p(doom)

On attention as the architecture of your future and why the math is more hopeful than it looks

Watch the video version of this essay on YouTube.

A few weeks ago, I was sitting in the audience at TEDx Miami for an event called The Future is Human, surrounded by people thinking critically about artificial intelligence and what it means to be human in an increasingly digital world. During one of the more technical talks, the speaker flashed a headline atop his slide that awoke something in me:

P(doom)

He was using it in its technical sense — the probability of a catastrophic AI outcome, such as a doomsday event or the end of things as we know them. He had a whole framework for it, but I was only half-listening because my mind had already gone somewhere else.

P(doom). The probability of doom. It captured what I feel on certain mornings when I wake up and let the headlines in. Or the dread that overtakes me when I let myself marinate in narratives of fear, urgency, and a world that increasingly seems to be run by systems failing the people they were built to serve.

I know you know this feeling. Maybe it shows up as the Sunday-night spiral before the work week. Maybe it’s the quiet, low-grade anxiety that something large and important is no longer working — in the culture, in your industry, in your career, or in the life you worked so hard to build. We live in a world that is genuinely turbulent, and staying informed feels like a civic duty even when the information consistently delivers you to despair.

But here’s where the math turned interesting for me.

(Not so ironically, I used AI to harken me back to high school statistics class and re-educate myself on the formula for calculating the probability of anything...)

P(X) = Number of Favorable Outcomes ÷ Total Number of Possible Outcomes

At both a philosophical and a spiritual level, the denominator — total possible outcomes — is infinite. Our natural world and humanity within it are not a closed system. The possibilities available to any of us, at any moment, are boundless. We live in an illusion of limitation, and the whole game of life is waking up and expanding beyond what we ever thought was possible. We are not on the receiving end of a fixed deck of 52 cards. We are the dealer co-creating with forces beyond our full comprehension, and we continue to generate new ones.

So if the total number of possible outcomes is effectively infinite, the equation simplifies to this: the probability of your life looking a certain way is almost entirely determined by which outcomes you’re actively counting and calling toward you.

Put more plainly: if you keep cataloguing the ways things could go wrong — the jobs disappearing, the chances closing, and the world narrowing — you are literally increasing the numerator for doom. You are doing the math on the wrong side of the equation. But if you turn your full, deliberate, energetically committed attention to what’s possible, what’s opening, and what’s being created, you increase the probability of that instead.

I know how this can sound, and I want to tread carefully because this is not a manifesto for spiritual bypassing or toxic positivity. We don’t resolve real injustice or real constraint by simply “choosing good vibes.” The world is complicated, and staying alert to what’s actually happening matters.

But there is a distinction worth naming between awareness and absorption, or between being informed and being captured. It’s the difference between being the interested observer and living inside the doom spiral as your primary address.

Your attention is not neutral. It is the most active force you have.

One of my mentors has a line he repeats often: attention is your most valuable currency, and you always get what you pay for.

I’ve been contemplating that more acutely lately since I started working with a new business coach Amber Lilyestrom — someone I was specifically attracted to not just because of her skill set, but because of the business she’s built, the life she created, and the unabashedly authentic way she moves through the world. She carries a kind of ease and authority that isn’t performed or achieved through sheer effort, but that she’s cultivated from the inside out.

Like every other coach or mentor I’ve chosen to work with since starting my business, I enrolled with her because I wanted to be near evidence of what I’m building toward.

That’s not a small thing. It’s actually the thing.

In order to achieve any goal, we have to (at some level) believe it’s possible. But believing something is possible is the floor, not the ceiling. What actually moves you from intention to reality is familiarity. It’s the felt, embodied, nervous-system-level recognition of who you’re becoming. When you can sit across from someone who is already living a version of what you want, your body stops treating it as foreign territory. It starts to feel like something you know, and, in some sense, like someone you’ve been all along.

This is why coaching and mentorship aren’t just about skill acquisition; they’re about proximity to the possible, until the possible becomes probable, the probable becomes expected, and the expected becomes you.

The progression I’ve come to understand looks like this:

potential → possibility → probability → certainty → creation in 3D reality

Moving from one stage to the next is accelerated by familiarity. The more you are in contact with what you want through evidence, embodied experience, and the people you’re in relationship with, the more your identity begins to reorganize around it. And identity is where all of this lives. Vision and concrete goals are important, but none of that will matter until that future reality feels native to you.

Which brings me to another equation for reality creation.

P(insert your future vision / dream / goal here) = belief in the possibility + intense focus × familiarity

The probability of your dream — your vision, your goal, the life you are actually here to live — becoming real is a function of intense focus, combined with genuine belief in its possibility, multiplied by familiarity. The kind that comes from proximity to evidence, until you become the version of yourself who already has it. That goes for the probability of doom as well… you don't get to have it on only one side of the equation.

Author and activist Charles Eisenstein puts it plainly: “The world that we prepare for will be the world that we create. The future is not a given, not to be predicted according to likelihoods — we create it as a choice.”

This is the most important leverage point available to any of us in a moment that can feel heavy with what’s wrong and frightening and narrowing. We are not denying what’s difficult, but we choose, deliberately and repeatedly, to increase the numerator on the other side.

While the TEDx theme was The Future Is Human, I’d offer a small amendment: the future is wherever you focus your creative energy, and it belongs to whoever decides to inhabit it now.

That’s not blind optimism. It’s math.

With possibility,

Nathalie

If you’d like to watch the expanded video version of this essay, you can find it on YouTube.