The Age of Transition
We feel it in our lives. We see it in the world. Perhaps there is a connection.
Something is Stirring
I used to think transitions were solitary. When I recently stepped away from a career that had once defined me, it felt deeply personal. A gentle unraveling. A private reckoning.
But then I started noticing the same story in so many others. Friends, colleagues, and people I’ve met online and off. Each one stepping out of something they had long identified with. Or standing on the edge of it, unsure when or how to take the leap.
Countless others I’ve spoken with are burnt out, restless, and reconsidering their direction. Contemplating a change that hasn’t quite begun, but feels inevitable.
But it hasn’t stopped with individuals. It’s showing up in the fabric of our economic systems, political regimes, pace of technology, scientific advancements, ecological urgency, educational structures, as well as our philosophical, religious, and spiritual beliefs.
In the last decade, economic systems have come under increasing scrutiny. The rise of conscious capitalism, B Corporations, and stakeholder models has grown alongside widespread disillusionment with wealth inequality. Many are asking: can this structure we have built sustain itself? Can it sustain us?
Political regimes across the globe have become increasingly polarized. Media ecosystems thrive on conflict rather than consensus. Extremes have become more visible, and more influential, than at any point in recent history.
Technology is advancing at a breakneck pace. The emergence of generative AI has reshaped creative and professional landscapes almost overnight. Many now believe we are approaching a singularity, where artificial general intelligence could transform life in ways we can scarcely imagine.
In science, we’re entering a period of profound reimagining. Quantum entanglement, multiverse theories, and new challenges to Big Bang cosmology are reshaping how we understand time, space, and origin. Even the foundations of physical reality are no longer fixed.
In ecology, the signals are impossible to ignore. Climate disruption, biodiversity collapse, and resource scarcity are no longer distant warnings, but daily realities. Yet alongside the crisis, a different consciousness is emerging. Regenerative agriculture, rewilding efforts, and Indigenous-led conservation movements are reframing our relationship to the Earth. The old story of domination is giving way to one of interdependence. The urgency is real, but so is the remembering. Of reciprocity. Of kinship.
In education, long-standing structures are being reexamined. The emphasis on standardization and outcomes is giving way to deeper questions about purpose, identity, and development. Learning is no longer seen as just information transfer, but as a shaping of who we become. Even the role of education itself is being reframed, from preparation for work to participation in a changing world.
In philosophy, the long-dominant paradigm of materialism is beginning to crack. A growing crisis of meaning, accelerated by burnout, disconnection, and the limits of purely rational frameworks has been met with renewed curiosity about consciousness itself. That curiosity is opening the door to alternative ways of seeing. Interest in panpsychism, non-local awareness, and phenomena like The Telepathy Tapes reflect a cultural moment that is not just tolerating mystery, but actively seeking it.
In religion and spirituality, boundaries continue to blur. Western traditions are embracing Eastern practices like mindfulness and non-duality. Longstanding doctrines are being reinterpreted or released. Belief itself is shifting.
Taken together, these shifts don’t feel isolated. They feel like a larger pattern emerging. Of course, it’s possible this is just my own confirmation bias: my selective attention tuning in to change and finding it everywhere. But when we step back, the pattern becomes harder to ignore. Something foundational seems to be shifting. And not in just one or two areas, but everywhere.
Which makes me wonder if this isn’t just a moment some of us are experiencing in our individual life transitions of adolescence, midlife, or retirement.
Maybe this is an age of transition. A season. A cycle.
Not just for a few of us.
Perhaps for all of us.
Mirroring Each Other
It’s tempting to see broader cultural shifts as background noise. But lately, they feel more like a chorus – voices from different sectors, countries, and generations all echoing something similar: the old map no longer makes sense.
In work, education, and identity, many of the institutions and norms that once offered structure now feel misaligned with our current reality. It’s not rebellion for rebellion’s sake. It’s a recalibration. A return to something truer, or perhaps an attempt to find something that’s never quite existed before.
I’ve felt it personally. Leaving behind a career that once seemed like the right path wasn’t an act of escape. It was an act of listening. To the dissonance. To the parts of myself that had gone unheard. And in doing so, I started connecting with others on similar paths. People reevaluating their roles, reimagining their contributions, and often rediscovering their creativity in the process.
Many of those conversations began here, in this strange and wonderful digital landscape.
I think of
, who began questioning the traditional definition of success nearly a decade ago and ended up charting an entirely new course through The Pathless Path.I think of
, who stepped away from a high-profile venture career in Silicon Valley nearly five years ago to pursue a spiritual calling. Today, he supports veterans recovering from PTSD and helps high achievers navigate the deeper terrain of transition and burnout.I think of
, documenting society’s growing pains and the crumbling of once-dominant mental models. Also building a community of like-minded individuals through The Leading Edge.I think of
, who stepped away from a long career to help individuals and organizations reconnect with intuition through her practice, Intuition Strategy, and is now launching a bold new venture: Corporate Tarot Cards®.I think of
, who left a successful legal career to embrace a different life: one rooted in presence, curiosity, and community.And while these are just a few of the many stories, they speak to something larger. They aren’t just stories of personal change. They are signals. Indicators of a larger shift.
