Consider me gagged and muffled. I confess: I wrote a long-winded, thoroughly boring, hopelessly cliched critique of Davos this year, like anyone under the age of 35 facing a future bleaker than the dark side of Pluto, probably should. And then I junked it. Why? Well, this year, Davos is back with a bang — and it’s simply not in good taste to call it a vulgar, loutish spectacle of Ponziconomics.

Hence, instead, I’ll humbly submit for your perusal a quick and dirty list of ten things you’re probably not allowed to say at Davos — but that if rebooting prosperity is what really care about, you should be.

Maybe, then, it’s worth asking whether we’ve got to get serious about the stuff that’s timeless, instead: passion, justice, connection, transcendence, discernment, to take on with a sense of reckless abandon not just the immediate questions of “competitiveness,” “business,” and “trade,” but the harder questions of what a rich, meaningful, productive life — for all — really consists of.

Perhaps, to time’s unblinking eye, this great crisis isn’t really about financial debt — perhaps that’s just a representation of a deeper set of truths. Perhaps it’s really about the deeper debts we owe to one another, and how failing to honor them has led us to a deeper bankruptcy: an insolvency of character, spirit, ethic, purpose, and above all, wisdom. Hence, perhaps* the idea of a “World Economic Forum,” like the ideas it champions, of “corporations,” “profit,” “jobs,” “GDP,” “shareholder value,” is an anachronism, an artifact that belongs to the past, a concept whose time has come — and gone.

Our best chance to heal our broken world might just be a series of revolutions — economic, industrial, social, political — that each starts with tinier awakenings — personal, professional, ethical, intellectual.

Hence, here’s my hunch: creating a better future’s going to take what it’s always taken. And that’s not powwows concerned with “winning,” because the future isn’t a game.

It’s going to take small steps towards rediscovering the timeless lessons of mattering; whose value isn’t just denominated in today’s dollars and cents — but whose worth is measured in meaning.