What I Saw in 2022
When Living Systems Meet Capital Markets
In March 2022, I published a small ebook called Permaculture and Investing: 12 Principles for Regenerative Capital. At the time, most people in finance thought I was being too philosophical. The market was still drunk on cheap money. Growth-at-all-costs was gospel. ESG was the darling of institutional investors.
But I wasn’t writing about what was. I was writing about what I could already see coming.
Two Different Views of the Same Landscape
Most investors in 2022 were looking at quarterly earnings, growth metrics, market share. They were measuring momentum.
I was measuring something else entirely:
coherence
Not buy signals. Not sell signals. Not whether a company would beat estimates next quarter.
I was asking: How aligned is this system with natural laws? How sustainable are these patterns over multiple timescales? What happens when the artificial support structures fall away?
Think of it like this: You can measure a building’s occupancy rate, revenue per square foot, market value. Or you can assess whether its foundation is sound, whether its structure can handle the stress loads it will face, whether it’s built to last.
Both are forms of measurement. But they’re measuring different things entirely.
What I Wrote Then, What Happened Since
Let me show you what coherence-based analysis looks like in practice. Here’s what I saw in 2022, organized around the 12 permaculture principles I was tracking:
Observe and Interact: The ESG Facade
What I wrote in 2022: “ESG has become a marketing tool disconnected from genuine regenerative practice. Companies check boxes while continuing extractive operations underneath.”
What happened: By 2024, the ESG backlash was in full swing. Major asset managers began backing away from commitments. State legislatures passed anti-ESG laws. The emperor had no clothes, and everyone could finally see it.
Why coherence mattered: ESG was never measuring what it claimed to measure. It was measuring compliance with a narrative, not alignment with natural systems. The collapse was inevitable once you understood that fundamental incoherence.
Catch and Store Energy: The Crypto Winter
What I wrote: “Speculative bubbles in crypto and tech are burning energy without creating sustainable value. When cheap capital dries up, these systems will collapse back to their actual utility.”
What happened: FTX collapsed in November 2022. Luna/Terra imploded. The “number go up” mentality evaporated. By 2023, we saw a 70% drawdown across crypto markets. Only projects with genuine utility and sound architecture survived.
Why coherence mattered: Systems that don’t store energy (create real value) eventually exhaust themselves. Speculation is borrowed energy from the future. Nature doesn’t allow perpetual motion machines.
Obtain a Yield: The Profitless Prosperity Mirage
What I wrote: “Growth without profit is extraction disguised as expansion. When the music stops, these companies will discover they never built a real business.”
What happened: WeWork, Peloton, Carvana, Teladoc - the list of “growth story” collapses reads like a who’s who of 2020-2021 darlings. Companies that never generated genuine economic value saw 80-90% drawdowns.
Why coherence mattered: A system must produce more energy than it consumes. Period. Financial engineering can disguise this temporarily, but natural laws always reassert themselves.
Apply Self-Regulation and Accept Feedback: The Fed’s Blind Spot
What I wrote: “Central bank intervention has created moral hazard at scale. Markets no longer self-regulate. The eventual correction will be severe because the system has lost its natural feedback mechanisms.”
What happened: The Fed raised rates 11 times in 18 months - the fastest tightening cycle in modern history. Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank, First Republic all failed. The “Fed put” turned out to be a mirage.
Why coherence mattered: When you override natural feedback loops (like price discovery through interest rates), distortions compound. The system eventually forces a violent rebalancing.
Use and Value Renewable Resources: The Attention Economy Trap
What I wrote: “Business models built on extracting human attention are fundamentally unsustainable. They’re mining a finite resource while pretending it’s renewable.”
What happened: Meta lost $700 billion in market value in 2022. Netflix lost subscribers for the first time. TikTok faced existential regulatory threats. The attention well was running dry.
Why coherence mattered: Human attention and mental health are finite resources. Business models that treat them as infinite extraction targets eventually hit biological limits. You can’t scale what isn’t renewable.
Produce No Waste: The Supply Chain Wake-Up
What I wrote: “Just-in-time manufacturing and global supply chains have eliminated all redundancy. The system has no slack, no resilience. Any shock will cascade.”
What happened: Chip shortages. Container ship backlogs. Baby formula crisis. Every “efficient” system revealed itself as brittle. Companies started reshoring and building inventory.
Why coherence mattered: In nature, “waste” from one system becomes input for another. True efficiency includes resilience. Zero-inventory systems aren’t efficient - they’re fragile.
Design from Patterns to Details: The AI Hype Cycle
What I wrote: “Every technology goes through a hype cycle, but the pattern is always the same: inflated expectations, disappointment, then genuine adoption by those who understand the actual use case.”
What happened: Web3 promised to revolutionize everything. By 2023, it had contracted to a few specific use cases. Same with metaverse, NFTs, and countless other “revolutionary” technologies. The pattern held.
Why coherence mattered: Technology adoption follows predictable patterns because human psychology and economic incentives are patterns. If you understand the pattern, you don’t get caught in the hype.
