It can mean: I should do the dishes. It can also mean: we should go camping.

One is a duty. One is a desire.

Most of the time, “should” does not arrive clearly labeled. It arrives with desire, shame, obligation, avoidance, frustration, and self-judgment all tangled up together until the origin is hard to see.

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where the should came from

The usual advice is to “stop shoulding yourself,” and that is often good advice. Many shoulds are cages. They come from family systems, workplaces, industries, gender conditioning, capitalism, religious residue, productivity culture, the imagined court of public opinion, or the inner authority figure with terrible politics and a clipboard.

Those shoulds deserve suspicion.

But some shoulds are desires that got wrapped in shame.

There is a version of “should” that starts as a genuine want. A person wants to make something, go somewhere, change something, ask for something, try something, build something, rest more, move more, or create more space.

Then, something interrupts it. Fear interrupts it. Friction interrupts it. It requires more capacity than exists right now. It asks for a decision before it has been thought through.

Sometimes the desire raises a scarier question: what if I get what I want and I am still unhappy? Or what if I get what I want and there is actually nothing bigger after it? What if this is the peak? What if I am allowed to want this, and then I have to admit how long I have been waiting?

So the desire gets delayed, then avoided, then resented. Eventually it starts sounding less like “I want this” and more like “what is wrong with me that I have not done this yet?”

That is the moment desire becomes a task.

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the swaddle of shame

Shame makes desire harder to recognize. It wraps around the original want like a swaddle. At first, that can feel protective. Shame gives the desire a reason to stay small, a reason not to ask too much, a reason not to risk disappointment.

Eventually the wrapping gets too tight. The desire cannot move, and the person cannot move either. What remains is the “should.”

I should write that down. I should make time for that. I should figure this out. I should care about this less. I should care about this more.

The should keeps tapping, but now every tap feels like an accusation.

William Blake wrote, “He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence.”

It is an intense sentence, but there is something useful in it. Unacted desire does not always stay clean and beautiful. Sometimes it ferments. Sometimes it grows mold. Sometimes it leaks into the rest of life as irritation, resentment, distraction, or self-disgust.

the roadblocks

There is a crushing fatigue that comes from keeping a desire suspended in midair.

First there is the desire itself. Then, sometimes the shame about wanting it. Then sometimes the shame about not doing it. Then sometimes the avoidance, because now thinking about the thing feels bad. Then sometimes the roadblocks built to avoid the bad feeling. Then sometimes the extra work of walking around the roadblocks.

At some point, not doing the thing becomes more labor than the thing. The dam has to be maintained. The leaks have to be patched.

This is how a desire becomes an energy leak.

desire is not always indulgence

There is an old Buddhist distinction between craving and wholesome desire. Craving is the hungry, sticky, compulsive kind of desire that says, if I get this, then I will finally be okay. But there is also chanda, often translated as intention, interest, aspiration, or desire-to-act.

That distinction matters because a lot of spiritual and self-help language treats desire as suspicious. Wanting something gets treated like the first sign of immaturity, as if to desire something is to admit that we are not already whole and perfect as we are.

Sometimes that is true. Sometimes desire is craving with better branding.

But sometimes desire is information. Sometimes a should is not trying to discipline anyone. Sometimes it is trying to remind them of who they really are.

the question underneath

Where is this “should” coming from?

Did it come from obligation? Did it come from fear? Did it come from a value? Did it come from a want? Did it come from shame about a want? Did the want become painful because it sat too long without action?

If the should came from inherited obligation, maybe the work is release. If it came from avoidance, maybe the work is gentleness. If it came from desire, maybe the work is not discipline at all.

Maybe the work is clearing a channel. Maybe the work is giving the vine a trellis. Maybe the work is one small action that lets the original want breathe again.

Offerings

the easier thing

When a desire has been wrapped in shame for long enough, acting on it can feel like surrendering to the shame. It can feel like letting the inner critic win.

But the desire was there first. The shame arrived later and claimed ownership.

Avoidance is labor. Shame is labor. Roadblock construction is labor. Self-surveillance is labor. Keeping a desire locked in a small room and pretending not to hear it knocking is labor.

Sometimes doing the thing takes less energy than continuing not to do it.

This does not mean every desire needs immediate action. Some desires need time, money, capacity, help, grief, a different season, or a better structure.

So before a should gets thrown out, obeyed, resisted, resented, or turned into another piece of evidence in the case against the self, it may be worth opening it.

There may be obligation inside. There may be fear. There may be someone else’s voice. There may also be a desire that has been waiting so long it forgot how to sound like one.

FYI: I also write For People and Planet, a weekly newsletter about climate solutions and the creativity driving them. If you’re curious, you can check it out here: forpeopleandpla.net

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With love, Bri Chapman

You know the ones. The ones from the corporate trainings and the bestselling books. They tell you that when things get tense, people do one of two things: they get quiet, or they get loud. They shut down, or they blow up.

The most famous version even gives the two a name: silence, or violence. Pick your lane.

It’s a tidy little map. And, it’s also mostly blank.

Starting with the part everyone quotes: “fight or flight.” Walter Cannon identified it in 1915, watching animals under threat. For a long time, that was the whole story.

But, soon we learned that this was, in fact, not the full story. The list kept growing.

Freeze came next, when the body can’t fight or run. Then fawn, where you reduce the threat by pleasing it, making yourself agreeable and useful and small. Then a researcher named Shelley Taylor described tend-and-befriend in 2000.

She pointed out that the original fight-or-flight research had been done mostly on males. Before the mid-nineties, something like one in six stress-study subjects was female.

So, even our automatic reactions were never just two.

And those are only the reactions.

There’s a whole other set of things that happen in conflict, and they don’t live down there in the reactive space. They need you online. Regulated.

You can ask a question. You can set a boundary, or get curious, or de-escalate, or take some space, or try to build an option neither of you had thought of yet.

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None of that is fight or flight. But, for simplicity, we can still classify the (current known) range of responses into two categories:

• Reactive (automatic, nervous-system hijack, you’re out of your window of tolerance):

  • fight - meet the threat head-on. Anger, confrontation, pushing back, taking control. The body floods with energy to overpower what’s in front of you.

  • flight - get away from it. Fleeing, avoiding, leaving the room, changing the subject, staying too busy to feel it. The drive to put distance between you and the threat.

  • fawn - manage the threat by pleasing it. Appeasing, accommodating, over-apologizing, making yourself agreeable and useful and small so the danger lessens. Keeping the peace at the cost of yourself.

  • freeze - when you can’t fight or run. Stuck, blank, deer-in-headlights. Time slows, the mind goes quiet, you can’t move or decide.

  • flop - when freeze goes all the way. The body checks out completely. Dissociation, numbness, the body pulling the plug to protect you when nothing else worked.

  • tend-and-befriend - Instead of attacking the threat or escaping it, you turn toward others: protecting and caring for the people close to you (tend), and reaching for connection and support (befriend).

  • etc.

• Responsive (regulated, deliberate, prefrontal online):

  • discuss - talk it through directly. Lay out what happened, what you each think, what you want, and work toward understanding. Actually having the conversation.

  • educate - share what information the other person doesn’t have. Explain your reasoning or the context they’re missing, without assuming bad faith. Sometimes a conflict is an information gap, rather than a clash of values.

  • de-escalate - lower the temperature on purpose. Slow down, soften your tone, acknowledge their feelings, take the heat out so the real issue can be worked. Not conceding.

  • set a boundary - What you will and won’t accept, and what you’ll do if it continues.

  • get curious - turn toward their reality. Ask real questions. Assume there’s something you don’t yet understand about why they’re doing what they’re doing.

  • repair - tend the injury. Own your part, reconnect. Conflict frays the thread between people and repair is how you mend it.

  • take intentional space - step back, on purpose, with a plan to return. The opposite of flight: you’re not escaping, you’re giving your nervous system time to settle so you can come back regulated. “I need an hour, let’s pick this up after dinner.”

  • collaborate - work the problem together as a shared thing. Create something that honors both points of view, instead of one winning or both giving up. High care for yourself and for them.

  • etc.

The strange thing is, we’ve known this for ages.

A hundred years ago, Mary Parker Follett was writing that there are three ways through a conflict, not two. You can dominate, where one side wins. You can compromise, where everyone gives something up. Or you can integrate, where you find the thing that actually holds both.

The conflict-resolution field has had a five-option model since the seventies.

And John Gottman, who has watched more couples fight than almost anyone alive, found that most of what couples fight about never gets resolved at all. 69% of it is perpetual. You don’t solve it. You learn to live inside it.

Which means the goal was never to win the conflict, or end it. The goal is to be in conflict well.

Offerings

Here’s what I’ve come to think: conflict might be the most alive place we have.

There’s a stretch of every river where it reaches the sea. The estuary. Freshwater pushing down, saltwater pushing up, the two of them arguing over the same few miles of mud.

It is the least settled water on the whole river. It is also one of the most fertile places on earth.. more life packed into it than almost anywhere, precisely because two systems are in constant conflict there. And neither one wins. The friction is the fertility.

The old models aren’t evil, they just kind of suck. They’re way too small. They took the richest and most contradictory, most alive thing we do with each other, and reduced it to silence or violence.

We contain multitudes, like the poet said. We are estuaries. The place where everything meets. The rich messy middle, the fertile mud.

FYI: I also write For People and Planet, a weekly newsletter about climate solutions and the creativity driving them. If you’re curious, you can check it out here: forpeopleandpla.net

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With love, Bri Chapman

The teacher is talking about appreciating what your body can do for you. Joyful movement. How wonderful it is that your body is able to do things.

And I’m sitting there with a question: what happens when your body can’t do things?

Because mine often can’t.

body acceptance

In civilized circles, we have mostly agreed to stop ranking bodies by how they look. Now, instead, we offer them gratitude for what they can do.

We moved the goalpost from appearance to output.

The main obstacle for this worldview is disability, which often gets ‘resolved’ by some version of the following: Even if you can’t run or dance or lift, your body is still working to keep you alive. Your heart is beating. Your lungs are breathing. Isn’t that something to appreciate?

I have beef with this for two reasons:

First, it’s a consolation prize. Everyone else gets to marvel at what their body can do, and you get to be grateful you’re not dead. Basically a participation trophy for staying alive.

Second, many people do live with challenging hearts, lungs, immune systems, etc. The “autopilot” we are supposed to be grateful for is very often part of what is not working. So, “At least the basics are working” becomes a small cruelty at best.

Joyful movement cannot help when movement isn’t available. Basic function cannot serve as the fallback when basic function is failing. Every version of appreciate your body assumes the body is, at some level, cooperating.

disability is part of life

We often talk as if “sick” and “well” are separate categories. The sick people over here. The well people over there.

But, there is no over there.

Disability is a group every person joins if they are fortunate enough to live that long. Disability writers often call everyone who hasn’t gotten there yet temporarily able-bodied. Age, accident, illness.. It’s everyone’s future.

Celebrate what your body can do works until your body can’t. And every body, eventually, can’t.

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a partner i can’t divorce

The frame I currently use is: my body is a partner I can’t divorce.

A partner asks something different of me than a machine or a project.

I have to learn it. Listen to it. Hear what it needs instead of what I wish it needed.

