How I Journeyed Through the Darkness of Collapse

Shedding the toxic skin of finance to rediscover purpose, humanity, and life itself.

— Strangled by My Own Success

I once sold investment strategies to the Goldman Sachs Partners Fund. For those who know the language of money, that phrase carries weight. A partners fund is not the pension money, not retail investors — it is the partners’ own capital. The so-called smartest money in the world. The due diligence is so ruthless, so merciless, that only a handful of investment pitches ever make it through the crucible to approval. I made it through.

Then I became General Partner in an AIG Fund.

And AIG — back then, in the late ’80s and early ’90s, under Hank Greenberg — was an empire. Insurance as global dominance, wielded not just in numbers but in power. I was there, invited to the tables where Greenberg and Henry Kissinger shared cigars and strategy. I dined in those rooms. I wore the uniform — Armani suit, red power tie, suspenders of Bulls and Bears that were as much a badge of belonging as they were a noose.

I thought I was filling myself — status, power, access to the inner circle of capital. But as I became full of myself, I discovered a hollowing out. The more the world admired my skin, the more parasites it carried inside.

It was like inhabiting a snake’s body that had outgrown me — tight, toxic, crawling with small infections of vanity and fear. To shed that skin, the snake must crawl into darkness, alone, to push against rock and shadow until the old sheath tears. That was my descent. My dark place.

From the outside, it was success. From the inside, it was collapse. The Armani stripes and the steel suspenders were strangling me into a body that was no longer my own, into a mindset that belonged not to life, but to a machine.

Rituals of power: An earlier version of Me, so proud in my suspenders of Bulls and Bears

I was managing multi-million-dollar investments, and that meant more than numbers on a screen — it meant power. Power over men and women desperate for capital, over entrepreneurs whose futures bent to my yes or no. Sometimes, it even meant power over whole industries. We financed what we desired, and in doing so, we reshaped landscapes. I remember overseeing the construction of the most modern cheese plant in Latin America, a decision that sent shockwaves through the dairy industry. Another day, it was buying the marketing rights for football clubs, placing our fingerprints on the passions of millions. My name was whispered in boardrooms, my presence courted in deals. I was, in a way, a celebrity of capital.

First-class flights, five-star hotels, marble offices that smelled of leather and excess. I was surfing the crest of neoliberalism’s great wave, riding the tidal surges unleashed by KKR.

What had begun at Kohlberg, Kravis, Roberts — a boutique experiment in financial engineering that soon moved to Drexel Burnham and later echoed through Goldman Sachs — swelled into the storm of leveraged buyouts that came to define an era.

I lived that storm firsthand at Citicorp Venture Capital in New York, where the pulse of Wall Street’s new religion beat through every deal. We believed ourselves titans.

It was the golden age of investment banking, and I — Armani stripes, suspenders taut, champagne glass in hand — believed I had mastered the tide. Only later would I learn the tide was mastering me.

And when the machine tightened its grip, the Armani suit I wore so proudly began to feel like a toxic skin. The stripes, the suspenders, the rituals of power — what once conferred belonging now constricted me into someone I no longer recognized. Something broke inside, though I couldn’t yet name it. So I did the only thing left: I stepped out of the system into the unknown — unaware of the inertia of power and control that still clung to me, and blind to my naive belief that the very tools and habits that had made me successful could also remake the world.

I did not yet know I was entering a long, dark apprenticeship through uncertainty, exile, and the slow, painful work of shedding.

— The Hollowing

And then came the feeling I could no longer deny. Not triumph, not applause, not even wealth could drown it out. It was the hollowing of my soul. I had been living as if accumulation were meaning, but what I felt was an emptiness that even the richest balance sheet could not fill.

So I began to run. Probably running away from miself. At first through rain forests and mountains with Argentine Spirit in the Eco-Challenge — 300 miles across New Zealand, two hours of sleep per day, twenty-two hours of movement, where human fragility outweighed even the fiercest terrain. But still, the hollow followed.

Then came the desert. Seven days, seven marathons. Two hundred and fifty kilometers across the Atacama, carrying everything I needed on my back. A marathon each day, and each day a stripping down of self. The desert’s vast hollowness mirrored the hollowness within me. Out there, silence is absolute, horizon unbroken, sky merciless. And in that infinite emptiness, I recognized my own.

