As you might know, Gallup tracks employee engagement across the globe every year.

In 2024, the “engaged” number fell from 23% to 21%. That doesn’t sound particularly dramatic until you also know: engagement has steadily, very slowly, increased over the past 12 years, and has only fallen twice.

Once in 2020… the pandemic year, of course.

But then it fell again in 2024. (Gallup hasn’t yet released their full report for 2025, but the early data isn’t good.)

I want to ponder that for a moment because it would seem that we are, right now, near pandemic-level disengagement.

Without a pandemic.

Without a lockdown.

Without any singular, identifiable crisis event that everyone can point to and say “That’s why.”

This is my point.

There is no singular problem.

What’s happening is that the walls between things are gone.

The crisis isn’t a specific event. It’s lots of events colliding. It’s everywhere… but also nowhere. This problem doesn’t have a name on the news or a headline in the papers. 

What we’re feeling is the weight of a world that won’t stop intersecting, but nobody’s given us the tools to process this kind of intersectional reality.

It’s not just that the world is bleeding into the workplace or vice-versa. It’s that we have no framework or outlet for the mind-boggling number of intersections we’re currently experiencing. 

Our intuition is screaming that something has fundamentally shifted. But we were all trained for separation: neat categories, separate departments, clean columns. So even though the signal comes through to our bodies loud and clear (“Something is weird!”) we have absolutely no idea what to do with that. The pressure just… accumulates below the surface, in our emotions and in our spirits and in our bodies.

You feel it, right?

The Dysregulation Tax

The American Institute of Stress calls this ambient societal stress. Right now, it’s nearly impossible to escape, and it’s really hard to manage because it’s tied to events outside our direct control. 

“Ambient societal stress” is definitely what I’m feeling most days.

To make this even worse, at work most of us don’t get to put a clean label of “world events” on our stress. 

In too many of our workplaces, there’s still an implicit rule of keeping these things “separate,” right? “Oooh don’t bring that stuff in here…” It’s too polarizing, too difficult. But we can’t NOT carry it with us, so at work we end up just seeing symptoms: ambient societal stress shows up as distraction, or fatigue, or brain fog, or interpersonal tension, or sometimes, as poor decision-making.

I don’t want to make a comment here about treating symptoms instead of the disease… it feels really cliche, but… I’m pretty sure this is what most of our workplaces are doing.

Neuroscience has a word for what’s happening underneath all of this: dysregulation. When our nervous system is constantly running a low-grade threat response, our executive functioning degrades. What does that mean? Creativity, collaboration, complex thinking, all of it takes a hit. This isn’t happening dramatically to all of us all the time, but it’s happening some of the time to enough of us to matter.

Think about it this way: if we multiply the impacts of ambient societal stress across every person in your workforce, that’s no longer a small issue. It’s a really big performance problem.

I call this The Dysregulation Tax.

This is a hidden toll on everything your organization is trying to do right now. It might show up as change initiatives that stall for no clear reason, or talented people quietly disengaging, or teams that just can’t seem to collaborate as well as they used to. You might not actually see it at all, at least for a while, because this is the kind of problem that compounds beneath the surface until it breaks something big. It’s gradually, then suddenly.

The Dysregulation Tax is particularly nefarious because it’s not even really allowed to be there. 

Most workplaces are still operating under the illusion that “separateness” is an actual thing that can happen. But it can’t. You can’t leave your body at home when you go to work. It feels absurd when I say it that way, but a lot of you listening to this know exactly what I’m talking about: your full self isn’t totally welcome in your workplace.

There’s another problem here, too, which is that organizations actually don’t WANT you to leave your body at home. Your emotions are the things that keep you plugged into intrinsic motivation which is what creates exceptional work. Your instincts are what help you make great decisions. Your humanness is what pushes you to go the extra mile for your customers. Your organization wants and needs all those things!

Do you see the problem more clearly now?

We are deeply dysregulated for very healthy, sane reasons but many of us spend huge parts of our day pretending that we’re “fine.”

Your intuition is intelligent. That primal, pre-verbal, something-is-fundamentally-different sensation isn’t a glitch in your nervous system. That’s ancient pattern-recognition software doing exactly what it was designed to do. Humans have survived for millennia by sensing when the environment shifted before they could explain why it shifted. That capacity didn’t disappear just because we now make spreadsheets instead of spears.

