Ten Things I Know About Purpose in a Civilisational Shift

Or why you should stop looking for career advice and find your place in history

^ Here’s an audio version of this newsletter if you want to listen to me reading it…. KCH x

For years, I have been craving a place to have the conversation that’s constantly unfolding in my head — a room where we can dance between the era of AI, the fraying of democracy, and the gasps of broken capitalism, and ask what all of it means for how we live and lead.

A room where ancestral lineage and the feminine sit comfortably alongside systems thinking and strategy; where emerging questions about consciousness and shifting definitions of what it means to be human are not fringe curiosities, but central to the inquiry.

I went looking for it in rooms of the good and the great. And it wasn’t quite there.

Turns out, I just built it.

The path to my retreat in January was an interesting one.

Intellectually, I realised early last year that I wanted to do more in-person events. Partly for the sheer pleasure of gathering my people, also strategically, because if AI is coming for everything that can happen through a screen, then I want a complementary business line to my 100%-over-Zoom 1:1 coaching.

At first a dear friend and I thought we’d lead a retreat together. We met almost a decade ago on a wildly intense personal development course that, alongside tuning up basically every aspect of your mind, body, and soul, explicitly taught us how to design and lead retreats. So far, so circular.

And then the universe gently nudged the date and the confluence of events such that the whole thing went from a co-led experience to a solo Katharine production.

I know enough now to surrender when I can feel the universe pointing me in a direction. I figured it was time to create something that was a pure expression of what wanted to come through me.

I played along.

Then the week before, once I knew who was coming, I sat down to take my plan from a loose list of ideas in my head and turn it into a full arc. An experience that would slow these women down, connect them to their bigger context — their ancestors, the earth and our ecosystems, their nature as embodied souls having a physical experience — and then situate them in this moment in history. By the end, they were going to leave with a clear action plan for 2026.

And that’s where the AI x politics x culture through the lens of systems thinking and spirit and the feminine came in.

A glorious, confronting soup of polycrisis and concurrent poly-opportunity.

A place to get nerdy.
To weep for the darkness of our times.
To take seriously the possibility of a new golden age on the other side of this period of disorder-chaos-reorder.

As I sat basking in a hot tub on the other side of the retreat, a few things occurred to me.

First, I was fully used up in the best way. My brain was literally silent, which happens exceptionally rarely. My heart was full and at peace.

When my brain came online again, it occurred to me that this is a culmination of my life’s work so far. I didn’t fully realise that going in, but on the other side, I can see the through-line.

Growing up in post-Soviet Poland and Russia — This gave me a sense of the turn of civilisations that most in the West do not have (obviously many people in the rest of the world have this way more viscerally than I do).

Two degrees in politics, philosophy, and economics, and then speechwriting for Davos execs in my early 20s — all that politics in the background of my childhood made me want to understand power early.

An early and long-lived love affair with science fiction — initially it was pure escapism (I had a lonely and difficult childhood) — but then it became a way to try on different futures. To see how the theories I studied in college might play out into the future.

And finally, the years in my early 30s when I rewired the insides of my brain, which in turn rewrote the 3D version of my life. A period which included all the psychological rigors of my coach training, the consciousness exploration and play of my Burning Man years*.

*It feels like it needs to be said here that I lead fully sober retreats. I’m very open to the “other stuff”, but it’s not my work in the world to guide people through that kind of healing.

It turns out it was all training for this one thing: helping brilliant people seize upon their purpose at this turning point in history.

And as I designed and led a retreat all about connecting people to their purpose — using that to fuel their power — I realised I was pulling on a self-taught curriculum of what purpose is and how it works in our lives.

The full curriculum may yet be the next book.

Here is a taster, which I hope helps you find a deeper sense of your own purpose…

Ten Things I Know Now About Purpose

These aren’t abstract principles. They are things I’ve tested in my own life and with dozens of brilliant leaders.

1. Purpose sounds weighty and onerous; it is not.

“Duty” and “Purpose” are not to be confused. Your purpose is an animating force in your life. It gives you energy just to think about it. It is powered by desire, by your natural craving to act and make change in the world around you. If your sense of purpose is weighing you down, it’s probably not actually yours — it’s something you’ve consciously or unconsciously decided to carry for someone else.

2. The Body Must Be Involved.

You cannot just think your way into your purpose. Your antenna is your body. What does it feel like — spoken aloud, walked with, danced with? Does it make you feel alive? Energized? Potent?

