More from f*ck i love you
the fily (audio)files audio essays
f*ck i loved that podcastYou’ll need to read the post to contextualize the video.
Here’s the post voiceover.
We Have 7.3 Years, Not 89 Seconds
Before we can talk about futures worth living in, we need to once again acknowledge where we are: in the ‘fast part’ of collapse, the quickening enshittening, the simultaneous breakdown and breakthrough where new is emerging from old.
I’ve previously used the metaphor of the doomsday clock to stress the moment’s urgency, repeating we have ‘89 seconds’.
Last week I read an article1 that quantified the metaphor: we have 7.3 years.
This week’s forthcoming podcast episode will give you the details but in short, the article unpacks ‘temporal collapse’ and our institutional inability to regulate exponential technologies, best summarized by E.O. Wilson:
humans have “paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.”
The authors of the article are riveting, rigorous, and unequivocal in their findings:
Cascade modelling across interconnected systems (AI, climate, finance, social) shows "formidable negative cascades" emerging in multiple scenarios:
68% probability of at least one systemic governance failure by 2030
94% probability of multiple concurrent failures by 2040
Median time to irreversible loss of control: 7.3 years
These models likely underestimate risk due to temporal collapse acceleration. The models themselves become obsolete faster than they can be updated.
While the article focuses on governance responses to exponential tech, what I find most fascinating is how it again describes a universal transformation pattern: slow, then fast.
The pattern repeats at all scales.
And we are in the fast part now.
Institutionalizing Survival Mode
Our institutions are — as my dear friend Amrita Ahuja would say — in Survival Mode.
Institutions have a nervous system just like humans, and it functions exactly like ours: when put under extreme stress, we — individuals and institutions — experience a measurable regression toward contraction, resistance, rigidity, defensiveness, and an aversion to novelty.
In such a defensive posture, innovation and adaptation, let alone growth, is impossible.
More importantly, these responses are fundamentally incompatible the transformative phase shift we are living through.
In a regulated state, you can access the adaptive capacities required to navigate transformational crisis.2 In survival mode, these capacities are unavailable, ironically when you need them most:
Capacity for Paradoxical Thinking: The ability to hold, synthesize, and operate with conflicting ideas and truths without needing to collapse them into a simple binary.
Capacity for Ambiguity: The ability to remain effective, open, and resourceful in situations that are uncertain, unclear, or lack precedent.
Capacity for Perspective-Taking: The ability to genuinely understand, integrate, and value diverse viewpoints, especially those that challenge one's own.
Capacity for Strategic Pacing: The ability to intentionally operate below maximum output to preserve energy and resources for resilience, creativity, and response to the unexpected.
Capacity for Focused Attention: The ability to consciously direct and sustain mental focus on chosen priorities amidst a sea of distraction.
Capacity for Restoration: The ability to recognize the need for and engage in practices that genuinely renew mental, emotional, and physical energy.
Capacity for Self-Direction: The ability to exercise meaningful control over one's own schedule, workflow, and pace to optimize well-being and effectiveness.
Capacity for Responsive Dialogue: The ability to create and participate in systems of clear, continuous, and constructive feedback that enable rapid learning and adaptation.
Capacity for Agency: The ability to act with purpose and the deep-seated belief that one's actions can produce desired outcomes.
Capacity for Emergence: The ability to foster conditions where novel patterns, solutions, and structures can arise from complex interactions, rather than being forced by top-down control.
Capacity for Generative Insight: The ability to synthesize creativity, imagination, and strategic intuition to produce novel ideas and foresight.
Capacity is State-Dependent
It’s also important to understand the above capacities are state-dependent.
The state of an entity’s nervous system determines the outcomes it is capable of.
The problem is that nearly all organizations, in particular the institutional ones, do not understand they are organic entities with nervous systems.
They fail to see that their cultural operating system is — almost as a rule in North America — stuck in survival mode.
They are, almost as a rule, running 'urgency OS’. It is the OS of the corporate narcissist.
That especially matters because organizational nervous systems are more powerful than individual nervous systems.
Individuals always entrain to their environments, and organizational nervous systems generate the environmental climates of our professional experience.
It’s why you can wake up feeling like a hundred bucks, do your morning meditation, go into your first meeting grounded af, and an hour later are a ball of anxiety and stress.
Emotional and physiological states are contagious.
As if the human cost of this isn’t enough — burnout, long term mental health leaves, quiet quitting, etc. — this also renders our institutions incapable of meeting a moment that depends on adaptive capacity.
Survival mode is the opposite of adaptive, and we’ve hard-coded it into the systems that govern our lives. This is why I describe them as the noose around our necks.
This is also a key reason why we may only have 7.3 years before “irreversible loss of control.”
This is what a world with corporate narcissists at the wheel looks like.
Institutional Nervous Systems in Survival Mode
Before moving on, here’s a brief mapping of what institutional survival mode looks like when running urgency OS.
FIGHT
The impulse to confront and overpower the threat.
Individual Expression --> Anger, irritability, aggression, blaming, controlling behaviour, confrontational attitude.
Organizational Expression --> Aggressive competition (e.g., price wars), hostile rhetoric toward competitors or critics, internal turf wars, blame/scapegoat culture, micromanagement, and rigid, top-down control.
FLIGHT
The impulse to escape and avoid the threat.
Individual Expression --> Anxiety, panic, avoidance, constant busyness, feeling of being trapped, desire to run.
