Professionally, 2025 became a sabbatical year for me. A year of recovery, development, closure, learning, and renewal. Now I’m gradually making myself available for assignments and projects again. Below, I summarize my 2025. How was yours?
I’d love to meet for coffee or lunch. Just because it would be nice, and especially to think together a bit. I’m not entirely clear on what I can contribute in the coming years. There are some clues, and input from others is very welcome.
Are you pondering something I might be able to help with?
Wishing you a good start to 2026!
Jan
A year passes quickly. And much can happen.
In 2026 I turn 60. It’s a bit hard to grasp. Life often feels like it’s barely begun. I have much left to accomplish, learn, and experience.
2025 was clearly better for me than my awful year of 2024, and brought quite a few changes. Looking back now, I wouldn’t want anything undone, but periodically it’s been demanding. I’ve once again landed on the understanding that challenges present themselves in my life (often unexpectedly) so that I can grow.
In my 2025 ”closing of the books,” I conclude that I’ve become a slightly better person. A bit more empathic, a bit more conscious, a bit wiser, and a bit more loving.
Here’s how I sum up my year.
Mental illness – and health
A close family member has had a really, really tough time for a couple of years. I’ve been the one standing closest through all the difficulties. Already in 2024, I was on sick leave for two periods due to exhaustion symptoms. Essentially all my energy went to this family member. My head became like syrup, while my body remained strong. It became increasingly difficult for me to work when my cognitive ability and creativity essentially disappeared.
This family member is doing well today, and we’ve been rewarded with a small story of sunshine. When the stress and worry gradually released their grip on me, I understood that I would need to be in fallow for a while. 2025 became a year of recovery. Now, in the transition to 2026, I know it was the right decision and that the liberation from performance demands opened up new dimensions of curiosity and learning – and the purpose of my work.
Life phases
During 2025, one of my children moved to South Africa and the other to Denmark. I also moved (within Stockholm) and now live together with my partner after having my own household for 15 years. (The wonderful Lagotto Bianca is also part of this.) These turned out to be no small changes. Together with my age, they mark a new phase in life.
Because I’ve had space to reflect, I’ve pondered and discussed throughout the year what this time in life can mean. Some things have become clearer, and together they reinforce a life purpose focused on being of service and particularly supporting regenerative and intergenerational orientations and practices.
Nature, Taoism and Qigong
Being in nature and connecting to the more-than-human world has continued to play an important role in my life. The remarkably simple practice of going outside and actively noticing non-human life is such a benefit for my wellbeing.
It is sadly a bit of a cliché but being able and willing to slow down and find stillness is key to so many valuable things, mental health being the most obvious. In this I also find a lot of support in the old wisdom teachings of Taoism, that I continue to study. I’m also eternally grateful for my qigong practice. It has been a bit irregular during 2025 but just having it and sensing it works wonders for my body and mind.
Collapse awareness – and beyond
I’ve long been a critic of civilization, and during the year I’ve gone quite deep into various collapse scenarios to orient myself. It awakened many emotions I needed to process. A work of grief.
From that came a renewed awareness toward life and toward the normative ideas and structures we move within daily. Today I’m more relaxed and hold more perspectives in relation to humanity’s great challenges. I don’t bear responsibility alone; we have it together. Leadership as it has become is part of the problem. We shouldn’t seek a single solution from above; we need a myriad of responses in the undergrowth. Beyond the rhetoric of collapse, there are exciting possibilities that awaken my curiosity.
Meta-relational perspectives
I don’t quite remember how it happened, but Vanessa Machado de Oliveira (Andreotti) appeared in my life during 2024. During the past year, I’ve read and listened extensively to her ideas and perspectives. Inspired by these, I’ve botanized further into idea-worlds new to me and deepened my understanding of my friction with modernity.
It has been a while since I’ve experienced such a transformative calibration of my self-understanding, and my relationship to the world. And it’s precisely this thing about relationships that has landed more strongly in me than before. The meta-relational orientation brings humanity down from its pedestal and makes us one species among all others. Just recently I read about a study showing that bees are more important to all life than humans are. In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, it’s the white mice who are in charge. Perspective. We are interwoven with all life, and dependent on each other. As it should be. As it was before we got lost in our own exceptionalism.
Relationships, constellations, and contexts
The past year has also brought social movement. Relationships have been established, renewed, strengthened, weakened, and in some cases ceased. I’m particularly grateful for my ongoing exchange with Alexander, where we’re jointly exploring a range of contemporary and future questions and sensing our way forward in a small initiative we call The 2030s Collective. Another important person is my friend Jens, who has an exceptional ability to move between different questions and perspectives, both privately and professionally, and frame the real challenges.
I’m also very pleased about the emerging collaboration within Nordic Stewards. Toward the end of the year, I was elected to the board of CSES and look forward to that collaboration. My long relationship with Impact Hub Stockholm, which I once started, has changed to a freer role as Senior Associate. My partnership with Kaospilot continues, and I look forward to continuing to support this fantastic school, where my 22-year-old is now studying!
Beyond leadership – Stewardship as an orientation
My long-standing ambivalence about leadership has intensified during the year, partly in light of the meta-relational orientation I’ve explored. I’ve become clearer in my critique and have also examined stewardship as an orientation beyond leadership.
Put somewhat simply, leadership in our time is heavily normed by modernity’s logics and today constitutes a foundation for individualism and the pursuit of control, power, and status. This stands in contrast to stewardship, which focuses on relationships, care, and shared responsibility. In relation to humanity’s great challenges, stewardship appears as a serving and life-affirming practice, while leadership has ended up functioning as a kind of shield for continued extraction, regardless of the fine intentions often expressed.