By the end, I had shed a skin. Like the snake pressing through stone, I had torn off a sheath that no longer fit. I emerged with a raw new clarity, a sense-making capacity I had not known before, and a fragile, pure intention: to discover my purpose.

But what awaited me after the desert was darker still. Beyond the collapse of my own illusions lay the emptiness of a whole civilization’s story. The void that opens when capitalism itself is no longer enough.

— Beyond the Box

What people rarely account for is that leaving the so-called comfort zone is not the hardest decision. We imagine it is — that to walk away from a corporate job, from the paycheck, from the title on the door and the identity that comes with it, is the ultimate leap. But in truth, it is only the first step. That corporate identity, constructed of possessions and position, is a false sense of security. It feels solid, but it is scaffolding around a hollow core.

The real decision comes after. Because most who leave simply build another box. The consultant box. The entrepreneur box. Even the startup box — each dressed in the language of freedom, yet bound by the same invisible walls. You may change the furniture, but you are still living in a room designed by the system you thought you escaped.

What makes the difference is something far more radical: a willingness to let it go. To sell your car not for another car, but to invest in discovering who you are. I sold mine — a beautiful Mini Cooper, a trophy of my years in investment banking and private equity. The cash lasted only a short while. Because here is the truth: if you haven’t yet discovered who you are, there is no revenue. There is only burn. The money runs out fast, and you are left with yourself.

So I began to improvise. I built frameworks for well-being projects. I created knowledge pools for companies, offered connections, organized community-building efforts. I tried to stitch purpose into the fabric of the old world. And while these attempts mattered, they also revealed something deeper: that this system cannot be healed by the same mindset that built it.

When you really discover complexity, you realize you are not building a startup — you are building a system. And with that discovery comes a sobering truth: reductionist approaches, no matter how clever, are futile without systemic capacity. As Einstein warned, you cannot fix a problem with the same mindset that created it. What is needed is not a shinier business model, not another startup dressed as salvation, but a change in how we see and approach the system itself. Only through holistic solutions — aligned with the patterns and principles of life — can we begin to move from extraction toward regeneration.

And systems are infinitely more complex. They cannot be managed with the linear logic of business plans and market share. They require systemic thinking. They demand new cognitive tools: complexity theory, systems of governance, an entirely different lens on what “success” means. They ask us to align with how life itself works — its patterns, its principles, its cycles. Sustainability is not a quarterly result; it is the ongoing vitality of the whole.

The more I leaned into this, the more I understood: what was needed was not a new company, but a new mindset. A way of seeing that could work with processes instead of forcing outcomes, that could honor living systems instead of extracting from them. That realization was not the end of my struggle — it was the beginning of it.

— Into the Real Problem

And then I began to see the real problem. It was not just my own hollowing, not just the corporate box or the startup box. It was the deeper web of traps in which we are all caught. What complexity theory calls multipolar traps.

A multipolar trap is what happens when each actor, pursuing their own short-term interest, drives the whole system toward collapse — even if none of them actually want that outcome. It is the tragedy of the commons, amplified across every domain. Nations trapped in arms races. Companies trapped in competition that strips resources. Consumers trapped in cycles of status and debt. No one designs it, but everyone is pulled into it. That is the architecture of our predicament.

Which meant the solution could not be individual escape. It could not be a shinier box, or a more virtuous business. It had to be systemic. And systemic change depends not only on understanding — though understanding is half the solution. To see the pattern clearly, to recognize the trap for what it is, already frees you from its spell. But the other half requires something harder: building the capacity and capabilities to deal with exponential complexity.

Capacity means developing the inner strength to hold paradox, uncertainty, and pressure without collapsing into fear. Capabilities mean learning the actual tools to navigate complexity: systems governance, regenerative economics, adaptive technologies. Because exponential change is not confined to one realm. It is happening everywhere — technology advancing faster than regulation, economies stretching planetary boundaries, governance lagging behind, cultures still building identity out of consumption and possessions.

This was the real threshold: not just shedding an old skin, but learning how to live inside an entirely different body of thought.

— Breaking Through

I have written before about the shift in paradigms — and even about how I had to strip my skin across seven self-sustained marathons in the Atacama Desert.

I want to share what lies beyond — what comes after — The breaking through — in order to honor this change and perhaps support those who now stand at the threshold, gathering the courage to take the first step. It is not an easy step, but it is likely imperative, and perhaps inevitable.

