Worldbuilding as Protest: the Slow, Rebellious, Deliciousness of Worlding in an Instant-Ramen-Business-Coach Culture
There's a particular flavor of exhaustion that comes from living in instant-ramen-business-coach culture.
Breakneck everything.
Launch in 30 days.
Scale to six figures by next quarter.
You don't need qualifications—just confidence and a Canva template. Every client is just you five years ago. Follow this exact framework (generated by ChatGPT, refined by no one) and you'll have a thriving business by Tuesday.
It's not that the promises are necessarily lies. Some people do build quickly. Some frameworks do work for certain people in certain contexts. But what gets left out and what's almost never named is the cost.
The cost of speed without depth and pausing long enough integrate your lessons. The cost of copying frameworks that have no roots in lived experience and that do not reflect the flow of energy in natur. The cost of building a business that looks successful on the outside but feels hollow because it was assembled from someone else's blueprint, optimized for scale rather than longevity.
And if you're a wild-hearted practitioner—a healer, ceremonialist, guide, creative—who came to this work because you have medicine to offer, not because you want to be a marketing machine, the exhaustion runs deeper. Because the culture tells you that if you're not moving fast, you're failing. If you're not scaling to $100k months yesterday, you're stuck. If you're still in the creative process, listening, exploring, and figuring things out, you're behind.
But what if you're not behind? What if you're doing something entirely different?
What Instant-Ramen Business Culture Actually Is
Instant-ramen business culture is:
Breakneck speed as virtue. Launch in 30 days. Post every day. Show up constantly. Hustle harder. Rest is for people who aren't serious. Slow is synonymous with failure.
Decontextualized frameworks. Templates and formulas ripped from their original context, de-natured, and sold as universal truths. "This is exactly what I did to make $100K, so just do what I did." No acknowledgment of privilege, timing, audience, or the thousand invisible factors that made it work for them but might not work for you.
ChatGPT strategies with no lived experience. Frameworks that sound smart but have never been tested in the messy reality of actual human relationships, nervous systems, and the unpredictable nature of creative work. Strategies optimized for vanity metrics instead of real transformation.
"You don't need qualifications." This one is particularly insidious. Yes, you don't need a PhD to help people. But the cultural message has morphed into: you don't need experience, training, discernment, or depth. Just package your trauma into a course and call it a business.
"Every client is just you five years ago." As if the complexity of another human being can be flattened into a mirror of your past self (hello savior complex!! hello projection!!). As if everyone's journey follows the same arc. As if your particular medicine is for everyone, rather than for a specific people in a specific context.
This culture thrives on replication, speed, and extraction instead of origination, depth, and regeneration.
And if you've been swimming in it long enough, you might start to believe that something is wrong with you for not being able to keep up. For wanting to build slowly. For needing time to tend your vision, to let it root, to discover what it actually wants to become.
But nothing is wrong with you.
You are a cultivating an alternative world in a culture that only values instantaneous results.
Worldbuilding as Protest
Worldbuilding is a fundamentally different orientation to building a vision / creating a business. It's not about speed. In fact, it is anti-speed. It is anti-replication. It's not about hacking your way to six figures.
It's about building something alive, coherent, and rooted—something that has the integrity to hold transformation, the depth to honor complexity, and the sustainability to last beyond the next algorithm shift.
And in a culture that fetishizes speed and scale, worldbuilding is an act of rebellion.
Here's what makes it set you apart.
It refuses the demand for speed. Worldbuilding takes time. Not because you're slow or inefficient, but because you're building something with depth. You're tending roots, not just pushing up visible growth. You're allowing the vision to mature, to show you what it needs, to become coherent before you rush it to market.
It centers lived experience over borrowed frameworks. You're not copying someone else's blueprint. You're discovering the unique structure your work requires—informed by your medicine, your nervous system, your values, your people. The frameworks you build emerge from your actual experience, not from what worked for someone else in a completely different context.
