On Resonance

Across the three great engines of contemporary life - venture, science, and politics - we are guided by powerful but divergent vectors.
Each claims to express progress. Each is measurable. Each is seductive in its simplicity.
Yet together they are tearing the world apart.

In venture, the dominant vector is growth.
In science, it is impact.
In politics, it is power - or its gentler alias, influence.

These have become our civilization’s master metrics. They structure ambition, shape funding, and decide legitimacy. We pursue them because they are countable and comparable. They give us a sense of movement, of scale, of success. But they are also destructive simplifications. They measure the visible surge of activity, not the enduring pattern of harmony.

Growth expands until it consumes its substrate.
Impact strikes - it rarely sustains.
Power consolidates, divides, and breeds resistance.

Each is a language of force, not of relation.
Each optimizes for the short term, not the long arc of resonance.

The Fragmented Vectors

If you map our global systems, you find three vast currents moving on intersecting but misaligned trajectories.

Economics expands relentlessly along the growth axis - a race to accumulate, measured in quarterly charts and shareholder returns. Yet the ecological and social foundations of that growth are cracking beneath it.

Politics, driven by influence and power, seeks to shape the collective direction of society. But the tools it employs - narrative warfare, polarization, manipulation - push us further apart. What should have been a forum becomes a battlefield.

Science, meanwhile, is graded by “impact.”
The word itself is telling: impact implies collision.
Funding agencies and journals use it as a proxy for relevance, but in doing so, they have made curiosity - the most generative of human drives - something that must justify itself in terms of immediate return.

These three domains - the engines of our civilisation - are each propelled by their own vector. But their arrows do not converge. Growth erodes the planet on which politics governs. Political cycles interfere with the continuity that science needs. Science in turn is instrumentalized by both, feeding technologies that accelerate extraction and division.

It is not a conspiracy. It is a misalignment of metrics.
And the world that emerges from those diverging vectors feels increasingly unstable, increasingly brittle.

The Search for a Common Framework

If this pattern cannot continue - and it cannot - we must ask:
What kind of metric could align these domains without reducing them to sameness?

What could guide economies, sciences, and societies in a way that sustains life rather than exhausting it?
That invites participation rather than enforcing conformity?
That allows curiosity, prosperity, and governance to resonate rather than collide?

I believe the answer lies in that word itself: resonance.

The Meaning of Resonance

Resonance is not a metaphor. It is a physical principle and a social one.
It describes how energy, once released, continues to travel - how a vibration or movement in one part of a system awakens a sympathetic vibration or movement somewhere else.

Unlike impact, resonance has to works with existing structures.
It amplifies rather than shatters.
It endures because it is tuned to the system that carries it.

To resonate, a signal must meet the structure where it is.
It must fit - in frequency, tone, and timing.

The same is true for new ideas, policies, and innovations. They also operate within existing knowledge structures, political systems and economies.
Each domain has its own architecture of norms, expectations, institutions, and values.
A resonant action is one that engages with these architectures - that sets them into motion rather than tearing them down.

Resonance therefore shifts the question from “How do we maximise change?”
to “What change will endure and propagate of its own accord?”

It is not less ambitious - on the contrary - it is more intelligent and refined.
Impact exhausts its energy in a single strike. Resonance continues, amplified by the structures it touches.

Resonance in Practice

In science, resonance means research that not only discovers but enables: methods, data, or concepts that others can reuse, reinterpret, and expand.
It respects the long timelines of understanding. It measures success not by short citation bursts but by generativity - how widely and durably an idea propagates through other fields and generations.

In venture, resonance means building companies and products that integrate with human and ecological systems instead of overriding them.
It values retention over acquisition, relationship over reach.
A resonant enterprise grows because people want it to - because it fits the rhythms of their lives.

In politics, resonance is governance by coherence rather than control.
Policies that resonate are those that citizens adopt as their own, not those enforced through fear or propaganda.
They recognize the diversity of value systems and find overlapping harmonies rather than false unities.

In each case, the pattern is the same: resonance works with the grain of reality, not against it. It aligns energy with structure.

Resonance as a Civilisational Metric

Resonance could be our first common metric across domains - a shared vocabulary for sustainable progress.

It doesn’t flatten the differences between venture, science, and politics; it aligns them along a new axis.
Each field would tune its own instruments, but all would play in the same key.

Imagine funding calls and board meetings and election debates asking the same simple question:

Will this resonate?
Will it fit with the systems that carry it?
Will it generate more coherence than it consumes?

Resonance is slower than impact, quieter than growth, humbler than power.
But it is also longer-lived, more humane, and more compatible with life.

From Impact to Continuity

To optimize for resonance is to accept that our civilisation is not a machine to be pushed forward but an ecology to be tuned.
It asks for awareness of existing structures - physical, social, cognitive - and for interventions that strengthen their capacity to respond.

Resonance doesn’t abolish ambition. It refines it.
It replaces domination with attunement, extraction with exchange, pressure with participation.

We can measure resonance, if we choose to.
Not through quarterly returns or citation counts, but through amplitude (how widely it’s chosen), duration (how long it endures), spread (how far it travels), reciprocity (how much others add), and generativity (what new things it enables).
These are the metrics of a civilisation that wants to last.

The Call to Tune

If growth, impact, and power are our civilization’s chords of tension, resonance is the note that can resolve them.

It does not demand utopia. It demands attunement - the humility to listen before we act, and to act in ways that others can continue.

When venture builds for resonance, it becomes sustainable.
When science works for resonance, it becomes wisdom.
When politics governs for resonance, it becomes legitimate.

That, perhaps, is the real-world impact we should aspire to.