Using the focus mode of these first two weeks of March, I did a deeper attempt to explain why I believe is important to explore and create something new in the area of Life Alignment. In this post, I also cover solutions to achieve it, including exploring possible characteristics of a new tool, method or framework.

The final goal is broad, maybe too broad. To prepare and train ourselves to become more active and aware players in the global complex system. Life Align is just a prelude to a higher kind of Shared Alignment.

Able like never before, why the recurring system crises and personal struggles?

After reading, sharing and exploring for the last years with others, some of them experts in these topics, my current vision of what is going on, especially in the richest countries, is:

We invested so much to be healthy and free.
Humanity invested centuries and depleted huge ecosystem resources to create a Global System that allows most of us to have a Life with material and physical safety and apparently open possibilities.

Yet at the Personal Level, some struggle.
Even if our basic needs are met, many of us feel growingly unsure, overwhelmed, weary and unrepresented at the System Level. I think this is because the System that gave us so much is now “asking back” in consumption, attention and conformity. Also, the size and complexity of the System makes key Life Alignment Choices hard, apparently irrelevant on the global level and not uni-dimensional as in the narratives we easily understand.

And the system we created doesn’t seem that stable and fair after all.
The sense of continuous crises mode, either in financial, pandemic, economic, environmental or equality strengthen the idea many already had that the system that gave so many of us so much has intrinsic core flaws and needs to evolve. It’s almost as if we have passed too much responsibility and autonomy to the system because we were in need of help (food, health, wellbeing, safety, work, freedom) and now we need to recover some of the individual responsibility because its the system that is in need of help. A new balance.

What are we missing?
What if we could get back a sense of Control and Fulfillment by getting support to manage the System Complexity and make our key Life Alignment Choices matter within long-term well-supported goals, maybe also together with others? That way I could use my individual freedom and choices to create a better version of myself and of the world around me in the long run.

A New Tool, Method or Framework

I think the answer is something that combines what exists but is scattered and that introduces new angles inspired by the perspectives I described above. Since after years of looking and exploring, I haven’t found any similar tool or initiative, it looks to me like it needs to be created.

The following list tries to propose what is needed for a new Tool or Method for Life Alignment.

1. Full-life Vision. The timeframes normally used are too short (weeks, months, years). We miss the long-term vision. Life Alignment, Choices and Balance in decades and even Full-Life Span. Not to fix them, because we need to be adaptable, but to evaluate them on this longer scope.
2. Integrate short and long-term. The current tools or methods we use to decide on short-term, if integrated into a Full-Life Vision, can gain new purpose and feed it with granular real and live data.
3. Multi-dimensional. We have tools, methods or narratives for each dimension of our lives, like cash, family, work, time, etc… but the richness and strength of Life Planning are the connections, blocking or positive, and balance between them.
4. Acknowledge Context. Contrary to some simplistic vision that anyone of us can do and become anything, each of us has its own context that both limits and empowers us. It’s a key uniqueness that, when known, can help us use and adapt to our context instead of sometimes fighting it or feeling bad about it.
5. Link to the System. We should have a way to Align and Plan our Lives taking into account information from the system like general trends, scenarios or constraints but also, and key to me, knowing the way we can influence the System with our choices. I think a new tool or method could achieve this link.
6. Empowered Shared Alignment. If many of us would plan our choices in a more formal way, we could, taking into account our differences and contributions, plan together. Apart from being more enjoyable, this shared alignment could unlock engineered impact at the system level, delivering powerful changes.
7. Work with Narratives and Stories. As described in the previous list items, the challenges and solutions look mainly technical but I believe the key is self and system awareness and those are deeply connected to narratives and stories we use to explain reality at both levels. A new Life Alignment Tool or Method should be able to integrate, deconstruct if necessary and enrich the narratives we own and share.

A Visual Proposal

In order to challenge feedback and get a more real sense of what could be the new solution, I created a diagram with examples of Inputs, Calculations and Usages. I also added a higher-level diagram with the relation between the Personal Life Align Framework and the Global System Framework.