Brace for Impact: 3 Converging Forces...
Brace for Impact: 3 Converging Forces Reshaping Our World As We Know It...
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“Strategic Insights for Digital Entrepreneurs Who Think Differently.”
Last week, I found myself deep in the Ozark Mountains.
I was hiking with my Front Row Dads “band” – six other fathers I meet with regularly to talk about life, family, business, and purpose.
No cell service.
No Slack.
Just long miles underfoot and the kind of stripped-down conversations that only happen when you’ve removed everything else.
One night, after a long day on the trail, we gathered around the fire.
The stars were sharp and clear. The world had gone quiet. And the conversation turned to something deeper:
What the hell is happening in the world right now??
We didn’t mean the headlines.
We meant the undercurrents.
The feel of things.
The unease that so many are carrying – about the economy, about the role of technology, about the future we’re preparing our kids for.
What followed was one of the richest conversations I’ve had in a long time…
We began tracing the pattern we’re all sensing – and I mapped out what I am personally seeing as three converging forces that I believe are reshaping life as we know it:
Ray Dalio’s “Big Cycle” and the slow-motion decline of U.S. global dominance.
Yuval Noah Harari’s warning that AI poses a fundamental threat to human meaning.
Nate Hagens’ “Great Simplification” – the reckoning with the impossibility of infinite growth inside a finite system.
And at the center of all three?
Something powerful.
A shift.
A recalibration.
The Return to Real.
Not as a slogan.
As a deeply human response to a world coming unglued.
Let me explain…
1 | The End of the American Cycle (Dalio).
In Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed or Fail Ray Dalio’s “Big Cycle” framework outlines the long arc of empire…
How nations rise through productivity and innovation, gain dominance through trade and military strength, and eventually decline under the weight of debt, internal conflict, and the erosion of trust.
According to Dalio, the United States is in the late stages of this arc.
The symptoms are all around us:
Exploding debt levels.
Political polarization at historic extremes.
Loss of faith in institutions – from the media to the legal system.
Rising internal conflict and declining global influence.
(And BTW – these patterns aren’t new. )
They’ve played out again and again through history – in the Dutch Empire, the British Empire, and now, perhaps, the American one.
The “Big Cycle” unfolds over 80–100 years and typically ends with a period of de-leveraging – when excessive debt, political division, and declining empire power collide to reset the system.
It’s a predictable cycle.
And with history as our guide, we’re likely close to this reset.
(And if Dalio’s framework is even partially right, we are heading into a period of increased volatility, lower trust, and more radical change – politically, economically, and socially…)
In this environment, people begin to hedge.
They localize. They build community. They focus on what they can control. They invest in the tangible “hard” skills.
They seek sovereignty – not in theory, but in practice.
The Return to Real – like we first explored in [Issue #028] The Return to Real Movement – reflects a grassroots recalibration in response to the slow unraveling of empire.
And no. This isn’t a reaction driven by fear and unfounded pessimism.
It’s an informed response to emerging patterns.
A way to create stability, meaning, and resilience – at the individual level – in an environment where the larger system feels increasingly fragile.
Which takes us to the second force…
2 | The Existential Threat of AI (Harari).
In Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow – Yuval Noah Harari has warned that artificial intelligence poses not just an economic threat, but a civilizational one.
It’s not simply about job loss or market disruption like we explored in [Issue #033] The Coming Collapse?
It’s about meaning.
For most of human history, our sense of value has been tethered to our usefulness – our ability to solve problems, create value, and make decisions.
But as AI begins to outperform humans in reasoning, creativity, pattern recognition (and even emotional simulation) – that usefulness is coming into question.
What happens when we are no longer the smartest beings in the room?
What happens when intelligence itself becomes a commodity?
Harari suggests that we may be facing a future where humans become increasingly irrelevant – not through violence, but through obsolescence.
And whether we admit it or not, we feel it:
When AI can communicate better (and with more demonstrated empathy) than most adults…
When algorithms know your preferences better than your spouse…
When more and more companies begin replacing high-level cognitive labor with language models…
The question is no longer whether AI will disrupt markets.
It’s whether it will displace meaning.
This has implications that go far beyond economics. It touches on our identity, our dignity, and our role in the future.
And so, in response, many are reaching for the tangible.
Not because they reject technology. But because they’re looking for anchors.
They cook from scratch. They grow food. They repair things with their hands. They host real conversations in Living Rooms vs. Zoom Rooms. They prioritize presence over productivity.
The Return to Real is, in part, a response to a creeping cultural unease:
That in a world where machines can do everything, the only things that matter are those that are fundamentally human.
Which takes us to force number three…
3 | The End of Infinite Growth (Hagens).
