The Pronoia Effect
A True Story
By Brooke Hall
★★★★★ 4.9 on Amazon
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She built the dream.
She lost it.
What she found set her free.
What if the thing keeping you stuck isn't your circumstances, but the way you've learned to survive them?
The Pronoia Effect is a true story about ambition, collapse, and what happens when the ways you learned to survive stop serving you.
Brooke Hall co-founded Light City, the first large-scale light, music, and innovation festival in America. 400,000 people came.
Then she lost it. Publicly.
What followed was a decade of unlearning everything she thought she knew about how life works.
The book closes with The Pronoia Practice, a simple three-step practice for getting out of survival mode and making the shift from fighting life to trusting it.
This isn't about creating a new life. It's about what happens when you finally stop fighting this one.
★★★★★ Loved by readers on Amazon
I devoured this book, and you will, too.”
—JEN MICHALSKI, AUTHOR OF ALL THIS CAN BE TRUE AND YOU’LL BE FINE
About the Author
Brooke Hall builds things at the intersection of creativity, community, and emerging technology. Over two decades, that work has taken the shape of a citywide festival, innovation conferences, cultural campaigns, an arts magazine, a creative agency, and a book.
She co-founded What Weekly, an arts and innovation magazine that documented arts and culture in Baltimore, and Light City, America's first international light and music festival, which drew over 400,000 visitors and generated $33.8 million in economic impact in its inaugural year.
She is the founder of What Works Studio, a creative agency working with ambitious organizations on campaigns that move people. Her work has been featured by CNN, The Guardian, New York Magazine, Fast Company, and National Geographic. She is a Salzburg Global Fellow and a certified meditation teacher trained by Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach.
Her book, The Pronoia Effect (October 6, 2026), tells the story of building something extraordinary, public collapse, and the single shift that changes everything.
The Pronoia Effect is a true story about ambition, collapse, and what happens when the ways you learned to survive stop serving you.
The book closes with The Pronoia Practice, a simple three-step practice for getting out of survival mode and making the shift from fighting life to trusting it.
★★★★★ Loved by readers on Amazon
The Pronoia Effect pulled me in completely.
I couldn’t stop reading.”
-DIANA LONG, AUTHOR OF DREAM IT, DESIGN IT, LIVE IT
