Developing A MettaModern Mindset To Cope With The Slow & Asymmetric Collapse Of Modernity
Let's not waste another crisis. Let's honor the pain of so many to awaken the super-seeds of wisdom within and reinvent, reimagine, and regenerate rather than rebuild as it all was before.
When some of the world's wealthiest people do not have access to clean air, water, or shelter, which is happening as I speak just a few miles from me in Pacific Palisades, it is a strong signal to pay attention to.
We can see it as it should be seen: a glimpse of our collective future in the present.
This unfolding tragedy that has shocked our city to the core also presents us with a rare opportunity to usher a phase transition to what so many hearts and minds yearn for: a world that works for all life.
This is because it is not in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, or even in Asheville, North Carolina (where a huge storm devastated thousands of lives last year). It’s happening in one of the richest places on the planet, in the 4th biggest economy (California) on the globe, where even movie stars have lost (one of?) their homes. As my colleague Ralph Thurm has pointed out, California’s status as the 4th largest global economy comes at a very high price: “The December 2024 California Doughnut presentation showed a devastating and deeply concerning result.”
“While California is the richest state in the US, it is falling short on 100% of the social indicators assessed. Despite being well known as a leader on environmental issues, California is overshooting 89% of ecological indicators assessed… and the average ecological overshoot is 283%.”
The best we can hope for, as individuals process, recover, and start to rebuild their lives in Los Angeles, is that we, as a community of leaders, metabolize this signal into value: into a system that works better than the one we have.
This is not meant to be glib or minimize the suffering of this crisis. While people are struggling, those of us more fortunate can donate—great links here to share your resources with those seeking help—offer meals and beds, foster pets, and more. Urgent care is crucial in a crisis.
But I believe we also have a moral imperative—if we see what is happening not as an isolated event but as a signal of something more, something important—to go beyond concern, acute care, social media criticism, and even activism to make a firm commitment to use our remaining lives and energies to regenerate our crisis-hit world in a way that fits our own unique dharma/purpose.
Newsflash: Despite our best efforts, most large corporations and almost all politicians are not going to do it. They can’t even get their acts in gear to maintain their own sustainability and DE&I agendas. Even if they wanted to, and their stakeholders wanted them to, most simply don’t have the leadership capabilities, and the Adaptive Capacity, to do so. I know because I work with them every day, and they are already overwhelmed by delivering their KPIs while trying to be a creative and kind leader.
It can and will only be us: the kinds of people who read articles like this and who nuture the resources—inner and outer—to do something about it beyond managing furiously the status quo.
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. Buckminster Fuller.
I began this article, which is an opening gambit in the new project we are creating—The FutureWise Institute—a few months ago. It will also, I think, become the first chapter of my new book.
I return to it today, sitting in the heart of Los Angeles as enormous wildfires threaten the homes of dear friends. Yet, weirdly, I have time to sit and write. A fire broke out a few hundred meters away from us on Tuesday night, and the power was cut.
Schools are closed again like in the pandemic (which has brought out some hidden anxiety in my son), we can’t walk the dog because the fumes are toxic, we’re trying to help in any way we can… but our lives have pretty much returned to normal.
This existential weirdness, in part driven by global and ecological weirding, can be usefully seen through the lens of a slow and asymmetric collapse of modernity.
To make some lemonade out of this lemon, through my own ikigai of wisdom keeping and wise leadership as that is all I can do, I turned my attention to finishing off this article today as a way to process what has been happening this week.
Here goes.
The Breakdown or Collapse Of Modernity
Modernity is breaking apart. And many of us, perhaps the majority now, are breaking up with it.
Modernity, although a “suitcase word” that can mean a thousand different things depending on context and area of study, can be summed up by this.
Modernity promised humankind that, with logic, cool-headed reason, analysis, mathematics, science, technology, innovation, industrial manufacture, and the global spread of ideas, money, and materials, we could grow wealth without limits and, in doing so, bring every human alive out of subsistence farming and poverty, extend lifespans, and improve quality of lives.
For scores of decades, it has kept its promise. Guns, steel, and the vanquishing of germs through penicillin, paracetamol, and polio vaccines. The Welfare State and the Green Revolution. Tens of millions rose up into the Middle Classes in Europe, the Americas, India, China, and Africa. There are planes, trains, and automobiles (for everyone, which is now part of the problem).
The arc of progress seemed clear. Aside from a few blips—Nazi death machines, Stalinist Gulags, Cambodian Killing Fields— the story of progress says we have been marching relentlessly towards more goodness for more people and we can keep on going.
