In a time where performative (or desperate) gestures of confidence may get more air-time than wisdom, I want to offer something else: a reflection on what it means to live, generate sustenance, and collaborate through uncertainty—especially when visions are shifting, leaders are faltering, and the ground beneath our feet continues to move. This post begins a discussion regarding how we may accompany one another through existential recalibrations—of self, of future, of belief—and why doing so might be one of the most vital practices we can cultivate during this year.
Background & Problem Space
I spend a lot of time in spaces where folks are talking about the future, and one thing that is coming up more and more, subtly but increasingly overtly, is about how people in leadership positions or acting as providers of vision and direction are having to:
pivot,
capitulate,
reverse course,
change their minds,
express or mitigate despair,
wade through uncertainty,
or any number of adjacent, in-between, or otherwise non-ideal ways of presenting oneself as a confident individual about the future.
The appearance of superlative amounts of confidence during this era generally cluster within these categories:
Single-dimension targeting*
Morally and intellectually dishonest or disingenuous extremes
Nihilism & apathy outright
This is to say: focusing only on one goal or solution at the expense of taking in a broader view; creating an heavily polarized Good or Evil view of self or others, or associate solutions or approaches; or broadly giving up and seeing it all as pointless. These are the areas where most folks right now (maybe in general, but I’m really talking about 2025, here, and now), are displaying extremely cavalier attitudes and undaunted or unflinching takes on things.
Alternatives We Can Enact
What I want to say in this piece is that the following is also a path one can walk:
You can be uncertain, frustrated, apathetic
Coalitions and spaces and community can still exist
But it may require context, courage, and choosing it to be so.
I don’t think the United States, in particular, has many models, examples, or legitimate heroes for how to handle situations like this that are not diluted, white-washed, or otherwise sterilized. I can mention a number of folks in the 1960s, but I fear I may loose attention in doing so.
What I want to focus on directly is challenging because none of the historical examples we may think of have dealt with the kind of change we are seeing right now; the waves we have to navigate are different.
So I want to speak to a small but important component to that process, which is:
Be prepared to allow for others to go through their vision, future, or worldview existential crisis as you collaborate and find ways of enduring and building with them.
Let’s unpack this briefly, while you’ve generously offered your attention — this is one of the most challenging things to actually look in the face in this moment that we’re in, and I appreciate you giving me the time to talk about this with you.
I am intentionally not attempting to label or prescribe a specific outcome, belief, or judgement here. I am instead trying to speak to a process of understanding what is going on, and offering a small bit of advice about how to best handle it.
As I noted above, this is a time where many of the folks we look up to, and the visions or solutions the have espoused, are undergoing varying degrees of change, uncertainty, instability, or potentially collapse.
It is natural and understandable to both look for our heroes, leaders, or figures to be confident and strong and offer a solution. But I am offering that we may:
reasonably guard against, and prepare for, the compulsion to seek security in those appearances,
as well as understand there are alternatives
That is, alternatives to abandoning our loftier beliefs or faith-in-humanity (or community in general), in by taking respite in a a more apparent stability, or more apparent “confidence.”
In other words, I am seeking to encourage and normalize that, in reality, the wisest, strongest, most viable, and most secure approach to this moment will actually warrant some pause, some reconsideration.
It may entail embracing some of the “I don’t know” of it all, and still putting forth meaning and fostering relationships in spite of not knowing.
Furthermore, it will be useful (maybe necessary) to accompany others as they transition through the stages of belief change, vision change, or reconsidering what to actually do right now.
About those with very clear, isolated goals
I think it is noteworthy to say, if there is a group, or a figure, that is clear about what they want to take away from this moment, it may also lend to the appearance of confidence; the old adage of “the best way to predict the future is to make it.” It is reasonable and probably wise to consider that there are factions attempting to pursue very specific targets right now (* Point 1 on single-targets, earlier) - but this can be differentiated from those who actually have a clear and holistic picture about what is going on right now.
As an old political science professor used to say, “The hardest time to understand is the one we are currently in.” To expand upon that, looking backwards you, you can see which of the potential pathways became more viable or eventually materialized - but history can seem linear and uncomplicated if there is not proper contextualizing for all the different ways things could have gone.
Implementation: What do we do?
So beyond identifying what may be happening, my suggestion and prescriptive stance is as follows.
Internal Work
Finding peace in times of uncertainty may sound unserious, but there are meaningful and sober ways to do so. There is such a strong ebb and flow to 2025, almost everyone I know is pulled and pushed with the waves and tides. I even have sympathy for the Influencers who are simply repeating their sales pitch and the virtues of their product or program in spite of these challenges; I’m now in that space increasingly, myself.
