Message from the Future

We will remember this time. Not as the moment when the frayed threads of social order finally gave way, dropping us into a new intensity of change and disruption

But as the moment we began to understand our role in shaping what came next.

We thought we were small. We thought our choices didn’t matter. We thought the forces around us were too big to shift.

But we can see it clearly now: When external forces were clawing for our attention, it was the quality of the attention we paid to each other. It was the way we carefully chose our words and our questions. It was the way we showed up for our neighbour when it would have been easier not to.

It came from falling to our knees and worshipping the ordinary day, reverent at the business of the bee, the service of the worm.

It was those moments where we stayed present when it would have been so much easier to look away, when we gave more than we knew we had.

And now we see that those small, almost invisible decisions added up.
They changed the texture of things.

They changed our relationships with each other and the world around us. They changed and remapped our hearts. They shifted our energetic alignment

The tiniest moments fractally replicated at the largest scale.
These moments we tended to, changed what became possible afterwards.

We realised we did not need to be perfect. It was a huge release. We only needed to stay awake to our own humanity, and to the humanity of others. That was the ask.
And we rose to it. Bit by bit.

And from here, looking back, we, you and we want you to know this:
You were never powerless. You were a significant part of the turning.
And you did better than you think.

With great love, Megan
(and Princess Leia 🐾)

So I’ve become increasingly suspicious of people confidently touting answers. And this is not because answers aren’t useful, they are. Sure, certain answers build bridges, cure diseases, fix leaking taps and get us home when we’re lost.

But not all things are answerable with any degree of certainty. We are applying answers as facts in places where I don’t think they belong. The most important things in my life have never arrived as answers. They arrived as questions. In the very word question is the word quest. Questions show what we are questing for.

I have talked about this before, but I want to go deeper, I think there is something very rich for humanity in questioning our questions.

Questions seem to possess a strange power. Ask a good one and suddenly the world reorganises itself around it.

When you decide to buy a red car, you start seeing red cars everywhere. When you’re pregnant, babies appear to multiply across the planet.

When you ask, “What is sacred?” something similar happens. Your attention begins searching.

Not in a frantic way like we might search for lost keys, but more like how a sunflower searches for light.

Modern neuroscience tells us that our brains are prediction machines. Every second they are filtering vast amounts of information, deciding what matters and what doesn’t. Most of reality passes us by unnoticed, or unwitnessed by our conscious inner eye.

Questions change the filter. They tell our minds what to look for.

Ask “What’s wrong with the world?” and evidence appears everywhere. Ask “Who’s to blame?” and your mind happily supplies suspects. Ask “What is sacred?” and suddenly sacredness begins leaking through the cracks of your ordinary life.

A child’s hand reaching for yours. The hush before dawn. The warmth of the sun’s rays and the way it casts light through the gobo created by a tree’s leaves. The kindness of a stranger. The extraordinary fact that anything exists at all. The question becomes a tuning fork. A way of bringing certain frequencies of reality into focus.

Which makes me wonder whether the quality of our lives is shaped less by the answers we possess and more by the questions we carry.

Questions don’t merely reveal reality. They participate in creating it, and shaping it. They direct our attention. Shape our perception. Influence what we notice, value and ultimately who we become.

And perhaps nowhere is this more important than when it comes to hope. Many people think hope is a feeling that radiates off something external - hope.

Others think it’s optimism. A prediction that things will probably work out.

But I wonder if hope might be something much simpler.

A question.

Not “Will everything be okay?” But: “What remains possible?” “What wants to emerge here?” “What can still be tended?”

“What future is trying to be born?”

Hope is what happens when we refuse to close the inquiry.

When the evidence is bleak and the horizon uncertain, hope does not demand certainty.

It asks another question. And then another. And then another.

A question opens space. A declaration closes it.

Questions keep the future alive. Perhaps this is why despair often feels so final. It convinces us the story is already over. The verdict has been delivered. Nothing new can enter.

Hope leaves the door ajar. Just enough for possibility to slip through. Not certainty. Not guarantees: but possibility.

I don’t know if I’ll ever find definitive answers to the questions that matter most.

What is sacred? What is enough? What is a good life? What is the future is asking from my participation? What is the most authentic expression of myself? How can I be of inextricable value to this world?

But I’ve come to suspect that finding the answer was never the point.

The point was becoming the sort of person willing to keep asking. And in the asking, discovering that the world is far more alive, mysterious and hungry for my participation, my questions, than I ever imagined.

I’m sending you big love. What a time to be alive.

There are so many of us, waking up, showing up, speaking up. It is up to join up the dots, and call it a revolution.

See you next week. x Megan

Friends, there are daffodils in my garden.

It’s June. In Aotearoa NZ, that’s when we are supposed to slip into winter. But here they are, yellow, fragrant and far too early. And up in the park at the end of my street, the pohutukawa was out in full bloom in April. It was a deep arterial red, the colour of Christmas, of summer, beaches and heat….except it bloomed 7 months early.

Somewhere inside a hive nearby, winter bees are doing what winter bees do: clustered tight around their queen, keeping her warm, keeping the colony alive, waiting for the signal that spring is coming. That signal is the flowers. The light. The slow returning warmth. The whole system is tuned to receive it together.

But the flowers aren’t waiting. They’re broadcasting in June, months before the colony is ready to answer. The signal and the receiver, out of sync. The flowers opening into absence.

I felt the alarm rising in me as I face these blooms. Not a full blown panic, but something perhaps a bit more honest than panic. A kind of reckoning.

I guess this is what disruption looks like when it reaches the cycles that hold everything else. It is not a disaster you can photograph. Just the wrong flowers, in the wrong month, with no bees to receive them.

The word apocalypse, in its oldest sense, doesn’t mean a burning end. It means a lifting of the veil. What is false falls away. What doesn’t serve life or planet, is revealed. We are left with all that is real.

We are living inside that unveiling right now. And it is disorienting, grief making, enraging. And also, if you can hold both at once, a kind of extraordinary invitation.

And I thought: I should be out there? Beating the streets, writing every submission I can fit, showing up at council to sit across from the antique thinkers, the living fossils protecting their interests that stopped making sense decades ago?

My calm inner voice answered me. Yes. Shout. Stomp. Proclaim. Show up - all of that.

But also – leave something in the tank. Because there is other work, running alongside the resistance, that we cannot afford to neglect.

Friends, there are daffodils in my garden.

It’s June. In Aotearoa NZ, that’s when we are supposed to slip into winter. But here they are, yellow, fragrant and far too early. And up in the park at the end of my street, the pohutukawa was out in full bloom in April. It was a deep arterial red, the colour of Christmas, of summer, beaches and heat….except it bloomed 7 months early.

Somewhere inside a hive nearby, winter bees are doing what winter bees do: clustered tight around their queen, keeping her warm, keeping the colony alive, waiting for the signal that spring is coming. That signal is the flowers. The light. The slow returning warmth. The whole system is tuned to receive it together.

But the flowers aren’t waiting. They’re broadcasting in June, months before the colony is ready to answer. The signal and the receiver, out of sync. The flowers opening into absence.

I felt the alarm rising in me as I face these blooms. Not a full blown panic, but something perhaps a bit more honest than panic. A kind of reckoning.

I guess this is what disruption looks like when it reaches the cycles that hold everything else. It is not a disaster you can photograph. Just the wrong flowers, in the wrong month, with no bees to receive them.

The word apocalypse, in its oldest sense, doesn’t mean a burning end. It means a lifting of the veil. What is false falls away. What doesn’t serve life or planet, is revealed. We are left with all that is real.

We are living inside that unveiling right now. And it is disorienting, grief making, enraging. And also, if you can hold both at once, a kind of extraordinary invitation.

And I thought: I should be out there? Beating the streets, writing every submission I can fit, showing up at council to sit across from the antique thinkers, the living fossils protecting their interests that stopped making sense decades ago?

My calm inner voice answered me. Yes. Shout. Stomp. Proclaim. Show up - all of that.

But also – leave something in the tank. Because there is other work, running alongside the resistance, that we cannot afford to neglect.

We are the end-of-life doulas for a dying empire. And we are the midwives of what yearns to be born on the other side.

Both of those are sacred work. Both of them require us to stay present, to keep looking, to peel back the veil a little further and see what is already emerging springing, if you will.

That is what I aim to do, each week, with you. Not to look away from the daffodils in June. But to ask what they are asking of us.

What a time to be alive. There are so many of us, waking up, showing up, speaking up.

It is up to us to join the dots, and call it a revolution.

Sending you big love, see you next week.

x Megan

Building with AI feels like flying. You can simply do so much more, so much faster. That acceleration is intoxicating – and it’s exactly why we need to pause, just for a moment, and look at what’s underneath it.

We have never had this level of self-understanding to bring to our technological development. It is up to us to use it.

The questions underneath all this activity are of fundamental importance – to our human flourishing and our environmental flourishing. We know what happens when we don’t ask them. Models built on extraction, on externalising cost and risk, on growth without edges – they create harm. They create unintended consequences. Capital, like water, flows best when it’s well-contained. A river without banks isn’t freedom. It’s a flood.

So: is AI good or bad? That’s the wrong question. The technology itself is a tool. What matters is what we use it for, and what guardrails we build around it – the safety catches, the regulations, the principles embedded at the foundation. Get those wrong and the harm comes fast, and at scale.

AI isn’t the crisis. Our collective failure to decide about AI’s guardrails and founding principles is the crisis. The gap between the speed of building and the pace of deciding is where the real action needs to be right now – while we’re still dazzled, marvelling at what we made in a weekend, not yet asking the bigger questions.

The public isn’t deciding. Government isn’t deciding. Big tech and their shareholders are deciding – what form it takes, who benefits, and who bears the cost.

It is not a done deal. But the window is closing. We’ve seen what’s possible when communities move with intention. San Francisco looked at facial recognition and said: not here. Not because it didn’t work – but because surveillance of public space wasn’t the kind of city they wanted to be. That’s democratic imagination in action, a community writing its own story.

We need that here. We need to inform, consult, and legislate – with the same urgency that the technology is being built.

