Seeing my 30’s in the mirror — my reflection at 40 — Part 1

24 min readJan 4, 2024

Today is my 40th Birthday. It’s with excitement and anticipation I am entering this next milestone decade in life. I wanted to write some reflections and retrospectives about what I feel is my favourite decade of my life thus far with the intention to share some of the life lessons that continue to shape who I am and how I show up. I have learnt a tremendous amount and feel I am living my dharma in the form of my devotion to United Planet, the UP Games and the emerging Gaian ecosystem. I feel at this moment in the centre point of my ikigai. I am beyond grateful for all the communities I belong to, all the beloved friends and family and love for my beloved wife Tatiana and daughter Leonie, with whom I just woke up being cuddled by with our wonderful dog Lancelot at our feet. I awoke to several hours of birthday tribute videos from friends all over the world. I am beyond grateful my cup overfloweth with love, impact, beauty and community.

In my 20’s I understood myself to be a vehicle of change. In my 30’s I seeked to be a vessel of change. Now I’m 40, I intend to be an instrument of change.

Perhaps the process of transitioning from my 30’s to 40 is my own birthing beyond my identity of being ‘young’ and rather learning the wisdom of an identity beyond identity of living life with a youthful zest of the love of life itself. In short, transitioning from ‘young’ to ‘timeless’.

So much of my journey has been about the youth rising as leaders in a transitioning world. With my father and Baba Amte as mentors, I got started young. Travelling to over 60 countries before my 20th birthday — I am lucky to be my parents’ son. I took over the running of Take Heart Foundation from my father at the age of 18 and fundraised for the creation of an IT and English Language school that specialises in training blind and handicapped students vocational employment skills. I saw early in life the power of education and communities to transform lives. I got a taste for the rewards that lay beyond the pursuit of traditional financial success.

My 20’s were a rollercoaster with great ambition. I graduated from Edinburgh University with a Masters in Comparative Religion. My undergraduate thesis was called ‘Selling Religion: An analysis of capitalism as a religion’ — this training enabled me to design from the roots of systems rather than the branches. After my graduation, I raised $5m for my company BraveNewTalent and worked with an incredible team of over 30 people between San Francisco, London and Bangalore. We were on a mission to ‘Democratise Learning, Meritocracise Opportunity’. We worked through many pivots to get towards this — from starting with talent communities, to career networking inside a facebook app to ultimately landing on enabling social learning communities for all manor of communities of purpose. Our clients varied from major corporations such as IBM, Starbucks, GE, Genentech, Mercer, Accenture, Lockheed Martin to Collaboration ecosystems such as Institute for Healthcare Improvement, Public Health Institute, Education Reimagined and Dell Medical School. We were one of the first in the industry to apply AI and machine learning to enable communities to achieve their learning goals. This journey led me to speak all over the world about the rise of the next generation, youth leadership, communities and the transformation of the world from Capitalism to Talentism. My youth became like a signature for me. I was one of the youngest among the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders — a community that continues to shape so much of my world. I was the winner of Enterprising Young Brit in the UK. I was part of the founding team of One Young World which is now the world’s largest youth leadership summit. I co-authored The Declaration of Space Opportunity and a book called the Youth Effect that summarised this intention.

Aged 28 my father, Count Arthur Tarnowski died. I learnt through his death that grief is like skiing. Lean in and catch the edges. I felt a profound sense of stepping into big ancestor shoes and a desire to serve our world with humble audacity. I also saw how challenging dying can be. I had lost a best friend, mentor and father. I have seeked to honour him ever since.

Aged 29, I married my wonderful first wife, Lea Bajc and began our very happy 7 year marriage. I entered my 30’s with Lea living in San Francisco. We lived such a happy time working on growing our companies and experiencing the Bay Area to its fullest. Lea and I are both avid learners and adventurers of all dimensions of life.

I was furthering my identity beyond nationalism. I saw the writing on the wall of inevitable systems collapse as I attended something close to 100 World Economic Events and meetings. I was growing in my lack of confidence that we actually were operating in a way that could lead to planetary thriving. I began to see more clearly the fragility of the extractive late stage capitalism and the hollowness of the mainstream narrative that was conquering the collective with dystopia. I realised we must transition from failing nation states to thriving planetary nations. My mentor Benjamin Barber created the Global Parliament of Mayors and taught me early on that 70% of the world’s wealth sits in 40 cities. He set me off on a journey to look beyond countries in my vision of the future.

