I watched four disruptive technologies reshape our world in forty years. Electric vehicles (EV). Advanced air mobility (AAM). Autonomous systems. Artificial intelligence. Computers and its endless array of digital paraphernalia. Each one arrived with the same architecture: massive hype, breathless headlines, billions chasing the vehicle while few asked where it would operate or whether it served anyone beyond the early investors. Eventually the dust settles. Money has been made. A few survive, and life goes on. We’re just stuck a little deeper with tools that keep us away from the forest where we replenish and recharge.
I wrote about all of it. I worked in it. I predicted, analyzed, and consulted for well-over twenty years . And somewhere along the way, I noticed something: the questions that actually mattered — about consciousness, about how we build systems that serve people rather than consume them, about what a good life actually looks like — weren’t being asked always. They were treated as someone else’s problem.
I looked at how the internet was designed, how computers are designed. All pointed to the same thing. How the human is designed. How the brain functions. How the wheel endlessly gets redesigned to the joy of investors. The revolutionary inventions were evolutionary enhanced copies of our nature.
The Turning Point
At 60, the gnawing feeling that something is missing doesn’t let go the way it used to. It demands more attention. There’s almost a finality about it. Will you take care of this thing or not? And you just have to.
I find myself happier walking our two chocolate labs through a Georgia forest than predicting the next industry cycle with technology on a screen or jumping on a plane to give a talk halfway around the world to other experts. The billion-dollar games, the manufactured urgency, the quarterly genius worship — I still understand it all. The picture got smaller every day.
You might recognize this moment. It isn’t unique to 60. It hits when the Prince or Princess stage of life — charging at every windmill, certain of the mission — gives way to something quieter. The King and Queen part of life has settled. Now comes the Emperor/.Empress part of your life. This is dusk.
You’ve conquered, you’ve built, you’ve defined your domain. Now you’re at the Emperor’s gate: the last third, the delivery on all those early promises. Work hard, have a good life, and realized it wasn’t about that at all. You wake up.
Work hard? Check. A life worth living? Absolutely. Resources to retire? I won’t say… But what I learned — that part I wouldn’t trade. The essential is different than what we have been taught. We knew it all along. It’s just that now, you have to handle it, face it once and for all. What sweet deliverance when you can be yourself and no longer chase lofty futures. It’s about you and The All.
The Letting Go
For the past six months, I went through one of the hardest passages of my professional life.
Not a failure. Not a defeat. Something quieter and more permanent: letting go.
I had spent twenty years helping build something I believed in — the transition away from petroleum, away from wars fought to protect oil routes, toward a way of moving that used our own energy and served our own people. Electric vehicles. Advanced air mobility. Air taxis. Flying cars. I wrote about it, consulted on it, mapped its strategy, carried its message to conference rooms and cockpits and boardrooms on four continents. I invited people to the table. I opened doors. I connected those who needed connecting.
And then — the way these things go — some of those startups I’d helped quietly flourish stopped returning calls. Not out of malice. That’s the part that takes the longest to make peace with. It wasn’t personal. It was simply that I had served my purpose in their story, and they had moved on. The elevator doesn’t always come back down.
I watched the industry I loved continue its pattern: 85% of investment in the vehicle, almost nothing in the infrastructure. The bottleneck I had been writing about for years remained unsolved. The hype cycled forward. And I realized I had been fighting a current that wasn’t going to change direction because I was in it.
At 60, walking away from a beloved industry is not the same as giving up. It is the recognition that your energy belongs somewhere it can actually land. That the most honest thing you can do — for yourself and for the work — is to stop pushing at a door that isn’t going to open, and find the one that is already ajar.
This close, yet so far. I walked away from air taxis and flying cars. And I am still making peace with that.
What the Ancients Already Knew
I was born intrigued by ancient civilizations and wisdom as a kid. Disappointed by adults and how they had lost their sense of wonder. I didn’t understand the sacrifices they had made to give me this life. Now I know.
I read the Tao Te Ching at 15. Something lit up that hasn’t gone out since. Finally, something that makes sense.
After that I followed the thread — Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhism, Zoroaster, Sufism, , Hermetics, Quantum Science and modern thinkers… that’s coming up next.
Each tradition asking the same questions in a different language. What is consciousness? What does it mean to live well? How do we build things that serve people rather than consume them?
The essence is the same. The container changes.
Thirty-five years in technology taught me that the questions never change. Only the technology does. The Stoics were navigating exactly what modern leaders navigate. The Gnostics were mapping the same machinery of distraction that algorithms now operate. The Taoists described the balance between force and flow that every founder eventually has to reckon with.
The answers were never lost. They were set aside because they’re inconvenient for quarterly earnings cycles.
I also wrote a book — 50 Years Behind the Wheel — because after witnessing this much disruption, the lessons deserved to be written down. Not as a business book. As an honest account of what four technology revolutions actually looked like from the inside. There are more to come.
The Bird’s Eye View and The Regrouping
I forged decades’ worth of connections and ties with the early and some lasting EV companies, engineers, and founder. The same with AAM. I traveled the world, met Sheikhs and shakers and doers. But I’m still hungry.
Why I Founded The Wholistic Center
Not as a retreat. As a bridge. A repository.
My technology background gave me the language of systems, cycles, and disruption. It helped me understand those minds than embrace these systems and thrive in them.
However, ancient wisdom gives me the perspective to ask whether disruption is the point, does it answer it, and where is the human left in the equation — and what we lose when we never stop to ask. That’s where I florish.
I stepped back from day-to-day AAM coverage because the infrastructure bottleneck I’d been writing about for years. It still isn’t solved. And now the world is addicted to the next bubble, AI, or is it augmented computer intelligence?
But rarely does the world need more solutions or more forecast. It needs perspective. It needs wholistic thinking found within asking the right questions going deep within. They are the ones built slowly, one realization after another one, lived in, digested, synthesized into wisdom. From reading people who thought carefully about the same problems long before there was an algorithm to distract them, I saw the same many of you do. It’s already out there. It has already been out there, written, and preserved eons ago.
The Wholistic Center is where that work lives. You’re invited to contribute. I hid that one far inside this article to see if you’d pick it up.
This is where we talk about Gnostic cosmology and what it tells us about the attention economy. What does Stoic philosophy means for leadership under pressure. And then there is Taoism, the Enneagram, Indigenous wisdom traditions, and what all of it has to say about the world we’re building right now.
If you’re at a turning point — professionally, personally, or simply asking questions that don’t have a product attached to them — pull up a chair.
That’s exactly who this is for.
Nicolas Zart is an industry intelligence consultant and journalist with 20 years in electric mobility and advanced air mobility. He founded The Wholistic Center to explore what ancient wisdom traditions have to teach a technology-driven world.