Life is all about transition. Everywhere I look, I see this. One of the most profound moments of transition we can experience in our family lives came this spring, as my dad passed away. That of course is a seismic shock to any family—even though in his case years of Alzheimer’s had worn away at him, and at us. It was time, and there is a certain peace that comes with that, a peace that came in his final weeks and that we all felt, somehow, as he slipped away and a new world with new questions began.

But it isn’t just my own loss. There’s a broader heaviness in the air, and a sense in many societies that we are on the brink of something new but not there yet. We hear it everywhere, in the media, in the conversations we have with friends and colleagues, in our politics. We are sitting in the embers of the world we knew before, waiting in our discomfort. It is reassuring to hear so many people talking about the big philosophical questions of life; about meaning, about social order, and about pain. For so long the superficial has dominated Western, capitalist culture—materialism, celebrity worship, the cult of productivity. It feels like there hasn’t been the space in many quarters to talk about the philosophical. 

Last month, Capita hosted a seminar in Paris on belonging and identity, with participants from the U.S. and France. At times, the room was thick with pain—and even grief—as we confronted the present and deep-seated societal wounds that have never really healed: the legacies of slavery and colonialism, wars, financial crises. Both nations have, for centuries, offered bold ideals for what citizenship and identity should be to their people. But both nations are struggling. And for a long time they have papered over or even downright ignored the ever-growing cracks.

So many of the ills of the world feel rooted in loss and the suffering it brings, as much as in a lack of belonging, which goes hand in hand with feeling a lack of agency—both individual and collective. We have been taught to chase the extrinsic values that have been so ingrained in our lives, the ones that power our economies and shape our institutions. But beneath that we ache to just belong and to find meaning in why we are here in this short, transient life. 

And therein lies the heart of the matter: it is ultimately our cultural struggle to deal with the uncertainty of our life that feeds so much of our anxiety, our very human need to try to “fix” that with control. Our hope in immortality.

The evolution of attitudes toward death over the last century in Western cultures is a revealing example of our discomfort with life’s uncertainty, and our growing desire for control. Up until the Victorian era, death was public, communal, and deeply ritualized in countries like the UK. But as mortality rates began to decline, religious beliefs shifted, and the two World Wars brought mass death and suffering, attitudes started to change. Death gradually became a more private, subdued affair—a stark contrast to places like the Capuchin Crypt in Rome, where the bones of friars are arranged to remind the living of “the precariousness of life and universal death.”

Today, death is often sanitized and kept out of sight—rarely used to teach, to remind, or to ritualize. Advances in modern medicine also shifted our relationship with death. People began to live longer, and death came to be seen less as a natural end and more as a failure of medical science. Something to resist. Something we might just be able to control.

Death aside, we experience loss all the time, even if we don’t name it that way. It brings us face to face with impermanence, life’s continual uncertainty, which modernity, armed with its toolkit of fixes, believed it could control. So we try hard to ignore loss as we rush to build AI models that will make us so much more efficient or roll out our quick-fix policy solutions. But have we ever been able to “fix” uncertainty?

So where do we go? Social thinkers like Bayo Akomolafe will tell you, right there; that is exactly where we need to go, in that loss, in the pain of systems collapsing around us, in those very cracks that Leonard Cohen sang about all those years back. There is no avoiding it. As the Haitian proverb goes, “Beyond the mountains, more mountains.” There is no way around it. There is only moving through.

At Capita, like many others, we are trying to forge our own path forward. And for us, that path begins with our families—whatever they look like—and the communities that surround them. It is there where we must start navigating our turbulent lives—together, not as separate entities that we have been taught to be.  

This year, through Think Beyond, we seek to build a temporary community of global leaders. People who are ready to ask: What kind of leadership do families and their communities need now and in the long term? What might the common good mean in this moment? Which narratives are we holding on to that we need to let go of, because their endings are long overdue? And how do we regrow the skills to meet life’s turbulence, in ourselves, our families, our communities, and our institutions? 

This kind of coming together is not about giving in or hiding in the theoretical or philosophical; it is to allow leaders the time, space, and vulnerability to reflect, heal, and begin to see different paths forward as they confront major social, cultural, economic, and technological transformations. To do that, we must say goodbye to what no longer serves us. It’s about supporting our collective ability to adapt, to grieve, and to grow.

In July, writer and social thinker Dougald Hine, whose thinking has influenced our work, will kick off the journey. Alongside thinkers such as Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, Hine has long spoken about the need for “hospicing modernity,” accompanying the old world in its final stages and midwifing something new; death, birth and transformation. 

We don’t yet know what that something new will be. But we have inklings for sure. We hope it can be guided by what we describe at Capita as common good pluralism, a framework in which the state, economy, and community work together to promote human dignity, flourishing relationships, and a shared vision of the good life for all.

There is no way to really describe the loss of someone close to you, and the grief that sits with you now and—from what I hear—for the rest of your life. As end of life designer Ivor Williams says, “Grief isn’t just something that happens when someone dies. It defines our entire existence.” The strange and for me unexpected dimension to the passing of my dad was how alongside that deep sadness, could sit profound love. An appreciation for all that matters in life—basics we need for the spiritual part of our very rational human nature. The fundamentals. Those deep truths that we’ve always known and philosophers have dissected for centuries. Solidarity and care as principles are just so intertwined with love, grief, and suffering. We all know this—I’m not telling anyone anything they don’t really already know. They keep us together when things fall apart.

Whatever turbulence we are facing right now in our lives will transform. It is a lifelong journey to equip ourselves for that reality. Nothing in life stays the same—everything from Buddhism to modern physics can tell you that. But what always remains are those universal human needs that can never be removed from us. In our brief time on this earth, perhaps we are all asking for the same thing: for deep hospitality, to be invited in.

Caroline Cassidy is Capita’s Chief Strategy Officer.