How to fully prepare for the Decade of Dramatic Disruption... in just one day
Not your typical prepper guide
You’re probably insufficiently prepared for the Decade of Dramatic Disruption (DDD 2030-2039).
And that’s okay. The human species has never before navigated a societal transition as significant as the shift currently unfolding. As the psychologist, Clare Graves, predicted in a 1974 paper, we’re standing at the precipice of a Momentous Leap, with three possible outcomes: Termination, Technofeudalism, or Transcendence.
The preparation required for a transition this big goes way beyond doomsday prepping. Stockpiling food, safe-havening financial resources, and location scouting are all prudent measures. They are also measures that willfully ignore, downplay, or remain stoically clueless about the shift in consciousness underway… while we experience the systemic breakdown unfolding on the daily news.
What did Einstein say? Something about “You cannot use Material Age thinking for a Material Age crisis.”
2025 has been a pretty tumultuous year [edit: and 2026 has had a pretty tumultuous start], but one good thing has come from it. More people are now talking openly about the systemic breakdowns occurring than when I started this work a decade ago. The open discussion makes it easier to classify two paths forward (without having to first spend time defining the challenge):
Path A: Optimize within the dying system (If this is the path that appeals to you, I recommend resources like Alex Steffen’s The Snap Forward)
Path B: Evolve your thinking to become what’s needed (the Threshold Guide)
This essay will dive deeper into what Path B looks like. It’s not a typical prepper guide. It’s the result of two decades of observing, thinking about, and conversing with others around the theme of a Momentous Leap as the Metacrisis unfolds. It’s informed by evolutionary biology and the active organizing principle within all living systems to adapt and evolve into higher expressions of itself. So this is dense, but I’ll do my best to keep it simple.
At the end of the essay, I’ll share a Consciousness Protocol. It’s inner work that you can do in a day and could save you a decade of suffering.
This will be comprehensive.
This isn’t one of those essays that you read through, nod along to, and then forget about.
This is something you will want to take notes on, return to, and set aside time to think about.
The protocol at the end is designed to uncover what you truly want in life, as our very understanding of what ‘life’ really means rapidly changes. It will take about a full day to complete, with effects that last far longer than that, and certainly far longer than 99% of new year’s resolutions.
If you put in the effort, you’ll be geared up to becoming (if you wish) an effective Threshold Guide, which I discuss in this essay:
I hope you’ll dedicate your full attention to this. My personal belief is that the societal outcomes of the DDD will rival the 1930s Great Depression. My daughter turns 21 right in the middle of DDD. She’s my skin-in-the-game. She ensures that I take this stuff seriously, and I hope you will too.
Let’s begin.
I. Why Material Thinking Won’t Cut It
I’ve written before about the shift from Material Consciousness to Mycelial Consciousness. It’s part of the wider trajectory of the evolution of consciousness over a 3.5 million year process: Mimetic ⇢ Magical ⇢ Mythic ⇢ Material ⇢ Mycelial.
If you’d like a quick refresher, here’s a logarithmic timeline demonstrating this shift. It shows both the evolution of entrepreneurship and consciousness.
The log line itself demonstrates the typical S-curve characteristic of all life forms:
A culture of bacteria growing in a petri dish follows an S-curve (slow at first, with a burst of growth that then tapers);
The growth of a human being follows an S-curve (embryo, teenager, elder).
This is the growth cycle of the human species on this planet, and it very precisely follows natural law. Note how growth is tapering off to form the top of the S-curve. This is an inevitable outcome from the limits to infinite growth in a finite petri dish (the planet), whether we do anything to stop growth or not.
In green are the different forms of entrepreneurship that have emerged through the ages: Farmer ⇢ Forger ⇢ Founder ⇢ Framer (emerging). Learn more:
The shaded blocks on the right show how consciousness has transitioned over time: Mimetic ⇢ Magical ⇢ Mythic ⇢ Material ⇢ Mycelial (emerging). Learn more about the different forms of collective consciousness:
You’ll also see from the graph that I mention three dominant human stories:
Religion - emerged between 500BC and 600AD
Science - started emerging just prior to the Industrial Revolution
Unitive - we saw the first weak signals emerging during the hippie movement of the 1960s and it’s grown stronger as both the Religious and Scientific viewpoints start losing faithful adherents — those who question their relevance in the emerging world.
