Hypertransformation, or, How the World is Coming Undone (and What to Do About It)

Hi! How’s everyone? Welcome back old friends, welcome new ones, and here’s little Snowy giving you a tiny puppy hug. 

Today we’re going to discuss…a Big Picture idea. Lately, we’ve been discussing the economy and finances a lot, because everyone needs to protect their life savings from the Trumpocalypse. So I don’t want to get too abstract on you in these difficult times, but I also want to help orient and guide you in larger ways.

It’s been a joy and delight getting to know so many of you in sessions, by the way. Really amazing. Just reach out anytime if you need advice.

Today’s I want to teach you about what I call Hypertransformation. Think of this in the vein of Havens, Sinking With the Ship, being the Adult in the Room, and so on, the Big Picture ideas that I use to help you orient yourself now.

What do I mean by this strange word? Bear with me. I’m going to keep it as simple as I can, and hopefully, by the end, you’ll have a new way to make sense of a world going haywire, and what to do about it.

Hypertransformation is just a way to say: a transformation in the nature of transformation. I know: what the hell, Umair? Dude! My stock portfolio’s melting down! My country’s on fire! Give me two minutes before you kill me, and I’m going to help you make sense of everything, Trumpism, MAGA, the markets, trade wars, climate change, the world, the future. I promise.

Be calm, take a breath, sit with me, and I’m going to teach you something that’s going to give you something vital right now. Clarity.

The World That Doesn’t Exist Anymore, Or, Lines

When we think about transformation, mostly, we think about lines.

We’re used to thinking that way, because linear logic is what’s embedded in all our paradigms. And so we think this way almost unconsciously, without even knowing we’re thinking it. Let me give you a few examples.

—We’re used to thinking that our stock portfolios will rise, with hiccups here and there
—That our careers and professions should be lines, rising upwards
—That our wealth will accumulate in a linear fashion

But it hardly stops there. The way we think is about lines, period.

—We’re used to thinking that peace and democracy and justice will spread around the world, and through history, in a great line.
—We’re used to thinking that our leaders will get better over time, even if there’s a hiccup here and there, in a linear fashion
—We tend to imagine that civilization itself is a linear project
—We think of progress as a line marching through the millennia

Do you see what I mean a little bit?

Only now none of this is true. 

What Happens When All the Lines Break?

Right now, a whole lot of people are in shock.

You know that, but I want you to think about why with me.

It’s because they’re used to a World of Lines. Imagining one. Living in one. Predicating their lives on one. Basing their decisions and choices on one.

But it’s not a world of lines anymore.

And now, many people don’t even know how to think.

They’re baffled and bewildered just looking at the world around them. Their societies, their lives, their careers, their savings, whatever, doesn’t matter.

The point is that they’re so used to seeing lines, that it’s the only Pattern They Can Recognize. 

But there are no lines anymore.

And so it feels to many people like they’e gone blind, maybe. Like nothing makes sense anymore. Like they can’t fit this world into their Pattern Recognition anymore.

They’re looking for lines. They can only see lines. But there are no lines anymore.

So they look and they look. For something that doesn’t exist. Remember how we talked about the panic—bewilderment—reaction spiral? This is at the heart of it, the core of it. Looking for something that doesn’t exist, and then sort of fitting that Pattern onto something that isn’t there, and making precisely the wrong choice.

Let me me make all that much, much more concrete.

Broken Lines, or What a World Going Haywire Means

What kinds of lines don’t exist anymore?

—Plenty of people are finding that their careers don’t exist anymore. The line is just…gone.
—Many people are waking up everyday and finding their portfolios sinking. What happened to the line?
—America’s descent into the abyss is no kind of line at all, but something much more like a free-fall, accelerating by the day
—The world isn’t getting more peaceful, democratic, and so forth, but dramatically, suddenly less so
—Climate change isn’t hitting us like a line, but like something else, much more intense, violent, and explosive

Wherever we look, and however we look, the old Pattern isn’t there anymore.

