SAGE ADVICE: Push OR Pull

Written By Gretchen Jones

On why you’re here, what you’re building, and the generation watching you do it.

As an elder Millennial (or youngest Gen X’er, depending on who’s asking) I have spent my entire professional life in the design and maker world. Which means right now, the moment we’re in, feels uncomfortably familiar.

The last time I felt this particular flavor of economic vertigo was 2008, when I was in my late twenties. The recession cratered the job market, and a generation of talented, perhaps over-educated people did what people do when the conventional doors close: they built their own. If you hadn’t lost everything, you had nothing to lose and perhaps a lot to gain. Money was suddenly cheap—interest rates dropped close to zero, for biz financing. Social media was brand new (and free!), offering access to audiences like never before. Press was no longer an absolutely necessary line item for building brand awareness, when all you needed was an Instagram and a Facebook account (back when they weren’t owned by the same evil hydra-style corp.) Website costs dropped like crazy; easy ecomm became a thing. Niche audiences were suddenly reachable across the world thanks to as little as a like, a follow, a comment. Brick-and-mortar became optional. Barriers to entry were as low as they had ever been, and a lot of folks—especially young folks—hopped right over.

So while right now is by no means the same moment, still… there are some strong similarities.

The numbers are real.

Americans are starting businesses at near-record rates. The solopreneur movement is surging. AI has lowered the operational floor for single-founder, micro, and small businesses to nearly zero. A QuickBooks survey found a 94% year-over-year increase in entrepreneurial intent. Businesses employing fewer than 20 people now account for 95% of net job growth. That looks like a real wave to me!

And the “who” behind the wave matters enormously. Women accounted for 49% of new businesses started in 2024—the highest share tracked in five years—with Black, Latina, and Asian Pacific women driving the majority of that growth. LGBTQ+ entrepreneurship jumped 50% that year, too. Rural business formation is growing 2.5x faster than urban. The people building this economy are, increasingly, the people the larger US economy has historically shut out.

I don’t believe this to be accidental. But let’s not uncritically celebrate too soon.

Last month I wrote about the Cultural Plateau—the creative and cultural flattening that happens when every system optimizes for extraction and replication, over originality and the risk that comes with it. This month’s numbers are the other side of that argument. The plateau didn’t just flatten our culture, it squeezed people out. And the squeezed are now building.

This entrepreneurial wave is not a triumph of the American dream. It is an alarm bell. And we should probably answer it.

Push or pull?

Here is the question I keep asking that no one in the small business industrial complex seems to want to sit with: how many of these people actually chose this?

The conventional entrepreneurship narrative is a pull story. You have a vision. You see an opportunity. You bet on yourself. You build.

But there is a second story running underneath the data. White-collar job anxiety is at record highs. Corporate life is increasingly hostile to anyone with care responsibilities— which is to say, hostile to most women. The childcare system in this country is broken in ways that are not fixable by the corporations creating the problem (although some are trying), and our government at every level has shown little to no appetite for even getting involved (Texas tried, recently, and failed, because it was “too expensive.”) Researcher Tessa Conroy found that entrepreneurship rates among women were measurably higher in counties with later daycare closures, or just slightly longer hours. I might be too bold here, but I don’t believe these squeezed women were necessarily just seizing opportunity. These women were solving an impossible problem with a tool that was, is, available. A precarious tool. A risky tool. An unforgiving tool.

Economist Kyla Scanlon coined the term “vibecession” to name the gap between what the data says and what people actually feel in their bodies and bank accounts. The hard data is beginning to catch up to the feeling. Cost of living increases are structural, not cyclical. Supply chains remain hyper-disrupted. Lending rates are punishing. Hyper-volatility is the new normal. And DEI is out. The rules of professional security— credential, perform, advance—have been serially broken by the same people who wrote them. And it seems like C-Suites of big orgs just resent their workers even more.

Underneath all of this is the harder question I’m asking myself: can our economy actually sustain current levels of entrepreneurship? The honest answer is probably not. Not because the businesses aren’t real, or the founders aren’t capable. But because the infrastructure required to support them—affordable capital, accessible healthcare and childcare, functional supply chains, consumer bases with discretionary income—is being systematically dismantled by the same forces producing the conditions that pushed people into entrepreneurship in the first place. Holy ouroboros.

We are not witnessing a flourishing. We are witnessing a coping mechanism at scale. And there is something both alarming and clarifying about that.

Almost twenty years after the Great Recession, after a pandemic that shook the sociocultural and socioeconomic ground beneath our feet, as we watch a global rise in dangerous populism reshape all of our futures, I keep returning to this: our culture in the US was built on libertarian tendencies. A “rugged individualism” that let the myth of manifest destiny ripple outward with the promise of ‘getting ours’ if we were bold enough, ruthless enough to fight for it. The promise was always that American exceptionalism meant you could and should—even must, depending on who you’re talking to—take care of yourself. That’s come to mean that taking care of yourself is the only survival strategy worth having.