We’re living in a moment where the lines between personal evolution and societal change are beginning to blur. One feeds the other. As individuals awaken to new values and possibilities, those awakenings ripple outward. And as the world transforms, it invites each of us to reconsider how we live within it.
Change is no longer something that happens out there. It’s showing up in our inboxes, our calendars, our choices.
And for many of us, it’s showing up most clearly in the mirror.
The Great Murmuration
It would be easy to call it coincidence. A cluster of unrelated awakenings. A wave of midlife moments colliding with a fast-changing world.
But the more I’ve sat with it, the less random it feels.
There’s a kind of rhythm to it all. People in different corners of the world, with different beliefs and backgrounds, all asking similar questions. All sensing the same friction. All drawn, sometimes hesitantly, toward some kind of reimagining.
Is this simply the statistical bell curve of human restlessness? Maybe this has always been happening, and I’m only just now paying attention? Or is there something else happening beneath the surface that is different about this current age?
Carl Jung might call it the collective unconscious.
might speak of morphic resonance. Others might frame it in terms of complex adaptive systems, where enough small shifts create a tipping point.And we are hearing those shifts from profound voices across multiple systems and areas of thought:
In economics, voices like Kate Raworth are reshaping the narrative. Her Doughnut Economics model proposes that our current growth-at-all-costs paradigm is ecologically and socially unsustainable. Instead, she offers a vision where we stay within planetary boundaries while meeting human needs. Meanwhile, the rise of regenerative finance, conscious capitalism, community-owned assets, and the B Corp movement shows a growing hunger for systems designed with care, not just profit.
In politics, thinkers like Yuval Noah Harari and
are raising alarms about the fragility of our governance systems in the face of accelerating complexity. Harari warns that the 21st century’s greatest threats of ecological collapse, technological disruption, and disinformation are global in scope, and yet we remain tied to national frameworks ill-equipped to meet them. Schmachtenberger calls for a shift from rivalry-based politics to systems of cooperative sense-making and long-term stewardship. Across the spectrum, there’s a growing sense that our current models were built for a different era, and may not be capable of navigating what comes next.In technology, we are accelerating toward something still unfolding. The emergence of generative AI has already transformed creative work, challenging our assumptions about originality, authorship, and meaning. Voices like
and Tristan Harris are raising deep ethical questions, asking whether our creations are outpacing our consciousness, and yet remaining optimistic. Harris highlights that without aligning AI development with human values, we risk exacerbating societal harms such as polarization, addiction, and the erosion of shared reality.In science, theoretical physicist Lee Smolin is legitimately questioning the dominant Big Bang narrative and exploring alternative cosmological models. Smolin’s theory of cosmological natural selection reframes the origin of universes through evolutionary patterns rather than a singular explosion. Meanwhile, advances in quantum mechanics, especially non-locality and entanglement, challenge our core assumptions about causality and separateness. What we once thought of as boundaries now seem more like bridges.
In ecology, thinkers like Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer and Dr. Brian Swimme are reframing our relationship to the Earth – not as a resource, but as kin. Kimmerer bridges Indigenous wisdom with scientific ecology, reminding us that “all flourishing is mutual.” Swimme, building on the work of Thomas Berry, continues a story of cosmology rooted in awe and interconnection, where the story of the universe is inseparable from the life of the planet. Together, they help shift the ecological crisis from a technical problem to a relational one. Movements like Rights of Nature, degrowth, and regenerative land practices echo that shift, asking not just what we will do, but who we are becoming in response.
In education,
is pioneering models that frame learning as a process of transformation, not just achievement. Her work with The Flight School reimagines the “gap year” as a space for meaning-making, global awareness, and self-discovery. Zak Stein expands this lens, calling education the central site of cultural evolution. In a time of deep societal transition, he asks not just what we’re teaching, but who we are becoming, and reminds us that “education is upstream from culture.” Together, their work urges us to treat learning as a moral and developmental act.In philosophy,
continues to reshape how we think about thought itself. His thesis that modern life is dominated by a left-hemispheric, reductionist mode of perception isn’t just neurological, it’s existential. “We are in danger,” he writes, “of misunderstanding everything that matters because of our unbalanced attention to what can be measured rather than what can be felt, intuited, and known directly.” extends this inquiry through his work on Bewusstseinskultur, or “consciousness culture,” which calls for a cultural shift in how we approach the study of mind and experience. , drawing from process philosophy, invites us to reimagine metaphysics itself – not as fixed categories, but as evolving relationships woven through time, perception, and participation.In spirituality and religion, even the most entrenched traditions are evolving. The Vatican’s openness to scientific dialogue and Pope Francis’s reflections on ecology and interdependence reflect a significant shift. At the same time, teachers like Joseph Goldstein continue to bring ancient wisdom into contemporary life, inviting a direct, experiential relationship with awareness itself. On a more esoteric level, there’s renewed fascination with near-death experiences, the ethics of psychedelics, and consciousness research. Dr. Lisa Miller’s work in The Awakened Brain explores the neurological foundations of spiritual perception, showing that spirituality isn’t fringe, but biologically encoded within us.
