This Changes Everything
Navigating the Meta-Crisis, a Technological Supercycle and The Great Turning
Pattern Recognition
I never wanted to choose a stream. Not as a kid, not in high school, not even when picking a major in university. The concept seemed utterly ludicrous to me, even back then. Why would I choose just “Young Women Inventors” or “Lights, Camera, Action!” summer camp, just World Issues or Chemistry class, when they’re both so fun – and so clearly intertwined?
I’ve always been interested in how things connect and how parts relate. I see patterns, how they repeat, and how they overlap. Like the Hawk, viewing everything from several hundred feet, I try to find where the river starts, how it flows and branches, and where it ends up.
But lately, it’s getting harder and harder to see and predict where it’s going. Like following an out-dated map to a place that no longer exists, things have become utterly perplexing. There’s a sense of being lost, but no one wants to stop and ask for directions, let alone point out that we may not actually have any!
Looking for some guidance, I listened to social researcher Brené Brown’s discussion with futurist Amy Webb, and I was both comforted and terrified by their perspectives and intuitions of what’s to come.
As I suspected, I’m not alone. Right now, we’re all sensing that thing in the air… but what exactly is it? A few months ago, it felt like grief. Like a wet weighted blanket, smothering us. We were immobilized, exhausted.
That thing in the air now… extreme uncertainty… again. And with it, more grief.
Can you feel it? That contracting feeling in your gut? Like we’re all just “waiting for the rumbling to stop.” Alongside it, a sadness, an ache in your heart. A knowing that we can never truly “go back to normal.”
CHANGE! It’s happening! Continuously and faster now. But what, exactly, does it all mean?
Uncertainty Plus
Turns out, the body knows what’s up. Our deeply felt unease is telling us something.
Our heart, gut, and nervous system – our internal compass – has a way of sensing and understanding things before our mind can even interpret the signals. Current research shows our nervous system is processing about 11 million bits of information per second, while our cognitive brain, or the CPU of the system, only takes in about 40 bits. Hang onto this fact.
The extreme uncertainty that’s now agitating us, that our bodies know and are sensing on the daily, has to do with several factors.
By following our out-dated map, we have found ourselves in a meta-crisis – the existential breakdown of our climate, economic systems, and social order all at once. Yup, that. Plus, the final throes of our underlying foundational paradigm – the end of modernity and the linear progress narrative. And for the first time ever, all these changes are happening at a global scale.
Our fear is real. And that desire to go back, to let the dust settle and pick up the game where we left off? We may not be ready to accept it yet, but that era is over. There’s no going back.
Just as we crested the peak of the pandemic, we were entering the start of what’s called a technological supercycle. A shift Amy Webb explains is “so intense, so potent, and so pervasive, it will literally reshape our human existence.”
This changes everything.
(Pause to take a few deep breaths. Stick with me here.)
First up, Artificial Intelligence (yep, you guessed it) is what’s begun this next technological revolution or supercycle – but this time, it’s at warp speed. Again, change isn’t just coming – it’s happening, fast, everywhere.
Just like the printing press, then the mechanical weaving loom, steam locomotive, and the telegraph transformed EVERYTHING, innovations in AI, combined with digitally connected things (smart/wearable technology), and bioengineering have already begun to shake things up.
And maybe we thought it was just about Chat GPT… (or Claude, Perplexity, Llama, or Gemini). But the other GPTs (General Purpose Technologies), they’re converging – increasing system complexity and the speed of change. We are now living in what Douglas Rushkoff calls Present Shock, “a state of anxiety which people all live with as they try to keep up with the ever-increasing speed and immediacy of time… a state of perpetual emergency interruption.”
THIS changes everything. But, after the end of one era, a new one begins.
Dance Break: You know that we were living in a material world, but I’m not a material girl.
The Three Stories
Now that we’ve entered this time of great change and extreme uncertainty, we must recognize that whatever the story we choose to tell, we are all part of Generation T – Transformation. All of us alive today have a part to play: the last of the Silent Generation, Baby Boomers, Gen X, Gen Y, Gen Z, Gen Alpha, and those coming very soon. Potentially Seven Generations all at the same time.
According to “deep ecologist” Joanna Macy, there are three stories we can tell, all happening right now, simultaneously. You may recognize at least two of them.
Business As Usual (Pre-Tragic) – The story that progress is forever “up and to the right,” told by those who are trying to just keep going by holding on to the old ways. They refuse to acknowledge human and planetary limitations and continue on the course of exploitation and extraction for exponential profit (“growth”). They continue to use power over others and support the systems that are trying to uphold the status quo. Like frogs in ever-warming water, they deny there’s even a problem.
The Great Unravelling (Tragic) – The second story, happening alongside the first, is the story of how our world as we know it is falling apart. Those telling this story see Business As Usual coming to an end and are consumed with fear. Some see this change as necessary and want systems to change, while others see it as pure tragedy and fear descending into chaos. Like bees after the collapse of their hive, they swarm and sting indiscriminately, not knowing what to do.
The Great Turning (Post-Tragic) – Through Business As Usual and The Great Unravelling, is the third story – the story of a great shift or turning. Those telling this story acknowledge the need for change and know that this will be hard work. Also known as the Great Simplification, or The Long Dark, it is the story of descent, dissolution, and heartbreak, as well as dreaming, gestation, and the emergence of something new. It is the story of composting and seeing what will grow from the muck. It is an active story, grieving what is being lost, working with what is as it unravels, and committing to creating something new, something yet unknown. Like caterpillars dissolving into bug soup, they are in the process of completely rearranging themselves – they’re in a state of transformation.
From Separation to Interconnection
As our bodies already sense, the next 50 years or so will likely be intense. But in all great shifts there is opportunity for evolution. If we choose to commit to the story of The Great Turning, humanity, overall, will make it through. And hopefully most of the other lifeforms on Earth as well.
That’s why The Great Turning is the story I choose.
Part of me wishes I didn’t have a hawk’s perspective, but I already see evidence of this change unfolding and can no longer deny it or run from it. The new meta-pattern is beginning to take shape. We are already part of it, and I choose to go through.
From the old pattern of separation – from the environment, from our bodies, from each other – to the re-emergence of older wisdom in a newer form. We seem to be evolving to remember and understand life from the paradigm of interconnection, at another level.
Life is complicated, nuanced, complex – interrelated and constantly changing. It is terrifyingly beautiful.
Condensing it into a binary, distilling all knowledge, compressing exponential possibility into the average probability, will not get us where we need to go.
Because no impact is external to the problem trying to be solved. And we can’t solve complex problems with just one type of expertise at the table. We need everybody. We need consilience – for all streams to converge – into something better.
While we don’t quite know what this something better, this new world, will be or how we’ll get there, we can look for guideposts and plant our own along the way. In trying, we help the pattern emerge.
Letting go of the false concept of separation and remembering our innate interconnection, we are beginning to change the ways we think, speak and act. We are beginning to turn.
If we let ourselves feel it, we know the era of power over – people, places, things – is ending. The new era of power with has begun to unfold. And grief, allowing our hearts to break open, is what might just get us through.
Wow, what a powerful post! I'm so with you on the Great Turning! Consider me a part of your team. :)