Audre Lorde wrote in 1980 that women had been taught to see our bodies “only in terms of how they look and feel to others, rather than how they feel to ourselves, and how we wish to use them.”

Body positivity moved from “how I look” to “what I can do.” Lorde pointed inward: how does it feel from in here?

This relationship with my body has required skills I didn’t want to need.

I have learned to stop treating myself like an invasive weed that should be able to thrive growing in concrete. I don’t. Most things don’t. And frankly, it is worth the effort to find rich nourishing soil.

I have learned that what I want and what supports me can be (and often are) different things. Tomatoes and avocados are some of my favorite foods in the world, and my body has recently decided we are allergic to both of them.

Staying in the relationship requires attention. It does not require love. We can simply coexist, my body and I. But, at minimum, I need to be attentive to my body’s needs and communications to the best of my ability.

My body does not get everything it wants. But I also do not get everything I want because compromise supports the relationship.

the terms

Every relationship is temporary in the form we know it. People change. They leave. They die. Time changes the person beside you. It changes you too.

The relationship with my body follows the same terms. What works today may fail tomorrow. What fails today may come back tomorrow. A living system is constantly changing.

I can’t divorce this body, but I also can’t keep it. Acceptance means staying in relationship with the body that is here. Listening. Responding. Relearning its terms as they change.

Offerings

FYI: Each week I share stories through For People and Planet, a newsletter focused on climate solutions and hope for the future. You can find it here if you’d like to follow along: forpeopleandpla.net

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With love, Bri Chapman

What happened was, I had just gone through a breakup and I was heartbroken and spite-Googling.

I wanted a revenge fantasy. Specifically: “how do I make him want me back so I can say ‘no thanks?’”

That search took me to YouTube. A few short videos later, suddenly I was watching men in fitted shirts talk about ‘outcome independence.’

You may be fortunate enough to have avoided this particular genre of YouTube content. But in case you do know what I’m talking about: ‘Abundance mindset.’ ‘Don’t chase.’ ‘Walk away.’ ‘Hold the frame.’

One of them boiled the whole thing down to six words, delivered with total seriousness (and, about half the time, a goatee): “hang out, have fun, hook up.”

I was fascinated. Like, at the time I would’ve told you I was anthropologically fascinated, sort of a “how do these people exist in the world??” fascination.

But of course, as often happens in the manosphere, the ideas started to rub off on me, except in this case ‘me’ was a young woman in her late 20s.

The self-help content aimed at women often assumes the problem is disconnection. The dating content aimed at men often assumes the problem is attachment to an outcome.

Those are very different problems. I had the second problem, while being marketed the first solution.

The men in suits were essentially telling their audience: stop gripping the result. Be present. Enjoy what is in front of you. Let the other person choose.

The packaging was so gross that it almost went full circle into a delicious guilty pleasure. But, the teaching was shockingly useful.

Quickly, I moved from outcome independence to appreciating the fleeting beauty of my one precious life. Acknowledging that all relationships are temporary and I have the incredible opportunity to love people for as long as they are part of my life.

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Years later

This came up again now, years later, because I am taking my 200 hour yoga teacher training class. The teacher read from the Bhagavad Gita.

You have a right to your actions, but not to the fruits of them.

I recognized it immediately.

Under all the bad packaging, this was the thing manosphere dating coaches had been circling with their “hang out, have fun, hook up,” ideas. ‘Abundance mindset.’ ‘Don’t chase.’ ‘Walk away.’ ‘Hold the frame.’ I could immediately see how the crude internet version had been circling one small piece of a much older teaching.

Two thousand years apart, one in Sanskrit and one in front of a podcast mic and a ring light, and they were talking about the same ideas.

After that I kept finding it everywhere.

• Alan Watts approaches it with the backwards law: the more tightly you reach for something, the more it recedes.

• Buddhism has upekkha, often translated as equanimity: releasing your grip on the outcome without releasing your care.

• Joanna Macy teaches activists and climate workers a version of the same thing: do the work and let go of the result, because staying clenched around the result will burn you out before the work is done.

The 2am YouTube rabbit hole was maybe the worst packaging in which I could have found these ideas.

But, it was also realistically the only packaging I would have opened at 2am.

Near enemy

In Buddhist psychology, many virtues have a “near enemy.” A counterfeit that looks similar from the outside.

Equanimity has one too: indifference.

Real equanimity means you stop gripping the result while you keep caring about the person.

Indifference means you stay calm because you have decided the person does not matter.

From the outside, those can look the same: less chasing, less obsessing, less performing for approval.

Inside, they are opposites.

Those manosphere dating coaches unfortunately sell both. Some of them are teaching presence. Some of them are teaching contempt.

“She was never yours, it was just your turn” sounds like non-attachment if you squint. And, it is also a horrific way to talk about another human being.

So, just to be perfectly clear, this is a do as I say not as I do essay: I do not recommend to scroll the manosphere in your 2am rage-induced rabbit hole and I do not agree with many of the sentiments expressed by manosphere dating coaches.

How it changed my life

These ideas, in every face I have found them, have dramatically transformed my life.

The manosphere does not own this teaching. Neither do yoga teachers. The Gita gave me one sacred version of it. Buddhist equanimity, Alan Watts, and activist practice gave me other doorways into related ideas.

I think it moves through people. Sometimes through monasteries. Sometimes through mats. Sometimes through podcasts by men who might be horrified to learn they are passing it forward.

I found it at 2am because I wanted a man to want me back.

Maybe sometimes what we need finds us at just the right time, wherever we are. ❤️

Offerings

FYI: On the side I write a weekly newsletter called For People and Planet. It’s all about progress, hope, and the ways people are building a better future with Earth. You can take a look here: forpeopleandpla.net

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With love, Bri Chapman

We’re the ones who can’t stop noticing what’s not working. Who fall asleep rearranging systems in our heads. Who feel the distance between how things are and how they could be like a stone in our shoe.

Lately I’ve been noticing that wanting the world to change is decidedly NOT the same as enjoying the actual changing part.

Wanting the world to change costs me nothing. I can want it from the couch. The institutions should change. The systems should turn over. The people who refuse to get it should finally get it.

I can believe every word of that, loudly, while my own life stays exactly where I like it.

Enjoying the world changing is a whole different thing.

The world changing doesn’t stay out there at a comfortable distance. It comes home. It rearranges the room I had just gotten comfortable in. It takes the plan I made and stops it from working. It takes the thing I was sure of and messes it all up.

And, it so rarely feels like linear, forward progress.

the windless room

Years ago, scientists sealed a glass world into the Arizona desert and called it Biosphere 2. They planted trees inside. The trees grew fast, and then they fell over. They couldn’t hold their own weight.

It took a while to understand why. The dome had no wind. And trees, it turns out, need wind. The push of weather is what tells a tree to lay down the dense, stubborn wood that lets it stand. Without that stress, the trees shot up tall and hollow and collapsed under themselves.

The protection was the thing that killed them.

If possibility is what’s left when certainty falls apart, then the falling apart part isn’t the disaster.

It’s the doorway.

The uncertainty we fight so hard against is the same thing as the possibility we say we want. They aren’t two separate states. They’re one state, felt from both sides.

A world that is settled has already decided how it ends, and there’s no room left for change.

You can’t have the new world without the uncertainty. The uncertainty is how the new world gets in.

Everything we say we want is on the far side of being willing to not know.

The world we’re reaching for is in there, in the part we can’t see yet.

FYI: Each week I share stories through For People and Planet, a newsletter focused on climate solutions and hope for the future. You can find it here if you’d like to follow along: forpeopleandpla.net

Offerings

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With love, Bri Chapman

How do we have all the nonchalance required to casually open something that took a million years to make, and all the social anxiety of being the one to open the store-bought bag of Lays at the BBQ?

In some ways, opening the fossil is a gamble. There are a finite number of fossils on this earth. They were made long ago. When we open one, it’s because we believe we can get maximal value from it now. We have good instruments. We have good methods. The argument for cracking it open is the argument for extracting anything now instead of later: we know what we can get from it now, and we don’t know what we could have gotten from it later.

By opening the fossil today, we are betting that future technology will not have learned more from it than we did today. So, we are betting that progress will slow down from here. Or, if not, we acknowledge we are maximizing our own personal experience at the expense of long term human advancement.

To take the same logic backwards, many of us want to slow down progress today. We want to slow down AI deployment for a variety of reasons including climate, employment, trust and safety, regulation, etc.

The continued deployment of AI is, in many ways, a bet on progress doing two contradictory things at once:

• AI progress will speed up so fast that we reach a solved future AND

• AI progress will slow down enough that the harms can be managed before they cascade

Both bets are held at once, by the same societies and even often the same individuals.

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Eternity

Eternity, in our world, is enormous and tiny at the same time.

Eternity is enormous in that entire wars have been waged by religions whose adherents believed the violence would secure them a place in the eternal life. Whole civilizations have built their cathedrals and their pyramids and their legal codes around the question of how to outlast death.

Eternity is the stake big enough to justify almost any present-day action.

And yet, eternity is so tiny that we will trade it for a quick buck. We will burn ancient and finite resources to keep the financial quarter on track. We will hand over the future of our world for the present-day convenience of billionaires.

How much do we actually value eternity?

Eternity for me, eternity for thee.

It seems that the personal kind of eternity is the kind we value. A personal place in heaven, paid for once by indulgences (and, arguably, now by anti-aging rituals and tech bro delusions about living forever.) The pursuit of eternal life. The pursuit of eternal youth. Longevity clinics, supplement stacks, plastic surgery, cryopreservation contracts signed in good faith. Eternity scaled to one body, one face, one consciousness, marked sacred.

The collective kind of eternity seems to be the kind we devalue.

Eternity for me is what I will pay almost any price for. Eternity for thee is what I will trade away for almost nothing.

The “AI of it all”

There have been a variety of attempts to cure humanity of its lack of care for the collective eternity. Many of them center around the same premise: inextricably link the personal eternity with the collective eternity.

Religion is the most notable example of this, with the idea that your behavior in your time on earth, your legacy, earns you your position in the eternal life.

So, in the AI case, what does it look like to inextricably link personal eternity with collective eternity?

In my mind I think of it like a ship on a collision course. When a ship is on a collision course, you have a few options. You can jump off. You can jump in front of it and try to slow it down or stop it. Or, you can stay on, try to get to the wheel and steer.

In this case, jumping off looks like:

• refusing to use AI tools personally

• declining to work at AI companies or take their money

• morally: clean hands.

• practically: does not seem to significantly slow or turn the ship.

Jumping in front looks like:

• protests, blockades, civil disobedience

• legal campaigns

• morally: heroic

• practically: may slow down the ship

Steering looks like:

• working on and with AI

• working really hard on and with AI

• morally: complicit. you benefit from the ship running, and your hands are directly assisting in running it

• practically: small chance of turning the ship, if you succeed.

For me, because I have the privilege of an engineering education, experience, and background, staying on, trying to get to the front and steering is what it means to tie my personal eternity, my legacy, with the collective eternity. It’s a bet, like opening the fossil. The stakes are high, and like most bets, the odds show ‘the house is likely to win,’ and yet, it’s a bet I am willing to make. For now.

FYI: Each week I share stories through For People and Planet, a newsletter focused on climate solutions and hope for the future. You can find it here if you’d like to follow along: forpeopleandpla.net

Offerings

Further reading:

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With love, Bri Chapman

A small number of mammals experience menopause.

