If the old systems are breaking, what comes next?
New systems and stories for an accelerated world
Welcome to edition #17 of The Wake Up Call, this week I write about:
How we must adapt old systems and stories for an accelerated world
What those new stories could look like across community, ritual, culture, philosophy and religion
This newsletter is for anyone who is questioning the endless pursuit of more. Stories exploring the psychology of meaning, acceleration and modern ambition. Each week I write one non-fiction essay for the mind or one fiction story for the soul.
This is the third essay in a series of articles about the upcoming Acceleration Decade.
I spend almost every day thinking about the future, where we might be heading, why so many are struggling, how we might prepare and how we can get back to a hopeful vision for humanity.
In my first essay I outlined how technology is accelerating beyond our capacity and how we might begin to prepare ourselves.
In my second essay I wrote about how humanity as a whole is struggling to metabolize all of this rapid change, in part because the psychological enzymes that we have historically used to make sense of change are breaking down.
In this essay, I will begin the difficult task of positing some news stories and systems that may aid us in transmuting this change into a better world for all. It’s a ridiculous endeavour to embark on but I’m going to try.
The aim with all my writing is not to outline the answers but to get people thinking about the topic, start a conversation and help spark some new questions.
If you find this essay or series helpful, think about giving it a like or a share so that it can reach those who may need to read it as well.
Anyway, let’s get into it.
for.and.from.the.mind
Things, as they are, do not seem to be working.
If we don’t consciously start to take part in building the future we want, we will wake up one day and not recognize the world we inhabit.
Right now all of the societal changes that are taking place are driven by corporations inventing new technology. That technology then influences society and the world around us. I believe we have it backwards and that is a big reason that we’re experiencing so many growing pains.
Technology is not serving society, Society is serving Technology.
In this paradigm, I do not think it is possible to realize the Utopian future that is still on the table (at least not for all of us). We need to flip it back. And if the old systems cannot process all of this change, we need new ones.
We don’t just want to cope with the upcoming acceleration. We need to redesign how we live, individually and collectively, in order to metabolize rapid, relentless change.
Last essay, I talked about the psychological enzymes that humans have historically relied on to make sense of the world are weakening. This week, I want to talk about what could replace or update them.
A reminder that the goal here is not to slow down the world. We can slow down our individual lives, which I think is of critical importance, but we cannot fight against the coming tide. Instead we need to increase our capacity to live in a world that never stops changing.
Five systems that we need to rebuild (with urgency)
These five systems are not separate. They work together.
When one weakens, the others have to carry more weight. When all five weaken at once, change becomes almost impossible to metabolize.
Community
Where did our communities go? Why don’t we know our neighbours anymore?
As everything shifted online, we over-indexed on getting our sense of community in the digital world. At first, it felt nice. You could find people all over the world that actually shared your exact interests. It felt good, people finally understood you! The problem is that digital communities cannot adequately support you when you’re in crisis, they cannot help you raise your kids and they do a poor job at challenging the way you see the world (echo chambers).
As we poured more and more energy into those communities, we had little time/energy left for the real relationships that were all around us. At our local coffee shop, out on our daily walk, etc. We fell for the same trap humans often fall for. More must be better. The more connections we had, the better…right?
We went for scale, for audience, for followers. For the most part, this was a failed experiment. We must move back to smaller, deeper more intentional communities. When we allow space for smaller circles, more intimate groups then we unlock a true sense of shared meaning-making.
Two things I have adopted recently to foster more intimate connections:
Every day at 4:30pm my phone alarm goes off, I then look at a list I have made of the ten most important people in my life. I reach out to one of them. It can be a call, a text or a quick hug (or conversation) if they are around me.
I stick to more of a routine and actually engage with the humans that are part of that routine/world. ie. I have a new community center that I’ve been swimming laps at every morning and I actually know the older ladies that swim beside me (they are seventy plus and kick my ass in the pool).
