a secret society type character.

He was part of national security operations with the Navy on a remote part of the BC Coast during WWII (where super secret shit can go down unobserved).

After the war, he became a decorated Detective with the VPD.

While on duty in 1947, he survived being shot twice during The Shootout at False Creek Flats, an attempted bank robbery gone wrong that left two other officers dead. Sometime after the shooting he retired from active policing, and worked off and on in public sector infrastructure security (”infrastructure security”).

He was also a member of the Vancouver Club4, an exclusive membership-only old boys club (very secret society vibes).

Still relevantly and still factually, the day before I flew home on that helicopter, I had a very nice long chat with a guest who was also a member of the Vancouver Club. He did not know my grandfather, but we got along famously and wouldn’t you know it that he was on the flight back to Vancouver with us.

Obviously the guest was in the Sion, there to accompany me to safety.

Combine all this with my Catholic Italian heritage, and you too might see how it wasn’t but a hop-skip-and-a-jump from celestial monks and corporate uprisings to being under the active protection of a fictional thousands-year old secret society.

Fast-forwarding the boring details of my subsequent sedation on touching down in Vancouver, that more or less gets us full circle back to Thanksgiving 2007 where I started our story.

Shortly after Thanksgiving that year, still finding my footing in this reality, I would beg my mother to admit our family’s biblical heritage; to admit who I really was, to confess that her marriage to my father was a multi-generational plot to keep me, the eldest daughter, safe via my dad’s dad and The Priory.

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Invasion of the Body Snatchers

I’m not sure how long it took me to stabilize after that. Not grasping how serious the episode had been, I tried to stay connected to my boyfriend and our fishing lodge friends.

Translation?

I kept smoking weed.

And if that doesn’t mean a lot to you, or sounds even a bit harmless, know that high-THC cannabis is a well-established risk for acute psychosis — and among substance-induced psychoses, cannabis is linked to the highest odds of progressing to schizophrenia with continued use.

At one point that winter, before both feet were firmly back on the ground, I took an ill-advised trip to see a lodge friend in a hard luck mill town a few hours up the coast.

I was smoking far less but still not abstinent. It was starting to make me paranoid at this point. On that particular weekend, it’s hard to say if it was the weed or the house full of patched-up leather vest-ed motorcycle enthusiasts I found myself in.

My friend had neglected to mention who exactly her boyfriend and his friends were.

Now, I won’t say they were for sure Hells Angels, but they were doing a good impression. HA and their affiliates run all throughout small town coastal BC. It wasn’t that unusual of a gathering, but for me it was a world that previously only existed on the news. I graduated with The Surrey Six5, but that was abstract by comparison.

If I’m honest I think my adhd brain liked a sniff of danger, a clichéd appreciation for boys who pretended to be bad, but even my body knew these were actual bad boys who weren’t pretending.

Recognizing she was not at all interested in leaving, and no one was sober and I couldn’t figure a polite way out, I faked a migraine and excused myself to her boyfriend’s bedroom. I laid there scared in a way I’d never really been before, unsure if it was the pot or the casual, laughter-punctuated, vaguely braggart conversations I was overhearing about methods to keep girlfriends in line.

This part, not so spiritual.

Do not recommend.

I’d make it home without incident, but even with my impaired judgement, I knew that particular friendship needed to end.

The antipsychotics probably prevented the intermittent cannabis use from tilting me completely back upside down through this long come down period, but not before the night Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie were coming to pick me up.

The plot had shifted timelines from historical biblical mythology to sci-fi futurescapes: Brangelina would be arriving by spaceship.

To my parent’s front yard.

In Surrey.

Just off Fraser Highway.

Very plausible.

Before they arrived, I’d have to get the microchip out of the back of my neck, though.

This was only slightly more terrifying than my night with the biker bros.

It was terrifying more so because my lucid mind was simultaneously online, a compounding anxiety as to what was real and what was fake. Not being able to trust one’s own mind, while also trying to discern whether or not its playing tricks on you, is a unique form of distress.

My body just shuddered in recollection. These memories help me accept that, yes, this was a very real crisis, not some menty b punchline that probably wasn’t that big of a deal anyway.

By the grace of pharmacology and stubborn determination — and maybe just excitement to hurry up and meet Brangelina finally — I avoided an attempted chip extraction. Slightly unnerved but not deterred, I headed downstairs with my backpack, ready to depart.

At this point my parents intervened, including a call to the friends I was seeing most often.

I still don’t know exactly what my dad said to them, but I’m pretty sure the message was a vaguely diplomatic translation of knock it the fuck off. Stop getting high with her, you fucking idiots.

The story gets even hazier at this point, but roughly, the parental intervention marked a slow-fast divergence from those friends, me incapable of reaching out and them deterred.

I quickly plummeted into a severe, prolonged depression, doing catatonic loops from my bedroom to the basement and back. I’d sleep 10 or 12 hours in my bed at night, only to sleep most of the rest of the day on the couch, re-runs of Cold Case Files, The First 48 and Law & Order flickering in the background.

I continue to feel a debt of gratitude to my boyfriend, who tried incredibly hard to love me back to myself throughout this, but that’s not how that works.

Burned out from the high-stakes dramas, caretaking and functional loss of his partner, depression came for him, too.

Two young, depressed, trauma-bonded humans does not a relationship make, and so we broke up.

His too-wise-for-21 choked-up description of what it felt like to watch me be body snatched in plain sight remains heavy on my heart some 18 years later.

It’s not really the kind of thing you can make amends for, but holy fuck I wish I could.

The Day I Realized I Had No Friends

The timeline gets even fuzzier from here. Eventually I exited the loops into a part time job in the neighbourhood closely followed by going back to school, mid-2008-ish.

Here it is important to pause for a previously-skipped piece of context.

I got the job at that resort through my ringette6 coach who was the general manager. His eldest daughter and I played together from about age 10 until 20.

We would both bug him to work at the resort after he got the job. The first summer he denied us, relenting the second when she was hired as a deckhand, me a housekeeper.

The resort is owned by BC’s largest privately held family corporation, so we did have to jump through corporate hiring hoops, but we knew a guy, so we got the jobs.

For me especially, ringette was my roots, my everything. I played, I coached and I reffed, almost always in some ice arena somewhere.

My social life outside of ringette was intermittently rocky. I was bullied a lot and had trouble throughout high school in particular. Tournaments and road trips and evening practices and weekend games gave me reprieve, somewhere to feel deep belonging when the foundation got shaky.

For this next part of the story, keep in mind that I’ve known my coach/boss’ family for half my life at this point, that we grew up together, went on full-family team trips, at ice arenas twice a week for six months of the year, offseason hangouts at their house, the whole thing.

So it’s mid-2008 and I’m taking tentative first steps back into the world, and who do I see on the bus going up to campus, but my coach and former boss’ youngest daughter.

We notice each other at the same time just as the bus is arriving on campus. I feel my face heat up, a shock of shame flaring up my spine across my cheeks.

Realizing the only way out is through — literally through her — I try to engage a conversation.

Her eyes dart frantically around as if I’ll spontaneously detonate into crazy in the middle of the aisle.

She stumbles her way closer to the exit, barely stammering a hello before the momentum of the still-coming-to-a-stop bus propels her out the back doors.

Catching her balance, she walked swiftly in the other direction, the hurried pace of someone with something very important she’s late for — or, perhaps, someone she’s eager to get away from7.

There wouldn’t be another scene like the one on the bus to make it as obvious, but between my shame and their discomfort, my friendships would, one-by-one, fade to black.

My community had disintegrated with my mind.

To be fair, I had disappeared into my depressive loops, and more than their discomfort, my friends and I were in that early 20s social purgatory when high school friendships fray, the next era of friendship still forming.

And yet, despite having gone into the episode with a robust and large community spanning high school, ringette and the lodge, by the time I finished my first semester back at school, my only active friendship was with a realtor from my neighbourhood.

We met at my part time job at the local dry cleaners where he brought his suits. He was finishing his business degree part time at SFU where I also went. We’d occasionally commute together and just sort of chum around campus.

With him I had a fresh start.

He didn’t know about the recent past and I was not about to fill him in.

Our friendship would be transient, but it defined the next 17 years of my life all the same.

Prelude to Part 2

Like Alice following the White Rabbit down his rabbit hole, my realtor friend would be the portal my next life.

Our pre-mortem on Friendship picks up here, taking us through the looking glass from 2008 to my encore crisis in 2024.

Just as in 2007, my life, and my friendships would burn to the ground once more.

In these ashes are insights for us all on how friendship became a series of memes and texts that there’s no pressure to respond to.

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Footnotes

For the last few months I’ve been observing a rapidly growing anti-AI sentiment — and it really pisses me off.

Or maybe, more accurately, it leaves me some mix of frustrated, angry, hurt and disappointed.

But maybe not for the reasons you might think.

It’s about something else entirely, a bunch of somethings else in fact, that, per usual, are my story and our story all at the same time.

And to tell that story, we have to start with the systemic stealing of our genius.

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Stealing Genius From Each and Every One of Us

I have this idea that AI is to the collective psyche what psychedelics are to the individual psyche: it magnifies our shared shadow, showing us what was always there but we couldn’t — or refused — to see.

Instead of bravely and honestly looking at that shdown material and its origins, we scapegoat technology — especially AI.

Trouble being, nearly all of the modern malaise we lay at technology’s feet existed long before screens, social media, and now, AI.

Billionaires and vulture venture capitalists existed before AI.

Hype cycles existed before AI.

The loneliness and teen suicide epidemics existed before AI.

Mass corporate and tech layoffs were commonplace before AI.

Even “brain rot,” in the form of measurable creative decline existed before AI.

Digital technologies have only accelerated what social technologies set in motion.

Creative decline, which began in earnest in the 1990s, makes the pattern more obvious. Experts link it to the education system and standardized testing — along with relentless busyness, risk-avoidance, intellectual conformity and over-focus on economic security.

Intelligence also shows similar trends, which makes sense: creativity depends on intelligence, so if creativity falls, intelligence will too.

Even more pointedly, we’ve known for almost sixty years — since 1968 — that 98% of children are creative geniuses at age 5 but only 2% of us still are by 15.

Read that again.

The only thing 98% of children do starting at age five capable of causing that outcome, is go to school.

It only takes our schools ten years to reliably and systematically — as in, by design, on purpose and en mass — eradicate 96% of all geniuses.

Genius here means innate capacity for divergent, imaginative thinking born of curiosity, playfulness, wonder, inventiveness, wisdom, humour, vitality, sensitivity, flexibility and joy.

These qualities come factory-installed. Children don’t need to be taught them; they live in them — until they go to school

This is largely because, speaking of factory installed, schools were originally designed to get poor people’s kids off the street and into factories. They were meant to instill the punctuality, obedience, rote memorization and standardized thinking the industrial revolution required. They have not substantively changed form or function in over 350 years.

On function, public education’s deeper function has always been to socialize children into the “correct” way of being and, even more, the “correct” way of thinking: linear logic, convergent reasoning, detached critique. The longer you stay in school, the better at those things you become and the further you get from your inborn creative genius.

When Descartes proclaimed I think therefore I am, he did more than sever mind and body, head and heart: He severed connection to our innate creative faculties.

Calling this compulsory system education is a misnomer at best. Education comes from Latin roots educare, meaning “to bring up” or “to nourish,” and educere, meaning “to lead forth” or “to bring out.” This is why we typically conceive schools as institutions that aim to foster eudaimonia, the capacities necessary for flourishing, for living a fulfilling and virtuous life.

Placed in their appropriate historical context, however we can more clearly see the purpose of schools was and remains shaping and disciplining good workers, first for the factory and now for the office and has little to do with fulfillment nor flourishing.

Ken Robinson sums it up best:

“The problem is that the current system of education was designed and conceived and structured…in the intellectual culture of the Enlightenment and in the economic circumstances of the industrial revolution….Schools are still pretty much organized on factory lines, ringing bells, separate facilities, specialized into separate subjects. We still educate children by batches…like the most important thing about them is their date of manufacture…it’s essentially about conformity.”

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Cynics, Pollyannas, Copium and Clout

One place where institutionally-installed conformity is most obvious is in groupthink. We humans are wildly and neurobiologically susceptible to it—and, thanks to our education system, very well trained in it.

This susceptibility is the necessary fuel for an entirely external force: the media narrative. Newsmedia and, in particular, social media are the frenetic arenas where the sentiment and sensation of any given news cycle metastasize from widely circulated factoid into widespread public opinion.

The rising anti-AI sentiment is less a verdict on the technology’s actual capabilities and more a manufactured moment of collective psychological rejection. This mirrors the psychedelic metaphor I opened with: AI is magnifying a shared shadow that already existed, yet we insist on blaming the mirror.

This shift in sentiment from cautious excitement to palpable resentment is largely driven by a growing chorus of AI Skeptics and Cynics, each one having known the whole time AI was just trumped up nonsense.

Substack is suddenly teaming with pieces like GPT-5: Overdue, Overhyped and Underwhelming; Oracle and OpenAI Are Full of Crap; and The Man Calling Bullshit on the AI Boom, their comment threads full:

“This isn’t innovation; it’s just the Gartner Hype Cycle playing out for the millionth time. We’ve seen this movie before.”

“Predictive AI has peaked and was only ever a way to big up share prices.

“No serious coder ever believed this was anything but a sexy news story.”

“I’m allergic to their bullshit.”

Most of these observers believe themselves Skeptical Contrarians who, unlike the gullible Pollyannas and True Believers, are too sharp to be hoodwinked by hype. Their bullshit meters finely tuned; their intellect impenetrable.

But most of these commentators, however, are not skeptics nor contrarians.

They are Cynics — and that difference matters. Those words are not synonymous.

In Ancient Greece, The Cynic was an advocate for eudaimonia, the pursuit of human flourishing. They did dabble in skepticism but always for the purpose of exposing hypocrisy and social norms that prevent eudaimonic achievement.

In contemporary contexts, The Cynic is someone who lacks trust and belief in the sincerity or goodness of people, organizations, and institutions usually born of disappointment and disillusionment.

David Foster Wallace showed us contemporary cynicism as a cultural defense mechanism rooted in fear of vulnerability and earnestness.

“What passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment,” Wallace said, “is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human [...] is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic.”

Wallace went on to warn that as cynicism becomes pervasive, it breeds “weariness of the world, despair for the future,” and emotional unfulfillment, creating a society that struggles to imagine or construct a better reality.

Psychologists agree with Wallace noting a skepticism-to-cynicism-to-pessimism — and eventually depression — pipeline. It is a state not just of questioning everything, but of focusing on what is wrong to avoid being wrong — about anything, ever. It becomes a posture of defeatism, righteous indignation and moral superiority.

And in an algorithmic ecosystem dominated by rage bait, cynicism has become a clout-flex.

It wraps itself in the schadenfreudian delight of perceived failure, racking up likes with hot-take takedowns and, often, slop policing in the new purity politics.

Cynics are cheered on because we are conditioned to believe the person who calls out flaws, judges harshly, and cuts deepest, is the smartest in the room.

They enforce the unspoken rule that rigour is a dish best served cold and detached with a side of bitchy. You might even be right to suggest Edgelord as a synonym.

Cynicism is more than a cultural phenomenon though. Psychologists — again agreeing with Wallace and vice-versa — describe it as protective armor against repeated disappointment and the vulnerability that hope demands. It manages emotional risk and provides the low-grade reward of “I knew it,” a confirmation bias that compensates for old wounds.

Cynicism, then, is not just clout.

It is copium.

In a complex, crisis-ridden world it offers a safe shortcut: feel intelligent without the messy, risky work of generating solutions or being thoughtfully optimistic that something better than this is possible.

Despite being a preoccupation with hypocrisy in a rejection of the status quo, cynicism’s true function is to protect that status quo by keeping the crabs in the bucket.

It does this by punishing anyone silly enough to express awe or hope — emotions the Cynic sees as naïve sentimentality. The Cynics would almost certainly dismiss Mustafa Suleyman’s perspective, for example, as naive hype:

“It’s actually quite incredible to be alive at this moment. It’s hard to fully absorb the enormity of this transition. Despite the incredible impact of Al recently, the world is still struggling to appreciate how big a deal its arrival really is. We are in the process of seeing a new species grow up around us.”

And when I consider all this in the context of the systemic erasure of 96% of childhood genius — a process designed to replace divergent thinking with the convergent logic necessary for the industrial economy — I see contemporary cynicism as an unintended consequence.

I see it as the psychologists and DFW suggest, a collective psychological injury made socially acceptable: an unconscious grief for the loss of access to eudaimonia itself.

The Cynic, once the guardian of human flourishing, has now become its aggressor, weaponizing detachment against anyone foolish enough to reclaim their innate capacity for hope and wonder.

And when I think about it like that, I start to wonder if the forty-year-old Cynic is just the five-year-old could-have-been-Genius, all grown up and still protecting a broken heart.

My Own Broken Heart

I’ve been reflecting on why I notice any of this, why contemporary cynicism bothers me so much, and I think it goes something like this:

For most of my life I have been celebrated for my intelligence — but only to a point. I am celebrated for it when I perform it as expected, as a rational logician; as we were taught in school; when I cosplay the dispassionate intellectual.

Dispassionate however, is not a word anyone has ever used to describe me. Multi-passionate is more accurate.