Humans. Orcas. Short-finned pilot whales. False killer whales. Belugas and narwhals, according to recent research.

In each case, females live long past their reproductive years. And in each case, older females appear to play an outsized social role: carrying memory, stabilizing relationships, guiding collective movement through changing conditions.

The grandmother who remembers where food can still be found in a famine year can determine whether the family survives.

The elephant matriarch who remembers distant water sources can carry a herd through drought.

These are not utopias. But these species do teach us something important:

Intelligence is not only individual. It is also relational.

Survival, in complex social mammals, often depends on distributed care, accumulated memory, and durable bonds between generations.

Modern political culture in the West has been profoundly shaped by the liberal-democratic ideals crystallized during the French Revolution: liberté, egalité, fraternité.

Liberty. Equality. Fraternity.

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Those ideas were profound achievements. They challenged monarchy, aristocracy, inherited hierarchy, and forms of domination that had governed many of our societies for centuries.

But they also reflected a particular image of the human person: the autonomous individual standing in formal relation to the state and to other individuals.

That model remains powerful. It protects rights. It creates legal universality. It limits arbitrary power.

And, it also leaves certain human needs underdeveloped.

The need to belong without conformity.

The need to be known as a particular person rather than treated as an interchangeable unit.

The need for forms of responsibility that emerge from relationship rather than contract alone.

The need for wisdom that is local, embodied, and carried across generations.

In the coming centuries, I feel we are going to need another layer of social intelligence:

Souveraineté. Authenticité. Communauté.

Sovereignty as grounded selfhood: the capacity for judgment that does not depend on external permission or institutional validation.

Authenticity as the ability for difference to exist without becoming alienation.

Community as mutual obligation among people who remain distinct from one another.

Healthy social systems require both autonomy and attachment.

Both rights and responsibilities.

Both individuality and interdependence.

Modern societies have become extraordinarily capable at protecting individuals and individualism in the abstract.

They have been less successful at protecting individuals in the concrete: helping people remain meaningfully connected to one another, supporting people’s wellbeing, autonomy, and health.

The pressures now arriving, (for example: ecological instability, technological acceleration, institutional distrust) are problems of coordination, trust, judgment, and social cohesion.

They require people who can act as individuals without becoming isolated from one another.

Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité remain essential ideals.

But the century ahead may also demand another vocabulary:

Souveraineté. Authenticité. Communauté.

FYI: I’ve started a weekly newsletter called For People and Planet. It’s a place where I highlight what’s working in the fight for a more balanced future. You can read it here: forpeopleandpla.net

Offerings

Further reading:

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With love, Bri Chapman

The fear took different shapes, but it was sort of all the same. We know it well: the undercurrent of all conversations these days. AI will replace me / displace my value / and ultimately, destroy my future.

I slept on it.

And this morning, I am finding myself enamored with all that is uniquely living. The juice. The revelry. The chaos. The misplaced punc,tuation and tupos.

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Direct experience is about to become the most valuable thing in the world.

By direct experience I mean two things.

The meeting of your senses with reality.

And.

The meeting of your emotions with reality.

The salt on your skin after the ocean. The catch in your throat when you leave your first apartment for the last time. The smell of the grass after the first rain of spring.

These are life. They are juice.

And they are the one category of experience an AI system cannot have. A model can describe or maybe even sense the salt water. It can simulate the throat catch in seven languages. It can generate light-on-floor in any visual style you want. But, it has no skin and no apartment and no spring.

For most of the last twenty years, the digital economy has been building toward an inversion. The more our work shifted online and digital, the more our compensation came from creating distance from direct experience.

The dedicated knowledge worker who never went outside. The strategist who scaled a business until she was optimizing markets she would never step foot in. The creative who built brand voices for products he would never hold in his hand. We got rich on the work of representing reality without being in it.

That arrangement is collapsing.

The abstracted, representational, knowledge-economy labor turns out to be exactly the labor an AI can do faster / cheaper / better than us. The thing being automated is the thing we had agreed was the high-value work.

What remains is only what, by definition, cannot be abstracted and distanced. Presence. Direct experience.

Directionality

AI is everywhere. It is ubiquitous and omniscient. That is its great strength and its biggest limitation. It runs through your phone, your inbox, your home assistant, your operating system, your search bar. It sits on every surface of your life at the same time. It knows everything at once and it points in every direction at once, (which is to say, it points in no direction.)

A direction is a desire + time.

A direction means: this matters more to me than that. I will spend my hours moving toward this. I will let other possibilities go. Direction is what makes a life a life rather than a list of possibilities.

What I noticed in yesterday’s conversations was that nobody was describing a directionless fear. People were afraid of being made directionless. Of losing the line of travel between who they were and who they were becoming. The displacement they feared was the displacement of their own forward motion.

It’s almost like we know so deeply and so intuitively that our direction is so uniquely us that we haven’t yet realized that AI doesn’t have it.

Desire

The people who feel grounded in this transition tend to share one thing. They know what they are moving toward.

The technology shows up as a tool inside the direction rather than a wave that swamps the direction.

These people have a thesis about their life that is theirs, set by their own desire, not assigned to them by their job or their algorithm.

Desire is half of direction.

Desire is the sum of our direct experiences.

Direct experience creates desire. Desire is half of directionality.

Desire, directionality, and direct experience make up the intelligence that will become the most valuable thing in the world, in an AI future.

In fact, maybe they always WERE the most valuable thing in the world, we just forgot for a minute.

FYI: I also write For People and Planet, a weekly newsletter about climate solutions and the creativity driving them. If you’re curious, you can check it out here: forpeopleandpla.net

Offerings

Further reading:

For more like this, follow me wherever you connect with friends:
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With love, Bri Chapman

The majority of leadership happens without formal authority.

You’re leading when you’re running a cross-functional project with no direct reports. You’re leading when you’re trying to influence your peers, or even managing up to shift your boss’s perspective. You’re leading when you’re building a movement within your organization, like pushing for a new initiative, championing a cultural shift, or mobilizing people around a shared vision.

In all these scenarios, you have no positional power. You can’t command. You can’t control resources. You can’t impose change through hierarchy.

So, how do you lead?

Traditional leadership development offers a lot of valuable tools: emotional intelligence, communication frameworks, strategic thinking, goal-setting methodologies, etc. These are important. But they are built on a fundamental assumption: once people have the right skills and mindset, they can execute.

What if that assumption is incomplete? What if you don’t always have the authority to execute in the way you’ve been trained?

This is the question activists have been grappling with for generations. When you are organizing for social change, you have no formal authority. No budget. No org chart. Just people, commitment, and the imperative to mobilize others toward transformation.

Traditional Leadership Development

I’m not here to throw traditional leadership development under the bus. With formal authority, these frameworks work. Situational leadership helps leaders adapt their approach based on context. The GROW model (Goal, Reality, Options, Will) provides structure for developmental conversations. Training in active listening, feedback, and emotional intelligence builds critical capabilities.

These tools have value. They have helped countless leaders become effective.

But, they share a common limitation: they focus on developing people to be better performers within existing constraints. They assume the playing field is relatively level, that the main thing standing between someone and their potential is knowledge, skill, or confidence.

They don’t address the invisible obstacles that prevent people from accessing their full power.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed

The foundations of liberatory leadership trace back to Paulo Freire’s 1968 work Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Freire was a Brazilian educator who taught peasants to read. And for this, the military dictatorship imprisoned him and forced him into 16 years of exile.

What made Freire dangerous wasn’t literacy itself. It was his method. Freire rejected what he called the “banking model” of education: the idea that the teacher deposits knowledge into the passive student, like putting money in a piggy bank. This model, he argued, reinforces oppression by treating people like empty vessels to be filled by those with authority.

Instead, Freire proposed dialogical education: a process where teacher and student learn together. Both are active subjects discovering and transforming reality. The goal wasn’t just to teach people to read words, but to help them develop conscientização—critical consciousness about the forces shaping their lives.

His claim was: Liberation cannot be given by benevolent authorities. It must be achieved by people themselves.

You cannot liberate someone for them. You can only create conditions where they can liberate themselves.

This principle turns out to be essential for leadership. And it’s what activists have operationalized through decades of organizing without formal power.

Modern Liberatory Frameworks

Modern liberatory frameworks, like those developed by Coaching for Healing, Justice and Liberation (CHJL), build on Freire’s foundation with explicit attention to:

• Somatic awareness: understanding how oppression and constraint live in the body

• Ancestral wisdom: reconnecting people to sources of knowledge and power outside dominant systems

• Decolonization: identifying and challenging internalized narratives from systems of oppression.

• Collective power: building networks and relationships, not just individual capacity.

The Liberatory Leadership framework identifies three core dimensions:

1. Cultivating visionary mindset and self-anchoring: This means helping people connect to their own sense of purpose, worth, and vision, independent of external validation or permission. It’s about grounding in “who I am” and “what I’m here to do” in ways that can’t be granted or revoked by authority figures.

2. Fostering relational and collective power: Liberation is not individual. It requires building trust, networks, and mutual support. This dimension focuses on creating the conditions for people to access power through relationship and community, not despite the absence of formal authority.

3. Driving transformative impact and wellbeing: This is about sustainable change that doesn’t require people to sacrifice themselves. It’s the recognition that you can’t lead others to liberation if you’re burning out in the process.

These aren’t just nice-to-haves. For activists leading without authority, these are matters of survival. They’re what makes the difference between movements that fizzle and movements that shape the future.

Why this matters for business leadership

The concept of “leading from behind” has gained traction in business circles, often linked to “servant leadership.” Robert Greenleaf coined the term “servant leadership” in 1970 (the same year Freire’s work was translated to English), describing leaders who prioritize the growth and wellbeing of those they serve.

Nelson Mandela captured this beautifully in his autobiography: “A leader is like a shepherd. He stays behind the flock, letting the most nimble go out ahead, whereupon the others follow, not realizing that all along they are being directed from behind.”

Servant leadership offers an important reframe: the leader’s job is to serve the team’s success, not to be served by them. Greenleaf’s test for servant leadership was: “Do those served grow as persons?”

But the liberatory lens takes this even further.

It’s not enough to serve people. It’s not enough even to help them grow within the constraints they face.

The liberatory leader’s job is to help people identify and remove the obstacles to their own power.

Leading, through a liberatory lens, means:

• Helping people see what constrains them, not just supporting them within those constraints.

• Building their capacity to transform conditions, not just adapt to them.

• Increasing their agency and authority, not just their performance or skills

• Creating the conditions for self-liberation, not providing liberation as a gift.

  • When you solve someone’s problem for them, you’re actually reinforcing their dependence on external authority. Even if your intentions are good, you’re sending the message: “You needed me to fix this. Change comes from people with more power/knowledge/resources than you.”

Dependency is the opposite of liberation. When you “help” someone by solving their problems for them, by giving them the answer, by using your authority to remove obstacles on their behalf, you may get short term results, but you reinforce the belief that change comes from external saviors.

Liberation requires that people develop the capacity to free themselves.

And here’s why this is especially critical when you lead without formal authority:

You literally cannot command people to follow you. Your only source of power is their liberated power.

When you mobilize people by helping them overcome internal and external constraints, by connecting them to their own agency and to collective power, you create something that doesn’t depend on you.

