Nora Bateson on The Entangled World podcast addresses these big, unsolvable problems by saying that "the thinking that we're using to address the problems is the same thinking that's creating them". It is solving problems from one narrow avenue and not thinking how this solution could possibly effect other contexts. We are so used to using this mechanistic, logo-centric, linear, reductionist way of solving our problems when we need to realize we are not a machine. We have parts within ourselves that simply cannot be altered in the way we wish to alter them. Nora then gives the example of taking a drug for depression which decreases your sex drive which then partly leads to your marriage falling apart. It's not that the drug didn't help with the depression but that the solution fails to see other contexts down the line. Perhaps the psychiatrist would say that that is a separate issue. But I would argue that all complex living things are entangled with each other and have entangled parts to them. The mere process of attempting to untangle something that is inherently tangled is part of the problem and most importantly, it is a surefire way to lose invaluable insight, wisdom, and characteristics about the problem at large.

Perhaps a rebuttal would be that it is simply too difficult to solve for so many things at once in a short amount of time since the psychiatrist is limited by how long they spend with their patients and the pharmacologist making the drug is limited by the timeline of the drug going to trials. But to not venture to think of other contexts that this thing touches, you will inevitably be trying to put out another fire in someone else's life, a fire that was created partly because of the solution you gave them. It is understandable that certainly we cannot think of every single one of these contexts but the exercise of at least opening ourselves up to different contexts and accounting for them would lead to more efficient problem solving and better lives overall.

Another example would be conservation efforts for animal poaching in Asia and Africa. Animal activists would protest and seek to get legislation passed to stop the poaching of tigers for example. There would be strong international pressure and national enforcement and indeed the incidents of tiger poaching were markedly decreased. Everyone was ecstatic that their efforts worked but after a few months, they would see that seizures of leopard parts were on the rise. This is a kind of conservation substitution effect where stopping the poaching of one animal would unintentionally lead to the increased poaching of another. This is a classic case of not understanding second or third order consequences where activists are not looking at the poverty in that country, not looking at the culture, and not aware of the overarching systemic problems.

Some Things that May Help

Esther Perel in "Where Should We Begin?" talks to a mom who is stuck between her husband and her daughter. She is trying to keep the peace between the two of them and seemingly can't get through to them because they both respond by saying that she's not on their side and she's always taking the other person's side. In the beginning, it was about the triangular dynamic between the mom, the dad, and their youngest daughter. The fights would happen often around the dinner table. But towards the end, we figure out, alongside Esther and the mother, that there is a subtler underpinning of a husband and a wife that have let their relationship fall by the wayside. Their two daughters were actually in between their relationship with one playing the part of the mediator and the other expressing the feelings of her mom and herself. The emotional part of their relationship was sorely lacking. Esther then said:

It's about changing the social, the emotional, and the physical configurations. It's not in that order, but it involves all levels because you've made a beautiful distinction. We can be very sexual and we are intimate there, but there is a level of connection between the two of you, a level of emotional threading that has leaked out of the relationship. And we are brought together in our worry or our arguments with our daughter.

Prior to the above, Esther also gave the mother a number of options she could try like filming the two having an argument and showing them or eating dinner with just her daughter and then having another bite with her husband in his woodshop or writing a letter to her husband. I love that because this is someone who is very aware of different contexts. She gives the mother so many different textures to choose from that would help get her family unstuck. She addresses the social, the emotional, and the physical aspects. That is how you solve a relational problem, a problem that is tangled up, a problem that is too big to handle.

Another recent article that sheds light onto this topic is Perspecteeva's "Our Prior Literacy (1/3)" written by a former Zen Monk, Ivo Mensch. He discusses that there is a depth to us and that "different transformational approaches work at particular depths". Something like talk therapy perhaps works on the surface level but something like EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) where the therapy is more somatic targets unconsciously held beliefs deeper in the stack. Mensch's mention of this type of depth ontology made me think of Steve March's work in Alethia and also Cynthia Bourgeault's three-centered awareness. Three-centered awareness is a concept that posits that "consciousness does not reside merely in the mental faculty alone but rests on a tripod of three distinct systems of perception": the intellectual center, the moving center, and the emotional center, which is somewhat similar to what Esther had said in her podcast. All of that to say, these examples clearly show that there are so many different facets to us. The intellectual (head) center obviously holds our logical, thinking, and verbal processing side. The emotional (heart) center holds a deep knowing, intuition, compassion, and resonance. The moving center (body) operates through sensation, movement, and kinesthetic awareness. It is deeply rooted in the present moment. And not one of them is "better" than the other, at least it shouldn't be. When used together and when we create solutions that satisfy all three, who knows how utterly comprehensive and fulfilling the solution can be! It also goes to show how many different ways we can come at a problem. If we have all these ways of knowing, how can we possibly expect that solutions coming from the thinking center will be able to satisfy something in the body or in the heart.

Of course, these therapies are services for the individual but Mensch says:

We can apply the same first-person scrutiny to our social reality, its structures and mechanisms, with equal curiosity, discernment and intensity as spiritual practice has directed in towards the self.

We can use what we know about ourselves as individuals to help understand our sticky macro problems. How can we tackle problems from many contexts? How can we become more comprehensive?