Nate Hagens refers to the moment we’re living through as “The Great Simplification” (Watch this video – highly recommended…)
At the heart of his thesis is a simple but uncomfortable truth:
We live in a civilization that assumes – economically, politically, and culturally – that growth can continue forever.
But we’re beginning to hit the wall.
Energy is the base layer of everything.
And while technology has given us extraordinary leverage over nature, it hasn’t eliminated the constraints of thermodynamics, depletion, or ecological limits.
Hagens introduces the concept of the Carbon Pulse – a one-time spike in global productivity and complexity made possible by burning through 4 billion years of accumulated sunlight (in the form of fossil fuels) in just 100 years.
This explosion of energy access gave rise to everything we now take for granted: industrial agriculture, global trade, modern medicine, and digitized life.
But it’s a pulse – not a permanent state.
We’re already past the point of Peak Oil in terms of quality and accessibility.
And we’re approaching a critical tipping point in energy return:
When we begin needing to expend more than one unit of energy to extract one unit of usable energy from the ground – the system breaks down.
Energy ceases to be a source of surplus.
It becomes a sink.
And with it, the entire logic of our growth-based economy collapses.
Meanwhile, the broader system – from financial markets to retirement models to consumer culture – still runs on the assumption of more:
More consumption.
More GDP.
More innovation.
More leverage.
And yet, deep down, many people sense the tension.
They know that infinite growth on a finite planet doesn’t compute.
That we’ve been borrowing from the future – economically, environmentally, and psychologically – to fund the present.
And so, unconsciously or not, people are beginning to adjust.
They’re paring back.
They’re shifting from scale to sufficiency.
They’re letting go of hyper-optimization and re-learning how to meet basic needs.
They’re finding joy not in accumulation, but in rhythm and seasonality.
Learning to Seek Awe & Wonder in the Ordinary & Everyday.
The Return to Real shows up here as a cultural adaptation.
Not driven by ideology, but by intuition.
A quiet recalibration toward a life that works – not on spreadsheets, but in lived experience.
A life rooted in limits, and richer for it.
4 | The Return to Real as Cultural Response.
When you lay these three forces side by side, a deeper pattern emerges:
Dalio’s Big Cycle reveals the decay of our dominant institutions…
Harari’s AI lens challenges the foundation of our identity and usefulness…
Hagens’ Great Simplification pulls back the curtain on our energy and ecological fragility…
Each force, on its own, is a major disruption.
Together, they mark the end of an era.
And deep down, many of us are responding.
We’re making different choices.
Not because we have a master plan.
But because something inside of us recognizes the ground is shifting.
The Return to Real is emerging as a kind of cultural nervous system – a pattern of adaptations responding to these converging pressures.
It’s showing up in the way people are:
Growing their own food.
Moving to smaller towns.
Learning to repair and build with their hands.
Leaving high-paying jobs to pursue meaningful work.
Spending more time offline and with their families.
We are reaching for what is tangible because the abstract no longer feels stable.
We are prioritizing sufficiency over scale because we sense the limits ahead.
We are seeking groundedness because the center no longer holds.
This isn’t about going backward.
It’s about re-grounding.
The Return to Real isn’t just one single macro-movement.
It’s many many micro move taking place.
It’s showing up in the soil, in our homes, in our wallets, and in our relationships.
And if you zoom out far enough, you begin to see:
It may be the most important strategic pivot of our time.
5 | A Personal Reflection.
Around that fire in the Ozarks, none of us claimed to have the answers.
We were just a handful of dads trying to make sense of the world – for ourselves, and for our kids.
But what struck me most in that conversation was the shared recognition: something fundamental is shifting.
And the old playbook…
The hustle, the scale-at-all-costs, the algorithm-chasing – no longer feels aligned.
For me, The Return to Real is not just cultural. It’s personal.
It’s why I left the city to raise my boys on a farm…
It’s why we grow food, tend animals, and work the land…
It’s why I’m more interested in meaning than metrics…
And it’s why I write this newsletter – to offer a space where we can explore these shifts together.
To ground our decisions in something more enduring than the headlines.
To orient our lives around the things that actually matter.
To prepare for what’s coming…
Not with panic, but with purpose.
As I look ahead, I find myself asking a simple but profound question:
What will still matter 10 years from now? What about 50 years?
That’s the question I’ll be carrying with me into the next issue.
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Until then – I would love to hear from YOU…
This issue is particularly important to me – because The Return to Real is the theme I’ll be exploring deeply in my forthcoming book…
And I’d love to know what – in particular – from this issue most resonates with you.
Please shoot me a note.
I read each and every message.
I’d love to hear how The Return to Real – or the desire to make that shift – is showing up in your life.
* * *
In the meantime…
Remember to hug the ones you love.
And until next week,
Ryan :-)