Circles and Havens, or Wealth in the 21st Century

Hi! How’s everyone? Welcome back old friends, welcome new ones, and here’s a little Snowy hug for all.

Today we’re going to discuss Havens Thinking. And how to really begin using it. It’s going to be a little abstract, so bear with me. (And apologies, I'm still catching up on emails and sessions requests. Many thanks, I'm humbled and amazed by all of you!)

Havens come in many forms. Financial, social, physical, even emotional. As I’ve said, in a time like this, our lives should be structured around Havens. And so many of you are already making the choice to either find or create yours.

Now I am going to give you a guiding principle. 

It goes like this.

How Do You Live in an Unstable World?

The world around us is now destabilizing fast. America’s collapsing. Conflicts are erupting. Financial systems can barely absorb it all. Democracy’s in peril. And we haven’t even gotten to climate change.

What do we look for as systems destabilize?

We look for circles.

I want to teach you to think in terms of circles now. This is a guiding principle for Havens.

Let me give you a very simple example, and then we’ll do more.

What does a typical investment portfolio look like? It’s 60% stocks and 40% bonds. The reason for that is that when one falls, the other should rise. That’s the thinking in the old world, anyways.

So that structure has a kind of shape. It’s a seesaw. And the problem in this world, you might already be able to guess, is that in a destabilizing world, a seesaw is a very bad choice of structure, because it’s inherently unstable itself.

And so when I launch the model portfolio I’m setting up (soon, you’ll all be able to subscribe), it won’t be structured like a seesaw. It won’t work like that at all. Because that structure doesn’t work anymore.

It’ll be structured more like a circle. Now, that’s very, very abstract. What does it mean?

First, don’t worry too much about it. Just learn to recognize the pattern. The more you overthink this, the less your pattern recognition will ever kick in. I am just trying to teach you to think about this in a synthetic way. And that will happen unconsciously. Circles, by the way, are one of Jung’s archetypes. I’ll come back to that.

Circles, or Structure in an Age of Instability

Circles have more than a few very special properties. They can support a great deal of weight. They bounce back. They don’t have sharp boundaries. 

(So in the example of my model portfolio, a circle means that it’ll be able to bear much more Macro Risk. It’ll be inherently resilient. And without sharp edges, there’ll be less to get tangled up on it, which means less exposure to risk. And things will flow one to the next.)

Now, you’re wondering, what does that mean in hard terms? It just means in this case that there will be a structure of assets that form a kind of interlinked circle, all of which are interrelated, with little “convexity,” or nonlinearity in financial terms. That doesn’t matter too much, that’s my job, here, I’m just trying to teach you how to think.) 

Let’s do another example before you get lost in that one. 

Think about relationships. Your relationships must now be Havens, too. But now think about yesterday’s advice for social ties. It was all about “networks,” wasn’t it? Network here, build your network there, go and network all the way over there, with as many other people, also networking as you can.

And I think many of you have learned in recent times a lesson of network structures. They’re unreliable. The ties between nodes in a network are usually weak ones, or “loose” ones in the jargon. And so many people who reached out to their networks in recent times were surprised to find at precisely the time they needed support or guidance or just help that job application move along most…none was to be had. It’s a common theme I’ve heard, but few understand why. 

It’s because network structures are inherently unreliable, like seesaws. Their relational form is weak because it’s sort of a branching affair, and in the same a way a tree can lose a branch and survive, so can a network. But what if you’re the branch?

So now relationally you must think in terms of circles. And that means just what it sounds like. Who is my circle? 

Circles also have strong and smooth boundaries.

So the question becomes: who is in my circle? And who is not?

And circles all contain. So another question becomes: what is my circle tending, containing, holding, together?

When we think of circles in relationships, the members all know one another, too, or at least can see and hear one another.

You see how different, already, this is from network thinking?

Like I said, don’t overthink it. Just go with the essence of it. You know what a circle is relationally. We all do. The point is to consider carefully your own, in their many context, and whether your relationships now amount to circles. And how they could. 

Because that is where the most power will come from. In this case, emotional power, supportive power, social power. 

And the lesson is: here we are talking about structural power. Not in the way that leftists use the term, but in the way that complexity scientists do. Different structures offer different levels of power, which yield different levels of resilience and self-organization. 

(Circles, strikingly, are very, very good at both of those, and this is an old finding from Stuart Kauffman’s work, if you’re interested in a dense, groundbreaking read.)

We are talking about a kind of inner power to survive instability, and that is what circles give us. “Inner power” here doesn’t necessarily mean in an interior sense of the will, or soul, it just means “power that comes from structure.” 