Until we didn’t. The triumphant march of progress has been stopped in its tracks.
We discovered there was a hard limit, a planetary limit, to growth. We realized that reason alone does not relieve the pain and suffering of emotion. Money only solves some problems for some people. Modern technologies, like all agnostic tools, proved to be both a salvation and a curse, depending on who wields it.
The Problems Of Modernity
Without attempting to list everything, here are some of the problems of modernity that have thus far resisted modern solutions:
Ecological breakdown
Biodiversity loss and another wave of mass extinctions
Depleted soils and disturbed food systems
Climate weirding
Economic instability and extreme inequality
The gig economy, zero-hour contracts, and the Precariat
In-work poverty
Cost of living crunches
Mass homelessness
Mass migration (which will increase massively with ever-more climate refugees)
Widespread angst and alienation
Political chaos
Skyrocketing suicide rates and “deaths of despair”
Poor health and poor yet extensive healthcare
The sky-rocketing of “post-industrial illnesses” like cancer, heart disease, obesity, addiction, and anxiety
The distortions and discontents of digital: from post-truth
Perhaps the single most significant culture shock of the collapse of modernity is the harsh reality that, arguably for the first time in history, most Gen Z and the Alphas will have less relative wealth, slower social mobility, and lower living standards than their Baby Boomer grandparents.
The Slow & Asymmetric Collapse Of Modernity
When we watch a disaster or post-apocalypse movie, the collapse of the modern world is fast, spectacular, and impacts everyone reasonably equally.
But the collapse I believe we are going through right now, as you read this, is far less easy to discern. Things can look quite normal, quite rosy, depending on the lens you look through and the location you are looking from.
Yet it is my honest belief, grounded not in the frisson of pessimistic and activist politics or rooted in the belly of a neurotic personality, that we are all living through the collapse of modernity.
Two features of The Collapse make it harder to see, believe, and acknowledge this reality, making it easier to deny, ignore, or repress it.
The Collapse Is Slow
Rather than happening in an instant, like when a meteor hit the earth and ended the reign of the dinosaurs, the collapse we are going through is slow. Like the famous frog happily sitting in the water as it rises by one degree at a time rather than jumping out of the temperature differential of 50 degrees, most are going through the collapse without any clue it is happening.
Yes, we see storms in Asheville, North Carolina, or fires in Pacific Palisades, California—rising sea levels in Vanuatu and floods in Bangladesh—and (most) attribute them to climate change.
But then we go to work the following day, put in the 10 hours required, take the paycheck, and buy something from Amazon that we feel we really need.
We know a guy who has committed suicide or a friend lost to digitally-driven conspiracy theories, but then we jump on Instagram and scroll to relax for an hour.
We see reports from the IPCC that by the end of the century, climate change may be catastrophic and that we only have 20/10/2/1 year to stave off a 2/3/5 degree warming, and then we book a summer vacation before chowing down on an In & Out burger.
The slowness of the collapse plays into our cognitive biases and emotional predilections to ignore the uncomfortable, assume things tomorrow will be roughly the same as they were today, and interpret the world with meaning-making frames from the past.
So aside from some rants on social, maybe some volunteering and campaigning, perhaps a few lifestyle changes—and perhaps a shift into a job that feels more purposeful—we allow life to carry on pretty much as before, even as we slide relentlessly into chaos.
This is the great danger of Slow Collapse. It feels more like an inconvenience, and one that mainly impacts others and not ourselves
The Collapse Is Asymmetric
Right now, I have dear friends literally fighting to save their homes in the Santa Monica Mountains in Los Angeles—some without home insurance because the market did not want to provide it at a reasonable cost—while I sit with a Flat White and type out these words just a few miles away.
This is because The Collapse of Modernity that we are all living through will affect different groups radically differently depending on many factors: social, geographical, geological, cultural, financial, economic, political, psychological, and personal.
Money is a factor here, for sure. Even in a disaster, capitalism protects its own, especially in the US and other countries with less coherence and cohesion on state-provided social safety nets. SoCal billionaire property developer Rick Caruso is currently paying for a private firefighting team, of off-duty firepeople from other cities/states, to protect his home (and perhaps others in the same street).
But money is by no means the only one. Geography, culture, place, and space will all play a role. The suffering of a family in war is very different if you are in a village on the frontlines in Ukraine or in Moscow, in Tel Aviv, or in Jabalia. Refugees have very different experiences if they are escaping Syria or Bangladesh, Asheville, or the Hollywood Hills.
The fact that this breakdown of modernity is asymmetric means it impacts all of us in very different and highly nuanced ways. The modern world is not just complicated but complex: the interrelationships and interdependencies are too complex to analyze clearly.