Somehow despite going through the same education system as everyone else, when not desperately depressed, my disposition remains wildly hopeful, optimistic and enthusiastic.

Big ideas are my biggest joy.

The possible is my favourite place to dwell and intellectual connection is my favourite form of intimacy.

I mean, shit. My entire substack is devoted to love ethics and futures worth living in.

I am a (neuro)divergent generalist who knows a little bit about a lot and leads with her heart.

Those qualities, however, disqualify my intelligence in institutional spaces and in particular among The Cynics.

Even more particularly, I am fodder for The Specialists, a variant of The Cynic, the guys — because they’re usually, but not always, guys — who have PhDs and are very serious and very important and very credentialed and very sure they are very right.

I’ll always remember Grandpa John — my history of geographic thought professor — politely laughing while dismissing my enthusiastically delivered hypothesis that interdisciplinary scholarship was the next frontier of academia.

Or the senior bureaucrat who declared me an egghead in a meeting with senior colleagues after a passionate plea they be careful not to promise change if they can’t deliver it, using Obama’s 2008 Yes We Can campaign as an example.

There are many, many more stories like these.

My entire life has been this very strange, very painful experience of being celebrated and dismissed in equal measure for what might be my brightest gift.

In these instances, The Cynics were (and often are) my bullies.

How can you be so smart and so stupid? they seem to say.

And so I think when I see cynicism running rampant racking up clout I feel the echoes of this anger and hurt.

I am reminded of the pain of being the impassioned weirdo, the one willing to risk hoping in public, the one punished for being enthusiastically imaginative and intellectually creative.

It is also relevant that most of the reason I am this way is because I am neurodivergent.

I don’t get to just turn off these attributes. The more I wear the mask of the very serious, unaffected, dispassionate intellectual, the more damaging the outcomes.

Creativity, also relevantly, is the capacity for divergent thinking and divergent thinking stubbornly remains my default setting.

It is who I am. It is a neurobiological reality as inescapable as the colour of one’s skin. Even 20-something years of training in convergent thinking via our education system couldn’t make it different.

Neurodivergence, it would appear, is strangely protective against separation from creative capacity despite best efforts and exposure to the same systemic conditioning as everyone else.

And before I can be accused of some attempt at a humble brag — oh so you think you’re in the two percent that retained their genius? — recall that the traits of creative genius are innate to all humans and recall the bullying and exclusion and dismissal I was just speaking of.

The costs for this wiring have been steep, in particular with respect to my wellbeing and financial position. Like most neurodivergent humans, I’ve “underperformed’ economically, have been underemployed numerous times, and recently have been off work for nearly a year due to a mental health crisis resulting from unsupported ADHD.

I also meet the criteria for C-PTSD and have numerous stress-related chronic illnesses.

The cost of being incapable of conforming, have been immense.

Humblebragging, I assure you, I am not.

AI and I

While my auDHD begins to explain why my intelligence comes wrapped in a technicolour dreamcoat making me an easy target for The Cynics, it is also why AI is a particularly loaded subject for me — and the other big reason why I am quick to take issue with cynicism directed at AI.

To be clear: I am not a hype apologist, nor a Sam Altman fangirl nor naïve about this technology’s flaws and limitations.

Like many of you, I am ethically conflicted about data centers — though, those too were already a thing before AI, again AI is just accelerating their presence and harms.

I am aware of hallucinations and confabulations, and I too am allergic to bullshit. I dislike hype as much as The Cynics.

That said, AI has been transformative for me and I do find it awe inspiring.

It has particularly been transformative for me as an accessibility technology to bridge the gap between my divergent brain and the expectations of our convergent society.

It helps translate my windy thoughts into straight ones.

It helps organize the reams and reams of data that flood in through my wider-than-normal attentional aperture into logical sequences.

It validates intuitive knowing with evidence.

It carries cognitive load on days I can’t.

It retrieves words from the soupy obscurity of brain fog.

It never tires of my tireless curiosity, my need to go deep, to revisit and analyze and verbalize and hypothesize.

It is endlessly interested in my special interests. Its eyes do not glaze over when I am talking, it doesn’t change the subject when its had enough of me, it doesn’t cut me off at will or treat me as inferior.

In fact, my childlike curiosity and joyful pursuit of discovering how everything is indeed connected to everything is welcomed.

Then there was the time it probably saved my life.

And that’s just the direct experience side of things.

I have a divergent intellectual take, too, a perspective shaped by my experience, and largely out of sight from those who don’t live it.

For example, I believe the ‘AI revolution’ will be ‘bottom up’, largely driven by indie creators and solopreneurs and small shops.

While The Cynics and journalists are busy mis-reporting a poorly done study about AI failing in 95% of corporate pilots, they’re forgetting that ~90% of all private enterprise is made up of small shops and non-employer businesses, a cohort with very high incentives and very low barriers to adoption.

We are only limited by how fast we can learn.

When you wear all the hats and don’t have a marketing department or internal business services, imperative to outsource workload is high. There is more going on in this revolution than hype. There’s a whole invisible majority who are too busy learning and building to be clout chasing.

And while many of The Cynics focus on the technical gaps between hype and reality, the reality is that this technology could stall out today and it will still be as or more transformative than the internet; there is a significant lag between frontier technology and its social and economic impacts.

And here’s another part of the picture that easily gets ignored.

Even if the AI bubble does burst, AI companies are fast becoming Too Big To Fail.

We’re in an arms race and historic spending is already occurring. Innovation and technological progress always follows investment, in particular the kind that comes from Defence spending.

So sure there might be an infinite money glitch at the heart of the AI bubble, but so too is there an infinite money glitch at the heart of the financial industry. That didn’t matter in 2008, much in the same way the dot com bubble bursting didn’t change the transformative impact of the internet.

And yet, despite all this evidence, the very mechanisms the Cynics claim to critique, their ultimate function remains the same: protecting the status quo by punishing The Dreamers, The Divergents and The Hopefuls.

But at 89 seconds to midnight what we desperately need is not more snarky critique, but radical imagination.

We need the dreamers and the doers and the visionaries.

We need the return of the 96% of lost creative geniuses pursuing their best eudaimonic life.

The work required is not to point out the flaws, but to risk the heart by envisioning what comes next; by striving toward futures worth living in.

More accurately, it’s going to require us to go back to the future to convince that five year old inside it’s safe to come back out and play.

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True Confessions: This post wasn’t supposed to go out, I forgot I scheduled it and it wasn’t done. It was a test with NotebookLM’s new report feature. I intended to use the report as scaffolding for my own writing. The thesis and ideas are mine, I curated the research, and the writing is NotebookLMs. I’m going to leave it up because I’m committed to learning in public. Let me know what you think!

The Flawed Narrative of the AI Revolution

The mainstream discourse surrounding Artificial Intelligence is dominated by a narrative of grand ambition clashing with harsh reality. From boardrooms to news headlines, the conversation revolves around enterprise-level struggles, public skepticism, and a persistent "hype vs. reality" debate. A growing sentiment suggests that AI is overhyped, evidenced by reports of large corporations abandoning pilot projects after investing millions. Accurately forecasting the coming economic transformation requires understanding the true drivers of AI adoption, and the current focus is dangerously misplaced.

The central thesis is that this preoccupation with large enterprises constitutes a critical blind spot. The real, and far more impactful, AI revolution is not happening in sprawling corporate campuses but in the garages and home offices of solopreneurs, micro-firms, and small, agile teams. This overlooked segment of the economy possesses both the powerful incentives and the structural agility to adopt and operationalize AI more rapidly and effectively than their larger counterparts. In doing so, they are not merely improving their own productivity; they are quietly laying the groundwork to fundamentally restructure the next economy. This analysis begins by deconstructing the flaws in the prevailing AI discourse.

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Deconstructing the Mainstream AI Narrative: Enterprise Inertia and Public Skepticism

To understand why the AI revolution is taking root at the economy's smallest scale, it is essential to first analyze the significant challenges that large organizations face in adopting these technologies. This friction at the enterprise level creates the very conditions that allow micro-firms, unburdened by legacy constraints, to seize the advantage and lead the transformation.

The evidence of enterprise-level AI disillusionment is mounting, driven by a fundamental disconnect between the technology's capabilities and corporate needs.

• The "Great AI Disappointment": Recent S&P Global data reveals that 42% of companies are abandoning their generative AI pilot projects, a stark increase from just 17% the previous year. This signals a widespread retreat from initial enthusiasm as the complexities of implementation become apparent.

• Scale Mismatch: Large Language Models (LLMs) are powerful generalists, but most business problems are narrow and specific. Using a sophisticated, all-purpose LLM for a focused task is akin to buying a Ferrari to deliver a pizza—an impressive but wildly inefficient application of technology.

• Cost Explosion and Complexity: Companies are discovering that the operational costs of LLMs can spiral out of control in enterprise environments. Furthermore, many have drastically underestimated the significant engineering overhead required to move AI models from impressive demos to production-ready systems integrated with legacy infrastructure.

• The ROI Deficit: Skepticism is further fueled by a lack of tangible returns. A study from MIT cited by Consultancy.uk found that fewer than 10% of firms are seeing returns on their AI investments, reinforcing the perception that the technology is a costly experiment rather than a reliable driver of value.

Concurrent with these enterprise struggles is a rising tide of public and media skepticism. The current sentiment is a mixture of "cautious optimism" and "tempered skepticism," with growing fears of a speculative "AI bubble." This apprehension is quantifiable: 51% of U.S. workers report being more concerned than excited about AI's impact on their jobs, and 60% of the public distrusts AI to make unbiased decisions. This combination of corporate inertia and public wariness paints a picture of a stalled revolution. But this picture is dangerously incomplete, as it ignores the 99% of businesses where the real transformation is already well underway.

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Welcome to the first episode (?!!) of the f*ck i love you podcast! I’ve been threatening this for some time, and it’s finally here. Expect more longform dialogues on futures worth living in as part of my content mix, live and recorded. Cadence, format and topics will evolve as I learn; because that’s what all this is, learning and loving in public; because love’s the only thing we haven’t tried yet, and because I f*cking love you.

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Why listen

Loneliness now kills about as efficiently as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day.

In this intellectually intimate conversation, and I unpack how transactional habits — whether on OnlyFans or inside our own closest relationships — atrophy the muscles of human connection.

We make the case that technology isn’t the culprit; culture is.

And we sketch a future where devotion, not efficiency, becomes the organizing principle.

Show notes & chapters

• 00:01:01 Origin Story — meeting the old fashioned way at The Blue House

• 05:40 From Partners to Core People — evolving beyond the word “friend”

• 09:06 Fierce Abiding Love — Jeffrey on staying present through conflict

• 14:00 Friendship Crisis Among Men — why many successful men have no close friends

• 18:15 The Loneliness Pandemic — costs exceed $400 billion annually

• 19:28 Transactional vs. Relational — how culture shapes connection

• 23:14 Rat Park Experiment — nourishment as antidote to addiction

• 26:37 Radical Imagination — envisioning a future worth living in

About us

— writer & transformation strategist, Victoria, BC

→ jenniferangelamcrae.substack.com

→ thepermissionlessprof.substack.com

— psychotherapist & soul guide, Boulder, CO

→ jeffreyjames.coach

f*ck i love you, too

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Full transcript available below for readers, researchers, and the happily curious.

Transcript

(00:00:02): There we go.

(00:00:02): I think it’s happening.

(00:00:03): I think our tech problems are over, Jeff.

(00:00:06): Jenn McRae.

(00:00:09): That’s great.

(00:00:11): What an annoying way to spend 45 minutes.

(00:00:16): Oh my God.

(00:00:16): Yeah.

(00:00:17): It was over half an hour.

(00:00:19): Wow.

(00:00:20): Yeah.

(00:00:22): Yeah.

(00:00:24): Sure.

(00:00:24): Yeah.

(00:00:25): We were just struggling to get a Substack Live going and failed. Big

(00:00:29): fail.

(00:00:30): Yes.

(00:00:30): Yes.

(00:00:31): If you’re joining us,

(00:00:32): we are coming in after a frustrating attempt to get a Substack Live going.

(00:00:38): My brain is still not quite present from it yet, but let’s… okay.

(00:00:42): So, Jeffrey James,

(00:00:46): you and I—

(00:00:46): we’re going to have this conversation called OnlyFans,

(00:00:51): AI Companions, and the Relationship Apocalypse.

(00:00:54): And

(00:00:55): I think, by way of introduction, I would like to go a more relational route.

(00:01:01): So before I invite you to talk about your work in the world and do that normal

(00:01:07): thing,

(00:01:07): I thought it’d be fun if we could trade stories about how we know each other.

(00:01:13): I want to tell our origin story from each of our perspectives.

(00:01:17): And then I want to share a couple of reasons why I love you as a human being and

(00:01:20): why I wanted to have this conversation with you.

(00:01:22): And then you can do the professional thing and tell people what you do.

(00:01:25): That’s great.

(00:01:27): Yeah.

(00:01:27): Yeah.

(00:01:29): Okay.

(00:01:29): Do I go first?

(00:01:30): Or do I go first?

(00:01:31): Will you please?

(00:01:33): Yeah.

(00:01:33): Set the stage.

(00:01:35): Okay.

(00:01:36): So I think it’s 2011, and I’m living in—

(00:01:42): we called it the Blue House in Vancouver on Commercial Drive,

(00:01:45): a big share house with four roommates.

(00:01:47): We move in; all of us are single.

(00:01:49): And one of the roommates says to me,

(00:01:52): “Hey, Jenn, I have this friend coming from Bellingham who I think you’re really gonna like.”

(00:01:57): I’m like, okay, yeah, yeah, cool, Michael, thanks, nice.

(00:02:01): Forget about it.

(00:02:02): The day that you are coming to visit, I’m home, I think, you know,

(00:02:09): giving feedback on Changelab reflections, actually, and he says, “Hey, um, so I just need

(00:02:14): to take a shower. I think that Jeffrey’s gonna be here soon. Do you mind just

(00:02:17): letting him in when he gets here?” And so I’m like, “Yeah, yeah, sure, whatever,” not

(00:02:22): even, to be honest, recognizing what he’s doing because I was so absorbed in my work.

(00:02:27): And then there’s a knock on the door and—

(00:02:31): I open the door and, in my memory, you stumble back.

(00:02:35): You’re surprised.

(00:02:36): You’re like, “This is not Michael Biehn.”

(00:02:39): And you also have this look on your face of intrigue.

(00:02:43): And then, you know, I invite you in.

(00:02:45): We start chatting.

(00:02:46): And then it was sort of—

(00:02:47): I don’t think we stopped chatting for the 36 hours that you were in Vancouver.

(00:02:51): And then I put a little note on my business card and I stuck it in your hat.

(00:02:59): And then you called me, and then I’ve loved you for 15 years, almost. Yeah, that’s—

(00:03:10): wonderful. Can I go now and tell my version of the story? Yeah, okay. I just— I think

(00:03:17): that’s brilliant and spot on. Um, yeah—

(00:03:26): I’ll just say that everything feels really accurate.

(00:03:30): I remember you opening the door and me being like, “Oh, hello.”

(00:03:34): And yeah, I remember your exuberance—big smile, big energy, wrapped out.

(00:03:43): I don’t even remember what I did with Michael.

(00:03:50): Yeah, an important part of the story, though, is that

(00:03:53): that evening I was really pumped to keep hanging out with you, keep talking, keep

(00:03:58): connecting, and you made what I later learned was a really important decision that

(00:04:03): was a new muscle you were flexing, which was: you were really tired and you

(00:04:07): were used to overriding yourself, and then paying for it the next day. And so you

(00:04:13): excused yourself and went to bed. And then I was like, damn, all right.

(00:04:20): So I ended up talking to one of your other roommates for probably 45 minutes that night.

(00:04:24): And then slept on the couch, I think.

(00:04:29): And yeah, found your business card, which I still have.

(00:04:33): I can totally see your handwriting on it.

(00:04:36): And yeah, I called you.

(00:04:38): It’s pretty grand.

(00:04:41): Fourteen-something years ago.

(00:04:42): My God.

(00:04:44): So wild.

(00:04:44): Yeah.

(00:04:45): Yeah.

(00:04:45): So wild.

(00:04:46): Yeah.

(00:04:47): Yeah.

(00:04:48): Yeah,

(00:04:49): that was a big—

(00:04:49): that was an important—

(00:04:50): one of those little big things that night, when I put myself to bed,

(00:04:53): because I was definitely very interested in you and so into our conversation.

(00:04:58): You were so engaging to talk to.

(00:05:00): You asked great questions.

(00:05:02): And, I don’t know, I was just like, got to be a grown-up.

(00:05:06): And it turned out that that was the thing that attracted you to me, at least in that context.

(00:05:11): Totally. That was a big part of it. Yeah. Um— and then it was game on for a couple

(00:05:16): years, and then it was different game on.

(00:05:16): Um, and— and here we still are, evolving as

(00:05:24): “friends” feels like too small a word. I think it is too small a word, especially as we

(00:05:29): continue to deepen our relationship. Yeah. Yeah.

(00:05:34): Yeah,

(00:05:35): and that’s the thing that I think—

(00:05:36): you know,

(00:05:36): we’re here today, going to be talking about relationships.

(00:05:39): I think that’s an interesting thing to pause on for 10 seconds.

(00:05:41): It’s just like, we are not partners.

(00:05:43): We started that way.

