Kinesis, or How Not to Sink With the Ship in an Age of 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, welcome new ones, many thanks to all, and here’s a big Happy Thanksgiving hug from Snowy.

Today we’re going to continue our discussions. We’ve been going through a number of principles lately—finding our Havens, shifting from a reactive to an anticipative orientation and mindset, developing TI, or transformational intelligence, so as not to Sink With the Ship, in this troubled age. Because—and this is the key principle—Many Won’t Make It.

In the next few posts we’re going to discuss principles to put this into practice. Today’s is going to be called kinesis. This is how we begin to find and create our Havens.

By the way, thanks again for the overwhelming response to book sessions with me—replies are incoming soon and we’ll start scheduling them. For those who asked, you can email me at umairhaque at gmail to get on the list.

So. Kinesis. What do I mean by that?

Not Sinking With the Ship

Let me explain it by way of a story. You probably don’t know this about me, and people are surprised in a funny way, but I’m a football fan. American football. And yesterday, in the Thanksgiving games, something almost surreal happened.

The Chicago Bears are having a terrible season. Poor guys just can’t seem to get it together. They rallied and fought back, and suddenly, it was a game, against the current leaders to win the Super Bowl, the Detroit Lions. 10 seconds were left. All the Bears had to do was kick the ball, and tie up the game.

But then. Bafflingly, shockingly, they didn’t do it in time. The clock ran out. They didn’t even take the kick. Bang. Game over.

This is the situation you are in right now.

Don’t let this happen to you.

The Bears failed to be kinetic enough. They got paralyzed.

Now. What’s the moral of my story?

Think about the world. Just today, Nordic nations are warning their citizens to prepare for war. I’m not saying it’s going to happen tomorrow, I’m just pointing out where we are.

The window is now closing. Just as the clock was ticking down for the Bears, so it is for you, for us, for this age. Time is running out. Not in a childish way, as we’ve discussed, We’re All Going to Die, but in an adult one.

What does that mean? It means that the world is in profound transformation now. Barriers of all kinds are rising, from trade to mobility to capital. Things are becoming perilous, bewildering, and strange. Everything’s out of kilter. 

All this means that people’s agency is going to now shrink in profound and often dramatic ways. They are going to find their options limited and their freedoms shrunken. Worse, surreally, and yet as so often in history, much of that will be at the hands of their own poor choices. You can already see those who are sick and tired of inflation, yet cheer on…tariffs they’re going to have to pay. 

But that’s only the start of the eradication of agency in a time of profound transformation. I don’t have to tell you, or shouldn’t, what forms of agency are now on the line. Let us just think in macro terms. When this age is over, what kinds of lives will people still be able to enjoy? What forms of agency will they have left, from political to social to moral to intellectual? You see, from technology to politics to culture and beyond, all these forces now converge to take away our agency.

Don’t let this happen to you. 

This is what I call Sinking With the Ship. None of us should live lives of withered agency, and yet many of us will, because we are making the choice to Sink With the Ship.

Let me emphasize that. The choice. I don’t need to point out to you how widespread self-destructive and foolish choices are now.

The time for warnings is over.

Now you must make a choice. The wise one is Not to Sink With the Ship. That choice must be deliberate, agentic, and you must mean it. Only then can you become kinetic.

Kinesis vs Paralysis

So what does that mean? Easier said than done, right?

How do you this thing of Not Sinking With the Ship?

You must make a choice now to take action.

That is what I mean by kinesis.

The kinetic will survive this age. The other kind will not.

The other kind means three categories not just of people, but also of institutions. One, those who get paralyzed. Two, those who grope around for being kinetic, but don’t take action fast enough. And three, of course, those who make self-destructive choices, like the many who want a better economy, but are about to head straight into the rocks of trade war, and possibly World War.

Now. Let’s discuss an example of paralysis. Remember, when I talk about the principle of Many Won’t Make It, it’s not some sort of doom-laden warning about Hollywood Movie apocalypse. It’s about institutions, not just people.

Let’s talk about one. I’ve been wearing Doc Martens since I was a kid. And right now? It’s a company that’s in big, big trouble. They keep on making the same pretty predictable mistakes. They try to be fashionable. It doesn’t work. They try to make shoes for all kinds of people. It doesn’t work. This is because they keep hiring the wrong people, people who don’t respect or understand the DNA of this legendary brand, who haven’t been teenage punks, and don’t understand the kind of symbolism and possibility at work here. Wearing a pair of Docs as a kid isn’t about fashion, it’s about survival.

See the links to what we’re discussing?

Now. Doc Martens is in trouble not just because of all the above. But because it’s paralyzed. It’s overwhelmed right now by its own failures and lack of ideas and lack of success. And as a result, it’s just sort of standing still, while its business craters. 

This is what I mean by paralysis. 

