The Digital Contrarian

TDC 046: 3 Converging Forces Reshaping Our World As We Know It...

• Ryan Levesque • Episode 46

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#046: What happens when three unstoppable forces converge and rewrite the rules of modern life?

Episode Summary

In this episode of The Digital Contrarian, host Ryan Levesque unpacks three seismic shifts reshaping civilization.

You’ll discover Ray Dalio’s “Big Cycle” of American decline, understand AI’s existential threat to human meaning, and learn how the end of infinite growth is fuelling a worldwide “return to real.”

Question of the Day 🗣️

What will still matter a decade from now—and which of these three forces hits closest to home for you?

Key Take-aways

  • Dalio’s Big Cycle signals late-stage empire decline—debt, polarization, institutional drift.
  • AI’s rise threatens not just jobs but humanity’s sense of purpose.
  • Infinite growth meets finite energy: Hagens’ Great Simplification sets hard limits.
  • A cultural “return to real” favours tangible skills, local community, grounded choices.
  • Adaptive entrepreneurs prioritise meaning over metrics to build resilience now.

Timestamped Outline ⏱️

00:00 – Context: today’s accelerating uncertainty
01:03 – Three forces reshaping life as we know it
01:36 – Force #1: Dalio’s Big Cycle & U.S. decline
03:37 – Force #2: AI vs human meaning
05:27 – Force #3: The end of infinite growth
08:10 – Where they converge: the Return to Real
09:31 – Personal reflections from the Ozarks
10:41 – The question that matters most

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Credits

Host: Ryan Levesque
© 2025 RL & Associates LLC. All rights reserved.

What the hell is happening in the world right now? Last week, I found myself deep in the Ozark Mountains. I was hiking with my front row dad's band. There are six other fathers that I meet with regularly to talk about life and family and business and purpose. 

We have no cell service, no slack, just long miles underfoot and the kind of stripped down conversations that only happen when you've removed everything else. And one night after a long day on the trail, we gathered around a fire. Stars were sharp, stars were clear, the world had gone quiet and the conversation turned to something deeper. 

What the hell is happening in the world right now? Now we didn't mean the news headlines, we meant the undercurrent, the feel of things, the unease that so many of us carry about the economy, the role of technology, about the future that we're preparing our kids for. And what followed was one of the richest conversations that I've had in a really long time. And we began tracing the pattern that we're all sensing.

And I mapped out what I am seeing as three converging forces that I believe are reshaping life as we know it. Number one, Ray Dalio's big cycle and the slow motion decline of U.S. global dominance. Number two, Yuval Noah Harari's warning that AI poses a fundamental threat to human meaning.

And number three, Nate Hagen's great simplification, the reckoning with the impossibility of infinite growth inside a finite system. And at the center of all three, something powerful, a recalibration, a return to real. Not as a slogan, as a deeply human response to a world coming unglued.

Let me explain. Let's begin with the first force, the end of the American cycle, which stems from Ray Dalio's work. In Principles for Dealing with Changing World Order, Why Nations Succeed or Fail, Ray Dalio's big cycle framework outlines the long arc of empire, how nations rise through productivity and innovation, gain dominance through trade and military strength, and eventually decline under the weight of debt, internal conflict, and the erosion of trust. 

Now, according to Dalio, the United States is in the late stages of this arc, and the symptoms are all around us. We've got exploding debt levels, political polarization at historic extremes, loss of faith in institutions from the media to the legal system, rising internal conflict, and declining global influence. And by the way, these patterns aren't new. 

These patterns have played out again and again through history, in the Dutch Empire, the British Empire, and now perhaps the American one. The big cycle unfolds over 80 to 100 years and typically ends with a period of deleveraging, when excessive debt, political division, and declining empire power collide to reset the system. And it's a predictable cycle. 

And with history as our guide, we're likely close to this reset. And if Dalio's framework is even partially right, we're heading into a period of increased volatility, lower trust, and more radical change, politically, economically, and socially as well. In this environment, people begin to hedge. 

They localize. They build community. They focus on what they can control. 

They invest in the tangible, hard skills. They seek sovereignty, not in theory, but in practice. The return to real, in this light, reflects a grassroots recalibration in response to the slow unraveling of empire. 

And no, this isn't a reaction that's driven by fear and unfounded pessimism. Instead, it's an informed response to emerging patterns, a way to create stability, meaning, and resilience at the individual level in an environment where the larger system feels increasingly fragile. And this takes us to the second force, the existential threat of AI. 

In Homo Deus, A Brief History of Tomorrow, Yuval Noah Harari has warned us that artificial intelligence poses not just an economic threat, but a civilizational one. And it's not simply about job loss or market disruption, like we explored in issue 33 of The Digital Contrarian, the coming collapse. It's about meaning.

For most of human history, our sense of value has been tethered to our usefulness, our ability to solve problems, to create value, and make decisions. But as AI begins to outperform humans in reasoning, creativity, pattern recognition, and even emotional simulation, that usefulness is coming into question. So what happens when we are no longer the smartest beings in the room? What happens when intelligence itself becomes a commodity? Harari suggests that we may be facing a future where humans become increasingly irrelevant, not through violence, but through obsolescence. 