With the complexity and incumbent asymmetry, our pattern-spotting faculties can be confounded, and we don’t see coherent signals of collapse amongst all the noise. We discount, delay, deny, dismiss, avoid, willfully ignore. This is an existential risk to our society and our species.
Signals of Collapse
As with many sense-making and advanced warning systems, I like to think of signals of breakdown and collapse (and so, eventually, breakthrough, but that is for future articles) in three levels of intensity.
Level 1 Signals Of Collapse
Subtle, weak, and sporadic. Most mainstream people will not register them as a signal, just an event or a phenomenon. They will be seen, usually, as specific and personal issues rather than systemic signals of deep drivers of change.
Only experts, professionals, and aficionados who train themselves to see the “weak signals” of the future in the present will clock them and reflect on them for what they might mean.
Examples:
The silent pandemic of lower back pain—of which something like 85% has no known physiological cause—that impacts hundreds of millions worldwide and costs the US alone around $80 billion a year (with stroke around $60B, for comparison).
The fact that, between 2020 and 2022, insurance companies declined to renew 2.8 million homeowner policies in the state of California.
The election of Donald Trump to office in 2016, beating the favorite Hillary Clinton in a “surprise” upset. Even the GOP was taken aback and analysts saw his as an outlier.
The constant slew of people having to fund essential healthcare through GoFundMe in the richest per capita nation in Earth—as well as the reality that even those who pay $30,000+ per year in health insurance are still left out in corridords on hospital gurneys waiting for a clinician,.
Level 2 Signals Of Collapse
Events that make it to the newspaper, but happen to “someone else”, and they are “over there” so do not really involve the rest of us.
Strong psychological and social tendencies lead to them being downplayed.
Many, if not most, will discount them as freak, unusual, unrepeatable “Black Swan” events or unusual deviances from the mean. We hope/trust they won’t impact us or won’t be repeated.
Examples:
The raging fires in Los Angeles are already projected to be one of the most expensive disasters in US history, and the fires aren’t even contained yet—in part because of the insane and decoupled-from-reality cost of homes in Pacific Palisades and Malibu even though
Societies unable to agree on basic facts,–even as Meta announced this week it will stop content moderation
The election of Donald Trump in 2024, with a popular majority after poor performance as a country CEO, a felony conviction, and a deadly riot in the center of US democracy inspired by his words and deeds
Wal-Mart, McDonalds, and Facebook have all shut down or significantly changed their DE&I initiatives as the MAGA government takes power once again.
Coca-Cola, Nestle, Unilever and many other corporations scale back their sustainability work even as the weather weirds and rages.
Level 2 signals of slow-motion collapse can be seen in the slew of extreme weather events in the last couple of years—24 storms of similar costing more than $1 billion each since Jan 2024.
They can be seen in the election of populist demagogues by electorates all over the world who are desperate for something different from more technocratic rational policies that have failed to solve so many problems.
Level 3 Signals Of Collapse
Unequivocal, acute events that everyone knows are game-changers, but often only after the fact. As we futurists say, everyone has 20/20 hindsight.
Even with Level 3 signals, cognitive biases, and dissonance will have many people attempt to rewrite history to downplay the signals and revise what happened to fit their needs and agendas.
The great problem with Level 3 signals is that, by the time we see them as such, it is usually too late to adapt. This is because transformation at any level, from the personal body to the political body, takes time as old habits are realized and new ones are built.
Examples:
The election of Adolf Hitler in Germany, the Nuremberg Laws, the invasion of the Sudetenland in 1938 (approved as a one-off by France and Britain) etc etc etc
The COVID-19 pandemic, which I believe will continue to change society in unprecedented ways and will be seen, in the rear-view of history, as a presage of more game-changing health issues to come, such as Anti-Microbial Resistance (which could claim 40 million lives in the coming decades)
Metabolizing The Signals To Move Beyond Modernity
It is our conjecture in the FutureWise Institute—currently a seed of a plan of an Institute for wisdom and wise leadership to guide us to “what comes next”—having been part of various movements that try to solve modern problems from within the modern system—innovation, activism, charity, social enterprise, systemic change—that modernity can’t solve the problems it has created.
More rational, disenchanted, logical, and smart thinking—alone—cannot solve the problems above and many others. If it could, it would have done so by now.
We have tried everything. Anarchism, socialism, communism, paternalism, workhouses, reform laws, laissez-faire capitalism, welfare states, New Deals, libertarianism, neo-liberalism, reformism, dictatorships, national socialism, demagoguery, social enterprises, philanthropy, purpose-driven enterprises, private-public partnerships, CSR, DE&I, World banks, micro-funding, various Summers of Love, communes, cults.