You create a movement, not a following. You build capacity that outlasts your involvement.

The leadership transformation

Here’s the shift the liberation perspective asks of leaders:

From: developing people to be better performers within the system

To: liberating people to transform themselves and the systems around them

From: leader as expert who diagnoses and prescribes

To: leader as partner in discovering and removing obstacles

From: individual skill-building

To: individual liberation & collective power-building

From: helping people adapt to reality

To: helping people transform their relationship to reality

When you lead without formal authority, this transformation is essential because:

• You can’t command, you must inspire. And people are inspired by leaders who help them access their own power, not by leaders who demonstrate superior power over them.

• You can’t control resources, you must build networks. Liberation inherently focuses on collective power, on weaving webs of mutual support and shared resources.

• You can’t impose change, you must mobilize. You need people to want to move, to feel their own agency in creating change, not to comply with your directives.

• Your power comes from liberating others’ power. When you help people overcome constraints and access their full capabilities, they become allies and co-creators. They lead beside you, not behind you.

Through this lens, the leader’s job isn’t to be the most capable person in the room. It’s to multiply capability throughout the room.

Key practices for liberatory leadership

If you’re leading without formal authority (or even if you have authority but want to lead more effectively) here are several key practices drawn from liberation coaching:

1. Ask obstacle-focused questions

   1. “what’s preventing you from doing what you already know you should do?”

   2. “what would have to change, internally or externally, for this to feel possible?”

   3. “what obstacles are you navigating that aren’t visible to me?”

2. Listen somatically. Pay attention not just to what people say, but to what their bodies are telling you. Where does the constraint live? What happens physiologically when they talk about the challenge?

3. Contextualize, don’t pathologize. Help people see their struggles as intelligent responses to real conditions, not as personal failings. “It makes sense that you’d feel that way, given…” is more powerful than, “you just need to…”

4. Build collective power. Connect people to others facing similar constraints. Create spaces for mutual support. Facilitate resource-sharing and coalition building. Liberation is never just individual.

5. Trust their wisdom. Resist the urge to be the expert with the answer. The person you’re coaching knows their constraints, their context, their capabilities better than you ever will. Your job is to create conditions for them to access that knowledge.

6. Focus on conditions, not just content. Don’t just help people solve the immediate problem. Help them transform the conditions that created the problem.

7. Experiment and iterate. Liberation isn’t linear. It’s about trying things, noticing what happens, adjusting. Create safe spaces for experimentation where failure is learning, not punishment.

Traditional leadership development gives us essential tools. We need emotional intelligence, strategic thinking, communication skills. But we also need the principles and practices that activists have honed through decades of organizing for change without formal power:

• The recognition that people are constrained by forces both internal and external

• The commitment to helping people develop critical consciousness about those constraints

• The patience to let liberation come from people themselves, not from benevolent authorities

• The focus on collective power, not just individual capability

• The trust that people have the wisdom to free themselves if we create the right conditions

When business leaders embrace liberatory leadership alongside traditional leadership, we create organizations where:

• More people can lead, because leadership isn’t tied to position

• Change is sustainable, because it comes from empowered people, not dependent followers

• Innovation flourishes, because we’ve unlocked the collective genius that no single leader possesses

• People actually want to be there, because they’re growing as humans, not just as resources

When we create conditions for people to overcome the obstacles to their own power, rather than just helping them perform better within existing constraints, we tap into something far more powerful than any formal authority could provide.

Offerings

FYI: I also write For People and Planet, a weekly newsletter about climate solutions and the creativity driving them. If you’re curious, you can check it out here: forpeopleandpla.net

Further reading:

For more like this, follow me wherever you connect with friends:
Bluesky 💖 LinkedIn 💖 Mastodon 💖 X 💖 Instagram 💖 TikTok 💖 Threads 💖 YouTube 💖 Facebook

With love, Bri Chapman

Alan Watts was a British-American philosopher who spent much of his life translating Eastern philosophy (e.g., Zen Buddhism and Taoism) for Western audiences. He had a gift for making the ineffable feel conversational, and his lectures and books became touchstones for anyone trying to think about consciousness, meaning, and the nature of reality.

One of his most enduring ideas is what he called “the cosmic joke.”

Tantra is a much older and broader tradition: a family of practices and philosophies that emerged across Hinduism and Buddhism, primarily in India and Tibet. It’s widely misunderstood in the West, often reduced to something about sex, but at its core, tantra is a radical re-orientation toward experience.

Many spiritual paths try to transcend the material world, but tantra turns toward it. The body, the senses, desire, emotion, these are all sacred.

These two philosophies don’t typically get placed side-by-side. But lately I’ve been playing with overlapping them and I keep finding something unexpected: they seem to arrive at a strangely similar place from completely opposite directions.

The Cosmic Joke

Watts describes a kind of existential punchline. Most of us spend our entire lives trying to justify our existence. Picking the right career, the right relationships, the right spiritual practice, the self-improvement, the legacy. Striving, optimizing, and worrying, all in service of earning your place in this universe.

And then, if you’re lucky, you realize: you were always enough. Existence never had to be justified in the first place.

It’s a joke because the thing you were searching for was never missing. The effort was real. The anxiety and emotions were real. But the problem you were trying to solve is imaginary.

For some, there’s a deep relaxation in this realization. Sort of like the feeling of finally putting down something unbearably heavy that you forgot you were carrying. Watts invites us to laugh at the absurdity of it.

The universe isn’t asking anything of you. It never was.

The Tantric Reversal

Tantra (speaking broadly, across a variety of traditions) arrives at something that looks similar from the outside but is built on a radically different foundation.

The tantric perspective is that everything is sacred. Not just the beautiful and transcendent parts, but everything. Pain, confusion, desire, grief, mess, bodies, the whole catastrophe.

Where many spiritual traditions draw a line between the sacred and the profane, between things that pull you closer to truth and things that pull you away, tantra dissolves that boundary.

Emotion is not an obstacle to awakening, it is the raw material of awakening. Sensation is a doorway. Suffering is something to include, metabolize, and transfigure.

In this view, the energy of anger is not fundamentally different from the energy of devotion. Nothing needs to be rejected, nothing needs to be transcended out of, everything belongs.

And here, too, many people find deep relaxation in this realization.

What matters?

This is the distinction I keep circling: in Watts’ view, we relax because nothing matters. The cosmic game is playful, purposeless, and free. There is no test to pass, no judge keeping score. You can relax because the pressure was never real.

In the tantric view, we relax because everything matters. Every moment is already luminous with significance. You can relax because there is nothing to fix, not because experience is meaningless but because it is already sacred as-is.

One says “stop taking everything so seriously.” The other says, “take it all seriously out of worship.”

And somehow both lead to the same relaxation.

The paradox

I don’t fully know how to hold both of these as true simultaneously. They feel like they should contradict each other. If nothing matters, how can everything be sacred?

And if everything is sacred, how can the whole thing be a joke?

But I keep coming back to the possibility that maybe they are not contradicting at all.

Maybe they are two lenses on the same truth, and what looks like contradiction is just the limits of language trying to examine something that doesn’t really fit into words.

Here’s my best attempt at synthesis, for now:

The joke is that there was never a problem. And the punchline is that what was here all along, the raw, unfiltered, unimproved this, was divine sacredness the whole time.

The cosmic joke isn’t that life is meaningless. It’s that we invented a problem: our own insufficiency, our need to earn our own existence. And in so doing, we became blind to the staggering holiness of what was already in and around us.

The joke and the sacred are not opposites. The joke is that it was sacred all along and somehow we didn’t notice.

I suppose the point is not to resolve these ideas into the One True Idea but rather to notice the moments when we catch the joke and the moments when everything goes sacred.. And to wonder whether those are actually the same moment.

I suspect they are.

Offerings

FYI: I’ve started a weekly newsletter called For People and Planet. It’s a place where I highlight what’s working in the fight for a more balanced future. You can read it here: forpeopleandpla.net

Further reading:

For more like this, follow me wherever you connect with friends:
Bluesky 💖 LinkedIn 💖 Mastodon 💖 X 💖 Instagram 💖 TikTok 💖 Threads 💖 YouTube 💖 Facebook

With love, Bri Chapman

You cannot tell me that the reasons for hopelessness now are greater than the reasons for hopelessness for an enslaved person in the 1850s, with no reason to believe that an Emancipation Proclamation was on the horizon.

You cannot tell me that the reasons for hopelessness now are greater than the reasons for hopelessness for an unemployed worker in the early days of the Great Depression who never heard of a New Deal.

And you cannot tell me that the reasons for hopelessness now are greater than the reasons for a closeted LGBTQ person in the 1950s who never knew of a country where they could live openly and authentically as themselves.

So yes, things are challenging. Things are scary. But the one thing we can’t give up is hope. And if every previous generation was able to summon their hope in the face of seemingly impossible odds, odds much greater than the odds we’re facing now, then surely so can we.

I have been critical of hope. I have called hope a four-letter word. But I want to take this opportunity to dig into what Representative McBride is really describing.

I think this isn’t really about hopelessness vs hopefulness. It’s actually about possibility-awareness vs possibility-blindness.

The reframe

An enslaved person in the 1850s had every structural reason to believe slavery was permanent. And yet, change was possible. An unemployed worker in the Great Depression had no precedent for massive governmental intervention. And yet, transformation was possible. A closeted LGBTQ person in the 1950s lived in a world in which authentic expression seemed impossible. And yet, radical change was possible.

This is about the recognition that systems which appear immovable can move. It’s the awareness that multiple futures remain available even when one seems overwhelmingly likely.

When we think about that enslaved person in 1850s America, for them, an informed sense of possibility wouldn’t mean believing freedom was likely or even probable. It would mean recognizing that despite every structural force supporting slavery, (constitutional protections, Supreme Court rulings, economic dependency, political consensus) the system was not metaphysically permanent. It could change. Not that it would, but that it could.

This distinction matters enormously. True possibility thinking holds multiple futures simultaneously. It acknowledges that things could get worse while also recognizing that they could get better.

It doesn’t minimize the likelihood of bad outcomes, it just refuses to assign them 100% probability.

The pessimist and the optimist

The person we call a pessimist has typically collapsed all possible futures into one: the negative outcome becomes not just likely but certain. This is its own form of naive thinking because it treats complex systems like they are deterministic.

The person we call an optimist (like McBride) has done something different: they’ve maintained awareness of multiple possible trajectories, including positive ones that seem unlikely but not impossible.

This explains why what looks like “hope” has been so essential to social movements.

Activists don’t believe victory is assured. Most of them are acutely aware of how they might lose, how they might be imprisoned, beaten, killed, or simply fail to achieve their goals. But they’ve identified a non-zero probability of success and they’ve decided that probability is worth organizing around.

The unemployed worker in the Great Depression didn’t need to believe the New Deal was coming. They needed to believe that some form of economic restructuring was possible, even if unlikely. They needed to believe that their organizing might influence whether it happened and what form it took.

In systems thinking, we call this a “strategic analysis of the leverage points within a system.“

The closeted LGBTQ person in the 1950s who got involved in early organizing wasn’t operating under the delusion that marriage equality was just around the corner. They recognized that the current state of affairs was contingent on social arrangement, not natural law. And if it was constructed, it could be deconstructed. The path was unclear, the outcome was uncertain, but the possibility existed.