How Panic Becomes Paralysis

This is where a lot of us are. People, of course, shell-shocked, including those who didn’t “believe” me, and wasted their time “debating” me, only to find themselves panicking right now. It was never about believing me. It was about history, truth, collapse, and consequences.

This is where a lot of people are, and it’s also where a lot of institutions are. Think of all the mega-corporations who are just paralyzed right now. It’s sort of funny when you think about it, because we’re used to these kinds of institutions being kinetic. Always innovating, trying, doing stuff. But today? Nike, Starbucks, McDonald’s, Louis Vuitton, doesn’t matter—they’re all sort of stunned and bewildered, staggering around, paralyzed.

Because they are unable to understand how things ended up here, and as a result of that, of course, they’re unable to figure out what to do next.

A lot of these sorts of institutions are now panicking. What happens when we panic? We make even poorer decisions, right? That’s when we make the really self-destructive ones, like those who just cheered for their economic death sentence, more or less. This is happening in the institutional examples I’m giving you, too: instead of hiring smarter, wiser, better people, they’re panicking, and trying to just grab yes-men and women, or those who promise them an easy turnaround, or a quick buck. But it’s not working out, is it?

That only deepens the spiral. And this is how panic become paralysis. 

We act impulsively. Or worse, we’re passive, and we let other do our thinking for us, and many of these institutions now rely on consultants, who sell them all kinds of snake oil, just like many people rely on pundits and so forth. Either way, we make self-destructive choices, which only make the situation worse, like Doc Martens trying to compete with Uggs or what have you, instead of…I mean can you imagine a company better poised for an age like this than them? Come on. 

Panic becomes paralysis through self-destructive choice. You can see this endlessly now in the world around us, from corporations to demagogues to social groups to social classes. 

You must break this cycle.

You cannot, and I mean cannot, allow yourself to become a victim to this form of self-deceit and self-ruin.

That is why we discussed, for example, the principle of listening to your panic. Not just “not panicking,” but understanding the message in your panic, which is to change. 

Which is to act.

The Art of Kinesis, or a Four Level Map for Becoming Kinetic

Now we can discuss the Art of Kinesis, or taking action Not to Sink With the Ship.

If I just say to you, act, it’s bewildering, right?

So let’s now break it down and make it much, much more digestible.

Here are four categories and levels of action that you must master if you want to not Sink With the Ship.

• Plans
• Strategies
• Execution
• Improvisation

Let’s go back to football. What happened to the Bears? Why didn’t they take that kick?

They panicked. 

At every stage of this Map of Kinesis I’m giving you, you can panic. And if you do—and instead of listening to it, you give in to it, which are very different things—you will fail at Kinesis.

So this Map should be understood as a whole. And just because one level doesn’t readily yield the next, that’s not a reason to panic, and make self-destructive choices. Rather, you must stay cool, stay calm, and persist, persevere, in being kinetic.

Now let me explain what it means.

Plans. I want you to think of two, five, and ten year plans. The timeframe isn’t that important. It could be one, two, and five, instead. Just think of them as short, medium, and long. Now think of where the world be at each stage. And where you want to be at each stage, in it. Those two things are intimately related, and they take deep and prolonged reflection. If you do this instantaneously, that’s probably rushing it.

Strategies are the totality of these plans. A strategy is your short, medium, and long term plan, and how they dovetail, how each leads to the next, how the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. This part again is about deep reflection, really fitting the parts together, like a finely made chair. It’s not to be rushed. Every contingency and possibility must be considered carefully. Remember shifting from reaction to anticipation? This is where we begin to do it.

Then comes execution. Don’t wait. Start putting your plans into action now. As soon as possible. You don’t need to have a master plan or grand strategy to act. That is not what being kinetic means. It means acting, now, and always planning and strategizing, as a habit, because…

We are discussing a way of being. Being kinetic. In this age, as the days and months pass, things will get that much more overwhelming, more fear-inducing, and people will feel shakier, more bewildered, and more lost. 

So the time to start being kinetic is now. And it is about making all these things habits.

Execution in this context can mean many things. It can mean, for example, jobs, professions, careers, relationships, investments. It can mean moving. It can mean reconstructing this aspect of your life, or that facet of your personality. Doesn’t matter—we’ll talk about all those more in the coming days. Today, I want you to begin seeing how to change in a more possible and realistic way, and give yourself the power to start.

Right now. This moment. This instant.

Then comes improvisation. This is the part where most fail, people and institutions. Plans and strategies never really come together as we expect. What did the Bears really fail at? Improvising. You must be prepared to improvise, and you must anticipate needing to improvise. Nobody’s strategy is ever perfect, and this is why, for example, all those corporations are spinning in circles, because they can’t grasp improvisation, as much as they need to—and they’re panicking instead.

Improvisation comes later, though. Right now, your challenge is just beginning. That’s probably true for most. 