It was aged 30 that I first experienced Ayahuasca and began my relationship with the wisdom of plants. It was through wisdom and teachings beyond my being that I made the transition from my 20’s being defined as a vehicle of change and coming to realise in my 30’s that I was a vessel of change. As I began my own surrender experiment into this realisation I discovered so much more about myself. I began to practise my own death and rebirth. I literally relived my birth experience on my first ayahuasca experience. This profoundly shaped my worldview and faith in the grace and intelligence of Gaia. I connected more deeply with the wisdom of my favourite patron Saint Francis of Assisi: “Make me an instrument of thy peace”. I connected with my ‘childlike faith’ in the possibilities of the future yet unwritten.

In 2014, aged 30 I also discovered Burning Man… Here, I learnt to become myself for everyone else is taken. I learnt to take off the cultural straight jacket of being raised in English society and how happy I felt to begin to discover myself more fully. I began to accept my eccentricities as an expression of my inner world. I spent so much of the decade in introspection of ‘who am I’ and ‘what is my purpose’? From two 10 day silent Vipassana retreats to many plant medicine ceremonies, I’ve been perpetually curious to commune with the divine. I learnt what it means to ‘be nature’ and live my life as an intentional T-cell of Gaia acting with intent on the auto immune system response to the meta-crisis.

I was part of many communities and learning from so many in the bay area circles. We’d host solons and gatherings exploring a wide range of topics and philosophies. Seeing my 30’s in the mirror — my reflection at 40 — Part 1

In my 20’s I understood myself to be a vehicle of change. In my 30’s I seeked to be a vessel of change. Now I’m 40, I intend to be an instrument of change.

I spent much of my late 20’s and early 30’s as a professional public speaker whilst I was the solo-founder of BraveNew. I was able to bring on board the majority of our customers over our larger competitors which were mostly billion dollar software behemoths that supplied most of the sub-optimal enterprise social technologies. I was paid between $8,000-$20,000 to speak for PwC, Coca-Cola, RBS, McAfee and all manor of other talks. I travelled the world speaking to audiences of sometimes up to 2000 people. I shared the stage with Nobel Peace Prize Laureates in Rio, and several TEDx talks, speaking at Davos, and other World Economic Forum meetings, the China Digital Summit among many other places. My father had said to me early on ‘Lucian, there are three ways you can have impact in this world. 1. through the power of the pen — the written word. 2. Through the power of oratory — the spoken word. 3. Through the power of action — always do all three. I found speaking to be a profound way to expand my horizons, meet literally thousands of people each year and spread a message of hope, potential and community to as many people as possible.

During my years in San Francisco I learnt more than ever before about myself. Lea and I developed beautiful friendships with some of the most wonderful, diverse and brilliant friends. San Francisco was having a new-renaissance. Yet — if you ever needed a bottled up example of why trickle down economics is a myth one needs to look no further than San Francisco’s homeless crisis. Despite such wealth the city has a crisis of injustice.

I spent many hours each week 1on1 with Ronit Herzfeld and the Leap Forward community. I did the deepest work into my self and traumas I have ever done. I was able to see my shadow more clearly and learn to pause and respond from love. We would spend hours each week in a buddy system reflecting and mirroring our inner worlds of our loves, hopes and dreams.

My mother, Bridget Astor died on 8th January 2017, 4 days after my 33rd birthday and two weeks later my stepmother, Isabella, died. Having lost both my mothers in the space of 2 weeks and was shaken to my core. When I became a father to Leonie three months later I connected with the paramount importance of family. Being ‘Daddy’ has taught me more about love, purpose and life than any other experience. I understood how much joy and responsibility there is in raising the next generation. I also began to connect more deeply with my ancestors and their intentions. I saw how the Grand Storyteller uses the lens of family stories. We hear the intentions of our ancestors and dance to the song of our descendants.

It was through my expanding relationships with my ancestors and descendants that I came to the hypothesis: Gravity is to the biosphere, what intention is to the noosphere. The noosphere is the ecosystem of ideas and information. Think of it as the collective imagination and consciousness. Ideas and information have energetic frequency in the noosphere. Our intentions act like noospheric pole positions giving access to the realm of collective imagination. Wherever and whenever intent is made manifest with an action I hypothesise it creates a ripple of that intent backwards and forwards throughout time similar to gravitational waves. I believe our intuition (and specifically our microbiome) functions as our ‘third ear’ picking up the intentional waves that travel beyond the space-time continuum. This is the reason why it is possible to feel the future and the past through our ‘gut feelings’. Wherever intention manifests into action it creates an intentional wave not bound by linear space-time — like a stone falling into the eternal lake creating a ripple beyond that point of time. It’s all vibrations as above and so below. This is why Hyperstition works as the science of self fulfilling prophecies. When a group of people develop a belief system they create the feedback loops that accelerate towards that reality. This is why I believe our world requires intentional unifying narratives to overcome the predominant dystopian narratives.

