Nothing Makes Sense. Everything is fine.

Lately I keep coming back to the line from Epictetus — ‘It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.’  It’s a phrase that’s survived 2500 years because it’s true.

For me life is, and always has been, a series of unpredictable events. What for one person seems to work out, another seems to always be a struggle. With events interweaved together and with outcomes driven by the behaviours that we adapt to react to them.

To this end I’ve been thinking about the current disarray of the world. The North Atlantic era of dominance is reaching its natural end. AI is reshaping everything from art to economics — it can write poetry, diagnose cancer, and mimic your voice before you’ve finished the sentence.

The long tail of the industrial revolution has changed western countries forever, especially the UK and parts of Europe, with de-industrialisation failing to be replaced by anything better, or even equal.

Birth rates are falling in these countries and booming in another meaning that immigration is not necessarily a policy failure (which it certainly is) but a reflection of the fact that in 1950 40% of the world’s population were of European origin and today it is around 13%.  The climate is shifting and impacting the world more every year. None of this is small — these are civilisation-level tremors. But we have faced hard things before and found a way to come together in one form or another.

As a rule, times of distress tend to draw us closer; a war rallying the British spirit or the death of a historical figure through history creating moments of reflection. However, instead in today’s world these current issues find us splintering. With the same pressures that once united people now driving us into smaller, angrier corners.

It really does all seem so existential, but perhaps it’s not the gravity of the challenges that are new just the lens we’re looking at it through.

To me, and indeed many others, the reason for this is algorithmic not emotional.

Social media started simply enough with good intention. A way to keep up with friends, share music, to share a moment, to build small a small network mainly of folks that you knew and like-minded people.

Then it expanded a little you and your friends and maybe a few celebrities, some news, the occasional brand. This seemed like a good thing, account numbers tended to follow Dunbar’s number, that my own experiences throughout the world working and meeting with indigenous peoples fully supports.

But in 2019 this changed. When platforms like Meta changed their algorithms to mirror the success of TikTok. What had been about you curating your own social network became about them maximising your reaction.

To this point, last week, Meta’s own court filings showed that on Facebook, only 17% of what people see comes from people they know. On Instagram, that number is 7%! So more than 80% of what we scroll through comes from strangers — not something that we’ve chosen but something selected for us. The idea of a “social network” has all but disappeared. What we have instead is engagement farming.

This to me sits at the root of the issue, simply put these are division-for- profit models where there seems to be a purity spiral into a world where nuance is entirely lost. Where you signal your allegiance to a group by being more to the cause than the last person. Whereby it doesn’t take long in these silos of proffered information for any two people or groups to move in opposite directions in the opposite direction. Likely a biological imperative to signal that in a social setting and works to Dunbar’s Number and beyond, but naturally when we are choosing our data sets to draw that from.

When that response is no longer organic, things start to break down. A simple, human sentiment like, “I don’t always agree with him, but I quite like Piers Morgan” would once have passed without notice. Today, it feels almost strange to write — because the whole ecosystem demands a firm position. There’s little room left for casual thought or quiet opinion; everything must be a stance. But that’s not who we are as a species.

If youur first few things over coffee are a breaching humpback whale, an insight into how a different culture has breakfast, watching an African child at play or seeing a South Pacific island sunrise then your day becomes a whole other thing. Spend the first 10 minutes of your day triggering your CNS becuase of the perceived outrageous behaviour of a political actor and that starts to impact the rest of your life.

Most of us are deeply passionate about a few things, and on everything else we hold mild views, open to persuasion. That’s a natural way to live, and while it’s not always harmonious, it has served us well. Yet in a world where every thought must declare allegiance — where you must love or hate a political party, a restaurant, a country, a people, a gender — the middle ground has all but disappeared.

This illusion shows up most clearly in politics. The supposed battle between left and right has become more theatre than ideology. In truth, almost every major Western political party is capitalist first — they all operate within the same economic framework, and all broadly want the same things: stability, growth, jobs, functioning public services, and a measure of fairness.

The disagreements are mostly about method, not destination — whether the levers should be public or private, regulated or free, taxed or subsidised. That doesn’t make the debates meaningless, but it does make the polarity artificial. What’s presented as two opposing worldviews is, for the most part, one system arguing with itself over the most efficient way to keep turning.

Recent years have made that harder to claim with certainty — populism, culture wars, and economic shocks have exposed real fractures — yet the fundamental machinery is the same. The divide is less ideological than it is again algorithmic: we’re being taught to see difference where there is mostly nuance.

Ok so that, rather long-winded thought process, brings me to the point I’ve been exploring – how much could be changed, and how quickly, simply by an algorithmic flip.

If our natural proclivity is to be nuanced, it follows that it must be harder to divide than to expand on something that is natural to us.

The world’s problems stay the same — inequality, climate change, politics of choice, all of it — but the feed shifts. Regardless of what you follow, it begins to prioritise signals of empathy, creativity, and wonder over outrage. It shows you a humpback whale breaching in the Pacific. A dancer in Samoa. A craftsman in Ghana. A quiet story about something a country actually got right. It nudges you toward curiosity, not cynicism.

Toward the kind of warmth that makes you want to go outside, to see, to learn, to talk.

Imagine if that principle extended beyond social media — if the systems that now monetise division were recalibrated to reward connection. The same data that predicts what will keep you scrolling could predict what will lift you, what will teach, what will restore your sense of belonging. What if the “engagement metric” wasn’t outrage or addiction, but retention of hope, drive to togetherness.

That isn’t just idealism; it’s a design choice. The code already determines what rises to the top. We could just as easily decide that what rises should be what heals. It would mean companies accepting that the short-term dopamine hit isn’t worth the long-term corrosion of public life. Governments could treat algorithmic transparency as a public-health issue. Creators could be paid not only for clicks but for the depth of dialogue they spark.

It doesn’t erase difference; it humanises it. It reminds us that right and left are bends in a winding road, not two cliffs facing each other. That “Boomers” and “Gen Z” aren’t tribes at war but people born into different light. That the point of all this technology was once to connect us — not to convince us we have nothing in common.

None of this requires new tech — just new thinking. Every major shift in human history has begun with a change in story: we went from myths of gods to the myth of progress; from divine right to democracy; from the factory to a feed. The next myth could simply be that connection is worth more than conflict.

Does this sound naïve? Maybe. But the fact that it does only proves how far we’ve drifted.

Epictetus was talking about the self about how life is better if we believe it will be and worse if we don’t. But in a world where algorithms do that for us these lessons have become collective more than individual.

The way we react is no longer just a personal internal choice but a performative one. In many ways social media externalises what until recently was part of our internal life. And if we’re going to do that then surely it would be nicer for all if the parts we share are our best sides, our kindness, our empathy and curiosity rather than our fears, our dogma and our prejudices. We can only hope.

The writing on this website forms a small part of my wider journey — a lifelong fascination with understanding and exploring how culture, technology, and consciousness shape the world we live in, and a search for evidence that far more connects us than separates us.

Through my work at Tintra Group and The Tintra Foundation, incredible teams are turning that exploration into practice — reimagining finance and development for a multipolar world.