Summary
‘Cultural mitochondria’ is Nate Hagens’s metaphor for the inner traits, and the people practising them, that might power a different culture. Hagens, host of ‘The Great Simplification’ podcast, coined it in a June 2025 episode, by his own account “on the fly”. Mitochondria turn nutrients into usable energy for a cell. Likewise, he suggests, traits such as groundedness, the capacity to grieve, restraint, systems thinking and play could be the engines of whatever follows today’s growth-driven economy: each “small, distributed, largely invisible, but absolutely essential”.
In a later essay the image shifts to people, who “might think of ourselves as mitochondria for a more life-affirming culture in the future”.
Rationale
His list of traits reads like dispositions we’d hope to see grow. But he begins with the individuals who carry them; we ask which contexts make such traits “feel more intuitive” for many.