Reflection: Becoming a Radical Free Agent
Since I took two weeks holiday in June, I used the opportunity to reflect on my experiences in a radical free agent role thus far and record prominent themes. My next portfolio update will combine events from the remainder of June and July.
As I progress on this experimental and transformative journey, I am learning to embody what this emergent work actually asks of me. Four months in, six thematic lessons stand out.
Lessons of Principle
Building a new paradigm starts with an uncomfortable admission. Almost every assumption a person carries about what is possible, or how a structure should function, was inherited from a specific history rather than derived from anything fundamental. Mistaking how things currently stand, or how they stood within living memory, for how things must fundamentally be closes off possibilities before they are considered. Approaching this work from a stance closer to a blank slate, and sensing directly the many layers of complexity in the Earth's systems and in human experience, is the only way to build toward something genuinely new instead of a variation on what already failed.
Aspiration towards a blank slate has a limit, however. Attempting to remove every assumption without replacing it collapses into relativism, the idea that no approach is more valid than another. This stance is not neutral. It is destructive, easily exploited, and tends to produce worse outcomes for most forms of life than a flawed anchor point would. What is needed instead is a first principle, a guiding star capable of grounding systemic design in something more solid than surface observation, since without it there is nothing to build on or grow from.
After examining a range of philosophical traditions, the first principle I keep returning to is interbeing, a term Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh coined in English, though comparable concepts appear across many other languages and cultures. Interbeing describes the reality that every being, object, and phenomenon depends entirely on everything else in the universe to exist. Principles that get invoked more often in this kind of work, such as balance, care, regeneration, and mutual thriving, are not separate ideas competing with interbeing. They are downstream expressions of it, consequences of taking interdependence seriously rather than alternatives to it.
The current planetary predicament traces back to a long failure to honor that interdependence. Extraction without regeneration, and exploitation without acknowledging entangled fates, violate the basic structure of interbeing. The resulting suffering now returns to the species that caused it, because nothing exists in complete isolation from anything else.
This carries a direct implication for how change gets designed. Standardized frameworks, particularly Western models built for replication across environments, tend to ignore the particular interdependencies of a given place and its people. Starting from interbeing instead means observing what flourishing looks like within a specific context, then shaping systemic work around that observation rather than importing a template assembled elsewhere.
In practice, this becomes a daily discipline instead of an abstract commitment. Every expectation placed on me, every structural assumption embedded in how I am supposed to work, communicate, or function within a still-dysfunctional system, gets measured against interbeing. Does it serve those entangled relationships, or does it ignore them? Practiced consistently, this habit gradually rewires the instinct itself, moving it toward treating interdependence as the default lens rather than an occasional correction.
Lessons of Integration
This discipline first meets resistance at the most basic assumption. The dominant paradigm treats work and life as separate domains. You clock in, become part of a machine, clock out, and return to yourself until the next shift begins. Everything inside the machine counts as employment. Everything outside it, including relationships, health, hobbies, and rest, counts as life, as though survival and living were two different projects running on parallel tracks.
In the radical free agent model, that boundary did not survive contact with reality. I did not plan for its disappearance. I noticed it, gradually, as each day stopped organizing itself into blocks of work and blocks of everything else.
Interbeing explains why. If the aim is to catalyze regenerative systems, the catalyst needs to embody regeneration first. Meditation, compassion, and mindful consumption are not wellness add-ons scheduled around the real work. They are the work, because a fragmented practitioner cannot credibly model an integrated system to anyone else. The same logic extends to something as ordinary as time spent watching wildlife or paying attention to what I eat. A healthy society requires healthy participants, and treating that requirement as optional, as a personal indulgence rather than due diligence, misunderstands what systemic transformation demands at the individual scale.
This pattern shows up temporally as well as philosophically. My schedule no longer separates into defined blocks between work and personal life. A given day consists of a fluid mix of tasks, personal maintenance and collective contribution running through each other rather than sitting in separate compartments. I treat all of it as a necessary investment of energy and attention. The old paradigm asked which category a given hour belonged to. The new one asks only whether the hour was well spent.
Lessons of Flow
When the boundary between work and life falls away, the question becomes how to navigate a broad portfolio without a fixed plan to hold it together.