In light of this, I began to live by my intuition. I began to surrender to the beauty way of life. At the death of my stepmother I inherited some money that had been set aside for her medical care costs. I decided this gave me some freedom to dedicate my life to Gaia, our descendants and live a life of impact that continues to this day. Life is a gift and the purpose is to live it. I learnt that the purpose of life was to live a life of purpose. I began to transition the company I started, BraveNew, into an open-source ecosystem of collaboration tools. By this time we were powering some of the largest healthcare innovation communities in the world, the largest veteran transition community in the world (that supported more than 20,000 vets leaving the military and gaining civilian employment) and many more communities of purpose.

On May 4th 2018 I founded Civana Foundation as a not-for-profit vehicle to continue my research towards a collective goal of a thriving planetary civilisation in harmony with all life. Civana comes from the Latin word Civis — meaning Citizen and the Sanskrit word Ana which means nourishment. This was my personal vehicle towards Citizen Nourishment and my own ‘Civic Oath’. Shortly after, I knelt before the Seventh Generation Grandson of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull and apologised for the actions of my ancestors towards his and asked for his forgiveness. My Seventh Generation grandfather, John Jacob Astor, had become one of the wealthiest people in the United States through his almost monopoly on the American fur trade and New York real estate.

I learnt my journey and ‘dharma’ was intimately linked with the actions and intentions of my ancestors. I realised I could not change their actions and therefore was not responsible for them but I could take ‘response-ability’ for them — take up my ability to respond. Since then I’ve built relationships with many indigenous leaders and been deeply shaped by their teachings and example. This led to my learning to go from family karma, to planetary dharma. I understood that my life was to be dedicated to the transition of the planetary age with no compromise. It was through this experience I learnt how we are all indigenous to Gaia.

I was raised with deep roots of family legacy and impact — what I like to call living life as a great ancestor. Since time immemorial communities across the planet have connected with the wisdom of their ancestors. Similarly indigenous communities and many traditions have a practice of communicating, glorifying and channelling ancestors. I grew up with a fascination of hearing the melody of the actions of my ancestors in history. I’ve always sensed that time was more like a language one can learn with practice. I sensed connection to our ancestors is the reverse of and mirror to the connection we can have to our future self.

I dived into teachings from indigenous communities around the world and found a depth of connection and truth speaking deeply moving and compelling. Chief White Eagle became a profound source of inspiration as well as Paramahansa Yogananda. I connected with the indigenous prophecies of Black Elk’s ‘Hoop of all Hoops’ that unites the world. I recognised the ‘Four Horsemen’ as the ancestral lines of the Four Directions and that my families belong to the Tribes of the North. I realised that my privilege could be channelled for purpose and this was both my duty and devotion. Special mention goes to my beloved Dekshi Cheif Phil Lane who initiated me as a Rainbow Warrior with the blessing of Crazy Horse himself. Most recently Chief Phil Lane celebrated Tatiana and my marriage with an Eagle Feather — the highest indigenous honour one can receive in this life. I share his mission and dharma to unite the indigenous nations of our planet to create a frame of governance and leadership beyond zero sum games and unconscious duality.

In 2019, aged 36, Lea and I consciously uncoupled and transitioned to friends and coparents to Leonie. This was both one of the hardest and most profoundly rewarding experiences of my life. I am deeply grateful for where we now stand and how Lea has been a role model, teacher and friend in my life. A real life angel enabling me to spread my wings and fly. In this process I went to new dimensions of my heart’s capacity — perhaps the greatest learning of my 30’s — to live more in my heart than my mind.

We sold our San Francisco home and I rented 711 Scott Street, one of the most iconic and historic mansions in San Francisco on Alamo Square. The house was built upon the well of the Ohlone People, indigenous to the Bay Area, and therefore the oldest gathering place of Northern California. 711 was built by William Filmer, first Grandmaster of the Masons in San Francisco and the creator of the Golden Gate Bridge. I believe in the fractal nature of acupuncture spots — place matters. Just as 711 Scott had birthed the Golden Gate Bridge I believed this icon of the past, relic of the future and portal for the present could be a Golden Bridge for the Golden Decade.

I opened Civana House with an incredible team of friends and we welcomed about 3000 people from over 1000 organisations into our home in our first 8 months. I was prototyping what I called a Planetary Embassy. I believe this is an idea hiding in plain sight — just as we have national embassies in capital cities around the world, by 2030 we will have Planetary Embassies in cities around the world. Rather than representing the interests of the political electorate (with the best politicians money can buy) Planetary Embassies represent the interests of all Gaian life — including other species and future generations.

