The Grand Plan

This isn’t a post about politics, but it is about the kinds of stories we turn to when the world stops making sense. Especially the ones that show up in headlines, talking points, and social feeds before breakfast.

Lately, say over the past few months, a familiar pattern has reemerged. One of those moments where public life fractures into two large camps: For, and Against. The object of that split doesn’t even matter. Sometimes it’s a person, sometimes a policy, sometimes a crisis. But the pattern underneath is always the same.

Inside the For camp, we hear praise: it’s all unfolding according to plan. Inside the Against camp, we hear alarm: it’s all part of a sinister plan.

Either way, everyone seems to agree there is a plan. That somewhere, someone has a map. That the decisions we’re seeing (whether praised or condemned) are part of a Grand Strategy. That some hidden structure exists and we’re just not seeing it clearly yet.

Maybe. But it’s worth asking: what if there isn’t a plan at all?

What if the people pulling the levers of power, be they economic, political, technological, what if they don’t actually know what those levers do? What if they’re just improvising, or posturing, or competing for status?

What if they’re mostly trying to be important, and hoping we believe they already are?

It’s uncomfortable to consider. We want meaning. We want order. We want someone to be in charge, even if we don’t like them, because the alternative feels worse.

It’s easier to believe in a plan, even a terrible one that we hate, than to face the possibility that no one really knows what’s going on. That no one’s steering the ship.

But that belief comes at a cost. It dulls our attention. It weakens our agency. It keeps us reacting instead of responding.

When our need for order is too strong, we start finding patterns where none exist. We force explanations out of randomness. We rationalize chaos. We assign motives to actors who may be no more strategic than we are. And in doing so, we give away our power to anyone who looks confident enough to claim it.

Here’s what I keep returning to: Events happen. Meaning is what we make. No one knows what happens tomorrow.

Yes, history shows patterns. But it also shows gaps. Just because something reminds us of the past doesn’t mean it will play out the same way. Especially now, when so many systems (climate, finance, tech, geopolitics, geesh name one that isn’t changing!) are shifting faster than the narratives we can invent to explain them.

So when something unprecedented happens, or happens in a way that defies precedent, we feel the urge to interpret it using old logic. We assign historical meaning. We try to predict the next move based on what has traditionally followed it before.

And yet, in moments like this, the only reliable prediction is that whatever comes next will not be historically appropriate. That’s where I think we are now. Not just politically, but cognitively.

From the evolution of intelligence to the volatility of power, there is no Grand Plan. Not from humans. Not from machines. Not yet.

There totally could be, if we want. But getting there means cooperating on purpose, not on accident. It means insisting on better questions, instead of just demanding better answers. It means deciding what we care about before someone else decides for us.

Sound unrealistic? Historically, maybe.

But we’re living in a moment that obviously doesn’t care much about history’s approval. And that means we get to choose how we make meaning now.

What would it look like to build a plan worth following into our future together, without attachment or pretending that we already have one? That’s what I’m thinking about. If you are too, I’d love to hear from you.