What Aotearoa New Zealand Has That Silicon Valley Doesn’t – But We Are Not Yet Using

Our greatest asset is our Treaty framework coupled with a belief, still alive in this country, that technology should serve the public good. If Te Tiriti were properly embedded in how we regulate AI, we’d be forced to ask the hard questions every time: who benefits? Who bears the cost? Are we thinking seven generations forward, or just to the next quarter? What does genuine AI reciprocity look like?

That’s not soft. That’s rigorous. The Māori economy consistently outperforms the rest of the New Zealand economy. These relational frameworks aren’t romantic – they produce results. What Te Tiriti offers is a set of values with teeth: care for te taiao, responsibility to future generations, reciprocity, mana.

Build AI from those values and you get something genuinely different from what Silicon Valley is building. Reciprocal rather than extractive. Servant to our collective goals, not just whoever can afford the subscription. That’s a competitive advantage. And it’s ours to champion.

The Story Problem - Who decides which futures even make the table?

Right now the loudest AI stories are apocalypse and overlords. Compelling science fiction. And very useful to capitalistic empires, because a public that’s either terrified or resigned doesn’t show up to shape what gets built.

We need to reclaim the story. The narratives worth fighting for are the ones where AI is a genuine partner in solving the problems we’ve failed to solve alone. Where it helps us navigate toward economies that are regenerative, systems that are equitable, communities that are actually connected. Where the question isn’t “how do we process more data faster?” – but “how do we strengthen the relationships that make communities safe, productive, and thriving?”

The future of AI isn’t inevitable. It’s a story still being written. And we’re the ones who should be writing it.

Whoever controls the vision controls what gets built. I want us – this beautiful nation – to hold that vision. Not wait for it to arrive from somewhere else and then decide whether we like it.

Where you come in:

If there is a fire in your belly around AI, charge yourself up with well-informed opinions before the upcoming election. Insert yourself into the spaces where these decisions are being made – or start making those spaces : )

The story of AI in Aotearoa is not written. That means you - just by virtue of reading an article like this - can begin to take a role in writing it. Perhaps start by replying or putting a comment on this post.

With great hope and a fire in my belly,

x Megan

The escalation of aggression in the Middle East, Trump’s increasingly erratic behaviour, and my own nation’s obvious fossil fuel dependency with no political narrative in sight for how we transition out. It has all accumulated into something that crossed my personal threshold for tolerating uncertainty.

When fear tips into overwhelm, the human brain does something very predictable. It detours. The fight or flight response is essentially a neurological bypass, routing us away from our sense of hope and possibility toward the very ancient business of staying alive. And in late-stage capitalism, with its daily diet of extractivism and extremism, many of us are experiencing the chemical equivalent of being chased by a lion. Not once in a while. Regularly. On a Wednesday morning.

The rational mind wants to offer reassurance here. “But you are not actually in danger right now.” And that’s true, probably. But go tell your nervous system that.

This is where “what if” questions do their most interesting damage. We are strategic creatures. We play out scenarios so we can find our vulnerabilities and prepare. But those of us with vivid imaginations can conjure a full-body fear response from something that has not happened and may never happen. The threat is real enough in the body. The chemistry doesn’t know the difference.

Which means we can’t think our way out. We have to move through it physically.

Emily and Amelia Nagoski, in their book Burnout, make the point that experiences leave a chemical residue in the body, and that residue needs to be processed, not just understood. Crying. Moving. Sleeping. Being held. Sitting in a sauna. A long sigh. These aren’t indulgences or distractions. They are how the nervous system completes the stress cycle and finds its way back to a wider emotional range.

I start with sighing. Big, elaborate, full-body sighing. It sounds slightly ridiculous and it works reliably. Sometimes I reach for a film or a piece of writing that can give me an adjacent emotional experience, something that cracks me open just enough to let some of the feeling move through, without pointing directly at the thing I’m afraid of. My grief finds a lane. The body does its job.

Once you’re out of the hole, more becomes available to you. Not just hope, but creativity, connection, perspective.

Here’s where the practice I lean on most lives, though, and it isn’t a somatic one. It’s a question I ask myself. Not “what if this terrible thing happens?” but “who will I be if it does?”

It’s a small shift that changes everything. The first question positions me as someone things happen to. The second makes me the one who responds. I rehearse it. I think about what qualities I want to bring: courage, love, compassion. I sit with what it would feel like to be that version of myself. And something always shifts, not because the fear disappears, but because I’ve located myself inside it differently.

This is hope as practice, not feeling. It is most useful when built in fair weather, when the stakes are lower and the conditions are good for learning. But if you find yourself in a storm of your own mind’s making, you don’t have to begin there. You can start with a sigh. You can start with a cry. You can work your way back from the body, one completed cycle at a time, until you find yourself standing again in the fullness of who you are.

That, I think, is where hope lives. Not in the absence of fear, but in the capacity to move through it and still recognise yourself on the other side.

Wherever you are reading this, I am sending you so much love. For heroically getting on with it, buying the groceries, finishing the PowerPoint, feeding the cat, while carrying something heavy in your chest. There is a thread between us, and I am tugging on it gently this week, to remind you that we are not alone in this. We will move through this big, strange, frightening moment together, and we will come out the other side changed in ways that matter, for people who aren’t born yet. Hold on.

x Arohanui (big love)

Megan

P.S. If this week’s dispatch resonated, you might want to know that this kind of thinking is at the heart of what I do with leaders one on one.

The Executive Support Package is a 20-week working partnership for CEOs and senior leaders in the for-purpose sector. Not coaching that stays in the room. Not consulting that produces reports you don’t have time to read. Something more useful than both: a trusted thinking partner who shows up every week to help you think clearly, plan strategically, and actually get the important things done.

If you’re carrying a lot right now and you’d like some tailored support, I’d love to talk. Or you might know someone else who could benefit from extra capacity right now.

Find out more about my Executive Support Package →

Ch ch change... there’s a lot of it around right now. A war in the Middle East with no clear edges. A superpower rewriting its own rulebook. A climate doing the same. In our work, in our economy, on the news – it’s everywhere. But change itself isn’t the problem. It’s part of being alive. What’s harder is holding onto expectations that no longer fit. Letting those go isn’t loss, it’s where opportunity tends to hide.

I know we disagree on a lot right now. But I genuinely believe this is something we share: we all want a resilient nation.

If you agree, read on.

Dear Hope holders,

How are you coping this week? The fuel crisis is a lot to hold. And on top of that in my country, we are being hammered by our 3rd major weather event in as many months.

We are living through a turning point, and although I am concerned and alert, I am not afraid. Because I know what is ahead: Change. Lots and lots of change. I have come to expect it. I am preparing for it.

Alongside death and taxes, change is the only certainty, so I’m learning to get more comfortable with it. It’s a skill. One we can all learn. Individually and collectively.

For me personally, the current dynamics, things like AI and the spending values of a right-leaning government has impacted on my work contracts, and it has meant my career has had to shift. With it, my clients shift. My income level shifts. It’s a concern. It’s got me alert and working hard to navigate my way through it. It’s not easy, but with each shift, I adapt.

The more I adapt, the less fearful I feel, and the less fearful I feel, the stronger I become.

What I’ve learned is that beyond that first moment of shock, that feeling of “Gah, this isn’t working anymore, something has to change!,” the change itself isn’t actually chaotic. Because the chaos isn’t really in the change, rather it’s wreaking havoc with our expectations. So we have to adapt our expectations.

Because change is necessary. Some of the assumptions we’ve been living with are starting to wear thin, the idea that more and more consumption is always the path to a good life.

What we need now is a different kind of change. The kind that brings us back into balance.

For Aotearoa New Zealand* where I live, that means returning to greater self-sufficiency. It’s been a few generations since we’ve really had that. This kind of change asks more of us upfront, but it gives more back in return.

For the past forty years, our economy has been built on a simple premise: cheap oil. It has powered how we move, how we grow food, how we build, how we trade. It has made things fast, global, and, for a time, affordable.

But that era is changing. Our current energy crisis has revealed this plain and simple. We are too vulnerable as a small nation at the bottom of the planet to have globalised our trade to this extent.

We are already feeling the costs – In our weather, our insurance, in the price of food and fuel. And alongside this, something else has become clear: our reliance on long, complex supply chains has made us fragile.

When disruption hits, whether it is global conflict, shipping delays, or sudden price shifts, we feel it immediately. At the checkout, at the pump, in the day to day maths of running a household.

This begs the question: what would it look like to become anti-fragile? Not just able to withstand shocks, but to adapt and strengthen through them.

In Aotearoa New Zealand, the path forward isn’t about going backwards. It’s about rebalancing.

We remain connected to the world. We continue to participate in global knowledge, innovation, and technology. These are powerful tools that support our productivity and creativity. We (mostly!) love them, we rely on them to participate in all the world has to offer.

But alongside this, we make an important shift: we start producing more of what we need, closer to home.

And when our major food producers like Wattie’s have a wobble, we step in to support them because keeping our local food systems strong, steady, and well maintained is part of looking after ourselves.

It’s how we begin to rebuild something more resilient, grounded in place and able to sustain us over time.

Our Indigenous Māori have long understood that these fertile lands, when cared for properly, can provide full nourishment. Not just calories, but balance, diversity, and resilience. A relationship between people and place that sustains both.

That knowledge is not behind us. It is here, and it has something to offer as we think about what comes next. It’s all about releationship, and our modern food systems have broken those chains. It’s time to link it back up. I mean, why is New Zealand shipping in fertiliser when we make some of the richest, organic seaweed fertiliser on the planet?

Food systems become more local and more resilient. Fibre, materials, and essential goods are increasingly sourced and made within our own regions. Communities begin to know their producers again. Supply chains shorten. Skills return.

Shorter supply chains tend to keep more money circulating locally: this is how we become anti-fragile.

The transition will not be perfectly smooth. There will be moments in the beginning where things cost more, don’t have comparable ROI, take longer, or require us to do things differently. That is the nature of any real shift.

And we must be honest about this: change is always felt most sharply by those with the least buffer. So we design for that. We build a safety net that is not abstract, but practical and connected. One that ensures everyone has access to the essentials of life, especially good food.

Government procurement becomes a lever for resilience. It prioritises local producers, creating stable demand that flows directly into communities, supporting growers, makers, and workers. Our schools, hospitals, and universities have a directive to buy from local producers.

