For new followers and new subscribers to my corner of the world that’s trying to think up a new one, Now What? isn’t for me to make a living but for me to make a difference. Since I stopped being Mrs. Him, decades ago, I’ve gone from project to project, of many varieties but all about tuning in to what we are becoming. If you lived in L.A. before Covid, and were involved in the wake-up, you‘d have spent time at my house and at venues in L.A. where I produced events. Now, having been prevented for so long from acting together has us very much in the mind, trying to make sense of what has changed, where my current project is to use Substack to help the zeitgeist go from humanity being self-absorbed to our being loving and caring.
The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born,
webs of heredity and environment,
of desire and consequence, of history and eternity.
—William Faulkner
The story of our development started 13.8 billion years ago, and here we are, evolving away. Our bodies have been set for a long time, but our thinking is unfinished. That’s obvious, since we are idiotic enough to be destroying ourselves. Among the 12,241 nuclear warheads in the world, some are 3000 times stronger than what we dropped on those two Japanese cities. We are playing with God power, and there is a madman at the controls. Why are we passive about this?
I wrote to MoveOn, responding to Supreme Court is making Trump a king:
With the Supreme Court making Trump a king, we effectively have a monarchy. With freedom from our democracy’s constraints, that maintain the founders’ model, what would we do? Instead of one president, how about a Team for the People, with women like Heather Cox Richardson, Joyce Vance, Anne Applebaum, and Marianne Williamson? Those are the ones I most closely track, but there are other wonderful women, whom I’d limit it to, to choose from, and it could be more than four. I trust the populace would be behind such a thing, where the many millions who would flood Washington’s streets are what coups are made of. Just picture such warm, smart, human-loving human beings leading the way. Overthrow the monarchy with politics of the people. Why not?
Billionaires could help, transforming how they do things from holding their assets to showering the world with them. Doing the most good would get Human Being Awards, as the spirit to be in. And it has the advantage of being pleasurable, with a definition of pleasure as coming from human interaction.
Now I get to use my oh so graphic example of the shift in understanding we need for the world to work. Norway operates its justice system based on what’s good for the community instead of what’s hard on the criminals. The revolutionary evolutionary idea is that everyone being treated well makes the world work well. Check out my Norway playlist!
I want to see the creation of the Team of Humanity, subscribed to by all of us behaving like we do in disasters, where, hands down, we are there for each other. I can see why nobody has put that flag up for us to rally round. Everyone is too humble to be comfortable with being THE person declaring for the creation of the ultimate in humanity’s evolution. No criticism here. And it could be a shared declaration by some of our beloveds. Just collect us. We’d be at the ready for boycotts or however else we could be influential as the voice of the people. One thing gives rise to another, and getting ourselves into a coalition would be a next step.
Who says yes?
As, Johan, one of my go-to sages here on Substack, says at the end of Part 1 of The World Ahead 2026:
The old rules no longer apply.
But history isn’t deterministic. Trajectories can shift. They shift because people keep the possibility of something better alive long enough for an opportunity to appear.
We need more empathy. More leadership. More cooperation and trust.
Not just from world leaders … too many refuse to see the danger or hope to profit from it. I’m talking about us. We can’t wait for politicians to act. We can’t rely on markets. We can’t count on Washington to lead or Beijing to step up or multilateral institutions to fill the gap.
We have to invent new communities grounded in truth, not spin. Bolstered by action, not just talk. Built on cooperation, not division.
That’s hard. I understand that. But there’s no secret lever to pull, no hidden strategy that makes this easier.
I just know we must...
The question is whether enough people see them clearly enough to adapt, resist, or build alternatives.
Note what an active responder Johan is to comments people make, as an example of my current advocacy for people who write about the state of the world to be responsive to comments, so Substack is like a giant conversation that’s pulsing with the creative energy of we the people.
Here’s a comment Johan made on his piece, We Got Rich. Now What? The Question We’re Not Asking:
We accumulated unprecedented wealth, but the systems that were supposed to translate that wealth into stability, meaning, or safety never evolved with it. Prosperity without purpose produces nostalgia for certainty, fear of the future, and a sense that the people steering the system have detached from the lives they’re reshaping.
AI is just the newest accelerant. The economic shocks aren’t accidental, they’re the predictable outcome of a system that rewards disruption over stewardship and scale over care. The “heartless ruthlessness” isn’t a personality flaw of tech leaders; it’s the behavioral logic of institutions that treat humans as externalities.
And yet the moment is full of possibility. The uncertainty is real, but so is the agency. If we’re smart enough to rebuild meaning, community, and purpose alongside the technology, the future doesn’t have to be a continuation of the present. Wealth didn’t make us happier, but it did expose what actually matters.
