Feb 11, 2025 12 min read

What Kind of Person to Be 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, and here’s a little grin from Snowy to brighten up your day.

Did you watch the Super Bowl? I did. This year, my lovely wife got me into football and we’ve been having a blast. It’s one of those funny things. How did I go so much of my life without watching football?

What did you notice about it? One big theme, as always, was the ads. And as one of the guys who invented modern branding and advertising, I couldn’t help but notice just how awful this year’s were. Because of AI. AI generated…flying mustaches. Weird fantasies. Singing seals. Just…the stuff of nightmares.

Do you know why that is? It brings us to today’s theme, which isn’t about advertising, but your life, in a world that’s not exactly going so well.

The Missing Adults in the Room

The ads in this year’s Super Bowl were so legendarily bad for a very simple reason. There are no adults left in the room.

In my former industry? The one that I helped create and shape, marketing, advertising, call it what you want? They are gone. What’s left is a shell of an industry, that’s chasing a quick buck, more and more desperately, hence, it’s doing incredibly foolish things, like telling its clients that AI generated mustaches are going to make people buy more…pizza. Hint: that’s how to destroy your brand, with titillating stunts, because what you want first is for people to trust and respect you.

But this isn’t about branding and advertising, like I said. It’s about a much, much bigger theme.

When I look around the world, I see it…at a systemic level. There are no adults left in the room. Well, maybe “no” is a little too strong, but certainly…not many. Not enough. And not certainly anywhere near the amount and caliber there need to be.

Think about it with me.

Are there any adults left in the room when it comes to…politics? On the one side, we have angry, violent man-babies, who think the entire universe should revolve around their thinly veiled infantile narcissistic mommy and daddy complexes. On the other, we have…parties like the Democrats…who are the opposite, weaker than three day old soda. Bewildered, befuddled, and without a plan, despite the rest of us wondering, then what the hell have you been doing for the last decade?

It’s pretty amazing.

But it’s not just politics, either. Think about the economy. Where are the adults in the room? They’re not there in corporate boardrooms, which are these days getting absolutely slaughtered. McDonald’s, Starbucks, Nike, luxury, fashion, doesn’t matter, it’s a long litany of titans who recite, glumly, the same old fairly startling lines: we didn’t see it coming. We don’t know why people don’t like us anymore. We don’t know what to do about it.

You didn’t…see it coming? You don’t know why people don’t like you anymore? Could it be because you raised prices…sorry, jacked prices…astronomically…during the worst cost of living crisis since the Great Depression?

Maybe that’s what bred all the ill will. Maybe mistreating people like that was a very, very foolish approach to doing business with them.

But even that’s not the point, and it’s kind of a digression.

The adults in the room, wherever we look, are gone.

What does that mean for the future? For your life?

Why There Are No Adults Left in the Room

When I say “adults in the room,“ what do I mean? It’s funny. When I helped create modern whatever, advertising, branding, blah, blah, I was just a kid. But I was one of the adults in the room, because it’s not about age.

It’s about a mentality, a mindset. I wanted institutions and people to relate in more authentic and genuine and powerful ways, so I created this thing called Meaningful Brands. Makes sense, no?

Now what do you notice about all this AI gunk that people were making so much fun of? It’s all meaningless. Singing seals, flying mustaches, etcetera. Means nothing. Builds nothing. Viral stunts…they don’t build brands. They’re just evanescent wastes of time.

But when I tell my industry that, it doesn’t want to listen anymore. Because there are no adults left in the room, who are capable of hearing it. Capable is the key word, because “adult” in this sense means something.

—It means having a sense of responsibility. Accepting and taking it.

—Thinking of the long term, not just the quick buck.

—Solving complex problems with limited information, not just resorting to cheap tricks and whatnot.

—The maturity to understand that everything and everyone goes through difficulties.

—The patience to understand that anything worth building takes time, and it never—never—happens overnight.

Most of our institutions are failing because they do not have these values anymore.

Most of our leaders are failing because they do not have these values anymore. Go ahead, you can ask yourself the obvious question about the obvious candidates right about now, and what they’re in it for, if you really want.

So why am I telling you all this?

I am trying to teach you something.

It goes like this.

Any System Without Adults in the Room Will Fail

Pretty simple, right?

Ah, but if we really understood, we’d be living in a completely, and I mean completely different world.

—Useless institutions like the Dems wouldn’t be useless.

—People choosing, time and again, their own ruin, and then complaining about it, bewildered, wouldn’t do it in the first place.

—Our institutions wouldn’t just sort of on the one side prey on people, and on the other, sort of ineffectually complain about it

—Our leaders wouldn’t sit there bewildered and paralyzed and baffled.