The mathematics of possibility

When McBride contrasts past and present challenges, she’s not making an emotional appeal. She’s making a statistical observation about probability and possibility: possible does not equal probable.

Possibility awareness requires holding contradictions . You must simultaneously believe that:

• Things could get much worse

• Things could get significantly better

• Which outcome occurs depends partly on factors beyond your control

• Which outcome occurs also depends partly on your actions and the actions of others

• You cannot know with certainty which outcome will occur

• Therefore, acting as if positive change is possible is rational and logical, not naive.

This is cognitively demanding and it is decidedly easier to collapse into certainty: either “everything will be fine” (actual naive optimism) or “everything will be terrible” (pessimistic certainty.)

Both naive optimism and pessimistic certainty offer the comfort of resolution.

Possibility thinking, however, offers no such comfort. It demands you act without knowing whether your actions will matter, based solely on the knowledge that they might.

People often mistake this for blind faith. But in reality it’s the opposite. It’s acting despite full awareness that failure is possible, even likely.

What people call optimism is usually the refusal to collapse into certainty. It’s the depth and breadth of experience to acknowledge that the historical record of our universe clearly shows that unlikely positive outcomes have occurred before. And they may or may not occur again.

A sense of possibility

The person with an informed sense of possibility doesn’t ignore the ways things could go wrong. They catalog those possibilities thoroughly. But they also catalog the ways things could go right, including the ways that seem improbable.

Then, they make a strategic choice about which possibilities to move toward and attend to, knowing that their actions and attentions shift probabilities without determining outcomes.

What I love about what Sarah McBride said is that it demonstrates a real-world sophisticated engagement with uncertainty. She illustrates that strategic awareness that multiple futures remain available IS the mechanism by which we navigate toward one future rather than another.

When she’s saying we can’t give up hope, what she really means is that we can’t give up our sense of possibility.

She’s asking for recognition that the future is not yet written. That historical changes have emerged from conditions far more adverse than ours.

That maintaining an awareness of positive possibility (alongside full awareness of negative possibility) is not only strategically necessary but intellectually honest.

Offerings

FYI: I also write For People and Planet, a weekly newsletter about climate solutions and the creativity driving them. If you’re curious, you can check it out here: forpeopleandpla.net

Further reading

For more like this, follow me wherever you connect with friends:
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With love, Bri Chapman

you might stall because you can see multiple good futures and feel responsible for choosing the most aligned one.

the framework

James Clear offers a simple way to classify decisions:

hat: try it on. if you don’t like it, take it off and try another. the cost of a mistake is low, so move quickly.

haircut: you can fix a bad one, but it won’t be quick, and you might feel foolish for a while. that said, trying something new is usually a risk worth taking. by this time next year, you will have moved on, and so will everyone else.

tattoo: once you make it, you have to live with it. some mistakes are irreversible. even years later, the decision leaves a mark. when you’re dealing with an irreversible choice, move slowly and think carefully.

most of the pressure we feel around decisions comes from treating everything like a tattoo when the majority of choices we make are actually hats.

why this matters for multi-passionate leaders

multi-passionate people struggle with decisions for a few reasons.

(1) they can see multiple good paths.

(2) they worry that choosing one means betraying another part of themselves.

(3) they’ve been taught that good leaders focus.

(4) they treat exploration as a failure to commit.

so they get stuck trying to pick the right project, waiting for the true calling to reveal itself, or agonizing over which direction to take.

I love this framework because it reframes leadership as sequencing instead of selecting. you don’t have to know your forever. you just have to know whether this is a hat.

the real cost is waiting

some decisions are one-way doors. once you walk through, you can’t come back. those need slow, careful thought.

but, most decisions are two-way doors. you can try them, see what happens, and change course if needed.

the biggest mistake is treating two-way doors like one-way doors: going slow on reversible choices. demanding certainty before action or waiting for perfect information that will never arrive.

in my experience, most decisions are two-way doors. they’re hats.

what kind of decision is this, actually?

projects are usually hats. you can start one, learn from it, and move to another. the cost of trying is low. the cost of waiting is high.

directions (strategic pivots, shifts in focus) are often haircuts. you commit for a season. you give it time to develop. if it doesn’t work, you adjust. you won’t lose a year. you’ll learn what works.

identities, public commitments, burning bridges are tattoos. rare. chosen consciously. treated with appropriate weight.

in complex systems, you can’t think your way into certainty. you have to act, observe, adjust. this is how adaptive systems learn. you don’t need to decide who you are in advance. you become it through what you try.

under uncertainty, clarity often comes from choosing reversibly.

most paths are just experiments. you’re allowed to change your mind. 💖

Offerings

FYI: I’ve started a weekly newsletter called For People and Planet. It’s a place where I highlight what’s working in the fight for a more balanced future. You can read it here: forpeopleandpla.net

Further reading

For more like this, follow me wherever you connect with friends:
Bluesky 💖 LinkedIn 💖 Mastodon 💖 X 💖 Instagram 💖 TikTok 💖 Threads 💖 YouTube 💖 Facebook

With love, Bri Chapman

our culture offers us two equally broken scripts:

1. either avoid all stress entirely (hyper-protective wellness culture) or

2. endure all stress (hustle culture, bootstraps, trauma valorization).

both are misunderstandings of how our bodies and lives actually grow.

we need to learn to tell the difference between the kind of discomfort that strengthens us and the kind that breaks us down.

the four types of discomfort

not all discomfort is created equal. the problem is that we’ve collapsed very different experiences into one bucket and treated that bucket as something to avoid at all costs— often under the banner of wellness, boundaries, or peace.

there are four key types of discomfort I think we should look at more deeply:

social discomfort: using underdeveloped muscles

showing up. being awkward. being seen. following through on plans you’re tempted to cancel.

the discomfort here is from underuse, not injury. when we disappear too completely into our protected peace, we’re not healing. we’re atrophying.

avoidance doesn’t protect these muscles. it guarantees they never strengthen.

creative discomfort: micro-tears, not failure

silence. inconsistency. making work that doesn’t land. sitting with not-knowing.

creative work creates micro-tears in our identity: i thought i was better than this. i thought i knew what i was doing.

that pain is not evidence you should stop. it’s evidence you’re actually working the muscle.

but endless output without rest and constant self-criticism is overtraining.

some phases are meant to feel incoherent.

the chrysalis doesn’t look productive, but transformation is happening.

moral discomfort: load-bearing strength

staying present to suffering. not opting out. not numbing. letting what you love actually cost you something.

this is like core strength: invisible, stabilizing, essential. moral discomfort is the price of staying awake in a world that desperately wants us to look away.

avoiding it doesn’t create peace. it creates collapse under pressure.

but also: carrying everything alone is spinal injury. choosing where to put the load, who to show up for, how to participate is discernment.

existential discomfort: adaptation stress

uncertainty. impermanence. not knowing who you’re becoming.

this discomfort is adaptive stress: the kind systems need when environments change.

trying to eliminate it through rigid routines, optimization, or certainty rituals is like bracing a joint so tightly it loses mobility. the body survives but the movement dies.

protecting your peace vs avoiding your life

peace is the intentional allocation of energy.

for me, i protect my peace by having fewer, closer friends. by prioritizing family. by consciously allowing my life’s work to take me out of my peace in that domain, so i have energy for what matters most.

you don’t train every muscle every day. you don’t ignore pain signals. you choose where to put the load. peace is about strategic recovery, not permanent sedation.

break up the monotony

there’s more to life than constant stability. when your days start blending together, do at least one thing to break up the monotony: walk a different way to work, wear that dress hanging in your closet for a “special occasion,” book the trip.

I love this list from . She says:

I made a list titled “The Art of Inconvenience.” The list includes:

• Tea kettles

• Record players

• Moka pots

• Bookstores

• Thrifting

• Polaroids

• High heels

• Magazines

A bit random, I know, but what ties them together for me is this: they require more effort to enjoy than the simpler alternatives. You may walk faster in your everyday flats, but you’ve been wanting to wear those heels, and you should – even if they’re going to slow you down. It’s easier to play a summarized version of an article on your phone than to actually read it in a magazine. It’s more convenient to use the espresso machine, but with the moka pot, the flavor is so much richer.

(Also on my YouTube at: https://youtube.com/shorts/l44rjnUciNk?feature=share)

what we’re actually avoiding and why

Existential Kink suggests that somewhere beneath our conscious awareness, we might be getting something from our “stuckness.”

maybe it lets us stay small and safe. maybe it protects an identity we’ve grown comfortable with, even if that identity is “the person who never has time” or “the person who’s too anxious to try.”

what if our discomfort and our obstacles aren’t blocking our power, what if they’re revealing where it’s been hiding all along?

avoidance itself is a choice, and sometimes the thing we’re protecting ourselves from is actually the very aliveness we claim to want.

what kind of life are you training for?

so here’s what i’m really asking:

is this discomfort strengthening me, or tearing me down?
which muscles in my life have gone unused out of fear?
where am i calling injury what is actually growth?
and what familiar patterns am i clinging to that keep me from becoming who i’m afraid to be?

and maybe most importantly: what kind of life am i training for?

because a life scrubbed of all discomfort may be clean, but nothing grows there. rich soil is messy. full of bacteria, fungi, decay, constant interaction and exchange. sterile environments prevent disease and also prevent life.

no mud, no lotus.

the mud is necessary. but drowning in mud is not. the skill is learning to tell the difference — and learning to recognize when we’re unconsciously choosing the mud because it feels safer than the flower.

Offerings

FYI: Each week I also share stories through For People and Planet, a newsletter focused on climate solutions and hope for the future. You can find it here if you’d like to follow along: forpeopleandpla.net

Further reading:

For more like this, follow me wherever you connect with friends:
Bluesky 💖 LinkedIn 💖 Mastodon 💖 X 💖 Instagram 💖 TikTok 💖 Threads 💖 YouTube 💖 Facebook

With love, Bri Chapman

we adapt without realizing we’re adapting. we want less. we expect less. we train ourselves not to reach.

the calculus is invisible but precise: desire becomes embarrassing. we idolize nonchalance. earnestness feels unsafe. caring too much starts to feel like a liability.

we learn to moderate our investment in proportion to our disappointment. we learn to stay light, to keep moving, to not let things land too heavily.

somewhere along the way, many of us learned to keep going by staying just a little bit gone. we learned to live at a slight remove from our own lives, present enough to function and absent enough to endure.

naming it

it’s not apathy.. it’s not burnout.. it’s not even nihilism.

the long dissociation is a sustained, low-grade separation from our own life force. not checking out completely, but just enough to function. this didn’t happen overnight, it accumulated slowly, quietly, adaptively, like sediment settling at the bottom of a river.

the long dissociation is what happens when overwhelm lasts longer than our capacity to metabolize it.

raquel s benedict accurately described the problem in a viral 2021 essay called “Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny”. “No one is ugly. No one is really fat. Everyone is beautiful,” she writes. “And yet, no one is horny. Even when they have sex, no one is horny. No one is attracted to anyone else. No one is hungry for anyone else.”

how we got here

dissociation is intelligence. our nervous systems are remarkable instruments of adaptation. when the conditions demanded it, they responded with precision.

think about the conditions: constant crisis bleeding into the next crisis, endless information streaming through our devices, too much suffering without any container strong enough to hold it.

