Have you ever arrived home and realized you don’t remember getting there?
Maybe you were lost in thought, running through the day’s worries, and suddenly—without realizing how—you were parked in your driveway. Your body handled the motions, but your mind was elsewhere.
It’s a familiar experience that happens to most of us. Maybe many times throughout the day. On our well-worn paths, we switch to autopilot. We go through the motions without actively engaging in what we’re doing. Maybe we’re daydreaming, mentally escaping the routine. Or maybe our minds go blank, seizing a rare chance to flush out the relentless stream of stimuli demanding our attention. Either way, we aren’t fully present.
Now, imagine that vacant state multiplied across millions of people.
Imagine an entire civilization moving through life like this—absorbed in routine, disconnected from themselves, disconnected from each other, and disconnected from the systems shaping their lives.
How much of our world was built not by conscious design, but by a collective autopilot?
What if it’s been just a few people consciously setting the rules, while everyone else is busy keeping up? It’s an unsettling thought. And yet, it could explain so much about the world we’ve built—an economic system that prizes short-term gain for a few over long-term stability for the many. A society that defines success by accumulation rather than fulfillment. A business culture that values productivity over people—if we’re truly honest, using up the best of people and discarding them is a Wall Street-celebrated business practice.
The way we work, the way we lead, the way we consume—it’s as if we’ve followed a predetermined path without stopping to ask where it’s taking us.
But now, the world is sounding an alarm.
On the macro level, Mother Nature is showing us—through fires, floods, and biodiversity collapse—that the way we structure business and society is incompatible with a thriving planet.
On the micro level, a growing mental health crisis is revealing that the way we’ve structured work is making us burnt out, disconnected, and unfulfilled.
This moment right now is when we snap out of autopilot and realize the road ahead leads off a cliff.
We don’t have to keep following it.
Every revolution in human history has begun by rewriting the rules of the world that came before it.
The Agricultural Revolution introduced land ownership, scarcity, and the first wealth hierarchies, anchoring humans to static communities rather than nomadic tribes.
The Industrial Revolution unleashed machines that scaled production but reduced workers to mechanized cogs in an economic wheel—separating humanity from the human within business.
The Knowledge Revolution shifted power from physical labor to intellectual capital, where influence belonged to those who could collect, store, and distribute information.
With every revolution, power consolidated into fewer hands, deepening the chasm between those who controlled resources and those who labored to survive.
Each revolution created astonishing progress—but each also carried unintended consequences. The Industrial Revolution entrenched power dynamics between the wealthy and the working class, laying the foundation for today’s extreme income inequality. The Knowledge Revolution created unparalleled connectedness—but also counterintuitively increased mental health issues and social fragmentation.
Which brings us to today.
We are waking up from autopilot to find ourselves standing at the edge of the next great transformation.
This chapter of our history is still unwritten. It invites us to take stock of the systems we’ve inherited. Like a spring cleaning, it’s time to pull everything out of the closets and examine not just what we’ve gained, but also what we’ve lost.
What structures still serve us?
Which ones are outdated?
Which were never built to sustain us in the first place?
History shows us that every revolution follows a pattern: what once seemed like progress eventually becomes the very thing that needs to change.
If business and society are due for their next great transformation—what do we want it to look like?