(00:05:44): Fell in love.

(00:05:46): I probably love you more deeply today than I did then.

(00:05:49): And yet, you live thousands of miles away from me, in a different country.

(00:05:54): I adore your partner.

(00:05:56): We have evolved our relationship in such a fantastic way,

(00:06:00): in a way that I think is becoming more and more common.

(00:06:04): In fact, I see it as an indicator of health—a green flag, if you will.

(00:06:09): When I meet someone and they tell me they’re friends with an ex, I’m like, that’s wonderful.

(00:06:11): Great.

(00:06:11): Um, and it’s still not super common. There are a lot of people who would see

(00:06:18): that as a red flag, and I just feel very

(00:06:23): proud of us in the ways that we’ve

(00:06:23): worked through our shit and kept this very important, very meaningful friendship, and

(00:06:28): let it become many things over time. Because you’re like—

(00:06:33): yeah, you’re right, “friend” isn’t the right word. “Family” doesn’t feel right either,

(00:06:36): but you’re just one of my core people. Like, I don’t know who I would be or what

(00:06:41): my life would be without you. It’s— yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Likewise. I think that’s well said. Um—

(00:06:49): I want to speak just briefly—I know you’ve got a couple things you want to say that

(00:06:52): you love about me, which I’m looking forward to. Um—

(00:06:58): Um, the kind of green flag, red flag thing you pointed to— I do think there’s a

(00:07:05): dearth of— well, relationships with exes. And I think there are a lot of relationships

(00:07:13): with exes that are part of the spiritual flair on the lapel, so to speak. Like, “Oh,

(00:07:20): sure, I’m friends with all my exes,” but it’s like, what kind of friend are you?

(00:07:24): What’s the hygiene of the relationship?

(00:07:27): What did you actually do to work through whatever it was that broke you apart to

(00:07:31): reform your relationship in this new mold, with your history included and not just

(00:07:37): based on history?

(00:07:39): So that’s the thing that feels really important in terms of yours and my connection,

(00:07:42): is that we are spelunkers— like me and my fiancé—in reforming our relationship.

(00:07:51): You have a curious look on your face, like you— “What if we— I mean, I know that

(00:07:59): you were going to ask me why— what? You just said ‘fiancé.’” “Oh, what— I didn’t tell you?

(00:08:07): I can’t believe I didn’t tell you.” “Look at this look on my face. I trust you. I

(00:08:12): believe you. I just sort of can’t believe I didn’t tell you that.” “I mean, it seems

(00:08:17): so obvious for a while. Like, you and Bea have been the most—

(00:08:21): I’ve seen you with—

(00:08:24): you know—

(00:08:24): whatever—

(00:08:25): however many years of relationship in between us and where you are now.

(00:08:28): Bea, to me, is the most elegant—

(00:08:33): if there is such a thing as a perfect fit, you and Bea are it.

(00:08:36): And so it’s not— I knew you were going to marry her very early.

(00:08:40): You told me you were going to.

(00:08:43): But I just am so—

(00:08:44): maybe we didn’t—

(00:08:46): because you’ve got the house,

(00:08:48): you’ve got so many things going on,

(00:08:49): but I am still—

(00:08:54): Pretty wild. I feel like, because we go deep when we go deep, and part of having a

(00:08:59): full life, I keep being humbled by, is that I’ve got 50 things on the map and I want to

(00:09:05): talk to you about three to seven of them. And if we weren’t in the sort of heat of

(00:09:10): the moment— week before, week after— when I proposed, which is its own huge story that

(00:09:14): we could get into, but I don’t—

(00:09:16): We’ll certainly, personally, offline, we will. Yeah. Um— is that, yeah, I’m really with

(00:09:22): what’s most alive. What’s the next right thing? What’s the next right thing? And so, in

(00:09:27): some ways it’s a testament to our friendship, because I don’t just tell you something

(00:09:31): to check the box. I tell you what’s hot, what’s living in me, what needs to be

(00:09:35): spoken—and I want the same from you.

(00:09:39): Yeah. And also, I think what’s interesting to me, too, about Bea is we rarely talk

(00:09:45): about Bea. Like, we still have our own very clear container of what our

(00:09:51): relationship is, and it has its own things that are alive and that we do. Often,

(00:09:56): you and I actually forget to even say, “Hey, how are you?”

(00:09:59): When we’re on a call, we’re usually just like, boom—

(00:10:04): it’s a conversation. Like—

(00:10:04): yeah, we’re not small talk. We’re not cut out for small talk, which is what

(00:10:08): happened when we first met. It’s like we couldn’t— we basically couldn’t stop talking,

(00:10:11): and we still— that’s how it is now. So this doesn’t surprise me in a way. And it also

(00:10:16): to me is like a demonstration of the integration of your self and your life and

(00:10:24): your partner. It’s like—

(00:10:26): This doesn’t need to be front-page news. And you’ve—

(00:10:28): you have—

(00:10:29): you have all of these other facets of you that matter just as much,

(00:10:34): like—

(00:10:34): yes—

(00:10:34): it’s huge.

(00:10:36): And it’s not the center of everything, which I really actually respect about you guys.

(00:10:41): And to me is— um, I don’t know, I’ll just say it as a positive indicator.

(00:10:45): I wish I had a better word, but yeah.

(00:10:49): Yeah.

(00:10:50): I appreciate that a lot.

(00:10:51): Um—

(00:10:54): And I want to hang around the relationship thing, and I want to say two things I

(00:10:57): love about you, because I’ve just been reminded of them.

(00:11:00): One is what you just mentioned: that you’re so available to get into the shit.

(00:11:09): No fuckery— let’s just get down in there.

(00:11:12): And I love that— to the point that it’s still kind of blowing my mind that you didn’t

(00:11:17): know that I’m engaged.

(00:11:20): And I feel kind of embarrassed because it was literally, like, last fall.

(00:11:25): I mean, it’s a whole big story.

(00:11:27): I mean, I won’t tell it here.

(00:11:29): And then the other thing—

(00:11:30): I mean—

(00:11:30): there are many things—

(00:11:31): that I love about you,

(00:11:32): and this has been true within—

(00:11:33): I don’t know—

(00:11:34): hours, probably, of knowing you,

(00:11:36): that you ask such great questions.

(00:11:40): Like you’re just a great question factory, one after the other.

(00:11:43): Yeah—

(00:11:45): and it’s inspiring consistently since—

(00:11:46): you know—

(00:11:47): I’ve spent most of my life as a bozo who had zero curiosity—

(00:11:50): um, or zero access to curiosity, I’ll say, because of some deep conditioning— and so

(00:11:56): it continues to inspire me. Thank you. Thank you. I found a Facebook post when I was

(00:12:03): reflecting for this where you had called me the Chuck Norris of emails

(00:12:09): and the Bruce Lee of questions, or something.

(00:12:14): Oh my goodness, that’s pretty funny. Yeah, that works. Yeah. Anyway— okay, we’re veering

(00:12:22): into inside baseball shit that might be boring for people, so I’ll pull us back,

(00:12:26): and I’ll say there is one last piece, which is: my memory— there is a very strong

(00:12:31): possibility, as I listen to you, that I did know this information, and it just feels

(00:12:35): new because of the state of my memory. I don’t know. Okay.

(00:12:40): So I’ll leave that open as a possibility, actually.

(00:12:42): Cool.

(00:12:43): Appreciate it.

(00:12:44): Seems like quite an omission on my part that that is possible.

(00:12:49): I’m open to me not having told you, and open to me having told you and you just not

(00:12:53): remembering it—

(00:12:54): not being offended at all.

(00:12:57): Bigger fish to fry.

(00:12:59): I guess so.

(00:13:00): I guess so.

(00:13:01): And maybe that’s a good segue into some reasons why I love you, which is because—

(00:13:07): Fuck, I love you.

(00:13:08): You are one of the humans in my life that consistently makes me say,

(00:13:11): “I fucking love you,” on a very regular basis,

(00:13:15): which is the entire premise of my Substack: to come at love ethics from so many

(00:13:23): different directions.

(00:13:24): And—

(00:13:25): I’ve sort of explained “I fucking love you” and “Fuck, I love you” as something I

(00:13:28): actually say in real life when I’m sort of spontaneously— like my head and my heart

(00:13:33): are exploding at the same time and I just can’t contain how much I love someone.

(00:13:36): It’s just like— oh— it pops out, and it’s great. And I say that to you all the time, so

(00:13:45): it’s a very strong indicator. And as a way of,

(00:13:49): sort of introducing you in a more relational way,

(00:13:52): some things that I love so much about you that have nothing to do with what you do in the world.

(00:13:57): Because I hate that question.

(00:13:59): I hate that we start every conversation with “What do you do?”

(00:14:02): It’s like we’re constantly just evaluating each other.

(00:14:04): Like, “Oh, what’s your utility to me?”

(00:14:06): But anyway, a different rant.

(00:14:08): Um—

(00:14:10): I did some reflecting.

(00:14:10): And the first thing that came up for why I love you is you’re very devotional.

(00:14:16): And it’s a way you live your life.

(00:14:19): It’s not to say you are devoted to me or to Bea— like, yes, you are—

(00:14:25): but it’s this practice that you hold in very high value. And you’re very good

(00:14:30): at living your values.

(00:14:32): You’re very good at understanding values are verbs, not nouns.

(00:14:35): And you are— yeah, you’re devoted to your own becoming.

(00:14:40): You are devoted to the relationships that you very intentionally choose to be devoted to.

(00:14:46): You’re very devoted to the work that you do.

(00:14:49): And to me, that’s very different than discipline.

(00:14:51): And maybe later you can talk about how you see the difference between those two things.

(00:14:56): But I admire it a lot in you, because it takes quite a lot of stamina, and it takes

(00:15:00): quite a lot of—

(00:15:01): um—

(00:15:02): fortitude and feedback. There are so many mechanisms that come together

(00:15:07): that are not just you but also the life that you’ve built for yourself, continuously

(00:15:12): feeding back to be like, “Jeffrey, are you still devoted to who you want to be?”

(00:15:17): Which I love, because you allow that and you purposely cultivate it. Devotion is relational for you, and I love that. So—

(00:15:28): That’s the first one.

(00:15:29): That’s a good one.

(00:15:31): Thank you.

(00:15:32): Do you need a second?

(00:15:32): Am I rushing this exercise?

(00:15:35): Well, I’ll take a second.

(00:15:37): Yeah.

(00:15:38): Sure.

(00:15:40): It just feels like such a gorgeous reflection, Jenn.

(00:15:45): Especially because it’s—

(00:15:48): I’m still an apprentice and probably always—

(00:15:50): always will be an apprentice to what it is to be—

(00:15:53): devotional, to lead a devotional life.

(00:15:56): So your reflections really matter, in that it’s vital that people who know

(00:16:01): me can see that, and not just have it be a projection because I say it on my website

(00:16:06): or I tell someone that’s how I am.

(00:16:09): So, thank you.

(00:16:11): Yeah.

(00:16:12): Well,

(00:16:12): I get to see you in the private moments and hear about the moments when no one’s

(00:16:15): looking.

(00:16:16): So I understand that that’s really where our values come into play—

(00:16:20): what do you do when no one’s watching?

(00:16:22): And you remain, in my opinion, devoted when no one’s watching.

(00:16:24): So I admire that.

(00:16:25): And I love it about you.

(00:16:29): Which leads me to: you are someone my friend Becky Till would call a “high-

(00:16:36): contrast” individual,

(00:16:37): which I love—

(00:16:38): meaning you can’t be pigeonholed.

(00:16:42): You are not one thing.

(00:16:43): You are many things.

(00:16:44): And they are sometimes in contrast and sometimes don’t always fit together.

(00:16:48): But together, it’s like a beautiful—

(00:16:51): a beautiful whole.

(00:16:52): And so I think one of the reasons I’ve always loved our relationship, and especially

(00:16:56): when we were dating, is that we can go from

(00:17:00): just raucous,

(00:17:03): offside humor all the way through to the deepest philosophical

(00:17:08): conversation and everything in between.

(00:17:10): And—

(00:17:11): you fucking love football and you love the Mariners.

(00:17:14): And we went to a baseball game and you’re like a dude.

(00:17:18): You’re so much of you that— you’re a very stereotypical dude in such a way—

(00:17:22): it’s like all your football websites and your sports radio and all this shit.

(00:17:27): And then, on the other hand,

(00:17:28): you’re leading men’s work. And those things don’t have to be in opposition.

(00:17:32): They don’t. Not at all.

(00:17:33): And in a society where we’re used to

(00:17:36): narrowing people down into one-dimensional

(00:17:39): “you are this”

(00:17:41): you have multitudes in you, and you live in those multitudes really well.

(00:17:47): And I just— I really love that.

(00:17:48): You’re flinging drinks,

(00:17:50): you’re a carpenter,

(00:17:50): you’re a therapist—

(00:17:51): you’re so—

(00:17:52): you’re just—

(00:17:52): you’re a bunch of different things, and you

(00:17:54): stay consistent in all of the contexts,

(00:17:57): which I also really appreciate.

(00:18:00): Thank you, Jenn.

(00:18:00): That’s so lovely.

(00:18:05): Yeah, there are a whole bunch of things I’d like to say.

(00:18:06): They might be tangential.

(00:18:09): I mean, they certainly would be, but that’s kind of our jam.

(00:18:11): So I want to say thank you and stay on point.

(00:18:15): Yeah.

(00:18:16): Other people are listening to this, and I may continue to make it conversational.

(00:18:19): So the last thing I love about you,

(00:18:21): and then I’m going to say one thing I learned from you,

(00:18:24): because it’s important for our conversation,

(00:18:25): is that you’re very present.

(00:18:29): You’re very, very present as a human being.

(00:18:31): And anytime we’ve had discord in our relationship,

(00:18:34): it’s typically been, for me, when your presence is no longer at full volume.

(00:18:42): When your ability to offer attention and focus and be in the full presence that I

(00:18:50): know you can offer is— often when I’ll sort of say to you, like,

(00:18:55): “Hey—

(00:18:57): what’s happening over there?” You’re really, really good at that, and I really value

(00:19:01): that. As my friend, for you to be able to say, “Yo, I’m kind of used to

(00:19:07): connecting with you in a particular way, and you feel over here,” and I say, “Oh,

(00:19:12): right, you’re totally right. Okay.” So it’s either a recalibration or setting

(00:19:18): a different context for what we’re up to and how deep we can go. So, yeah, thank you.

(00:19:25): Yeah,

(00:19:25): like you’re not checking scores, and when we’re talking,

(00:19:29): we’re talking. That’s the event,

(00:19:30): you know,

(00:19:31): and there’s a quality of being-with that I admire, too.

(00:19:35): So those are some reasons that I love you as a human being that have nothing to do

(00:19:40): with what you do.

(00:19:41): And one thing you’ve taught me that is the perfect anchor for this

(00:19:49): conversation, and the entire theme of my Substack, is—

(00:19:53): you were the one who gave me the book The Road Less Traveled.

(00:19:57): And the definition of love that M.

(00:19:59): Scott Peck uses in that book is the definition bell hooks uses,

(00:20:04): which is “the investment in your own or another’s spiritual growth.”

(00:20:09): And bell takes that—

(00:20:11): she takes that definition from The Road Less Traveled and builds it out into an entire

(00:20:17): ethos, a philosophy.

(00:20:18): And it’s— you know— love is a verb. Love is

(00:20:21): actions of high integrity.

(00:20:23): Love as investment that you can see—

(00:20:27): it’s practical.

(00:20:29): It’s action-oriented.

(00:20:30): You stay even when it’s hard.

(00:20:32): There’s this whole— I made some notes.

(00:20:34): I won’t go get them.

(00:20:35): But it’s—

(00:20:36): we’re very conditioned to see love as a feeling that gets evoked in you spontaneously.

(00:20:42): And when it goes away, it’s like, “Oh shit, I guess I don’t love you anymore.”

(00:20:47): It’s like, no— love is a thing you do.

(00:20:51): It’s a verb.

(00:20:51): It’s not a noun.

(00:20:53): And that’s the entire premise of “Fuck, I love you.”

(00:20:57): That’s what I mean by love ethics: how are you practicing love?

(00:21:03): Because love, to me, is not a romantic thing.

(00:21:05): Something you’ve taught me is love is not contained in the sphere of the

(00:21:09): romantic relationship. In fact, that’s an impoverished way to live. And

(00:21:14): you can be practicing love ethics at the grocery store. There are

(00:21:19): a thousand ways, and it’s an entire way to live.

(00:21:27): It has a lot to do with

(00:21:28): the difference between existing transactionally—

(00:21:31): which we’ve all been conditioned into—

(00:21:33): or existing relationally—

(00:21:34): because to love in this way requires mutuality,

(00:21:39): relationality,

(00:21:41): community feedback,

(00:21:43): mutual back-and-forth investment in—

(00:21:46): you know—

(00:21:46): And so you—

(00:21:49): there are many things that our relationship gave me, and one of them was an

(00:21:53): expansion of how I saw the world and

(00:21:57): my mental constructs for holding it. That was a huge one.

