The Insubordinate Ancestor

A few weeks ago, on my birthday, I wrote about Roman Krznaric’s The Good Ancestor and the question that has quietly become my compass:

Are we being good ancestors?

I sat with that question for a while. And the more I sat with it, the more uncomfortable it got. Because asking it honestly forces a second question right behind it:

If we want to be good ancestors, what do we actually have to do differently — today, this week, this quarter?

This post is my attempt at an answer. Or rather, the beginning of one. It’s also a bit of a lead-up to public appearance at conferences over the coming months — where I’ll be trying to make the case that flourishing and collapse acceptance are not opposites, but partners.

To get there, I want to bring two more books into the conversation: Timothée Parrique’s Slow Down or Die and Todd Kashdan’s The Art of Insubordination. They sit on either side of the good-ancestor question like two wings: one tells us what we need to change in the system, the other tells us how to find the courage to push for that change when almost everything around us says “don’t rock the boat.”

1. The system we are inheriting (and passing on)

In Time to Grow Up I worked through The Consilience Project’s argument that our current idea of progress is developmentally immature: we celebrate narrow wins (GDP, life expectancy, technological capability) while systematically externalising the harm. Tetraethyl lead. Haber-Bosch. Engagement-optimised feeds. Each one a “solution” that quietly handed a much bigger problem to the people coming after us.

Parrique sharpens this in Slow Down or Die. His diagnosis is brutal in its simplicity:

We are on a bus speeding faster and faster toward a cliff, and we celebrate every added miles per hour as progress.

A few of his points have stayed with me, and they are exactly the things a good ancestor would refuse to look away from:

• Green growth is a myth. Decoupling GDP from ecological burden — really decoupling, globally, fast enough, deep enough — has not happened and is not happening. The math doesn’t work.

• The market sphere is dispossessing the non-market sphere. Every hour we hand over to the attention economy is an hour stolen from family, friendship, community, rest, nature. The reproductive sphere — care, relationships, ecological regeneration — is being asset-stripped to feed the productive one.

• “Increasing our speed does not always save us time.” What looks like efficiency at the individual level often shows up as systemic time poverty at the collective level.

• When reproduction stops, everything stops. A society that exhausts its caregivers, its soils, its oceans and its meaning-making cannot be patched with another productivity app.

If we connect this back to Krznaric’s framework, Parrique is essentially describing a civilisation with zero deep-time humility, zero legacy mindset, and a holistic forecast that consists mostly of denial.

Which brings me to the harder question: why don’t we change course, even when we can see the cliff?

2. Why we don’t change — and why “being nice” won’t fix it

This is where Todd Kashdan’s The Art of Insubordination has been quietly rearranging my thinking.

Kashdan’s argument, in one line:

Principled insubordination is a brand of deviance intended to improve society with a minimal amount of secondary harm.

His point — backed by a lot of social and organisational psychology — is that healthy systems don’t just need psychological safety. They need psychological safety and principled dissent. Without the dissent, safety just becomes a more comfortable form of conformity. The cliff still gets closer; we just feel better on the way there.

What we need is someone actually slamming their foot on the break. Or at least grabbing the wheel and veer it away from the cliff.

A few of his ideas feel especially important if we want to be good ancestors in 02026:

• Tribal thinking levies a “novelty penalty” on unorthodox thinkers. This is why people pointing at planetary boundaries, degrowth, or collapse are still routinely dismissed as naïve, fringe, or doomer — even when the data is on their side.

• Psychological safety only translates into superior performance when minority viewpoints exist and are welcomed. Translation: a “safe” team that all agrees with each other is just a polite echo chamber. Same for a “safe” society.

• Principled rebels work from the inside, spark curiosity (not fear), project an aura of objectivity, show willingness to sacrifice, and stay flexibly consistent. This is not a recipe for shouting louder. It’s a recipe for being trusted while saying difficult things.

• Power compromises self-awareness. Today’s challengers easily become tomorrow’s defenders of a new status quo. Staying insubordinate means staying humble, even after you “win.”