The problem is that these days we’re not teaching each other how to trust our intuition or how to see the pattern it’s pointing at.

We were never taught a framework for intersections. We were trained for separation: “work” in one box and “world” in another. So when everything starts colliding and converging, we don’t have a good way to make sense of it. We don’t have tools for it. We just have this low-grade, persistent sense that something has shifted — and, especially at work, we have to feel this but have no space or venues in which to name what it is or do anything about it.

But if we take a little space, and follow that feeling all the way down — past the noise, past the anxiety — what we find underneath isn’t dread.

It’s knowing.

You know things are changing. And sure, maybe knowing that is a different kind of scary. But it’s important to know: we’re not crazy. The strangeness we’re sensing isn’t random. It’s not just too much news or too little sleep. It’s a pattern we’re all living inside… a measurable, repeatable, civilizational pattern that has played out across centuries.

Your gut and the history books are pointing at the exact same thing.

The Separation Was Always A Lie, We Just Feel It More Now

For most of the industrial era, separation was a powerful organizing principle of civilization. Work here. Family there. Economy in one column, politics in another, world events somewhere in the background on the evening news… safely contained, one hour, after dinner.

Here’s what nobody says: those lines were never natural. They were engineered. Deliberately, often by people who benefited from keeping the domains of human life siloed from each other.

Think about what separation actually accomplishes. If workers don’t see themselves as citizens, they’re easier to exploit. If citizens don’t see themselves as economic actors, they’re easier to manipulate. If your religious identity and your political identity and your work identity never touch each other, the people managing each of those spheres never have to answer to each other. Keep everything separate and each domain can run with no accountability from the others.

Division is a fabulous management tool.

In this era, the CEO who polluted the river on Friday and donated to environmental causes on Sunday didn’t feel like a hypocrite, because they could tell themselves they’re just a person navigating a world that was designed to keep those roles from confronting each other. 

In this era, the politician who preached about family values and then voted against family leave benefits wasn’t confused, because they could tell themselves they were just operating in a system built to keep “personal values” and “policy” in separate columns.

The separation was always a lie… we just feel it more now.

It turns out, the walls weren’t just there to keep things organized. The walls were also there to keep us from seeing how the system actually worked.

I think people have always sensed this to varying degrees, even when they couldn’t articulate it or speak up about it. That low-grade feeling that something wasn’t adding up — that the official story didn’t quite match lived experience — that was always intuition doing its job. The built walls suppressed the signal, they didn’t eliminate it.

But then came the internet. Mobile. Social media. A.I.

Each of these technology waves didn’t just change how we work, they dissolved another wall. 

The news cycle became a 24-hour scroll on the same device you use for work email. Your online identity and your professional identity collapsed into the same LinkedIn profile. The “outside world” and the “inside world” became the same frickin’ world. There was simply no separation, anymore. Work/life balance? Any of that still around expired mightily in 2020.

And our nervous systems — which were never built for this volume of ambient noise — well, they never got the memo to “just stay professional about it.” Evolutionarily, that’s just not really a thing our nervous system does.

Over the past few decades, people haven’t gotten softer, the walls have gotten thinner. And what was always true about how all the different parts of our world intersect have slowly become unavoidably visible.

Our intuition was right. It was always right. Now, we’ve just finally run out of walls for the truth to hide behind.

Welcome To The Intersection Age

What we’re living through now has a name, even if most headlines haven’t found it yet.

This is The Intersection Age. Everything is intersecting with everything else. Economics bleeds into geopolitics. Geopolitics bleeds into your industry. Your industry bleeds into your talent market. Your talent market bleeds into your culture. Your culture bleeds into performance. Performance bleeds into your stock price. Your stock price is impacted by another war halfway around the world.

There are no more clean separations. No story stays in its lane. There’s no “external” event that doesn’t eventually show up on your P&L as distraction, attrition, or resistance to change.

I know this feels chaotic and unprecedented. 

But while it may be chaotic, it’s not unprecedented.

History suggests this kind of moment has a pattern. Strauss and Howe called it the Fourth Turning. This isn’t the first time humanity has stood in this particular intersection. 