3. You Hold a Puzzle Piece of the Future — Not the Whole Thing.

None of us is here to understand or hold everything. And when you forget that, overwhelm and paralysis hit almost immediately.

One of the reasons I like the puzzle-piece metaphor is that your job is not just to find what’s on your piece — it’s also to find the other folks with adjacent pieces and see what happens in this crazy new 5D picture we’re building.

4. Your Purpose Will Make You More “You.”

Purpose points you at a journey; it is not a goal to be checked off on a list. And the journey will make you more yourself. I actually think some chapters are not at all about achieving the thing you’re pointing at, they’re just animating you in the direction of experiences, skills, and connections you’ll need for the work that follows.

Personally, I think the desires that underpin our purpose may even be whispers from our future selves. (There is fascinating new science around consciousness and causation working backwards through time — beyond blowing your mind, it offers the hint of a possibility that we can sense, in some way, where we are going next.)

5. And It May Cost You an Identity.

You cannot step into your next, truer expression while clinging to outdated versions of yourself. Purpose often requires letting go of the roles and labels that once felt safe. It may be subtractive before it is expansive.

6. Even at Moments Like This, Not All of Us Are Meant to Be Fighters.

The most natural response to the news right now is some form of rage — an urge to fight — often followed by a wave of apathy. What is all this fighting even accomplishing?

This is where Joanna Macy’s framework for the Great Turning has become invaluable to me.

Resisting — what she calls Holding Actions in Defense of Life — is necessary when civilisation enters a dark period. But it is only one dimension of the work.

We must also build structural alternatives. As Buckminster Fuller put it, “To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” At some point in the future, as has happened many times in history, people will sit down to redesign systems — governance, money, economies, institutions. They will look at what worked, what failed, and what experiments were run in the margins.

We can do a lot here right now.

We get to nurture experiments. We get to test new models of organising — in companies, communities, capital structures, creative collaborations. Some of this work happens at intimate scales; some at planetary ones.

I like to think of playing with structural change as fractal — some opportunities easier to make sense of at the intimate level, others at the scale of a planet.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Macy’s third dimension is the one that moves me most: Shifts in Consciousness.

As she writes:

“These structural alternatives cannot take root and survive without deeply ingrained values to sustain them… They require, in other words, a profound shift in our perception of reality.”

If we build new structures with our unchanged minds, we will end up replicating so much of what we want to leave behind. We need to shift consciousness — to rewrite our internal code — if we want our external world to look and feel deeply different.

As I said in my newsletter a couple of weeks ago, I do think part of our purpose is living out our values, protecting our neighbors, etc. And, we cannot be so consumed by what we are trying to stop that we forget to practice what we are trying to become.

Part of our purpose may be to resist, to protect, to hold the line. But just as vital is imagining and embodying the world we want to build.

7. Purpose Has Seasons.

Joanna Macy, later in her life, added a fourth element to her model of our roles in the Great Turning — nurturing. She explicitly called out that parenting, caring for elders, and caring for nature are essential and eternal work, vital to protecting the wisdom and the people we are building this better future for.

This is not to say that if you have ageing parents or young kids your purpose is reduced solely caring, but it is to say that our roles in the system may evolve in periods where we hold these added responsibilities.

We talked at the retreat about how those of us with young kids had reconsidered our roles in the world of activism — there are certain kinds of risks that no longer felt appropriate and other kinds of activities that called the mothers more deeply.

8. Your Purpose Draws on All Your Experiences.

I don’t think there are accidents. Our toughest experiences help us understand what we do and don’t want to perpetuate — be it what we do or don’t want to bring into our parenting. Or, when we think about professional purpose, for example, toxic work environments can teach us the kinds of leadership we want to embody and perpetuate.

Working in close proximity to the pinnacles of capitalistic “success” is a gateway to understanding the moral void at the heart of our current systems — and the nudge many of us need to go dream up more human ways of working and building.

Practically, this means we need all types to dream up the future — not just the lovers and the guides, the artists and the farmers, or even the academics and the philosophers. I want people who are deeply versed in modern finance on the “Structural Change” team, folks who have seen how the sausage gets made in the advertising world up close (we want the most persuasive storytellers on our side). I want folks from Meta and Amazon and Google, those who get technology and the systems that we need to remake in our vision.