Reflecting on The Art of Insubordination, it almost starts to feel like a missing chapter of The Good Ancestor. Krznaric tells us what kind of thinking the future needs from us. Kashdan tells us how to actually carry that thinking into rooms that don’t want to hear it — boardrooms, policy meetings, family dinners, LinkedIn feeds.

3. The good ancestor and the principled rebel

If I bring Krznaric, Parrique and Kashdan onto the same page, a fairly clear picture emerges. A good ancestor in this decade is not just someone who thinks long-term. A good ancestor is someone who is willing to be politely, persistently, lovingly insubordinate to the parts of our current system that are stealing from the future.

That means:

• Insubordinate to the growth-at-all-costs narrative — even when it is the official religion of an economy addicted to GDP growth.

• Insubordinate to the attention economy that converts our finite hours into grotesque wealth for a few tech oligarchs.

• Insubordinate to techno-optimism — the kind that calls every concern “doomerism” so it never has to look at the reality.

• Insubordinate to the idea that caring is soft — when in fact, as Parrique reminds us, all production rests on reproduction. Care is the substrate of everything.

• Insubordinate to the assumption that we are isolated individuals, rather than dependent members of a more-than-human community embedded in a finite biosphere.

And underneath all of this: a good ancestor lets themselves grieve. Grief is not the opposite of action — it is what makes honest action possible. What we are not allowed to do is let grief curdle into despair, and despair into permission to disengage.

4. So what do we actually do? A working direction

I am wary of tidy 5-step plans on questions this big. But I do think we can name a direction, and then let each of us translate it into our own context — work, family, community, citizenship.

a) Slow down on purpose

Not as a lifestyle aesthetic, but as a political and ecological act. Audit what Parrique calls your time footprint: which of your “time-saving” tools and commitments are actually time-consuming at the systemic level? Reclaim hours for the reproductive sphere — care, relationships, rest, nature, citizenship — and treat that reclamation as serious work, not leftovers.

b) Internalise what your work externalises

Borrowing from Development in Progress: before celebrating a new product, deal, technology or strategy, ask: what is this externalising, and onto whom? Future generations? Other species? Colleagues’ nervous systems? The Global South? If you can name it, you can start to internalise it.

c) Build small “evolutionary cells”

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s evolutionary cells, Joe Brewer’s bioregional learning centers, Margaret Mead’s small group of thoughtful committed citizens, Ilya Prigogine’s “small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos” — they are all pointing at the same thing. Don’t wait for the system. Build the prototype of the next one, in your team, in your neighbourhood, in your bioregion. And invite others in.

d) Practise principled insubordination — at work, especially

For leaders and coaches (which is where most of my work lives), this is the daily move:

• Make it safe to disagree, and expected.

• Reward people who name the externalities everyone else is politely ignoring.

• Refuse the false choice between “performance” and “flourishing.” In flow, in psychological safety, in mattering, those are the same thing.

e) Stay flexibly consistent on the long arc

Krznaric calls it cathedral thinking. Kashdan calls it flexible consistency. Same skill, different angles: hold the long-term goal firmly, hold the short-term tactics lightly, and keep showing up — for decades, if needed, not weeks.

5. A question to leave you with

If you take only one thing from this post, take this:

Do unto future generations as you would have past generations do unto you.

— Roman Krznaric’s reformulation of the Golden Rule

And then, in the spirit of Kashdan, ask yourself one more:

Where, this week, am I being too obedient to a system I don’t actually believe in?

That answer — not a grand strategy, just that one honest answer — is, I think, where being a good ancestor begins.

In 02026. And in 02070. And, if we get this right, well beyond.

If this resonated, I’d love to hear from you — especially if you are working on, or thinking about, evolutionary cells, bioregional projects, regenerative organisations, or principled dissent inside larger institutions. That’s the conversation I’m here for.

I’m a Certified Positive Psychology and Flow Coach, Founder of Culture4Flow, and fractional Chief Flourishing Officer (CFLO). Based in Helsinki, Finland, I support people and organizations move toward genuine flourishing — through coaching, facilitation, companionship. 🌱

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