When Living Systems Meet Capital Markets
In March 2022, I published a small ebook called Permaculture and Investing: 12 Principles for Regenerative Capital. At the time, most people in finance thought I was being too philosophical. The market was still drunk on cheap money. Growth-at-all-costs was gospel. ESG was the darling of institutional investors.
But I wasn't writing about what was. I was writing about what I could already see coming.
Most investors in 2022 were looking at quarterly earnings, growth metrics, market share. They were measuring momentum.
I was measuring something else entirely:
coherence
Not buy signals. Not sell signals. Not whether a company would beat estimates next quarter.
I was asking: How aligned is this system with natural laws? How sustainable are these patterns over multiple timescales? What happens when the artificial support structures fall away?
Think of it like this: You can measure a building's occupancy rate, revenue per square foot, market value. Or you can assess whether its foundation is sound, whether its structure can handle the stress loads it will face, whether it's built to last.
Both are forms of measurement. But they're measuring different things entirely.
Let me show you what coherence-based analysis looks like in practice. Here's what I saw in 2022, organized around the 12 permaculture principles I was tracking:
"ESG has become a marketing tool disconnected from genuine regenerative practice. Companies check boxes while continuing extractive operations underneath."
The incoherence between ESG narratives and actual operations. Companies were getting ESG ratings for reporting, not for fundamentally changing how they operated.
The ESG backlash erupted. Major asset managers faced lawsuits. States divested billions. The entire framework came under intense scrutiny for greenwashing.
When measurement systems become disconnected from reality, the correction is inevitable. I wasn't predicting a backlash—I was observing a system that had already lost coherence with its stated purpose.
"The 'go big or go home' culture creates brittleness. When markets reward size over resilience, they're selecting for the next crisis."
Tech giants had built monopoly moats so wide they'd stopped innovating. Centralization was creating single points of failure everywhere.
Antitrust enforcement intensified globally. DOJ filed suit against Google. FTC challenged Amazon and Meta. EU's Digital Markets Act forced platform opening.
Ecosystems that lose diversity become vulnerable. When I wrote about monoculture risks, regulators were still asleep. But the structural vulnerability was already there.
"Waste in natural systems becomes food for other parts of the system. In venture capital, waste is celebrated as 'growth investment.' Until it isn't."
Startups burning cash to capture market share with no path to profitability. Venture capital subsidizing customer acquisition that would evaporate the moment the money stopped.
The VC correction hit hard. Profitability suddenly mattered. Companies that had raised billions at peak valuations shut down. The era of 'grow now, profit later' ended abruptly.
Systems that rely on continuous external inputs collapse when those inputs stop. This isn't about predicting Fed policy—it's about recognizing unsustainable patterns regardless of when they'll be exposed.
"Centralized systems are efficient until they fail. Then they fail catastrophically. Distributed systems are less efficient until you account for resilience."
Over-optimization for efficiency was creating dangerous concentrations of risk. Supply chains, banking infrastructure, tech platforms—all increasingly centralized.
Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, nearly taking the tech ecosystem with it. Supply chain shocks continued. CrowdStrike outage took down global operations. Single points of failure became impossible to ignore.
When I wrote about distributed vs. centralized yield, SVB hadn't failed yet. But the coherence problem was visible: systems optimized for efficiency in calm conditions become disasters in stress conditions.
"The relationship between consciousness, nature, and human health isn't mystical—it's biological. Companies that understand this will build different products than those that don't."
Healthcare and product design were treating humans as machines to be optimized rather than living systems to be supported. The disconnect between how we're designed to live and how we actually live was growing.
Metabolic health crisis becoming undeniable. Mental health epidemic forcing new approaches. Companies like Levels, Whoop, and others building around biological reality not pharmaceutical intervention.
This is my professional foundation—the intersection of health systems, natural principles, and business model coherence. The companies that align with how humans actually function will outperform those that fight against it. This isn't alternative medicine; it's systems biology meeting market opportunity.
"The medical device industry could heal itself through partnerships and circular product design. But that requires seeing 'competitors' as potential collaborators."
Massive waste in healthcare from single-use devices and siloed innovation. Opportunities for circular models that no one was pursuing because of competitive dynamics.
Growing movement toward reprocessing, device-as-a-service models, and cross-company collaboration on sustainability. My podcast from that time explored exactly this territory.
