Recently I read a book by A. Solovev, “The Age of Burned-Out Superheroes“. At the same time, at work, stakeholders were actively discussing an idea: connecting people who want to do a “check-up” of some area of their life — career, health, leadership skills — with specialists who could help them.

It felt like an interesting coincidence.

Because according to the book — and other authors mentioned there — it seems that more and more people today are interested not in career growth, leadership skills, or even AI education, but in something much more basic: internal balance, anxiety relief, and psychological stability.

The book mentioned Calm (https://www.calm.com/) .

Inner peace has become a billion-dollar business. What people once searched for in religion, philosophy, or personal life is now sold as a subscription.

Calm is a startup valued at over $1 billion. Its product is simple:

• meditation
• anxiety reduction
• better sleep
• emotional recovery

The book mentioned around 2 million paid subscribers (as of 2024), paying about $70 per year. Many companies buy Calm subscriptions for their employees to help reduce stress.

This alone says a lot about the direction we are moving in.

In the same book, I came across two acronyms: VUCA and BANI.

VUCA appeared in U.S. military terminology in the 1980s and later moved into business language. It describes a world that is unstable, but manageable — a world where adaptability, strategy, and leadership are the main tools.

BANI is a much newer concept. It was proposed by futurist Jamais Cascio in 2020, in his article Facing the Age of Chaos.

If VUCA describes the external world, BANI describes how this world feels from the inside.

VUCA is the language of management. BANI is the language of psychological experience.

VUCA asks: how do we remain effective? BANI asks: how do we avoid falling apart?

VUCA developed over decades. BANI appeared almost instantly.

This reflects an important shift.

The problem is no longer just complexity. The problem is fragility.

Both VUCA and BANI require flexibility. But the human psyche requires stability.

And this creates a contradiction. The world demands constant adaptation, while the human mind demands something to hold on to. Because of this, I have some doubts that another “career health check” product is automatically destined for success. I have no hard data to support this. I did not research the market deeply. These are just observations and internal impressions — and those can be misleading.

Daniel Kahneman described something called the frequency illusion: when you notice something for the first time, you suddenly begin to see it everywhere, and it feels like it has increased, even if it hasn’t. There is also confirmation bias – once the brain forms a hypothesis, it begins to search for confirmation and ignores contradictions.

So what is this post really about?

Well, it is about paying attention to philosophers, probably…

For a long time, I thought philosophers lived somewhere far away from reality — speaking beautifully, but abstractly. Slightly detached. Slightly naive. I was wrong.

In the next post, I will write more on VUCA and BANI — and why teams burn out even when they have the “correct” Scrum, the right processes, and the right structure.