Maps are useless when there's no road
Relational Infrastructure as central to the work of Education
Vanishing Maps & Shattered Pathways
Once upon a time (not so long ago!) a young person in the U.S. could count on at least the illusion of a linear path: high school to college, college to job, job to upward mobility. The timing varied. The details shifted. But the architecture was there. It told you where you were in life.
That architecture has crumbled. Or, more precisely, it has dissolved into fog.
In 2025, an OECD survey found that nearly 40 % of 15-year-olds across industrialized countries could not name a single occupation they expected to pursue. This isn’t laziness - it’s the destabilization of foresight itself. Job sectors emerge and collapse within years. AI reshapes knowledge work. Climate change destabilizes economies. Political polarization erodes civic trust. And all of it filters down to individuals, who are now told: “Design your own future. Just make sure it’s relevant, employable, ethical, scalable, and resilient to global shocks.”
These aren’t just new challenges. It’s a different psychological landscape altogether.
Take the phrase “career pathway” - common language of education reformers and government agencies - the term implies motion, sequence, and coherence. But our inherited systems increasingly fail to provide any of those things.
The New York Fed reports that over 41 % of recent college graduates work in jobs that don’t require a degree—a number stable for over a decade. Furthermore, according to Strada’s Education-to-Employment research, nearly half who start underemployed stay underemployed ten years later. Meanwhile, Measure of America estimates that more than 4 million young adults in the U.S. are “disconnected” - they’re neither in school nor working, costing an estimated $150 billion annually.
But this isn’t just economic inefficiency. It’s a wound to the psyche. When effort and promise don’t reliably yield security or direction, the result isn’t just anxiety - it’s fundamental disorientation, distrust, and disillusionment.
We become ourselves through others. The self is not a standalone structure—it’s a site of relation. ~ Judith Butler
Anchors: Relationship as Infrastructure
We need a new metaphor. Not pathways or ladders or bridges.
Anchors.
Not anchors that weigh people down, but anchors that allow them to navigate motion.
In the absence of reliable structure, human beings orient themselves through relationship. A 2024 meta-analysis in World Psychiatry found that social connection is one of the strongest predictors of resilience, executive functioning, and physical health under chronic uncertainty.
Relationship regulates the limbic system. Trust mitigates the amygdala’s overreaction.
The Search Institute has long documented how “developmental relationships” drive not just academic performance but life readiness—correlating with persistence, adaptability, mental health, and long-term employment.
In fog, what matters most isn’t distance covered. It’s whether you’re still facing the right direction, still oriented towards making forward process versus walking in circles. Trusted relationships provide this orientation.
The Four Anchor Types
Over the past 30 years, members of my organizations and I have worked on deep human development with learners from the ages of 13 to 60+. And we’ve identified four recurring ‘anchor types’ that offer stability without rigidity:
Elder Guide: A trusted older adult who offers accountability and long-view wisdom born of lived experience. They provide perspective, a place of “long memory” for the community - and, through that long memory, a gentle refusal to panic in the face of deep and/or systemic uncertainty. Traditional examples of this are the Griot (African), Guildmaster (European), and Sensei (Japanese).
Peer Circle: A small, consistent group of peers who offer mutual support, challenge, and companionship through shared uncertainty. Traditional examples of this are Palaver Huts (W. African), and Quaker Clearness Committees.
Third Place: A physical or virtual space outside of home or work where a person feels welcomed, seen, and able to reflect or belong. A place with breathing room, serendipity, and unsupervised exploration. Japanese Chashitsu, nomadic campfires, riverbanks in South and S.E. Asia (where - as a byproduct of clothes washing, fishing, collecting water, etc. - people gather for social interaction).
Shared Craft: A hands-on discipline, skill, or creative pursuit where growth unfolds through practice, feedback, and collaboration. Jazz ensembles, theatre groups, etc.
Each serves different psychological needs: containment, expression, witnessing, challenge, play. Together, they create relational infrastructure - like streetlights and signposts, but for human orientation.
If you’ve spent time in dae’s education spaces, you’ll likely quickly recognize these anchors as part of the background design of the student experience.
Spaces of Belonging
The Architecture of Belonging
Space isn’t neutral. The room teaches before we do.
A conventional classroom with rows teaches hierarchy. A school office with frosted glass says “don’t interrupt.” But the best learning spaces teach availability, curiosity, and permeability.
We design for this: no podiums or “front”—everyone faces each other. Writable walls make mistakes visible, erasable, communal. A kitchen (ideally) in the center reminds us that we feed each other. Quiet rooms for retreat honor the fact that “on” isn’t always the most useful state to be in.
And we don’t treat authentic human relationship with learners as part of some wraparound service for the “real program”. Relationship with learners is the program.
Effective architecture includes layered mentorship (peer, near-peer, and further-ahead), relational check-ins (naming human connections, not just technical outputs), and daily/weekly circles for reflection and witnessing.
These elements aren’t extracurricular—they’re infrastructural. They’re why learners return after failure.
When a learner knows where their physical and ontological body fits, they are able to hear where their heart wants to go and their mind is capable of taking them.
Rediscovering Interdependence
None of this is new! It’s just been forgotten - worse, it’s been actively suppressed for decades through an irrational, inhumane, and ultimately ineffective push for utility and productivity not just as the highest expression of The Good, but the only expression of The Good.
