“It’s been a rough year for many of us trying to build a better system, a better world, or simply a better path forward.”
But underneath the noise, something important is shifting, and it’s asking more of our species than ever before.
I’m not going to lie, this year has been rough.
Not your usual professional rollercoaster. Something far more unnerving, like a rusty coaster... with a wobbly harness… and a blindfold… in a storm...chased by a dragon.
The kind of year where you catch yourself staring at your empty cup, trying to read the tea leaves for the next twenty-five years based on the last twenty-five you’ve already burned through. (Is this mid-life?)
Music, however, I’m glad to say has been a lifeline. Songs hit differently when they mirror the season you’re in. So, here’s to all the songwriters who’ve felt this long before I truly understood it, and a reminder the importance of the arts in our daily lives.
Anyway, onto the article.
Two years ago, when I took the leap to build a practice around food systems, tourism, and regenerative design, the road ahead wasn’t simple, but it was at least clear.
We had 2030 and 2050 climate targets. Innovation was lining up. Capital was forming. I was addressing a gap.
My role felt straightforward: work across value chains, help people adapt, connect science and nature-based solutions to operations, and nudge the whole thing forward.
Simples, right?
Then came this year.
A year where the floor kept shifting underfoot, tiles sliding, lights flickering, no stable footing anywhere.
And I know I’m not the only one who felt it.
It’s been a systemic slowdown, and many of us have been on fumes, while people are sitting and waiting for the next low risk decision.
Technologically, politically, emotionally, the centre hasn’t held.
Goalposts have moved. Funding evaporated for good people doing necessary work. Short-term, self-interested thinking leapt back in as quick as a cat left outdoors in a storm at dinner time.
With layoffs sweeping whole sectors, the instinct to hunker down, to protect, to shrink, to withdraw, has become contagious.
Discretionary spend has also dropped. And with it, pressure has mounted on bars and restaurants, the places that hold our social life together. Combined with supply-chain and staffing pressures, they are closing at record pace.
Through all this noise, three words are circling in my head as I’ve been trying to work it out:
Courage. To keep doing the right thing even when the alternative is easier and pays better.
Dignity. The reminder that how we treat each other still matters, especially when systems are fraying.
Hope. Not naïve optimism, but the discipline to make things work and not give up. Hands-on and hopeful. (Thank you, Dr Goodall.)
And maybe it’s just me, but in the past few weeks… something has felt like its changed.
It feels as though the centre of gravity in business and government is starting to pass into new hands.
An unplanned and unannounced generational handover. Demographics of voting age people are changing.
Research confirmed earlier this year that Millennials are also now the largest cohort of managers in the workforce, and Z to X the largest decision-makers in society.
Peter Leyden calls this moment:
“The handover between worlds.”
One world winding down. Another is beginning to flicker into existence.
Right in the middle of this fragile handover sits a crisis that’s harder to talk about, but impossible to ignore:
The collapse in wellbeing among young men.
Scott Galloway describes it in On Being a Man, loneliness, withdrawal, algorithmic escapism engineered to harvest adolescent dopamine for economic gain.
Our children have been commoditised to a point they have great difficulty participating meaningfully in society, which is terrifying when we need all hands on deck.
And it’s increasingly more difficult to distil the truth, right when we need to understand how to best navigate dynamic and complex systems.
As a young dad of a boy, that one lands in my chest. Hard.
What world do I want for my 28-year-old son in 2050? How do I prepare him for what’s coming?
It’s my most important job.
Some of this unraveling is simple:
We’re scrolling instead of sitting at tables. Choosing digital proximity over physical presence, conversation, salt air, sunsets.
It’s easier. Cheaper. Lower risk. You can hide. You can edit. You can disappear.
But it’s not real.
“We need the natural world to be healthy, because that’s where we come from.”
We forget that when we’re trapped indoors. No matter how impressive VR becomes, we’re still animals, wired to need nature.
We need more holidays, outdoor sports, big nights out with friends, bare feet and board games.
If the first part of the year was about surviving the noise, the next part has been realising that the noise was trying to tell us something.
About how the system is stretching before its next sprint, which I am grateful for coming across Peter Leyden’s pieces on “The Great Progression”
Through that lens, the thing I’d been reaching for finally surfaced:
Hope.