And whether we admit it or not, most people can feel it. When AI can communicate better and with more empathy than most adults. When algorithms know your preferences better than your spouse. 

When companies like Shopify begin replacing high-level cognitive labor with language models. The question is no longer whether AI will disrupt markets, it's whether it will displace meaning. And this has implications that go far beyond economics. 

It touches on our identity, our dignity, our role in the future. And so, in response, many are reaching for the tangible. Not because they reject technology, but because they're looking for anchors.

They cook from scratch. They grow food. They repair things with their hands.

They host real conversations in living rooms versus Zoom rooms. They prioritize presence over productivity. The return to real is, in part, a response to a creeping cultural unease.

That in a world where machines can do everything, the only things that matter are those that are fundamentally human. Which takes us to the third force. The end of infinite growth. 

Nate Hagans refers to the moment that we're living through as the Great Simplification. At the heart of his thesis is a simple but uncomfortable truth. We live in a civilization that assumes economically, politically, and culturally that growth can continue forever. 

But we're beginning to hit a wall. Energy is at the base layer of everything. And while technology has given us extraordinary leverage over nature, it hasn't eliminated the constraints of thermodynamics, depletion, or ecological limits. 

Hagans introduces this concept of the carbon pulse, a one-time spike in global productivity and complexity made possible by burning through 4 billion years of accumulated sunlight in the form of fossil fuels in just 100 years. This explosion of energy access gave rise to everything that we now take for granted, from industrial agriculture to global trade to modern medicine and even digitized life. But it's a pulse, not a permanent state.

We're already past the point of what's known as peak oil in terms of quality and accessibility, and we're approaching a critical tipping point in energy return, when we begin needing to expend more than one unit of energy to extract one unit of usable energy from the ground. And once this happens, the system breaks down. Energy ceases to be a source of surplus. 

It becomes instead a sink. And with it, the entire logic of our growth-based economy collapses. Now, meanwhile, the broader system, from financial markets to retirement models to consumer culture, still runs on this assumption of more. 

More consumption, more GDP, more innovation, and more leverage. And yet, deep down, many of us sense the tension. Most people know that infinite growth on a finite planet doesn't compute. 

That we've been borrowing from the future economically, environmentally, and psychologically to fund the present. And so, unconsciously or not, people are beginning to adjust. They're pairing back. 

They're shifting from scale to sufficiency. They're letting go of hyper-optimization and relearning how to meet basic needs. They're finding joy not in accumulation, but in rhythm and seasonality. 

They're seeking awe and wonder in the ordinary and everyday. The return to real shows up here as a cultural adaptation, not driven by ideology, but by intuition. A quiet recalibration toward a life that works not on spreadsheets, but in lived experience. 

A life rooted in limits and richer for it. The return to real is a cultural response. Now, when you lay these three forces side by side by side, a deeper pattern emerges. 

Dalio's big cycle reveals the decay of our dominant institutions. Harari's AI lens challenges the foundations of our identity and our usefulness. Hagen's great simplification pulls back the curtain on our energy and ecological fragility. 

Each force on its own is a but together they mark the end of an era. And deep down, many of us are responding. We're making different choices. 

Not because we have a master plan, but because something inside of us recognizes the ground is shifting. The return to real is emerging as a kind of cultural nervous system, a pattern of adaptations responding to these converging pressures. It's showing up in the way people are growing their own food, moving to smaller towns, learning how to repair and build with their hands, leaving high-paying jobs to pursue meaningful work, spending more time offline with their families. 

We're reaching for what's tangible because the abstract no longer feels stable. We're prioritizing sufficiency over scale because we sense the limits ahead. We're seeking groundedness because the center no longer holds. 

And by the way, this isn't about going backward. It's about regrounding. The return to real isn't one macro movement. 

It's many, many micro moves. It's showing up in the soil. It's showing up in our homes.

It's showing up in our wallets and in our relationships. And if you zoom out far enough, you begin to see it may be the most important strategic pivot of our time. I'll end today's video with a personal reflection. 

Because around that fire in the Ozarks, none of us claimed to have the answers. We were just a handful of dads trying to make sense of the world for ourselves, for our families, and for our kids. But what struck me most in that conversation was the shared recognition that something fundamental is shifting. 

And the old playbook, the hustle, the scale at all costs, the algorithm chasing, no longer feels aligned. Now for me, the return to real is not just cultural, it's personal. It's why I left the city to raise my boys here on our farm. 

It's why we grow our own food. It's why we tend to our animals. It's why we work the land. 

And it's why I'm more interested these days in meaning than metrics. And it's why I write my weekly newsletter, The Digital Contrarian, to offer space where we can explore these shifts and these ideas together. To ground our decisions in something more enduring than just the headlines. 

To orient our lives around the things that actually matter. To prepare for what's coming, not with panic, but with purpose. As I look ahead, I find myself asking a simple but profound question.

What will actually still matter 10 years from now? Now that's the question I'll be carrying with me into this next week. Until then, I would love to hear from you. This conversation is particularly important to me because the return to real is a theme that I'll be exploring deeply in my forthcoming book. 

And I'd love to know what, in particular, from this conversation most resonates with you. So please shoot me a note, leave me a comment. I read each and every word. 

And in the meantime, remember to hug the ones you love. And until next week, I'll see you again soon.