I am sure we will see this decade the emergence of Planetary Embassies, Temples — places of transformation and transcendence and Lighthouses — where communities gather.

I had been inspired by the Moonshot Party Myth when Barbara Marx Hubbard introduced me to the practice of celebrating that which we seek to achieve. I decided in 2019 to throw a ‘Remember the Future’ celebration set in 2030 in Davos. I invited leaders to an intervention to come into the future and celebrate the achievement of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. This became the talk of the town and people queued around the block to get in. We reached capacity in no time and my journey into time magic began. The evening made it into the New York Times. I realised almost instantly that time was a powerful tool to ‘flip the script’ and rewrite the narrative. In a world conquered by dystopia, the narrative is the front line. I began to host ‘future self’ celebrations, dinners and workshops all over the world. I was looking for how this could be gamified to reimagine our world. I had been inspired by Buckminster Fuller “You don’t change things by fighting the existing reality, to change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete”. I realise time itself might be the missing ingredient here to create what Buckminster Fuller called the Design Science Decade. That time would be the tool to realise the vision he had for a World Game he had in 1961 that would “make the world work for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological damage or disadvantage to anyone.” I began exploring how a game could be used to redesign our world.

I began my multi year study of the non-linear nature of time. This hit a new crescendo when I was studying with Jamie Wheal to be at instructor level for flow state training in 2019. I had a profound experience of coming face to soul with Chronos — linear time. Despite having the first experience in memory it was as if I had been there before and I knew what to say. I spoke what could be best described as a ‘Time spell’ — I said “Time. You do not control me. I do not belong to you. I choose to live within your limits but I make it known that I have sovereign choice”. At that moment I had one of the most profound transcendent experiences of my life. I won’t share the details here but suffice to say my understanding of time was forever changed as I learnt time is not what it seems.

The more I integrated this the more I realised that time is a key to the next paradigm. I believe that time is a powerful tool that can be used to reimagine anything. I was inspired by Einstein’s comment “the only distinction between the past, present and future is a stubbornly persistent illusion.”. Similarly he wrote ‘you don’t solve problems with the same level of thinking that created them. I began to realise what Einstein was getting at was dimensional thinking. When we include the fourth dimension of time in our thinking we are able to see with new perspectives.

In Davos 2020 I launched the Golden Decade memes and have since published the first 40 of 100 Golden Memes this decade. It became clear to me that an evolution in consciousness is emerging with an incredible mythology and culture necessary for society to evolve beyond the Age of Me, the Age of separation into the Age of We. I wish to shine a spotlight on this emerging phenomenon as I believe it to be the best strategy for planetary thrival that I can see.

My luck was upon me — That same year in Davos, I met my beloved wife Tatiana at a space party surrounded by astronauts. I was awestruck when she introduced the incredible work she is doing with Leaders on Purpose as an evolution in the planetary operating system revolving around putting purpose into the heart of value creation. We began our relationship later that year in August 2020 on the island of Brijuni in Croatia followed by Ibiza — and the rest the saying goes is history… Read Part 2 for more on my learnings of our Kismet union.

During the launch of Planet Home in 2019 I was organising some of the community engagement and a 2030 dinner in Civana House. A group of us held a visioning circle about pathways to a thriving future and we conceived of United Planet as a decentralised United Nations that would connect change makers, communities and coalitions rather than nation states. I began focusing on what this could look like and how it could be implemented. I began with the element of time — that designing the future world beyond the monopoly of ideas that nation states hold. I thought this could look like a membership club for the planet and could meet around a network of Planetary Embassies in major cities around the world.

Meanwhile, I was continuing to gather change makers and host events at Civana House asking many about their vision for the future. I was helping to organise a round table series of retreats for changemakers in Esalen Institute, home of the human potential movement. On March 18th we were due to start a retreat with 40 systems change designers in Esalen but the lockdowns were announced on March 15th. One of the friends I had been organising with said he needed to go offline and could I come up with something. I meditated on this invitation and put together an initial plan for the United Planet Game starting the next day on March 16th. We kicked off the retreat virtually and began a series of sessions each day that started with a Yin inner practice and then progressed into a Yang collective visioning of the future we wish to create. We started to form councils and alliances around regenerative futures.

As COVID19 began I thought it was exactly the crisis the world would unite around. I was wrong. The dystopian and separation culture had reached new heights. I found myself living in Civana House with 7 other dear friends unable to function as the prototype planetary embassy we had become. I had been thinking of launching a decentralised United Nations that connected people and communities before countries. I thought there could be no better name than United Planet.

