Are we quietly preparing for the apocalypse?

Carbon levels have reached 420 parts per million, world leaders are bullying former allies while the rest of the world is watching on TV, and AI systems now write code faster than human programmers.

Everyone seems to ask what might be ahead.

On top of that, a few of the world’s super-rich individuals are openly fascist, constantly high, and actively destroying democracy. They reproduce in line with pronatalism ideals but don’t spend time with their children outside photo ops.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve never been less tempted to join a club. And it doesn’t seem like I’m the only one rethinking what truly matters.

As billionaires race to space, ordinary people struggle to afford housing. The promised benefits of hard work have left many exhausted and lonely. And what use is a corner office if you're too burned out to enjoy your life?

Being rich is out.

The big question is whether the redefinition of what constitutes "wealth" and "success" is just a passing trend or the beginning of adaptation to what may become a post-capitalistic reality.

Whenever you want to understand what is ahead, your best bet is to look at people without stakes in any specific future.

Most people cannot buy a social media platform to push their political agenda. They are just making tiny changes to their lives, adapting to the information they have at hand.

Trend report after trend report redefines “luxury”, suggesting that sleep, health, close relationships, values, and knowledge are now important wealth indicators.

More people train for marathons, take career sabbaticals, and join book clubs.

These new luxuries correlate surprisingly well with what science suggests makes for a happy life. The open online course The Science of Wellbeing from Yale teaches students how to increase happiness through gratitude, social connection, kindness, altruism, and sleep, among other things.

Of course, all of these new luxuries are easier to prioritise if you have money, which is probably why they can be an indicator of wealth in the first place. But maybe we should credit the millennial generation's obsession with self-help books and therapy for this shift — credit where credit is due.

Being well-informed is a luxury today.

Even in a world of fake news and truth-seeking, those genuinely looking for the key to a good life tend to realise that authentic human connection, belonging, and health are at the core.

However, I cannot help but wonder if these emerging priorities are more than personal preferences and rather practical adaptations to an uncertain future.

As our planetary, economic and social systems show increasing signs of strain, people are intuitively preparing by investing in resources that might retain value across systemic transitions: knowledge, relationships, health, and practical skills.

When you add together melting ice caps, increasing wealth gaps, geopolitical tension, political extremism, school shootings, mental health decline, and increasing loneliness, you get a poly-crisis. Anyone with the intellectual capacity to analyse multiple variables simultaneously knows the system will change.

Some might argue these shifts are merely cyclical, but can a system demanding infinite growth function indefinitely with finite resources?

Recent geopolitical events have people even more worried about escalating global conflicts, and climate emergencies wiped out entire neighborhoods in cities home to millions of people at the beginning of the year. All the science points in one direction: It’s not about whether the system will change but when.

And while money might give you an advantage in a stable system, it can be surprisingly useless during systemic shifts when other skills suddenly become much more critical.

If we don’t know how long capitalism will be the dominant paradigm, quietly preparing and changing our values is the first step to transferring wealth from a capitalistic to a post-capitalistic system.

This would suggest that collecting money and work titles makes no sense. Instead, those who will come out ahead will be the individuals who know how to build strong relationships, collaborate, solve problems, be grateful, stay healthy, repair what they already have, and so much more.

Recognising changes ahead of time is also a skill. It allows us to collect the skills needed and valued when the current system falls and the new paradigm evolves.

As carbon levels climb, tensions escalate, and machines do our thinking, those seemingly simple shifts – valuing connection over consumption, health over wealth, presence over prestige – may be the most pragmatic preparation.

Perhaps the redefinition of wealth we're witnessing isn't just adaptation but the collective intuition preparing for what’s next.