It honors the animate, relational nature of business. Your business isn't a machine to optimize. It's a living ecosystem. It has relationships, flows, cycles of growth and rest. Worldbuilding acknowledges this. It treats your work as something to tend, not just manage.
It builds something that can't be easily commodified. When you build a world—not just an offer or a funnel—you create something with its own essence, its own culture, its own coherence. People can't just copy your Instagram strategy or swipe your sales page and replicate what you've built. Because what you've built isn't a tactic. It's a world.
It requires embodiment and presence. You can't worldbuild while dissociated. You can't create coherence while you're numb. Worldbuilding demands that you stay rooted in your body, connected to the earth, attuned to what's alive. This is the opposite of the hustle-and-grind, override-your-needs, push-through-burnout ethos of instant-ramen culture.
It makes space for mystery and emergence. You don't have to have it all figured out on day one. Worldbuilding allows for not-knowing. For discovery. For letting the vision reveal itself over time. This is threatening to a culture that demands certainty and fast results—but it's essential to creating work that has soul.
The Slow, Rebellious Deliciousness
Here's the part that instant-ramen culture will never understand: Worldbuilding is delicious.
Not in a "this is easy" way. Not in a "there's no discomfort" way. But in the way that making something beautiful with your hands is delicious. In the way that tending a garden is delicious. In the way that slow-cooking a meal from scratch, with attention and presence, is delicious.
There's pleasure in the living of the build. In the experience of intuitively putting each piece together, feeling when something clicks into place, noticing when something needs more time to develop.
There's satisfaction in coherence. In knowing that what you've built reflects your actual medicine, not someone else's template. In recognizing that your world has its own essence, its own integrity.
There's aliveness in the process. In being present with the uncertainty, the discovery, the moments when the vision shows you something you hadn't seen before.
This is what gets lost in the rush: the experience of building itself can be nourishing. When you're not racing to launch, not forcing yourself to post every day, not overriding your instincts to follow someone else's formula—you get to actually be with your work. To feel it. To let it shape you as you shape it.
This is the deliciousness. And it's rebellious because it refuses to treat your creative life force as fuel for someone else's productivity machine.
For the Disillusioned, tired worldbuilders
If you're reading this and feeling that particular flavor of exhaustion—the kind that comes from trying to build in a culture that values speed over soul—I want you to know: You're not too slow. You're not behind. You're not broken.
You're just trying to do something that can't be rushed.
You want to build online, but you're disillusioned by the online world. You've bought the courses. You've followed the frameworks. You've tried to move at the pace the culture demands. And something in you keeps saying, This isn't it. This isn't how I want to build.
And that voice is right.
You don't need another instant-ramen formula. You need permission to worldbuild. To tend your vision at the pace it requires. To honor your nervous system, your medicine, your need for coherence and depth.
You need frameworks that are rooted in lived experience, not generated by AI or copied from someone else's context. You need frameworks that help you discover the structure your work needs, not just the structure that worked for someone else.
You need community. Other practitioners who are also choosing to build slowly and well, who understand that worldbuilding is a developmental process, who won't shame you for not launching in 30 days.
This Is What We Practice in the Worldbuilding School
The Worldbuilding School is designed for people who want to build online but refuse to sacrifice their souls to do it.
Over six weeks, we walk through the 6 Phases of Visionary Praxis—a framework that's been tested and refined through years of lived experience working with wild-hearted practitioners, not pulled from ChatGPT or copied from someone else's model.
We do 80% of the work together in class. Because worldbuilding shouldn't happen in isolation. You're hand-held through the process of clarifying your medicine, structuring your offers, crafting your message, and building sustainable momentum.
We move at a pace that honors depth. We don't rush you to launch. We don't pressure you to scale. We help you build something coherent, rooted, and alive. Something that can sustain you for years, not just through one launch cycle.
And we do it in community with other practitioners who are also choosing the slow, rebellious path of worldbuilding.
Worldbuilding School starts November 11th. Learn more and enroll here.