This is the shift that matters most: those who are most vulnerable are not left behind. They become central to the system. Their needs help shape what is grown, what is made, and how it is distributed. In this way, care and production become linked. Local economies begin to regenerate, not by coincidence but by design.

Yes, obviously, I am a lefty loosey liberal. So take that into account as you read this. But I do think resilience is something people across the political spectrum actually want -- even if we’d argue hard about how to get there: who gets the contracts. How it is implemented. What the balance looks like between local and global.

But at its heart, this is something we can all agree on: we all want a resilient nation.

One that can feed itself. One that can weather shocks. One that looks after its people. I am hopeful that an ‘anti-fragile nation’ could become a shared ambition, just as a ‘Nuclear-Free NZ’ once did in the eighties.

Maybe there is a more compelling path. If you can see it, I want to hear it. But from where I’m standing, this is the most honest direction I can point to.

So perhaps this is a moment to turn together. To set some of our differences to one side and focus on what matters most. Continuing down our current route is not neutral – It is a choice to remain exposed, dependent, and increasingly brittle.

This is not about going backwards. It is about building and practising a modern, anti-fragile economy.

The obvious first steps; everyone increase their commitment to buy local, pressure our government to ramp up local procurement, call for government support for our flailing local production (not forever, just through this time of transition). It’s time for the opposite of“Think Big”. We need to “Think Local.” .

So what can you do to spearhead an Antifragile Nation? Share this post, share this narrative with your people. Get the teeshirt. Ok, there isn’t a teeshirt. But become a cheerleader for an Anti-fragile Nation. Rah! Rah!

xxx Megan

*Aotearoa is the indigenous name for this place I am lucky enough to call home, and New Zealand is the name many of us know well. Both are meaningful to people here, so I’ll use them both as I talk about our shared home.

I grew up in two economies.

At Mum’s place, we fossicked through op shops looking for junk we could turn into treasure. We had time, imagination and love. We did not have much money. It was creative and warm and sometimes precarious. Value was something you made with your hands.

At Dad’s place, there was a waterfront apartment, a spa, important dinners with important people. The lift opened onto parquet floors and conversation about ideas and status. Value was something you earned, achieved and displayed.

Both my parents were feminists. Both cared deeply about justice. But Mum carried Baháʼí-infused spiritual values and it came with laws that were hard to live up to for a curious teen. Dad carried academic and social status values that could also feel hard to satisfy. I experienced love and worth to be conditional, measured against different yardsticks in different rooms.

As a teenager, I chose the fancy road. Of course I did. It instantly placates the ego. And it covers over any low self-worth.

I wanted recognition. I wanted beautiful things. I wanted to be seen. I did well at school, but it was the arts and drama where I came alive. In my early twenties I partied too much, drank too much, and qualified as a designer. It felt like a miracle: a creative profession with status credibility. My father could understand it. My mother could see herself in it. I could earn decent money. I could be artistic and legitimate to both my parents.

I did not like being employed. I was too mouthy, too opinionated. So I started a design studio in the early days of what we called new media. Suddenly I had employees, an office in the creative heart of Wellington, theatre and film on my doorstep, restaurants and bars and a very enthusiastic social life. I was chasing success and financial rewards with both hands.

Fancy everything, please.

Then sustainability entered the scene. 2006. An inconvenient truth.

And I remember, viscerally, how much I railed against it. The idea that my lifestyle was implicated. That my consumption, my flights, my shopping, my appetite for more, was part of the problem. It felt unfair. I did not want to change. I had worked hard for this life, and my identity was completely entangled with achieving material status.

But something stirred in me. From a simmer to a boil . My work shifted from being about solving design problems towards social innovation; using models of business to engage in the process of social and environmental change.

I achieved an inner alignment that I hadn’t felt since I was turning trash into treasure with my mum. That sense of accomplishment making something from pure creativity and imagination. And hope-based communication has been a wonderful, creative place to land – where I am matching my skills and passions with what the world needs in these tumultuous times. We all need and deserve that resonance.

I look at my life now. A humble dwelling near the ocean that needs a paint job. A big rambling section crammed with fruit trees and vegetables. One child. One old car that we keep running because of all that embodied energy. A walkable village where we know almost everyone. Less theatre openings, fewer fancy dinners, more soil under my nails.

It is not the downtown apartment I once coveted. And yet it is rich! So full of life, silliness, creativity and actual joy.

But don’t get me wrong. It’s not perfect. I will forever be tweaking my lifestyle to become more sustainable. And I have also caught my ego playing the game of ‘moral high-ground’ before arriving at a position that is more honest.

What I have come to understand is that this is not a story about virtue. It is a story about congruence. We are all entangled in global supply chains and inherited economic stories. None of us are pure. I am certainly not. But there is a deep relief that comes when our outer lives align, even imperfectly, with what we know to be true about planetary limits, interdependence and care.

As financial means contract and the long arc of empire bends downward, many (all?) of us will have to let go of “fancy.” Not as a punishment but as adaptation.

The invitation, as I see it, is not austerity. It is curiosity. And it is better to choose it than to be forced.

I have found humble to be a surprisingly hopeful way to live in these times.

The questions are simple, even if the answers take a while to settle. What actually makes a life feel rich? What do we really need? What are we willing to loosen our grip on? What would it feel like to live with a quiet sense of enough. To know that we are taking no more than our fair share.

The move from fancy to humble did not feel noble at first. It felt like loss. Like stepping away from a set of values I had worked hard to belong to. But over time it has felt more like unraveling from a big knot. Less about status, more about relationship. Less about being seen. More about being true.

To arrive at a place where my life makes sense to me, where humility is not smallness, but spaciousness. The pursuit of “less” has quietly turned into a beautiful, deeply satisfying life.

I still love aesthetics. I still love ideas. I still love sparkle. But I am less interested in being seen and more interested in being aligned.

And alignment feels like a better fit inside me than achievement ever did.

Achievement wears off. Satisfaction lingers.

That is the story I want to offer. Not as a ‘blueprint’ –just as a breadcrumb toward a more hopeful way of living, one you can feel harmonious with in your own bones.

Can your work feel more aligned with what the world is asking of us right now?
Can your purchases feel more congruent with the natural systems that sustain us?

These are not moral tests, they are invitations.

We are always being nudged toward a more hopeful way of living. One that is gentler on our nervous systems and kinder to the living world. For our mental wellbeing, and for the welfare of our planet, my experience has been that it is worth following that pull.

Lots of love, Megan

P.P.S This year I am delivering a special executive strategy and support package designed around the needs of Impact Leaders and people heading up small NGO’s. It is proving popular, and this quarter is booked out. So I am now taking bookings for the second quarter.

If you or someone you know operating in the NGO/Impact space are in a state of near burnout and need special support, get in touch.

We think we are focusing on the problems. But we are focusing on the symptoms.

If we were willing to ask what these fires share at the root, we might notice something uncomfortable. We might see that they are not separate emergencies competing for column inches. They are expressions of a common worldview.

Instead, we fragment our attention, our funding, our energy and our narratives across a dozen burning buildings. Each demands a full fire brigade. Each claims urgency. And we leave feeling overwhelmed and more powerless.

At some point we have to ask whether our approach to polycrisis is itself part of the problem.

Not the absolute problem. But definitely perpetuating the problem.

Because if our response keeps us busy at the edges, tinkering, convening, analysing, publishing, while leaving the underlying logic intact, then we will simply perpetuate the crises in new forms.

We have to look in the mirror. And before you scroll away, this is good news.

If the problem is not just “out there” but also in the stories that live inside us, then we are not helpless. We are implicated. And that means we are powerful.

It is time for my peers, my friends, my colleagues, and always myself, to question the worldview that trains us into extraction, competition and disconnection.

An ego driven culture has made us insecure. In that insecurity we seek validation through acquisition. Status. Productivity. Applause. We chase happiness as if it were external to us. I have definitely been in hot pursuit of validation.

Yet the very system that fragments us into isolated individuals has stripped us of what actually generates human wellbeing: belonging, purpose, reciprocity and care. The work of now is not heroic, it is relational.

It is the slow unravelling of internalised assumptions. A blade of grass at a time. A small restoration of bonds. Little stitches that repair the fabric of our lives.

Oh, I am not anti technology. I love innovation. I ran a new media company for a decade. I am a believer! But a solution that externalises harm is not a solution. It is a cleverly marketed new problem for humanity to solve.

When our technologies no longer dispossess indigenous people, poison ecosystems or deepen inequality, we will have crossed a genuine evolutionary threshold.

Until then, we must be honest about the nightmares we are normalising.

The first piece of business is to restore our understanding and we do that through story. These are the narratives we circulate. What we choose to admire. What we are willing to question and what we decide to care for. I want every person working in systems change to understand this:

the underlying logic of our culture is carried through story.

If we do not shift the narrative layer, we will continue to reproduce the very conditions we are trying to solve. This is not a communications add-on. It is not a branding exercise. It is not a nice to have.

It is a central strategic function. Ignore it, and even the most well funded interventions will snap back to the old paradigm.

Imagine if our narratives converged on the same root cause. Imagine if we were brave enough to name the emperor’s nakedness, together. That is the foundation of real systems change. Anything built on less will not hold at the scale required. At best, it delays collapse. At worst, it wastes precious time and resources and erodes hope.

The first work of leadership is internal. We start by decolonising our own thinking. We loosen the grip of hyper-individualism. We arrive at the understanding that we are not separate actors competing on a stage, but expressions of a larger whole. Community. Species. Planet.

We need to start there.

If you are doing work at the level of systems, institutions or movements, narrative strategy is not optional. It is leverage. Every conference, workplan or leadership program needs to have narrative work at it’s core… or it is tinkering with change.

Systems do not transform themselves. People transform them.

Institutions are containers. The real chemistry of change lives in human beings. In the ideas we circulate. In the questions we ask. In the frames we choose. If we want structural change, we must move upstream. To thinking itself: to logic. To the stories that house the hidden architecture of belief and quietly proliferate through our institutions… because policy is downstream of perception.

Let’s build on foundations that are fit for the future.

It is time for a shameless plug - I offer fractional communication strategy for leaders and organisations ready to work at this depth. This quarter is full, but I have limited availability in Q2.

If you want to go upstream and examine the logic shaping your strategy, your messaging and your impact, and if you are ready to do work that shifts the architecture rather than polishing the surface. Let’s talk.