Leaving the system is not like changing careers. It is not like pivoting from banker to consultant, or from corporate executive to entrepreneur. It is more like sailing out of a safe bay into an ocean that no map can chart. Behind you lies stability, recognition, financial security — the old paradigm. Ahead lies only the unknown.

The ocean is terrifying. The currents pull you off course. The winds batter your sails. Storms rise without warning. The waves break against your hull. You have no instruments except a sense of direction, and a conviction that you must go completely east into the unknown. It is Columbus. It is Magellan. It is the choice to leave what is seen for what is only imagined.

And yet, here is the truth: you know, deep inside, that there is no way back. The bay you left is not a place of safety — it is self-terminating. It is sinking, even as it pretends to offer stability. To return would be to join the shipwreck in slow motion. So you sail on, into the uncharted, knowing that whatever awaits, it is at least alive.

I once described this shift as thousands of ships in heavy seas, sails torn by contrary winds, each struggling toward an unseen continent. None knows if it exists, but all are rowing, all are risking. That is one image of leaving the old world.

Another comes from Brother David Steindl-Rast, who wrote: “We all draw from the same underground spring, but each of us reaches it by digging in our own place.”

The journey out of the old paradigm is not a centralized march, not fireworks announcing a new era. It is more like this: each of us, with our own hands, digging where we stand. Different methods, different paths, yet all seeking the same underground source of life.

Together, the ships and the wells tell the same story. Humanity is scattering in every direction — some on stormy seas, some in the dust of hard soil. Yet beneath it all, there is one spring, one horizon, one land beyond the ocean waiting.

— Awakening to Uncontrol

When you step outside the system, the first thing you notice is not freedom, but disorientation. You begin to see systemic interactions — currents that were invisible inside the old paradigm. It is like falling out of a trance, the hypnosis of beliefs and values that had once felt like solid ground.

The corporate world had taught me control: control of capital, control of outcomes, control of time itself. But that control was an illusion. An imposed, self-imposed, deceiving sense of order — one that never truly existed. Because in truth, we control nothing. Losing that illusion felt like fragility. But it was not fragility — it was uncontrol.

And uncontrol is not collapse. It is awakening. Awakening to the truth that we have built a false reality, one that worships power, dominance, conquest. A reality that is unsustainable because it mistakes the mask for the face, the scaffolding for the living structure.

Outside that reality, you begin to glimpse the vortex we have created — what Nate Hagens calls the super-organism. I see it in the image of the solar system: at first, it looks static, a neat picture of planets circling a sun. But in motion, you realize nothing is still. The sun itself hurtles forward, dragging the planets in a spiral, each struggling to keep its orbit at thousands of miles per hour. That is what leaving the paradigm feels like: a vortex of evolution, of unprecedented change, with uncontrollable forces at play.

The helical model — our solar system is a vortex

What looked permanent is revealed as impermanent. What looked linear is revealed as feedback loops. What looked stable is revealed as systemic change in motion. And in this revelation comes both terror and beauty: to awaken is to see that we are always moving, always evolving, always in orbit around forces greater than ourselves.

When I finally allowed myself to see the numbers, they landed like blows. In just the last fifty years, humanity has erased nearly 70% of all vertebrate wildlife populations, and half of all marine life has vanished from our oceans. These are not abstract statistics; they are the pulse of the planet, the living inheritance squandered in a single generation.

For me, the recognition arrived with a heaviness I later learned to call solastalgia — a word coined by Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht to describe the homesickness we feel while still at home, when the familiar world is unraveling before our eyes. It is not nostalgia for a distant past; it is the grief of watching the present collapse.

I felt compelled to confirm this unraveling in situ. So I went north, to Svalbard, the Norwegian archipelago that is warming six times faster than the global average, to watch the Arctic shelves bleed into the sea. I went west, into the depths of the Ecuadorian Amazon, to see the rain forest torn open by oil and cattle.

These were not trips but pilgrimages, a way of saying to myself: this is real, this is happening. And when I returned, I tried to awaken others with what I had witnessed. But in boardrooms and executive retreats, the weight of my testimony barely disturbed the surface. Eyes flickered toward me, seeking a category — ecologist, doomer, activist ?— and once I was boxed, the conversation floated back to golf handicaps and petty politics. The unraveling of life itself was acknowledged for a heartbeat, then shelved like an inconvenient file.