I could go on, but you get my drift.

The point that I want to teach you today is deceptively simple.

Let me say it again.

Any system without adults in the room will fail.

Countries.

Companies.

Markets.

Cities.

Including your life.

Becoming the Adult in the Room, or Maturity in an Age of Collapse

What I am trying to teach you is that right now, you have a difficult challenge before. But I know that you can do it, and I am always here for you.

You have to be the adult in the room.

Now, many of you might say to me, but I always have been! I’ve had to do that for my kids, my grandkids, my nieces and nephews, and so on.

But I wonder how many of you really feel like that. Or do you feel—it’s ok, go ahead and admit—baffled and paralyzed and confused? I suspect more, many, many more people are in the latter camp, even if they put on a brave face of stolid acceptance.

Who feels like an adult these days, seeing all these crises wrack us at once? Don’t most of us feel more like—and more and more like—children? Like these forces are too great, too overwhelming, too unfamiliar? Isn’t that how even many of the world’s most powerful institutions, after all, are acting, and I’ve given you tons of examples above already.

So don’t downplay the complexity of the challenge before you.

You have to be the adult in the room now.

But not in the old way, which, truth be told, while it may not have always been easy, was a hell of a lot easier than right now. In that world, stability and progress and linearity and so forth meant that “being an adult” was more a role than a kind of set of values.

And that is the key lesson I am trying to teach you today.

To survive and thrive in this age of collapse, you must accept adulthood in its rawest, truest, and most elemental form. Not just role-play it, like our parents, perhaps, were taught to do, and they taught us to do, and that is now failing us, because role-playing a thing without really understanding it, feeling it, being it—it’s just a recipe for panic, stress, and despair, isn’t it?

So.

This is the challenge before you, and to take it on, like all challenges, you must first accept it. If you can’t do that much, then you will never master it. You might even be able to keep on role-playing at it, which may even serve you well for a time, but my guess is that as the pressure of a collapsing world reaches fever pitch, at some point—you’re going to crack like glass.

So we are talking about really being an adult. In a sophisticated and deep and profound way.

Which is scary as hell.

None of us, and I mean none of us, can do that by themselves.

Three Things You Have to Do Now

What does all this mean? There I am, getting mystical again. Sorry. Let me boil it down and make it practical for you, because none of this is about intellectualization, but about being, before everything around finished turning to dust, and takes you with it.

What do adults in the room have to do?

They have embody the values I’ve outlined for you above, and that’s number one. Those values, and it’s not a kind of fixed thing, set in stone, we’re just approximating a way of being with inelegant words here, consist of patience, thinking long-term, integrity, authenticity, responsibility, accepting and managing complexity, being able to grapple with ambiguity, resisting the seductions and temptations of the desert of the mind and the spirit.

Embodying those means what it says. You must model these for everyone around you. That is what being a leader is. We have so few leaders in the world today because most people are not willing to even do this first job. But if you can? Then people will gravitate to you naturally, and you will have a kind of superpower that is extra potent in a world going haywire.

So reflect on this carefully.

It doesn’t matter if it’s just for your family, for those you love. It doesn’t have to be in a grand way. We are talking about your life, and whatever scale is right is OK, natural, good, fine.

The point is the principle. Right now? Nobody should see the panic in your eyes. That is not because there should never be panic in your eyes. Sure there should. But you must master it, in the ways I’ve taught you, by listening to it, going into it, through it, and then beyond it. And then you will be able to model for those you love and those around you how to handle difficult times like these, won’t you?

We Can All Be Like the Guys Ruining the World. But Should We?

And that is very much the challenge before you now, isn’t it?

After all, we can all be like the guys ruining the world. Can’t we? We can all lash out at our family systems, just the way they lash out at societies. We can wreck everything we’ve built as families or organizations, the very same way they do at a national or global level. And what purpose is that going to serve? We must learn from their mistakes, even faster than they make them.

That brings me to the second thing you must do. You must have a vision. For yourself and your loved ones. I’m not talking about a fantasy, and I’m not talking about something grandiose, a delusion. For many of you, it’ll be practical and urgent, centered around your Haven. Your Havens. What are they? How do you get there? What do they consist of?

The second job of an adult in the room is to have a vision for their systems. Those systems can be family systems, they can be organizational systems at micro levels, small businesses, or at macro levels, like huge corporations and countries and so forth. Doesn’t matter, the point is that the adult must envision, and in that way, fire the imagination of the system, and begin to orient and guide them.

Without this fundamental task, nobody can go anywhere.

Now think of all those awful Super Bowl AI ads again? What do they really reveal? A lack of vision. Is it any surprise then that so many of these companies are doing so poorly?