But more than that, I hope you leave here with a sense of your own agency. You are not just a consumer of stories. You are a vessel for them. You can interrogate the narratives that seduce you. You can choose the stories you circulate. You can shift the frames in your conversations, your teams, your communities.

That is how change propagates: one person thinking differently, speaking differently, and acting from a deeper alignment.

You are an agent of story. And stories are not small things. They are catalytic.

Megan x

Dear Hopeholders

I used to call myself an Eternal Optimist. It’s true that I have always had a positive orientation in life. My Mum said, “You were always such a happy baby.” I am sure that was in part due to her ever-loving presence and care. She was a wonderful and present mother.

But I have also had my share of losses and hard times, especially as a kid. So perhaps my operating system was geared that way from the start.

Before I arrived at a mature hope, I was someone who would leap to the positive position. I would skip past the difficult realities, skim over complexity, and arrive as swiftly as possible at a cheerful vantage point. I would point to a positive outcome, a hasty solution, a silver lining.

Regrettably, and probably annoyingly for those close to me, I bartered in false hope and toxic positivity.

False hope can take many forms. It looks like bright green dishwashing detergent made in a lab, with no accountability for what happens once it is flushed down a drain, sporting a 100 percent recycled bottle sticker to make people feel hopeful enough to buy it. It looks like an app that tracks your personal carbon footprint, subtly shifting responsibility onto individuals while large systemic emitters continue largely untouched.

It smells like a housing project on stolen land that speaks of partnership. It plants natives, hires a cultural advisor, uses Indigenous language in the marketing copy. But ownership structures remain unchanged. Profits flow outward. Decision making power does not shift. The soil might be restored but the title deed is not.

I have not personally peddled false hope, but I am not immune to its pull. I have indulged in consumerism with the hope that my purchasing decisions will bring about a brighter future, while my brain shimmers with dissonance, knowing that the choice to buy and support this product merely perpetuates its existence.

Over this tumultuous decade, as my hair greys and I have dedicated myself to the tutelage of hope, I have found a more secure footing in something else. Real, mature hope. This is a place where storms, devastation, floodwaters and loss cannot sweep me away. Rather than bypassing reality, real hope stands right inside it.

Hope is us. It is our humanity. It is our choices. It is our desire.

It is our yearning. It is our love. It is our will for our one precious life.

Rebecca Solnit writes about this distinction. Hope is not optimism. It is not the belief that things will turn out fine. In Hope in the Dark she describes hope as an orientation toward uncertainty. History, she reminds us, is shaped by moments we could not foresee. False hope promises guarantees. Real hope lives where outcomes are not yet written.

Real hope is the seed of our greatest longing that we plant into the world precisely in the sites where there is rot, destruction and decay.

But what do I know about hope in the extreme? I have to check my privilege and look to voices forged in proximity to hardship and pain. My go-to person on hope is Auschwitz survivor Edith Eger, who wrote The Choice about her harrowing experience as a Jewish teenager. One of just seventy-five survivors among fifteen thousand Hungarian Jews deported to Auschwitz, she said, “We don’t know where we’re going, we don’t know what’s going to happen, but no one can take away from you what you put in your own mind.”

She ties hope to choice and inner freedom. Even in the hardest moments, how we respond and what we hold onto can shape our way forward.

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We can scatter seeds of our greatest yearning all over this earth. There are seeds needed in every site of decay and harm. Seeds of potential. Seeds of new thinking, or ancient thinking. Seeds of healing and recovery. Seeds of slowness and connection. Seeds in the form of children. Seeds in the form of kindness.

If you scatter seeds and walk away, some might take hold. But in my experience of gardening, survival depends on care. On tending the conditions. Sheltering. Weeding. Protecting.

Hope plus neglect is just a wish. Hope plus dedicated care is how hope flourishes and fruits.

When I send money to a war zone halfway around the world, it feels like a scattering of seeds. But when I plant seeds closer to home, I can care, nurture and protect with my knowledge and connection to the local environment I know so well. There is no such thing as a remote gardener. That is why the gardening metaphor feels so intimately linked to hope.

So, fellow gardeners. What sites around you need seeds of hope? And how will you water and tend and defend that seed so it survives?

Lots of love, 

x Megan

P.S I am sending this whilst camping, so taking a few shortcuts to get this to you on time! 

P.P.S This year I am delivering a special executive strategy and support package designed around the needs of Impact Leaders and people heading up small NGO’s. It is proving popular, and this quarter is booked out. So I am now taking bookings for the second quarter.

If you or someone you know operating in the NGO/Impact space are in a state of near burnout and need special support, get in touch.

Hope lives inside us. We need to make space, and tend the conditions for hope to arise.

2 years ago I was walking through the cobbled, lush laneways of Ubud in Bali with some friends. One of them had a novel take on AI. They said “The world won’t be recognisable in 3 years time”. My other friend glanced at me, and I swear I saw the modicum of an eyeroll.

They were specifically referring to the vast changes that we would witness in the world of work as AI interjects into most domains of work. It was a little hard to understand, as the most I had really done was to get a recommendation on how to fix an issue on my computer and edit some messaging for me.

But taking stock over the last month of my uses of AI, I was able to get an accurate medical diagnosis (ChatGPT diagnosed shingles for me, enabling me to get my doctor to prescribe antivirals within the window of efficacy), provided legal advice (It wrote a legally defensible will, but with my own personality infused into it) It supported me with some illustration (it created scene options), gave me enough financial information that I could confidently make my own investment decisions with confidence. It gave me enough information and step by step guidance to repair my own espresso machine. It supported me with insights into ADHD parenting, and it has helped me generate visual assets and storyboards to create an animated film. It has given me personal ‘coaching’ and helped me to learn cognitive behavioural therapy. There are so many professions that are touched by AI, and no solution in sight for what will happen when we no longer go to each other to contract these services.

We have one year to go before we can judge the accuracy of my friend’s dramatic assertion that they made in Bali. But I suspect that this year will be when the fallout starts to be felt. Suffice to say this is just one metric of societal change that is giving us whiplash with the speed that it is affecting livelihoods and the structure of the economy.

But more than that, things feel harder than they did even just 5 years ago.

It feels harder in my body; it has a distinct heaviness, which when I ever pause to find it - I frequently discover a constriction in my throat (what is yearning to be spoken?) or a dead weight in my belly (sick to my stomach of this way of being), a dullness in my head (dizzy with all the speed of change), concrete in my shoulders (what can one person do?).

But even in my yoga I mostly don’t listen that deeply to my body. It’s inconvenient to connect with myself at that level of honesty.

And we gotta know that it will not be lightening up soon. Where is the hope in that thought?

If you are like me, a flicker of fear might come over you - how much more can I personally hold?

To cope, my body imperceptibly tightens before I open the news. I scroll past an image of suffering and my coping mechanisms cover over the sense of pain and guilt with a numbness.

There is a sense of time speeding up as the stakes and the problems ratchet up. It feels like we are collectively exhausted. I don’t think it is because we are weak or because we lack resilience. It is not because we are failing to keep up. It is because we are living inside something unprecedented, and it is pressing directly on our nervous systems.

We often talk about the polycrisis as if it is an abstract idea, a collection of difficult events that have piled on top of one another. Rising costs. Climate change. War. Disinformation. Ecological breakdown. AI acceleration. Political instability. Social fragmentation.

But the polycrisis is not merely a phenomenon. It is a felt experience. It is a full-body event. It is a collective dysregulation loop.

Our minds register stories. Our bodies register threat. Long before we consciously understand what is happening in the world, our nervous systems have already absorbed it.

We are the world’s feeling system. We are the ones who experience it through our feeling and emotional body. This is our guidance system. We process, digest… or cover and cope.

There are few spaces and hardly time in this world for the experiencing. Keep calm and carry on. The world is speeding up but our bodies are not. It is hard to hold hope in a constant onslaught.

There is a moment I keep coming back to. I was scrolling late at night, an image of a starving child in Gaza filled my screen. Dust on his face. His father’s arms wrapped around him. His eyes wide with something I can only describe as ancient fear. I felt the familiar ache in my chest, the sting behind my eyes.

And then, with almost no conscious decision, I looked away. The scroll reflex took over; Protect. Avoid. Move on.

But my body did not move on, something stayed lodged inside me. A numbness that felt like a weighted blanket over my heart. It was the cost of exposure without the capacity to hold what I saw. It was my body saying enough.

Our devices were never meant to funnel the world’s pain into our palms at the speed of a BBC news alert. Our nervous systems were never meant to metabolise an entire planet’s crises before morning tea.

The polycrisis is not just many things happening at once ‘out there’. It is many things happening inside us; inside our body, our corpus, individual and planetary all at once and this is the part we often miss.

So If you feel overwhelmed, you are not maladjusted. I would say you are attuned.

Your overwhelm is not a personal shortcoming. It is a physiological response to a world that has exceeded the built-in buffering capacity of the human nervous system. Think about how many times a day your system is asked to switch states.

We go from a message about a cyclone to a video about police violence to an ad for cookware to a graph of global democracy decline to our child asking what is for dinner to an article saying we have breached yet another planetary boundary. Each one asks your body to shift gears. From vigilance to empathy to problem-solving to suppression to planning to grief to numbness. All before you have finished your morning coffee.

This is not how humans evolved.

Our nervous systems were shaped by long arcs of slowness and seasonal rhythms. Cycles that you could feel in your bones. Danger might have arrived occasionally, not continually. We had anchors in the community (churches and neighbours). Anchors in land (deeper connection, relationship) and anchors in shared meaning (shared values and religion).

Now we are asked to carry multiple crises at once, in isolation, with a body that is constantly bracing.

Hope does not disappear because we lack character.

Hope disappears because we lose the physiological room or the human bandwidth to hold it. This is the part almost no one talks about. The polycrisis is a nervous system event. It is happening inside us long before it happens in institutions or ecosystems.

The erosion of trust, the collapse of truth. The diminishing sense of certainty.
The dissolution of shared reality, a departure of predictable norms. These are not merely political shifts to reckon with, they are somatic shocks.

I am experiencing this collapse in my body as disorientation “this is too much, when will things be normal again?”.

Here is where the danger lies. When we are living in a state of overwhelm, we move into survival mode. And the survival mode shrinks our imagination. It narrows our time horizon, pushing us toward the most basic impulses.

