In recent years in this space, I’ve reflected mostly on the lessons learned over decades of thinking about humanity’s current situation on our planet. I’ve pondered how we arrived here, what a promising future might look like, and how we could achieve it.
During this time, my collaborators and I have begun implementing what we've learned. Today, I want to provide a high-level summary of our understanding of the situation and our hopes for the future. I'll focus on the two most crucial pillars we believe are essential for creating change towards a desirable world. This will serve as the foundation for the coming weeks, during which I will unpack the activities within our various initiatives, describe how they interact, and explain how they contribute to the overall vision.
We've lost our way, much like ants occasionally do. Ants rely on pheromones to guide their collective behavior, but sometimes they cross their own pheromone trails and end up in a circular path. Unable to escape, they ultimately die of exhaustion. This mirrors our current predicament as humans, doesn't it?
If we zoom out sufficiently, we can see the outline of our own circle of death. It starts with money. The total financial liquidity on the planet doubles roughly every 10 years, leading to steep exponential growth. To maintain the value of each financial token, since 1971, we have backed this money with our own productivity, measured as GDP. This too grows exponentially, roughly doubling globally every 20 years. Ultimately, GDP measures the amount of atoms we manage to move across and on behalf of our economy per year. Moving atoms requires energy, which is why our energy demand also doubles every 30 years—exponentially.
Everything in nature grows exponentially for a while, so this is not inherently bad. Unfortunately, we have locked this exponential growth into a multipolar trap by measuring short-term political success directly or indirectly in terms of GDP growth, as well as short-term economic success in the same way. This creates competition both within and between nations, making it impossible to step out of the dynamics of the game—even if one wanted to—because the first mover would likely be dramatically disadvantaged. As a result, everything stays as it is.
This is why many advocate for and propose so-called green energy sources like geothermal, fusion, or secondary and tertiary solar energy (such as solar panels and wind). The issue with this approach is that the totality of the required materials and their acquisition is likely to exceed the energy budget and resources available on our planet—at least those that can be harvested without causing dramatic externalities.
The issue with fusion and geothermal energy is even more significant. These sources also require large infrastructural changes, resulting in high material demands. However, the actual problem lies in the abundance of energy they present. Currently, the planet can still manage the waste heat from our processes. But with an abundance of green energy enabling and likely accelerating our exponential growth, the planet could overheat in a few hundred years just because of the waste heat. You might be tempted to say, "Well, let future generations deal with it." However, consider how grateful we would be if the people 150 years ago, when first warned about the effects of burning fossil fuels on the climate, had taken action there and then.
While it's not very intellectually challenging to understand all of this, breaking out of this system as a global civilization is incredibly challenging. In part, this difficulty stems from the situation of mutually assured destruction. We've created a global economy where the production of most goods relies on an interwoven global supply chain. This interdependence helps ensure that nations are less likely to attack each other, as doing so would ultimately harm themselves.
Within this interconnected economy, the primary comparative measure of a country's success is GDP. Consequently, the political and economic arenas of virtually every country compete both internally and internationally to grow GDP as quickly as possible. Which is a friendly way of saying that we are turning nature into waste at increasing speeds.
While most of the focus is on the political and economic arenas, real change is unlikely to originate there due to the multipolar traps they are caught in. The first mover in these domains is likely to lose, making significant shifts difficult. Change will not primarily come from these sectors. However, once sufficient energy has been applied to move the system into a new state, these two domains can—within the constraints of the new attractor basin—use their enormous agentic force to bring the new system to full flourishing.
As we begin to recognize that we’ve collectively placed GDP and its continuous exponential growth at the center of human activity, we can reframe this realization as an opportunity. Rather than focusing on the symptoms, we can now ask a deeper question: what should we place at the center of our collective meaning-making, sense-making, and decision-making?
If we then kaizen the shit out of this (pardon the French) and drill down to the first principles of what truly matters to our experience on this planet—not in the metaphysical sense of "what caused the universe?" but in terms of what directly shapes our lives—we arrive at Life as the ultimate center of our actions and ambitions. Not just the human experience of life, but Life as a universal principle: life that has evolved to create more life, embedded in an intricate web of relationships and interdependencies. Life that thrives through connection, regeneration, and mutual flourishing.
With Life at the center, we can now interrogate the surrounding dimensions: Where does Life get its energy? How does Life source, refine, and distribute it? How does Life govern itself, and how does Life signal within its systems? In other words: does Life burn ancient, rotten algae to generate 19 terawatts of energy, just to dig deep holes and extract rare molecular chains, which are then shipped across the planet and repeatedly processed before reaching their final destination? Of course not. Life taps into the 172,000 terawatts of energy provided freely by the big fusion reactor in the sky—the sun. It uses this energy to continuously recycle the six essential atoms of life, seamlessly moving them from the dinosaur you once were to the flower you are yet to become.
And does Life rely on central authority and governance to manage this process on a global scale? No, it uses relationships and relationality to balance needs and resources, ensuring the best possible allocation for every being involved while simultaneously benefiting the whole. This natural information system is far more advanced than our clumsy constructs of markets and money, or our limited frameworks of voting and democratic decision-making. Life operates through interconnected feedback loops, where cooperation and interdependence drive balance and abundance without the need for rigid, centralized control.
Building the infrastructure for an entirely new paradigm cannot be an isolated activity. Booting up a new reality requires mutually supportive ecosystems, where different efforts reinforce one another. However, in our assessment, there are two primary pillars around which efforts can be created that offer particularly powerful leverage points.
The first is, quite obviously, materiality. By this, we mean any initiative that bridges the wisdom of both science and ancient knowledge to create practical, applicable solutions for real-world problems faced by real people—and then making these solutions freely available in the commons for everyone to use.
The second is coordination. This refers to the ongoing effort of reminding ourselves, and each other, that the ultimate goal is the nurturing of life and love through mutuality, reciprocity, and relationship. Coordination is about ensuring that we are aligned in our purpose: to foster life in all its forms, while cultivating a web of relationships that sustain and regenerate the whole. Together, these two pillars—materiality and coordination—form the foundation of a new way forward.
In the coming weeks, I will present the five concrete initiatives we have been developing over the past five years to strengthen these two pillars: materiality and coordination. Each of these activities is designed to deepen our efforts and create meaningful impact. Following these elaborations, I will introduce a new set of offerings that sit at the heart of all these efforts and will become the central focus in the years ahead.