We’re not living in an existential collapse. We’re living in a transition. Things are about to get better, but it’s going to be hard work, and we have to choose to do the right thing.
“We can choose courage or we can choose comfort, but we cannot have both.” — Brené Brown
Courage also means choosing long-term value when the world is shouting for quick wins. Doing what’s right for the system, not just the quarter. Holding the line when retreat feels safer.
Sitting with the discomfort of choosing patience and being unpopular.
You see the need for the courage to be kind everywhere. Even in tiny, human moments, like smiling in an elevator or holding a door open.
It’s been a year of great tragedy and interesting changes in politics. Democracies lurched into extremes, and then snapped back.
The New York mayoral race was a quiet, important course correction:
Safety and fairness. Accountability and compassion. Not the loudest voices, the steady majority.
The system corrected.
The money and misinformation to trigger emotions didn’t work this time around. Could this mean that some of this gaslighting has been shaken off and we are seeing clearer, and choosing differently?
That different generations are engaged differently, and see through the noise now?
Is Robert Reich’s “Sleeping Giant” ushering in the new world?
COP30 in Belém right now has re-reminded us how fast the clock is running, and how uneven the global response is.
The science is terrifying. The politics are very messy. The costs of the harm are huge.
But one message was consistent: A push to redesign financial architecture around reality.
We cannot keep mispricing the planet and calling it a market failure. It’s a design failure.
Kate Raworth puts it quite plainly:
“We need economies that are regenerative and distributive by design”
And this means allocating funds to dynamic projects where the outcomes are not crystal clear, but they will provide benefit over the long term, to people and planet.
Sustainable choices cost more because destructive choices are allowed to stay cheap, through subsidies and not calculating the harm they cause.
True-cost accounting, UNEP’s TEEB, EU Digital Product Passports, is shrinking the excuse to retain the brown discount. (Great work Jenn Yates and True Cost Accounting for Food Systems Transformation.)
Policy is catching up. Technology is catching up. Public will also catch up.
But until the playing field is level, courage is still required, especially for the first movers and early adopters.
Dignity might be the most underrated leadership skill of our decade.
Scott Galloway’s work on young men is confronting: rising isolation, shrinking confidence, and a drift into the glow of screens.
Jonathan Haidt has echoed it for years, prolonged digital immersion is reshaping how we relate, how we focus, and how we grow up.
Beneath all of this sits a bigger question:
What happens when people lose the places where they can grow, connect, and be seen?
Dignity isn’t just a feeling, it’s the conditions we build around people. It’s the space to find your footing. To learn and contribute. To feel safe enough to show who you really are.
It’s the process of helping people uncover their own strengths and giving them the chance to put those strengths to work, even as the systems around us are so noisy as they buckle and reset.
Because without dignity, people don’t just lose confidence. They lose direction. And when direction goes, so does hope.
And then the spiral of hopelessness can manifest all sorts of incredibly heartbreaking outcomes.
(I’m also currently reading Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, which describes this in great detail).
Recent research shows that Millennials are now the largest managerial generation.
We’re not perfect. We burn out. We over-index on empathy. We try to be everything to everyone.
But we’re also the last generation to remember life before the internet rewired attention, relationships and identity.
So we’re asking:
How do we lead with dignity when the systems above us, and the technologies beside us, are still wired for extraction?
How do we look backward and forward, drive the disruption that is required with the resources we have, without displacing anyone.
What happens to jobs and share-prices, if you make an iPhone that is repairable?
What’s the best way to rip a band-aid.
Not Simples.
“AI risks making work more isolated, more monitored, and less human.”
Warnings about early signs of deceptive behaviour in advanced models have already surfaced, not because the systems are malicious, but because the guardrails are thin. We’re sprinting on capability and stumbling on ethics. And there is, frankly, a greater-than-zero chance that we lose control of what we build without coordinated restraint.
Dignity asks different questions:
Are workers part of the conversation?
Do people understand the systems managing them? Are we using technology to expand human potential, or quietly erode it?
A dignified workplace is one where people know where they stand, even as the tools evolve.
Right now, we’re not there.
I hear it constantly from other young parents: “What if I’m replaced by an algorithm?” “What future will our kids inherit?”
People don’t need platitudes, they need transparency, agency, and pathways to adapt.