You name it, we tried it.
But the problems just keep growing. This is because all of these “solutions” stem from one source: the Modern Mind. Disenchanted, disembodied, disentangled.
Nobody, no matter how smart they are, is entirely sure of what comes next or how to get there. The metacrisis or polycrisis cannot be solved by more of the same, just a bit different.
In fact, having worked in so many areas of change—from self-transformation to systemic transformation—we are convinced that the Modern Mind and its approach to collective problem-solving fails in the face of the metacrisis.
What we mean is that researching the problem objectively, designing a scalable solution, investing in it for profit or funding it by central government, testing it empirically, and then “plopping” it across all places and cultures—which is what progressive policies have done for a couple of centuries— cannot cope with the sheer cultural complexity and bioregional diversity of how the polycrisis shows up.
Yes, we need to keep existing efforts going on climate change, but we can see from COP and Davos talk-shops to Unilever’s pull-back from climate pledges, from Facebook stopping fact-checking to the internal fight for the soul of OpenAOI, that modern thinking cannot cope with the trauma-driven, fear-based, money-oriented, power-tripping mindsets and behaviors that exist in the centers of Modernity.
This is the inciting incident, as they say in narrative theory and the Heroine’s Journey, of the FutureWise Institute.
Being FutureWise: Living & Leading In Collapse
The Slow & Asymmetric Collapse of the economic, social, and political paradigms of modernity can be seen in real-time on your TV as reports come in from the wildfires in Altadena, Pacific Palisades, Malibu, and Topanga.
It is our belief that the collapse requires all leaders—in business, in communities, in families—to have the wisdom necessary lead their people toward an as yet unknown (and unknowable, as it requires innovation and transformation) future that fits a 9 billion strong, resources-strained, hot, noisy, and rapidly changing world.
Smarts have got us here. We need wisdom to get us to the next organizing systems for humankind.
Smarts are necessary but not sufficient. In fact, analytical thinking biologically limits our capacity for empathy, compassion, inventiveness, and creativity.
The rapid, radical, and ruthless change of our times requires a paradigm shift in how we lead and the space from which our leadership is sourced.
We will be living at the “edge of chaos” for decades as the slow and asymmetric collapse unfolds. The older order is breaking down, yet the new order has not yet formed. We are in the world between worlds.
This will be confusing, bewildering, challenging, and painful for us as individuals and as societies. The suffering will be distributed unequally, as we see today in LA, where wealthy people who have lost their homes have taken hotel suites in Laguna Beach while low-income families are in shelters, climate refugees in the heart of the Modern Metropolis.
We leaders will need to help their followers and organizations adapt and transform rapidly, many times in our lifetimes, to many changing realities. We need entire communities of leaders to develop capabilities that afford them the potential so love their own problems locally, and at the bioregional level, without losing access
This means we need to be FutureWise. We need to build in ourselves and our communities a set of Adaptive Capacities characterized more by emotional regenerativity and mental agility than by cognitive complexity.
This is about phase transitioning our own consciousness—into a MetaModern Mind, or as we see it, a MettaModern Mind—before we start to solve the problems that the Modern Mind created (even as it solved the problems previous Minds had created for it).
The MettaModern Mind & Post-Collapse Thinking
I am still allowing this thinking to emerge from within and between, yet I will share that my sense is the MettaModern Mind forms within individuals as they work through their idiosyncratic version of The Collapse and metabolize it into their development as leaders.
This is to say, each of us will experience our own unique form of The Slow & Asymmetric Collapse. Some will have already experienced the breakdown of The Modern firsthand—through extreme weather events and subsequent loss of property and even life.
Some will be yet to experience anything more than feelings of angst, ennui, and perhaps nausea (in the Sartrean sense)—sensing collapse without really having the frames and words to identify it and talk about it.
Rest assured, we will all have to experience the Collapse in some way. It impacts every human alive.
Thankfully, according to our work in the biological-psychological-sociological process of transformation, breakdown always precedes a breakthrough… if we choose to metabolize the experience as opposed to acting out the stress it causes, denying it, suppressing it deep down, or drowning out the noise and the uncanny feeling with addictions (whether news feeds or fine wine).
As we come through this world-historical and necessarily life-changing journey—the personal is political, and the political is personal—the best of the Modern Mind will persist.