I know we are getting abstract, but I want to acquaint you with this way of thinking. It will help guide and protect you now.

Circles, Squares, Triangles, and…Messes

Now let’s discuss some other structures, or shapes.

What about triangles? They’re a particularly bad choice.

Have you ever noticed how nothing much really in the biological world is a triangle? That is because triangles are inherently unstable. Just think of them in relational terms. We talk about “love triangles,” and rarely do those turn out well, or else, well, novels would barely exist. In macroeconomic terms, when there’s a situation of “triangular trade,” as exists today between America, China, and Russia, it rarely works out well, because imbalances pile up too easily.

So triangles are out. And where and when you sense a triangular structure you should walk away. That’s a general principle. When it comes to money, career, life, finance, and so on. By the way, a triangular structure for a career is something like, a lateral move, then an upwards move, etcetera. But of course, ladders don’t really work anymore. The more you try to climb like this, the more Macro Risk you’ll take.

What about squares? Squares, of course, are more stable than triangles, but rarely, either, do they exist in nature or biology. And that is because they are too stable. We don’t want structures that are too stable to fight back against instability. We want “dynamic stability,” or the way that stones smooth in the river, moving along slowly, or the way that a heart beats. 

This, too, is a notion from complexity theory, and we will now have to apply it to economics and finance in a destabilizing world.

So squares are too rigid. Too inflexible. Too unyielding. And for that reason, they are also brittle. They break and shatter against too much pressure. And as they do, they don’t break well, they shatter into sharp pieces, which is even more dangerous. That’s a mess, and we definitely don’t want to end up in messes in a world of instability and Macro Risk. 

Circles don’t tend to do either of those things. Make messes, or fracture badly. What happens when they break? You can take part of a circle and make a smaller circle, because of course, it is already flexible. You see the kinds of properties I am trying to describe here?

So what does a circular career look like, then? That’s another example we can do. It’s something like: you begin by learning, and you go around the circumference, and you end up back where you began, but maybe teaching. This is what is going to happen to most careers now. The old model of “seniority” is dead, and there is no real ladder anymore. Instead, as we grow towards being senior executives and leaders and so forth, we will teach, guide, orient, in many different ways, rather than merely perform.

Wealth in the 21st Century

So. What am I trying to teach you? A very different way to think about wealth.

Think about the many forms of wealth you have. Money, sure, which is financial capital. But then there’s also relationships, social capital. There are hard assets, physical capital. And there are deeper kinds, even, like emotional capital, or your sort of approach to the world and how you feel.

All of these should now be structured in circular terms. That’s abstract, and it’s weird. It’s weird because it’s new. 

You see, one of the unconscious assumptions we hold is that everything should be structured in linear forms, like squares or triangles, or in network ones. And those are the forms of yesterday’s ages, so that’s why we think this way.

We sort of inherently assume those structures are better. And yesterday, that was maybe even true. The network was the archetypal form of the internet age. The square and the triangle and the seesaw were the archetypal forms of the various industrial ages. So our thinking is still trapped there. We’ve become sort of blind to circles, in all this.

The circle will be archetypal form of this age. It is how we will learn to structure everything in an age of destabilization and collapse. How will we fight climate change? We’ll build circular economies. How will we protect our wealth? Our portfolios won’t be dangerous seesaws, they’ll be circles, like cells, sheltering what’s within. How will our sets of social relationships work? They’ll be circles, made of strong ties, which will weather the many storms to come, and support us as we cross them together.

The world will be made of circles now.

My advice is: start making yours.

I know, like I said, that that’s abstract. So just feel your way into it. Play with it, have fun with it, grasp the essence of it. It’s OK to do that. You don’t have to be a complexity scientist to grasp the point here, though if you like to read, go read some of that. You just have to be a human, because as Jung taught us, we all know circles without even really seeing them. We feel them. How does it feel to be in a strong circle of friends? Good, right? How about in a circle when the ship’s sinking? That’s called a lifeboat. How does it feel when life comes full circle? That’s called fulfillment. 

I could go on. I’m trying to teach you something that goes deep here. So just sit with it, and learn to let your pattern recognition kick in. Here are a few tips.

—Where you see circles, that is where you will find Havens
—Where you build circles, that is where you will create Havens
—Where circles grow, that is where Havens will take the place of yesterday’s archaic and failing institutions.

I know that’s a lot. Don’t pressure yourself about it too much. We’’ll talk about it more in the coming days. For now, that’s a brief intro to how to use Havens Thinking to gain structural power. 

As always, just reach out if you need help or advice.

Lots of love,

Umair (and Snowy!)

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