Dec 13, 2024 11 min read

How to Make Decisions About Your Life in an Age of Crisis and Collapse

I’m Umair Haque, and this is The Issue: an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported publication. Our job is to give you the freshest, deepest, no-holds-barred insight about the issues that matter most.

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Hi! How’s everyone? Welcome back old friends, a warm welcome to new ones, and here’s a big puppy hug from little Snowy.

Today we’re going to continue our discussions about life, decisions, business, strategy, in this age of crisis and collapse. With a focus on choices.

I’ve outlined a number of principles for you lately. Not Sinking With the Ship, Many Won’t Make It, breaking the reactivity-bewilderment-panic spiral that so many people are institutions are trapped in and by. And we’ve begun discussing three more pragmatic principles, Kinesis, taking action, Synthesis, joining up your resources and competencies in new ways, and Poiesis.

In the last essay, we talked about synthesizing a new relationship with the world. A confident, mature one, where you’re not a passive, or worse, active victim of crisis and collapse.

Today we’re going to talk more about how you do that. Poiesis is just the ancient Greek word for “creativity,” and it’s the one of the keys to Not Sinking With the Ship.

Let me explain.

The Age of Impossible Decisions, or Why Everyone Sane’s Demoralized and Bewildered

Before you now lie a series of what feel like impossible decisions.

—Should I move, and give up the life I’ve built in a certain place?

—What happens to my career or profession? Is it going to be eviscerated like so many others, and even if it doesn’t, will it continue to pay the bills?

—What am I going to have to sacrifice this year to keep the lights on, the family fed, and so forth?

—How do I deal with the instability of everything around me, which feels crushing? Should I just retreat into escapism?

—Is the only way to survive let alone prosper now to become the kind of person I don’t want to be, a predator?

— I’ve devoted my life to knowledge, truth, science, literature, art, healing, etcetera, and now, in a time where these things don’t seem to matter, was it worth it?

—If I give it all up, what guarantee is there that it’ll be better somewhere else?

I could go on. I don’t know a single person that isn’t facing a series of impossible decisions right now. I speak to many, many people, and what’s striking in my conversations is that this is the focus of every single one right now.

So if you’re not facing a series of what feel like impossible decisions, count yourself very lucky indeed. But also take a second that you might well be very soon.

Because these waves of collapse and crisis will continue to emanate and spread. They’ll engulf us all. Where are we in the world? Where are heading? We’re in an eerie parallel of the 1930s, and you know, too, exactly what happened then. You can pretend you don’t know, I suppose, but what good does that do? The time for feigning ignorance or playing intellectual games is over. This is your life we’re talking about now.

Now. What do impossible decisions do to us?

They leave us bewildered. Frustrated. Frightened. Then, after that passes, they leave us angry. And after that, too, passes? They leave us demoralized, dispirited, and maybe even break us from inside. I have seen this happen to many people over the last year or two. I don’t want it to happen to you. I don’t want you to let it happen to you.

Now you must recognize reality. We’ve been talking about a new, confident, mature relationship with the world, as frightening as it is. Because what other kind is going to get you through all this?

Reality means understanding that all of the above is true.

—These are impossible decisions.

—Yet, you must make them.

How do you square all that?

Through Poiesis.

Poiesis, or the Art of Creating Better Choices

Now you are beginning to understand why I use this old word “Poiesis,” and don’t just say “creativity.” I don’t just mean creativity in the way we use the term now, which is about art or design or films and so forth. I mean it at a much higher level of operation, which is about…

Choices.

Let’s go back to the problem.

You are now confronted by a series of impossible decisions. Yet you must make them.

Let’s simplify some of those.

—Stay or go?

—Switch or don’t?

—Sacrifice or not?

—Take the leap, or keep staring into the abyss?

On and on they go.

How do you solve this meta-dilemma, which is what it is, a dilemma about a series of dilemmas? You must create better choices.

This is what I mean by choosing this funny old word, Poiesis. Of course it’s the root word of poetry, so maybe that helps sort of convey the feeling a little more.

Now. What does creating better choices mean?

First of all, it means…

**Not Accepting the Choices You Have Right Now, and Not Making the Same Old Ones**

The choices you have right now feel stunted, bewildering, and panic-inducing because they are. They aren’t good ones.

So you must make a conscious decision not to think of, accept, settle for, these as your only choices.

Let’s make that much, much more concrete.