I am sixty-four now. When I was thirteen, abundance was still within reach. I remember weekends on the farm in the south, where rivers ran clear and full of fish, where the air hummed with insects and the sky darkened with birds. I cuddled baby wildlife, watched herds of guanacos graze, tasted oysters pulled straight from sandy beaches and gathered dozens of Sand dollars. It felt infinite then — life upon life, weaving itself without end. Today, much of that abundance is gone, and in its place a silence that is almost unbearable.

Was I depressed?

Yes, I was. Because I had lost the sense of belonging. I found myself in a solitary place, staring into the unraveling of our predicament — a self-terminating game we were unconsciously playing. What deepened the ache was the impotence: the thriving force within me that always believed I could change things, now turned into a weight too heavy to carry alone. I was living too close to the frontier, where change is envisioned but rarely materializes. In that place, I discovered I was not my own enemy, but my own shadow — an adversary shaped by impossible expectations. And I realized I was not alone in this.

Many others were carrying the same burden, and most of our conversations circled around one question: how do we live with this?

What sustained us was not quick solutions, but purpose — the stubborn, imperfect, daily search to heal, beginning with ourselves.

This is the wound beneath our economic charts and climate debates: the hollowing of a living world, the grief of a belonging stolen. And yet, grief itself is a kind of compass. It reminds us that we are bound to these rivers, these forests, these creatures — that the unraveling of their lives is also the unraveling of ours.

What comes after awakening is not liberation but sadness. A profound sadness. Because once the hypnosis falls away, you see not only your own illusions, but what we are doing to ourselves, to each other, to the planet. You see the machinery of self-destruction disguised as progress, the violence of exploitation dressed as utopia.

This sadness is heavy. It deepens when you feel called to find solutions, to dedicate your life to mending the torn fabric. For me, that calling came with impotence. Each effort, each framework, each experiment seemed too small against the tide. And the more I tried, the heavier the sadness became. It pulled me into darkness.

I risked everything to awaken the system — to shift the paradigm, to introduce coherence where only fragmentation reigned. But the frustration of continuous failure hollowed me. And there was no way back. Once you have seen through the veil, you cannot put it back. Once the paradigm collapses in your mind, you cannot reassemble it. You live in a new reality, one that most others refuse to recognize.

And that is where depression and anxiety find new fuel. Not only from the grief of what is being destroyed, but from the denial of others. The unwillingness of those around you to have the courage to see. Their refusal becomes a kind of exile. You are not rejected outright, but you are no longer at home among them. You do not belong, though you once belonged. You carry the memory of belonging and the weight of unbelonging.

This takes you into a special place, very very lonely. You’ve exiled yourself from the system. You are in a world of uncertainty, vulnerable. Unless you are a millionaire, you still economically depend on the system you want to change. Which makes you participant in the very processes you want to reverse. Every change means complying with part of the system. Radicalization is not possible — for most of us.

So here comes the process of self-awakening. Of understanding that you have a purpose. Of recognizing the pure intention behind that purpose and the values that sustain it. And it is only through this practice of values, of commitment, of pure intention, that you can transition out of darkness. But let me tell you — it is a steep, slow, cumbersome ladder.

— The Frontier

This place is unlike any I had known before. Here, there is no money — at least not in the way I once knew it. Every day is a battle for survival. Everyone in this place is searching for money, and that is the curse. The old system reduces everything to price. And the cruelest irony is that to resist it, you find yourself trying to price the very things that have no price — soil, water, breath, love. You are forced to put numbers on what is beyond value.

This is the greatest frustration of all. You try to stop the machine by using the machine’s own levers. You believe, perhaps, that you can trim-tab the system, that you can turn the supertanker of capitalism by placing your small rudder in just the right place. And yet, at the frontier, the greatest battles are fought. Because here, at the edge, you can profit — but only at the cost of your purpose. And purpose is no longer a strategy. It is your life.

So you start climbing the ladder. Slow, steep, cumbersome. You bless every step where soulmates appear — people who share the hunger for something more than price, who keep you company in the exile. And slowly, as you climb, you begin to discover something unsettling: how far you have separated from your own self. The process of discovery is not simply learning; it is unlearning. Shedding the skin of illusion, holding yourself to a set of values, and practicing the art of letting go.