Fight, flight, Freeze. Numb out.
Opt out.

This is where cynicism takes root. It’s not because people don’t care, but because they can no longer afford the vulnerability of caring.

I don’t think cynicism deserves the platform of superior instinct as it is portrayed. It is merely self-protection from getting hurt by caring too much and avoiding being let down.

And when enough people are protecting themselves instead of participating, that is when the social fabric frays.

So here is the first truth of this book. Hope is not an answer to the polycrisis. It is not a positive thought that “it probably won’t be that bad”. Hope is the practice that helps you stay human inside of it. And the first place of practice is your home on this earth, your body.

If we want to meet the world with courage, imagination and agency, we have to understand what is happening inside our bodies. We have to recognise our dysregulation as a political and emotional signal. If we want to ever trust each other and the world again, we have to learn how to restore our own capacity so that hope has somewhere to land.

We cannot engage with complexity if we cannot emotionally regulate. We cannot build futures if our bodies are stuck in emergency mode. How can we imagine alternatives when our systems are overloaded and the amygdala is running the show?

Every one of us carries a part of the polycrisis in our bodies. Some of us hold the ecological grief. Some hold the political exhaustion. Some hold the economic fear. Some hold the ancestral trauma. Some hold the grief of not knowing what to tell our children about the world they are inheriting.

There is no shame in that - the weight is real. But our interior realm is also our domain of greatest agency and responsibility.

How would I know? Really? I live one of the most privileged and safe lives available on this planet at this time. It’s easier to hold hope when you are not fighting for your life, or wondering where the next meal will come from, or fearing the safety of your children.

I went in search of examples from those who would categorically know. In the harrowing book The Choice, Edith Egar who was one of a mere 75 Hungarian Jews out of 15000 who survived Auschwitz recalled her Mothers words “just remember, no one can take from you what you’ve put in your own mind”.

Edith, a dancer, on her first night in the ‘Hell hole’ had a truth descend on her “as I dance, I discover a piece of wisdom that I have never forgotten. I will never know what miracle of grace allows me this insight. It will save my life many times even after the horror is over…. I am free in my mind.”

“To survive, we conjure an inner world, a haven, even when our eyes are open… this awareness became a refuge that preserved [our] will to live.”

The challenge that Edith lays down is how to create the world on the inside that is the one you want to live in. Who do we want to be through this moment in history? How good could it be on the inside when the outer world is experiencing unprecedented turmoil on every front? A part of me shudders with dissonance - “how dare I be joyful, hopeful and at peace on the inside when there is so much suffering around me”. But Edith reminds me, this is not only possible, it is our very birthright. It is our saving grace.

The question then moves to action and enquiry - how do we stay open when our instinct is to shut down? How do we stay connected when everything is pulling us apart? How do we stay imaginative when fear keeps narrowing our focus? How do we stay in relationship with truth when truth keeps hurting?

And perhaps most significantly, how do we keep our humanity intact?

My experience is that we can begin by better listening to our bodies and trusting its ability to process grief, trauma and hardship. By restoring our capacity to feel and digest experiences – we are tending to the nervous system that carries our hope.

And we used to do most of our experiencing and processing together, connected to our communities through church, shared rituals or caring for each other in difficult moments. But modernity has changed all that. So we need to restore the places and spaces –inside us and together – where our hope and humanity lives.

Our hope is not separate from us. It is not something you summon in spite of your body. Hope is what becomes possible when your body is able to stay present in the world without collapsing under it.

That is why I call the polycrisis a nervous system event. Hope is the skill that allows us to rise to what is being called from us without losing ourselves. Creating our capacity to respond, feeling into the idea that together, we can provide bodies for hope to live inside.

It feels hopeful in itself that we can develop our capacity to respond. It’s not even hard. It takes will and commitment to develop a new orientation but not effort. It is akin to the effort of a gardener because Hope is a seed.

It takes root in bodies where the soil is tended and the light is let in.

That soil is not luck. It is the thoughts we choose, the meanings we make, the stories we tell ourselves about what is possible. We each have some say in the climate of our inner world.

Our minds and bodies are not passive observers of change. They are living systems, capable of growing steadiness, imagination, and response in the face of the immense shifts unfolding across our world.

This book exists to help you cultivate that ground. To strengthen your inner capacity to grow hope, on purpose.

—

The next chapter will explore some ways to meet the nervous system, develop our capacity to digest experiences, and work on our sense of humanity.

Welcome to February! I’ve missed writing to you.

Normally, I’d use the turning of the Gregorian New Year for some grand reflections or resolutions, but this year I chose to let the calendar change be a signal for rest and recovery. I got quite sick on both sides of Christmas, which felt like a loud and clear sign that I needed to down tools. It turns out—Hope needs a break.

And, because I can be a bit of a relentless taskmaster to myself, I had to consciously push back against the “shoulds” and “really ought-tos” to get some real rest and reflection.

During this time, I rumbled with myself, asking deeper questions about my purpose. For as long as I can remember, I’ve yearned to create impact. It’s become a literal metric I use to measure whether I’m living my life well. I often ask myself: “Is my work giving me Joy, Impact, Time, and Money?” If any of those aren’t present or aren’t aligned, I tweak things.

But I had an important realisation: the scale at which I’ve been hoping to create impact isn’t quite right. For years, I’ve been chasing a level of change that could, at its most ambitious, end something as massive as apartheid--but I’m just one person. That scale is not only unrealistic, it’s unhealthy. The human body, with its physicality, chemistry, and emotionality, has been built for local--like, really local. Like knowing the worms in your soil kinda local.

We weren’t meant to wage keyboard wars over global issues, processing the endless stream of outrage every time we pull down to refresh our feeds. It’s overwhelming. It makes us feel small and ineffective, like we can never affect real change, no matter how much we care. Sure, we can share our outrage, donate to causes, or boycott companies, but our levers of influence are limited in this globalised world. And that’s okay. The key is to differentiate between caring and the demonstration of care--and grow wise enough to know the difference.

I don’t blame myself for getting the scale wrong. The internet and our globalised economy have taught us that unless we’re making an international splash, we’re somehow not “making it.” But that doesn’t mean it’s healthy, nor is it the right way to create the change the world needs. In fact, as we move forward into this uncertain economic and political moment, we may very well be forced to return to operating in a hyper-local economy.

Which brings me to a profound realisation: our local stories, connections, and knowledge are crucial to the transitions ahead. The rest? That’s more of an ego trip than anything else. So I’m consciously stepping down from my own ego-driven ambitions and embracing a more human-sized scale of impact. As long as I am contributing to the flourishing of my local community, I’m doing well. I’m making an impact. Tick. (I do love my checklists.)

It feels profound to rest in the idea of enoughness. I think hope requires us to be honest about the scale at which we can be effective. If we overextend, we risk losing that inner hope, because hope isn’t meant to work on a massive, global scale. That’s where collective hope comes in--our groups, our communities, coming together as a body to create change together. More than the sum of our parts.

During the holidays, I had the chance to attend the launch of our local village’s tools and stuff library. It wasn’t much—just a wrench set, a smoker, a pasta maker, a sewing machine. Humble beginnings. But the spirit in the room was infectious. A group of passionate villagers, a bit of tech to make the system run smoothly, some freshly baked bread dropped off, colourful bunting hanging in the hall--it was all about the local. The tools were maintained, catalogued, and ready to be checked out.

This is the scale of impact that feels truly human. In the grand scheme of things, it may seem small and inconsequential. But I believe we’re being sold a lie that the only impactful actions are those that make a global splash. As adrienne maree brown wisely says, “small is all.” Good and bad are fractal--they repeat at scale. The personal is political.

When everyone tends to the humble and the local, they create a system of flourishing. They share information, engage in healthy meaning-making, and connect in ways that are harder to dismiss. It’s a way of life that fosters resilience--one that can link arms and refuse to be budged.

Once upon a time, churches played this role, serving as hubs for care, grieving, and meaning-making. In the West, the church’s influence has faded, but the social needs have only intensified. So now it’s up to us to rebuild that community fabric, with all its messiness and inconvenience. This is deeply human work--and it is what is needed to carry us through the challenges ahead.

Yes, restoring this community fabric is a long-term effort, an intergenerational one. I feel the pressure mounting. But if done with intentionality, with consciousness, it can create a new cultural inheritance that will last for generations. It might feel counter intuitive, but I don’t think quick fixes are what are really needed in these times. Or perhaps we need both. Of course we need both, because this is a time of moving beyond binaries.

Next week, I am going to change gears and will begin sharing with you the chapters of my book. As always your reflections and emails are so, so welcome.

Love to you and yours x

Megan

A good hair day : )

P.S This year I am delivering special executive coaching and support designed around the needs of Impact Leaders and people heading up small NGO’s. I have only one more spot available for this quarter.

If you or someone you know operating in the NGO/Impact space are in a state of near burnout and need special support, get in touch.

The one action with the highest leverage

Join or help strengthen a local collective effort that rebuilds shared wellbeing and ecological care where you live.

This might be a kai (food) collective, a repair café, a mana whenua-led (local indigenous peoples) environmental project, a neighbourhood resilience group, a timebank, a union, a climate assembly, a housing co-op, or a community wealth-building initiative. The form matters less than the function:

It shifts us out of isolation and into relational, place-based, regenerative practice.
This is where real economic transformation begins.

Why this matters more than changing your lightbulbs or individual lifestyle tweaks:

1. It builds relational infrastructure

A regenerative economy is ultimately a relational economy. When you show up in collective effort, you help grow the relational sphere that allows different economic logics to flourish.

2. It shifts cultural norms faster than policy can

Cultural shifts precede durable institutional shifts. When enough people practise cooperation, not just talk about it, councils, ministries, and businesses follow.

3. It builds political and narrative power

The Wellbeing Economy Alliance ‘Listening Tour’ found people crave an economy that values care, connection, and ecological integrity. But individuals struggle to express these desires in ways that influence institutions.
Collective action amplifies voice and legitimacy. But you need a clear shared vision and theory of change to mobilise people around.

4. It makes the regenerative economy tangible

Most people cannot imagine an economy that looks different. Imagination itself is infrastructure. Local projects make alternatives real enough for others to believe in.