There are no lines, and if you base your life, choices, decisions, mindset, way of thinking on them…if that’s the only Pattern You Can Recognize…you’ll almost certainly end up Sinking With the Ship.

A World of Lines is Becoming a World of Curves

Ships don’t sink in lines. They sink in curves. 

That is what is happening to our world. It is going from a place of lines, to one of curves.

Now let’s recast some of those examples, so you can see what’s happening to everything around us, and I mean everything, much, much more clearly.

—America’s descent from the first Trump era to this one isn’t a line, it’s a rapid, heartstopping fall off a cliff downwards
—Climate change’s mega-scale impacts aren’t hitting us like a line, but like a curve, rocketing upwards, and I don’t just mean temperature, I mean the effects of everything from crop failures to mega fires to insurance systems failing
—Democracy and peace are what are known as global public goods, and they’re coming undone in a sudden swerve, a great curve
—Progress itself, after centuries of linear advancement upwards, has hit a Sudden Stop, and that’s a curve of another kind

I am trying to give you the gift of a new kind of intelligence, sometimes, I call it Transformational Intelligence. Let me put it another way. Now you must begin to develop and employ a new kind of Pattern Recognition. 

Not lines, but curves. Because there are no lines left in the world.

Let’s do a few more practical examples now, to really sharpen the edge of this new Pattern Recognition.

—What the lunatics are doing to the US government isn’t a line, it’s a wrecking ball, swinging in a line, dismantling it in sudden fashion
—The effects of the tariffs won’t be a line, but a curve, setting fire to the economy
—Many Americans are going to lose their life savings, not in a line, but in a curve
—Stock markets and so forth, eventually, right down to the dollar, will have to come to grips with the ugly reality of an America getting poorer, fast, not in a line, but in a series of curves—corrections, crises, and crashes.

(Why) Everyone Needs to See Curves, Not Lines

Why am I telling you all this? Because right now, almost nobody has developed this form of Pattern Recognition. 

The world’s biggest boardrooms, who spend fortunes trying to see the world accurately, didn’t “see any of this coming.” The Democrats…LOL…didn’t. America’s pundits and intellectuals didn’t warn you this was going to happen, at least not 99% of them. Wall St thought there’d be a “Trump Bump.”

Everyone is still looking for lines. Every institution, every organization, every leader. Every person, too, which is why I’m trying to teach you not to.

Why are so many people in so much denial? Whether it’s about “it can’t happen here” or climate change or cultlike MAGA movements or pick your poison? They’re still looking for lines. That don’t exist anymore. But that’s all they know how to see. And so when they don’t find them, they insist that they must be there, somewhere. Explain a lot? 

Because if you keep seeing the world as a series of lines, when it’s now a set of curves, you will never be able to understand it at all, much less decide how to move and act in it. You will always be reacting, bewildered, never able to make sense of what’s happening around you.

Now you must develop Curve Thinking and Seeing. And Line Thinking and Seeing gets in the way. These are two distinct forms of intelligence. And they rely on different faculties, too. Curve Thinking and Seeing is empathic, creative, intuitive, open, curious. Line Thinking and Seeing is mathematical, rigid, formulaic, closed, incurious, dogmatic. 

See why so many people are in so much denial?

So understand it very, very clearly. There are no more lines. There are only curves now.

And what is your job in a world of curves?

Staying Ahead of the Curves Ripping the World Apart

It’s a bit of a cliche to put it that way. What’s interesting is that we all know that saying, but it hasn’t really meant much. Only now, it does. Now you had better stay ahead of The Curves Ripping the World Apart.

What does that mean? Let’s do some concrete examples.