The key point about these narratives is they apply only to Materialist thinking. There were earlier human narratives, but these applied to Mimetic, Magical, and Mythic consciousness. For the purposes of our current enquiry, we won’t analyze these earlier narratives in this essay. They are important, but not within the scope of this essay.
The Emergence of Threshold Guides
Threshold Guides know how to navigate this significant entrepreneurial and cognitive transition from Material to Mycelial Consciousness.
Each shift doesn't displace the previous form; instead it transcends and includes. Threshold Guides, for example, are equally comfortable engaging with farmers, forgers, founders, or framers. They are equally adept at working with mimetic, magical, mythic, or material consciousness.
What Threshold Guides recognize (because they’ve spent considerable time honing their worldview, or the story they tell themselves about what’s unfolding) is that our current challenges are an evolutionary phase shift, rather than a breakdown of all life as we know it. They know that ‘being prepared’ is part of the problem, because preparing means desperately clinging to the familiar: the Material. It’s the equivalent of the caterpillar ‘being prepared’ to resist the transformation at all costs. Resisting makes no sense at the evolutionary perspective.
Here are the specific beliefs a Threshold Guide knows will fail and has thus already relinquished:
Individual survival over collective resilience
Fixed location over adaptive mindset
Resource accumulation over resource flow
Expertise-as-power over distributed wisdom
Control over surrender and adaptation.
Here are the specific beliefs a Threshold Guide embraces:
The mycelial network as a living metaphor and effective example
Interconnection over independence
Information and resource sharing over hoarding, censorship, and secrecy
Redundancy enables adaptation
Supporting weak nodes strengthens the whole
The “wood wide web” as model for human networks (see Suzanne Simard’s work).
The Threshold Guide doesn’t have all answers. Instead they nurture and hold space for answers to emerge. By now, we have a plethora of answers, all nurtured and held by place-based regenerators, alternative currency/governance thinkers, and many more. At present, none of these answers are politically or even economically feasible.
“Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.” — Milton Friedman, 1982
A Threshold Guide spends less time prepping and more time keeping the alternatives “alive and available until the politically impossible becomes inevitable.”
So why won’t material prepping cut it?
I can sum all of this up by saying that the first step to understanding the urge to prep is to understand that all behavior is goal-oriented. You only do something when you’re clear on what goal ‘doing the thing’ will help you get closer to. This is somewhat obvious, but it’s worth reminding ourselves.
What is the goal we’re trying to accomplish when we materially prep for DDD?
The goal is to defend the Material way at any cost; to hold onto the familiar; to ensure that life can continue relatively unhindered. This kind of thinking comes from the conditioning we’re all subject to: the culturally accepted ideas of safety and success in the Material Age. It’s what we don’t want to let go of, so we prep, thinking this will secure our material possessions.
In other words, it’s the caterpillar prepping to resist the transformation at all costs.
An evolutionarily incoherent strategy.
So if material prepping won’t cut it, how should we prepare?
That’s what we’ll cover in the next section.
II. What Every Enlightened Being Knew Through History
(and which no prepper manual ever covers)
Jesus, Buddha, Lao Tzu, Krishna, Sri Aurobindo.
Every spiritual master who ever walked this Earth all described the same force.
Call it God. Call it Tao. Call it Dharma. Call it the Divine Evolution. Call it Svadharma.
Or call it what it is: The Evolutionary Impulse.
The innate drive within all living systems to adapt and evolve into higher expressions of itself.
Elisabet Sahtouris showed me the biological theory. Others have shown me the cosmological theory. My early rejection of a decade of immersion in institutionalized religion showed me that all religions essentially have the same message. This is the pattern woven into everything that lives.
Jesus said: “I am the Way.” I now know that his original teachings were nothing to do with religion, but had everything to do with the natural unfolding of consciousness into higher awareness.
Sri Aurobindo said: “The Divine Force of Evolution is pressing down upon matter, demanding transformation.”
Lao Tzu said: “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.”
Buddha said: “All conditioned things are impermanent.”
Krishna said: “Whenever dharma declines, I manifest to restore cosmic order.”
I’ve recently come to realize that the Evolutionary Impulse cannot be explained, just as any of the religions cannot be explained. They all need experiencing.