With the kick off of the Golden Decade and United Planet vision I launched a decentralised planetary currency from the future called Stars. I have a hypothesis that money can be programmed with time and intention. I pegged one Star to one US dollar based on the total supply of dollars on January 1st 2020 ($15.314 Trillion). For the whole of the 2020’s the value of Stars will be $1 plus the increased supply of US dollars printed for Quantitative Easing (which I like to call the economic opioid crisis). To illustrate this in 2024 there are $20.77 Trillion in global supply meaning the exchange of a Star would be $20.77T — $15.314=$5.456 trillion — a 36% increase in supply making the exchange rate $1.36 in 2024. My intention with this was to design a currency that is impossible to be manipulated by nation states, corporations and other private intentions and did not belong to any one but rather every one. An ethical planetary currency.

My intention for this was to create a new vehicle of financing planetary innovation. I call these Star Bonds. The intention for Star Bonds is to create a baby between smart contracts and social impact bonds. Essentially an outcome based, time bound planetary goal that is programmed to create a collective reward for the ecosystem that collaborated to achieve the shared purpose. I intended this to become what I call a planetary commons-wealth engine that finances the outcomes we must achieve for our thriving. My hypothesis is that we could use time to create an economic jujitsu move on the concept of money itself.

I began to use Stars as a mechanism to reward the creators of the United Planet vision. They didn’t have immediate ‘cash’ value but they functioned like shares in an emerging planetary platform cooperative.

I wanted the perfect day to launch United Planet which became the 50th Anniversary of Earth Day on April 22nd 2020. All of us that lived in Civana House at the time — Joshua, Melissa, Teresa, DannyBoy, Mahoney, Hunter and Mandy — decided we wanted to create a festival celebration of Earth Day to remember. We started 4 days before and reached out to our network of changemakers and in no time organised 100 speakers, performers, musicians and workshops across 4 stages throughout the day. We live streamed the 2030 lunch with Unify to an audience of 40,000–75,000 people. During the lunch we brought together industry leaders such as Charles Eisenstein, Daniel Schmachtenberger, Jamie Wheal, Janet Stone, Amanda Sage and other luminaries. I spoke during the lunch about what I called a Planetary Hat-trick — 3 major plays that shaped the Golden Decade:

The United Planet Game — we gamified every aspect of systems change to reverse engineer a thriving future for all.
Gaian Language — a new planetary language designed to use every sense of our capacity to be able to expand our communication beyond dual confines and include other species in our universal language. I have since been developing the Gaian language.
The Greatest Celebration of all Time — the celebration as the highest vibration that unites the planet around a shared vision and United Planet. We launched the Gaian Oath:

We are a United Planet.

I am Gaian.

On my honour, I commit to a thriving civilisation in harmony with all life.

This was intended as a hippocratic oath for chrononauts (time travellers) that when we enter a shared vision of the thriving future we call United Planet we only speak what is true, good and beautiful.

I started hosting many of these early UP Game sprints. We started with ‘Sound for health’ gathering 36 leaders in sound technologies around the visions for sound in the future of society. We then went into Food for Health, Community Impact and Intergenerational Leadership Alliance with Chief Phil Lane.

We were creating the game mechanics of the United Planet Game whilst prototyping it. This Bold.ly Now interview with Rachel Morrison for One Earth Live. The initial approach was a 8 week sprint meets collaborative workshop with 90 minute daily collaborative sessions with one we on and one week off. We would go through a process of Seed in week 1, Sprout in week 3, Blossom in week 5 and Harvest in week 7. These finished with a presentation session where participants would present their harvest to investors and other collaborators. I was also organising ‘Dinner Portals’ where myself and the other residents of Civana House organised a dinner party which we live streamed. Sometimes over 1000 people would tune in to watch these Dinner conversations.

As the second anniversary of Civana Foundation came on May the 4th be with you, I wrote this summary of where the United (initially it was called Unified) Planet Game originated: https://luciant.medium.com/may-the-4th-be-with-you-the-inaugral-up-game-c4c9d4730bb7

May the 4th be with you — The Inaugral UP Game

Today is Civana Foundation’s 2nd birthday. In celebration, we launched the inaugural UP Game on Sound for Health. The…

luciant.medium.com

With the launch of United Planet Part two of this reflection is coming UP next

Seeing my 30’s in the mirror — my reflection at 40 — Part 1

May the 4th be with you — The Inaugral UP Game

Today is Civana Foundation’s 2nd birthday. In celebration, we launched the inaugural UP Game on Sound for Health. The…

Written by Lucian Tarnowski