It happened in the 1930s and 40s when the wall between government and the economy collapsed and the New Deal rewrote their relationship. It happened in the 1860s when the wall between federal authority and states’ rights finally gave way. It happened in the 1770s when the walls of the monarchy crumbled and created the United States. The pattern goes back centuries, and every time, I am pretty sure the people living through it felt exactly what you’re feeling now. 

They had a sense: something has fundamentally changed.

They were right.

And so are you.

But remember: the people who survived those moments didn’t survive by trying to reinforce the old rules. They survived by building new structures capable of holding the new reality.

That’s the work in front of us. And here’s what I really want you to hold on to: this season of crisis always ends. We are not in endless chaos. We’re in transitional chaos. There’s a difference, and knowing that difference is itself an advantage.

Leadership Lens

Here’s today’s Leadership Lens.

First — what you’re seeing in your people is real, and it has a name. That scattered, low-grade exhaustion running through your teams? At least part of that is likely to be dysregulation: a normal nervous system response to a world that has stopped making sense. Your employees didn’t get weaker, the walls got thinner because of The Intersection Age. Naming these things for your people is an act of leadership because it helps them make sense of what’s going on and why they feel the way they do.

Second — global context is a performance tool. Most leaders treat “what’s happening in the world” as a distraction from the work. Flip that. Employees who have a coherent framework for understanding the broader societal moment they’re living in are measurably less anxious, more adaptable, more present, and they create better strategies because they know what the heck is happening! Giving your people global context is empowering.

Third — your organization is already living in the intersection. Work, identity, economics, technology, and politics are colliding inside your culture right now whether you’ve decided to acknowledge it or not. In chaotic times like this, the leaders who recognize and honor that complexity will outperform the ones who keep waiting for things to settle down. Because spoiler alert: things are not “settling down.” This is the new terrain being created in real time, and it’s likely to get messier before it gets cleaner… that’s how these seasons go.

So if you’re a leader, the question isn’t whether the outside world is affecting your people. It is. The question is whether you’re going to help them make sense of it or leave them doomscrolling at 11 pm instead of sleeping and unable to talk about it the next day at work. Create spaces for these discussions to happen. If your people are trying to make sense of the world in isolation, you’re going to have a thousand different realities inside your company.

As a leader, this starts with you. You need to model this kind of sense-making — and frankly, I’m glad you’re here reading this, because helping you do that is why I write these every week. But you also need to do sense-making with your people. They are almost certainly carrying more than you know and their intuition is telling them the same thing yours is telling you.

Honor the intersections. Name this moment a Chaos Window. Give them space to regulate.

Because the lines are gone. They’re never coming back in the same way they were before. The leaders who help their people understand how to navigate that are the ones who will build organizations worth working for.

The Optimistic Rebellion

Here’s what crisis narratives can get really wrong: they assume that understanding the chaos makes people more anxious.

But the opposite is often true.

Think of how humans respond when the power goes out. When a neighbor needs emergency help. When there’s an earthquake. When a child is in danger. When things like this happen, humans always spring into action to help each other.

Why is this the case?

There are different kinds of fear. There’s the fear of something unnamed, lurking, shapeless… the monster you can’t see. But then there’s the fear of something you can see, understand, and make a plan around. The first kind is paralyzing. The second kind is energizing, and it’s the thing that often turns strangers into neighbors.

This is another reason we do this every week: to turn the future from a shapeless monster into something energizing. When we understand what’s happening, we can look at the chaos and say: “I know what this is. I know roughly where we are in it. And I have ideas for what we can do.”

Here’s where this week’s Optimistic Rebellion comes in.

A few more thoughts about intersections…

Ungoverned intersections create opportunities for great harm. Think: profit without accountability, technology without ethics, management without transparency. We’ve seen what those things look like. We’re living in the consequences of decades of walls that kept power from being questioned across domains.

But governed intersections produce something entirely different. When profit and purpose are mutually accountable, we get sustainable businesses. When technology and labor intersect with a real need, humans get released from drudgery. When work and identity blur with intention and care, we get organizations people actually want to be part of.

So our Optimistic Rebellion is this: refuse to let the intersections be owned by the people who benefit from making them a mess.

The industrial age was built on separation. The new reality will be about connection.

The world doesn’t stop at the office door anymore.

Your gut knew that before you had language for it. Now you have both.

So, let the world feel weird. But also let that feeling push you into helping make the next world better.