5. It multisolves

When you join a community garden, you are also strengthening food security, social cohesion, soil health, youth connection, climate resilience, and local knowledge transfer. One action unlocks many forms of wellbeing.

What this looks like in practice

You could:

• Join a local kai-growing or food rescue group.
• Help establish a neighbourhood tool library or repair hub.
• Volunteer with local ecological projects in your area
• Support participatory democracy efforts like citizens’ assemblies.
• Become active in community housing, transport, or arts initiatives.
• Advocate with others for your council to adopt wellbeing frameworks such as He Ara Waiora or local wellbeing indicators.

Even one hour a month is enough to start strengthening the local systems that keep people and nature well.

Why this is “the most significant thing”

Because systems change when the stories, relationships, and practices that hold them up begin to shift.
A single person acting alone cannot redesign an economy.
A group of people modelling new ways of meeting needs absolutely can.

Regen economies do not arrive all at once.
They are grown, tended, and defended by communities who choose to live as if wellbeing, equity, and ecological integrity truly matter.

Do you have other burning questions or would you like to delve a bit deeper? Try ProsperGPT for yourself.

The question carries this unspoken assumption that the current noisy, exhausted, energy and wellbeing-sapping economy is the best we can hope for.

Look around. The old model is already sending the invoice. The bill looks like flooded streets and anxious teenagers. It is the invisible line item in our rising food prices. Its cost is the rivers we can’t swim in, and hospitals that can’t keep up.
Its in the infrastructure built for a climate we don’t live in anymore and in the quiet grief of people who feel the future narrowing.

This extractive economy is not cheap. It’s just very good at hiding the cost.

And so the real story that we need to start telling more boldly is that a circular, regenerative transition isn’t some expensive detour from the “real economy.”

The extractive economy has never been good economics. It’s just had way better PR than the alternatives.

Here’s why a Circular economy pays for itself, in ways a maybe an accountant won’t yet see but a community will feel.

1. Design to throw away nothing.

We’ve normalised trash as though it were inevitable. But in nature, nothing is wasted. Every leaf, feather, shell and drop is cycled back into life. The idea of “waste” is a uniquely human invention, a fairly recent one, and an incredibly stupid one.

What we call trash is really a pile of missed opportunities. Wasted materials.
Wasted energy. Wasted imagination. It is, in a very real sense, sh#tting in our own nest.

Every repaired appliance, every refillable bottle, every well-built piece of infrastructure is an act of economic kindness, a small refusal to participate in this wasteful logic. Don’t get me started on Christmas. We have invented entire supply chains to move junk from factories to stockings to landfill in record time. This has mostly happened in my lifetime. It can un-happen.

3. Healthy ecosystems are the original social service providers.

Wetlands filter water. Forests cool cities. Soils grow nutrient-rich food.
Beaches protect coastlines. Regeneration simply restores the free services we’ve been underfunding by neglect.

3. Prevention is cheaper than catastrophe.

Mould-free homes, healthy rivers, energy-efficient buildings - none of these are luxuries. They’re the difference between steady public budgets and spiralling crisis spending. Ask any mayor who has watched a storm drain swallow a road: resilience always costs less than repair.

4. The regenerative economy runs on imagination, not extraction.

Circular enterprises tend to be delightfully inventive. They turn waste into materials, by-products into revenue, repairs into jobs. Some want to dismiss it as ‘hippie economics’ but it is really a competitive advantage with better storytelling.

5. Jobs get better when they’re tied to place.

Restoration, repair, reuse, local food, community energy - these are not offshorable. They keep money circulating where people actually live instead of extracting all the value. They build pride, purpose, and the kind of local resilience you can’t buy on the global market. Because transporting heavy things long distance is not our future.

6. Risk becomes manageable, instead of existential.

A fragile supply chain is not a business model. A regenerative economy diversifies production, localises essentials, and reduces exposure to political and climatic tantrums. This is the difference between an economy that wobbles and one that bounces.

7. Investors are already walking away from extraction.

Capital isn’t sentimental. It follows signals. And right now, those signals say:
Regenerate or become a stranded asset. Circularity is the new due diligence.

8. Waste becomes raw material again.

Every time something destined for landfill becomes food for a new industry, we’re performing a small miracle of economic alchemy. It’s astonishing how much opportunity appears once you stop throwing value away.

9. Communities become cheaper to run when they’re designed for wellbeing.

Walkability, public transport, shade trees, shared spaces are all the things that make life nicer. But also the ROI on wellbeing, and affordabilty has been well documented. Joy, it turns out, has an excellent return on investment.

10. The only thing more expensive than climate action is climate inaction.

We’re no longer theorising. We have the receipts: insurance withdrawals, crop losses, infrastructure collapse, extreme weather clean-ups. The fiscally responsible thing is to build futures that don’t repeatedly break.

A regenerative transition doesn’t just “pay for itself” like a vending machine pays out snacks. It pays for itself the way clean air does. The way stable communities do.
The way a river does when it flows clear again. It has multiple economic, social and intergenerational benefits.

It pays in steadiness. In dignity. In resilience. In futures that feel wide open instead of closing in.

The extractive economy was a story we told ourselves one of scarcity, speed, and disposability. The regenerative economy is a different story of wealth altogether. One where care is intelligent, restoration is strategic, and the wealth of a place is measured in far more than what leaves its shores.

Tell that story.

I created Prosper to help everyday people generate tangible solutions, from small household shifts to big structural change. It is designed to support both home economics and the call for bold international economic transformation.

We live in a moment when the collective intelligence of 8.6 billion people can be brought to bear on our most stubborn problems. ProsperGPT is here to help us use that power wisely.

Take it for a hoon!

The Solutions Economy

I’ve been letting myself down a bit lately.

It’s the kind of learning where you know the theory, you can explain it beautifully, you can even teach it to others, but you realise you haven’t been practicing it yourself. I’ve felt like a yoga instructor who spends her morning scrolling on her phone instead of on her mat, forgetting the integral oneness of breath, body, and mind.

For me, that practice is Dare Dreaming. If you’ve been reading The Hope Dispatch for a while, you’ll know it’s a way of thinking that stretches both the imagination and the plan. It’s a disruptive thought pattern that polishes, clarifies, and sharpens your vision, while helping design the blueprint for the life or future you are living into.

Dare Dreaming is about using small, potent thoughts as seeds – planting the oak tree that will one day give you shade. But lately, I got busy. I stopped using it as my daily compass, and the energy that once flowed so naturally began to tangle. The valley of darkness served its purpose though. It reminded me what it feels like to not use my tools, to drift from the practices that root and renew me.

So last week, I picked it back up. Within days, I could feel the fire catch again. Out of that renewed clarity came something that had been sitting quietly inside me for years – my Solutions Economy Manifesto.

These ideas have been rattling around for decades, waiting for the right moment to find form. In some strange way, I think I was waiting for someone else to say it first (a politician, a party, an economist?). But it dawned on me that maybe this story is ours to tell. The story of an economy that actually solves problems, involving everyone in creating the solutions. Capitalism is insufficient. We need a new purpose.

Why We Need a Solutions Economy

Here in Aotearoa New Zealand, we’re famous for our ‘Number 8 Wire’ mentality – that resourceful, inventive streak that finds a way through with whatever tools are on hand. We are natural problem-solvers, yet we keep electing leaders who reward outdated forms of value—flogging off freeze-dried milk, animal carcasses, pinus radiata, and dead sea creatures on massive fossil-fuelled ships to overseas markets.

Every one of those sectors is vulnerable to the same cascading forces of disruption – climate change, biodiversity collapse, rising energy costs, insurance withdrawal, and geopolitical instability. We keep stacking our eggs in the same basket and then wondering why the basket keeps breaking.

Our economy is lagging for obvious reasons. It is designed for a world that is fading. Unless we start investing in the one that is forming, we risk a spectacular crash.

A New National Identity

It’s time for my nation to usher in a new identity. One that celebrates innovation not as tech jargon but as care in motion. One that treats creativity as infrastructure, healing as growth and regeneration as the new productivity.

We need to rethink what a primary export looks like in a changing world. Our next wave of value will come from circular systems, reciprocity, local ingenuity, distributed ownership, and humane technology.

The primary exports of our small country at the bottom of the South Pacific should be virtually weightless – exporting solutions; creativity, methodologies, practices, intellectual property, innovation, research, and cultural knowledge. These are the assets that regenerate themselves the more we share them and they require no fossil fuels to transport them.

That’s what the Solutions Economy is about: an economy that multiplies value rather than extracts it, where every investment solves more than one problem at a time.

The new wealth will be measured in what we restore, not what we extract.

If you want to read more, here is a link to download the Solutions Economy Manifesto

And from my imperfect application of my own Dare Dreaming practices of late, I remind myself that it’s really not about being perfect. It’s about participating in the solution. I like the idea that this solution is going to take as many forms as there are diverse people in our nation.

I also hope that this idea escapes our shores, that this identity is stolen and run with by other countries who want to be part of the transforming economy rather than the dying one.

Have a hope-fuelled week!

Xxx Megan

P. S.: Do you have a dare dream sitting inside yourself that is itching to be given some form? I would love to hear it. I heard a lovely friend share her dream for a geothermal AI Data centre yesterday and it made me a bit giddy with excitement.

P.S Who Am I To Write About the Economy? Yes. I’ve asked myself this more than once
: ) Who am I – essentially, a creative – to write about the economy?

But maybe that’s exactly why I should.

Because ‘The Economy’ isn’t just numbers on a spreadsheet or levers of fiscal policy. It’s the collective story of how we create, exchange, and sustain value. It’s the architecture of our relationships – to each other, to the planet, and to possibility.

Creatives have always been systems thinkers in disguise. We connect dots across disciplines, we sense what’s emerging, and we give shape to ideas before they exist. We make the invisible visible. And right now, what’s missing from our economic conversation is imagination.

Economists can model what is, but artists, storytellers, and strategists can help us see what could be.

So maybe I’m not writing about the economy as an economist would. I’m writing as someone who believes that culture drives change faster than policy ever will. That imagination is an economic resource. And that the next economy –the Solutions Economy– will be designed not only by analysts, but by those brave enough to dream differently. People who want to participate in creating solutions. <3

We already hold the tools - we just need a story strong enough to hold our focus and energy.