The principle is the point. No vision, no going anywhere. Doesn’t matter how many tricks or expensive conceits you throw at it. And we’ll discuss it more, but no, a vision isn’t something malign or malicious, that’s a nightmare, nor is it just a delusion of grandeur or omnipotence or what have you. A true vision is very, very different—don’t overthink it, it means what you think it does, a state of the world and your life in which things are better. You get to decide what that means, but it doesn’t mean “I’m the Ruler of the World, and the Bad People All Die,” or anything at that childish infantile narcissistic level.

And to bring that to life, the adult in the room must have a strategy. Probably a set of them, but that doesn’t matter. The point is that there must be a set of plans, which interlock, and have various dependencies, for this vision to be realized, and that’s all a strategy is.

We’ll talk more about that later, but note, again, just how absent of strategy the world is today. Let me explain this one by absence. No, “My Country First” isn’t a strategy. LOL, are you kidding? It’s wish-fulfillment. That’s very different. A strategy would be, “I would like you to value me more, and here’s how I’m going to do it.” But me trying to abuse you into that wouldn’t exactly accomplish much, would it?

So again, don’t confuse this by intellectualizing it. A strategy isn’t just “I beat you into submission,” because that’s just aggression and it’s probably going to backfire. A strategy is something that’s probably going to work, because in it, there’s not just “a winner” and “a loser,” and that’s true even in the Super Bowl, because hey, guess what, every time can try again, and sometimes, we admire the “losers” all the more for it. My favorite team, the Ravens? I don’t care they didn’t make it to the Super Bowl. I’m in awe of their artistry and deeply inspired by the toughness and wisdom of their coach, John Harbaugh.

But I digress, kind of.

So these are the three things that you need to “do” to start being in the adult in the room.

And that’s sort of a mouthful. ”Doing,” but only to yield “being.” I am here to teach you. And that is about changing you. I am not just sort of telling you to “do” things, but guiding you at a deep, unconscious level towards being in a very different way.

So just sit with all this. Don’t overthink it.

Just start…being this way. Try to flow this way. Don’t role-play it, don’t act it, don’t force it. Being all this, in the beginning, is scary as hell.

Being the adult in the room is terrifying. In the beginning. And that part never goes way. What happens is that as we discover our well, our deep source of wisdom, strength, courage, and guidance—we recognize that terrified self is the child. And we kind of hold it close.

Not because it is wounded. But because we are. And only in this process of love and revelation do we become whole.

Just let your mind feel that. Don’t worry about “understanding” it. We are not trying to develop in you the juvenile mind of cause and effect. You already have that. The greater mind is what we are after, in that is very much the whole, and it only comes from becoming whole.

Now. Let me say one last thing.

Very Shortly, Everyone is Going to Want Adults in the Room

Very, very shortly? Everyone is going to be desperate for adults in the room. Everyone. Governments, corporations, banks, doesn’t matter, everyone. Right down to, yes, LOL, “voters,” the very poor fools already regretting their bad choices.

So there is every reason to become one, now.

Again, I don’t mean role-playing one, I don’t mean giving yourself a grand title, and I don’t mean the way we used to think of it yesterday. I mean it in today’s terms.

Very, very shortly? Tomorrow? Everyone is going to want someone who can—

—Lead with confidence and calm in the face of panic and crisis.

—Who can emanate and radiate wisdom and courage as things go to hell.

—Who can orient everyone around them with a vision that’s clear and deep and powerful to believe in.

—Who can offer a strategy that galvanizes failing systems and institutions back into operation.

—Who can be a rock, a lighthouse, a fortress, an anchor, in a world that’s collapsing.

Everyone is going to want this kind of person.

So what do we call them? I’ll introduce this figure to you soon.

For now, though, understand the point.

Become the Kind of Person the Future is Going to Need, Right Now

Everyone is going to want this kind of person. By their side. In their organization. Leading their institution. Part of their lives.

Your challenge is becoming this kind of person, right now. Not for the instrumental reason above, everyone is going to want them, but for the reason that everyone is going to want them, because everyone is going to need them.

This is the kind of person to become now. Very, very few of us are all the way there. Through all the adversity and strife of these times, some of us, those wise enough to accept the challenge, mostly, will become such figures.

The old you is dying, my friends. Most of us don’t understand this, and it’s at the root of your shock and estrangement. But it’s natural now. Let that person go. Become the one the world needs you to be. You need you to be. Your loved ones need you to be. The future needs you to be. That is the person your true self must develop towards now.

We are all suffering right now. No, it’s not a contest. Suffering can count for nothing, or it can count for something. Let yours mean something.

My advice to you? Start becoming this kind of person right now, and don’t look back.