What actually holds when everything is shaking
Weekly Dose of Work Recovery Vol. 3.11.26
“The mind is searching for certainty it can't find right now. Love is the only certainty that doesn't require the world to cooperate.”
When everything is shaking, what actually holds?
I've been sitting with a question lately that I keep hearing from folks across the country — not just here in Minnesota, where things have been especially raw this year.
How do I know what actually matters right now?
And I think most of us are asking some version of this. Because if you look around, the volatility feels different. AI is reshaping who gets to work and how. Political instability is rattling systems we've relied on for decades from our healthcare, the judiciary, institutions we assumed would just... hold.
And when the things you've built your sense of security around start feeling unpredictable, something shifts inside you — often before you're even conscious of it.
Your nervous system is searching for certainty it can't find. You're snapping at people you love. You're exhausted in a way sleep doesn't fix (sidenote: what is sleep again?! haha).
Our autopilot response is often to reach harder for productivity, for money, for proof that you still have solid ground under your feet. Sound familiar?
Here's what I keep coming back to.
I've been looking to philosophers, activists, and people who have navigated far greater instability than most of us have faced. And almost universally, they arrive at the same answer.
Love.
Not in the greeting card sense. In the practical, grounding, utterly reliable sense. Love as care. Love as mutual aid. Love as staying connected to other humans even when — especially when — everything else feels like it's coming apart.
What helped people survive the pandemic wasn't just staying home. It was the bubbles they built. The neighbors they checked on. The smaller, warmer worlds they created when the big world stopped making sense.
I think that's what this moment is asking of us again.
Not more striving. Not bigger goals. Not grinding harder to outrun the uncertainty. But making your world a little smaller and a lot more intentional. Creating cocoons of safety. Returning to the people and practices that remind you who you are when your job title, your revenue, and your productivity metrics aren't available to do that for you.
A question to carry with you this week:
If love were one of your primary values guiding your decisions for the rest of this year — what would you prioritize differently?
Sit with that in two directions. Love for others, yes. But also love for yourself.
Would you rest more? Walk more? Spend less energy proving your worth and more energy building the relationships that hold you when things get hard?
When external stability disappears, internal clarity becomes everything.
That's the best inner compass right now. It's not sophisticated. It's not a framework or a strategy. But it works and it's always within our reach.
Sincerely,
Bree
P.S. If you want structured support with work recovery, 1:1 mentorship offers personalized guidance, nervous system regulation tools, and practical strategies to help you recover from work and reclaim energy, clarity, and capacity. Reply to this message anytime. I read and reply to every one of them.
This week's did you know…Our attention capacity is being hijacked
I'm currently reading Attensity! a manifesto from The Friends of Attention with the authors arguing that our ability to pay attention is not a personal failing to be managed, but a human capacity being systematically stripped from us. The book names what's happening as "human fracking": a handful of tech companies extracting and monetizing our most essential cognitive resource, with consequences that reach far beyond mere distraction, instead eroding selfhood, destabilizing democracy, and reducing the full complexity of human experience to whatever can be quantified and monetized.
It names our urgent opportunity to reclaim our attention as a collective movement of resistance called Attention Activism. They make the case that attention is not a private asset to be hoarded but a communal capacity to be protected together. It's a rallying cry — a call to re-enchant a world that the attention economy has quietly gutted.
Source: Attensity! by The Friends of Attention
Stuff we Couldn’t Gatekeep
CEOs are betting big on AI but they aren’t even bothering to use or test it…hmmmm? Check it out here.
Gloria Steinem’s take on what needs to change for women at work in 2026. Read More
Using AI at work? Watch out for these security risks that could cost your job. Learn More.
Special Report on the women in Minneapolis. Proud to know them, be them, and see them. Special Report Here.