Less “Keep Calm and Carry On (until you’re replaced)”, more honest communication, retraining, and genuinely widening opportunity for the people who have given their best hours to the company.
And this is where Pope Leo XIV enters the conversation in a surprisingly relevant way.
When he chose the name Leo, he signalled continuity with Pope Leo XIII, the architect of modern Catholic social teaching. Leo XIII wrote in Rerum Novarum (1891) that it is unjust “to misuse men as though they were things in the pursuit of gain.”
A warning about dehumanisation in the age of industry.
More than a century later, Pope Leo XIV has returned to that theme, arguing in his early statements that the dignity of work and the dignity of the worker must not be sacrificed in the name of efficiency or innovation, especially as AI accelerates. He called for “a technological future that does not forget the human face,” echoing Francis’s own concerns about automation and exclusion.
Systems must serve people, not consume them. Technology must enhance dignity, not hollow it out.
Complex isn’t, but I am grateful that there is another strong voice on the topic.
Hope isn’t optimism. It’s participation. A steady willingness to build what doesn’t exist yet.
Peter Leyden also shares how we’re clearly stepping into a new era, akin to the Post World War II Boom, the Post Civil War Expansion in the USA and broader Enlightenment and early Industrial Revolution in Europe.
More specifically:
AI
Clean energy, and
Bioengineering
are hitting tipping points together, which bring incredibly exciting opportunities globally.
But,
How do we shape this wave rather than get swept into it?
We can’t have blind faith in tech and the people who own them, but it’s important to recognise that transformation is already well underway, and we need to be prepared for the race ahead.
Wu Wei.
Act with the current, not against it.
John Fullerton puts it simply:
“Regenerative economics is a shift from reducing harm to creating the conditions for life to continuously renew itself.”
To align with the principles of a living systems worldview.
This is not some spiritual ideology. It’s a closer understanding of the dynamics of how nature actually works (us included).
Many layers that are incredibly interconnected and constantly moving. It’s not linear or black and white.
And it’s a shift from taking, to balancing to healing, which results in:
Healthier places.
Stronger communities.
Replenished natural capital.
Circulation over extraction.
And when we build organisations and supply chains that leave people and places stronger, hope is built into the structure.
Which leads me to food and tourism.
Food systems are the circulatory system of civilisation. If you trace why humans moved, traded, innovated, and built relationships in the first place, you always end up back at food.
Tourism is the cultural interface of that system, the way people learn to see a place, understand it, and care for it.
And when value chains work with the grain of a landscape, its growers, its knowledge, its stories, everything shifts.
Restaurants strengthen farms. Hotels strengthen ecosystems. Destinations strengthen culture.
If we set it up right.
Authenticity isn’t a brand strategy, it’s what emerges when integrity runs through the whole chain. And as we rethink what “luxury” really means, we’re rediscovering that it looks a lot like this: care, place, story, relationship.
This is where regeneration becomes lived, where design turns into behaviour, and systems become sensory.
And it’s where I place my hope for the next twenty-five years: in the work of shepherding ideas through a value chain until they become experiences that stay with people, experiences that heal place while giving something unforgettable in return.
This year has been one of contradictions:
Extreme politics, and democratic correction.
AI disruption, and emerging guardrails.
Climate alarm, and systems catching up.
Social fracture, and a hunger for connection.
Screens everywhere, and a longing for nature.
Messy and confusing… but, I’m glad to say post tea leaves, not hopeless.
Play our cards right, we may have something representing Star Trek.
Play them wrong, something between Terminator and The Time Machine.
If we have the Star Trek, let’s try and avoid developing The Borg.
I don’t have the full answer.
But I know the beginning of one:
Reconnect with each other.
Reconnect with work that feels honest and true to who you are.
Reconnect with nature. (we are nature)
Reconnect with agency.
Reconnect with a longer horizon (one that involves AI, Nature, Clean Energy & Bioengineering)
And Stretch. We’ve got a race coming.
May as well enjoy it.
— Andrew
Inspiration for the article: The Great Progression - 2025-2050 - Peter Leyden - Big Think
Andrew Cameron is the founder of ENZYME, a Singapore-based advisory working at the intersection of regenerative hospitality, food systems, and sustainable procurement across Asia-Pacific.
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