There’s a particular kind of person who feels the call — a pull, a pressure, a sense that they came to this moment in history for a reason. Not because they have all the answers. But because they can’t look away.
Michael Haupt calls them Threshold Guides.
Our Substack Live yesterday was supposed to be a dialogue. Instead, technology gremlins showed up and I was silenced — much to my dismay and disappointment.
Michael calmly carried on and brilliantly held the talk solo for over an hour. Fielding questions from the chat while I watched on. You would never guess it was his first LIVE.
Here are some of my highlights and I recommend you watch/listen to the whole talk. Micheal has strong views on the current situation, which he combines with analysis , frameworks and predictions.
On the calling
“You’ll be a threshold guide and many people will laugh you off. You’re like Noah building an ark during a drought. But you have a calling you cannot let go — and the evidence is now rapidly mounting that threshold guides are necessary.”
The Noah analogy is a good one. Seven years of building in the dry. Everyone thinking you’re insane. Until the floods come. I’ve spent over 20 years preparing for collapse, it’s good to know many others are now preparing for that and what comes next.
On what’s actually competing for our future
Michael is clear-eyed about the two possible outcomes ahead — and neither is inevitable.
“A top-down technocratic governance system that controls you through money. Or a bottom-up bioregional governance built from the living world itself. Those are the two poles of coherence competing for global attention right now.”
The technocratic take over works by manufacturing desperation and then offering relief — a new monetary system that people will be so grateful for they’ll accept it without question. Michael sees the patterns of the 1929 depression playing out again: engineered chaos, followed by a solution that entraps.
The alternative is being built quietly, in valleys, in bioregions, in small communities practising something that looks less like politics and works more like mycelium.
On the money trap
Truly getting out of the exploitative money system and creating financial independence is hard. This is an area Michael has expertise and particular interest in .
“How many regenerative projects do you know of who are desperately standing with their hands out saying please fund me? In the process of asking for funding, they lock themselves to the extractive monetary system. Whatever initiative you fund through an extractive system remains extractive.”
This is not a comfortable claim and it challenges us all to create and live in as many alternative economic ways as possible.
Is the Dismantling of the Economic System a Conspiracy ?
Michael is careful here —
“I’m not claiming a secret group is conspiring against anything. This is standard human behaviour in a class-based civilisation at the end of its cycle. They’re simply protecting what they’ve accumulated. It’s expected. It’s happened before. It’s happening now.”
The pattern is the point Michael explains, this is what history has shown us repeatedly.
On what to actually do
Not protest. Not waiting for someone else to fix it. Not despair.
“Our role is to build and develop and hone and polish and crystallize those fields of coherence so that people are naturally drawn to them.”
The connection to Breaking Together
If you are reading along with our Breaking Together series, Michael’s framing will feel familiar — and relevant. The three chapters Zahra and I are talking about today on BOOK CHAT; Freedom to Know, Freedom from Progress, and Freedom from Banking are perspectives of the same ground.
Jem Bendell names what has been stolen from us: our ability to understand reality clearly, our liberation from the growth imperative, our relationship with money as something other than control.
Both Jem and Michael are Threshold Guides showing us where and how those systems are breaking down. Then guiding us to what gets built in the space they leave behind. That is the mission and purpose of Threshold Guides and why you are needed now.
Let us know what you think of these ideas. Do subscribe to Michael’s Substack Framer OS — his well considered essays are valuable resources for navigating now and creating what's next.
Come along to BOOK CHAT today 17.30 UK with Zahra Collapse Life
Also I have been asking people I see as Threshold Guides here on Substack what this means to them and what it takes to be one.
I’ve had some marvellous and inspiring responses , so more on this fascinating and necessary subject to come…
With Love and Solidarity,
Thank you Paulette Bodeman, Melissa Baxter, Adam Hicks, Felice M, and many others for tuning into my live video with Michael Haupt! Join me for my next live video in the app.