Integrate Rather Than Segregate: The DEI Backlash
What I wrote: “Diversity initiatives that focus on surface-level metrics rather than genuine integration create new forms of segregation. True diversity emerges from living systems principles, not from corporate mandates.”
What happened: By 2023, DEI fatigue was real. Programs were being cut. The initiatives that survived were the ones that had created genuine value through integrated thinking, not checkbox diversity.
Why coherence mattered: Nature doesn’t do quotas. It does symbiosis. Real diversity creates emergent properties. Mandated diversity without understanding integration principles creates resentment and backlash.
Use Small and Slow Solutions: The Unicorn Extinction
What I wrote: “Blitzscaling and hypergrowth strategies ignore natural development cycles. Companies that grow too fast before establishing strong foundations become structurally unsound.”
What happened: Layoffs at Meta, Amazon, Google, Microsoft. Startup valuations crashed. The companies that survived were the ones that had built slowly and sustainably, not the ones that had burned cash for growth.
Why coherence mattered: Living systems scale gradually, developing resilience as they grow. Forced growth creates structural weaknesses. The tortoise wins.
Use and Value Diversity: The Monopoly Problem
What I wrote: “Markets dominated by a few players lose their adaptive capacity. Monocultures are vulnerable to systemic shocks. True market health requires diversity.”
What happened: Antitrust actions against Google, Meta, Amazon. Regulatory pressure increased globally. The pendulum started swinging back toward breaking up concentrated power.
Why coherence mattered: Biodiversity creates resilience. Economic monocultures create fragility. When one dominant player controls a market, the entire ecosystem becomes vulnerable to single points of failure.
Use Edges and Value the Marginal: Where I Live
What I wrote: “The most interesting innovations happen at the boundaries between disciplines, markets, and worldviews. But these edge cases get ignored by mainstream capital because they don’t fit neat categories.”
What happened: Psychedelic therapy. Longevity medicine. Decentralized energy. Food as medicine. All the “fringe” ideas I’d been tracking started moving mainstream as the old paradigms failed.
Why coherence mattered: Edges are where systems exchange energy and information. Evolution happens at boundaries. The mainstream always lags behind what’s emerging at the margins.
Creatively Use and Respond to Change: The Adaptation Advantage
What I wrote: “Rigid strategies fail in chaotic times. The winners will be those who can sense changing patterns and adapt quickly while maintaining their core integrity.”
What happened: Companies that pivoted won. Companies that doubled down on 2021 strategies died. The ability to read the changing environment and respond became the defining competitive advantage.
Why coherence mattered: Living systems are adaptive. They sense environmental changes and respond without losing their essential nature. Organizations that could do this survived. Those that couldn’t, didn’t.
What This Means for Investing Now
I wasn’t predicting the future in 2022. I was reading coherence patterns that were already present but invisible to conventional analysis.
The same patterns are visible now, if you know how to look:
Current low-coherence patterns (avoid):
- AI companies with no path to profitability burning billions on compute
- “Sustainable” funds that hold oil companies with ESG committees
- DTC brands with negative unit economics funded by venture capital
- Companies growing through financial engineering rather than value creation
Current high-coherence patterns (investigate):
- Distributed systems that increase resilience while reducing costs
- Technologies that work with natural systems rather than against them
- Business models that create genuine value at small scale before scaling
- Solutions that address root causes rather than symptoms
The Coherence Advantage
Here’s what most people miss: coherence analysis isn’t about being right about timing. Markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent, as Keynes said.
But coherence analysis is about understanding which systems are sustainable over multiple timescales and which are running on borrowed energy.
When I wrote about ESG’s incoherence in 2022, I wasn’t saying it would collapse next quarter. I was saying the pattern was unsustainable, and eventually reality would reassert itself.
It did.
When I write about current patterns now, I’m not predicting when they’ll break. I’m identifying which systems are aligned with natural laws and which are fighting them.
The ones fighting natural laws eventually lose. Always.
The timeline might be uncertain. The outcome isn’t.
Why This Matters More Than Ever
We’re entering a period of increasing volatility and uncertainty. The old playbooks don’t work. The narratives are fragmenting. Everyone’s trying to predict what comes next.
But prediction is the wrong game.
The game is: understand the underlying patterns. Identify what’s coherent and what’s not. Invest accordingly. Wait.
Nature is patient. Natural laws are inexorable. Coherent systems eventually win.
The investors who understand this have an enormous advantage. Not because they can predict the future, but because they can identify what’s sustainable.
What Comes Next
I’ll continue tracking coherence patterns across markets, technologies, and business models. Not to predict quarterly moves, but to identify which systems are building genuine value and which are running on narrative fumes.
If you’re interested in seeing the world through this lens, that’s what The Pythia Scrolls provides: ongoing coherence analysis that cuts through the noise.
Because while everyone else is trying to predict what happens next, we’re focusing on something more valuable:
Understanding what lasts.
Originally written March 2022, updated February 2026 to show what actually happened. The patterns held.
Want to see the original Permaculture and Investing E-Book, email me and introduce yourself? Email me here
Interested in ongoing coherence analysis? Learn more about The Pythia Scrolls