—This is the only place I can live

—This is the only society I can belong to

—This is the only profession I can have

—These are the only friends I meet

—These are the only ways I spend my time

—These are the only things I can pursue

—This is all my life is

I’m not trying to be a motivational speaker, LOL. I’m just pointing you to you the reality of living through times of crisis and collapse.

If you settle for the choices that are being offered to you, then of course, in times like these, your life will end up going in the wrong direction. Because our institutions are failing, our leaders have checked out, and nothing much works very well anymore.

So if you accept the choices before you, you are going to get wrecked. This isn’t a prediction, it’s an observation. I’ve seen this happen to many people over the last few years. How could it be any other way? This is what words like “crisis” and “collapse” mean, at a human level, after all.

Now you have to be courageous, wise, tough, and smart. These are some of the elements of a new relationship with the world. And that means creating better choices for yourself than the ones being offered to you.

Let me make that clearer with an institutional example, which I think helps more than personal examples these days. Think of how companies are getting hammered these days. Starbucks, Nike, McDonald’s, doesn’t matter. The point is that tons of the world’s biggest institutions are…adrift. Maybe not quite sinking, yet, but certainly, sort of bewildered.

Just like people are.

How did they get there? In much the same way. They kept on taking the choices offered to them. And those ended up being a very limited, stunted, and foolish, if I can be blunt, set of choices. So for example, the usual suspects of consultants would roll in, and tell the same old fairy tales about AI or what have you. But it turns out that nobody wants to use AI chatbots to, LOL, buy shoes or coffee. Nor will they save you from a world where tariffs point to the implosion of market liberalism.

They didn’t create better choices.

They didn’t create new choices. These are some of the world’s most powerful and wealthiest institutions. Once upon a time, we used to call all this “strategy.” That’s a lost art now. They ended up on autopilot, and hoping that would work.

It didn’t. Why not?

If You Don’t Turn Off Autopilot, You’ll Sink With the Ship

In this day and age, where does autopilot get you? You end up Sinking With the Ship.

The Ship is on autopilot. Or at least it was, if you want to really get into the metaphor. Now, those who want to steer it straight into the icebergs are at the wheel. That’s not so different, because that’s where autopilot was heading, too, only now, the course can’t be changed.

So if you go on autopilot, then of course, you will Sink With the Ship. That’s why even so many of these large, powerful institutions are now in increasingly dire and severe crisis, from corporations like those listed above, to the Dems, to political parties around the globe, to these things we call nation-states. Doesn’t matter—the point is that…

You have to turn off autopilot.

In the context of a life, autopilot means something like this. I accept the choices I’m offered. And that’s OK in stable times. I got into these three universities, here, let me pick one. I got offered these two jobs, let me choose. My friends want to watch this Netflix show, let me join them. Everybody’s on Twitter, let me—ah, see, you just got my point a little.

In ages like this, you have to turn off autopilot. And that’s not easy, because much of modern life is predicated on leaving it on. On not having to think very hard at all. Especially about genuinely tough, existential choices. In that sense, modern life is a luxury, and sadly, as people give up on it, in self-destructive rage, life only gets harder.

Now you have to really consider all this very, very carefully. And ask yourself: is it worth it?

—Is it worth living in a place that’s collapsing? I mean that in a considered way: maybe it is, if you have enough money that you can simply ignore it, and spend all your time in your garden.

—Is it worth going on in a career that isn’t working out very well, as so many in tech or marketing or what have you are discovering?

—Is it worth trying to chase a quick buck in this form of asset or that one?

—Is it worth having relationships that now seem to drain you and leave you less capable of agency?

All of this is turning off autopilot. It’s not easy. It’s hard work. It sucks, often, because there you are, thinking about all this stuff that just used to be thoughtless, not so long ago.

But the upside is this: you start to get your agency back.

The Key to Making Impossible Decisions is Creating Better Choices

Only when you turn off autopilot can you begin to really grasp the reins of Poiesis.

So there you are, and you’ve decided not accept the bad, poor, stunted limited choices that are what “crisis” and “collapse” mean in the context of your life.

Now you can start creating new ones.

That can mean many, many things, so let me make it concrete, but this isn’t all it should mean.

—Maybe you should be applying for jobs in that place

—Maybe you should switch careers now, seeing the writing on the wall

—Maybe you should invest in a business, but over there, not here

—Maybe you should develop a life for yourself in a way that isn’t possible in a place like this, but only in one like that

And maybe you should explore all those possibilities.

