Anastasia speaks at the World Beautiful Business Forum

Melina Dunham (left) and Anastasia Linn on stage at the Athens Regenerative Exchange: A Game, held at the former Athens Stock Exchange. Photo credit: Karel Golta.

The House of Beautiful Business is an event series dedicated to offering “a brave new space for an honest conversation about tech, society, and business.”

For their tenth anniversary edition, they convened over one thousand participants and speakers in Athens, Greece for the first World Beautiful Business Forum.

Arketa Institute co-founder Anastasia Linn and Jeni Miles of Wholeloop Labs were invited to join leaders like Indy Johar of Dark Matter Labs, Ilektra Kouloumpi of Doughnut Economics Action Lab (DEAL), Courtney Savie Lawrence of the UN-founded innovation platform C3 Labs, and Simon Berkler of TheDive in amplifying post-growth ideas at the Forum, as part of the Ministry of Regeneration track.

For Anastasia, this included co-moderating 'The Athens Regenerative Exchange' with Melina Dunham in the former Athens Stock Exchange building and hosting two intimate high-stakes poker games inspired by key insights from our recent pension paper.

The Demos Center at the American College of Greece where Pensions Poker was held. Photo credits: (left) Eugene Theodore, (right) Anastasia Linn.

Reflecting on the poker games on Linkedin, Anastasia wrote:

“When I told Tim, Till, and Melina that I wanted to do a session around Arketa Institute's recent pension paper, I promised them I could make retirement planning sexy. I think Pension Poker fulfilled the brief. 😉

Two exclusive groups of players in a dark gallery room, placing high-stakes bets on their collective futures and sharing intimate thoughts on a topic so taboo we often hide it even from ourselves: am I doing enough to prepare for a time when I may no longer be able to provide for myself?

The game brought up some big emotions and even bigger questions: who/which systems do we trust? Are we better off doing this alone or together? And why have we accepted the collective delusion that everything will be alright if we just have enough money saved up?

It was fun to develop a playful way to have this pressing conversation, and very rewarding to see that it really helped participants start framing their retirement savings—and their lives—not just in terms of financial value, but also in terms of health, skills, network, physical infrastructure, and the one piece holding it all together: ecosystem stability.

If the biosphere fails, the human economy can't thrive, and our investment portfolios will effectively evaporate.

If we plan on having a future, it's high time we started acting like it.”