In this monologue, Rudy De Waele critiques the 400‑year‑old rationalized system that, while generating wealth, has suppressed essential human qualities. He identifies pervasive modern addictions—binge‑watching, online porn, consumerism—as economic drivers that erode self‑trust. De Waele argues that the current societal collapse is being felt most acutely by younger generations who are gathering in physical, offline communities, where real change is already unfolding, though it remains invisible to the broader media‑driven narrative. He emphasizes that a lack of self‑trust underlies the broader loss of trust in others, urging a return to basics: rediscovering personal identity, dreams, and emotional awareness. From his perspective, personal transformation—learning to navigate emotions and integrate thought with feeling—is the prerequisite for any meaningful digital transformation or large‑scale innovation. He positions personal growth as the foundation for community‑level impact and future societal evolution.
Chapters
Yeah, I'm happy to jump into this following on your introduction and Steve's introduction. So we are all struggling with this lack of trust, yeah, which is basically the lack of trust in ourselves. Yeah, so if you really think it down, so we are in this system, 400-year-old your thought system where everything has been rationalized, rationalized, everything we do is rationalized. Yeah, it has given us huge abundance and created huge wealth for us, yeah, but also it has been limiting us in certain ways. So everything that keeps us human, yeah, and that's actually inherent human is being pushed away from that and all this now the last few years has been accelerated by technology. So if you look at the system we are in, yeah, most of the people have a problem with their belief system. They have a problem with assumptions. They have a problem with addictions. Yeah. And even intelligent people who are not really addicted to hard drugs or whatever, we all have addictions, you know, whether it's like Netflix binge-watching, whether it's watching porn online or just being a consumer. You know, so there's so many different types of addictions and the whole economy is based on that. So, and I think we are struggling now in this collapse of this old system, it's literally collapsing and the young generation gets this totally, yeah, because they don't need to be connected because they are gathering in real physical locations and the next level of humanity and the next level of changes is happening offline. And this is why so many people get also businesses, they cannot get a grip on it and also they get a bit restless of like what is going on because most of the media is also controlled by a certain group of people who give very polarizing messages or messages to create more polarization. But from my point of view and from my experience, most of the change is happening offline. And there's a lot of change happening, I tell you that. It's just not visible yet because a lot of the people are working in smaller communities and are not really connected yet into a global type of awareness. But the awareness is there, the change is there, and the change is happening. But it's all based on like, let's first get back to the basics. How can I trust myself first? If I cannot trust myself first, I cannot trust anybody else. And this is basically what's happening. No Nobody is trusting anyone any longer because we don't trust ourselves. We need to really go back to the basics, like who am I? What do I want in life? What do I dream? You know, how many people are still dreaming? Nobody's dreaming any longer. Yeah. We just wake up, we get our mobile phone. We just entangled in this, you know, matrix of information and stuff. Yeah. That we need to do stuff. We need to work. We need to do talks. But who says that you need to work? In the first place. Yeah, so I think really questioning all that is the basis of like where the next level of innovation is going to happen. And I do a lot of talks to organizations and companies, and my claim is always that everybody's talking about digital transformation, but my claim for the next level of humanity is all going to be about personal transformation. If you are not able to transform on a personal level to a different thought system which needs to move to a more a more complex system of like, how do we deal with emotions? How do we deal with feelings? Not just on a thought level, because everything we do is thought level. A thought is just a thought. Yeah, it's just a thought. And you can, you know, spiral down every type of thought to something like, you know, what is it really? What, how is that thought related to creating good in the world, in your own wellness in your own family, with your neighborhood and your community. And once we are able to do that in a physical world, then we can also make it happen on a larger scale. So I can just start there and then I can talk more about other things or methodologies and how we do that if you want.
