“The Rift”
Orientation
In A Time of Transition, we named a seismic threshold moment ~ the dissolving of an old world, the emergence of a new one. In What’s Changing About Change?, we explored how change itself is becoming more exponential, unpredictable, and complex.
Here, we turn toward a different but related condition ~ one that many are quietly sensing, even if we haven’t had words for it: A growing mismatch between the accelerating pace of change in the world around us and our individual, collective, and systemic readiness to meet it.
This widening gap is what I refer to as The Rift ~ and it’s what we’ll begin exploring here.
It’s Not All In Our Heads
Many are quietly asking: “Why can’t I keep up?” “Why does everything feel so overwhelming?” “Am I the only one who’s falling behind?”
That inner confusion ~ often held in isolation ~ becomes fertile ground for shame. We assume something must be wrong with us. That we’re fragile. Inadequate. Somehow broken.
But when we zoom out and widen the lens, a different picture emerges. The same symptoms ~ burnout, anxiety, numbness, despair ~ are surfacing across geographies, generations, and roles. Teachers. CEOs. Teenagers. Caregivers. Elders. All reporting a fraying of capacity. A disorientation of pace. A subtle or overwhelming sense of rupture.
So a new question arises: If so many are struggling in parallel, might this not be personal failure…but a signal of shared conditions?
This is the premise behind a concept I call The Rift. It reframes the distress many are feeling ~ not as a sign of individual dysfunction, but as a signal of something deeper out of sync: a mismatch between the world we’ve built and the nervous systems we inhabit.
What?
We live in a time of profound transition. A seismic shift is underway ~ delineating the fading outlines of an old world and the emergent contours of a new one. But it’s not just that things are changing. The nature of change itself is shifting: becoming exponential, unpredictable, harder to grasp. Technologies evolve at warp speed. Crises compound across systems. Certainties dissolve faster than we can reorient.
But here’s the deeper challenge: our internal capacities ~ how we sense, process, adapt, and relate ~ haven’t kept pace.
Our tools have evolved faster than our selves. The outer world has accelerated beyond the inner scaffolding meant to hold it. And the widening gap between what we’re setting in motion externally and our capacity to metabolize it internally?
That’s The Rift.
The Rift is the growing gap between accelerating external change and our slower-growing internal capacity to navigate it. This gap isn’t just theoretical . It’s somatic.
The Rift is not hypothetical. It’s somatic. It’s systemic. It’s relational. It lives in our nervous systems. Our institutions. Our inboxes. Our conversations.
It’s why so many are experiencing anxiety, burnout, and despair…not because we’re “too sensitive” or “not resilient enough,” but because we’re attempting to meet exponential complexity with tools, frames, and nervous systems shaped by a slower, more linear era.
In this context, overwhelm is not personal failure. It’s a wise signal. A body-based alert that we’re being asked to navigate a world moving faster than we’re built to handle.
So What?
To understand how we got here, let’s zoom out.
A Changing Relationship to Change
For most of human history, there’s been a co-evolutionary spiral between the external world and our internal capacities. We made tools, and those tools reshaped us. Fire, farming, factories ~ all of it changed what it meant to be human. But the pace of those changes allowed for integration. Our inner worlds had time to stretch, metabolize, and adapt to the shifts around us.
For most of history, humans and our world evolved in rhythm. With each new tool, what it meant to be human shifted…and we had time to respond.
That’s no longer the case. As futurist Ray Kurzweil and others have noted, we’ve hit an inflection point: external change has become exponential.
A historic shift: when external change leapt from linear to exponential…outpacing our inner systems and reshaping the human condition.
The problem is, our internal rate of change ~ how we develop, learn, evolve ~ has remained relatively linear. The co-evolutionary spiral between outer and inner has fractured.
As Donald Schön observed decades ago, we are“falling further and further behind our times.”
External change has become exponential while our rate of internal change (ie, learning, development, adaption, evolution) remains linear. The co-evolutionary spiral between the two has now ruptured.
And this rupture isn’t just cognitive…it’s embodied.
We feel it in our nervous systems, in our institutions, in our relationships. There’s a widening dissonance between the world we’re in and the inner capacities we’ve built to navigate it. And when we can’t keep up, the mind often turns against itself.
But this doesn’t mean something is wrong with us. It means something is shifting around us. The system is reorganizing ~ faster than our current ways of being can comfortably metabolize.
Understanding The Rift
The Rift is not just a metaphor. It’s a structural reality ~ a growing mismatch between the scale of challenge and the capacity to meet it. And this mismatch affects our inner experience.
To better understand how, let’s dip into the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a key figure in positive psychology and the “father of flow” — a state of deep engagement and “optimal experience.” He observed that humans tend to thrive when challenge and skill are in dynamic balance. When that balance is disrupted, we feel unease: anxiety when challenge outpaces capacity, boredom when capacity exceeds the level of challenge.
One way to think of it is:
High challenge + low skill = anxiety
Low challenge + high skill = boredom
Flow is a dance between challenge and skill. When the music of the world speeds up ~ and we haven’t learned the steps ~ we stumble into overwhelm.
Bringing this back to The Rift: as external change accelerates (increasing challenge) and our inner capacity to process, adapt, or respond grows more slowly (relatively static skill), the mismatch widens. Overwhelm isn’t just emotional ~ it’s a structural outcome of diverging curves.
When challenge outpaces capacity, we fall out of flow and into overwhelm. Without new scaffolding, the Rift will continue to widen.
Signals, Not Symptoms
What if our distress isn’t a malfunction but a message?
In this light, anxiety, depression, and burnout aren’t merely personal pathologies ~ they are intelligent signals emerging from a broader systemic misalignment. They may be our nervous systems saying: I’m overwhelmed because the world I was prepared for no longer exists, and I wasn’t given the tools to meet the challenges that are here.
It’s time we stop pathologizing the pain ~ and start contextualizing it.
It’s time to stop pathologizing the pain and start contextualizing it.
Final Thoughts
The Rift doesn’t look or feel the same way for everyone.
How we experience this widening gap is shaped by many forces ~ history, identity, access, trauma, privilege, neurodiversity, and the uneven distribution of both pressure and possibility.
The Rift doesn’t erase those dynamics ~ it weaves through them. It’s not the sole cause of our distress, but one thread in the larger tapestry of forces shaping this moment. But by naming it, we can begin to normalize the overwhelm and disorientation many of us are carrying ~ seeing it not as a sign of personal failure or individual pathology, but as a collective signal toward evolution.
Because if we can begin to see this signal clearly ~ we might stop asking, “What’s wrong with me?” And instead begin asking ~ “What is this moment asking of us?”
A Glimpse Ahead
In this post, we explored how a widening gap between accelerating change and our capacity to meet it is shaping this moment ~ somatically, systemically, relationally. In the the next post, The Learning Imperative, we’ll investigate what becomes possible when we stop treating stress and overwhelm as personal failures…and begin seeing them as signals that we are being asked to evolve, together.
But for now, pause. Notice how this idea of a rift lands ~ in your body, your relationships, your sense of timing.
Where in your life do you notice a widening gap between what’s being asked and what you’re resourced to meet?
What might it mean to navigate that space with compassion, rather than collapse or hustle?
Works Referenced
[1] Ray Kurzweil, The Law of Accelerating Returns. 2001
[2] Schön, Donald A. Beyond the Stable State. 1971, as paraphrased by Russell Ackoff in Ackoff’s Best.
[3] Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.