And here’s more of Johan in a piece I cross-posted to this list that gives us a fascinating teaching about reality. There’s a sweep of history from what is deeply imbedded within us, and Johan has the tracking. I like how he ends The Noise Is the Signal: A Behavioral Reading of Media Collapse:
We’re losing the ability to agree on the facts…not because people are irrational, but because the institutions we relied on to establish shared reality have been exposed as partial, self-interested, and sometimes quite biased.
This is terrifying.
But it’s also an opening.
Because maybe, just maybe, we can build something better than a system where truth was whatever powerful institutions said it was.
The noise isn’t the problem.
The noise is us, finally speaking.
And the world has no choice but to listen.
You can’t convince me humanity doesn’t have good instincts:
"Being loved is great. Being loving is even better. You are in control of how that can be your state of being so you’re always feeling good…I’m not advertising myself as the model for this behavior, just how it’s the secret to well-being. So much misery could be spared. So much money for therapy could be saved, so much turmoil about miseries of the world could be bypassed." —Ava DuVernay
(or maybe me that I wrote down listening to her)
That quote goes with my life-changer that came along in 2025, from Raj Sisodia, who works with corporate executives for them to deliver what can create the world we need to be in. Here’s seven minutes of what Raj had to say on a panel he was on:
We’ve learned that it’s all about love, but loving terrible people is a Christlike stretch. The good news is that we don’t have to make it. Coming from love is all we need to do. Here’s the nugget of Raj’s to take on as the operating system of your transformed life: “Every single thing we do in this life should come from love. Every action, every statement, even if you have to let somebody go, the hardest thing you have to do, can you do it with love and not anger, fear, greed? Most business decisions come from fear and greed. Can you make that exact same decision but from a place of love?” All good people who want to know what to do, start by practicing this!
And if you didn’t see last week’s post, Take a Trip with Santa, there’s still some holiday left for tuning into its holiday daily Delights.
Watch for an extra post I’m working on for New Year’s Day, to propose something that either will get me a faceful of egg or will start a conversation.
HOUSEKEEPING
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In Now What? I advocate a revolution. You could say an evolution, to a next phase of consciousness where we act from our interconnection as one humanity. In not having paying subscribers I lose the support the gods of Substack might give, where I am so uniquely revolutionary that I’d think they would sing some praises. But, all I have for support is you.
Beyond Liking and Commenting on this post, here’s how you can help Now What? to be seen:
1. Substack writers can Restack this post for Notes.
2. Substack writers can Cross-post this post to your subscribers.
3. Everyone can Share this post in all ways. If you forward it, delete the “Unsubscribe” link at the bottom or people you forward it to could unsubscribe me.
4. The best thing Substack writers can do is to Recommend my Now What? Substack to your subscribers. There’s a direct link if you are on the net. If you are in email, go to your Dashboard. Under Creator Tools on the left click Recommendations → click Add recommendation → search for Suzanne Taylor’s Now What?
Suzanne, what feels right about Now What? is that it does not separate inner change from collective responsibility. The same instinct that surfaces in disasters, when people drop pretense and take care of one another, is the instinct worth organizing around. Not someday, not after collapse, but now.
The idea of a Team of Humanity does not strike me as naive. It names a hunger for leadership rooted in care, intelligence, and moral courage rather than control. History does not move only through institutions. It shifts when people recognize themselves as participants again.
I am also drawn to your insistence that this be a conversation, not a platform. Responsiveness is part of the ethic. Listening is part of the leadership. Meaning does not arrive fully formed. It emerges through relationship.
So yes, I say yes. Not because I know what comes next, but because keeping the possibility of something better alive is how futures change.
Suzanne, I hope this doesn’t sound mean, but noble as the lofty ideals are, they mostly appeal to people who have the bandwidth to appreciate them (i.e. educated, affluent … and probably “white”). The masses for whom day to day life is an insecure, fear-filled struggle don’t have time to marvel at the wonders of the universe story. Existence probably doesn’t feel very wonderful to them.
At this point, surveying all human-caused problems and their proposed solutions, I’ve simplified down to one tack: limit the individual’s ability to accumulate wealth — perhaps to somewhere between 30 and 100 million. And do something similar for corporately held wealth.
I’m hard pressed to think of any human-caused problem that at the bottom isn’t driven by the need to hoard as much wealth as possible. Instead of struggling to fight “fires” on dozens or hundreds of fronts, would it not be more effective to take away the fuel that drives them all?
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See the article in Time Magazine: "I’m a Millionaire. No One Needs More than $30 Million". https://time.com/7325632/universal-basic-income-millionaire