Whatever we call it, the feeling is hard to deny: something is shifting.
Maybe it’s like a murmuration – a collective turn made of individual movements. Just as in a swarm of birds, each one moves individually, but somehow the whole cloud turns at once. There’s no leader. No command. Just a subtle sensitivity to motion.
Maybe we’re responding to something we can’t yet name. A cultural gravitational pull. An unspoken readiness.
Or maybe, and this is the possibility I find most interesting, we’ve always been connected like this. We’re just now beginning to remember that connection.
Awake Within The Unknown
No matter what it is, there’s a strange relief in realizing that no one has it all figured out. Not governments. Not institutions. Not even the wisest among us. We are, all of us, in a moment of not knowing. A collective uncertainty.
And that’s uncomfortable. But it’s also where possibility lives.
The in-between space comes after the old way has stopped working, but before the new way has emerged. And it is full of friction. It’s where doubt and inspiration brush up against each other. Where meaning flickers, disappears, and then returns in some unexpected form.
When I first stepped into this liminal space myself, I resisted it. I wanted answers. I wanted clarity. I wanted a clear next step. But clarity doesn’t arrive as a conclusion. It arrives as a posture. A way of standing inside the unknown and still listening. Still choosing. Still creating.
In creativity, just as it does in physics, tension creates potential energy. In music, dissonance gives rise to resolution. In our lives, the same is true. The tension of this moment isn’t a failure of foresight. It’s a catalyst for agency.
The fact that we don’t know how it will all turn out is precisely what gives us the motivation to shape it.
This is not a waiting room.
It’s a workshop!
We’re being asked, individually and collectively, to live inside the question. Not just intellectually, but emotionally – and spiritually too. To act with humility, to create without certainty, and to stay curious enough to see what might emerge.
This is the heart of any transition.
Not the answer, but the willingness to remain awake within the unknown.
Invitation
If this really is an age of transition – not just for some of us, but for all of us…
then the question isn’t what should we do?
It’s: how do we want to show up within it?
That’s where possibility lives.
Not in having the answers,
but in sensing the opportunity embedded in the shift itself.
One of my favorite Chinese proverbs states:
“The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is today.”
Maybe we look back twenty years from now and wish we had paused more often.
Listened more deeply.
Planted seeds we wouldn’t live to see bloom.
Or maybe we look back and realize we did.
That we followed our curiosity.
Trusted the discomfort.
Reached for one another instead of retreating in fear.
We don’t need to solve it all. But we can participate with more intention.
We can choose presence over performance.
Meaning over momentum.
Connection over control.
And when the path feels unclear (because it will), we can remember that clarity is not a prerequisite for movement. Sometimes it’s what follows.
So here’s the invitation:
Look around.
Listen closely.
If something in you is stirring,
know that you are not alone.
If something feels like it’s unraveling,
it might also be becoming.
And if you’re stepping into the unknown,
it may be because you’re right on time.
What part of this moment is asking something of you?
What might your future self thank you for starting right now?
The old story was about certainty.
But this one… this one we’re in together.
And it feels a lot more like trust.
Maybe we’re not falling apart.
Maybe we’re falling into place.
If this piece stirred something in you, I’d love to hear what transition is calling you right now. What feels like it’s ending? What might just be beginning? Feel free to share in the comments, or simply sit with the questions. They’re always patient.
Note: This piece was written, recorded, and scheduled ahead of time. I’m currently on a silent retreat without access to technology, so I won’t see your comments right away. However, I look forward to reading and responding when I am back in the first week of May.
My sense is that this transition in the age of network information has been enabled by a number of factors including a massive shift in online circling, authentic listening, dialogos, and generative empathic collaboration. Those regularly participating in trusted information and empathy networks end up intuitively drawn to patterns of murmuration. These murmurations are amazing to watch but even more thrilling to participate in. Listening to those named individuals in practice with each other can lead to memetic biomimicry among those who are sensitive and attentive to patterns and reverberations.
https://open.substack.com/pub/releasingthemuse/p/murmurations-in-communities-of-practice?r=8fury&utm_medium=ios
Thank you very much for that post. It becomes obvious from this and from the way that you respond to others' posts that you are genuinely attentive to the world around you. I want to repeat that --"genuinely attentive". Because this is not common. It is not something most people are. We scroll past looking for that which interests us. You are not looking for specific things that fill your agenda book for the day. You are open. And that's what makes this post important. Earthstar One's comment on the brazen individual voices that stand out in the beauty of a murmuration's swirling storm, was valid until you realise that there are leader birds and follower birds even within the murmuration. Individuals can tilt the frame, ever so slightly, with a way of seeing the world, that can in fact start the slide; tip the scales in favour of achieving critical mass. I do not know if we are in an age of transition just yet. But, that YOU are not here, responding to these comments--instead choosing to be elsewhere for a higher purpose--shows that you just might be that individual.