Weather Report: The Storm Is Here
Twenty patterns. One meta-story. A world moving faster than we were designed for.
I recently came across Mariah’s Substack “The New Unhinged” - and her post “The World Is Having a Fucking Stroke” listing twenty patterns happening right now caught my attention. From fried nervous systems to collapsing trust to the universal feeling that something big is coming.
Sharp eye. No flinching. Mostly accurate.
I’m not here to argue with her diagnosis. I want to take it somewhere else.
She names what’s moving. I want to talk about what keeps us stable within the movement.
Diagnosis is one thing. Staying upright another.
This is my response, or rather a follow-up, a different stance toward the same reality.
THE META-PATTERN
Something is happening. Obviously. It’s always happening.
But is it accelerating? Yes. And this isn’t mystical intuition - it’s measurable.
I was born in 1961. Thirty years before the internet, also lived thirty years after. I watched the population double. Saw species disappear faster than we can count them. Felt the texture of time compress.
I am not making assumptions.
Zoom out further and planetary timescales tell the same story.
Billions of years to single-celled life.
Millions to complex organisms.
Thousands to agriculture.
Hundreds to industry.
Decades to digital.
Now we measure transformation in years.
Epochs are compressing.
The question isn’t whether change is accelerating. It is.
The question is: what happens when the rate of change exceeds our adaptive capacity?
You get the twenty symptoms Mariah listed.
You get a mental health crisis that won’t respond to apps and affirmations. People fleeing cities without knowing why. Meaning collapse, trust collapse, attention collapse.
Humans are running ancient biological hardware inside conditions it was never designed for.
THE SHARED STORY IS ALREADY GONE
I wrote recently about “The death of the shared story” - how we’re no longer living inside the same narrative. The same event now produces different worlds. Not different opinions. Different realities.
For nearly a century, the West held a single myth of progress and stability. Whether it was accurate matters less than the fact that it held.
It no longer does.
When the collective frame cracks, coherence stops being a default. It becomes individual work.
We can no longer rely on external stability - shared meaning, trusted institutions, predictable ground.
Which means internal stability isn’t optional anymore.
MASTERY REDEFINED
This is what mastery looks like now:
Staying coherent in a world that loses its coherence.
Nothing is wrong - this is what is.
The universe moves from perfection to perfection, even when we can’t see it.
Plus honestly, the system was broken already, just not uncomfortable enough for us, the privileged, to complain.
The narratives we held are dissolving. The familiar ground is moving. And our nervous systems are signaling danger because that’s what they’re designed to do when the environment shifts faster than adaptation allows.
Coherence, surrender, trust, adaptability - these aren’t spiritual luxuries.
They’re survival tools for high-velocity reality.
THE TWENTY FIELD CONDITIONS
Here are Mariah’s twenty patterns - restated as field conditions.
Collective nervous systems are running beyond capacity. Chronic activation for decades. Baseline dysregulation is now normal. That’s why we see nervous regulation conversation everywhere.
Hyper-independence has become default armor. Trust collapsed, so people stopped reaching. Self-reliance feels like strength.
Economic reality is performed. Most are financially fragile while maintaining appearances. A collective theatre nobody agreed to. Wealth disparity has always been the #1 source of instability.
Identity is in constant revision. Without stable ground, people rebuild themselves repeatedly. Less growth, more troubleshooting.
Meaning structures dissolved faster than replacements formed. Religion, career, ideology - the old containers emptied. Nothing solid took their place. Good, holding on to a screwed up system is not sign of health.
High technical capacity, low practical competence. We can build AI but are failing at basic emotional management. Specialized knowledge, brittle humans. We teach our kids the wrong things to thrive. Not new either.
Algorithms shape emotional regulation. Attention systems now parent the psyche, especially for the young. Return the attention within to wake up. Stay outside if you wanna keep sleepwalking.
Numbness passes for equanimity. Overstimulation pushed people into functional shock. It looks like calm. Far from it, it is the calm before the storm.
Quiet preparedness is spreading. People are building resilience without announcing it. Not paranoid. Responsive. And probably useless.
Community exists as aesthetic. Togetherness without obligation or trust. The form without the function.
Middle class erosion is structural. Not a mystery. Not inflation. A managed squeeze. I felt it. You may feel it too. Or will soon.
Attention has been colonized. Engineered distraction. Paralysis is a feature, not a bug.
Trust collapsed in all directions. Institutions, media, each other. No shared foundation to stand on.
Supply chain fragility is now visible. Efficiency without redundancy. One disruption from chaos.
Cognition is increasingly outsourced. Thinking happens externally. Memory, navigation, analysis - borrowed, not earned.
Authoritarianism arrives without friction. No doors kicked in. Consent manufactured through convenience.
Mass relocation as somatic signal. People move before they understand why. The body knows first.
Entrepreneurship as economic triage. Side hustles aren’t passion projects. They’re survival responses dressed as ambition.
Spiritual seeking surges in the void. When meaning collapses, humans look up. Sometimes wisdom, sometimes compensation. And the market knows it, offering more and more junk to numb the seekers.
Universal intuition of transition. Across all camps, the same felt sense: something is shifting. No shared language for it yet.
WHAT COMES NEXT
In a next post, (if I survive the 20 conditions above 😂) I’ll take each of these field conditions and offer a practical response - a way to stay coherent inside them.
CLOSING: BEFORE THE STORM
One last thing.
Coherence is easier to build before pressure hits.
You don’t develop physical strength during the emergency. You train before. So when the moment comes, capacity is already there.
The storm isn’t theoretical. It’s here, and accelerating.
Inner stability isn’t luxury. It isn’t spiritual hobby. It’s the foundation for navigating whatever comes next.
Start now.
Not because the world is ending.
Because the world is moving faster than your nervous system was designed for - and the gap between those two speeds is where people break.
Or where they learn to stay whole.
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PS: “Change Your Story, Change The World” is a storytelling endeavor that looks deeply into the psyche that creates the stories we live by—with the intention to help us shape better stories, both personally and collectively.
Because the stories we tell are the reality we live.
Although I’m not sure “the world is having a stroke” is the best title for this I do think Maria is correct this are changing exponentially quickly. Many of her points are obviously happening. The key is to know the tools to create a system “body, mind, soul” that stays a number of steps ahead of the masses and even the folks that are intuitively changing but don’t know why.
Yes things are changing fast, but how do we make sure we are ahead of the curve as I think being anywhere close to the curve will be dangerous to say it mildly! With love ❤️🙏
Have you ever read the fourth turning? It’s a fascinating book, for full disclosure apparently it’s a favorite book of the troll Steve Bannon… However, it’s a very interesting book.