The Proximity Principle: Building Regenerative Systems in an Extractive Economy

The other day, someone knocked on my door. A real, live person.

From my office window, I saw a red bike propped in the U-drive. I sighed inwardly as I pulled myself from the depths of the company architecture I was polishing, assuming it was some kid selling garbage-can power washing. (I love an entrepreneurial kid, but I was focused.)

As I walked toward the door, my anxiety rotated through the options of who might be on the other side, and for a split second, I felt the familiar flicker of unease. The truth is, I don’t always feel safe opening the door anymore. I personally live in a country where you don’t know who’s armed, whose fear might turn into defense, and whose defense might turn into harm.

(That’s new for me, but it’s not new for everyone. I grew up inside a bubble that let me mistake my safety for normalcy and others’ vigilance for paranoia. Many people have always had to calculate safety before connection.)

The bike was reassuring. Maybe Jehovah’s Witness? Certainly nothing ominous. Our front door has a big glass window, so I didn’t have to wonder long. I saw a silver-haired biker, hovering nervously on my stoop.

Maude* had seen that we’d recently had a window replaced by Window World, and she wanted to know how our experience was. Another company was charging six hundred dollars more, and she was trying to decide if saving the money was worth the risk.

We stood in the doorway for fifteen minutes talking about the neighborhood, our windows, the heat, and the absurdity of how rare this kind of thing has become. She’d spent twenty years in Belgium and moved into this neighborhood about three years ago—the same time we did. When she left, I noticed the warmth that lingered. It was distinctly different from the hesitation I’d felt when I first heard the knock.

I've spent many a day inside this house: running meetings, recording podcasts, building companies, raising kids, connecting with people all over the world.

I’ve built a life of total connection and complete isolation at the same time.

As I sat at my computer, post-Maude, my overthinking brain in overdrive… I thought… maybe the next evolution of business is a return to something more human. After a decades long push to scale, maybe it’s time to evolve toward connection and community that feel, not just function.

That impulse to come closer again has a word: proximity. (The kind of closeness we’ve spent years optimizing away.)

And when I say proximity, I don’t mean proximity to power or performance. I mean community that requires consent, care, and co-regulation—the kind that holds tension and safety at the same time.

The Systems We Built to Keep Us Apart

COVID made our worlds smaller and our screens louder. We learned how to make everything work from home—teams, launches, school, therapy, friendship. The convenience became seductive. We could scale empires from couches, never meeting the people whose lives we impact. Then AI arrived and promised to make it even easier. (Easier for whom, though? Whose data, language, and invisible labor are being scraped to make that ease possible?)

In the process, we’ve outsourced not just our marketing, but our identity, our memory, and our agency.

Now, that's a bold claim… so let me explain:

Before the age of gurus and growth hacks, most small businesses ran on proximity; a proximity I was very used to. With my first business, I grew to just under six figures through radio shows, referrals, BNI breakfasts, community events, and, eventually, the gravy train of social media ads in 2017 - 2019. We experimented, paid attention, and knew our markets because we lived among them.

We also didn’t know what we didn’t know, so we grew more organically, trusting our own intuition more than some source of truth outside of ourselves.

Because shortly after the early gravy train of online business came the era of the “perfect funnel.” We stopped experimenting and started imitating. We handed our agency to algorithms that promised scale, and in return we got dependency.

Every boosted post, every ad buy, every automated nurture sequence rerouted our local dollars straight into Meta’s quarterly earnings. Money that used to circulate through printers, event spaces, photographers, and neighborhood papers now disappears into the attention economy.

It’s the same extraction logic we see everywhere else, and it isn’t just extraction. It’s surveillance, too.

(I promise this isn’t a tinfoil-hat moment. I still believe birds are actually birds.)

Speaking of birds… yesterday, while showing my two- and four-year-olds an abandoned bird’s nest, I found myself thinking about what we’ve lost to progress. I hadn’t really stopped to look at a bird’s nest in quite some time, but toddlers help you see the world differently. I looked at it, I mean really looked at it, in wonder. I imagined the bird building this perfect nest: how does a bird know to make this perfect circle? Does it look for just the right twigs? Does it recognize which twigs belong at the base, which belong at the rim? Is the bird an architect?! What kind of programming does it have to build something so exact?

