What to do instead: When everyone else is panicking

That's just the way it is.

I have never in my life accepted that as a reason to keep doing a thing. Not once. Not when I was eight years old and certainly not now. The idea that we should continue doing something broken and harmful just because that's the way it's always been done — I find that genuinely insane. I always have.

And yet. It is everywhere. It is the water we swim in. It is the thing people say in meetings like it closes the argument, like pointing at a locked door proves the garden is dead.

It doesn't. It just means nobody has gone through the door yet.

I grew up going to a bookmobile. A truck full of library books came to my small country town like clockwork, every other Wednesday. The driver was scary. Eyebrows like nobody's business. But even my fear of him didn't keep me away, because the books were in there and the books were the whole point.

One of those books is still in my head and on my shelf. Tattered. Loved.

The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett, is not a sweet story about a girl and a garden. It is a story about a household that has agreed, collectively and completely, to accept what is as what must be. Archibald Craven lost his wife and locked himself away from life. His son Colin has been told since birth that he is sickly and will probably die, and has believed it so thoroughly that he has made it nearly true. The servants tiptoe. The garden stays locked. Everyone has decided that this is just the way it is.

And then Mary arrives. An outsider with no investment in the diagnosis. She finds the locked garden and she doesn't see a dead thing. She sees a neglected one. Those are not the same. She finds Colin in a locked room and she doesn't see an invalid. She sees a boy who has never been loved. Also, not the same.

She is right. That is the whole radical premise of the book. The garden was never dead. Colin was never dying. What looked like the fixed and final state of things was just one version of what is.

Not what must be.

The doom chorus is singing right now and it is loud.

Capitalism is collapsing. The economy is broken. The old ways of doing business are finally, definitively, catastrophically failing. And if you built something and you are trying to keep it alive, you are hearing this every day. From people you respect. From the numbers in your own dashboard. From the voice in your own head at three in the morning.

Here is what the chorus is not telling you: what to do instead.

They will name what is dying all day long. They will not ask what wants to live. They stand at the locked garden door, look at the bare branches, and conclude that gardens don't grow. And then they walk away feeling righteous and clear-eyed and very very serious about the whole thing.

I have watched people abandon businesses they loved because the chorus got too loud. I have watched founders walk away from something real and good and needed because they couldn't hold their own knowing against that much noise. That is not wisdom. That is Colin in the bed, convinced he is dying because everyone around him has agreed that he is dying, and nobody has gone through the locked door yet to tell him otherwise.

The extractive model is failing. It should fail. Businesses built on taking attention without earning it, on manufacturing desire for things people don't need, on hollowing out workers and land and trust in service of the quarterly number — those businesses are hitting the wall they were always going to hit. That is not a collapse of commerce. That is a collapse of extraction. Those are not the same thing.

Neglected is not the same as dead.

Extraction is not the same as business.

The garden was never the problem. The locked door was.

Every business I have ever grown has started from two questions.

What does the founder love? Not what they think they should love. Not what makes a good origin story. What actually pulls them forward on the days when nothing is working?

And what does the world genuinely need from them? Not what the market research says. Not what they can convince people they need. What actually needs tending that they are actually equipped to tend.

The intersection of those two things is not a niche. It is not a positioning statement. It is a garden. Tend it with love and attention and it will grow in directions you did not plan for. It will not collapse, because it is not built on extraction. It is built on reciprocity. On genuine care. On love as an actual operating system rather than a brand value you put on your about page.

This is not soft. Mary was not soft. She went through the locked door when everyone had agreed the door should stay locked. She asked the questions nobody wanted asked. She was considered difficult and strange and she was absolutely right and the garden came back to life and Colin ran, after people thought he would never even walk.

Love is the mechanism. It was always the foundation to build from and to return to. I have watched it work for a decade in conditions that should have been impossible, in my own work and in every business I have had the privilege of building alongside. The businesses that are thriving right now, in this economy, in this noise, are the ones tending something real. The ones that know what they love and who they serve and show up for both with everything they have.

You are not Archibald Craven.

I know it feels like you might be. He is an easy man to become when the light is leaving the world and the voices are confirming your worst fear. That it is over. That you were wrong to try. That the garden was always going to die.

He was wrong. You know he was wrong because you read the book. Or because some part of you already knows what Mary knew, that neglected is not the same as dead, that a diagnosis is not a verdict, that what is does not determine what must be.

Your business is not dead because capitalism is struggling. The thing you built from love does not have to follow the extractive model into collapse. It is not the same kind of thing.

But it needs tending. Not managing. Not optimizing. Not surviving until conditions improve. Tending. With love. Because that is the only thing that has ever actually worked, and the doom chorus cannot tell you this because the doom chorus has never grown anything.

That's just the way it is, they say.

No. That is just the way it has been. Those are not the same thing either.

Pick up the trowel. The garden is waiting.

It was never dead.