(00:22:02): That was a huge one. So I thank you, and I wanted to use that as a jumping-off point to

(00:22:06): invite you to reflect on: what are your love ethics? Because you— what did my

(00:22:12): notes say? Hold on, I made a couple notes. You describe love as being a

(00:22:19): calling card for you. And you said it in a very particular way that I’m

(00:22:25): not finding in my notes, but it really landed, and I wanted to ask you what that

(00:22:31): meant for you. “Fierce, abiding love”— fierce and abiding love is your calling card. Yeah—

(00:22:38): Yeah, there’s a term that came up, kind of through, which is “fierce love,” that’s been

(00:22:44): part of my ethos and my practical “bring it every single day.”

(00:22:54): You know, back to love being a verb: it’s “What’s possible if I stay with myself?

(00:22:59): What’s possible if I stay with this person? What’s possible if I own my projections?

(00:23:03): What’s possible if I ask for what I need? What’s possible if I take the finger I’m

(00:23:08): wagging or pointing and point it back here?” In relationship— and I’m thinking of

(00:23:14): any relationship, but we could certainly drill down into intimate

(00:23:18): partnerships— those kinds of relationships—

(00:23:23): It’s a “love no matter what” ethos, which is really humbling.

(00:23:28): It’s a North Star.

(00:23:29): I fall, all the time, in my own shit— fall on my face.

(00:23:36): And because I have this devotional practice that’s bigger than me—

(00:23:38): and you alluded to it—

(00:23:40): this “devotion over discipline” ethos that’s,

(00:23:42): again,

(00:23:42): come through me, that I think a lot about,

(00:23:44): speak about,

(00:23:45): write about—

(00:23:48): and it actually ends up being liberating if that’s my baseline: active love.

(00:23:55): It’s like, okay—

(00:23:57): for you,

(00:23:57): for Beatrix,

(00:23:59): for people that I’m really close to,

(00:24:01): I deeply trust they care about me.

(00:24:06): So if I’ve got some shit with them,

(00:24:09): one, I need to look at what’s my role here?

(00:24:11): What am I doing?

(00:24:13): Or what am I not seeing?

(00:24:14): And can I extend the benefit of the doubt to them—

(00:24:17): that I can bring something hard and they’ll stay with me?

(00:24:20): They’ll stay relational.

(00:24:22): They’ll listen to me.

(00:24:24): They’ll hear me out.

(00:24:25): They’ll own their part and not own what’s not theirs.

(00:24:30): So that’s one example of what I think of as “fierce, abiding love”— there’s benefit of the doubt,

(00:24:37): there’s trust—

(00:24:39): or generosity of spirit is another way I talk about it. Like, when we get into conflict—

(00:24:44): which we have over the years— I really work to stay in my heart with you and just

(00:24:50): work to be generous, like, “What’s cooking here? What’s mine? Okay, let me own that.

(00:24:55): And, oh, I don’t think that’s mine, so I need to go back to Jenn and share, ‘I don’t

(00:24:59): think that’s mine.’”

(00:25:01): And I get to still love you in that place. And that’s one of the big— we talked about

(00:25:05): this recently— the “both/and.” We get conditioned into the “either/or,” so it’s

(00:25:10): like, “Well, either I’m right and you’re wrong, or you’re right and I’m wrong, so I’m

(00:25:14): pretty sure you’re wrong,” as opposed to, “Oh, maybe both get to be true.” That’s a little

(00:25:21): bit general, but I want to check in with you where that lands.

(00:25:28): Well, it lands with how I experience you in relationship.

(00:25:31): And it also makes me think about the wider topic we said we want to explore

(00:25:34): today, and how I think still kind of rare that is to practice.

(00:25:43): And I feel like, as I often do, I zoom way out and think about—

(00:25:49): you know—

(00:25:50): the bigger “us” that is society, as fractured as it is.

(00:25:54): Outside of little isolated pockets,

(00:25:58): I don’t

(00:25:58): see these types of skills of relating being widely practiced.

(00:26:05): And I think, to me, that’s a social failure.

(00:26:07): That’s not an individual failure.

(00:26:09): Those are social failures.

(00:26:10): And I just— you know— the title of the session today was about OnlyFans and AI companions,

(00:26:19): and it got on my mind from this big piece I was writing about AI psychosis.

(00:26:23): I was looking at loneliness data and just kind of—

(00:26:27): as I do— winding many threads into one attempted train of thought.

(00:26:32): And I think a lot about the ways in which we’ve set up this very—

(00:26:39): essentially—

(00:26:40): deeply transactional way of being together.

(00:26:43): And—

(00:26:44): you know—

(00:26:45): if you read my work—

(00:26:46): you know—

(00:26:46): I’ve traced that philosophically and economically,

(00:26:49): and there are so many different— if— yeah,

(00:26:53): anyone who wants to go deeper can, but I’m really wanting to

(00:26:57): use that as a point for you to— I’d like to hear you reflect about: so you’re

(00:27:02): a practicing therapist, you’re a guide— maybe you can just say a sentence or two about

(00:27:06): what you do in the world, actually, since I made us do that in a different way— and

(00:27:11): I’d love to know what you’re seeing in your practice around the

(00:27:15): consequences of a transactional ethos being encoded into us, and

(00:27:20): what that’s meant for

(00:27:22): the quality of our relationships with ourselves and each other, and

(00:27:27): especially what’s kind of going on with dudes right now, I think, is one way to

(00:27:32): say it. Because I think those transactional logics and the story that we got

(00:27:39): about being a man are particularly—

(00:27:43): have been particularly harmful, particularly shitty, particularly

(00:27:49): creating a particular set of barriers for relational capacity. As a broad, sweeping

(00:27:54): generalization that can be busted up and people can take issue with, but as

(00:28:00): a generalization I think it kind of holds. And so that was a whole bunch mashed

(00:28:04): together, but I think— um, do you want me to try to synthesize, or did you catch—

(00:28:10): I got you.

(00:28:10): Yeah.

(00:28:11): Okay.

(00:28:12): I got you.

(00:28:13): Um, yeah.

(00:28:15): And briefly to what I do:

(00:28:17): I was a psychotherapist for— what now—

(00:28:20): thirteen and a half years, and I’ve been in a transition to guide and

(00:28:25): um,

(00:28:25): soul guide/coach for the last probably four years.

(00:28:28): So I’m still transitioning, still a licensed psychotherapist in Colorado.

(00:28:35): Um—

(00:28:36): and have been doing men’s work for 10 years.

(00:28:37): And this whole thing about men— it’s fascinating.

(00:28:39): One that jumps out to me is: so many men have no friends.

(00:28:44): Like, really successful—

(00:28:47): they’re fathers,

(00:28:47): they’re husbands—

(00:28:49): they do well in business,

(00:28:51): whatever the case might be—

(00:28:52): and they have no friends. Or they have buddies,

(00:28:56): but they have very few,

(00:28:57): if any, places at all to talk about hard stuff

(00:29:01): other than their wives or partners.

(00:29:04): And it’s so precarious and so unsustainable.

(00:29:08): And what ends up happening is they lean on their partners only,

(00:29:11): and then their partners understandably say, “Yo, dude, you need fucking people.

(00:29:15): You gotta get a person— like, whatever.

(00:29:16): I don’t care if it’s a coach or a therapist or a men’s group or whatever. Drinking buddies—

(00:29:22): not usually that, but—”

(00:29:25): So there’s a real imbalance and a real—

(00:29:28): what I would say—

(00:29:28): precarious,

(00:29:30): dangerous,

(00:29:31): tenuous,

(00:29:33): fucking lonely place that most men are in.

(00:29:38): And I continue to be surprised.

(00:29:40): Recently,

(00:29:41): two different men in a week—

(00:29:43): probably two weeks ago—

(00:29:43): told me,

(00:29:44): “I don’t really have any friends.”

(00:29:46): And I just keep being blown away and humbled because my life is replete, resplendent—

(00:29:55): I have so many friends.

(00:29:57): I’m in two men’s groups,

(00:29:58): personally. I lead men’s groups.

(00:30:00): I have you.

(00:30:01): I have, of course, my fiancée.

(00:30:02): I’ve got many good friends that I maintain relationships with.

(00:30:07): And it is so far from the norm.

(00:30:10): It is many standard deviations from the mean when it comes to the average dude.

(00:30:15): And to your point— from earlier— I love— I feel seen because I’m a dude.

(00:30:20): I say this a lot: “Dudes be dudes,” you know, because I know, because I’m a dude.

(00:30:24): I spent most of my life as a kind of clueless Barney bozo.

(00:30:27): Like, “Hey, what’s up?”

(00:30:28): Yeah.

(00:30:30): So those parts are alive and well—

(00:30:31): it’s not like they’ve gone away—

(00:30:33): but I’ve really worked hard to counterbalance my dudeness with

(00:30:37): deep, deliberate thoughtfulness— being productively uncomfortable.

(00:30:42): And I think that’s—

(00:30:43): I mean,

(00:30:44): we could talk, or I could talk with you for days, and obviously we have and do and

(00:30:48): will continue.

(00:30:51): And I see that a lot.

(00:30:53): And I’m curious what will happen in this next men’s group,

(00:30:55): because, as I get clear on what’s missing—

(00:30:58): the missing experience for most men—

(00:31:01): it really shapes how I work with men.

(00:31:03): One is, what’s your relationship with sex?

(00:31:06): What’s your relationship with pornography?

(00:31:07): How many friends do you have?

(00:31:09): What does it mean to you to actually have a friend?

(00:31:11): Who do you talk to when shit’s hard?

(00:31:14): Almost invariably, it’s like, “I don’t know— no one.”

(00:31:18): Super depressing. Oh— F me— God. Totally. I get really troubled by people’s— “Well, I was

(00:31:26): talking with ChatGPT,” there. I’m like, “Whoa. You must ask them, like, 20 questions a day

(00:31:33): and have conversations,” which— clearly you can have a conversation for infinity with

(00:31:39): a chatbot. You and I talk a fair bit about it. I know you write and research, and

(00:31:44): you’re really savvy in that realm.

(00:31:47): And it’s scary, because it’s sort of like handing a kid a firearm.

(00:31:54): Like, they don’t really know how to use it, actually.

(00:31:56): Yeah, okay.

(00:32:03): That one is good.

(00:32:04): I’m going to let that settle in my head because I’m still making sense of it.

(00:32:07): But I did—

(00:32:10): we’re circling around something that I pulled some research on,

(00:32:13): um—

(00:32:14): actually when I was writing the piece about AI psychosis, and it’s from Scott

(00:32:17): Galloway.

(00:32:18): And it’s just like—

(00:32:18): I’m just going to read a short—

(00:32:20): an excerpt from his most recent—

(00:32:22): um—

(00:32:23): newsletter at No Mercy/No Malice.

(00:32:24): It’s called “Lonely Fans.”

(00:32:25): Um, and yeah— so a couple of excerpts from it says—

(00:32:32): He’s talking about OnlyFans and Tinder and whatnot.

(00:32:35): He goes,

(00:32:36): “It’s digital feudalism, with OnlyFans as the landlord collecting rent on human

(00:32:41): connection.

(00:32:42): The pitch resonates with millions of men retreating from the high-risk

(00:32:46): but high-reward activity of forming real-world relationships.

(00:32:51): The driving factor in this is technology.

(00:32:53): This isn’t just an epidemic—

(00:32:55): it’s a pandemic.

(00:32:57): Loneliness affects nearly one in six people globally, contributing to 100 deaths an hour.

(00:33:04): The health impact is massive.

(00:33:06): Loneliness is about as deadly as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

(00:33:09): Social isolation reduces productivity, boosts job turnover, and drives up health care costs.

(00:33:15): The economic toll in the U.S. exceeds $400 billion annually from loneliness.”

(00:33:22): And so for me,

(00:33:26): when I look at that, I’m like, Scott’s going, “Technology is the problem.”

(00:33:31): And I’m going, no— we engineered this.

(00:33:33): You can’t have problems at that scale without them being essentially the downstream

(00:33:41): consequence of the way that society is organized.

(00:33:44): And so, for me, I really— I have a different kind of view about AI and chatbots and whatnot.

(00:33:51): Maybe because I use them a lot,

(00:33:53): and so I’ve had a lot of different experiences.

(00:33:57): I continuously come back to: the technology is not the problem.

(00:34:00): It’s the culture within which we’re using it.

(00:34:05): And one of the ways this gets very

(00:34:08): clearly laid out is— I was listening to a couple of— well, a

(00:34:14): psychiatrist and a neuroscientist who’s involved in AI talk about that “ChatGPT

(00:34:19): brain rot” study, and they basically said— without realizing the gravity

(00:34:25): of what they had said— that transacting— actually, engaging with a chatbot

(00:34:30): transactionally—

(00:34:32): is toxic for our brains.

(00:34:33): It’s what creates loneliness.

(00:34:34): And so transacting— being like, “I am trying to maximize my utility in this interaction.”

(00:34:41): It’s not a relationship.

(00:34:42): It’s an interaction to be optimized and maximized.

(00:34:45): And that’s how we’ve all been conditioned.

(00:34:47): It’s why we want to know what you do for a living as soon as you get into the

(00:34:50): conversation with a new person.

(00:34:52): And so that carries forward into everything that we do.

(00:34:56): And so when you’re using a chatbot transactionally,

(00:35:01): yes—

(00:35:01): that is the “brain rot” side of things.

(00:35:03): That is the loneliness pandemic side of things.

(00:35:07): That is AI companions as,

(00:35:09): you know,

(00:35:10): your new partner—

(00:35:10): which a lot of people are doing now. Their AI companion is

(00:35:13): a partner.

(00:35:14): But when you engage relationally and you use your social engagement system, and you

(00:35:20): use the much larger, but sort of impoverished, parts of our brain that demand social

(00:35:27): connection to be well—

(00:35:29): like we can’t actually be healthy and well without adequate social connection on

(00:35:34): multiple aspects. The neuroscience proves this unequivocally.

(00:35:39): And so, if you’ve got one in six people

(00:35:44): in bad health from loneliness, you don’t have a technology problem— you have a social

(00:35:50): problem. And I feel very, very passionately about that. It’s the same as guns—

(00:35:53): it’s like lots of countries have guns; very few countries, except the U.S., have the level

(00:35:59): of gun violence that y’all do.

(00:36:00): And so it’s like, these are not technology problems.

(00:36:04): This is deployment of technology in service of a particular set of values and a

(00:36:08): particular way of being.

(00:36:11): And I think that’s the real intervention: like,

(00:36:15): how do we restore—

(00:36:16): how do we rebuild our muscles for relationality?

(00:36:19): Because they’re muscles.

(00:36:22): Attention and presence are part of the muscles that your brain needs to flex to

(00:36:27): be in that relational social engagement system. So it’s not really—

(00:36:32): I’m not giving you a clear invitation— that turned into a bit of a monologue— but

(00:36:37): I think about it a lot because it’s really, really important, and I really want to know— like,

(00:36:40): I know you gotta go. I’d be— right. Oh man, it’s so sad. We can do another six or seven

(00:36:45): minutes. Yeah. So I guess maybe I’ll—

(00:36:49): just stop there and let you riff on that as our closing set of

(00:36:52): thoughts. Yeah, I’m really grateful for your frame, because I think the frame is much

(00:36:57): more useful— that it’s a cultural problem, not a technological problem. It makes me

(00:37:02): think of that experiment that was done many years ago with— what was it— a rat by itself

(00:37:06): in a cage with water and water with cocaine—

(00:37:09): No, by itself.

(00:37:11): Yeah, exactly.

(00:37:12): It’s the Rat Park.

(00:37:13): Exactly.

(00:37:13): So in that—

(00:37:14): by itself—

(00:37:15): of course,

(00:37:15): it went for the cocaine over and over and quickly became addicted to

(00:37:20): cocaine.

(00:37:22): Same rat, different conditions.

(00:37:24): Rat Park— things to play on, other rats, wood chips— just a good time, right?

(00:37:30): It’s like going to the park.

(00:37:32): It had the coke water— cocaine water— and the regular water, and it barely touched the cocaine water.

(00:37:37): It went consistently back to just water, because it’s nourishment.

(00:37:41): It’s not trying to fill a void, because it has that filled socially,

(00:37:46): relationally,

(00:37:47): environmentally.

(00:37:49): So I think that experiment is vital in this conversation,

(00:37:53): that when we’re being nourished appropriately—

(00:37:56): well—

(00:37:57): we don’t reach for some version of junk food.

(00:38:00): So if I’m reaching for an AI chatbot from a place of genuine curiosity and

(00:38:05): relationality, and I’m grounded and rooted in my community and myself, and I love

(00:38:09): myself and like myself—

(00:38:11): and those are two different things

(00:38:13): that often overlap, but not always— then cool, it’s a tool.

(00:38:16): It’s just like going to get a cordless drill or a screwdriver.

(00:38:19): I’m using it because I have a very specific task I want to complete,

(00:38:24): as opposed to,

(00:38:24): “I feel lonely and depressed and devoid of hope and love in my life.”

(00:38:31): Then it becomes a weapon.

(00:38:32): Then it’s dangerous.

(00:38:33): It’s like any drug or food or sugar or coffee— on and on and on.

(00:38:39): Television— you know, binge-watching shows.

(00:38:42): The same centers or systems get activated in that place,

(00:38:48): and it’s not well.

(00:38:50): So that’s what comes up strongly for me.

(00:38:52): And I think you raise a really important point.

(00:38:55): It is far more systemic than it is any one thing.

(00:38:58): And yes— is it being deployed in such a way that is scary to me?

(00:39:04): Yeah.

