Now Is When The Old Timing Stops Working

Last week, I wrote about building bridges across collapsing timelines. Many of you recognized immediately as an internal feeling you could now name it. This week, I want to name something more precise: what’s collapsing is not just systems, careers, or narratives; what’s collapsing is the timing that held them together. And once timing collapses, no strategy built on the old rhythm can hold. 

We Are in a Time Crisis. Most conversations about 2026 still orbit the same questions: Is AI moving too fast? Is geopolitics becoming unstable? Is climate uncertainty irreversible? Is work losing meaning? These questions are not wrong, but they are incomplete. Because speed is not the problem. Technology is not the problem. Complexity is not the problem. The problem is that we are still trying to live inside a timing architecture that no longer matches reality. We are asking linear questions inside a nonlinear moment. And that mismatch is what people feel as anxiety, burnout, disorientation, decision paralysis, or the quiet sense that “something is deeply off but I can’’ name it yet.”

What’s happening now is not a dramatic “end of the world” scenario. It’s more precise than that. The Shift is Subtle, but Total. We are moving from a world organized by external schedules to a world that demands internal coherence. From prediction pointing towards perception. From control to attunement. From optimization to orientation. This is why many highly competent people feel suddenly ineffective while others, without more information or power, seem oddly steady. They are not smarter or more creative. They are better timed. 

I hear quite often, mostly in western forums, that AI is accelerating the future. It’s not. It is revealing who has no inner structure. I am currently in Barcelona where I did a Master's in research on responsible AI and where I also teach about the temporality of AI. AI didn’t create the current moment. It exposed it. Because Artificial Intelligence systems amplify whatever timing it encounters: rushed systems become chaotic, extractive models become brittle, fragmented identities become overwhelmed. 

But the same tools, placed inside a coherent temporal frame, can support clarity, creativity, collective intelligence, and long-range thinking. This is the distinction most debates miss. The question is not whether AI replaces humans. The question is whether humans can stabilize themselves enough to work with intelligence (artificial or otherwise) without fragmenting. For decades, many believed change would come through movements, reforms, mass adoption or collective agreement. That era has quietly ended. 

The vision was not wrong, but the next phase requires more than advocacy. Requires embodiment. Large-scale coherence can no longer be imposed from the outside. It must be generated locally, internally, and relationally. Small fields. Stable nervous systems. People who can hold paradoxes without collapsing. This is how real transitions for regenerative ecosystems happen historically, biologically and culturally.  

2026 Is a Threshold Year. And I am not saying that because something dramatic will happen. But because what no longer works will stop pretending to. Careers built on permanent acceleration will strain. Institutions built on extraction will destabilize. Identities built on performance alone will feel hollow. At the same time, something quieter is emerging:

people reorganizing their lives around rhythm instead of urgency, leaders learning to listen before acting, creators working with cycles instead of trends, communities forming around presence, not platforms.

They are early adaptations.

What actually helps now is not more information, not faster decisions, not better tools. What helps now is: learning how to sense timing, recognize thresholds, slow down without falling behind, and act without forcing outcomes. It demands a strategic maturity. The future will belong less to those who predict well and more to those who can stay coherent while everything reorders. So stay coherent.

If you feel unsettled, I tell you you’re not failing. You’re noticing. If old paths feel misaligned, you’re not lost. You’re early. And if you sense that the work ahead is not about building something new but learning how to inhabit the time of our lives differently, you’re already inside the transition. We don’t need more certainty, we need better timing. And that, finally, is something we can learn. 

Gust