Our status quo - the pyramid of wealth and power dominated by the few at the top - has failed and is beyond reform. This failure is not rooted in superficial issues such as politics or governmental regulations; the failure is structural. The very foundation of the status quo has rotted away, and brushing on another coat of reformist paint will not save our societal house from collapse.

When Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote his famous essay Self-Reliance in 1841, the economy was localized and households supplied many of their own essentials. In our hyper-globalized economy, we’re dependent on distant sources for our essentials.

When I burned out, what I wanted but could not find was a practical guide by someone who had experienced burnout themselves. None of the material I found spoke to what I was experiencing or to my sense that our economy is now optimized to burn people out. I decided to write the guide I wanted but could not find. This is my experience of burnout, reckoning, and renewal. Burnout is a life-changing experience in a good way, as absurd as that may sound to those in the depths of burnout. To paraphrase Samuel Beckett: I can’t go on, but I must go on. There is a way forward.

Will you be richer or poorer? What does the future hold for you - and for the world? Supposedly, we're all getting richer, but many of us feel we’re becoming poorer. Why? One reason is our economy doesn’t even measure many kinds of wealth and ignores many costs. Clearly, clean air and water, good health, and civil liberties are valuable, but you won’t find these on any balance sheet. Our system’s incentives are to maximize short-term financial profits, and everything else is treated as if it doesn’t exist.

All nations, including the United States, face systemic crises that are reinforcing each other at an explosive point in history. The status quo is now the problem rather than the solution. These novel crises demand an entirely new grand strategy. The global crisis offers an opportunity to redraw America’s grand strategy from the ground up. Should we fail to make full use of this opportunity, the United States will fail, along with all the other nation-states that are incapable of redefining the problems so that new solutions become possible.