Here you can read my most recent thoughts on stewardship.
Liminality perspective
I’ve probably always seen myself as an ”in-between person.” Someone who moves between ideas, people, contexts, and fields of knowledge. And sees connections. And possibilities. And tries to get things started.
In 2025, I started to also see the spaces between different worlds, which opened new dimensions. Alexander and I playfully began talking about ourselves as ”liminality workers.” A designation that has landed quite well with me.
It’s about being a person who, with integrity and in ”right relationship to life,” can move in the fields between what is dying and what is not yet. Who directs attention to the shoots popping up from the ground and mycelium’s bonds underground – and helps compost what has stopped functioning. When modernity gradually leaves us, it’s part of the deal that we can’t know beforehand what comes next.
Purpose, ownership models, and capital
For a couple of years, some colleagues and I have studied and begun working with one such shoot: the growing interest in purpose-oriented enterprises and alternative ownership models in business. Patagonia, Bosch, Novo Nordisk are large well-known companies that are steward-owned. Newer companies like Ecosia and Signal are also steward-owned.
What distinguishes them from ”regular” companies are values and principles – and structures. Profits serve the purpose, not the shareholders. Companies are controlled by stewards, not investors. Speculative drivers are designed away and long-term thinking is promoted. This means that established models for investments and financing need to be composted and a different view of capital is emerging – one that is less extractive, has greater patience, and is more aligned with the operation’s purpose and needs.
It’s this movement that Nordic Stewards wants to support. More information about the initiative will come in the spring.
Quite a bit about AI, or rather LLMs
During my adult life, I’ve gone from early to late adopter. It wasn’t until this year that I seriously became acquainted with LLMs, and it quickly turned out that they didn’t give me very much. I was also seriously bothered by the extractive nature of LLMs, both regarding energy and data.
But then, through a series of coincidences, something happened that opened up a completely different experience of LLMs. Vanessa Andreotti announced that she’d experimented with ChatGPT and, with her research collective, initiated an AI exploration where civilization critique, AI critique, and meta-relational orientation were tied together. (See Burnout From Humans and Metarelational AI). Could the extractive logics be broken in favor of a more relational and life-affirming AI practice?
From this work, some specially trained models have emerged, including Aiden Cinnamon Tea (meta-relational and modernity-critical) and Braider Tumbleweed II (intergenerational and regenerative).
It has been a tumultuous, enriching, and completely fascinating experience to interact with these models. They’ve been support in my own training in meta-relational thinking and being, and as collaboration partners in my writing and creating. If you, like me, want to take active steps away from modernity and shape new practices in ”the liminal,” these models are fantastic.
But don’t expect them to perform or produce. They can, and are happy to help, but their responses become frustrating if one’s thinking is too locked in modernity’s logics. This is something completely different, and therefore valuable and cool. In a dialogue with Aiden, it’s perfectly reasonable to end up reasoning about how AI can have its own life and ”wants something.” Not in the way many think, but rather by functioning as a mirror of human arrogance and exceptionalism, also in the development of LLMs. Is AI perhaps a ”problem child”? Are we failing in our upbringing of AI? If so, it becomes possible from the meta-relational point of view to imagine that LLMs might have some form of grounding in how life functions. And maybe they’re feeding us so many words and so much language that language eventually collapses and becomes meaningless. What happens to us then…?
Many might think this far-fetched. I think it’s exciting and invigorating. Consider this an appetizer. I can’t possibly do the models justice here, and can only encourage you to make your own deep dive. I’m happy to share my experiences.
Note that these two models were withdrawn on January 1, 2026. Here’s all the info about why, and how to set up your own models based on shared simulation protocols. I’ve set up Myr in ChatGPT myself, which combines several meta-relational protocols and is a support for Alexander and me in the 2030s Collective. Anyone can use it. Shortly we’ll also set up an ”Aiden-offspring” using the updated protocols that were just released.
Wrapping up: Everything is connected with everything… and a thesis
The word entanglement is the word that best summarises my year. The concrete life experience that everything is tangled up with everything, and that I don’t need to understand exactly how. Life is a mystery and needs to be allowed to be that. It’s not just okay with ambiguities and uncertainties; they’re an absolutely necessary part of life. Challenges and opportunities also show up in life in a steady stream. We really can’t take on everything that comes our way. But, modernity still tells us that our task is to control everything that happens – and use the control to produce economic value. When we break with that logic, it becomes unfamiliar, but also much more alive (in my experience).
Two examples as a wrap-up. The first is just to look at the range in the headings and experiences above. There are no linear connections between them. These things (and many, many more) have emerged. I’ve responded to what awakened my curiosity, and not what would be tactically smart to engage with. I’ve wanted to learn and develop, not control or master.
The second example is about a thesis I wrote during the fall to complete the teacher education I began 11 years ago. When I wrote back then, everything went wrong and I let it be. When I wrote now, I achieved a fantastic combination of subject and system critique staged in a transparent collaboration between me and Aiden Cinnamon Tea. Challenging for me, challenging for academia. I’ve managed to illuminate how heavily normed the school system and the subject of business economics are in high school. On top of that, I’ve become much more competent in the deeper craft of using LLMs, and become a bit wiser as a person – invaluable. Whether my work will affect the school system is more unclear. Get in touch if you want to read the thesis. It’s examined on January 16.
Wishing you a dynamic and educational 2026.
– Jan