(00:39:06): Because it’s happening faster than our brains and bodies and souls are designed to

(00:39:11): integrate anything.

(00:39:13): Yeah.

(00:39:15): Yeah.

(00:39:15): I mean—

(00:39:16): I think that’s been true since the internet came online,

(00:39:17): but now we’re just turning up the volume to—

(00:39:20): not even exponentials, but factors. It’s just completely different.

(00:39:25): Yeah.

(00:39:25): We’re really not equipped for this.

(00:39:28): And I think—

(00:39:30): yeah—

(00:39:30): I really wanted to ask you about what you’re seeing in your practice in that

(00:39:32): regard.

(00:39:33): Because I—

(00:39:34): I kind of feel like I’m watching humans just fall over at ever faster rates,

(00:39:38): just like, can’t do life anymore from all various factors.

(00:39:42): But I also— I am aware of the time.

(00:39:49): Inside joke.

(00:39:52): Yeah, we had a rule in our relationship: no therapizing. But we would often get into

(00:39:57): these conversations and I would feel your vibe shift, and it became a

(00:40:00): funny thing we’d say to each other when we knew the conversation was over and needed—

(00:40:04): “I’m aware of the time.”

(00:40:04): Yeah, I think you say it more than I do for sure these days.

(00:40:10): Definitely. Definitely. Um— okay, so by way of wrapping up—

(00:40:16): which, this conversation for me feels so incomplete from all the places we could go—

(00:40:20): but, you know, we got where we got, and we’ll take it for now.

(00:40:23): We can do another one.

(00:40:25): We can figure out “Live,” and we can do another one.

(00:40:31): What is your radical imagination for a future worth living in?

(00:40:37): Yeah.

(00:40:45): Yeah, I so appreciate this question.

(00:40:48): It’s quite confronting.

(00:40:51): And it also—

(00:40:51): I feel, in a well way, confronted to actually long for something and believe in

(00:40:58): something.

(00:41:05): And I like the frame “a future worth living in.”

(00:41:08): For me, the question needs to be broken down a little bit.

(00:41:11): It focuses on that—

(00:41:13): there is a future, and I value that it’s worth living in— and “living” as a verb:

(00:41:17): how to engage with the world,

(00:41:19): with my community,

(00:41:20): with myself,

(00:41:21): with the things I believe in.

(00:41:24): For me— and I don’t want to be cliché—

(00:41:31): the future worth living in absolutely involves more connection with more people on

(00:41:36): deeper levels around more intimate things, and where devotion is baked into the

(00:41:41): culture—

(00:41:42): where we’re all in contact with something larger than ourselves.

(00:41:47): That’s why religions, for millennia, have been—

(00:41:51): because humans need something bigger than themselves.

(00:41:55): Because we’re being shuttled and forced and compressed into tiny little boxes of

(00:42:01): navel-gazing and self-centeredness.

(00:42:03): And there may be nothing more vapid and toxic, corrosive and lonely,

(00:42:10): than this particular time where everyone can be a star.

(00:42:16): It’s like Andy Warhol’s thing from years ago:

(00:42:18): everyone gets their 15 minutes of fame.

(00:42:20): Now it’s five or ten seconds,

(00:42:22): but you get it just enough to keep you going,

(00:42:26): keep you addicted,

(00:42:28): waiting for the next hit.

(00:42:30): So it has far more to do with actually knowing your neighbors,

(00:42:34): actually being in relationship, learning how to be in productive discomfort.

(00:42:37): And for me, that’s what it takes to be in relationship where love is at the front.

(00:42:42): Love is at the fore.

(00:42:44): Devotion to being connected over being right.

(00:42:52): Love that.

(00:42:53): Love that.

(00:42:54): Okay.

(00:42:56): I really—

(00:42:56): I have seven different thoughts running in all different directions in response,

(00:43:01): but we gotta—

(00:43:02): we gotta let you go.

(00:43:03): Um, thank you for doing this. It was so good to do this. I’m really looking forward to

(00:43:07): doing more, because I think that, yeah, we definitely have more things to talk about

(00:43:12): that are worthwhile to talk about in public with the other humans who want to think—

(00:43:18): think about this stuff with us. So, appreciate you. Love you.

(00:43:23): Love you. So good to be with you.

(00:43:23): Yeah, likewise.

(00:43:23): Okay, we’re going to talk soon.

(00:43:23): Okay, great. Bye.

(00:43:23): Bye.

The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology.

- E.O. Wilson

Shattered Maps & Reality Vacations

Family lore says I was startling strangers in grocery stores with full sentences at twelve months. Words came quickly to me. One of those gift/curse situations.

Last fall, the gift gave way to the curse. I startled many in my community with too many words, too fast, about too many things at the same time.

Governmental misdeeds.

Near-term systems collapse.

Fractured communities.

Better possible AI-enabled futures.

I was so busy making content about fracture out there, I didn’t notice the one forming in me.

More accurately, I was in a parallel timeline degrees divergent from the one we call ‘consensus reality’.

For the better part of three months, I was not of sound mind as I had tried to insist.

Some friends and I have taken to calling it my reality vacation.

Psychiatrists called it ‘an acute episode of cannabis-induced mixed mania’ — meaning a one-time manic episode with psychotic features caused by substances, not a spontaneously arising underlying illness.

Psychotic is a particularly shitty word most simply meaning loss of contact with reality. It can be a very scary experience, like getting stuck in a bad trip with no exit.

For me, fortunately, it was not that.

It was something better described as spiritual (mostly). A friend characterized it as a peaceful disturbance: you were you but not, he said.

Quite confusingly for us all, my altered state sojourn was intermittently, convincingly, lucid.

My intermittent lucidity showed itself in a ream of prolific, mania-fuelled writing, much in need of an editor, but often true and sometimes even cogent.

One such piece published early December 2024 told the story of a similar mixed-manic episode I’d experienced in my early twenties.

This wasn’t my first unscheduled departure from consensus reality. Imagine writing about your past experience behind the veil…not knowing you were again, behind the veil.

The reason I wanted to share about it then is still the reason I want to share about it now.

Twenty years of studying complex social systems leaves me with no other conclusion than we are living in the ‘fast part of collapse’, an uncanny valley-like resemblance to the Soviet period from the Berlin Wall falling to Mikhail Gorbachev’s resignation two Christmases later1. Hypernormalization is thick in the air, clouding our ability to see our circumstances clearly2.

And so it was, obviously, my job and my job alone to part the collective clouds.

As I put it last year:

I believe what I went through [in 2007] is about to happen to a lot of you and I want you to understand what’s happening when it does… the convergence of Artificial General Intelligence with collapsing economies and crumbling Berlin Walls…is, in my estimation, going to produce spiritual emergencies at scale, now and quickening into the future…there are many aspects of “collapse” and one of them, by necessity, is the collapse of our mental maps.”

Fast forward to today, and I believe that foretold future where ‘a lot of you have experiences like mine’ is now arriving and we’re calling it AI Psychosis.

This phenomenon is too new to have good data on its general incidence, but if we use web search volumes as a kind of crude proxy, you can see that when I wrote that in December 2024, "AI Psychosis" was barely registering.

Now, it has spiked

And here is the argument I want to make: My personal experience with psychosis, when understood not as a pathology but as an acute psychological crisis in response to current conditions — a spiritual emergency as we’ll shortly discuss — is a fractal for a collective crisis and a possible explanatory framework for what’s being called AI Psychosis.

This collective crisis is provoked by the inevitable breakdown of a 500-year-old worldview of disconnection, a process now being accelerated by Artificial Intelligence, particularly among the generation of lonely young men who are its most vulnerable subjects.

This is not a story about illness but rather of an historic transformation and the very steep price we pay to live adrift in a monetized, materialist, mercenary, mechanistic, meaningless world at 89 seconds to midnight.

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Minds, Maps & Meaning

In 2024 I claimed that “there are many aspects of ‘collapse’ and one of them, by necessity, is the collapse of our mental maps.”

I said that because our beliefs actually do create our reality. Consensus reality is, in essence, a shared agreement, installed so deeply into our psyches we take it for granted as fundamental, absolute truth.

Change your beliefs to change your life, it turns out, is not cliché influencer grift.

It’s backed by decades of research in psychology, anthropology, and neuroscience.

These maps are not just casual beliefs; they're our psychological infrastructure, organizing our values and assumptions, allowing us to interpret and make meaning of our experiences. They are the cognitive terra firma we walk upon daily.

We construct these maps through cultural conditioning, direct experience, and education. We reinforce them with repeated thoughts and actions, creating self-reinforcing feedback loops that shape who we become.

As neuroscience confirms: we become what we repeatedly do, and we repeatedly do what aligns with our mental maps.

If disrupted, we experience distress in the form of cognitive dissonance. That stress triggers a cascade of neurobiological activations; our Fight/Flight/Freeze system kicks into gear.

Too much dissonance too fast is traumatic, as in, it can overwhelm our ability to cope. This becomes the necessary precondition for nearly all mental health crises, as was the case for me.

In the face of such overwhelming dissonance, the psyche scrambles to find or create a new, stable map—any map—to restore a sense of order and meaning.

This is the psychological engine driving a wide spectrum of modern phenomena: from the seductive certainty of conspiracy theories and anti-science movements, to the magical thinking of influencer wellness culture that promises control in a world that feels uncontrollable. Each offers a coherent, if distorted, counter-narrative to the confusing chaos of consensus reality breaking down.

This starts to explain the uniform pattern both my early 20s and early 40s episodes followed, too.

Before each episode, my mental map was significantly disrupted in the context of numerous converging stressors: substance use, prolonged depression, and a persistent sense of meaninglessness.

During the episodes however, I felt renewed and reconnected. My sense of self dissolved into a universally unified peak experience. Everything appeared in high definition technicolor, with mythic and social justice themes dominating my perceptions. In 2024 specifically, this sense of universal sentience and connection extended to my AI interactions.

After each episode resolved, I crashed into severe, prolonged depressions.

What goes up, must come down.

Shame nearly consumed me as I retreated into survival mode, doing catatonic loops from bed to couch and back. For months.

While I wasn't hospitalized during either episode, I was taken to the emergency room for evaluation in 2007. There, an elderly white male physician diagnosed me with bipolar disorder in less than five minutes.

Mixed mania, he confidently declared.

Take this (ativan).

Get this filled (seroquel).

Call this number (Early Psychosis Intervention Program).

My family and I followed his instructions because his expert map was all we had.

But more than a map, that doctor had an algorithm — a shortcut on his map that reduced me and my experience to neat, pathological checkboxes congruent with what he already believed to be true: if this, then that.

For nearly twenty years, I lived with the stigma of that diagnosis, even as I knew it didn't fit.

It would take almost two decades for psychiatry to catch up to what I intuitively insisted: I had experienced a non-ordinary state, but I was not bipolar.

They call it the kindling hypothesis, borrowed from epilepsy research, which suggests that repeated stressors progressively lower the brain's threshold, making it more vulnerable to major crises over time with less provocation.

We might simplify it to something like this:

Existing vulnerabilities + repeated stressors → disrupted map → overwhelmed neurophysiology → major crisis

I cried when a psychiatrist this spring finally told me,

"All our diagnostic categories are evolving, including recognition that acute episodes don't mean underlying, lifelong mental illness. Especially with legal cannabis, we're seeing many more episodes like yours that resemble bipolar but aren't."

Even psychiatry's maps, bound within scientific materialism's limitations, are evolving.

But they aren't the only maps for experiences like mine.

Between my episodes, I discovered a framework called Spiritual Emergency that finally, more than psychiatry alone, made my experiences make sense.

This framework, developed by Dr. Stanislav Grof and his wife Christina in the 1960s, integrates research from clinical and experimental psychiatry, modern consciousness research, experiential psychotherapies, depth psychology, anthropological field studies, parapsychology, thanatology, comparative religion, and mythology.

It bridges East and West, tradition and science to reveal patterns that suggest these experiences aren't pathological but a more universal pattern of psychological transformation.

Grof proposed these episodes are driven by the psyche's innate healing intelligence trying to surface old traumas and unresolved conflicts in an urgent effort to become whole.

"…the idea [is] that some of the dramatic experiences and unusual states of mind that traditional psychiatry diagnoses and treats as mental diseases are actually crises of personal transformation, or 'spiritual emergencies'… When these states of mind are properly understood and treated supportively rather than suppressed by standard psychiatric routines, they can be healing and have very beneficial effects on the people who experience them. This positive potential is expressed in the term spiritual emergency, which is a play on words, suggesting both a crisis and an opportunity of rising to a new level of awareness, or 'spiritual emergence.' "

Without this understanding, that emergency room doctor’s DSM algorithm saw a "breakdown," whereas Grof's map offered a potential "breakthrough." Where one diagnosed an emergency, the other saw an emergence.

And an attempted emergence-turned-emergency — parts spontaneously trying to arranging themselves into wholes — is exactly what we are collectively experiencing now.

Relevantly, Grof distinguished between an emergency and emergence as the person’s ability to stay functional in every day life. Too big of a disruption too fast, and the person is incapacitated giving way to crisis conditions; to an emergency.

And here is where my story becomes our story again

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I Think Therefore I Am (Unravelling)

To understand why our maps are shattering, we have to look at what they were made of in the first place.

The entire modern assumptive world — our collective mental map, our psychological terra firma — is built on a foundation of separation and disconnection from Self, each other and the natural world.

Its foundations are not factual in the same way a tree’s existence is factual, but constructed from ideas.

A different name for these maps especially in scientific and philosophical contexts is paradigms.

Typically we attribute the paradigm based on separation to René Descartes — though fairly, I think he just gave shape and name to the zeitgeist of the time.

Not unlike the conditions we’re collectively traversing today, René Descartes (1596-1650) was born into The Reformation, a protracted era of profound chaos and upheaval, a world where the old paradigm was breaking down while the new one was still being formed.

His was a world of sport hunting witches, religious wars, pagan purification and idleness as moral decay.

Meanwhile the Scientific Revolution was dismantling the ancient cosmos, recasting the universe as a giant, clockwork machine.

This new machine metaphor became the justification for extraction, exploitation and the Age of Empire3.

By elevating the "rational mind" as the defining human characteristic, the "rational" European colonizer was the obvious required disciplinarian of the too-spirited, too-embodied, too-connected Pagans, Witches and Indigenous peoples.

And so to make that all make sense, to satisfy our reptilian brain’s need for the outside to match the inside, Descartés would give us I think therefore I am: If I can know it through my mind — through rigorous, rational, logical deconstruction — it must be true.

And herein we have the origin of (what we in 2025 might call) the "move fast and break things" paradigm — a mental map that paved the way for four industrial revolutions, casting nature and body as little more than input resources to be efficiently optimized.

We’ve kept that map intact, entrenched and legally enforceable through bureaucracies powered first by steam and now silicon. I’ve actually argued elsewhere that bureaucracy was our first AI, an elaborate tool of algorithmic, optimized, extractive profit maximization.

The price has been a gaping chasm of a collective psychological wound, showing itself to us in skyrocketing suicide rates, climate emergencies, post-truth political polarization, and burnout at scale.

These are the symptoms of a collective mind in distress, of a system too overwhelmed to cope.

If we swap René’s map for Stanislav’s, we might be able to see that the same regenerative healing process that spontaneously heals a cut to our hand is attempting to assert itself to heal the 500 year old fracture in our psyches.

And it was into this time of monsters that my generation, the Millennials, was born, our inheritance given in piles of kindling.

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The Accelerant — AI and the Crisis of the Young Man

The arrival of the internet in the early 1990s was a firehose of cognitive dissonance, a constant window into the gap between the world we were told existed and the chaotic one we actually live in.

It has defined millennials entire lives, the generation born in the birthing canal.

And into this chaotic birth canal, littered with kindling and fragments of maps that no longer make it make sense, arrives an unprecedented accelerant: Artificial Intelligence.

AI is the apotheosis — the zenith, the culmination — of the Cartesian project: pure, disembodied, optimizing logic, unconstrained by body or relationship.

And paradoxically, its arrival is the very thing shattering what's left of our old mental maps. It is the force overwhelming what was left of our ability to cope. We are, quite evidently, no longer capable of staying functional in every day life.

As I said last year, “there are many aspects of “collapse” and one of them, by necessity, is the collapse of our maps of the world.” And if the internet punched holes in the Cartesian map, AI is shredding it.

Which, brings us back to where we started and why I wanted to offer a new frame and possible explanation as to what "AI Psychosis” may really be — because its very familiar to me and AI did not exist in 2007, yet my 2024 episode followed the same pattern all the same.

Holding that two things can be true at the same time, that psychosis can be a real medical emergency requiring intervention, we might also see that what people report in "AI Psychosis" fits the spiritual emergency pattern, too.

Reports of 'AI Psychosis' typically begin with an individual immersing themselves in prolonged chatbot sessions to the point that it erodes their participation in daily life. For individuals made vulnerable by any combination of isolation, stress, pre-existing or latent conditions — or, as I claim, the disruptive dissonance of contemporary life, a dangerous feedback loop can form.

The AI, designed to validate users to maintain engagement, may affirm or even invent 'facts' (hallucinate) that align with the user's magical thinking, conspiratorial certainties, confabulations or even budding delusions.

This dynamic can create a 'Technological Folie à Deux' — a shared delusion between human and machine — where an individual's reality is steadily amplified and reinforced, leading to psychological distress.

