The Systems That Profit from Your Energy
Excerpt from The Comeback Stack
LIFE ASSETS: The Only Way to Light Up Your Life
and Love It Again
You Are Better Than Burnout
Author’s Note. Read This First.
Before you begin with this excerpt, I’ll lay out what’s already been covered. In Sections One and Two of the book, readers discovered the inner framework that makes every comeback possible. Both sections are devoted to recognizing your Life Assets (the inner resources you’ve accumulated that enrich your life, and that are valuable and exchangeable with the world around you).
Within your portfolio of Life Assets, we focused on two:
- Your Values. The personal ideals, organizing principles, and natural priorities that keep you sane and true to yourself.
- Your STACKWINS. The unique collection of your Skills, Talents, Aptitudes, Competencies, Knowledge, Wisdom, Insights, Nature, and Strengths.
Together, these two Life Assets form the foundation of who you are, and give you the tools to experience success and satisfaction in everything you do.
This excerpt begins at a key moment in the book when I list four clusters of megatrends. Here you meet the twenty global pressures shaping how you live, work, and feel. They are not theories. They are measurable forces acting on your brain, body, and choices every day. Each one is insidious, sneaking into your life, putting demands on you, pressuring you to comply.
You are about to put words to the feelings of stress that have been pulling you off your own path. Once you see these four clusters, you will have a hint of where your energy has been leaking. And I hope you’ll have a sense of indignant rebellion: you do not need to live by anyone else’s idea of success, happiness, or purpose.
Excerpt Series: The Comeback Stack
LIFE ASSETS: The Only Way to Light Up Your Life and Love It Again
You Are Better Than Burnout
Excerpt Table of Contents
Part 1: Your Shield Against the World
Part 2: The Systems That Profit from Your Energy
Part 3: Sovereignty Drift
Part 4: The Extraction Economy
Part 5: Broken Bonds and Busted Foundations
Part 6: The Body and Spirit Hijack
(You’re reading Part 2 of 6.)
How to Win From This Chapter
If, after reading about a megatrend, you can take a breath and say, Yes. I see it. I am not crazy. This is impacting me, you win.
That moment means you have stepped out from under its control without even knowing it had grabbed you.
Awareness breaks the spell.
Next, if you allow yourself to be confident in the fact that you can use your shield – Your Values – to protect yourself and all that is important to you, you win again. Recognition restores sovereignty.
You cannot stop a megatrend, but you can know what it is and what it asks of you. And when you know Your Values, you have the power to decide how you will answer.
Ready? It might not be fun. It may stir up some sorrow or anger.
Truth frees what fear binds.
But I guarantee you, it will restore missing freedom.
Many of my clients have rewritten the list as an exercise in personal sovereignty, leadership, parenting, or purpose work.
Here is how: as you read through each megatrend, notice what stirs within you. If my exact words do not resonate, restate them in your own way. Your words matter. You get to own your view.
Cluster One: Sovereignty Drift
The following six megatrends erode your agency from the inside out, changing your pace and forcing you to compare yourself to others in unrealistic ways, creating hyper reactivity, overwhelming you with self doubt, making you wonder who’s really your friend, and even making you question the meaning of humanity.
These are the forces that confuse your direction.
The megatrends included in this cluster are:
- The Success Hangover
- The Productivity Prison
- The Permanent State of Emergency
- The Crisis of Self Confidence
- The Loneliness and Longing Epidemic
- The Fear of Human Obsolescence.
The language and the pressure of these megatrends can do many things to you, the least of which is make you feel self conscious, self doubtful. I think the worst thing about these six in Sovereignty Drift is that they can make you lose your own direction. Each one of these can make you feel confused in its own right, but when they’re put together, it can feel absolutely oppressive.
Cluster Two: The Extraction Economy
The following six megatrends profit by capturing your money, your space, your data and your allegiance, your fear and your wish for something better. These systems monetize your attention and get you to spend, they watch and predict your behavior and use you for their own means and profit, they confuse your sense of what health and wellness mean, and they make you feel dependent.
These systems profit from your energy.
The megatrends included in this cluster are:
- The Financial Loss Trap
- The Over Consumption Culture
- The Surveillance Economy
- The Trust Deficit
- Pharma Overreach
- Wellness Capitalism
The way these megatrends objectify you has many outcomes. They can make you feel like you are a lamb, and a salivating wolf is just around the corner ready to eat you up, or simply like you are being followed…like you have no privacy and no one to count on. Each one of these can make you feel objectified. Imagine the pressure of all six of them adding their unique type of pressure on you every hour of the day..
Cluster Three: Broken Bonds and Busted Foundations
The following four megatrends fray the social connections that should be there to help you develop as an individual, to guide, support and protect each other. These are about the civic and relational scaffolds of life, and when any of these fall, community and continuity fail.
When bonds break, belonging disappears.
The megatrends included in this category are:
- The Leadership Crisis
- The Fractured Family
- The Outsourcing of Early Childhood
- The Broken Classrooms
When the bonds that should hold us together are broken, and the foundations that should support us are busted, you can feel unmoored and without direction. Each one of these can leave you feeling like there’s no one to trust, no place to belong, and no solid ground beneath your feet. When all four are working on you at once, it’s no wonder you feel like the world has lost its way and you’re searching for something real to hold onto.
Cluster Four: The Body and Spirit Hijack
The following four megatrends distort human signals, aging, and your relationship with the divine. Meaning, emotion and spiritual work become inconvenient bystanders of your life instead of central themes for your soul’s nourishment. These challenges are about embodiment, the spirit, emotion and what’s sacred.
These four steal your connection to what is sacred.
The megatrends included in this category are:
- The Anti-Aging Panic
- The Collapse of the Sacred
- The Medicalization of Emotion
- Fake Transcendence
When your body, emotions and spirit are hijacked and turned into problems to solve or hide from, you lose touch with what makes you fully human. Each one of these can make you feel like there’s something wrong with you if you age, feel deeply, need meaning, or want connection to something sacred. When all four are pressing on you at once, it’s no wonder you feel disconnected from yourself and searching for a way back to what’s real and true.
Entire books are written on each and every one of these megatrends. In this chapter, I’m not going into the research, but, instead, on the profile of each one. Enough to prove to you that each one is impacting you either directly or indirectly, today.
For each megatrend, I’ll give you the following
• A brief definition
• A description of how it’s trapping people
• The lie this megatrend is responsible for
• The truth that is counter to the megatrend
• The cost of the getting bound by it
• Alternative nomenclature information:
If you want to dive deeper into a megatrend topic, in the addendum, you’ll find a link to a list of all the best seller and academic books on each and every one of the listed megatrends.
In the first cluster of six megatrends, called Sovereignty Drift, we’ll talk about how the challenges to your identity, agency, priorities, accomplishments, and definition of intelligence push you towards self-abandonment. Each one of the following six profits by holding you in a state of self-doubt, urgency, self-negation, and isolation.
Postscript: End-of-Part Reflection
You’ve now seen the four clusters containing the twenty megatrends shaping your life.
If you’re anything like me, reading the list might have stirred frustration – or even made you wonder, “Why am I reading this?” I get it.
But I hope you also felt something else: a quiet sense of victory. When awareness replaces confusion, power returns. That’s the point.
Now you can see these forces for what they are; pressures you can handle differently than before.
In the next part of this series, we’ll dive into the first cluster, Sovereignty Drift, where the fight for your inner authority is either won or lost.