Yet, with the MettaModern Mind, we transcend all the many limitations of its way of thinking: that it is a separate, skin-encapsulated ego that must prioritize its own needs above all else. In its place will be generative and regenerative ways of sensing, feeling, thinking, and acting that can forge, rather than fail, the future.
The MettaModern Mind is quintessentially relational and not individual. It is formed out of interdependent webs of mutuality and reciprocity, not independent styles of thought and self-centered action. It is a heart-centered mind that has grieved for the loss of egotism inherent in modernity and come back more caring, loving, and capable than ever.
The MettaModern Mind it is embodied and sensual before it is cognitive and analytical. It emerges once we have sufficiently integrated the mind with the body, the protective with the connective, the creative spark with the controlling of nature.
The Super-Seeds Of Wisdom & Wise Leadership
We have spent many years analyzing, researching, experimenting, and teaching various models and practices of wisdom, the literature of the wisdom tradition literature, advances in developmental psychology, as well as the myriad frameworks for adaptive or transformational leadership.
We have even developed our own curriculum for transformative leadership as well as our own original theory of transformation, Bio-Transformation.
Yet we have experienced, time and time again, that corporations, institutions, and organizations simply do not want to develop the kind of wisdom, and wise leadership, that the world needs now.
This is where the FutureWise Institute comes in. The website is coming soon.
By integrating our wisdom tools, practices, and knowledge with the experience gained in our leadership consultancy, a number of key skills, capabilities, and character traits have emerged that we sense and believe are “seeds” of wisdom and wise leadership that we can all cultivate within ourselves.
The Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, whose monastery Plum Village we have spent time in, taught that we can all choose to nourish seeds within ourselves. In Peace is Every Step, he writes:
“Consciousness exists on two levels: as seeds and as manifestations of these seeds… There are many kinds of seeds in us, both good and bad. Some were planted during our lifetime, and some were transmitted by our parents, our ancestors, and our society… Our ancestors and our parents have given us seeds of joy, peace, and happiness, as well as seeds of sorrow, anger, and so on. Every time we practice mindful living, we plant healthy seeds and strengthen the healthy seeds already in us. In my daily life I often endeavor to foster and encourage my positive seeds.”
We have taken this concept a little further by combining it with the archetypal psychology of the great Carl Jung, who drew on Western ideas as far back as Plato, to suggest there are elemental forms within human consciousness and within society in the form of “collective consciousness,” that everyone can leverage, or tap into, through their imagination and awareness.
By bringing together Eastern ideas of seeds and Western ideas of archetypes, we get Super-Seeds: characteristic super-powers that we can invest time and energy in for awakening, cultivating, strengthening, and embodying in how we lead others wisely towards what comes after modernity.
Let us not waste another crisis by getting paralyzed by survivors’ guilt, navel-gazing or praying for something better to magically come along, repeating persistent patterns of rushing to fix it all (fixing is the 5th F-State of the stress response after fight, fight, freeze, and fawn), conspiritualizing, and political campaigning that all changes little—or simply being entranced as we watch the Collapse on TikTok and TV.
In the drama, chaos, and noise of the next few years, exacerbated but not caused by Trump, Musk, and their ilk, we have the choice to do the work to unfold what comes next within us before we start regenerating; or to keep on doing what we have always done: complaining, protesting, criticizing, conspirtualizing, investing, withdrawing, and fixing without sustained embodied wisdom.
Let us honor the turmoil and tribulations of so many Angelenos—10,000 homes gone, 10 lives lost, and it’s just the beginning—to move beyond comments, criticism, and conspiracy to awaken the super-seeds of wisdom within and step up and forward to reinvent, reimagine, and regenerate rather than simply rebuild as it all was before.
Super-Seed Of Wisdom 1: Hyper-Adaptability
Hyper-adaptability is one of the super-seeds of wisdom that we consider to be essential for leading ourselves and others to “what comes next” after the collapse—slow-motion and unequal—of advanced capitalism, liberal democracy, and the modern world.
Hyper-adaptability will be the subject of our first deep dive article into the 16 or so super-seeds of wisdom we will be focusing on in the FutureWise Institute and our new book.
Watch this space.
We can all tap into the archetype of The King/Queen (by being truthful, just and generous) or The Lover archetype, by being caring, sensual, and
What we love even more about this term, given our rooting in and appreciation for modern science, is that we can connect this concept of Super-Seeds to the science of crystals—in which a seed crystal is a “small crystal that is used to grow larger crystals of the same material.” A super-seed, then, is an elemental characteristic that we all have access to even if it's very weak within—we can all access them given our predominately shared genome, neurobiology, and human culture—from which we can intentionally grow our level and depth of embodied wisdom.