Zooming out: growth on a planet in polycrisis

Why your tiny decisions matter

I just finished reading Orbital by Samantha Harvey. It follows six fictional astronauts throughout 24 hours on the International Space Station, during which time they orbit Earth sixteen times.

Being submerged in a world beyond our own, looking down at planet Earth “where the continents run into each other like overgrown gardens” is extremely comforting to me in the same way looking at the Atlantic makes you feel small and seeing a shooting star at night even smaller.

Finishing the book sparked a space content binge, including Apollo 13: Survival on Netflix and several old Brian Cox (the man with the nicest voice in our world?) documentaries. Hmu with your space content reccs!

I’ve also just read the World Economic Forum Global Risk Report 2025. It’s a dry title for a very human report. It lays out in charts and infographics the crises that humans are experiencing every day. These were the key risk areas outlined in the report:

1. Declining optimism - over 50% of respondents described their global outlook for the next ten years as stormy or turbulent.

2. Deepening geopolitical tensions - state-based arms conflict ranks as the top perceived risk. Could not be less shocking.

3. Societal fragmentation - inequality (wealth, income) is perceived as the most central risk of all due to the influence it has on other risks and on diminishing our collective sense of shared values.

4. Environmental risks - environmental risks present the most significant deterioration over ten years versus other risk groups.

5. Tech risks kind of - but still under the radar i.e. we don’t yet know the impact of AI but we *sense* there are some downsides lol.

It is within both of these contexts - our planet floating in space and the polycrisis age we inhabit - that we are building brands, businesses, and movements. Plowing your energy into growing a brand in these scenarios while the world is on fire seems like absolute insanity. What is the point?

But action is never taken from a zoomed-out position. This is the vantage point from which we gain perspective, research and analyse. The doing, the change making, the building and improving is done zoomed in on a micro scale.

Zooming in on the crisis interconnections map, each node is not a solid object but a malleable sphere growing and shrinking based on our collective actions.

The decisions we take every day about what, how, where, and why we create are quiet acts of rebellion. Each time you choose sustainable growth over growth-at-all-costs, spend marketing budget away from Big Social, or prioritise deep connections with a smaller community you're voting for a different future. When you know how much is enough, reinvest profits into causes that need them, volunteer your time, or speak up - you're reshaping those World Economic risk nodes in your own small way.

We’re all contributing the enshitification of our worlds in some way or another. But the little choices we make in favour of our planet and its inhabitants over generating more gold medallions for billionaires create ripples.

From orbit, Earth might look like overgrown gardens running into each other, but down here, in the soil of those gardens, is where the growth happens. Here and now is the only place to plant the seeds of change. Zooming out to gain new perspectives is vital. But it’s our tiny everyday decisions that matter most.

Chat soon

Matilda

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Hey if you don’t know me I’m Matilda Lucy 👋 a freelance digital strategist based in London. I support consumer brands to redefine what success looks like today and achieve it via growth audits, strategy and fractional support. You can book an intro call into my cal here. Thanks for reading Broken Growth!