But manifest destiny is just scarcity mindset supreme - get yours before someone else get’s it. And our ‘collective awokening’ as I call it, and the subsequent MAGA backlash that whipped us back into cosplaying yesteryear (yah I did reference that book right there, folks) has made it impossible to unsee the true costs of that orientation. What we are feeling has presented itself as a low-grade anxiety lurking just beneath the surface of everything that’s leading most of us to choose business ownership.

Are we having to operate independently because we have stopped or refused to operate as collective communities? Are we deprioritizing worker health and safety—short and long term, monetary and physical—because the institutions that were supposed to protect them decided extraction was more profitable? The evidence suggests yes. And the entrepreneurship boom is what it looks like when people stop waiting for institutions to save or support them.

Push or pull? My honest answer is both. And that’s important, because it determines not just why we’re building, but what we’re capable of building from here.

What we build is not neutral.

Richard Thaler, a Nobel Prize-winning behavioral economist, spent his career arguing one foundational thing: people are not purely rational and selfish actors—they’re also human. That means sometimes irrational, sometimes empathetic, too. His framework of “choice architecture”—the idea that the structures within which we make decisions shape the decisions themselves—is not just a tool for policy nudges. It’s a lens for understanding what entrepreneurship actually is or can be.

When you build a business, you are creating the opportunity for people to make choices. Your own choices, first and foremost, but also your employees, your clients or customers, your community. The extraction economy—the one many of us are fleeing or being ejected from — is also a choice architecture. It was designed. It produces specific outcomes by design, like growth at any cost. Profit as the only metric. Time poverty as a structural feature, not a bug. Winner-take-all as the only game, even though almost all of us were never told we were playing.

Here is my contrarian optimism: we can build something different. And I mean that not as aspiration, but as argument.

This is what humanistic economics actually means—not a soft version of capitalism with better branding, but a genuine claim that what we build as individuals can redirect where society as a whole goes. Charles Eisenstein (I know I’ve referenced his work many times before and I will surely do so again) calls it “sacred economics”: an economy organized around contribution rather than extraction. You don’t have to agree with all of it to see the practical logic. Small, values-aligned creative businesses are not just survivable experiments in the margins. They are modeling a way forward.

Big small impact. Small big impact? We need to recalibrate our intentions, our attention, and our energy toward decisions that create positive effects on an incremental, human scale—rather than continuously chasing mass appeal and the kind of scale that requires us to become what we fled. Technocrats bent society to their will through accumulation and extraction. We bend it back through depth, care, and deliberate practice.

What we build is not neutral. Neither is choosing to build small, slow, and with integrity.

The generation watching.

This is where I need to say something about Gen Z in the workplace that is going to be unpopular in some corners of the internet. I’d argue it’s also painfully obvious to anyone who has tried to hire a junior employee for a small or microbusiness in the last couple of years.

The complaints are real: a lack of self-direction, difficulty with constructive feedback, expectations of advancement that outpace the actual development of expertise, wage demands that, while reflecting the genuine cost of student debt and a housing crisis, can be more than an owner takes home, and a general struggle with the ambiguity of unstructured work. This is not a workforce small businesses can easily absorb. The entry-level talent pipeline is, for many of my clients, functionally broken.

But these are not character flaws. They are the entirely predictable outputs of how we raised this generation.

We over-programmed them because… capitalism. Every hour scheduled, every milestone tracked and rewarded. We built children who are excellent at executing against a rubric who feel lost, genuinely at a loss, without one. We gave them gold stars for showing up and called it encouragement. Then we dropped them off at workplaces already destabilized by a pandemic and hybrid everything, and wondered why they couldn’t self-direct. And now we’re handing them AI while speaking out of both sides of our mouths: demanding adoption and threatening replacement at the same time.

The capacity for sustained, intrinsically motivated work is not innate. It’s learned, practiced, modeled. Which leads me back, sort of, to the question of what are we actually gestating here, as a collective? Not metaphorically. Practically, what are you bringing into being? Who are you bringing into being (yourself, your employees, your customers.) What is it, what does it need from you to survive, and what do you want it to do in the world?

This is why I’ve been developing a framework I call the Cadence of Creation— specifically for parents who are also creative entrepreneurs, which is to say, most of my clients—women. What I’ve observed over years of working with them is that their capacity to build is not constant but cyclical. Just like thier periods, bodies, etc. So holding themselves to a linear, always-ascending growth model— the same consumer-culture logic that produced the extraction economy—while parenting is not ambitious. It’s fucking irrational.