Whenever an evolutionary stage experiences turbulence and blockage and stops flowing (like today), disruption arrives to break it open.
So we have five teachers and one truth.
The universe (and more specifically, consciousness) evolves. And the coming DDD is an invitation to evolve. Very few will RSVP, because doing so is uncomfortable.
The Material Age taught us that disruption is a threat; that change means a loss of something we’d become accustomed to; that fear, uncertainty, and doubt represents danger; that letting go of the familiar is a failure.
Every enlightened being knew that disruption is also an invitation; that change can also be seen as emergence; that uncertainty opens up a creative space; that letting go leads to transformation.
The caterpillar experiences dissolution as death.
The butterfly knows it as birth.
The Decade of Dramatic Disruption doesn’t mean systems are randomly failing.
The 2030s will be disruptive because consciousness itself is demanding an upgrade, and the old operating system can’t run the new program.
Jesus didn’t say “stockpile grain and find the right location to hunker down.”
He said: “Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains alone. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.”
He was describing the Evolutionary Impulse working through human consciousness. Old ways of thinking must die so that seeds of new thinking can sprout.
We cannot evolve through control.
We can only evolve through surrender to what wants to emerge.
Every spiritual tradition has a word for this moment:
Christians: The Second Coming (Christ/Mycelial consciousness awakening in every heart)
Buddhists: The Age of Maitreya (the Buddha of loving-kindness)
Hindus: Satya Yuga (the age of truth returning)
Indigenous: The Great Turning (the seventh generation)
They’re all describing the same evolutionary threshold.
And we’re all standing on that threshold right now.
You’ll experience a few fundamental changes when you understand and fully embrace this thinking, and I admit it could sound esoteric, even metaphysical:
Material Age Question: “How do I survive the collapse?”
Evolutionary Question: “Who am I being called to become?”
Material Age Strategy: Stockpile, isolate, control, defend
Evolutionary Strategy: Deepen, connect, adapt, serve
Material Age Fear: “What if I lose everything?”
Evolutionary Recognition: “What if everything I built was scaffolding for what I’m becoming?”
After I rejected institutionalized religion in my early twenties, I became fascinated in suppressed versions of Jesus’ teachings: The Book of Enoch, The Ethiopian Bible, The Gospel of Thomas, A Metaphysical Interpretation of the Bible.
I learned that Jesus never taught salvation. That was an invention of the Roman Empire to keep their population controlled.
He taught consciousness transformation:
“The kingdom of heaven is within you.”
Not later. Not elsewhere. NOW. It’s not a place we go to; it’s a state we experience.
Sri Aurobindo said it differently but meant the same thing: “The supramental consciousness is pressing upon us. Matter must either transform or break.”
The way I now see it: You’re either going with the flow of the Evolutionary Impulse or you’re in its way.
You’re the caterpillar either embracing transformation or resisting it with all your might… but the transformation will happen, because that’s the natural law.
Preparing for Transformation
The questions that follow in the next section aren’t therapy and they’re not your usual prepping advice (sorry).
They’re designed to help you see where you’re resisting the Evolutionary Impulse. Where you’re clinging to caterpillar consciousness when the butterfly is trying to emerge.
Real preparation looks like this:
Learn to grow food so you can be self-sufficient
Learn to grow food so you can be a generous node in the network
Build financial security so you won’t need anyone’s support
Build adaptive capacity so you can serve in uncertainty
Find the right location to hunker down
Become the right consciousness to hold space
Every master knew this truth:
The Evolutionary Impulse will carry you IF you align with it.
It will shatter you if you resist it.
When you align with what wants to emerge through you, the Universe supports you.
This support doesn’t come about because of magic, or woo-woo spirituality, or kumbaya feel-good vibes, but because you stopped fighting the current of life and started flowing with it. It’s a biological reality, albeit one we’re never taught.
One more thing before you begin with the Consciousness Protocol exercise I promised:
What you’ve been calling “preparation for disruption” is actually “resistance to evolution.”
The disruption you fear is the evolution you’ve been waiting for.
The breakdown of Material Age systems isn’t tragedy.
It’s creative reorganization.
It’s consciousness demanding that you level up.
The same intelligence that organized atoms into stars and stars into galaxies...
That intelligence is working through you right now.
In your breath.