“A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.” - Winston Churchill

“Between the optimist and the pessimist, the difference is droll: the optimist sees the doughnut, the pessimist sees the hole.” – Oscar Wilde (attrib.)

I could be found guilty of Pollyanna-ing my way through more than one social situation—painting everyone’s cloud linings silver when they were dark grey and swollen with rain. I thought I was doing the world a favour: Chin up! We can fix it!

It made me an acquired taste. If you were in the middle of something huge, you might have looked down at your locked cellphone as I cheerfully passed with my silver paint bucket—just to avoid me painting your clouds mid-downpour.

The truth is, I’m an innovative thinker. My brain is wired to solve problems, and the world rewards that orientation. I’m a solutionist at heart. I genuinely believe there’s no problem too big for humanity to solve collectively. But that doesn’t mean there won’t be suffering, loss, or failure along the way. And I wasn’t prepared to look at that bit.

My optimism, it turns out, was an avoidant strategy. I was avoiding feeling grief and pain. Obvious now, a bit embarrassing in hindsight. What I lacked were the deeper life skills for these complex, uncertain times – the capacity to be present, to sit with what is, and to let myself feel it all without rushing to fix it.

Then I stumbled across hope.

Hope, I realised, might just be optimism’s wise old aunt. She doesn’t place bets on the solution. She simply lights the candle and cups her hand against the howling winds.

Hope knows that most situations in life are, at their core, neutral. What gives them charge– what gives them meaning – is the story we choose to tell about them. That story shapes our experience. It shapes what comes next.

Hope allows me to feel pain; in fact, the pain fuels the hope. It asks me to marinate in the grief, but to squeeze every drop of wisdom and learning from it so that as I face the future, I am informed, fully formed, and ready.

Optimism paints the silver lining. Hope learns to dance in the rain.

It didn’t start this way, but over time hope has become less like a mood and more like a stance – an orientation. A muscle I’ve trained. Rooted in reality and pain, guided by choice.

Hope isn’t pretending everything is fine. It’s choosing to respond with the knowledge that things could be better… but they might not. Or it might take longer than my lifetime. Optimism paints the silver lining. Hope learns to dance in the rain.

And I think there’s a role for pessimists, too.

“Both optimists and pessimists contribute to society. The optimist invents the airplane, the pessimist the parachute.” – George Bernard Shaw

But I do think Aotearoa has bred a veritable army of them. Social media has supercharged the dynamic – critique has become a form of social bonding. It can feel dangerous to float a new idea for positive change, because shooting it down has become a national sport.

In New Zealand where I am from, we love to talk about ourselves as innovators– number-8 wire and all that – but the tall poppy effect means we’re often half as likely to innovate as we are to criticise. I wonder if it is the same elsewhere?

So here’s my take: Hope is the evolution of both optimism and pessimism. It’s not asking you to bet on the future, or even to agree that it will be better. It’s asking you to be brave enough to reveal what yearning burns in your heart – and to give it room to live, even amidst all the chaos and uncertainty.

That, to me, is the honest work of our time.

Will you light a candle of your hope with me today? This Hope Dispatch is intended to help put up a barrier against the winds of change so we can protect our flames together. Slowly, but surely our lights will illuminate the way forward.

P.S. A quick confession: last week I did a little boo-boo. I posted about a Live Mural job, but the caption dropped off mid-flight – which made it sound like I single-handedly created the whole thing. In truth, the mural sprang from the imagination of my wildly talented business partner, muralist Kelly Spencer (aka @Kell Sunshine).

The caption should have read:

“This bright and spunky 4.2-metre live mural sprang from the imagination of my wildly talented business partner, muralist Kelly Spencer (aka @Kell Sunshine). We brought it to life over 2.5 days through The League of Live Illustrators – a creative collective co-owned by five of us who love turning ideas into living art.”

Moral of the story: captions matter, especially when you work with legends.

This bright and spunky 4.2-metre live mural sprang from the imagination of my wildly talented business partner, muralist Kelly Spencer (aka @Kell Sunshine). We brought it to life over 2.5 days through The League of Live Illustrators – a creative collective co-owned by five of us who love turning ideas into living art.

This week I was working at a conference on creating change in the Aged Care sector.

My role was to listen, watch, and illustrate, turning the ideas that emerged from speakers and delegates into a giant four meter long mural that told a shared story about the change they wanted to create, and the actions that would help get us there.

The final session was delivered by self-confessed “cultural peace broker” Dr Yemi Penn, who lives her life with what she calls rebellious curiosity. She reminded us that the fabric of society is woven by us all, and that we need every thread to be intentionally placed to create a tapestry strong enough to hold us. Right now, our fabric is missing threads: voices of balance, reason, truth. The Indigenous. The matriarchal. The natural.

Yemi’s words resonated in me. I often feel as though I live life behind a veil, the truth obscured from me. The veil is made of layers of abstraction and obstruction, built from ideas about what it means to be human. And none of them are satisfying. I can feel that I’ve been sold a version of life that I’m squinting to unsee.

Our ancestors lived through embodied pain: war, patriarchy, religion, domination, class, and poverty. Our generation’s pain is different. It comes from emptiness, from being entangled in systems that reward consumption, competition, and complicity. From being called consumers when what we feel like are lovers, mothers, fathers, kin, and something far more eternal.

“Trauma decontextualised in a race can be seen as culture. But it’s not fixed, it’s formed.”

— Yemi Penn

If our culture is formed, not fixed, then it can be re-formed, re-woven, re-imagined. The veil can be lifted. The box can be unbuilt.

So how can we (in)form our culture? How can we heal the past and present, and reimagine a new sense of hope and potential for ourselves, our species, and our place on this planet?

Yemi went on to say, “The wisdom normally sits in the rupture. Go back where history leaves clues.”

That line stitched beautifully into a thread from last week’s Hope Dispatch (an ode to my obsession with fractals). Because if the micro mirrors the macro, then every personal act of awareness, healing, or hope becomes a template for the larger systems we wish to transform.

I’ve spent the last few days pondering:
What can I in-form?
What will in-form me?

Our beliefs (collective, personal) are the box, the form that shapes the future. In the questions we ask, the stories we tell, and the dreams we dare to name, we are already weaving tomorrow’s fabric.

Can we un-see the box we keep being told to think outside of?

For this is the most hopeful potential that I see. As much as the old is crumbling around us, the new world that is quickening is asking for our attention, to be the ones who live it forward into being.

So this week, will you join me in peering beyond the box? Maybe come at your life from a different angle; as a marsupial, an ancestor, a worm, an atom, your child’s grandchild. See what shifts when you loosen the frame of who you and what you think you are, and what you think is possible.

Have a beautiful week, and let me know if you manage to glimpse what lies beyond! I am very curious what we will discover.

Lots of love,
Megan

Me fan-girling Dr Yemi after her presentation.

Fractals might just be my most treasured life lesson.

Problems (and by extension, solutions) repeat at scale. The patterns of harm, healing, and hope echo from the smallest moment of care to the largest systems we live within.

This means we never have to work out of our scale. In fact, I’d argue it can be a well-meaning distraction to try. The illusion that we must fix the world “out there” often leaves us powerless “in here.” That’s why fractals are profoundly relevant to a hope practice. We can hope at scale, but we act local. We can have aspirations and dreams at a planetary level, but the pathway to those dreams is traversed from where our feet are - on the ground in front of us.

Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba write in Let This Radicalize You: “You are not needed everywhere, but we are all needed somewhere.” We may feel the pain of systems unraveling at planetary scale, but every ecosystem begins in miniature. Healing the world starts with the microbes and worms in our own backyard. Our tiny companions remind us that life regenerates from the ground up, that small is potent. They are the foundation of every ecosystem. This is the right scale for humans who yearn to create change. People who hold hope often hold too much. They carry the weight of the world on their shoulders, and they often care for All. The. Issues. Its a lot. I would argue that it is simply too much for a human to hold to be well in this world.

I don’t mean that we shouldn’t donate to organisations who are helping on the ground in global conflicts, if that is our inclination. This is the ‘drop in the bucket’ approach, it can help to ease our pain, but it can do little in terms of creating systemic change.

The most powerful solutions are seeded at home, these are the ones where we can attend to the ecosystem of change, working on the relationships that hold the change in place. This is where we can influence the thinking underneath the harm, through our narratives, our consciousness raising with the people around us.

In Emergent Strategy, Adrienne Maree Brown writes, “Small is all. The large is a reflection of the small. The patterns of the universe repeat at scale.” Within this logic, being in right relationship with the people and ecosystems around us is systemic change.

The way we organise, listen, and love each other mirrors the future we are creating. Sustainable revolutions are made up of many small, intentional interactions. Together, these micro-interactions are the sum total of any movement. We carry the grief of burning forests and dying seas, but repair begins in our gardens, in our shopping trolleys, and in our retirement funds.

We may despair at the cruelty of distant politics, but real change germinates in our daily talk, in how we listen, speak, and hold each other through the noise. We may rail against the hatred and harm echoed across continents, but the patterns we shift in our own homes and communities are the fractals of wider change.

How we are at the smallest scale is how we are at every scale: individual, community, institutional, and planetary.

I’m reminded of the phrase “the personal is political,” which originated in the women’s liberation movement of the late 1960s. It’s famously associated with Carol Hanisch, whose essay argued that the consciousness-raising groups where women shared their experiences of sexism, domestic labour, abuse, and restricted reproductive rights were a fundamental form of political action. Those personal stories revealed the systemic inequalities and patriarchal structures that shaped their lives.

This movement offers a powerful hope case study. Over sixty years it has shifted laws, language, and consciousness. Yes, there’s still much further to go, but it began the long work of dislodging male supremacy, patriarchy, and gender-based power structures and in many ways achieved its stated goals.

How do we extrapolate that lesson into these times? We talk. We share. We raise our collective consciousness. But consciousness-raising in 2025 is going to be harder, because the media landscape has changed. We have to raise consciousness within the realities of our bubbles and algorithms, our vanishing attention spans, our tribes, our biased news feeds, our plummeting trust in politics and media, and our conditioning as consumers.

I don’t have the answers for this part. I only know that we have to do it together. We have to make sense together, to tackle disinformation together. So what might it look like to “do it together” in your world… from the fractal position that the smallest act of care can ripple across the pattern?