So Poiesis doesn’t just mean sort of doing stuff willy-nilly. It means creating new choices. That means, in turn, three very specific things, which is the part that people struggle with, so let me spell it out for you.

—Refusing to accept the limited, stunted choices you have now.

—Refusing make the same old ones.

—Beginning to explore different ones.

When you do these three things together, then there’s a kind of lightning-bolt, eureka moment effect. But they must be done together, if you really think about it, otherwise, like so many, you end up going in circles. If you’re sort of half-heartedly mulling over doing “something else” with your life, career, profession, etcetera, but in the end, you don’t change your choices, of course, it never ends up amounting to much.

What Human Possibility Means in an Age of Collapse, or, This is Your Life

I want to put all of this for you in formal terms now, so that you have a mental model of your life.

All of this is what’s called your Possibility Set. These are your possibilities, not in an abstract sense, but in a real one.

What happens in ages of crisis and collapse, like this one, are that our Possibility Sets begin to shrink and wither. They can do that in so, so many ways. Through the loss of basic rights. Through the decimation of economic mobility. Through widespread financial hardship. Through long-run stagnation. Through something as dramatic, perhaps, as the loss of democracy or modernity itself.

All of this leads to what we social scientists call “scarring.” Scarring means what it sounds like. We use the term in the abstract, but there’s nothing abstract about it. It means that societies are scarred, but what that really means is that people’s lives are. There is a permanent change, not for the better.

So what you are experiencing now, what millions upon millions are, is scarring, which means the dramatic reduction in Possibility Sets. But here things take a dark, foolish, and sinister turn. People respond to scarring by lashing out in rage, and shrinking everyone’s Opportunity Sets further, including their own. This is how, for example, nations lose their democracies. This is the problem of Other People’s Stupidity. It is how depressions and wars happen, in the end.

Why do I teach you all this theory? So that you really grasp the problem. It is endemic and system now in our world. The loss of possibility. But it has also become a self-destructive cycle all its own, perpetuating itself, just as in history’s darker moments, like the 1930s.

And you must escape and transcend all this.

You do that by dramatically expanding your Possibility Set. This is what Poiesis really is.

And to do that, in turn, means being courageous, wise, intelligent, and determined enough not to Sink With the Ship. Because in the end if all we’re doing is scarring each other, what’s left? Nothing but One Big Scar, at the bottom, right?

To dramatically expand your Possibility Set means creating better choices, and that means all that we’ve talked about above. It’s not rocket science, but it feels daunting. It feels daunting because in ages like this, you’re left bewildered, your head spinning. The key is to refuse the bad choices you’re offered, turn them down, walk away, and create new ones.

No matter how many others take them.

If you saw a thousand people jumping off a cliff, would you conclude there was a pot of gold at the bottom?

Creating those better choices isn’t easy, but it’s also not as hard as you probably think. It’s just another sort of task to get in there and do. Along the way, as with so many other disciplines, you learn the ins and outs through experience. You learn how hard to push, in what ways, with what energies, and in which directions. Don’t worry about that. You’ll learn that only by doing it.

The point is to create right now. Better choices. For those and the ones you love. And to do it at a certain rate, too. Which is faster, now, than everything falls apart. We’ll discuss that next time, because this is getting too long.

Creating Better Choices, So That We Aren’t Just Limited to Collapse and Crisis

Let me try and simplify all that for you, because in many ways, that’s still more abstract than I’d like it to be.

We all know deep in our guts that the Ship is Sinking. But only some of us are going to have the wherewithal to get off. You can’t buy your way off, no. You can’t force your way off. You can’t talk, negotiate, plead your way off. You have to create your way off. Whether that means taking some wood from the finely paneled snooker table to build a raft, or whether it means, I don’t know, a para-sail. That part doesn’t matter, the part that does is the principle.

You can only create your way off, and only you can create your way off. Maybe you can link up with a few like minds, true, but this is the challenge of Not Sinking With the Ship.

It is a creative one, in these deep and abiding ways. Now we’re called on to be creative, in ways that truly matter, to sort of save the souls and lives of ourselves and our loved ones, as the world around us begins to truly crumble and crack apart. And every moment, the ship steams towards the bergs, and those on the bergs cheer it on in fury and rage. This is where we are, and it’s not pretty.

Yes, you face impossible decisions now. And yes, too, you must make them. The way you make them is by creating better choices. Those that don’t limit you to impossible odds.