Traditional project management assumes a linear path built from a budget, a timeline, a predetermined outcome, and the milestones connecting them. This structure breaks the instant it meets genuine complexity, since a living system does not behave like a machine with predictable inputs and outputs. My approach instead resembles flowing water in that it prioritizes continuous sense-making and constant reorientation over a plan fixed in advance. Judgment calls come from reading what the environment signals in a given moment, not from consulting a document written before that signal arrived.
This is not passivity, and it is not the same as being directionless. It means declining to force outcomes where no interest or energy exists yet, and instead locating where momentum is building on its own. This might look like community frustration over a specific local grievance nobody is organizing around yet. My role becomes something closer to assembling a puzzle from scattered pieces, starting with whichever is easiest to orient toward systemic change and letting the connections ripple outward from there, rather than trying to impose a picture that does not exist yet.
The portfolio stays loose by design. I remain in contact with a wide range of groups and step in when it makes sense, and my attention shifts to wherever the current is strongest at a given moment, not on a fixed rotation. The closest term I found for this posture is wu wei, effortless effort, a phrase that sounds mystical until you recognize it as an ordinary form of common sense. Work with the grain of what is already moving instead of cutting against it.
Lessons of Agency
Flow only works once you let go of an assumption most people never examine, that you are supposed to be the one in control.
A previous project called the Collective Action Network (CAN) taught me this the hard way. I need to write an expanded postmortem about it, but the short version is that I tried to impose a sequence on events, insisting things unfold in a particular order and at a specific pace. I was also operating from too high a level of abstraction, trying to architect an outcome before establishing the relationships it would depend on. Complex systems do not cooperate with either instinct, and forcing the issue anyway only kept me stuck exactly where I started.
Letting go of that assumption does not produce helplessness, but its opposite. Old growth forests illustrate this point well. They do not grow in straight rows of a single species, the way a plantation does. Each tree pursues its own growth within a shared ecosystem, drawing light and water according to its own position, and the forest rebalances itself when something drifts out of proportion, without any central authority directing the correction. Applied to my own work, agency means I have influence over what I contribute to a feedback loop, even though I cannot dictate what comes back through it. I am responsible for my part of that loop, not for owning its eventual outcome, and the distinction matters more than it sounds like it should.
Ownership and responsibility get treated as synonyms, but they are not. Responsibility, in the sense I mean it, follows from having agency, since the capacity to act carries an obligation to act well. By contrast, ownership is a concept of possession and liability, assigning blame once something goes wrong. Corporate failures illustrate this well. When an incident traces back to a long chain of small failures across an entire structure rather than one culpable actor, the usual response still isolates a person and holds them accountable, since a structure is harder to blame than an individual. This habit of pinning outcomes on individuals is a form of blindness to how systems function, and that blindness limits agency, because you cannot act effectively on a reality you refuse to see clearly.
The more accurately I read the systemic dynamics around me, which shift from place to place and even within myself, the more I work with the flow instead of straining to hold it in a shape it will not keep. I never felt more capable of shaping outcomes than I do now, although by the old paradigm's measure, financial control, I have little.
Lessons of Value
Letting go of financial control raised an obvious question in return. What am I actually getting back from all of this?
By the metrics of the dominant paradigm, not much. The income this work currently generates on its own would not sustain me, but the value I contribute, gauged by initiatives catalyzed and coherence introduced, is substantial. The gap between value given and value received is not reflected in the income figures at all.
What I accumulate instead is relational capital, meaning trust built through direct, visible participation in a landscape people recognize as their own. This functions as something closer to a social safety net than a transaction, an assurance that the people I show up for will not simply let me drown if something goes wrong. The modern culture of strict individual self-sufficiency, the expectation that a person earn everything through isolated labor, is a relatively recent invention, not a permanent feature of human organization.
This relational base also converts into financial support more reliably than I expected, since people are more likely to fund causes that touch their own lives directly than distant abstractions. Because my work sits inside a town people live in and pass through, it carries a legibility a distant cause lacks. The people funding this work tend to be local, interact with the work directly or hear about it secondhand, and value what they observe over what they are told. The climb from awareness to active backing is slow, and I remain nowhere near self-sustaining, but that base is more resilient than a single grant would be. If a contributor withdraws, the loss is partial rather than total because the funding is distributed across many sources, not concentrated. The alternative, a single grant tied to a specific project, is precarious by design, leaving you chasing funding instead of building something that compounds.