A tight community helps us give meaning to all of the change. And we can distribute the psychological burden of change across our trusted group.
Rituals
Many of our modern rituals are in place to help us optimize. We were sold the idea that there was nothing wrong with society, we were the ones that were broken. And we were all only ever one ritual away from being optimized enough to handle it all.
As a former optimization-addict, I can tell you that there is no end to that game. In my eyes, the answer lies in Integration Rituals rather than more optimization. There is no sense in layering on more things on your crowded to-do list when you haven’t had time to even make sense of your current human experience.
Here are a few helpful rituals that you can introduce into your own life:
One day of silence per week
Weekly reflections with your closest friends/family
Technology ‘sabbaths’, no tech on a given day
Transition rituals between stages of life
Rituals help us understand who we are. Without ritual, change accumulates without meaning.
3. Culture
Our culture used to play a key role in slowing down change. It would reinforce shared beliefs/understanding and pump the brakes on changes that were outside of those, like a filter it would accept/reject new changes. It also created some continuity between generations.
Somewhere along the way, our culture stopped doing all of those things. The dominating story in our culture is that speed and progress are the only way things get better. That we would somehow accelerate our way into a better world. The whole ‘move fast and break things’ ideology that started in Silicon Valley seeped into everyday life.
We need to reintroduce friction deliberately.
This may be one of the biggest challenges we face. This is not easy to do. In our capitalist world, friction is seen as the enemy to progress. But I believe it is a feature, not a bug.
There are many areas in our systems that have intentional friction baked into them. If you want to sell a drug to millions of people, you first must get it rigorously tested by the FDA before it is allowed to be consumed. We decided that it was worth slowing down our medical advancement to ensure we didn’t unleash something that harmed or killed on a mass scale. Is it insane to think that we would do the same with consumer technology?
We now live in a world where someone can ‘vibe-code’ an app on Monday, create a viral marketing plan on Tuesday, push a paid digital advertising campaign on Wed and have it in the hands of millions of users by Thursday…with next to zero oversight.
There are now many studies on the negative effects of social media on children, there’s already early research on AI usage lowering IQ. How do we know what technology is harming or helping us?
We also need to de-couple culture from technology, it feels like the new Church-State paradigm. And no, this is not just a technological problem. The volume/speed over depth trade is widespread everywhere. It shows up in the content we consume, the books we read, the movies we watch.
I don’t believe we want a world where creativity is a volume game. If we want beautiful art and writing in our culture, we must reward depth over volume and be okay with slower creative cycles.
We reward that depth with our wallets and our attention. In a world driven by algorithms, our attention is the most valuable asset we all have right now in shaping culture.
4. Philosophy
New philosophy tends to rise when society loses its shared orientation. It gives people helpful frameworks for interpreting new realities before institutions know how to respond. We desperately need philosophers again.
Even the big AI companies like OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic have all recently hired notable philosophers to tackle AI safety, consciousness, human-AI relationships and design. But this feels like the tail wagging the dog. The same systems creating the acceleration/instability are now trying to solve the downstream psychological/philosophical consequences of the acceleration they profit from. It’s better than nothing but we cannot rely on this to genuinely help society in any meaningful way.
This is the main purpose behind my writing is to encourage and inspire others to think deeply about the problem we face. They are not going away. And perhaps some of the solutions are sitting in your head (yes you, the one reading this right now!). I am not smart or arrogant enough to think that I can come up with a solution to this acceleration myself, but collectively I know we can.
I know it feels overwhelming to spend time dissecting the world, who are we to think we could actually make a difference? We can and we must.
You do not have to get too academic with it or try to figure out how to change everything about the world overnight but what you can do is start with yourself. You can create your own framework for meaning and your own view on the world. That is how this all started with me. I went on a journey to understand myself better and if you walk that path long enough, you have to start to analyze the world around you. We are relational beings, we do not live in a vacuum.
