Shit is messy. Hope’s time is now.

This is a longer one, so I recorded it for you to listen on the go.

Times are heavy and dark. Clouds of smoke rise all over the world. Horror in places we once saw peace. It is tempting to give up hope. But no. Hope’s time is now.

The systems of power and control are losing their grip. The bigger the progress, the bigger the backlash. That means we are shifting the very ground that future generations will stand on.

We are moving, sometimes too slowly, sometimes in leaps – towards shared power, fairness, healing, leadership through empathy, compassion and kindness.

These shifts were seeded by our parents, and their parents, and theirs before them. Each generation carried a hope that their children would live with more justice than they did.

They lived without the tools we have now – the ability to harness the sum total of human intelligence, to collaborate across borders, and to apply that to the vast challenges of our time.

So what of this new age? What is its challenge to us?

I believe it marks a shift from the age of me to the age of we.

The old stories were about individual flourishing: me, my potential, my ladder. But that was always an illusion. We are not singular. We are cells in a larger organism. Nested, layered, connected. There is no neat boundary where I end and you begin.

We are multitudes. Bundles of processes. Overlapping ecologies of genes, neurons, bacteria and stories.

My mother taught me this early. When my brothers and I would bicker, she made us sit at the kitchen table and draw the teapot in front of us. Each sketch looked completely different. She would hold them up and say, “What’s this? I told you to draw the teapot!” It was her genius way of showing us that each perspective is partial, but together they build something richer, more dimensional. There is no right. Do you register that? No ‘right’.

So let’s drop our culture’s obsession with being right. That was the wrong question all along. What matters is process. Who is in the room. Whose voices count. What values shape the work. What wisdom slows us down when everything else screams “go faster.”

This is why I am optimistic. Not because it will all go well. I’m expecting it won’t. I am optimistic because we are living through the most exciting paradigm shift humans have ever known. And the real paradigm shift isn’t the tech – it’s us.

The tech is a mirror of our intelligence trending toward interconnectedness. It shows us who we already are: an organism. Someone is the eye. Someone is the ear. Someone is the toe. That person over there is the middle finger. And yes, someone is the dick. (I’ll let you guess who…) Each part plays its role in moving us deeper into understanding the elegance of the whole.

We finally have tools to hold vastness and complexity without collapsing under it. But we must rebalance. Most AI is trained on stale pale male thinking, and that monoculture has delivered us into a polycrisis. The potency comes when we fuel it with the voices that were left out – indigenous, women, mothers, disabled, introverted, elders, the silenced. That is when our intelligence multiplies. As Noah Yuval Harari says, we are noisy parliaments of selves. So how do we live as multitudes? How do we unlock ecosystems of potential instead of just polishing individual talent?

We multisolve together, not in silos.  I have been working on a political conversationalist tool which specifically works at this level. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about bridging the expanse between our world views and the potential trap of both-sidesism. If every perspective is treated as equally “right,” solutions collapse into bland compromise. But nor is there one right answer. All we have is the prism of perspectives – some ideas are more central, some are like seasoning on the edges – like ingredients in a recipe.

Our job is not to be right. Our job is to create the right processes for decision-making. Deliberation. Education. Voices at the table.

And here’s what supercharges this: intentionality.

Curiosity is important, but intentionality is the power tool. If tech giants yank our attention like puppies on a leash, intentionality is us taking the leash back.

Try it now. Quietly say to yourself: “I am here to unlock what potential in us?”

Feel how that lands? That is your intentionality. That is hope as action.

Each time we choose it, we can remind ourselves we are running a collective. And maybe, just maybe, it helps us look at catastrophe differently: that even tyranny is serving an unfolding in humanity so profound, so reverberant, that it will echo for centuries.

It is only through this darkness that we will discover new common ground.

And that is why hope’s time is now.

x Megan

P.S. I don’t pay for subscribers. My hope is that this resonates for you and you will share it and uplift others. That is the way we grow hope in this world. Thank you, from one cell to another x