the nervous system, faced with input it cannot process, makes a rational choice: feeling everything wasn’t possible so the system learned to feel less. this is survival intelligence at work.

the distance gave us something valuable: functionality, productivity, social acceptability.

it allowed us to show up, to perform our roles, to meet our obligations. It gave us distance instead of devastation. numbness instead of collapse.

the long dissociation didn’t mean we stopped caring. it meant caring became unsustainable, so we learned to care less acutely, less completely, less dangerously.

what it costs us

vitality. imagination. initiative. desire. not all at once, not dramatically, but gradually. the way color fades from fabric left in sunlight too long.

life becomes something lived competently but thinly. engagement without intimacy, opinions without investment, movement without momentum. we go through the motions with skill, but something is missing. we’re there. but we’re not really there.

how can you build something when you are watching from a distance? distance dulls responsibility. absence weakens authorship. the choices we make feel less consequential when we’re only half-present for them.

the life you want requires your participation.

the nonchalance epidemic

detachment has become socially rewarded as coolness and untouchability. distance is perceived as sophistication. if nothing matters, nothing can break you.

commitment becomes dangerous. belief feels naive. meaning requires vulnerability.

nonchalance promised safety, but it asked us to stay absent from our own lives. to remain removed from the very things that give our days weight and texture.

what won’t help

the way forward is not through forced sincerity or performative vulnerability. emotional exposure is not virtuous.

intensity without integration, feeling without groundedness, none of these help.

what helps is restoration of presence.

https://youtube.com/shorts/eJG5x0wDXPc?feature=share

meaning as practice

meaning is a practice. one that happens in increments.

aliveness comes back in doses.

in practice, it looks like taking one thing seriously again. choosing to care without certainty. staying with discomfort.

meaning grows where we keep showing up, even when we’re not sure why.

coming back

we can’t simply rip dissociation away.

it must be loosened gently, with curiosity and attention instead of urgency.

the long dissociation protected you for a reason. it kept you safe when falling apart wasn’t an option.

gently untying the blindfold might look like pausing before you answer, “how are you?”

it might look like noticing when you are performing engagement rather than feeling it.

we don’t heal the long dissociation by demanding more of ourselves.

consider a bouquet of flowers. they don’t fix anything. they don’t solve problems or reverse damage. they don’t last. maybe they will be around for a week if you’re lucky. they serve no utilitarian purpose.

but, the gesture matters. the act of choosing them, arranging them, placing them where you’ll see them.

the participation matters.

it is a small act of presence.

a refusal to stay entirely removed.

the long dissociation taught us how to survive. it was intelligent, adaptive, necessary.

but survival was never the same thing as being alive.

and perhaps now, slowly, carefully, we can begin to tell the difference.

Offerings

FYI: I’ve started a weekly newsletter called For People and Planet. It’s a place where I highlight what’s working in the fight for a more balanced future. You can read it here: forpeopleandpla.net

Further reading:

For more like this, follow me wherever you connect with friends:
Bluesky 💖 LinkedIn 💖 Mastodon 💖 X 💖 Instagram 💖 TikTok 💖 Threads 💖 YouTube 💖 Facebook

With love, Bri Chapman

we live in an age obsessed with narrowing.

pick a lane. find your niche. become known for one thing.

that advice is everywhere, delivered with the confidence of inevitability. as if specialization is a law of nature. as if becoming smaller is the price of becoming real.

and yet, for many of us, that story never quite lands.

we try to comply. we try to funnel our curiosity into a single channel, trim away the interests that don’t “fit,” quiet the parts of ourselves that wander too far from the center.

but the cost is familiar: a low-grade grief, a sense of self-betrayal, the feeling that we are cooperating in our own diminishment.

being drawn to many things is the most ordinary thing in the world.

it’s human.

imagination itself is what makes us human in the first place.

capitalism, however, prefers clarity over complexity. specialization makes people easier to place. easier to evaluate. easier to extract value from.

a narrow role slots neatly into the machine.

a whole person does not.

so we are taught, subtly, constantly, to fragment ourselves. to choose which part gets to count.

to make the rest of ourselves a hobby, a side gig, or a guilty pleasure we only get to indulge in after the “real” work is done.

maybe this is backwards.

maybe our curiosity is not a liability to be managed but a signal.

maybe the pull towards many domains is orientation.

maybe something essential is lost when we amputate parts of ourselves in the name of focus.

to me, this tension feels especially sharp now.

in an age where our tools are increasingly capable, where execution can be automated, accelerated, and outsourced, the real constraint is no longer what we can technically produce.

it’s what we can imagine. it’s our ability to see connections, to synthesize across domains, to sense what doesn’t yet exist but wants to.

imagination doesn’t live in narrow corridors. imagination thrives in overlap. in people who read, who listen, who follow strange leads and refuse to confine themselves to one path.

(The lie of the niche on YouTube: https://youtube.com/shorts/jxYsapyA0r0?feature=share)

wholeness is the ground state

in non-dual tantra, reality is already whole. nothing needs to be purified, reduced, or transcended to be sacred. the divine is found by recognizing that all parts of yourself, every curiosity, every desire, every direction you are pulled, is already an expression of consciousness exploring itself.

from this view, the question is not: which part of you is the real one?

but rather: how is the whole expressing itself right now?

fragmentation is forgetting. narrowing the self is contraction mistaken for focus.

when capitalism says “pick one,” it’s asking you to make yourself legible to a system that benefits from your reduction.

consciousness does not narrow unnecessarily. why would the infinite limit itself?

to be clear, this is not an argument against depth. tantric practice is profoundly disciplined. but the discipline is not about elimination. it’s about expanding your capacity to hold more without fragmenting.

to stay present with complexity and intensity rather than simplifying it away.

what if being multi-passionate is not a scattered modern condition but a remembering?

a refusal to forget your own wholeness in service of a system that needs you smaller?

two movements of creative development

there is a pattern that emerges when you look closely at people who have managed to stay whole while also creating exceptional work.

they move through two distinct phases not as fixed identities but as territories of becoming.

the first is a period of wide exploration. this is where curiosity leads. where you follow what lights you up without demanding that it justify itself. where taste develops through exposure.

where the inner world expands in many directions at once, gathering images, ideas, questions, obsessions.

consider someone who spends years moving between music production, graphic design, and writing. they are learning how rhythms work, how visual composition creates meaning, how sentences build momentum. no single domain claims them completely. they are gathering a vocabulary.

this phase is essential. without it, there is no raw material. no sense of what calls to you and what doesn’t. it’s a time when you discover what you are actually interested in, not what you’re supposed to be interested in.

but this phase alone does not lead to mastery.

at some point, exploration becomes diffusion. the inner world stays rich, but it remains mostly unexpressed. potential hovers, beautiful and unrealized, because there is no container strong enough to hold it.

this is where the second movement begins.

this is a deepening. a decision about which interests to devote sustained attention to.

a learning about how to hold multiple threads without fragmentation.

that same person might decide to make music seriously, but the years spent studying design inform their album artwork and visual identity. the writing practice shows up in their lyrics, their liner notes, the way they talk about their work in interviews.

nothing was wasted. everything cross-pollinates.

consider someone who studied biology and then pivoted to data visualization and then got interested in climate communication. each shift might look scattered from the outside but eventually they create data-driven climate narratives that only someone with that exact combination of knowledge could make. their range becomes their signature.

this is how breadth becomes depth.

the shift is subtle but consequential. it’s the difference between dabbling and developing.

the lie of the niche

there is a lie embedded in the culture of niching: that seriousness requires reduction. that devotion demands exclusion. that to be committed, you must give something up.

commitment is not the same thing as constriction.

you can be devoted to depth without severing yourself from breadth. you can develop real skill in multiple domains. you can let your interests inform each other, creating work that exists at the intersection of things that are rarely combined.

think of the person who is both a therapist and a ceramicist. their understanding of the body, pf presence, of what it means to work with resistance, all of it shows up in both practices. the clay teaches them things about therapy. therapy teaches them things about clay. neither one is the “side project.”

this is not easy. resisting specialization makes you harder to categorize, harder to market, harder to explain at a dinner party.

but attention is not a finite resource to be hoarded in one direction. the more fully you inhabit your curiosity, the more there is.

you will be asked, again and again, to pick one thing. to make it simpler for people to understand what you do.

but, there is a kind of integrity in refusing to collapse your inner world just to be understood more quickly. a loyalty to your own nature that doesn’t always pay off immediately, but pays in aliveness. in the texture of your work. in the connections you are able to make that others miss.

if you are someone who feels pulled in many directions, you may have been told that this is something you’ll eventually outgrow. that maturity looks like choosing and settling and simplifying.

but I think that is wrong. I think this moment in our world is asking us for wholeness, not specialization.

you contain multitudes. you always have. the question was never whether you should, only whether you’d be allowed to.

you don’t need to prove the usefulness of your curiosity. you don’t need to optimize it, brand it, or justify it in advance.

the world we are entering will be shaped by those who can hold many threads at once, and refuse to cut themselves apart to do it.

being multi-passionate just might be the best thing that ever happened to you.

Offerings

FYI: I’ve started a weekly newsletter called For People and Planet. It’s a place where I highlight what’s working in the fight for a more balanced future. You can read it here: forpeopleandpla.net

Further reading:

For more like this, follow me wherever you connect with friends:
Bluesky 💖 LinkedIn 💖 Mastodon 💖 X 💖 Instagram 💖 TikTok 💖 Threads 💖 YouTube 💖 Facebook

With love, Bri Chapman

But that’s not how it actually works.

The person who influences outcomes isn’t always the VP. It’s the engineer everyone trusts to make the right call. The product manager whose opinion quietly shapes roadmaps. The designer who somehow gets stakeholders to see things differently.

These people have something more durable than authority: they have influence that doesn’t require permission.

And the best part? It’s entirely buildable.

Here’s how.

Part 1: Build Trust (Because Without It, You Have Nothing)

Trust is the only real leverage you have when you don’t have authority. You can’t compel people to listen to you. You can’t force them to care about your opinion. All you can do is become someone they want to listen to.

Trust is built through small, repeated behaviors that accumulate over time.

Dependability

This one sounds obvious, but most people get it wrong.

Being dependable doesn’t mean never making commitments because you’re afraid you won’t follow through. It means making thoughtful commitments and then actually delivering on them. Again and again and again.

Every time you say you’ll do something and then do it, you’re making a deposit into your credibility account. Every time you don’t, you’re making a withdrawal.

Do this enough times and people start to assume you’ll come through. That assumption is gold. It means they’ll include you in conversations earlier. They’ll ask for your help on harder problems. They’ll trust you with things that matter.

Consistency

People need to know what version of you they’re going to get.

If you’re encouraging one day and dismissive the next, supportive in meetings but critical in Slack, people won’t know how to work with you. They’ll start managing you instead of collaborating with you.

Being consistent doesn’t mean being boring or never changing your mind. It means your values, your communication style, and your way of showing up are recognizable. Predictable in the best sense.

When people don’t have to wonder which version of you will show up, they can relax. And when they can relax, they can actually hear what you’re saying.

Transparency

Say the same thing behind someone’s back as you would say to their face.

This is harder than it sounds because it requires you to be kind in all scenarios, not just when someone’s in the room.