Organizational Expression --> High employee turnover (The Great Resignation), risk aversion, divesting from "difficult" projects, avoiding necessary but uncomfortable conversations, chronic restructuring, and a focus on short-term escapes over long-term stability.
FREEZE
The impulse to become immobile and shut down in the face of an overwhelming threat.
Individual Expression --> Numbness, dissociation, procrastination, feeling stuck or paralyzed, inability to make decisions.
Organizational Expression --> Quiet quitting and mass disengagement, analysis paralysis, bureaucratic gridlock ("that's just the policy"), innovation stagnation ("the way we've always done it"), and a systemic failure to respond to clear and present dangers.
FAWN / APPEASE
The impulse to placate the threat and earn safety through service or submission.
Individual Expression --> People-pleasing, lack of boundaries, inability to say no, prioritizing others' needs over one's own, seeking external validation.
Organizational Expression --> "Yes-man" culture that punishes dissent, performative initiatives (e.g., wellness programs that don't address root causes of burnout), prioritizing shareholder demands or public perception above all else, and a deep-seated organizational conflict avoidance.
Sound familiar?
So what do we do?
Relational Prosperity & Peaceful Productivity
This is where Amrita’s work and my own work on transformation become the same.
When you get this email, I will be on vacation with her. She is the founder and CEO of Groundwork, a system for getting things done in a new way — a practice of peaceful productivity.
It is a practice for cultivating those exact state-dependent adaptive capacities we so desperately need.
She teaches how to move from survival mode, how to identify our survival patterns born from our underlying pain so we can begin to transform it.
The realization we’ve recently had, is an individual can only do so much to transform their underlying pain, when there is an ‘overlying pain’ being inflicted from the organizational nervous system.
Individuals entrain to their environments so their efforts can only go so far.
As we said above:
Emotional and physiological states are contagious.
This big aha moment came when Amrita asked me to develop a community growth strategy for Groundwork. This is today’s video embed.
She and I operate in a highly relational and reciprocal way: client referrals, shared projects, and trades as a few examples.
I can’t remember what exactly this strategy was ‘in trade for,’ mostly because it doesn’t matter.
It’s not how that works.
It’s not how we work.
We don’t have some ledger somewhere noting who did what for who.
We love each other, we respect each other, and critically, we are invested in each other’s success. Not because we have a formal business relationship, but because we do our best to live in integrity with our values, and we very much value reciprocity and relationality.
This is the core of the Groundwork philosophy. This is the Groundwork cultural OS in action.
And, as we’ve been exploring, Groundwork is a design pattern that can be applied at any scale:
At the individual level, it is the OS of your life, not just your work.
At the group level, it is the OS of your team.
At the organizational level, it can be the OS of entire businesses and institutions.
This is also a big part of what it means to move from a transactional to a relational way of being.
Financial Capital is just one form of resource. Focusing on it to the exclusion of others can leave us impoverished. Acting in transactional, extractive ways may make your bank account grow, but almost certainly at the expense of all other forms of capital in your life — especially and often relational capital.
As I said in the presentation: if my goal in all my friendships was to extract maximal value for the least amount of investment, I wouldn’t have any friends.
Our Offering
We’re cooking up some exciting new projects. To give us time for that, I’m interrupting regularly scheduled programming and replacing my usual weekly essay with the strategy presentation I created for her.
I offer it as another layer for the transformation map we’ve been building.
We are in a civilizational crisis because our institutions are stuck in Survival Mode. To navigate this, we need new capacities rooted in a relational way of being.
Groundwork is a practical system for developing this new cultural OS, and our collaboration is a living example of it.
The presentation I’ve embedded explores how to scale this vital pattern from the individual to the organization, creating the very entities we need to build futures worth living in.
It’s a preview of the many different design patterns needed for shared prosperity.
It is about the kinds of organizations that will make the future worth living in.
It is about relationality as a social and economic practice—the center of my and Amrita’s Venn diagram.
I hope you enjoy it.
We’d love to hear what you think.
Xo
Jenn
"Everyone has had differing experiences, and therefore, everyone is building a different personal mind inside. No one is doing it purposely; it's reactive. It happens quite naturally because you're not ready to openly experience life.
The highest state is to be comfortable learning and growing from life's experiences. But if you're not comfortable with some experiences, you use your will to resist them. That merely means you're not evolved enough in that area.
There is physical evolution and there is spiritual evolution. They both involve adaptability to your environment. The former for your body, and the latter for "you" in there, the soul."
-Michael Singer, The Untethered Soul
I’m not sure what’s happened but the original article was first open access, then shortly after reading paywalled, and is now taken down? I’ve reached out to the author(s) a few times for clarity and have not heard back. When it was open access, I put it into NotebookLM to make this week’s podcast episode, and had also already grabbed some screenshots. To say, I have derivative content from the original and am still figuring out the ethics in the absence of communication or an original source to link to.
These capacities are a mashup of my own work, Amrita’s and from the temporal collapse article.
***
If this piece lit up your brain and heart at the same time, sharing, liking, commenting or subscribing is Creator Speak for “fuck i love you, too”.
And let’s be honest this is still capitalism and this economy is shit (again) so I don’t use paywalls. If you’re in a good position and excited to
make a one-time or monthly contribution,
I’d be super grateful.
I’ll still fucking love you either way.
***
Share this post