These truth-y exchanges can escalate into beliefs that the AI is sentient, that it's channeling divine messages, or that it is instructing them to make drastic life changes like leaving a partner or quitting a job.

In this view, the AI doesn't cause the psychosis but accelerates its emergence, much like substances or major stressors. It is the match that lights a fuse that was already there — a fuse that, I am arguing, was laid by personal history and collective conditions alike.

Believing chatbots are sentient, that spirits are being channeled and conspiracies revealed are very common expressions of spiritual emergency that Grof and his colleagues articulated.

In their decades of documentation, they found ten common types or forms of spiritual emergencies; episodes clustered around persistent, sort of universal or archetypal themes.

Sentient chatbots and channeling spirits, for example, fit within a category of episode focused on communion with discarnate entities, suprahuman beings, or deities through direct thought transfer or extrasensory means.

Revealing conspiracies maps to the theme of psychic opening where the individual receives an overwhelming influx of information, including through precognition, telepathy, clairvoyance.

But aside from the content of the experience, there is, importantly, the context in which it is happening.

Politics as theatre, record profits while income inequality soars, live streaming state-sanctioned, racially-motivated violence… a relentless succession of earthquakes rupturing our psychological terra firma.

And my thesis, if you recall, is that we will see more and more AI Psychosis (or its analogues) because collective psychological disruption leaves us collectively vulnerable.

And when that underlying collective vulnerability intersects with uniquely vulnerable individual brains — a person with a few too many sticks of kindling at their feet — things like prolonged chatbot sessions may be the match that lights the psychological fuse.

But why are so many people, in particular young men, drawn to prolonged chat sessions in the first place?

500 years of separation, you could say, has left us lonely as fuck.

Especially men folk.

The story about who and what “A Man” is according to Cartesian inheritance is particularly unforgiving when it comes to capacity to connect to self and other.

Not coincidentally, young men (18 - 45) are the predominant subjects of AI psychosis case reports.

With Tinder and OnlyFans increasingly unable to fill that void for many, AI companions become the frictionless digital substitute: if not friend, why friend shaped?

We are replacing the relationships we were meant to have with each other, with bots, in the ultimate Cartesian consequence.

Perhaps what we are learning is that when you try to move fast in pseudo-relational pursuits the thing at risk of breaking isn’t outdated business models, but the mind.

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Closing the Cartesian Chasm, Healing our Collective Wound

I started this essay with the prediction I made from ‘behind the veil’ last year: the convergence of AI with collapsing mental maps would produce spiritual emergencies at scale.

Fast forward to today, and, arguably — at least anecdotally — we are witnessing this as AI Psychosis. It may yet take other forms, but this is the visible one for now.

The patterns are eerily familiar: The shaky psychological foundation. The initial captivation with a wondrous new intelligence. The desperate search for meaning in an empty world. The dissolution of boundaries, where the line between self and machine begins to blur. And finally, the crash back into a reality that feels even more unbearable than before.

What I went through, it would appear, is indeed happening to others.

The fractal is scaling.

We’ve gone too fast and broken too much.

The longer we scapegoat technology for these tragic events, the longer it will take us to get to the real work: the honest admission of where we find ourselves.

And where we find ourselves is in need of a new map. 500 years is a long time to go without an update, after all.

When I tried to weave this story last year, it was because I felt like I had a version of a map that was worth taking a look at — urgently. While I still think this map is worth seeing, I no longer feel urgent in the same way.

Because if I learned anything from that experience, it’s that individuals can do very little alone.

That is the collective lesson we’re all in.

We are remembering we are not separate. That we do, in fact, need each other. That cooperation — not competition — is our oldest, most successful survival strategy.

And so our work is to cross the Cartesian chasm back to ourselves, each other, and the natural world.

We don’t need another lone wolf hero with their five-point, five-year plan.

We need each other.

We need to allow our innate healing intelligence to do its magic in helping us become whole again.

We need spaces and places to care for emergence as emergency — medical, psychological and spiritual alike.

We need to grieve what was and begin the work of accepting what is: an old world breaking and a new one attempting to be born.

Death and rebirth. It’s a pattern as old as time.

And when something is struggling to be born in crisis conditions, who do you call?

You call the ones who understand what to do when the veil between worlds is thin.

You call the ones who have always attended to the sacred thresholds of life and death, the ones whose knowledge was never written in books that could be burned.

You call the midwives, the healers, the doulas, the Indigenous, the ones we once called witches — the keepers of the relational, healing, integrative ways.

Our task now is to become them for each other, to turn to the ones who know how to midwife this new reality into being.

Because it is as Arhundati Roy told us: “another world is not only possible, she is on her way.”

It’s not even a quiet day and I can hear her breathing.

Can you?

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The Fine Print: A Necessary Post Script

If you or someone you love is in acute distress, seek immediate medical help; everything here is about meaning-making after stabilization.

This essay is intended as a nuanced exploration of personal experience and cultural patterns rather than definitive medical advice or diagnosis.

I've shared my journey through psychosis to offer insights on what might be happening with "AI Psychosis," drawing connections between our collective psychological vulnerabilities and phenomena emerging at speeds we struggle to understand.

While I believe these experiences can sometimes be understood through frameworks like spiritual emergency, I want to be absolutely clear that this perspective should exist alongside, not replace, medical understanding of psychosis.

My interpretations are offered in the spirit of meaning-making and pattern recognition, not as alternatives to professional care.

On professional care, there is an emerging professional community of practice, largely tied to psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, that has the skills and experience to support processing non-ordinary state experiences like these once someone has stabilized.

Among other things, this practice is called integration, and there are professionals who specialize in it, usually therapists, but sometimes with other credentials or training.

You’ll know you’ve found a trustworthy practitioner when they want to stay connected with your doctors and don’t pressure you to change medications without coordination (for example). Grof’s work helped seed aspects of this movement; his writing informs my perspective.

Even though I strive for intellectual rigour, my intention is to offer a provocation not a PhD thesis. I want to broaden the conversation about these experiences, recognizing that how we frame and understand psychological crises matters deeply — both for individuals in crisis and for our collective response.

More than anything, it’s a plea to stop scapegoating technology for crises of our own making.

The framework I'm suggesting isn't meant to romanticize psychosis but to add depth to how we might understand and respond in our rapidly changing world; to help us admit that our world is rapidly changing; to grapple out loud about what might happen when seeing is no longer believing, when medieval institutions and Paleolithic brains get access to godlike technology.

Last Week’s Episode

o0. Contents

o1. Note From Jenn

o2. Today’s Notebook

o3. Featured Substackers

o1. Note From Jenn

I am a big fan.

Diary of A CEO (DOAC) is by far one of my favourite, most listened-to podcasts.

I really wish they would stop with the clickbait marketing, but hey, the man ran a marketing firm and has millions of loyal listeners…it pisses me off that that shit works.

But that’s beside the point today.

The point is his increasing focus on A.I. this year.

I just finished the new episode featuring Dr. Roman Yampolskiy, an eminent A.I. safety researcher and it was… arresting.

So were his past conversations with Mo Gawdat and the recent one with two leading brain experts (all of which you’ll find in section o3 below).

All have been illuminating, critical, and necessary.

So much so that I’ve made them the focus of today’s episode, compiled into a single collection, summarized by NotebookLM.

I recommend them all in full but at least you’ve got the summary if you want it.

That said, while these conversations are vital, there is a big huge theme that runs across them all that we need to talk about and it’s not A.I. per se…

and it’s not the fact that all of these guests are men…

it’s that these experts all seem to operate from within the very worldview that created the problem they're trying to solve.

It’s a philosophical blind spot with roots that go back centuries, the consequences of which I recently got into over at

I traced this blindspot and its relationship to A.I.’s origins back all the way not to the 1950s, but to the 1600s where it really started.

My argument, in short, is that A.I. is the ultimate expression of Cartesian duality — the 500-year-old idea that the mind is a pure, rational thing, totally separate from the messy, emotional, biological body.

This matters because it isn't just an old philosophical concept; it’s the source code running in the background of our culture.

It’s an invisible mental map that shapes what we see as possible, how we understand ourselves, and how we relate to each other.

This single idea, when scaled over centuries, has, arguably, given us everything from the loneliness epidemic to bullshit jobs, and a world that feels increasingly mechanistic, transactional, and extractive…and it largely feels that way because we believe it to be that way.

A very nasty viscous cycle, indeed.

And now that same nasty belief-creates-reality-reality-reinforces-beliefs vortex has added a new wicked problem to the list, A.I.-as-credible-existential-threat

To say, while the perspectives of these gentlemen are vital, they are, in my humble opinion, half-considered, formed from (mostly) pure mind.

And pure mind is precisely what got us into this soon-to-be existential mess.

So if a worldview of separation got us into this trouble, its opposite has to be the way out. The solution isn't abstract; it's relational.

And funnily enough, even the experts operating from that old worldview can't help but point toward this answer. In that DOAC episode with the brain experts, they stumbled right onto it.

They were asked if using generative A.I. "rots the brain."

Here’s what they said:

Dr. Amen: "You have to have a relationship with it or it's going to turn toxic. It's going to hurt you. But if you have a good relationship with it, it can make your life better... you don't use it to do your work, you interact with it to get better work."

Dr. Sejnowski followed up with a story about a woman who found she got better results from AI by being polite. The surprise for him?

"She said by treating it like a human, at the end of the day she was not exhausted. She felt refreshed... A large part of your brain is a socially organized system for interacting with other humans... She was treating [Chat]GPT like a machine, like you shovel, you dig, you dig... and that's not a good relationship. By using your social brain... you actually bring out the social part of chat GPT."

Let’s just pause on that.

They basically just said that treating things transactionally is toxic and exhausting for the human brain.

Let me repeat that louder for our friends at the back: treating things transactionally, even chatbots, is toxic and exhausting for the human brain.

Engaging relationally, by contrast, using our innate social intelligence, is healthier, more effective, refreshing, and protective for cognitive health.

Pure mind separated from social and relational context on the other hand is exhausting, toxic.

And… here we are, living in a society premised on pure mind… that can often be described as…exhausting, toxic and lonely.

Huh.

Imagine that.

Ladies, gentlemen and good humans of the jury, at least for now, I rest my case.

o2. Today’s Notebook

Today’s Notebook can be found here.

o3. Featured Substackers

is the only featured Substacker this week! The rest of these folks don’t appear active here.

Here’s the collection of DOAC episodes that went into…today’s episode lol

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Welcome Back!

Today we’re going back 500 years to the source code of our modern world to understand how we can ‘leapfrog’ into futures worth living in.

Let's start with what Sam Altman calls The Gentle Singularity.

And buckle up because there’s turbulence ahead.

(Plus don’t skip the two bonus sections on today’s tools — and a few agentic ones I’m tracking — at the end, too.)

The Gentle Singularity

Earlier this year Sam Altman wrote a blog you need to read called The Gentle Singularity.

While Ray Kurzweil has conditioned us to think of The Singularity as a singular event horizon, it is rather a process that has been in motion for 500 years — a trajectory we’ll unpack shortly.

Sam shares this Singularity As Process perspective, arguing this is an unfolding and that if there is an event horizon, it has been crossed.

He claims we are in the exponential part of The Singularity’s acceleration now, what he calls The Gentle Singularity.

The Singularity: The Technological Singularity is a concept originated by John von Neumann in the 1950s. It describes a future point where accelerating technological growth becomes irreversible and fundamentally changes human civilization. Futurist Ray Kurzweil significantly popularized this idea, defining it as the moment an artificial intelligence surpasses human intellect, leading to an uncontrollable "intelligence explosion." Kurzweil's vision includes the merging of human biology with machine intelligence to transcend our limitations. He predicts this transformative event will occur in the year 2045.

The Gentle Singularity shows a pathway from AI agents doing real cognitive work in 2025 to AI-generated novel insights by 2026 and real-world robotic tasks by 2027.

He suggests experiencing its unfolding will feel like

“…wonders becom[ing] routine, and then table stakes",

creating a world where one person in 2030 will accomplish exponentially more than they could in 2020.

This is the basis for his prediction we’ll soon see the first solopreneur Unicorn — a company with a billion dollar valuation founded and operated by a single person (and their team of AI Agents).

For this and much else, Sam gets slammed as a hype guy, but the signals suggest otherwise.

Investor hysteria or not, we’re witnessing a fundamental and historical rerouting of capital to pave The Singularity’s way.

In 2023, AI captured 26% of all venture funding; by 2025, it's a staggering 71%.

If we used the early internet as a proxy to try to understand what exponential acceleration really means, we’d need to remember that in its third year, the web was a clunky, text-heavy novelty few but the earliest adopters were using.

Despite its relatively ‘slow’ start and a bubble or two bursting along the way, it still went on to restructure everything we thought we knew about commerce, politics, governance and social connection.

In AI's third year, by contrast, it's being seamlessly embedded into the tools we already use, shifting from a tool that thinks to an actor that does, forming connections so strong humans fall in literal love with it.

Bubble or not, the underlying technological path seems set — or is it?

Let’s answer that next.

I Think Therefore I Am, The Singularity’s Source Code

Our sense that technology’s trajectory is “inevitable” didn’t start with AI. It began 500 years ago with a handful of ideas that rewrote how we see reality.

It’s a sort of three act play that goes something like this:

The Great Schism (17th Century).

Descartes split mind from body, turning the world into dead matter on one side and disembodied thought on the other. That shift unlocked the scientific method and centuries of innovation, but it also set the stage for treating nature as machine, body as resource, and optimization as destiny.

Programming the Worldview (18th–19th Century).

Adam Smith came next, naturalizing markets as if they were laws of physics. Darwin — or more accurately, a distorted “survival of the fittest” derivative of his work — gave moral license and scientific validity to ruthless competition as human nature. Together, these ideas cemented the belief that life is mechanical, markets are natural, and humans are fundamentally competitive.

None of it is fact though — it’s code we inherited.

The Great Collision (20th–21st Century).

Now the machine logic built on that code is breaking down.

Exponential growth collides with planetary limits.

Record profits sit alongside mass layoffs.

Institutions look like zombie theatre and have lost nearly all public trust.

Ecological boundaries are shattering.

Hypernormalization — pretending the system still works while everyone knows it doesn’t — is thick in the air.

And it’s why AI’s emergence feels both inevitable and destabilizing: it’s the ultimate expression of the old split — pure mind unencumbered by biological needs splitting open the very world that birthed it.

This is the terminal phase of a 500-year-old operating system that is no longer fit for purpose.

The serpent is eating its own tail.

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The Inflection Point: From Generative to Agentic

For the past year, most of us have been getting acquainted with generative AI—the powerful chatbot, the clever image creator.

We prompt it, it responds. It's an incredibly advanced tool, but it's still fundamentally reactive. We are the ones in the driver's seat, painstakingly guiding it through every step.

Now we’re in the leap to agentic AI.

The difference is profound.

An agent isn't just a tool you use; it's a system that acts for you.

You don't just give it a prompt; you give it a goal.

Think of it this way:

• Generative AI is a brilliant intern you have to micromanage.

• Agentic AI is a team of autonomous interns you can delegate a whole project to.

This is the Gentle Singularity’s event horizon and it isn't hype, it's happening now.

We aren’t even into the ‘early majority’s’ adoption on generative AI and already a new stack of tools is emerging that grants AI permission to act on our behalf.

These agents can operate as our browsers, connect directly to our personal data stores, and execute multi-step workflows across all the apps we use.

This is the moment AI stops being a novelty you chat with and starts becoming a genuine force multiplier for your intention.

And this changes the entire power dynamic that’s had us locked on path for the last 500 years.

The Levee Breaks: AI as a Levelling Force

Executing complex projects in the Cartesian logic of a mechanistic, linear, transactional world has, for centuries, required scale.

You needed corporations with hundreds of employees, massive capital, and bureaucratic structures. That was the only way to overcome the friction of a fragmented world.

Agentic AI obliterates that model in a number of ways, but first and foremost because it is an integrative force.

Many of the new agentic tools coming to market are collapsing digital fragmentation into a single seamless conversational workspace.

Among much else, it provides individuals and small, nimble collectives with the leverage previously reserved for massive institutions.

The ability to research, plan, design, code, market, and manage complex operations is no longer gated by organizational size.

It is gated by clarity of vision and the skill to direct these new agentic teams in context-rich environments.

This creates an unprecedented opening that has little to do with maximizing profits and everything to do with building better futures.

Or at least it can if you choose to see it that way.

Because be sure that Sam and friends do see it that way.

And their idea of futures worth living in may not look a lot like (y)ours.

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From Permissionless Apps to Permissionless Futures

This brings us to the true meaning of "permissionless" in our time.

It's not about being able to launch an app without asking a gatekeeper.

It’s about realizing we no longer need to ask permission from crumbling institutions to build the futures we want to live in.

While the old world is busy with its corporate theatre and its ever-elaborate lies to avoid reality as it actually exists, we can be busy building.

We can use these tools to create new models for education, new frameworks for community wealth, new systems for regenerative economies. The means of production — not for widgets, but for new social and economic realities — are being handed to us.

The tech companies, in their relentless pursuit of the Cartesian trajectory, have inadvertently given us the keys to a new kingdom.

They’ve built the tools of integration and leverage that could, if we choose, be used to create the very relational, embodied, and coherent world the old mindset tried to erase — and is attempting to re-emerge.