Compounding the problem is the American worship of individualism and individual independence, which teaches us that adulthood is a solo sport. But the truth that we all know is that humans don’t flourish in isolation. We require interdependence, especially in transition. The idea that young people require stable relationships to become themselves is ancient, but it is buried under industrialized education, algorithmic sorting, and the cult of the individual ego.
Jeffrey Arnett’s concept of “emerging adulthood” (ages 18-29) describes a distinct life stage defined by instability, exploration, and identity-building. What’s needed isn’t just direction, but anchoring - a safe-enough tether from which to take risks.
Yet our systems pull the tether away. We expect 17-year-olds to choose college majors that will shape decades of debt and earnings. We treat 25-year-olds as “failures” if they’re still exploring. We subtly shame those asking for help and overtly punish those who choose to pause.
We need systems that normalize uncertainty, scaffold risk, and reward connection.
Traditional apprenticeship systems built mastery on proximity, not performance. You learned by watching hands that had worked for decades. You didn’t just build a chair - you built a self, inside a lineage.
Today’s industrial world has deformed these rituals into rubrics, replacing circles with checklists. But humans still learn the old way: through belonging, repetition, and mutual attention.
Policy and Public Imagination
When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.
~ Viktor E. Frankl
Behind independence rhetoric lies policy decisions that have decoupled education from employment and removed public support for anchoring structures.
The 1996 welfare reform pushed low-income adults into immediate employment regardless of stability or skill match, devaluing education and defunding relationship-based programs. No Child Left Behind incentivized test scores over relationships, turning teachers into technicians and students into data points. Debt-fueled higher-education expansion created a generation for whom college was both promise and trap.
Yet data show relationships predict outcomes better than credentials alone. Harvard’s Making Caring Common project found students who felt “known and valued” by at least one adult were twice as likely to persist in their goals, regardless of socioeconomic background.
A New Public Imagination
What if we designed systems around the assumption that people need people to become themselves?
Instead of only funding job training, we’d also fund relational infrastructure - community stipends, peer mentoring, third places. Instead of asking if students are “on track,” we’d ask whether they are connected, seen, and able to make meaning of what they’re doing. Instead of focusing solely on employability, we’d build for adaptability - rewarding reflection, curiosity, and iteration as signs of long-term strength. And therefore long-term stability and engagement in our society.
This is not an impossible vision. dae is very far from the only group working on rebuilding human and relational infrastructure into systems of human development.
But these models remain at the margins. To become the norm, we need public imagination and policy to catch up.
Philosophy of the Fog
What if we embraced ambiguity not as failure, but as fertile ground?
The Greeks had the concept of aporia - when the philosophical road runs out and only paradox remains. Not a dead-end, but a pause to let go of what is known. Sacred disorientation. Plato saw this as necessary: only when assumptions break down can something new be born.
Simone Weil wrote that attention is “the rarest and purest form of generosity.” In scattered times, we must build islands of attention—places where people are truly seen. That’s what anchors do.
In Jewish tradition, when a traveler is lost in the desert, the prescription is simple: stay where you are until someone finds you. Movement creates confusion. Stillness creates discoverability.
Our learners aren’t asking us to build their futures. They’re asking us to witness them in the fog—to offer structure without script, to stay close while they find the way.
In this fog, what they need is accompaniment. Accompaniment is a term drawn from liberation theology. It means: I walk beside you. Not ahead. Not behind. Not to lead you. But to be with you as you find your way.
We don’t go to the margins to rescue. We go there to be changed.
~Fr. Greg Boyle, founder of Homeboy Industries
And, let’s not romanticize this.
Anchoring is hard. It means answering the same question for the fifth time without condescension, holding silence when someone spirals, making space for anger then staying when it softens.
It’s easier to optimize for efficiency than commit to presence. But every real educator knows: transformation doesn’t follow schedules. It arrives in strange hours, through side doors, when someone finally believes they won’t be abandoned halfway through.
I was going to die, sooner or later, whether or not I had even spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silences will not protect you.... What are the words you do not yet have? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? We have been socialized to respect fear more than our own need for language. ~ Audre Lorde
And story is infrastructure, too.
Part of anchoring is helping people locate themselves in story. When learners feel their struggle is isolated failure, it compounds the fog. When they realize their experience is structural, they stop self-blame and start strategizing.
We spend time on narrative literacy: What happened in your education journey? What myths have you inherited about success? What rhythms do you want your life to follow? What stories feel more true than LinkedIn profiles?
When you have language for your life, you can start to become its author.
Orientation Over Optimization
We’re surrounded by optimization tools, but optimization is for known terrain. Unknown terrain demands orientation—not certainty, but facing the right way.
To orient is to pause, listen, ask: Who am I becoming? What matters now? What calls me forward? Who will go with me?
This human work cannot be outsourced to dashboards or automated. But it can be built, hosted, funded, and shared.
In the end, we are not building programs. We are not building pathways. We are not even building skills.
We are building places where people can become.
Places where you can show up foggy and still be seen.
Places where you can try and fail and still be valued.
Places where your future is not treated as a predefined script, but an original story still being written.
And that work - the work of building these places - is not ancillary to the economy, or civic life, or education. It is the work.
Because every profession, every company, every family, every movement, every community, is downstream of whether people feel anchored enough to act, to connect, to become.
You’re already OK - now get to work,
a.m.