In Times of Uncertainty Get Out and Touch Grass
Navigating our cyborg existence can feel like running in place sometimes.
I recently went to a paint and sip night in my neighbor’s apartment, one of those spontaneous gatherings that somehow becomes more meaningful than you expect. We sat there with our brushes and canvases, and it was amazing that the chaos that riddled our conversation didn’t match the beauty of the art we created.
Here were women from completely different industries—media, tech, food security—and yet we all shared the same unsettling feeling: the ground beneath our feet won't stop shifting.
Cyborgs In Need of Constant Updates
We talked about what I've started thinking of as our “cyborg existence”—the way we're simultaneously living in two interconnected but distinct systems that are both experiencing unprecedented turbulence.
The Physical Plane: This is the tangible world. The one we should feel more secure in but climate change seems to be manifesting as constant flooding, unpredictable weather patterns, and a sense that even our physical environment has become unreliable.
The Digital Plane: This is where we spend increasing portions of our lives, where the cryptocurrencies seek to circumvent traditional systems, WEB 3 promises decentralization of power, and humans compete with AI for influence.
It is this dual existence in two planes that makes us cyborgs, unfortunately, the consistent shifts of both worlds mean we are constantly in need updates. At least that’s how it feels sometimes.
The Exhaustion of Constant Adaptation
What struck me most about our conversation was how similar our experiences felt across such different fields. Whether you’re in media barely keeping up with the content game and watching platforms change algorithms left and right, in tech seeing entire industries disrupted by AI and startup chaos, or in any other field, there's this shared sense of running just to stay in place. We're all trying to reach for something that feels perpetually just out of grasp.
The mental load of navigating this dual complexity is enormous. Our brains are constantly processing change on multiple levels—economic, technological, environmental, social. It’s like being asked to run on two treadmills simultaneously, each moving at different speeds, both accelerating unpredictably.
Jumping off The Treadmill
The paint night, we did what we all have to do sometimes. We stopped. We let the world keep spinning. We “touched grass” —a phrase one of the tech women used, half-jokingly, about her colleagues who rarely venture offline.
We didn’t solve anything that night, but we did find a collective understanding. In times when everything feels uncertain, the path forward might be deliberately small and incremental. One foot in front of the other. Day by day. Not because we lack ambition, but because this kind of intentional pacing might be the most sustainable way to navigate complexity.
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