Whatever face people are putting on right now, even if they are front-running or band-wagoning on whatever appears to be the Winning Team (in their view), people are scared and uncertain. So what do we do about it, at the internal level?
Find what regulates you, both individually and with others. What are your consumption limits and quotas? What are you doing that is away from all of the chaos and stress? What are your indulgence, your downtime — the carefree space we need to recharge? What about your constructive outlets or things to invest in?
These are suggestions, but you will need to invest in knowing yourself well enough to have a reasonable barometer of what kinds of stress and burnout you are accumulating, and how to care for it.
Even though the focus on this post is interpersonal, it seems critical to emphasize the internal work. The world is fierce and demanding, and you’ll have to tend to yourself first before others - just like on the airplane safety videos.
External Work: Accompanying the Variable Beliefs and Visions of Others
Community will be critical in this area, and whether you are simply looking to join one or tasked with managing and caring for others, this will come up.
Some people have been in the game for a long time and staring at these problems for decades. Some folks only now are understanding what “AI is about”, or dealing with what politics has showed itself as capable of doing.
What I want to offer is that, collectively, we are all in the same boat. Nobody really knows. Nobody really knows what is going on or what is going to happen, and “that’s ok” — which I say not to normalize it or dismiss it, but rather to say we are in a period of that much change. I am also not suggesting everyone is simply going to get along, with a little compassion and understanding.
My message here is more so that the times are different, and it would be wise to consider carefully the trajectory of someone’s background, belief transitions, worldviews, and sense of the future.
We are going to need to collaborate, forge coalitions, alliances, and new ways of working together. Surely, there will be challenges and incompatibilities and lack of alignment at hand. But as we find new ways of doing things ahead, it is viable to understand how our changing times can mask or distort potential allies.
Or, how people simply dealing with the world as it is, will have varying degrees of contribution and availability as you attempt to forge your own way ahead, reconsider or solidify your own beliefs, and your particular plan going forward.
The new name of the game is a kind of extended, distributed co-regulatory path-finding practice. Alongside some valued colleagues and collaborators, I am attempting to discern, demarcate, and otherwise write more about this, as I find it to be a critical matter and even skillset that is substantially underrepresented.
We are not prepared for this moment in most of our formally available training. But there are things to know and learn and do, and ways to support and grow and cultivate that which we will require to sustain, endure, and flourish in the months and years ahead.
At the very least, there are better and worse ways of handling all of this, and there are those of us working to sort out what they are. If you are working in this space, or want to be doing more in this space, and resonate with this message, please reach out.
Be prepared to allow for others to go through their vision, future, or worldview existential crisis as you collaborate and find ways of enduring and building with them.
Recommended Reading
I don’t truly know a book I’d recommend about this, given the lack of actual context for the influence of AI (and its impact on surveillance, information distortion or control, and the unknown and to-be-built digital ways of relating to each other), and the general World War era political pressures — both. (No less other factors, which I will unironically bypass for brevity here.)
But I would suggest looking into:
Those who are Steel Manning a particular view and its trajectory, so as to demarcate where things may go if that line of reasoning holds out. (Recall “The hardest time to understand is the one we’re in”, from earlier.) Due to the innumerable approaches, visions, and agendas at hand, those who identify clearly where one of them is going can be of great use to your own triangulations and extrapolations.
Quality takes on emotional literacy, and perhaps even things like faith transitions, or people moving in and out of cults.
I don’t mean to sound hokey or histrionic, but, we are indeed in a period where people’s views are fought for, no less the Attention Era in general. Also, one of my most respected in-the-thick-of-it people in the building of AI has commented about the nature of Silicon Valley and tech startup spaces as similar to the Axial Age or Late Antiquity, where the vying for believers and quest for dominance of alignment or devotion to a vision.
Good literature about finding meaning or leadership or forging community in ties of uncertainty. Particularly if it goes beyond “uncertain markets”, but actual macro-level uncertainties.
What would you suggest?
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From Here To There: Substack, LinkedIn
I still think about this weekly if not more often. Today's musing on the topic is how there is a context of being able to hold space for people who are repairing their sense of hope and vision, and how to properly modulate your aspirational efforts so as to not overwhelm that process. "Don't give me that hope" (Avengers) is a very real thing, and a thing that all of us who are aspiring towards soberly-hopeful aims has to content with.
I was reminded of this piece when viewing
AI Critic Marcus, on a recent social post around the growing sense of backlash.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/gary-marcus-b6384b4_why-is-the-ai-backlash-growing-outside-share-7456554051284021248-qefz?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAOulq8BqXwLh2mDu6UZvnp3rsIdK_Eof3Q