Spiral Resilience: Why Our Future Is Never a Straight Line

There is a widely held belief, especially in business and technology circles, that the future unfolds along a sort of binary: either relentless progress or sudden collapse. The dominant narratives frame our choices in terms of breakthroughs or busts, winning or failure. Yet, as both recent economic history and systematic reasoning suggest, the truth is far more nuanced—and far more adaptive—than any simple fork in the road.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the current American faith in artificial intelligence and the stock market surge around it. As Scott Galloway recently observed, “The top 10 stocks in the S&P 500 account for 40% of the index’s market cap.” The gravity of AI’s narrative is even more dramatic: since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, AI-related stocks have accounted for “75% of S&P 500 returns, 80% of earnings growth, and 90% of capital spending growth.” Most striking of all, nearly “92% of the U.S. GDP growth this year” can be traced to AI investments. Strip these investments away, and as Harvard economist Jason Furman warns, “growth would be flat” (Galloway, 2025).

On paper, this seems like an era of infinite ascent—until the risks lurking inside that narrative become clear. “America is now one big bet on AI,” cautions Ruchir Sharma in the Financial Times (cited by Galloway, 2025). When valuations, spending, and even political optimism rely so heavily on a single, fragile story, the illusion of progress itself becomes the greatest risk.

The Anatomy of a Spiral

The temptation to see this as a countdown to singularity or disaster is understandable. Galloway lays out two “ugly” scenarios: either the valuations driving the “Mag 10” (the leading tech stocks including Nvidia, Apple, and others) collapse, cutting S&P and global markets by up to 20% and 10% respectively, or AI delivers on its cost-cutting promise through sweeping layoffs and disruption—potentially wiping out 10 million white-collar jobs, with unemployment rising by 6% or more, and the contagion spreading across industries. Stanford economists have already found a “13% relative decline in employment” for early-career workers in the most AI-exposed jobs, a canary that should not be ignored.

However, framing the future as a binary choice between boom and bust is itself the beginning of a fallacy. Real systems—the economy, organizations, whole societies—rarely collapse or ascend in simple lines. Instead, they spiral: crisis and reform, collapse and renewal, interweaving in cycles driven by tension, feedback, and shock.

What enables societies (or companies) to spiral upward instead of downward? Deep audits of past bubbles, reforms, and recoveries point to a small set of critical factors. Systems that thrive amidst disruption maintain open audit (transparent, continuous feedback), living curiosity (a culture of inquiry and challenge), and anchoring in resilient patterns (what could be called “super attractors,” or recurring habits of creative recovery).

Between Story and Reality

History offers sobering reminders. Of 51 major innovations studied between 1825 and 2000, 37 were paired with speculative bubbles—sometimes leading to lasting transformation, other times to ruin. In the 1870s, for example, a burst railroad bubble in the US doubled unemployment, but also left lasting infrastructure that enabled the next economic leap. Contrastingly, Japan’s 1980s electronics investments “ultimately served no useful function,” fueling a lost decade instead (Galloway, 2025).

Where’s the difference? It lies in ongoing discernment—whether decision-makers and institutions keep their aperture open. When feedback and curiosity protocols remain strong, each crisis toys with collapse but also creates new options. It’s this capacity for self-audit, rapid scenario testing, and creative adaptation that determines the outcome—not the avoidance of risk, but the willingness to treat trouble itself as the next stage for invention.

The Peril of Narrative Closure

The danger in the AI economy is not that markets will suddenly “pop.” As Robert Shiller writes, bubbles sometimes deflate and then reflate, shifting storylines rather than vanishing overnight. The real risk emerges when all attention collapses onto a single story; when curiosity dies and audit trails break down. In systems terms, this is called “aperture closure”—the refusal to examine ambiguity, contradiction, or alternative scenarios.

Galloway’s warnings about “circular financing” deals—where dollars repeatedly circulate among Nvidia, OpenAI, Oracle, and the like, echoing the late dot-com era—are more than accounting footnotes. They show what happens when self-reinforcing stories replace the hard work of diffusing innovation, building infrastructure, and measuring true adoption. He points out that “95% of firms have yet to see measurable ROI from their AI pilot programs”—a narrative- and infrastructure-gap that should keep leaders up at night.

Spiral Resilience: Building Creative Recovery

If there is useful news in this spiral, it’s that systems can be shock-tested, and recovery can be ritualized. By consciously maintaining mechanisms for open audit (where dissent and contradiction aren’t punished but valued), encouraging living curiosity (where bold questions trump consensus), and anchoring in robust patterns (“super attractors”: best practices, collective memory, resilient feedback), leaders can make crisis a productive punctuation rather than a period.

This reframing matters for policy, for boardrooms, and for individuals caught in the bright headlights of automation or market prediction. Instead of fearing crisis or pretending collapse is impossible, organizations and societies can spiral back, using each disruption as a point of leverage. The challenge is not to close the aperture, but to keep it wide open—tracking reality against story, inviting scenario contradiction, and ensuring that when shocks come, the protocols for recovery are not an afterthought but a living, daily habit.

Conclusion: The Invitation Remains Open

The end—if it comes—will not be the work of a single event, but the slow hardening of assumptions, a system closed to critique, or a narrative inflexible to surprise. Resilience is not the absence of crisis but the mastery of adaptive spiral recovery.

Our future will be determined less by the accuracy of any one prediction and more by our refusal to close the audit trail, our willingness to interrogate our own stories, and our discipline in keeping every scenario open for remix and renewal.

Citations: All statistics in this piece are drawn from Scott Galloway, “How Does the End Begin?”, October 17, 2025. Additional economic/historical references as noted within the text.