Writing that made me want to yell: “White collar workers of the world, unite.” And I’m only half joking ;)

9. The clearer you feel your purpose, the easier it is to operate.

Once you feel clear about where you fit into the pattern in this chapter of your life and the world’s turning, then you can figure out what that means for this year, your next role, this week, today.

You can prioritize. You can identify big, bold, aligned actions.

This is important because if you try to go first to “What’s my next role/business/creative project?” then you risk unmooring yourself from the moment. To continue my earlier analogy, you’re starting with too small a fractal.

When I work with clients looking to change what they’re working on, I want to zoom out first. For example, I had a client who had created a highly successful community and network strategy for one of NY’s best VCs. In fact, her network was so good that it was one of the reasons the VC became so successful and prominent.

Now, if we’d started our work to identify her next chapter asking about her next role, we’d have probably been thinking about other VCs or other network/community roles.

By zooming out to the macro, we could anchor her in a big life-long quest — in her case, we realized her purpose is re-centering relationships at the heart of business.

From that bigger lens, her next step could have been starting a company that helps address this or working at the leadership level for almost any company with an aligned mission.

She’s now in leadership at a phenomenal company that supports investors with investing and many other facets of their own becoming. Deeply aligned — both practically in that her role is about relationships and culturally in that the team are excellent humans who share her values. (And way more on purpose than doing a version of her previous role for a bigger, fancier VC that didn’t care so much about human relationships.)

10. Most of us have a new purpose emerging right now.

Your purpose lives at the intersection of your gifts, your experiences, your wisdom, your desires — and what the world needs of you in this moment.

And what the world needs is not fixed.

In many ways, the demands of this era are radically different than they were even a few years ago — and they will be different again a few years from now.

So OF COURSE many of you have found yourselves wondering whether you’re in the right job, the right industry… whether your work even matters, or will continue to exist.

Purpose, as I understand it, cannot be separated from context. And the context we are living inside is civilisational.

When we zoom out — to cycles of empire, technological acceleration, ecological destabilisation — and then zoom back in to one specific human life, something powerful happens. We remember that our days are not random. They are situated.

Our work either meets the moment… or it doesn’t.

And if we don’t consciously layer that awareness into how we spend our time, we risk living lives optimised for self-improvement but unmoored from the collective (surely part of what got us here).

We also risk something deeper — the quiet moral failure of not doing our part. Of not becoming good ancestors at precisely the moment the future most needs us.

And yes, if you got this far and thought — ouf, this all sounds so serious.

You’re right.

And in my work, the context is always play.

So at the retreat, big intellectual conversations sat comfortably next to giggles and locally sourced feasts. Women relaxed in hot tubs musing on the fate of capitalism and then hopped into the snow for a cold “plunge.” Chocolates were devoured. Many book recommendations shared.

The sisterhood was quick, deep and strong. These women recognised themselves as fellow mapmakers immediately — and they’re still whatsapping each other weeks later.

And yup, on the other side of this, it is clear to me that this sits at the heart of the next iteration of my purpose — helping brilliant leaders locate themselves inside history and feel the power that follows from plugging into the moment.

It lives in my 1:1 work.
It lives in my writing.
And yes, it lives in these retreats.

So if you have been craving a table where these conversations are welcome — where intellect and soul sit side by side — I am gathering interest for future retreats.

Here is a short form you can fill out to hear about upcoming dates and help me decide where to host the next one (Upstate NY, Big Sur, the UK?).

I will close by sharing a few words from the women who joined last month:

• “I’m leaving more confident, with more faith in the process and empowered with a reframe that makes this time in my life feel important.”

• “I am truly, deeply enough. Trusting that I can have fun and be successful… grateful for this experience that was a little witchy and incredibly grounding.”

• “I’m ready to loosen the reins and trust the good in my life is real. I’m leaving on a higher and more nourished plane.”

• “I am more ready, even than I knew.”

That’s it for today.

Next time I’m going to share some of the tools I use to help my clients connect with their purpose, so please subscribe if you haven’t already!

May you feel ever more on purpose.

KCH x

PS. I’d love to hear your questions around purpose - what do you want to know about it? How are questions around purpose showing up in your life now? I am going to be creating a lot more writing/content/perhaps even courses helping people step into their purpose and I want to know what questions you have, what feels easy/hard etc.

PPS. Those are bunny tracks in the snow at dawn on the retreat. The bunny was not contemplating her purpose (that I know of), she was just on her bunny quest. I wish us all moments of such pure animal flow, as well as all the big meta questing :)