None of this diminishes that my partner covers most of our household costs, but I no longer treat it as evidence the model is unsustainable. Interbeing means no organism sustains itself entirely alone. Every form of life in a natural system depends on other forms of life for its survival, and humans always relied on each other in the same way, however much the dominant culture prefers to describe self-sufficiency as a virtue and interdependence as a failure. I started thinking of myself, my partner, and the immediate support network around us as a single system that enables this work to exist at all, rather than one dependent person and one independent provider. My partner is not the face of this work, but the input he provides is as integral to its continuation as anything I do myself.
This is not a model I would recommend universally. It depends on circumstances specific to me. However, as an exploration of a different value exchange, treating a support system as a whole rather than optimizing each part in isolation, it is worth developing.
Lessons of Language
The most practical lesson, and possibly the most consequential one, concerns translation.
Every community I work with developed its own vocabulary, often inherited from whatever discipline it branched out from and adapted as new terms folded in. This happens even within a single language. Within English alone, the words different circles use to describe closely related ideas can diverge enough that two people use different terms for the same concept, or the same term for different concepts, without noticing the mismatch.
This miscommunication creates two temptations, both of them detrimental. The first is to simplify everything down to whatever vocabulary is most broadly familiar, which strips out the nuance that made the original terms necessary. Concepts like "metacrisis" or "bioregioning" exist because the phenomena they describe are genuinely more specific than the everyday words available for them, and flattening that specificity for accessibility erases the precision that made the term worth introducing. The second temptation is to impose one party's language on everyone else as the correct way to speak, insisting that a particular word is right and another is wrong. This carries a real risk of reproducing colonial patterns, since Western or institutionally dominant terminology is usually treated as the legitimate baseline, with everything else expected to conform to it.
A subtler problem underlies both temptations, mistranslation that neither party notices. Two people can each believe they understand the other perfectly and still be missing something, the same way translation between two actual languages can preserve most of a sentence's meaning while quietly losing a piece of it. This is not a matter of bad faith. It happens even between well-intentioned collaborators working hard to understand each other.
What works instead is allowing language to evolve organically through sustained contact and direct collaboration, not a single conversation or a glossary handed from one group to another. When two communities are genuinely required to understand each other at depth, not just exchange pleasantries, they tend to develop a third vocabulary that resembles neither original but carries what both were trying to say, sometimes adding a dimension neither captured on its own. This is where network weaving becomes directly relevant to the language problem, since keeping relational and informational flows consistent across many groups enables this cross-pollination at a steady rate rather than sporadically. Over time and with enough sustained contact, an entire constellation of otherwise disconnected communities can move closer to mutual intelligibility, not because anyone imposed a shared vocabulary, but because enough genuine exchange took place for one to emerge.
In practice, this means being explicit from the outset whenever I convene people from different backgrounds. I now say directly, at the start of an event or working session, that everyone present comes from a different context, each with its own language and connotations, and that this can make cross-context communication difficult in ways that have nothing to do with anyone's intent. What can look like gatekeeping from the outside is usually just a term that is ordinary in one group and unfamiliar in another. Naming that distinction openly, rather than letting people assume bad faith, did more to prevent friction than any glossary I could hand out in advance.
A related tension shows up whenever I write for a general audience rather than a specific group. Specialized vocabulary can read as exclusive even when exclusion was never the intent, yet simplifying it costs distinction, context, and nuance. Explanation, not simplification, is a better approach. A new concept can be introduced and defined as it is used, without requiring anyone to already speak the language that produced it. Going forward, I plan to apply this directly to the portfolio update process. Each future update will come in two versions, one in the most accurate language and concepts available, and a second rewritten for a reader without prior exposure to this field. The pair will reference each other, so a reader who finds the technical version dense can move to the simpler one, and a non-technical reader curious about the full picture can explore further.
I don't believe it would be appropriate to frame the radical free agent model as either a success or failure. Rather, its development is indicative of progress, and the six lessons above guide the paradigm shift that makes it possible. Principle serves as the ground everything else stands on. Integration enables me to do the work at all. Flow and agency let me move with systems rather than against them. Value and language determine whether that movement reaches anyone beyond me. Taken together, they mark an approach still under construction, tested under real conditions rather than assumed into existence, and edging closer to something that can catalyze change with intention.
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