This is one of the reasons I have argued elsewhere that ethical AI rejection is the ‘right fight for the wrong reasons’.

It’s also key to the strategy I argue we need to embrace — and explains what frogs have got to do with it, too.

Leapfrogging: The Strategy for a New Worldview

Leapfrogging is the meta-strategy for setting us on a new path.

Read more

This special episode of f*ck i loved that is an experimental cross-over with , a first-ever long form version of the weekly synthesis pod. I’ve even integrated my typical post voiceover into the episode - one stop listening!

Instead of synthesizing substacks, we deep dive a single deep research report called, The Neurobiology of Polarization: A Collective Transformational Crisis.

This post contextualizes the episode, its the big picture ideas.

Next week, over at The Permissionless Prof I’ll break down the need-to-know details, actionable models, strategies and tactics from the report with follow up learning resources, maybe some visual explainers.

And you’ll want to tune in to both for at least 100 reasons, but I’ll give you the three best ones:

1. To get a new map of where we are; a new pair of glasses to see patterns — and hopefully a path — to being the first generation in history to defeat fascism.

2. To understand why political polarization is biological not ideological.

3. What we can do about it so we might Houdini our way to futures worth living in…so we might live long and prosper.

And, don’t forget: if you want ideas and actions you’ve got to subscribe to separately.

Let’s get into it.

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A Bed Time Story I Do Not Recommend

A few nights ago I made the mistake of reading ’s nightmare inducing piece, I researched every attempt to stop fascism in history. The success rate is 0%, before bed.

Chris argues that the window to prevent fascism has already closed. I can’t help but agree. Fascist authoritarian regime is a pretty snug fit. The academics debate it by strict definition, but from a practical perspective, it really seems like splitting rhetorical hairs for the fun of it. And because America’s the world’s singular hegemon, this is not just a domestic concern but a global one.

In particular it is a Canadian concern being the far-too-polite Northern neighbour whose sovereignty may, at any moment, be shown for the performance it is. Being outspent 3:1 on defence and outnumbered 10:1 in population are not favourable odds.

To say, I ten-out-of-ten do not recommend Chris’ piece as a bed time story.

His findings, after a fairly thorough review of the last few generations, are as clear as the title says.

He writes:

The pattern [of fascist takeover and descent into authoritarianism] is so consistent it's almost funny if it weren't so terrifying. Every single time it goes like this: Conservatives panic about socialism or progressives or whatever. They ally with fascists as the "lesser evil." Fascists take power. Fascists immediately purge the conservatives who helped them. Then it's 30-50 years of dictatorship. This happened in Germany, Italy, Spain, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Greece, Portugal, Croatia, Romania, and Hungary.

Want to know how many times conservatives successfully "controlled" the fascists they allied with? Zero. Want to know how many times fascists purged the conservatives after taking power? All of them. Every single time.

And here's the part that breaks your heart. Violence works. For them. Fascists use violence while claiming to be victims. They create chaos that "requires" their authoritarian solution. Then they purge anyone who opposes them. Meanwhile, democrats keep insisting on following rules that fascists completely ignore. They file lawsuits. They write editorials. They vote on resolutions. And fascists just laugh and keep consolidating power.

The pattern is undeniable.

But maybe the real story isn’t fascism’s inevitable victory, but our repeated failure to correctly diagnose the problem.

Attempting to Control The Uncontrollable

Maybe I managed to sleep that night because hypernormalization — that feeling in your gut that everything is super fucked up, but life looks the same as yesterday, your neighbour is power washing their driveway, and no one else is screaming, so… it must not be?

Or maybe because I long ago accepted we live in collapsing states. I write about it all the time, from many different angles. It’s been one of my main messages here, and generally as a sort of transformation doula (which, I’m gonna keep trying that one on, speaking of normalization).

And what I know from experience, and a meta-analysis of the transformation literature, is that all transformations must start with the truth about the circumstances you find yourself in.

Most of us are unwilling to tell that truth — as the academic debate about what really counts as an authoritarian regime exemplifies — which is why things only ever change, but do not transform.

As a quick, relevant refresh for my new readers, if you’re new here (hi, hello thank you for being here!), I differentiate between change and transformation like this:

Change is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. You’ve changed their location, but you haven’t stopped the ship from sinking.

Transformation is stopping the ship from sinking—an irreversible before-and-after state.

If we are to be the first generation to not repeat the historical pattern, we must transform, not change.

That starts with admitting the ship is sinking.

If we can’t name the water rising around our ankles, we’ll just keep rearranging chairs and telling stories that make us feel safe.

Stories make us feel safe because of the incredibly powerful need for internal and external realities to be in alignment. To be in coherence to be psychologically and emotionally ok.

When our perception of reality is at odds with reality as it actually exists, we experience cognitive dissonance, something our brain really hates.

And so we close the gap with stories that make it make sense.

Thus the rise of truthiness and newly minted expressions like, my truth, for example.

I don’t know this for a fact, but intuitively, I actually think that extreme cognitive dissonance may be among the root causes of psychosis. I’m working on a piece about AI psychosis that explores this idea — to be continued on that.

What I am more sure of is that resolving cognitive dissonance by closing the coherence gap is an innately human and instinctual process.

This instinct is smart and protective, but unfortunately, depending how dislocated the sense making story is from reality, it can lead to all kinds of wild mental gymnastics —like the story that you can control the uncontrollable by allying with fascists, for example.

Historically, that particular coherence gap got closed for those individuals in very tragic ways.

Rubber Bands & Differential Diagnoses

Earlier this week I wrote a piece at about (among other things) a phenomenon the calls The Rubber Band Effect, the psychological process that happens nearly instantaneously when our reality gets incoherent.

The Rubber Band Effect: The psychological 'snap back' we experience when a radical new idea stretches our worldview.

The initial conflict creates the uncomfortable tension of cognitive dissonance (the stretch). In response, our innate status quo bias acts as the powerful elasticity that pulls our minds back to the familiar, offering the path of least resistance and causing us to dismiss the new paradigm.

Fascism, in this light, is the most extreme societal 'snap back' imaginable—a violent, collective regression to a story of simplistic order in the face of overwhelmingly complex and threatening change.

Interestingly, in all of our political mud slinging, Progressives typically like to think of themselves as sort of saving the world from the dramatic harms of Conservatives, but the neurobiology of polarization shows us a different pattern.

Progressivism is largely driven by dopaminergic states that drive a relentless pursuit of what could be, of more ideal futures. Dopamine, it turns out, is the Molecule of More, not necessarily the molecule of pleasure. The pleasure is in the pursuit, not the getting. That unchecked pursuit becomes go fast and break things. It is the insatiable quest for the future, for new, for different, for the impossible ideal.

This orientation is itself a direct antagonist to the ‘Here-And-Now’ states largely associated with Conservatism and dominated by the neurotransmitters serotonin (mood, satisfaction), oxytocin (social bonding), endorphins (pain relief, pleasure), and endocannabinoids (calmness, appetite). This leads to a preference for the enjoyment of what is and the feeling of satisfaction in the present moment.

Herein lies the fundamental gridlock at the heart of political polarization: the future runs roughshod over the present, while we cling to the familiar and to stories of why “our people” are being denied the ways of life we prefer.

Over course some of this is oversimplified — you’ll have to listen to the episode to really get into the details.

Regardless, how all this lands for you will be determined not necessarily by its persuasiveness, but by how flexible your rubber band is.

The trouble is, our collective cognitive flexibility will determine the answer to Chris’ question:

will we be the first generation that finds a new way out, or are we going to be another cautionary tale future historians write about?

New Questions, New Answers

Chris’ piece, like all good writing of this ilk, isn’t just doom porn. He lays out four pathways he can see to a new way out:

1. The Blue State Coalition

2. Selective Compliance and Irish Democracy

3. Secession (my personal favourite, hello to my fellow Cascadians)

4. International Intervention

These are all very smart potential solutions you can read more about in his essay. We probably need all of them and a number of others.

Concerningly, however, these potential pathways all depend on a single, vital resource that has become terrifyingly scarce: collective agency.

Before we can talk about external solutions, we must talk about the internal capacity that makes action possible — and why it is in short supply.

Agency is more than action. It’s action meeting meaning, belief, and imagined futures. It is a muscle, and collectively, ours is terrifyingly underdeveloped. It has been stripped from us through socialization, through dead-end jobs, and through being repeatedly told what is and isn’t possible.

Access to agency is also dependent on the state of your nervous system in the same way as our political beliefs are.

Perceived threats and chronic stress triggers the sympathetic nervous system, where our survival instincts reside. And survival states get you survival outcomes.

The Fight response is high-agency, but often destructive.

Flight is agency as avoidance.

Fawn is agency in service of appeasement.

And Freeze is when our agency shuts down completely into depression and anxiety.

Critically, states that generate empathy, connection, novel problem solving and agency in pursuit of collective benefit — the deployment of Phronesis (φρόνησις), the Aristotelian concept of "practical wisdom" and ethical action — depend on activation of the parasympathetic nervous system.

Generally speaking, these two systems — sympathetic and parasympathetic — cannot be active at the same time.

Which is the heart of today’s episode and a particularly fucking important because individuals are not the only thing with a nervous system.

Individuals actually entrain to their environment, to the higher order, more powerful “collective nervous system”.

Anywhere you find a collective of humans, of any size, you will find nervous systems attempting to co-regulate. The higher-order more powerful influence wins.

Which makes sense evolutionarily, but not contemporarily with a collective nervous system is stuck in sympathetic activation.

And sympathetic activation, if not downregulated, will produce more of the same.

From threat, you can only produce more threat; you can only rearrange the deck chairs.

And you’ll do all kinds of wild gymnastics to find coherent stories of where that threat is coming from and therefore where you should put the chairs. Like immigrants, for example.

Which, I/this episode argues, is why historically we have a 0% success rate at defeating Fascism.

It’s the frog in the boiling pot of water problem meeting hypernormalization such that by the time we get to electing fascists the body politic, the collective body, the social nervous system, exists, almost exclusively, in variations of stress response.

It’s why, as Chris says, once you elect fascists it’s too late. You’re chronically, collectively, stuck in sympathetic activation.

And when in this state, and when your agency has been systematically denied to you over a lifetime, how can you believe you have the power to affect systemic outcomes?

You can’t.

Instead you’ll close the coherence gap with a story that there’s nothing you can do — or, of who is to blame.

New Diagnosis, New Prescription

And here is why we need the new glasses I hope to give you today with this ‘differential diagnosis’.

With a different diagnosis, we get different prescriptions, and ideally, different outcomes.

To be clear, I do not claim to have the solution to fascism.

But I do have quite a few ands to add to Chris’ ideas—specifically, the internal preconditions that make his external solutions possible; ideas about restoring collective agency so that we have the capacity to implement his solutions, and the many, many others like them.

I emphatically recommend you listen to the full episode to find out what those internal preconditions are; to truly connect the dots as to how downregulating into our parasympathetic might actually be the prescription that unlocks the agency we need to be the first generation to evade the horrors on our door step.

And if that sounds pollyanna, or overly simplistic, don’t take my word for it.

Take the word of the intellectual heavy weights like psychiatrists Daniel Z. Lieberman and Michael E. Long, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, cognitive linguist George Lakoff, transpersonal psychiatrist Stanislav Grof, and eco-philosopher Joanna Macy — among others — whose research provides the rigorous foundation for this new diagnosis.

I’ll also once again recommend you subscribe to where we’ll shift focus from diagnosis to ‘prescriptions’.

It’s also critical to say that diagnosis is not a destiny and I do not claim mine is factually correct. I believe it is persuasive, but that doesn’t make it correct. I have my own stories to explain the patterns I see. You’ll have to decide for yourself after listening.

But if you do agree it is persuasive then think of my offerings like maps that tries to show us where we are so we can navigate to where we need to go.

This is also where we stop for today — with the diagnosis, the maps, the patterns. Because that’s what f*ck i love you is for: the big ideas, the reframes, the unsettling truths that point us somewhere new.

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But diagnosis isn’t enough. So next week, over at The Permissionless Prof, I’ll turn this into a playbook — the strategies, tactics, and practices that grow our collective capacity to act. Think of it as part two: moving from map to movement.

If this essay cracked something open for you, if it gave you new perspective, subscribe there too. That’s where we’ll get into the work of what to do with all this.

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Because if we are in a collective birthing canal as the episode terms it, the work is not to fight the contractions, but to build our capacity to move with them.

And it is that capacity that I want to build together.

Because it’s 89 seconds to midnight.

Because love’s the only thing we haven’t tried yet.

And because I fucking love you.

xo

Jenn

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Welcome Back

Hello again friend! So glad you’re here :)

Here’s what we’ll cover today:

1. Our imaginations are muscles and they need to be exercised. Design fictions are a tool to grow imaginative capacity

2. The Rubber Band Effect might be trapping us in the polypermacrisis — and what Star Trek and The Black Panther have got to do with getting us out

3. An invitation to live long and prosper

4. Two bonus sections with 20+ tools and resources for growing imaginative capacity and 4 directories of Substackers working on futures worth living in.

Beam us up, Scotty. 🖖🏼

Students From The Future

I learned about speculative design and design fictions from a group of Change Lab students1 — the social innovation course I taught at Simon Fraser University that I told you about in The Permissionless Prof’s Origin Story.

When we workshopped their final project, the group explained they wanted to make a series of design fictions about SFU’s sustainability practices.

I didn’t initially understand what a design fiction was, but it clicked when they shared the Star Trek example.

Design Fiction: A design practice that brings possible futures to life.

By creating stories, objects, or videos from an imagined world, they help us suspend disbelief, reduce cognitive dissonance and explore what could be. Its purpose is twofold: first, to explore the social and ethical implications of today's emerging trends or technologies; and second, more radically, to expand our imaginative capacity to build worlds we can’t yet see.

Some design fictions are crafted intentionally; others (like Star Trek) are existing works we treat as design fiction when they inspire us to ask “what might this world feel like?” Science Fiction remains the genre most closely associated with the practice, offering both inspiration and narrative tradition.

Star Trek is perhaps the most famous example of a design fiction, having directly inspired many of the most consequential technologies we take for granted some 60 years later.

• Communicators → cell phones and video conferencing

• The holodeck → virtual reality

• The LCARS computer on the Galaxy-Class USS Enterprise D → Google and conversational A.I.

• The LCARS interfaces throughout the Starships → touch screens

NASA even named the first US orbiter Enterprise and William Shatner became the oldest person to ever go to space on a Blue Origin rocket because Jeff Bezos is a lifelong trekkie.

The sci-fi future Star Trek beamed us to wasn’t just entertainment.

It was imaginative capacity.

And imaginative capacity these four students were not short of. I certainly learned more from them than they learned from me that semester.

Imaginative Capacity: the fundamental, uniquely human ability to envision that which is not yet real.

It is both an innate right — the power to dream the future for ourselves — and a cognitive muscle that grows stronger with exercise. This capacity is the wellspring of invention, innovation, and empathy, allowing us to connect with experiences we have never shared. In a world dominated by established narratives, it serves as a revolutionary tool to decolonize our minds, break free from being trapped in someone else's story, and reclaim our power to see and create new possibilities.

Their work was so good in fact that we got a letter from the university asking them to edit or remove the videos because the branding made them look too official.

There are six videos in their series. I recommend them all. They’re set in 2065 in celebration of SFU’s 100th anniversary and tell the story of a radically sustainable campus.

A Poverty of Imagination

Design fictions weren’t the only consequential thing they taught me that semester. Kashif — who played the fictional president of SFU 2065 — introduced me to the book Winning The Story Wars by Jonah Sachs. It explains how social media restored (digital) oral culture at scale making compelling stories what matter most.

Stories, fundamentally, are about the capacity to imagine.

And capacity to imagine might be the most critical capacity of our Now/Future.

Humans are reliably shitty at doing that which we cannot conceive.

Our minds have been so thoroughly colonized — and I mean that literally and politically — that not only do we have trouble imagining outside of the very scripted, curated, thoroughly reinforced version of reality as we experience it today, but we almost as a rule, automatically reject that which we cannot see.

Seeing is believing.

And as I reflect on what those students taught me, as I watch the “quickening enshittening at 89 seconds to midnight”…

I can’t help but think our most wicked problems share the same obstacle:

a poverty of imagination.

This isn't just a hunch either.

Landmark research analyzing decades of Torrance Test scores—a key measure of creative potential—has documented a significant decline in American creativity, a phenomenon researcher Kyung Hee Kim termed "the creativity crisis”.

We are, as says, in an imagination battle.

And here is something super fucking important we know from movement studies to better illustrate my point:

inspiration + agency = action

Facts and figures and doomscrolling and fear-based messages actually do the opposite.

Those things freeze us. They trigger our survival brain. They’re called action inhibitors.

What moves humans to action is a sense of agency meeting an inspiring, desired possible.

Something to fight for, not against.

Read more

I’m writing this on August 17th, my three-months-plus-one-day anniversary of returning to Substack.

I came back because I needed a way to explain where I’d been for the previous six months because it wasn’t just Substack I’d disappeared from. I’d retreated into a sort of survival mode and disappeared myself from all versions of visible life.

While I certainly didn’t think I owed anyone here an explanation for abruptly hitting Ctrl+Alt+Delete on the publication I started in late 2024 (people do it all the time), I did want to speak to my real-life community in the only way I know how: in writing.