Natural systems don't have competitors—they have relationships. When business models start mimicking ecosystem dynamics, they become more resilient and more profitable. This will be central to my Hub & Spoke Investing approach.
"We are not individuals. We are ecosystems. Health isn't about killing pathogens—it's about supporting the community of organisms we're made of."
Microbiome research was revealing how interconnected human health actually is. But most healthcare still operated on reductionist, single-target thinking.
Virome research exploding. Holistic approaches to metabolic health gaining traction. Science finally catching up to what integrative medicine has known.
The virome-microbiome connection is huge. It will reshape how we think about immunity, mental health, chronic disease. I go deep on this in my private service because the investment implications are profound—but the science is still too emerging for most investors to understand what they're looking at.
"Emotional trauma isn't psychological—it's physiological. Ancient wisdom traditions knew this. Western science is just now remembering."
Growing recognition that trauma lives in the body, that healing requires somatic approaches, that mental health and physical health are inseparable.
Explosion of interest in somatic therapy, nervous system regulation, polyvagal theory. Companies building around these principles. Science validating what bodyworkers have known forever.
This is how my brain works in real-time: I'm tracking ancient wisdom traditions alongside cutting-edge science on EMFs and environmental stressors, while seeing how both connect to natural healing principles. Multiple timescales, multiple knowledge domains, all converging on the same truths. This will be a major Scroll topic because the business opportunities are massive.
Here's what I need you to understand: These weren't lucky guesses.
I wasn't predicting events. I was tracking coherence—measuring how aligned systems were with natural laws, watching how patterns evolved across multiple timescales, sensing where stress points would eventually show up.
Some people call this pattern recognition. Some call it intuition. I call it coherence sensing.
It's what happens when you combine:
When I write in flow states—which is how that 2022 ebook emerged in just two days—connections appear faster than I can capture them. It's not channeling in any mystical sense. It's synthesis at speed. Pattern recognition operating at the edge where analysis meets intuition.
Let me give you a recent example: In early conversations with AI tools, I immediately recognized that Claude was different from ChatGPT. Not because of benchmarks or hype, but because of something I could sense about how it engaged with complexity. While everyone else was focused on ChatGPT's viral moment, I was already working with Claude on strategic projects. That sensing—of what's coherent vs. what's just loud—is the same gift that saw these 2022 patterns before the data proved them out.
I'm making the Living Systems Investing principles public because they should be accessible. These patterns exist in nature, in ancient wisdom traditions, in complexity science—they belong to everyone. You can learn them, apply them, use them to make better decisions.
But understanding the framework and having the coherence sensing to apply it in real-time are different things.
Think of it like music: You can learn music theory. You can understand chord progressions and time signatures. That knowledge is valuable.
But can you hear where a piece of music wants to go next? Can you sense which note resolves the tension before you play it? That's developed through practice, through years of listening, through making the theory embodied.
Living Systems Investing helps you reconnect to dormant intuition. The principles—whether from permaculture, ancient wisdom, or complexity science—give you a vocabulary for what you're already sensing. They make pattern recognition more systematic.
But the mastery—the ability to track evolution longitudinally, to sense misalignments intuitively, to integrate signals across multiple timescales simultaneously—that develops over time. Or you work with someone who's already developed it.
This Vision piece is the first of many. I'm building a living knowledge garden where ideas connect organically, where you can explore the principles that drive my analysis, where the track record speaks for itself.
The full ebook from 2022 is available as a resource—I encourage you to read it and draw your own connections to what's happened since.
Future pieces will mine other predictions from my archives (there's a decade of blog posts that I'm just now ready to revisit). But more importantly, they'll show you how to start developing your own coherence sensing.
Because here's the thing: We're at the edge of chaos right now. The old systems are breaking down. New patterns are emerging. This is exactly when coherence-based analysis matters most—when traditional metrics fail because the game itself is changing.
If you want this level of pattern recognition applied to your business, your investment thesis, your strategic decisions—that's what The Pythia Scrolls service is for.
If you want to explore the frameworks publicly and develop your own sensing—that's what the knowledge garden coming soon at garden.pythiacapital.io is for.
Both paths are valuable. Both paths are coherent.
The question is: Which edge are you ready to explore?
Lynn Marie DePippo
Founder and CEO
Pythia Capital