In your heartbeat.
In the questions and/or sense of serendipity forming in your mind as you read this.
The Protocol that follows is perfect if you enjoy doing self-directed inner work. If you’d like to go even deeper, supported by others doing the same work, I’m running a Worldview Workshop on February 11th and 18th. It’s the perfect way to ground yourself as events on the global stage become predictably more unhinged as we approach 2030. You can learn more about the workshop here.
III: The One-Day Consciousness Protocol
How do you dig into your unconscious thoughts?
How do you become aware of your conditioning?
How do you reach profound insights and truths that change the trajectory of your life?
Through the simple, but often painful act of questioning.
Something that so few people do, and you can tell by how they speak or give their thoughts on a specific topic. Questioning is thinking, and very few people do it.
That’s what this batch of questions is designed to do. We’re not trying to get to 100% accurate answers. We’re simply stimulating thought patterns and connecting new synapses.
MORNING SESSION: Excavating Your Material Conditioning (60 minutes)
Instructions:
60 uninterrupted minutes
Pen and paper (not digital)
No AI assistance
If you can’t answer immediately, return later
a) Seeing What You’ve Been Blind To (20 min)
What success marker are you holding onto that won’t matter in 2030? (Salary? Job title? House value? Social status? 401K? Credentials?)
What are you hoarding that you could be sharing? (Skills? Knowledge? Resources? Connections? Time?)
Who do you look down on who might be better prepared than you? (The person growing vegetables instead of climbing ladders? The one who chose community over career?)
What are you trying to control that wants to flow?
What truth about your life would embarrass you to admit out loud?
If you’re honest, what are you actually preparing for? (Safety? Status preservation? Being right? Not looking foolish?)
These questions are meant to make you aware of what you currently value. The next step is to turn those into a “Material Vision,” which is a brutal awareness of the life you’ll be stuck with if there’s no shift in the way you think about DDD. That way, you can use that negative energy to aim your efforts in a positive direction and act from a place of intrinsic motivation.
b) Your Anti-Vision - The Life You Refuse (20 min)
If, five years from now, nothing changes in your life and the DDD is upon us, describe an average weekday at 3pm.
Where are you?
What does your body feel like?
Who’s around you (or not)?
What are you doing?
What are you avoiding?
Ten years, still unchanged. What connections did you miss? (What community formed without you? What role could you have played?)
Who in your life is already living your feared future? (Someone 5-10 years ahead on the “financially safe but small” path? What might they have lost?)
Write one sentence: The life I refuse to live is... (Make it visceral. Make it true.)
c) Your Evolutionary Invitation (20 min)
Three years from now, you’ve aligned with the Evolutionary Impulse. What does an average weekday at 3pm look like?
Where are you?
What does aliveness feel like in your body?
What role do you play in your community?
What replaced “security” as your North Star?
Complete this: “I am becoming the kind of person who...”
What’s one thing you would do THIS WEEK if you were already that person?
DAYTIME: Breaking the Autopilot (6 interrupts)
Set these reminders NOW in your phone. As the reminder arrives, take a few minutes to think about your response. Jot down thoughts in your journal.
11:00am: “Am I moving toward isolated safety or mycelial connection?”
1:30pm: “What Material Age belief just drove that choice?”
3:15pm: “If someone watched my last hour, what would they say I’m preparing for?”
5:00pm: “What’s the most important thing I’m pretending isn’t important?”
7:30pm: “When did I feel most alive today? Most dead?”
9:00pm: “What did I do today to protect my identity instead of serve my purpose?”
EVENING: Integration & Direction (40 minutes)
a) Naming the Pattern (15 min)
After today, what feels most true about why you’ve been fearing the DDD?
Name your actual enemy. Not circumstances. Not people. The internal pattern.
Your Anti-Vision in one sentence: (From Question 10 - refine it if needed)
Your Vision in one sentence: (Who you’re becoming, knowing it will evolve)
b) The Mycelial Framework (25 min)
One-Year Lens: What would have to be true for you to know you’ve broken the Material Age pattern?
Not: “I’ll have X saved/stored”
Instead: “I’m known in my community as someone who...”
One-Month Project: What do you need to learn, practice, or build this month?