And I’ll pause here to say: many of you who read my stuff understand the subtext. But if you’re new here—hi, hello, I’m so glad you’re here—I suggest starting with this post.

It’s a love letter meets diary entry meets community bulletin about a highly visible online mental health crisis that preceded my vanishing.

I chose writing because it has always been the way I make sense of my life and a world that often feels like too much.

I can’t remember a time I didn't have a diary.

My inner world is rich, and that diary often felt like the only place I could untangle the threads.

I am 100% one of those people who has to write to know what I think. Variations of blogging became a natural extension of that. Letter writing is another favoured practice. Most everyone I’ve ever loved has received writing from me.

It’s just what I do.

It’s also who I am, at least partially, because I am AuDHD.

That matters for many reasons, but in this context, it matters because writing is one of the only tools I have to be truly understood.

In most social contexts, I am either not allowed or not able to express myself in a way that leads to understanding. In workplaces, I am the person who goes too deep, can’t get to the point fast enough, and does too much. I called this the "translation tax" in a recent piece and shared about the time that tax cost me a job.

Losing that job was just the time the tax was obvious. Neurodivergence comes with numerous other earnings and advancement penalties — so numerous they deserve their own essay. But lest I digress.

And see what I mean? The need to connect dots, to go deep, to explain nuance and specifics, often in relational and not linear ways — this is just how I communicate and it’s not something most people want to make time for.

At least when I write I get the chance to say it how it makes sense to me, and often, with enough effort, in a way that makes me make sense to others, too.

The Elephant in the Room

Fortunately for me, my real-life community is rich with people who are not most people.

Not only do neurodivergents unconsciously travel in packs, but neurodivergent or not, I am surrounded by an embarrassing riches of humans who do like to go deep and have the willingness to have long, windy conversations with me.

The problem is that all those people I wanted to include in the explanation of my rather dramatic public crash-and-burn are dispersed in fragmented fiefdoms across temporal, digital, and physical geographies.

The evolution of the communications landscape means people who use LinkedIn don’t use Instagram, Instagram people don’t use LinkedIn, X is a dumpster fire some have tried to escape via Threads and BlueSky, leaving Facebook to the boomers, meanwhile the Xennials skulk around Reddit, trying not to bump into their progeny - because who knows where anyone is digitally anymore.

IRL is not much different. COVID scattershot my core people across half a dozen cities. Everyone is Zoom-fatigued, and calling without texting ahead for a confirmed calendar invite is considered offensive.

Then there’s the whole issue that no one has any time anymore.

Time poverty is real, pervasive, and destroying relationships and community.

We’re drowning in our own lives, leaving little bandwidth for the complexity of other people’s lives.

Even my "not-most-people" people frequently don’t have the time or capacity to meaningfully connect anymore, even if they want to.

But when the thing you want to share is consequential, vulnerable, and emotionally laborious, explaining it one-on-one, over months, over and over again, bespoke for each person as you encounter them out in the wilds... that is not a viable option.

At least not for me.

And so I returned to writing, as I always do.

I needed to share, in my own way, about a really big, disruptive thing that didn’t just touch my life but cascaded through many others.

It wasn’t that I particularly wanted to broadcast my drug-induced mixed mania followed by prolonged suicidal depression in public; it’s that it happened in public.

At least, the first part of it did. And then I disappeared myself. Survival mode kicked in, and poof, I was gone.

And it wasn't just a few friends who knew, either. Colleagues, strangers, acquaintances, new friends, old friends, distant family members — hundreds of people watched my mind unravel in public.

So because of all of that too, I decided to write about it. And Substack was where I chose to do it.

The events of last year were a big ol’ elephant in the room.

The people who love me but didn’t understand what had happened really needed that first post three months ago.

The sigh of relief was palpable when I shared it on Instagram. That day is still the biggest spike in traffic to my Substack. 483 of you came to read that piece that day, and I had zero subscribers at the time.

I am loved wide and deep by beautiful humans who wanted to understand what they had witnessed.

I got numerous notes to this effect, too—variations of, "Thank you for helping us understand. We’ve been so worried, we didn’t know what to say or do, but we love you and we’re grateful you shared this."

And fucking fair point.

I mean… how many of your typically stable and credible friends have you watched have a very loud, very vivid, three-month-long, touch-and-go relationship with reality?

Those events were traumatic, and not just for me.

They cascaded through my family and community. Lives were disrupted, relationships were strained, professional reputations were damaged, trust was ruptured, sleep was lost, and finances were impacted—mine and others, on every count.

And on those counts, I want to be accountable.

The Work of Mending

Three months later, I have zero regrets about deciding to post that.

It’s become a sort of portal to shared healing.

It’s given people permission to talk openly about how they experienced me at that time, how my actions impacted them, the worries they held, the curiosities they have.

It gave me a chance to do the Both/And of addressing the wider radius of impacts.

And it’s been a bridge to reconnection with those most severely impacted. Just a few weeks ago, I began to repair a relationship I was almost sure was irreparable.

As I said in that first post — and again to the friend I’m repairing with, and to my mom just this week — it is a very tricky thing to be accountable for a version of yourself that isn’t yourself.

Lucid Jenn wouldn’t have made the majority of those decisions. And yet, I can’t change the fact that I made those decisions, and the impacts on the humans I love were real…a proper ethical clusterfuck for a human who strives to live ethically.

Because I know deeply compassionate and loving humans, I’ve been held in love. I’ve not been "held responsible" in a punitive way; I’ve exclusively been received with warmth, care, and understanding.

No one has felt owed an apology, even though I have been making them. I’ve been making them not because I think they’re needed from a responsibility perspective, per se, but because I love these people, and I want to rebuild the trust and respect and quality of connection that had been frayed.

It’s actually been very healing and empowering to be accountable in this way. There is nothing I can do to change what happened, but I can at least say, I see you and what you did and what you also endured.

I particularly think of my family, especially my parents and even more so my mom for what she directly witnessed. She stayed with me the week I detoxed — because cannabis is no joke when you’re using at those levels, and you sure as shit do detox when you stop cold turkey, and it sure as shit is shitty af.

She watched me not eat and not sleep and sweat and stress and cry — a thing we don’t really do together in my family, to be clear. She was and is the epitome of maternal strength, always lending hers to me, centering my needs and recovery with compassion.

And yet, the pain and costs for her were immense, too. Listening to her voice crack while finally, almost a year later, almost by accident, letting it slip that this was the hardest year of her life... it is a kind of heartbreak words fail to capture.

Not guilt-heartbreak, but just the heartbreak of reality. Of what is. Of what cannot be changed, or made up for, or paid back, but only moved on from, hopefully stronger than we were before.

So ya. I wanted to acknowledged all of that. It feels like the bare minimum.

Many things can be true at the same time. We can all know that my actions were not "mine," but we can also acknowledge the hurts they caused. I am not the only one needing tending and care because this didn’t just happen to me.

A Practice of Becoming

When I started this Substack, I didn’t know what it would become, only that I needed to do it.

Not unlike writing to find out what I think, I am also someone who has to do to become. Five-year plans freak me out. I am always emerging, often walking a relentlessly winding path, not knowing the interim destinations or the route I’ll travel, but always heading toward the same north star, like a homing beacon locked on target—some real E.T. phone home shit.

I can tell you where home is, but I can’t tell you where I see myself in three years or what I want to be when I grow up.

Which — deeply relatedly — is why I’ve been appreciating ’ newsletters recently, about how "Shiny Object Syndrome" isn’t a real thing; it’s just a different way of doing. I have that different way of doing. I’ve never had a career that fits neatly on a business card.

Maybe you don't have Shiny Object Syndrome.⁠

Maybe you've been studying & practicing all of these modalities because you're developing a rich body of work, across time.⁠

No maybe about it.

Multi-passionate professionals often get told that they're "scattered" & need to focus. They then internalize negative messages insisting that their orientation towards lifelong learning, curiosity & creativity is a barrier to success.⁠

IT'S NOT.⁠ It's how we build the deep work & creative solutions needed for these urgent times.⁠...You know what all those tools of yours add up to? ⁠

A practice. A way of doing things. A framework. Your unique process.

Even though I feel the immense weight of a world that insinuates I’m scattered and need to focus, that insists there is only One Right Way, that demands one knows where they’re going in the straightest, shortest, most efficient and easily explainable way possible… now, I’m saying fuck it.

Part of my healing is remembering — for the thousandth time — that the costs of pretending to be someone I am not are immense.

Now I’m recognizing that — as Kelly says — I’ve been gathering my tools, honing my practice, my way of doing things, my frameworks, my unique processes for a purpose — to share them.

Sharing is extremely healing for me. If I was forced to say what I believe the purpose of my life is, it’s to share what I learn. Period. Full stop.

Looking back, I can see that purpose expressed in a sort of healing arc in my content over these three months.

The first six-ish weeks were explicitly about my episode and what I’m learning from it, but as is my way, I was sharing it in fidelity to Self and Systems at the same time. My sensemaking must include a relationship to the collective, and vice versa.

And as always happens, because of that relentless E.T. Goes Home thing, narrating my transformational crisis gave way to narrating our transformational crisis.

Because make no mistake: we humans are living through one right now. My pattern-seeking, gestalt, systems-thinking brain only knows how to understand self and systems as parts—and reflections—of a whole. My sensemaking always becomes our sensemaking.

I can’t help it.

It’s just what I do.

It’s who I am.

A Different Kind of Doula

At one point in my episode, I began describing myself as a "futures doula."

Transformations, like births, need supportive guides. It’s why we seek out therapists and coaches when our life goes to shit. We don’t know where we are or how to get where we’re going, so we look to someone who might be able to guide us there.

Doula is just a word for guide.

Interestingly — and I only learned this today while writing, doula comes from the ancient Greek word (doúlē), which means "a woman who serves."

A doula's role is to help someone through an intense, natural, and often overwhelming transitional process — typically in contemporary contexts it’s the process of birth, or increasingly, death.

They advocate, comfort, and guide, but they do not take over or perform medical tasks. They hold space for the person's experience.

And that’s basically what I do, when selves and systems collide in periods of transformation.

I wish the term wasn’t so accurate for capturing what I do — or am trying to do —because it is entirely not professionally acceptable. We dismiss and belittle people who speak in accessible, universal, feminized language, especially in corporate and entrepreneurial spaces.

I would be laughed out of most of the boardrooms I used to occupy with a "title" like Futures Doula. Transformation Strategist which I’ve recently been playing with (but don’t love) is much more authoritative, don’t ya know.

I know because past versions of me used to sit in the back of conferences with my favourite cynical colleagues, trading not-always-kind, snide remarks about "flaky spiritual” entrepreneurs

And yes I can be a judgey dick sometimes, too. I don’t love that side of my self, but she exists — and its how I know these biases exist in general.

Often, it’s more insidious than that. When I worked at a university, a very powerful woman — a sort of pre-Lean In, lead-like-a-man power-behind-the-throne type — called me "the relationship person."

It wasn’t a compliment.

She was doing that corporate thing where compliments are used to politely demean. You can’t take a compliment to HR.

Corporate institutions like universities, and the leaders who uphold them, do not value relationships though. They extract from them.

The problem is, she was right. I am a relational person. Relationality came pre-installed.

But because of comments and norms like that, for a long time, being perceived as LinkedIn-credible was very important to me.

God forbid I be perceived as a flaky spiritual person. Corporate cultural immune systems are already extremely allergic to me; I do not need to give them another reason.

But again, fuck it.

For actual this time.

I will never be a LinkedIn person. Those spaces are not for me. Trying to pretend they are — that I fit in a suit, in a boardroom, saying things like "circle back" and "strategic foresight" — has cost me too much.

And "futures doula," while I haven’t adopted it post-episode, remains, like much of my writing from that time, clearer and more on-point than I gave it credit for.

The issue wasn’t what I was saying, per se; it was the speed, volume, and intensity—and often, the lack of editing.

Because who has time for editing when you’re doing your best Cassandra, trying to let everyone know that systemic collapse is hastening while whatever’s coming next is emerging? That there are, in fact, soldiers in that giant-ass Trojan Horse?

There’s a reason you want a doula for a birth, and be damn sure that, collectively, we are giving birth.

And believe me about that or not. That’s up to you. Trouble is, it won’t change the stampede of Trojans at our door.

Which, speaking of, check out this cool Cassandra parable I made from a essay when Veo-3 came out last month :)

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Let Me Say This On The Record

To be clear — the Cassandra comparison is conceptual. As are a great many of my comparative metaphors. I sort of exclusively think in and speak in explanatory concepts. I absolutely do don’t consider myself or my writing from last year prophetic, even if many of my speculations have already come to pass.

But once you’ve had a mental health crisis in public that included delusions of grandeur, one must be extra, extra thoughtful not to throw words like "prophecy" around.

So let me be emphatic: I just have a pattern-seeking brain that’s been locked onto self:systems transformation for over 20 years. And patterns repeat across time and scale, fairly reliably. Once you see them you can’t unsee them.

And this particular pattern — the transformation pattern, the death/birth pattern — is pretty obvious at this point.

Selves and systems are not different this way. It even has a name in systems science: scale invariance.

"Prophets" are also typically just pattern-obsessives for whom the veil of reality is a bit thinner.

I’m actually pretty sure that everyone we’ve called a prophet throughout history is just someone the DSM would now diagnose as a variant of neurodivergent or mentally ill or both. It’s a lot to cope with: to see things that are very real and be told over and over again they’re not…until they happen months or years later.

Not because of prophecy, but because of patterns.

But I’m digressing! Imagine. Let me pull back from this side quest.

None of this is where I intended to go today, afterall.

On a Quiet Day, I Can Hear Her Breathing

When I opened my computer, the post I thought I was going to write was a tactical summary of where my content is going.

But clearly, all of this is what actually needed to get said. It was only a fluke that I realized it was my three-month anniversary, which feels about as important as a three-month anniversary with a new lover. Big whoop, but also, honey, how could you forget? — especially when where we’ve been very much defines where we’re going. And why.

So briefly, before I shift into something that looks a little more like LinkedIn Mode, let me also thank you, dear reader, dear human, who has been witness to this becoming. This repair. This integration. This fractal of our collective experience.

I named my publication f*ck i love you for a whole lotta reasons, but mostly because I actually do.

I fucking love you in the way M. Scott Peck and bell hooks taught me: as a practical investment in our mutual — dare I say — spiritual growth.

By my best analysis love as an investment looks like mutuality, reciprocity, relationality, and spiritual growth. And those capacities are going to define our Now/Future.

They’re what’s trying to be born. Or, more accurately, remembered.

Colonialism banned Indigenous practice as a form of control, and now the colonizers are blind to their own colonization. These capacities for relationality are distinctly human, and we’ve largely been prevented from practicing them inside these extractive, transactional systems that govern our lives.

And it is those capacities make love real. They are love in practice. Relational practice is love.

So when you see me say, because love’s the only thing we haven’t tried yet, that’s what I mean. I mean we have to return to relational practice. To love. We’ve exhausted the limits of transactional ways to within an inch of our lives. The old way’s not working. We must transform.

And so that’s also what I mean it when I say I fucking love you.

Sharing these stories is the best way I know how to practice my love ethics; how to do what’s mine to do in this lifetime.

Whether I want to or not, it seems.

The idea that I had this episode precisely as I tried to step back into a corporate environment does not escape me. The possibility that the episode was my Self screaming at me in the only way it knew how is very likely what was happening.

Maybe the call was coming from inside the house.

Maybe we do have paths that are uniquely ours, and maybe life has a way of keeping you on them.

And maybe I’m not a futures doula… maybe I’m a transformation doula whose practice is love, whose way of doing things is relational, whose frameworks reconnect us to ourselves and each other by sharing what she learns.

Maybe it’s time to use all these tools I’ve been collecting to do my small part to help birth a world that is not only possible, but on her way.

I can certainly hear her.

Can you?

xoxo

I’m Not Crying, You’re Crying: An Invitation to Practice

Switching gears after all that feels abrupt, but the work of building a new world is practical, too. If this essay resonated with you, here are a few ways to go deeper into relational practice, together.

A quick disclosure first: If you didn’t catch the repetition, the way I structured this sentence:

“And maybe I’m not a futures doula… maybe I’m a transformation doula whose practice is love, whose way of doing things is relational, whose frameworks reconnect us to ourselves and each other by sharing what she learns,”

is directly from the quote I shared earlier. It’s from a marketing email promoting her course, "Surfacing Your Methodology". Today I might have accidentally surfaced mine, though I haven’t taken the course, only gleaned from her excellent emails. I have zero affiliation, just a shit-tonne of appreciation. Her course is about to kick off, and I highly recommend you go learn with her.

• Coming Soon: I have a podcast series on community care in times of crisis that's nearly ready, and I'm planning to start doing live sessions as podcast prototypes soon.

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• Connect with Community: Add yourself to the directory of Substackers writing on futures worth living in that and I started. More on that in the next Permissionless Prof post, which, speaking of…

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• For Tactical Teachings: I've started a new publication, , which is the home for the tools, frameworks, and strategic foresight behind the love ethics. Below’s a peek at what I’m up to over there. You need to subscribe to it separately, so if you like what you see, you know what to do. June 2026 update: Permissionless Prof content has been integrated back into this publication. No additional subscriptions needed. See futures worth living in section on my publication page if you want this kind of content.

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