Think of, I don’t know, the Democrats. Did you hear the incredible episode of Pod Save America where they were cheerful about losing that badly? Shrugged it off, laughed, and said, hey, what’s the problem, basically? They aren’t even ready to begin changing. That’s because of course there’s a class of insiders who have made huge amounts of money off of losing something important to a lot of other people. But this institution isn’t even on the map of kinesis. Will it ever be? Who knows, who cares, this is about your life.

Kinesis, Transformational Intelligence, or Who’ll Make It and Who Won’t

I want you now to be kinetic.

To become kinetic.

This is a way of being, and while I’ve made it sound perhaps a little too simple, let me highlight for you the real challenge, which I’ve touched on. It’s not that it’s hard to know where to start, though it is, and I glossed over that, so: start anywhere, but just start.

The challenge is that becoming kinetic is now going to become harder and harder by the day. That’s because the window is closing for various kinds of action. Let’s say that in a few years the Fed really is abolished, or somehow transformed—good luck getting your money to a safer place then. This is the kind of surreal position we’re in in history. 

But it’s not just the barriers and obstacles arising now that are going to make becoming kinetic harder. It’s also the emotional toll of living in an age of collapse. It leaves many stunned and bewildered on a daily basis. As a result, the last thing most people can do at the moment is take action, even in the small ways we’re discussing now. They doomscroll or flock to their chosen pundits to think for them or turn to some form of escapism and so on. All that’s understandable, in a way, even if some of it’s petty, but none of it’s wise.

So the sooner you begin becoming kinetic the radically better off you will be. Radically. Think of an exponential line. What’s the world going to look like a year from now? It’s going to be not just harder in a linear sense to take action, but in an exponential one, by the looks of things. And you can think of that, if you need to, in very concrete terms: how much higher will prices be, when tariffs hit, how many options will have shrunk, how much will still be functional, and so forth. 

This is why Many Won’t Make It. People, institutions, systems, paradigms—because the possibilities to change are now shrinking by the day, so unless you start now, you will end up overwhelmed by paralysis-becoming-panic.

Now. All of this might still leave you somewhat overwhelmed. 

Being kinetic is a transformation.

It isn’t a small thing. We are talking about a different way of being-in-the-world.

Not as a fool. Not as a passive consumer of Other People’s Thoughts or Lives or Experiences. Not the kind of person who lets others think for them. Not as the kind of person we’ve been taught and told to be, because that kind of person, who sort of sits back, follows the rules, and tries to follow the established pathways—what happens to them these days? They Sink With The…

Kamala and the Pod Save gang are still laughing. They literally sank with the ship, or maybe sank it. So…is any of this funny? Sorry—please, don’t let your politics interfere with thinking clearly. Like her or them, doesn’t matter—we are talking about your life.

This is what it means, let me not mince words, to be a fool. You cannot be seduced this way now.

You must be kinetic, and that is a deep transformation of all of you, not a small and temporary change. 

It is a different sort of relationship between you and the world. One where you don’t accept a collapsing one as a passive thing, a victim, or a fool.

Kinesis and the Transformations Your Gut’s Been Shouting at You to Start Making

Transformations. Think about them. Avalanches. Floods. Eruptions. Doesn’t matter. They begin with small things. One grain of sand, one snowflake, one fissure of lava. This is you. Now, the smallest actions count in the largest terms.

So start anywhere, but just start. I know you’ve been thinking about many forms of change over the last few years. Who hasn’t? But the mistake people have made isn’t not listening to me, it’s not listening to their guts, as we’ve been discussing. And so they’re way behind the curve. But even now, as the window closes, there they are, sort of laughing along with Pod Save America or what have you. But who’s the joke on?

All these changes your guts been shouting at you to make. Doesn’t matter what they are, and they’re different for each of us. Relationships, careers, professions, cities, countries, lifestyles, investments, etcetera. Now you must start, and not stop. 

You must begin to make these dramatic changes, because now we are in a very, very different position in history. The price for not changing will be dramatically higher than the price for changing. Change is always difficult. Just changing up your portfolio let alone your home—troublesome, difficult, costly. And yet right now, if you don’t change, the price to be paid in the not too distant future will be incredibly costly, right down to…

Sinking With the Ship.

This is the essence of TI, transformational intelligence, and you can see how many still don’t quite get it, from people to institutions. No plans. No strategies. No execution. No improvisation. Just paralysis.

No kinesis.

I hope that helped. I know that’s a lot, and it’s not meant for you to read in one sitting and then sort of go away and forget about. This is meant for you to come back to, reflect on, chew over, to guide you in lasting and deep ways, which is why I’m making these maps for you. Please use them. We’ll do that together for those of you who’ve reached out to book sessions with me—thank you for such a response.

Lots of love from me and Snowy!!

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