If you think long and deeply about how you are going to process change and live a happier, healthier life, you may just stumble upon ideas that can help change the world.
Religion/Spirituality
Uh oh.
Trigger word. Trigger topic. Trigger everything.
I am not here to challenge anyone’s religious belief. I accept and have directly learned/taken lessons from just about every religion that I know of. All religions are filled with beautiful wisdom and teachings that should be embraced.
It’s also true that in much of the developed world, organized religion is losing its grip. Globally, the picture is more nuanced. Religion is certainly not disappearing. But the shared religious structures that once helped our societies process change are weakening (in many of the places that are driving this mass acceleration).
Historically, Religion/Spirituality helped us process change through narrative stability and by providing us with answers that went beyond our current change and suffering.
You see many people embrace God when they go through traumatic events outside of their control. When nothing makes sense, if you believe in God, God is still there, no matter what. That anchor is actually very helpful. It allows us to identify with something beyond our immediate circumstances.
So how can we encourage people to foster some of those really positive benefits that come from religion without all of the dogma attached to them?
For me it was helpful to move past doctrine and embrace practice.
You do not have to believe in a Christian God in order to pray. You do not have to believe the Buddha in order to meditate. You do not have to believe in Allah in order to fast.
We all must believe in something. Only you can figure out what that something is for you.
And maybe, for you, that something is nothing. But if it is nothing then make it The Great Nothing. And spend time each day thinking of The Great Nothing.
Even time spent in silence, meditation, reflection and presence revering The Great Nothing is time well spent. Because if you really quiet the mind and connect, you will realize how wondrous, beautiful, chaotic and insane this big great nothing really is. And how small our little, human problems really are. Then all of this change feels a lot less overwhelming.
I broke these into individual sections but, again, these all must work together.
Community is where meaning is shared. But community needs ritual to stay alive.
Rituals repeated over time become culture. Culture is shaped by philosophy (the ideas people believe about what life is for). And philosophy often points toward spirituality (the deeper orientation beneath the ideas).
The work is not to revive each pillar in isolation, but to understand how the reinforce each other. I believe that by examining these five pillars and continuing to reimagine them, we can begin to build a sort of infrastructure for our new accelerated world.
And yes, it also feels unfair to put the burden entirely on the individual to withstand a system they did not design. But that’s where we are. That’s where it starts at least.
With each of us adopting new practices while we slowly re-build and re-imagine the psychological enzymes that help us transmute this change into a better future for all.
If we do not rise to the occasion, we will see a deeper fragmentation across society, synthetic meaning starting to replace real meaning and increased dependence on external regulation (AI, drugs, virtual reality).
This next decade does not have to be defined by technology alone. We can write a new definition. Humanity could look back at this period of time as one of hope, agency and collective responsibility.
As the time when we faced our biggest challenge yet and rose to the occasion. When we did the hard work of rebuilding broken systems, writing new stories and creating a world that fully embraced what it means to be human, for all humans.
That is within the realm of possibility, and I believe it starts with you.
latest.podcast.episode
In my latest episode of the Wake Up Call I ramble to myself. It’s a solo episode where I reflect on my own personal journey and talk about my next chapter.
You can check out the full episode here or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
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Thank you for being here and taking the time to read this.
I encourage everyone to get involved in the conversation in the comments. I try my best to respond to each and every one (even if it takes me a little time).
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All love,
Scott Barker
*To try to keep the integrity of this project, I don’t use AI for any copy-writing or proof-reading (only research and debate). I am a human, I write like a human and humans make grammar/spelling mistakes. Writing mistakes might not be around for much longer so I hope you enjoy them while you can :)
Thank you for this thought provoking post. I like the idea of the Great Nothing. I can’t quite bring myself to believe in any god or deity these days but connection and ritual have value beyond any particular story attached to them, to keep us grounded and humble and awake.
Well put. Ancient wisdom and rituals stuck around for a reason