Letting go is as powerful as moving the system itself. Because the real bridge is internal. The change does not come from outside but through you. You are not separate from the rest. As Thich Nhat Hanh would say: “The way out is in.”

For me, the path was a weaving of the Andean cosmovision, Ayni/ reciprocity, and Zen Buddhism’s interbeing. It was the voice of Thich Nhat Hanh teaching that “no mud, no lotus.”

Suffering and beauty are not opposites but entangled forces. Mud does not prevent the lotus — it gives birth to it. The system’s collapse and my own collapse were not the end of life but the compost from which life could grow.

And as I slowly built capacity — tools of systemic thinking, lenses of complexity, the courage to face impermanence — I began to see the patterns and principles of life we had disregarded. The lesson was not control, but acceptance. Acceptance of uncertainty, and even more: trust in uncertainty.

Here, Joanna Macy’s voice entered my life, reminding me of the gifts of uncertainty. Joanna reminds us that uncertainty is not a curse but a call — to live more consciously, to act with intention, and to let our deepest values guide us even when outcomes remain unknow. Uncertainty is not an enemy. It is a teacher, a threshold, a gift.

— The Logbook of Uncertainty

Leaving that old bay did not deposit me on a sunlit shore. It put me into a weather I could not have imagined: bright with possibility and shadowed by an unnameable risk. The deepest truth I have learned is not the comforting kind.

It is simply this: I do not know whether we will make it.

That is the honest center of the story — the uncertainty that hums beneath every decision, every project, every brave attempt to reroute a civilization.

And yet, when I look back across the burned fields of my old life — across Armani stripes and first-class flights, across syndicated deals and boardroom dinners — I would choose the same path again. Would I do certain things differently? Of course. Hindsight is a merciful tutor. I would have been kinder sooner; I would have unlearned faster; I would have sought soulmates earlier. But would I trade the desert for the suit? Would I trade the strangeness of exile for the numbness of compliance?

…No. I would climb that ladder again, with the same stubbornness, because the ladder is where I found what mattered most: a fragile, true orientation to life.

This entry is, in part, a logbook. Not a manifesto or a map that claims authority, but a worn journal of experiments and failures, of attempts to translate purpose into policy, of learning how to govern with humility and how to finance with restraint. It is an entanglement of perspectives — stories from the ship, sketches from the well, marginal notes from the desert.

It honors the multiplicity of paths: the technologists, the farmers, the artists, the monks, the policymakers. We do not all dig in the same place, but we draw from the same spring.

The gravest lesson is that the terrain is uncharted. There is no single playbook. This is both terrifying and liberating. Terrifying because the stakes are collective and enormous; liberating because the absence of a map invites creativity and responsibility. If there is a call to action here, it is not a formula. It is an ethic: cultivate purpose, practice patience, build capacities, and above all, live by a set of values that can outlast your quarterly report.

I will not pretend my sadness has vanished. Some nights it returns with the force of wind against canvas. But alongside the sadness there is also a stubborn gratitude for having felt it fully — because feeling the abyss is what taught me the depth of what is worth protecting. The exile has shown me that belonging, if it is to be genuine, must be chosen and practiced. It is not a thing you inherit by title or contract; it is something you co-create in the small, daily acts of reciprocity and repair.

And yet, beyond the sorrow, I have found reason for hope. Out on the ocean, my ship has begun to sense signs of arrival: the smell of land carried on the wind, the cries of seagulls overhead, fragments of vegetation drifting past the hull. These are not illusions; they are signals. Humanity, too, is beginning to sense landfall. There is a shift, not always visible to the mind, but already stirring in our hearts and our souls.

They say the darkest hour is just before dawn. And dawn, I believe, is coming. In these years, I have discovered I am not alone. What once felt like collapse and depression was, in truth, loneliness. Along the way I have met hundreds, perhaps thousands, of changemakers filled with pure intention, guided by purpose. Together they form an emergent field, a paradigm shift, a new cosmovision.

This shift is teaching us again what it means to be human — not conquerors, not consumers, but participants in a living system. It is about aligning with the patterns and principles of life itself: reciprocity, regeneration, interdependence. It is slow and fragile, but it is real.

So, if this logbook began in darkness, let it end in the recognition of light. The great unraveling is also a great awakening. And though the passage is uncertain and the seas are rough, I sense that we are not drifting aimlessly. We are sailing toward a horizon of belonging, one that has been waiting for us all along.