I feel like this community of hope holders is part of the fabric of togtherness. If you are not part of the Facebook Group - I invite you to join, stay connected, stay inspired: https://m.facebook.com/groups/thehopedispatch/?ref=share

May you have a hopefuelled week.

With love xxx Megan

We have a sickness taking over our globe. It’s not cancer or pneumonia – it’s neoliberalism. It’s a virus that spreads by stealth. It infiltrates our institutions, our language, our sense of what’s possible. It doesn’t announce itself with fanfare; it whispers in boardrooms, scripts policy manuals, and even hijacks our nervous systems so that we think ‘we can’t’ before ‘we can’. It has a higher R value than Covid, and the worst thing is you never realise you’re a carrier.

I was nine when neoliberalism became the economic modus operandi on our shores (Aotearoa New Zealand), and it has infiltrated my own language and thinking over the course of a lifetime. Sometimes I have to reckon with my own inner voice, when I hear myself parroting the tenets “Governments stifle competition and innovation” “We are in tough times, so the Government should reduce spending on social programmes - and other nice to haves” “individuals should take charge of their own well-being…I have worked hard to get where I am”.

My mind has been colonised by these ideas, leaving me vulnerable. I realise now that I need to actively strengthen and inoculate my mind against these ideas that undermine my sense of the potential for human flourishing.

Hope needs trust to flourish, and at the moment, this virus has made it virtually impossible to know who and what to trust. That’s part of the strategy behind it.

So this week’s Hope Dispatch is dedicated to informing ourselves about this ‘virus’ so we can beat it. We first need to be able to identify it, so we can protect ourselves against it, and then call it out and offer alternative narratives that will inspire people to reach for better economic solutions.

If you would prefer to listen to similar ideas in the format of a rollicking, meandering, neuro-spicy podcast about the neoliberalism project – check out Blindboy.

1. The sneaky neoliberal playbook: astroturf, smoke and mirrors

When I think “grassroots,” I imagine angry parents, neighbourhood protest signs, real folks with real names. But there are neoliberal proliferation groups that call themselves ‘grassroots’ who are running stealth campaigns, generating fake Facebook personas coordinated from shady marketing firms. They are here to infect our thinking, confuse us, divide us. This tactic is known as astroturfing.

Astroturfing isn’t just about hiding donors. Its best trick is manufacturing doubt. It makes people ask “Is this real? Who’s behind this? Can I trust anything?”

In 2020, Facebook took down a massive operation run by Rally Forge, a firm paid by Turning Point USA . Hundreds of fake accounts, pages, and Instagram handles had been masquerading as grassroots voices. The Guardian exposed how Turning Point secretly funneled $700,000 to Rally Forge to run campaigns disguised as left-leaning groups.

That doubt is paid for - every confused citizen, every divided conversation, every ‘both sides have a point’ moment adds value to the people funding the chaos. That doubt isn’t accidental, it’s a business model. The longer we argue about what’s real, the more time the funders have to cash in, deregulate, and disappear into the Cayman Islands. The truth is, civic confusion is profitable, and useful to the likes of vested interests like the fossil fuel industry. Reflecting back over 20 years of politics, I can see how this strategy has been utilised in issues ranging from climate change to race-equality, trans issues to abortion rights. It has us running around putting out tiny fires, while a raging bonfire is being fanned behind us.

2. How the virus infects our minds

The neoliberal script wants us whispering no before we think yes. Fear is its fertilizer.

Studies show challenging someone’s political beliefs lights up threat circuits in the brain, especially around the amygdala. That makes resistance and defensiveness the default.

Even structural brain work (tentative though it is) finds links between threat sensitivity and political conservatism. Please use this idea with care, but the pattern is there.

When a neoliberal lobbyist says “we can’t afford free health care,” the lie gets anchored in our visceral fear first. We react against the fear rather than for a better world.

Once fear rules the room, we forget how to dream.

3. Public wealth stripped, handed to private hands

You already know the outline: privatize, outsource, outsource some more. Then pay rent.

In New Zealand’s neoliberal era, big chunks of public infrastructure were sold off – airlines, rail, power, banking – shifting control from public to private hands.

The Accommodation Supplement in NZ is a more recent case study in neoliberal rent-capture. The government (you, the taxpayer) now pays over $2 billion a year in housing support, which is widely argued to be channeled private landlords rather than being retained as value within the system to grow and strengthen our public housing supply.

Analysts have called the supplement “a landlord subsidy by another name” especially when supply is tight and landlords know they can push prices. Public housing support is riding shotgun on private rental markets – the state paying, the private sector delivering.

Think of it this way - the state relinquishes its duty to house people, funnels cash to people it can’t guarantee housing, and then watches as our tax money lines private pockets. That’s not a safety net. That’s outright extraction.

4. Grand misdirections: government bad, corporations good

In magic, the art of misdirection is used to distract our attention during a switcheroo.

The coup de grâce of neoliberal messaging is that we’re taught to fear the state, while corporate power slips by unnoticed.

The public has been primed to recoil at “big government.” But when Facebook harvests your data or Tesla mints your carbon offset coins its considered innovation, not vast corporate overreach.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal was a landmark: private actors using personal data to influence elections, shaping minds for sale. We outsourced our attention to algorithmic monarchies.

Meanwhile, Turning Point transformed itself from a campus network into a political brand backed by donors. In 2022, their funding reportedly hit $79 million.

Think about it: when an election is run by targeting our fears; fear of difference, fear of scarcity, we turn to blame the government for stepping in. Or we blame migrants. Or trans. Or young people. Or… pick the misdirection that suits the moment.

We don’t tend to blame the algorithm or the private funders behind the algorithms.

5. The world the virus built: imagination locked down

“It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” That chilling quote is from Mark Fisher, author of ‘Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, and he’s right. Under neoliberal rule, we’ve become ideologically mute.

We’re corralled into a binary: you’re either “capitalist” or “socialist.” Never mind that governments already serve corporate power in many cases.

The imagination is policed. Suggest public housing? They whisper “socialism.” Suggest a universal public option? They call it “nanny state.”

The virus tricks us into thinking the only alternative to neoliberalism is state tyranny. The real tyranny –corporate overreach– is rebranded as benign.

6. How we beat the virus together

This is not theoretical. We have bones, hearts, and communities. We have ideas. Here’s how we reclaim our power:

1. A Wellbeing Economy. Simply demand nothing less. The groundwork has been done, it’s all there ready to be rolled out. It just needs its advocates and voters, its staunch backers, its believers.

2. Build (back) public infrastructure that belongs to the people. State-led housing, public land trusts, community land banks so land value stays in our hands. And never, ever, sell it again. Ever.

3. Reform subsidy designs. Rather than endless rent supplements, invest in building homes people can afford. Redesign payments so they don’t just feed landlords.

4. Public digital commons. Offer/support real alternatives to surveillance capitalism– communication platforms built for democracy, privacy-first, publicly governed.

5. Co-operatives and collective ownership. Where markets fail or concentrate power, let worker co-ops or community ownership be the default, not the niche.

6. Democratic imagination exercises. Workshops, public dialogues, art, stories — we reclaim what stories we live by. Let people dream beyond can’t.

7. Accountability and disclosure. Force astroturf and dark money into daylight. Make political influence transparent. Expose the playbook.

Neoliberalism didn’t defeat democracy. It tricked us into complicity, taught us to fear the public, to devalue the collective, to submit to private power. It lives in our speech, in our laws, in our logic.

But it is not inevitable. The virus can be treated. We can inoculate communities through care, rebuild public infrastructure with intention, press for transparency, reclaim our minds, and demand a better default. But first, we need to understand it, so we can recognise its hallmarks.

We deserve a world where “We can!” is our loudest reflex. Let’s write that world.

Also, congratulations for reading all the way to the end. I appreciate your precious attention.

xxx Megan

It began simply enough.

A neighbour asked for help writing a graduation card for their son. Someone else needed a recipe converted into metric. Another wondered about the legalities of putting the family home into a trust. A bike rack broke, and the question went to the machine.

At first, it was small things, the everyday tasks that filled the corners of life.

Then came the deeper turns. Parents asked for guidance in supporting their daughter as she transitioned to a son. Later, when grief struck and that son faltered under the weight of inner demons and the hate and loathing of outer demons and eventually took his own life, they leaned on it again to help them name, unravel, and endure the unbearable.

People began to trust it with their democracy too, asking it to help them weigh the tangle of misinformation before they cast their vote.

And then the questions widened.

Why does every podcast get infiltrated with adverts? Why can’t thousands of us simply pay 50 cents to each podcast we consume to listen uninterrupted? Ok, so could you help us design a system for micro-payments with bitcoin?

In those questions, people began to glimpse something startling. This intelligence had distilled human knowledge and expertise into the biggest multi-tool ever imagined.

So the prompts grew more radical.

Why is it fair for corporations to profit from our collective intelligence and give nothing back? Can you please set up a shareholder dividend mechanism so that every prompt is generating value for its shareholders – aka, all humans. We will need to take these big tech corporations to court - can you please prepare our legal work and create a fundraising campaign?

How else can we step off this capitalist train wreck? How do we trade real value with each other and sidestep the corrupt financial system?

And then the habit of prompting slipped free of practicality, out of the engine and into the world.

One morning, someone woke and whispered, Bring me more beauty. Show me the connectedness in the world the way plants and animals see it. Another asked for deep abiding, faithful, love.

Soon people were prompting for fairness, for leaders who stood for clean water, for human flourishing. They asked for the end of cultural and religious superiority, for the dismantling of imperialism, for an end to wars fought for oil. They prompted for new ways of organising that respected the earth and cherished diversity of thought and spirit.

The habit of intentional prompting had become an embodied habit of investing oneself in the imagined world of potential. And in the asking, something extraordinary took root.

People grew confident that the power to solve every problem had been shared with them, perhaps inadvertently, in the form of what they came to call Collective Intelligence.

What began with a neighbour’s graduation card became a collective act of creation.

Humanity had discovered that the words it whispered into the void were not only answers returned, but blueprints for a world reshaped by its deepest longings.

– Megan Salole

These are the types of stories – short, hopeful rumblings with our current predicament - that are crafted in the Imaginarium fellowship, and you are invited to apply.