It made me wonder just how much of our intuition, or, as I claimed above, our agency, we have outsourced to others; completely losing touch with our own ancestral “nest making wisdom.”

In service of the attention economy and surveillance capitalism, the small-business owner has become the new raw material. Our creativity feeds the feed. Our communities become target markets. Our language becomes ad copy.

We’ve been marketed “connection” and “convenience” and accidentally sold our freedom.

The Moment That Clarified It

This week, I sat in a doctor’s office and saw a small sign on the wall: This visit may be recorded using an AI assistant. I first noticed it when I was checking in: a simple line that had no real explanation or opt in other than “initial here.”

When I asked the doctor about it, he said the software was called Freed AI. It “helped with notes.” But the patient (aka me) got nothing in return.

The system collects everything, gives nothing back, and calls it “a progressive future filled with convenience.”

That’s what the modern marketing machine does too. It records our conversations, harvests our attention, and hands us analytics to prove it was worth it.

We’re told that’s just the cost of doing business. but maybe… it’s the cost of forgetting who the business was for in the first place.

A Different Kind of Scale

Proximity is infrastructure. Not the kind built through comfort or sameness, but through shared risk and repair. Proximity that remembers safety isn’t equally distributed and commits to changing that. Maybe this is how we build regenerative systems in an economy built on extraction.

When I say proximity, I don’t just mean knocking on a neighbor’s door (though that’s nice, too. Just the other day, our model airplane went over the fence and we had to knock on our neighbors’ door to get it back. Something I remember doing ad nauseum in the 90s when we wall balled a little too hard and the ball ended up in our neighbor’s yard. It’s something that can be avoided if we surveil our children enough, too. See how this lesson just keeps showing up?)

I mean staying close enough to your own work to still feel it. Close enough to your customers to hear what they’re not saying. Close enough to your values that a marketing plan can’t talk you out of them.

That kind of closeness doesn’t scale easily… but maybe that’s the point.

In Practice

Whether or not you speak astrology (and I know just enough to be dangerous), we’ve been in Libra season: an invitation into balance, reciprocity, relationship. And coming out of Virgo season, I’ve been feeling that tug between perfection and partnership. The part of me that wants to make it all make sense, and the part that knows the practice is the point.

When I first named this newsletter This Isn’t Working, I meant it playfully. It was a nod to all the systems that are working exactly as designed… in service of the few at the expense of the collective. It was also a phrase that repeated in my head for the past few years as I was immersed in things that just… weren’t working for me.

But I’ve realized: words are spells. And every time I sent one of these emails, I was unconsciously reinforcing what wasn’t working instead of tending to what could.

So now, this space is shifting from critique to practice. From “this isn’t working” to “what are we learning as we try?”

That’s why it’s now called In Practice, because that’s all any of this is. Every system. Every launch. Every conversation. They’re all microcosms. A small rehearsal for the world we actually want to live in.

The Invitation

Where could you bring your business closer to what you intended to build again? In ways that honor safety, consent, and collective care? Closer to the people it serves, the places it touches, the dollars it spends?

Because sometimes freedom isn’t found in more and more reach. Maybe it’s found in the repair of what we know, deep in our bones, isn’t working. And being willing to practice towards what might. It’s about remembering that the words we use, the systems we build, and the way we name things… …all cast their own kind of spell.

Let’s make sure we’re casting ones we actually want to live inside.

xo,
Brittany

P.S. The systems we inherit don’t have to be the ones we sustain. If something in your business structure no longer feels true, let’s look at it together.

On our call, you can expect: – A grounded, values-centered conversation about what’s working and what’s not – Space to name what feels most alive or tender in your business right now – Clarity on whether a thought-partnership jam between us is the right fit for this season

Sound like what you need? ​ Grab 30 minutes with me here. (You’ll fill out a quick application, and then we’ll get time on the calendar.)

*Name changed to respect her privacy and uphold consent—the kind this story’s really about.