REconomy: The Fundamentals of Business As Unusual
The news isn’t how bad things are. The news is how good they could be.
— Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love
This first Insights post introduces the idea and emerging reality of a REconomy, laying the groundwork for future posts that will offer living examples, personal journeys and practices you can apply to yourself, your family, your community, your project, your company or your institution.
RE•co•no•my
A word in the book Money is Never About Money (which we're releasing chapter by chapter in an online readable version) that speaks of the end of an economic system built on lack—or, better said, the incredibly destructive fear of lack—and the emergence of a world where more for you doesn’t mean less for me.
For me, 'RE' means three things: reimagining, reinventing and regenerating how we live, work, relate and give.
Reimagining our place in the world
Reimagination starts when we dare to question the deep, negative belief systems that have shaped our collective programming and wreak havoc on society and ecology. In other words, reimagination requires us to stop buying into the idea that things are just the way they are and open our eyes to the possibility that they could be much more beautiful.
This, in turn, requires that we start seeing ourselves as a beautiful, valuable species—or, a species that can play a useful part in healing the planet. Not separate from, but innately part of nature
Reinventing how we organise, relate and co-create
Daring to question what we've been spoon-fed to believe inevitably spawns our desire to review how we live, work and collaborate. Giving in to this desire will have an enormous impact, because honestly, much of what we call family, school and company is still heavily set up to incite rivalry and produce obedience—not to liberate individual genius, collective intelligence and fruitful collaboration. Which also means that much of what we call 'work' and 'working with' doesn't work—except in one way: to block what makes life on Earth wonderful.
Rivalry-inciting, obedience-demanding, power-over ways often arise unconsciously and with the best intentions, but that doesn’t make them less damaging. Even the so-called winners of this game end up short, whether they realise it or not. So here are two questions I feel we need to ask ourselves and each other:
- How can we as individuals fully flourish in fulfilling a shared calling?
- How can working together make us wiser, more powerful, more creative and more fun 🥳 than the sum of all our separate selves?
In other words, how do we co-create a world that enriches all of life, including (would you know it 😱) our own lives?
Regenerating social, ecological and economic systems
I like Wikipedia's take on the word ‘regeneration’:
Regeneration in biology is the process of renewal, restoration, and tissue growth that makes genomes, cells, organisms, and ecosystems resilient to natural fluctuations or events that cause disturbance or damage.
When I translate this to the human plane, I see regeneration as the process of finding alternatives to unstable ecosystems (social, ecologic and economic) that make everything weak and dependent—even those in 'power', and applying these alternatives to help ourselves and each other grow into a strong, healthy and happy collective, with the capacity to zestfully bounce up whenever challenges or disasters strike.
There's much more to be said about how we can reimagine, reinvent and regenerate, and the Miracle Project Insights platform is a growing container of ideas, some of which have been tried and tested, all of which are continuously evolving, like everything in nature and the universe. So, in this post, I will stick to the basics I just mentioned, plus what they're based on:
Life over numbers
Our current economies still derive most of their meaning from numbers. Numbers that need losers to have winners, seem to bring prosperity only when they go up, and seem to work only for the so-called happy few.
On top of this, economics has been made into an exact science, which I think is more than pretty stupid; it’s dangerous. It's dangerous to reduce something that's deeply social—spiritual even—to datasets. The destruction we cause by doing this is no news, but as of yet, few people—let alone institutions and governments—structurally manage to keep their understanding of ‘prosperity’ away from the promised land of Gross Domestic Product.
And here's a fun fact: prosperity has n o t h i n g to do with growing numbers, and it has everything to do with a growth in love and care-based practices.
So, in a REconomy it doesn’t matter whether our Gross Domestic Product rises or falls; what matters is that we think and act out of a place of love and care, for ourselves, for each other and the planet. Everything that falls outside of this scope will cease to exist in a REconomy. Because simply speaking, it’s not economical, and on a deeper level, because a growing body of people will have come to realise that the Universe is a fundamentally friendly place, full of abundance-creating patterns that work for all of life.
If all of this sounds a bit woo-woo airy-fairy to you, I want to say this: waking up to the truth of our existence and a longing that I believe resides in all of us—no matter how hard we try not to feel it, plus training ourselves to engage in relationships that give instead of take life, is the most practical step I see us taking. In fact, it's the only step that makes a real difference, and an essential one if we’re to stop history from repeating itself over and over again.
But prioritising life over numbers can only become our collective truth when enough of us dare to look honestly at the deep convictions of scarcity and separation underlying the holy grail of economic growth. The beliefs and fears that there's not enough to go around, that more for you must mean less for me, that we don’t have enough and that underneath all of it, we’re not enough.
There is enough and we are enough, yet in a way, we’re not.
We don’t live on small, separate islands floating through space; we live on a massive, tiny blue dot together, inextricably connected with each other and everything that gives life.
As soon as we factually embrace this, instead of building a negative, fear-driven story around it, our not-good-enoughness becomes an opportunity instead of a limitation. We start seeing a whole that can only sustain and nourish us fully when each interconnected part becomes the healthiest, most vibrant version of itself.
So, at its core, a REconomy is about reimagining, reinventing and regenerating how we relate—to ourselves, each other and the world.
I’ve deeply explored and confronted (mostly in myself ☺︎) the fundamental mistakes underlying our still-dominant ecological, economic and social thinking, the truth this mistake hides, and what becomes possible when we start seeing that more for you is more for me.
May this platform be a testament to an ongoing journey of learning, but more importantly, an alive and growing source of inspiration for anyone who wants to join the business that I find more kick-ass every day: the business of co-creating a New Earth.
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