When people know you operate this way.. when they know your thoughts aren’t a mystery, when they never have to wonder what you really think.. they start treating you like a reliable narrator. Your words carry weight because people know they can trust them.

Transparency isn’t about oversharing or being brutally honest. It’s about integrity. It’s about being the same person in every room.

(how to build influence without authority: https://youtube.com/shorts/l6E4JyqGZIw?feature=share)

Part 2: Establish Expertise (Without Trying to Prove You’re Smart)

Influence doesn’t come from being the smartest person in the room. It comes from being the person who helps others think.

Share Your Thinking

Don’t just share your conclusions. Share how you got there.

Walk people through your reasoning. Show them the tradeoffs you considered, the assumptions you tested, the questions you asked yourself. When you do this generously, without making it about you, something interesting happens.

People start using your frameworks. They start solving problems the way you would solve them. They start implementing the solutions you suggested, sometimes without even realizing it.

That’s influence. Not “do what I say,” but “I think the way you think.”

Build Real Connections

People only value the opinions of people they respect. And they only respect people who understand them.

This is where empathy becomes strategic. When you take the time to understand what someone else is dealing with, for example: the pressures they’re under, the constraints they’re navigating, the outcomes they’re measured on, you stop talking past each other.

You start speaking their language. You start framing your ideas in ways that land. You become someone whose perspective they actively seek out.

Influence is relational. It doesn’t happen in a vacuum.

Communicate Simply

If people can’t understand you, they can’t be influenced by you.

This is where a lot of people trip up, because they think expertise means using jargon, acronyms, and complex frameworks.

Real experts make things simpler, not more complicated. They take messy, tangled ideas and make them clear. They translate complexity into something others can actually use.

The best test: if someone walks away from a conversation with you and can’t explain what you said to someone else, you didn’t communicate simply enough to be influential.

Part 3: Know Where Your Influence Is Likely (and Stop Trying to Boil the Ocean)

Here’s something most people get wrong: they think influence is binary. Either you have it or you don’t.

But influence isn’t evenly distributed. It’s contextual. It’s relational. And it radiates outward in concentric circles.

Circle 1: Your Direct Team

These are the people working on the same project, sitting in the same meetings, solving the same problems. This is where you have the most influence, because they see your work. They know how you operate. They’ve watched you follow through.

If you can’t influence here, you won’t be able to influence anywhere else. This is your foundation.

Circle 2: Cross-Functional Collaborators

These are people you work with, but not every day. They know some of your work. They’ve heard your name come up. They have a partial picture of who you are.

You can build strong influence here, but it takes intentionality. It takes showing up consistently, being helpful without needing something in return, and proving that you understand their world, not just your own.

Circle 3: People in Your Field Who Share Your Values

These are people you’ve never worked with directly, but who care about the same things you do. Maybe they follow your writing, or they saw you speak at a conference, or a mutual connection mentioned your name.

Influence here is possible, but it’s slower. It comes from making your thinking visible. Writing, sharing insights, being generous with what you’ve learned. It comes from becoming a known quantity in your field.

Circle 4: People Who Don’t Know You and Don’t Share Your Values

This is where people most commonly waste their energy.

They try to influence someone who’s never heard of them, who doesn’t care about the same outcomes, who operates from a completely different set of assumptions. And then they wonder why it’s so hard.

It’s hard because you’re starting from zero. No trust, no credibility, no shared context.

Influence here only grows after you’ve expanded the earlier circles. After you have a reputation. After people who do know you can vouch for you.

Don’t start here. Build outward.

The Long Game

Influence without authority is not a trick you can learn in a weekend workshop.

It’s a long game, built on trust, clarity, and generosity. It’s about becoming the kind of person whose presence makes conversations better, whose ideas help teams think more clearly, whose integrity makes others feel safe.

It’s about showing up the same way, day after day, until people stop wondering if they can count on you and start assuming they can.

When you build influence this way you don’t need authority. Because the people around you already want to follow your lead.

Offerings

FYI: I’ve been putting together a weekly newsletter called For People and Planet. It’s where I share stories about climate solutions and the people working on them. If you’d like to read along, you can find it here: forpeopleandpla.net

Further reading:

For more like this, follow me wherever you connect with friends:
Bluesky 💖 LinkedIn 💖 Mastodon 💖 X 💖 Instagram 💖 TikTok 💖 Threads 💖 YouTube 💖 Facebook

With love, Bri Chapman

They tell you how to stand, how to speak, what to wear. They offer prescriptions for projecting confidence and authority, as if leadership were a costume you could put on each morning. As if “gravitas” were something you could learn from a checklist.

But executive presence is not about conforming to an outdated image of what an executive should look like (an image that has been, overwhelmingly, white and male).

The leaders who truly inspire trust and motivate others aren’t following a script.

Magnetic leaders who naturally draw people to follow them, are embodying something deeper.

They’re radiating four fundamental qualities: care, clarity, curiosity, and courage.

The Four C’s

Care shows up in everything. The way you dress, the way you do your work, the way you interact with others. It’s visible in your attention to detail, your devotion to craft, the quality of your relationships. The rarest form of generosity is simply paying attention. Leaders with real presence give this attention freely.

Clarity emerges through communication, through vision, through purpose. It’s the ability to see what matters and to help others see it too. Cutting through noise to find signal, through confusion to find direction.

Curiosity drives the identification and pursuit of possibilities. It asks why things happened the way they did. It imagines what could be different. Curiosity is the quality that allows us to be transformed, to remain open and adaptive in uncertainty.

Courage is the ability to have difficult conversations, make difficult choices, and remain steadfast when everything feels uncertain. We build strength and confidence every single time we look fear in the face instead of turning away.

These four qualities are cultivated from the inside out.

When you develop them genuinely, executive presence becomes inevitable. It’s what radiates from you naturally.

(What IS executive presence?? https://youtube.com/shorts/JxFpTfnb7T8)

The Unexpected Crucible

Here’s what surprised me in my research crossing over from climate anxiety into leadership development. Engaging deeply with our most challenging global problems (like climate change) is one of the most powerful ways to cultivate executive presence.

When we look unflinchingly at the most difficult challenges humanity faces, we have to confront our own sorrow, grief, and rage. And in that confrontation, we meet our deepest sources of care, clarity, curiosity, and courage.

In our sorrow and grief, we meet our care. Grief and love are woven together from the beginning. Great sorrow only comes from great love. When we allow ourselves to feel the weight of what’s at stake, we discover how much we care for our world and the people in it.

In our deepest Why’s, we meet our curiosity. When we face collapse and complexity, we’re forced to ask deeper questions. Why did things unfold this way? How could this happen? We begin to see clearly the world that could be, the one that hasn’t yet been brought into being. This is the deep, imaginative capacity for curiosity that every great leader needs.

In our rage, we meet our clarity. Anger is information. It shows us the divide between the world as it should be and the world that exists today. That clarity is essential. It helps us distinguish what matters from what doesn’t.

In taking on impossible challenges, we meet our courage. When you look at the biggest unsolved problems humanity faces and decide they’re yours to work on, even without a guarantee of success, even when you’re not in a position of formal power, you’re cultivating the kind of courage that defines real leadership.

What This Means for You

The people I’ve seen develop the most compelling executive presence aren’t the ones who studied how to project confidence. They’re the ones who allowed themselves to be genuinely affected by something that mattered. They let the world touch them. They faced difficult truths without looking away.

This doesn’t mean you need to become a climate activist to be a good leader. But it does mean that avoiding hard truths, shielding yourself from difficult emotions, and staying comfortably certain will never build the kind of presence that inspires others.

Authentic executive presence emerges when you stop performing and start living. When you cultivate care in how you show up in the world. When you pursue clarity about what matters. When you stay curious about what’s possible. When you act with courage.

These 4 c’s are about becoming the highest version of yourself. The version of you that’s been shaped and strengthened by engaging honestly with the most difficult and important issues facing our world today.

That’s what creates a magnetic leader.

The substance underneath, forged in the crucible of crisis.

Offerings

FYI: Each week I share stories through For People and Planet, a newsletter focused on climate solutions and hope for the future. You can find it here if you’d like to follow along: forpeopleandpla.net

Further reading:

For more like this, follow me wherever you connect with friends:
Bluesky 💖 LinkedIn 💖 Mastodon 💖 X 💖 Instagram 💖 TikTok 💖 Threads 💖 YouTube 💖 Facebook

With love, Bri Chapman

And because the word is so vague, it becomes fragile.

When people say they need hope, what they often mean is:

“I need to know the future isn’t already lost.”

“I need to believe my actions still matter.”

“I need to feel less alone in caring.”

“I need proof that something better is still possible.”

“I need to remember what I’m fighting for.”

Hope, in the common psychological sense, is an attachment to a specific version of the future where everything turns out okay. And attachment, neuroscientifically speaking, is a precarious thing to build a worldview on.

So instead of treating hope as a monolith we must cling to, let’s look at what’s really happening inside us when we crave it, why hope collapses so easily under climate pressure, and what stronger emotional architectures we can build in its place.

(also available on YouTube at: https://youtube.com/shorts/1UuoZYGxuac?feature=share)

What Hope Really Is (a Neuroscientific View)

In the brain, hope is not a feeling. It’s a prediction mechanism.

When we imagine a desirable future, the brain releases dopamine, the neurotransmitter associated with motivation, anticipation, and forward movement. Dopamine is not about pleasure; it’s about the pursuit of what could be. It’s the fuel that says: move toward that.

But dopamine is also tied to prediction error: every time reality fails to match the desired outcome, the brain downgrades its estimation of future success. In climate terms, that looks like:

• another wildfire season → prediction error

• new tipping-point research → prediction error

• policy failure or delay → prediction error

The more error signals accumulate, the more the brain reshapes its expectations downward. You might experience this as a quiet voice saying:

“What’s the point? It’s already too late.”

Not because you’re weak. Not because you’re uninformed.
But because your brain is doing the math.

This is why hope, as most people use the term, is psychologically brittle. If hope depends on the belief that “we will avoid the worst outcomes,” then hope will collapse every time new evidence emerges.

Which is all the time.

Why Hope Collapses Under Climate Pressure

When we face existential threat, several psychological systems activate simultaneously:

1. The Threat Response

Fear narrows attention. The amygdala pulls focus toward danger, and the prefrontal cortex (responsible for long-term planning) dims. Under threat, the brain prefers certainty over possibility. Even if the “certain” thing is doom.

This is why apocalyptic thinking feels strangely grounding.
It’s cognitively easier to predict disaster than to tolerate uncertainty.

As Ursula K. Le Guin put it:
“The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.”

But the nervous system doesn’t like “intolerable uncertainty.”
It prefers finality.

2. The Need for Cognitive Closure

Psychologists call this the desire for a definite answer, even if it’s negative. During periods of sustained threat, the mind grabs onto narratives that feel complete:

• “We’re doomed.”

• “Technology will save us.”

• “It’s already too late.”

These are opposite poles of the same psychological mechanism:
narratives that end the discomfort of not knowing.

3. Learned Helplessness

When we try to make change and don’t see immediate results, the brain can internalize:

“No matter what I do, nothing changes.”

This is the classic pattern of learned helplessness, and climate collapse (by virtue of its scale and slowness) creates the perfect conditions for it. Once a person falls into helplessness, hope feels not just naïve but impossible.