Examples:
Complete permaculture course
Read three Threshold Guide texts, share insights
Initiate three genuine neighbor conversations
Start weekly skill-sharing circle
Daily Levers: What 2-3 actions can you time-block TOMORROW that your future self does automatically?
Be specific. Be realistic.
Examples:
15-min grounding practice
Share one resource with one person (not social media)
20-min mycelial skill development
Your Non-Negotiables: What won’t you sacrifice? (These are your constraints - the rules of your game) Examples:
“I won’t abandon my current responsibilities”
“I won’t force this on others”
“I won’t bypass practical preparation”
Your Mycelial Identity Dashboard
Before bed tonight, create this on one page:
┌─────────────────────────────────────┐
│ MYCELIAL IDENTITY DASHBOARD │
├─────────────────────────────────────┤
│ Life I Refuse: [Q16] │
│ │
│ Identity I'm Growing: [Q17] │
│ │
│ One-Year Shift: [Q18] │
│ │
│ This Month: [Q19] │
│ │
│ Tomorrow's Actions: │
│ 1. [Q20] │
│ 2. [Q20] │
│ 3. [Q20] │
│ │
│ My Boundaries: [Q21] │
└─────────────────────────────────────┘Put this where you’ll see it every morning.
These questions aren’t achievement goals; they’re not to-do items to be ticked off a list.
They’re alignment markers.
They show you whether you’re flowing with the Evolutionary Impulse or fighting it.
That was a lot.
Hopefully it was helpful. If it was, please consider sharing it with someone you care about. The reality about exercises like these is that they send an energy out into the field. The more who commit to explorations like these, the stronger the collective field becomes (and the smoother the transition).
This is the direction I’ll be inching towards in 2026: metaphysical preparation for what is no doubt going to be a challenging few years, possibly worse than the Great Depression. I spent 2025 assimilating what great thinkers have said through the ages, specifically related to the Evolutionary Impulse, and I look forward to sharing more throughout the year.
That’s a wrap for today...
Frame on! 😁
Michael
If you’d like to go even deeper, why not join our Worldview Workshop on February 11th and 18th? It’s the perfect way to ground yourself as events on the global stage become predictably more unhinged as we approach 2030.
Whenever you're ready, here’s how I can help you (with more offerings coming soon):
If you’re feeling even a little unsure about what it all means for you and your family, why not apply for a 2030 Clarity Call? We get on a call for 45 minutes. You tell me where you’re stuck and how committed to change you are. I show you what pattern I see - what’s dying, what’s being born, and what might be yours to do next. You receive a written synthesis within 45 hours of our call. There’s a sliding scale of costs, including a free option: Apply now.
This is what I have been trying to explain to a friend for quite some time.
Ironically, he is the one who sent me this article.
What resonated is not the idea of collapse or drama, but the framing of this moment as an evolutionary transition rather than random chaos. That is exactly where my thinking has been landing over the past year, largely triggered by the cognitive dissonance of watching political, cultural, and psychological systems behave in ways that no longer make sense using old assumptions.
In conversations, I kept coming back to the same point. Complex systems break down before they reorganize. Fear rises because fear is fast and efficient. People narrow their thinking not because they are stupid, but because the environment is pushing them into older, more energy efficient cognitive modes. That looks like polarization, spectacle, and regression on the surface, but underneath it is a system under strain trying to find a new equilibrium.
What has been especially striking to me is how this lens suddenly makes ancient wisdom feel less mystical and more practical. The teachings of early seers, religious traditions, Stoicism, and contemplative practices were not just moral guidance. They were early maps of the human nervous system. Now neuroscience and psychology are independently confirming the benefits of meditation, reflection, emotional regulation, and restraint in exactly the kinds of high stress, high complexity environments we are entering.
That convergence is what convinced me I was not just overthinking things. When ancient practices and modern brain science start pointing in the same direction, it suggests we are rediscovering tools that help humans adapt during periods of instability, not escape from them.
This article put language to something I have been circling intuitively. Not apocalypse. Not business as usual. A transition phase where old operating systems no longer scale, and the real work is learning how to think, regulate, and relate differently before something more coherent can emerge.
Mmm I honestly loved reading all of this, it's beautiful to come across another threshold guide/walker and see so much of your own thoughts in someone else's words.
I have some space over the next few days to sit with these very powerful and important questions.
Thank you.