Cadence of Creation cycles roughly follow your kids’ development:

  • Maintain: birth to 5. Your bandwidth is newly and non-negotiably divided. You haven’t yet fully oriented yourself to parenthood or what it changes. This is not a season for new initiatives—hold what you have, refine what works, hire or trade for help, and resist every hustle-culture voice that tells you otherwise. Maintaining is not failing. It is strategy.

  • Build: ages 5–10. Your babies are suddenly kids. Primary school schedules open up room to think, room to experiment. This is the season to take real risks, launch new offerings, grow. Push go!

  • Maintain: ages 10–15. Anyone who has parented a middle schooler knows: you are simultaneously a logistics manager, a taxi service, and an emotional first responder for someone whose amygdala has become a pit of vipers. The emotional labor and operational demands are real and relentless. Hold steady. Fine-tune. Ask for help.

  • Build: 16+. They don’t need you in the same way (and are showing you so by how little they want to be around you.) This is training for both of you—the first phase of individuation for them, and recovery, for you. YOU take back YOUR agency and autonomy, and start building again.

The data on women’s entrepreneurship makes this framework not just useful but urgent. One in four women entrepreneurs has left their business entirely due to caregiving demands. The scale gap—women own 39% of businesses but generate just 6.2% of business revenue—is not a motivation problem. It is structural time poverty. The “maintain” seasons are not failures of ambition, they’re just an honest reaction to how life works and should be built into your businesses full stop.

Then there’s this: the parents who understand their own creative rhythms, who maintain with intention and build with strategy, are modeling something their children desperately need to see. That meaningful work has seasons. That downtime matters. That mastery accumulates over time. That “maintain” phases are not a punishment but rather meaningful preparation.

We are not just building businesses. We are building the people who will build what comes next.

Bend it back.

I am contrarian by nature. My tendency is to rebel against the norm, and the norm right now is that the technocrats have bent society to their will once again. Hello, modern robber barons. Hello, oligarchy in populist clothing.

So let me ask the question I actually want us sitting with: what should we do with our power as innate creatives and creators—as people who have always made something from nothing, who have always found a way to build meaning inside systems that were never designed for us?

The entrepreneurial wave of 2026 is not 2008. The stakes are higher. The costs are higher. The structural headwinds are worse, especially for the women, queer founders, and founders of color who are driving a disproportionate share of this growth and receiving a disproportionate share of the obstacles.

But the extractive economy is gettin’ tired. At least some of the people whose backs it was built on are leaving it. And what they’re building, either with intention or by necessity, carries within it the seed of something different. Not rugged individualism repackaged. Not manifest destiny with a better logo. Not scarcity dressed up as ambition.

Dr. Sharon Blackie, mythologist and psychologist, argues that metanarratives—the foundational stories that organize entire civilizations—don’t get replaced by design. You cannot workshop the new story into existence. They accrete from the bottom up: from individual people reauthoring their own lives, living differently, until those lived stories accumulate into something the culture recognizes as true. The distinction she draws is between fabrication and emergence. The old Western metanarrative—progress, growth, extraction, human dominion—took centuries to harden. It stopped feeling like a story and started feeling like a fact.

We cannot simply decide on a better one. But we can live one.

Newsletter curator Patrick Tanguay, synthesizing Blackie’s work alongside philosopher L.M. Sacasas, adds the necessary corollary: do not resign from meaningful activity simply because the system is exhausted or because machines can simulate what you do. The Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno said it plainly: “I will not resign from life; I must be dismissed.” The point is not to defend human uniqueness. It is to keep doing what is yours to do because it is good for you to do it.

This is what bending it back actually means. Not a design project. Not a manifesto. An accumulation of lived choices—in how we build, who we hire, how we pay, how we show up—until the new story emerges from the weight of all that living.

What if we used our influence—all of it, in our businesses, in our communities, in the way we work and hire and pay and show up—to bend things back toward more collective, less extractive modes of operating? What if the answer to the technocrat moment is not to opt out, but to show, loudly and deliberately, what it looks like to build on human terms?

The question is not whether you’re going to build. You’re already building. The question is what architecture you’re designing—for yourself, for the people who work with you, for the kids in the room who are watching you figure out how to do work that means something.

Build like they’re watching. Because they are.

A special thank you to my husband, who helps me synthesize my ideas and sharpen my edges for… you.

#getwithit
gJ

REFERENCE LIST — Sage Advice June 2026

Gretchen Jones http://www.gretchenjones.co
Previous

SAGE ADVICE: RE:Connection—Reachable, Not Reliable
Next

SAGE ADVICE: The Cultural Plateau