4. The Doom-Loop Reward Cycle

Doomscrolling activates the same dopamine circuitry as hope, but without the vulnerability.
It gives:

• certainty (“it’s bad, and here’s proof”),

• emotional intensity,

• a sense of being right,

• and a simplified world.

Doom is addictive because it offers closure.
Hope is fragile because it does not.

What People Are Actually Seeking When They Say They Need Hope

Most people intuitively know that hope is fragile. They aren’t actually looking for hope.
They’re looking for something much more specific.

Here are the most common needs hiding inside the vague request for hope:

1. Inspiration

We want to see evidence that humans can still act courageously and creatively.

2. Permission to Desire a Brighter Future

Doom culture can make longing feel foolish. People want to know they’re allowed to want more than mere survival.

3. Proof of Possibility

Not certainty, just possibility.
Even a sliver can reopen motivation pathways.

As Thich Nhat Hanh wrote:
“Because of impermanence, everything is possible.”

4. Evidence of Agency

People need to believe their actions still matter. They want to know they aren’t powerless.

5. Community and Belonging

Despair strengthens in isolation. It collapses in relationship.

6. A Future They Recognize Themselves In

People want to know that the future contains things worth fighting for, not only things to avoid.

When we fail to use precise emotional language, all these distinct needs get flattened into the word “hope”. A single brittle beam trying to carry the weight of the entire psychological house.

Building a More Resilient Architecture

Instead of relying on hope-as-prediction, we can construct a more stable psychological architecture: one designed to withstand uncertainty, threat, and change.

1. Non-Attachment (Buddhism + Cognitive Science)

Attachment to a specific outcome creates suffering.
We can, instead, practice:

• intention without guarantee

• engagement without prediction

• presence without yearning for certainty

This mirrors the science of motivation:
expectancy collapses when outcomes feel fixed or irreversible.
Non-attachment keeps expectancy alive.

2. Active Hope (Joanna Macy)

Macy describes hope not as optimism, but as a practice:

Active Hope is not wishful thinking. It is recognizing the possibilities that exist and acting in alignment with them.

Active Hope doesn’t collapse when predictions change, because it is not prediction-based. It is participation-based.

3. Complex Systems Thinking

In nonlinear systems:

• change is emergent

• thresholds matter

• small actions can have disproportionate impacts

• the future is not singular, but a field of trajectories

This dismantles all-or-nothing climate narratives.
There is no one future.
There are many.

Our job is to influence which one strengthens.

4. Imagination as Infrastructure

bell hooks wrote:
“What we cannot imagine cannot come into being.”

Imagination is a cognitive technology. It is a technology that expands the brain’s perceived possibility space. When imagination shrinks, depression rises. When imagination expands, agency returns.

Imagination is not escapism.
It is strategic foresight.

5. Emotional Granularity (Neuroscience)

Using more precise emotional language activates greater prefrontal regulation and decreases amygdala dominance. In other words:

Naming what you’re actually seeking makes you more resilient.

Instead of:
“hopeful,” try:

“inspired.”
“full of possibility.”
“connected with community.”
“I know my actions matter.”
“I desire so much more for my future.”

These are load-bearing beams.
Hope is not.

This Is What Actually Sustains Us

What we need in a warming world is not hope as prediction, but:

• Possibility

• Agency

• Community

• Imagination

• Grief

• Non-attachment

• Desire

• Attention

• Participation

These are architectures built to endure uncertainty, not collapse under it.
These are structures designed to move with shifting conditions, not shatter when the future doesn’t behave.

Hope may flicker.
But possibility does not.
Agency does not.
Grief does not.
Desire does not.
Imagination does not.

These are renewable emotional energies.

Conclusion

Hope collapses because it depends on the future behaving.
We collapse because we expect ourselves to behave.. to be steady, certain, unshakeable.. in a world that is anything but.

But the future is a relationship.
A moving, emergent field of possibility that changes as we change.

We do not need hope in the traditional sense.
We need clarity, courage, participation, and imagination.

Offerings

FYI: I’ve started a weekly newsletter called For People and Planet. It’s a place where I highlight what’s working in the fight for a more balanced future. You can read it here: forpeopleandpla.net

Further reading:

For more like this, follow me wherever you connect with friends:
Bluesky 💖 LinkedIn 💖 Mastodon 💖 X 💖 Instagram 💖 TikTok 💖 Threads 💖 YouTube 💖 Facebook

With love, Bri Chapman

The headlines, the metrics, the endless notifications, all of it hums with a single message: time is running out.

I wonder if we are forgetting what time really is.

In Ancient Greek thought, there were two kinds of time.

Chronos was the time of clocks and calendars: measurable, sequential, ruled by productivity and progress. Today, this is the time capitalism runs on. The ticking reminder that we are late, that we are falling behind, that we must hurry if we want to matter.

Kairos, on the other hand, was the time of the soul. That opportune moment when conditions align, when something unseen becomes possible. Kairos reveals openings. It is the time of ripening. Of thresholds. Of emergence.

We have built entire civilizations around chronos. Around speed. Scarcity. The fear of being too late.

To re-learn the rhythms of change, we have to remember kairos.

(also available on YouTube at: https://youtube.com/shorts/ObIV_o54ORI?feature=share)

WINTER

Every ending asks for a pause.

Not the efficient pause of resting before more working, but the pause of dissolution.

We have been taught to fear endings. But endings are the compost of change.

They clear space for what cannot yet be seen.

In the winter, the ground looks dead. But underneath it, the soil is alive with decomposition.

Life is being reworked at a cellular level.

The structures of certainty collapse into potential.

The end is not a wall, but a doorway.

When we stop clinging to permanence, time itself softens.

Decay is a part of growth we have forgotten.

SPRING

Relationships are shifting beneath the surface until a threshold is crossed.

In complex systems, change never happens on schedule.

It happens when tension builds, when networks reorganize, when a hidden threshold is crossed.

It happens when the old patterns can no longer contain the life inside it.

This is kairos. The right moment within time.

To live in kairos is to stop counting minutes and start sensing conditions.

What is ready to emerge?

To be an ancestor of possibility is to live as if the future were porous. Shaping and being shaped by every small act of presence.

SUMMER

Chronos demands prediction. Kairos invites participation.

When we treat the future as a prophecy, we wait for certainty, for signs of success, for permission.

But when we understand the future as a project, we act as co-creators.

We give our energy to what wants to live.

To act in kairos is not to rush. It’s to respond with attention, humility, and care.

The future is growing through us, now.

AUTUMN

Love and loss are not opposites, but partners.

Release is a form of generosity.

In every falling leaf, the tree is not dying but returning nutrients to the soil that sustains it.

We live through emergencies — personal, political, planetary — and mistake them for endings.

If we listen, crisis becomes life re-organizing itself.

When something falls apart, the question is, “what is this clearing space for?”

Grief becomes a teacher. In autumn, we participate in change without clinging to an outcome.

We let the world turn without losing our belonging in it.

CLOSING

Time doesn’t run out. It circles back.

Each breath, each season, carries us through endings into beginnings we can’t yet name.

Chronos keeps the time, but Kairos keeps the rhythm.

When we stop racing, we remember how to listen.

Offerings

FYI: Each week I share stories through For People and Planet, a newsletter focused on climate solutions and hope for the future. You can find it here if you’d like to follow along: forpeopleandpla.net

Further reading:

For more like this, follow me wherever you connect with friends:
Bluesky 💖 LinkedIn 💖 Mastodon 💖 X 💖 Instagram 💖 TikTok 💖 Threads 💖 YouTube 💖 Facebook

With love, Bri Chapman

It reminds me a lot of the way people talk about climate anxiety. Both are rooted in forces that feel huge, systemic, and out of our control. And both seem to provoke two main types of fear: personal and collective.

(Video also available on my YouTube: https://youtube.com/shorts/FlUoV3mXfQo?feature=share)

Two Kinds of Anxiety

Personal anxiety is the feeling that I will be directly impacted.
In the climate case, maybe I’m afraid I’ll lose my home to a wildfire or flood.
In the AI case, maybe I’m afraid I’ll lose my job to automation or become obsolete.

Collective anxiety, on the other hand, is broader. It’s not that I expect to suffer personally, it’s the sense that we, as a species, are in trouble.
That humanity is veering off track.
That something about the direction of progress feels wrong, even if I’m personally fine.

Both kinds of anxiety are valid. They’re signals that something deep inside us recognizes imbalance. That the systems we live within might not be designed for our wellbeing.

The System Beneath the Fear

When we peel back the layers of both climate anxiety and AI anxiety, we find a common root: capitalism. Specifically, the way capitalism is structured today.

Capitalism, as it currently operates, behaves a lot like a cancer. It requires constant, unrestricted growth to survive. If it stops growing, it collapses. And that endless growth imperative shapes everything — from our economy to our psychology.

In the climate crisis, this shows up as overproduction and overconsumption. The system demands we keep making and buying more, even when it pushes planetary boundaries.

In the AI context, the same growth logic applies.
AI itself is a neutral technology. It’s a set of algorithms and data. But under capitalism, those algorithms often get directed toward things that people think are going to maximize their shareholder value:

• Replacing human labor with cheaper machine labor.

• Optimizing attention economies to keep people scrolling, clicking, buying.

• Extracting as much engagement, productivity, and profit as possible from human experience.

From Prediction to Participation

So how do we move through that anxiety without numbing out or spiraling into despair?

Whether it’s about climate or AI, the key shift is the same:
We need to move from prediction to participation.

Prediction is the habit of constantly checking the news, scanning headlines, and trying to forecast whether we’re on the right track. It gives the illusion of control but keeps us stuck in worry.

Participation is active. It involves asking: What can I do, with my skills and values, to shape the kind of future I want?

In the climate case, participation might look like taking stock of your skills and figuring out how you want to contribute to bringing the future you want to life.

In the AI case, participation could mean:

• Learning how the technology actually works: its limits as well as its potential.

• Building literacy around its mechanics instead of reacting to headlines.

• Asking deeper questions like:

  • What is AI good at, really?

  • What is it bad at?

  • How could AI serve a humane future?

And then comes the next step: visioning.

Envisioning the Future You Want

Once you understand the mechanics — of AI, of capitalism, or of climate systems — you can start imagining alternatives.

Maybe in your ideal future, AI doesn’t exist at all.
That’s valid.

Or maybe it exists in a different form, one that supports the needs of people and planet.

The point isn’t to predict which version of the future will come true.
It’s to participate in shaping the one you actually want to live in.

Closing Thoughts

AI anxiety and climate anxiety both emerge from the same truth: we’re living through systems that move faster than our collective capacity to reflect on them.

But anxiety doesn’t have to be a dead end. It can be an invitation to learn, to imagine, and to act.

If this resonates with you, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Do you experience AI anxiety? If so, what helps you move from prediction to participation?

Offerings

FYI: On the side I write a weekly newsletter called For People and Planet. It’s all about progress, hope, and the ways people are building a better future with Earth. You can take a look here: forpeopleandpla.net

Further reading:

For more like this, follow me wherever you connect with friends:
Bluesky 💖 LinkedIn 💖 Mastodon 💖 X 💖 Instagram 💖 TikTok 💖 Threads 💖 YouTube 💖 Facebook

With love, Bri Chapman