—We’ve been talking about finances lately. The curve to stay ahead of is wealth pouring out of America, as it becomes a nation that the world can’t trust or invest in.
—Many careers and professions are now going to be over, and you have to stay way, way ahead of that curve, and jump to the next one before they are.
—Societies like America are going to implode in great curves, and you are going to have to navigate that by staying ahead of it all, whether that means sheltering in place, moving, or carving out something safe in many places at one
—There’s going to be a race towards Havens now, and you should be ahead of that curve, too, finding yours, or creating it
—As all these macro-trends converge, from climate change to democratic collapse, our institutions will begin to fail, whether insurance, finance, markets, and you had better stay ahead of that curve, too, and that doesn’t mean yanking your money out of the bank tomorrow, but it does mean seeing which institutions will survive, and which won’t
—Many, many Americans will basically lose most of what they spent their lives working for, and being ahead of that curve will quite possibly save your life
—People themselves are going to divided along a curve: those who are the Adults in the Room, and those who Sink With the Ship

Do you see my point a little bit?

These are far from the only curves, and I haven’t really expressed even these all that well. The point isn’t for me to tell you all the curves, it’s for you to develop the Pattern Recognition to begin to see them. Everywhere, all around us, reshaping our world.

Curves Are Different, and Why Seeing Them is Hard

As instinctively as everyone sees lines. We see lines without even looking for them, don’t we? But curves are different.

We don’t see curves. Because we don’t want to see curves. Lines are safe, stable, and predictable. They make us feel placid. They’re not dangerous things. So we believe in lines partly because it’s easy to believe in lines. And one reason our failed paradigms are all built on lines is because it’s easy to think in terms of lines, too.

Curves aren’t like that. Curves make us uncomfortable. They leave us uneasy. Curves are collapses, explosions, implosions. They’re pandemics and crashes and destabilizations. 

What was a curve over the last ten years? What wasn’t? Covid was a curve. Trumpism was a curve. Brexit was a curve. The rise of the far right around the world was, too. The way trillionaires took over everything. How our institutions failed. Climate impacts. The world coming undone was a curve.

Curves are things we don’t like thinking about. And even when we do, they’re of the too-good-to-be-true variety, the Ponzi scheme, the magic money tree, the perpetual motion device. For the most part, though, curves are things we don’t like to dwell on. Who likes to think things could fall apart? That the center might not hold? That everything could spin itself out of control? 

And yet here we are.

So don’t fool yourself. It’s easy to tell yourself you’re “ahead of the curve” in some cliched kind of way. But really seeing curves, as a form of Pattern Recognition? If enough people in our world could do it, we wouldn’t be in this mess. It is the rarest skill of all.

Hypertransformation

That is what I mean by “transformation in the nature of transformation.” The old way of thinking about, seeing, understanding how things around us change, our economies, societies, word, lives—it’s lines. But that way is now over, because the world isn’t like that. The new way is about curves, not lines, and in that sense, transformation itself has changed.

Now. All that’s abstract, so I want to leave you with some concrete steps to think about.

—In your life, you must orient all your decisions and choices now around curves, not lines
—If you are running a business, as I know many of you are, your vision must now be to help people stay ahead of all these curves, and to develop Curve Thinking and Seeing, not Line Thinking and Seeing. Do that, and you will have a foundation for the next decade
—In your career, you must see the curves clearly for what they are, and your job is to define and shape and just help your organization see the curves
—As a member of society, it’s vital that you understand the curves before you now, and how sharp and steep they really are, especially if you’re American

Those are just a few ways to develop this facility of Hypertransformation. 

Ultimately, we’re talking about changing you and your life in a curve, too. A good one, not the bad one the world is trapped in. That is what Hypertransformation really is.

And all of our organizations need it, too. They need to Hypertransform, become capable of moving in curves, not just lines—how else do you survive in a world ripped apart by All the Wrong Curves?

Let me leave you with a thought.

If all you see is lines, understand, you aren’t seeing yet at all. Now you must see curves everywhere. Just sit with that. It’s not meant as an ultimatum or to scare you. Just to teach you and to guide you. So that you too can guide and teach. 

In this world, in this moment, we seem to have gone blind. Our first task as a civilization now is just to see clearly again. All of you who understand me are visionaries, in this truest sense. That is your job.

Lots of love,

Umair (and Snowy!)

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