Dear Friends,
I’m experimenting with something new here.
My monthly essays take time to bake — and I love that rhythm. But I’m always tracking signals, noticing patterns, following threads, and wanting to share more of that with you in real time.
Ideas don’t always arrive on an essay schedule. And some show up with urgency, not polish.
So every couple of weeks, I’ll send some Sunday Signals: a few things that feel alive, revealing, and worthy of our attention — trustworthy currents beneath the noise.
Think of these as dispatches from beyond the static: small clues, deeper truths, and the occasional quiet part said out loud.
This first edition comes from TED 2026, where I spent last week surrounded by unexpected ideas, unsettling tensions, and the unmistakable sense that the future is arriving unevenly — and faster than any of us can metabolize.
I’m grateful you’re here,
Abby
What’s kept me returning to TED through the years isn’t the spectacle. It’s the edge — the place where what I think I know gives way to what I can’t unsee.
Two experiences rearranged me this time.
The first was a talk by Jessica Irwin, who was born with cerebral palsy and has never been able to speak. Using a digital voice, she invited us to reconsider what intelligence looks like beyond our narrow assumptions and inherited definitions.
The second was the first AI-generated TED Talk: technically dazzling, visually mesmerizing… and viscerally unsatisfying.
It deepened my conviction that, whatever machines can simulate, we will keep searching for a living pulse.
Randall Lane unveiled a new approach to Forbes’ signature billionaire:
▷ True Net Worth = Net Worth + Appreciated Donations
What I love about this: it takes status, recognition, and competition — the very forces that built the game — and quietly redirects them toward contribution.
Because money doesn’t move on its own.
It moves downstream of what we value, fear, believe.
By making generosity a path up the list, not down, it begins to change the story of what it means to win.
And yet, as long as wealth is defined only by money, we’re still trapped inside an old spell. Real wealth is also relational, spiritual, ecological, communal.
The more radical reframe? Measuring wealth not by how much money we have (or give away), but by how much life moves through us.
Carissa Véliz offered one of the clearest warnings of the week:
▷ Predictions don’t just describe the future. They shape it.
The moment someone declares something “inevitable,” imagination narrows, agency shrinks, and power concentrates.
She urges us to be wary of prophets with profit motives — those selling certainty while quietly benefiting from our surrender to it.
The future isn’t just being described. It’s being sold.
And the moment we remember that, our agency returns.
The breakthroughs shared on the TED stage can't be separated from their shadows (whether or not the speaker chose to name them):
Drones for safety….and surveillance.
Genetic testing to prevent disease….and design humans.
AI systems beginning to act, build, and decide…unencumbered.
The future is being written fast — less by policymakers, more those coding it. And the danger of what I’ve called amoral ambition is compounding.
The real question isn’t whether these tools are powerful. It is whether we’ll be wise enough to align their power with life before the win-at-all-costs incentive structure makes that choice for us.
During each dazzling and disorienting tech talk, I kept thinking about this new film:
🎬 The AI Doc: How I Became an Apocaloptimist
It makes the arms race now underway — and its stakes — startlingly concrete. I can’t recommend it more highly.
Beneath all the noise about AI, disruption and the future of everything, there’s deeper shift underway. More and more of us are outgrowing the version of success built on clarity, control, status, and measurable outcomes.
The old game still has prestige. It just has less life in it.
My recent conversation on The Breadwinners podcast explored a question beneath so much modern striving:
🎤︎︎ What does it mean to build a life — not just a career?
If that question is alive for you too, give it a listen.
Thoughts on this approach? I’d love to hear your feedback.
And if there are signals you think I should be tracking and amplifying, send them my way. ✨
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