Lastly, I wanted to end with another thing that Nora Bateson discussed on the Entangled World podcast. She wanted us to picture the image of the Sustainable Development Goals which has these colorful little boxes and each of the boxes says something like no poverty, zero hunger, good health and well-being, etc. Then she said to imagine a mother nursing her baby. She said that in order to feed the baby, we needed to have people not dying from poverty, not dying from hunger, who had clean water and sanitation, etc. In the end, she said that the image of a mother nursing her baby is every one of those sustainable development goals. What I found so interesting in addition to what Nora expressed about the juxtaposition of those two things is that breastfeeding has an unimaginable amount of benefits for baby as well as mother. (Note: I steadfastly believe in fed is best, so don't come at me.) It's nutrition for the baby, there's a reduced risk of illness, there's a stronger immune system, and there's an emotional bonding happened. It is also regulating both their nervous systems. Nature gives us this holistic approach when it comes to the problem of feeding a newborn. It is not just "here's milk to grow your baby". It is helpful physically, emotionally, and spiritually. The solutions for the world's biggest problems need this type of attentiveness and delicate action.

I remember taking her up close to a fountain with the big lecture halls in the background. She looked at me as if trying to tell me that she wanted to jump in. I said we can't do that. I remember looking up to take in my surroundings. All around me were squares and rectangles of stone, tall lecture halls that feel like they go on forever, and red-tile roofs that remind me of Spanish looking houses. The manicured lawns were pristine and the saplings lining the wide walkways were all 10 feet apart. The only thing that was amiss was my child running wildly away from me, going from walkway to the grass down the sloped hill, not following the path. The college students didn't know what to make of us or how to navigate around this toddling child. I thought to myself that once we were all these young creatures not giving a damn about the walkway and going our own path; then we somehow transform into these college students wearing Airpods, paralyzed in front of a toddler, not knowing how to make sense of things that don't follow a path. Of course, we learn many things that help us along the way to becoming a citizen of this society, some very crucial things. But there is something very essential that we shed off from child to young adult.

I was at first repulsed by the architecture. This was when I was first reading Iain McGilchrist. I thought that if this is how we portray our educational institutions, it is most certainly leaning far towards the left hemisphere. I was disgusted especially since this was a time when I wanted to experience more right hemisphere activities. As I walked through the campus more, however, a different feeling was coming through in me. I was in awe. In awe of human ingenuity. I wondered how these ginormous buildings were constructed and how the landscape complemented the buildings. It was beautiful in its own left-hemisphere way. The way to go about sorting out our complex issues (climate change, metacrisis, etc.) isn't to hate these "negative" parts of the world, but to accept it. I am reminded by what Carl R. Rogers said: "the curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change." We should see it in a different light, perhaps from a different perspective, from a different lens. To own it. To turn towards it, instead of away from it. That it can feel like both tragic and brilliant or evil and good or decaying and generating. Maybe the decay will propel you to generate something new.

Vanessa Andreotti, in her book Hospicing Modernity, begins one of her early chapters with this:

Stories that expire can no longer dance with you. They are lethargic or stuck, they can't move things in generative ways anymore, but we often feel we cannot let them go. Many of these expired stories give us a sense of security, purpose, and direction -- precisely because they seem stable and solid. Thus, we become attached to them and get used to their weight in our lives. If we notice they are dying, we refuse to accept it and we put them on life support because we fear the void left in their place when they are no longer there. We forecast that this void will leave us empty, story-less, and that there will be no vitality in this emptiness because everything will be meaningless, pointless, purposeless, and sad. (Machado, 2021)

While Andreotti is talking about stories that society tells itself, I connected with this paragraph because this was what happened in my own life. There were years where I was putting up with an expired story of my own, the story that I was going to "make it" out in the world with whatever career path I chose, that I was going to do something "big". The toughest part was, of course, letting go. Because if I let go, what was I going to do, how was I going to support myself, who was I going to be. These questions are all legitimate, all brought to me by the manager within. The troubling part, at the time, was that there were seemingly no answers within me. There was no voice that was shouting for me to do x, y, or z. It was deadly quiet and that just worried me even more. You don't know what to do with yourself. And you don't truly know if you're going to figure it out. Andreotti writes:

The next step is to figure out a way to release these stories, and -- for at least a minute -- to sit with the mystery of the void we feared. This is where we might discover that our forecast was wrong. We might find that the void consists of both nothingness and everything-ness and that it can be an unlimited source of serenity, sanity, energy, and inspiration.

Then, a big life event happened to me. I got pregnant! My thoughts turned inward towards the baby and suddenly I had a lot to do to get everything ready for new life. Slowly, I felt that I could no longer waste any more time dealing with this expired story. My big life event was partly what pushed me to shed off the story. I'm not sure what would've happened if it didn't happen. I think it's important not to discount what an affect getting pregnant did to me. It was a catalyst given to me from the world to drive me into shedding off this expired story, something that I'd like to think Iain McGilchrist would call responsive evocation, "the world 'calling forth' something in me that in turn 'calls forth' something in the world" (McGilchrist, 2019).

In one of Ester Perel's early podcast episodes, we are introduced to this young married couple "facing challenges around the roles they play in the relationship dynamic. He has defined himself as a calm, saint-like figure. While she, perhaps in reaction to his 'sainthood', plays the part of hysterical woman prone to explosive outbursts." Instead of going straight to the root of the matter, which seemed to be the wife's violent words during their fights, she turns her attention to the husband who thinks he's innocent in this whole ordeal. He views himself as a noble person, a person with a good heart. So to receive backlash when he has such a good view of himself is jarring. Esther comments:

The way he describes the cycle, the escalation, leaves him out of the equation. It’s as if he’s not an active participant here and she’s doing everything on her own. In a dance where you have one person who attacks and one person who stonewalls, it‘s very important to understand that the person who stonewalls contributes in intensifying the pursuit of the other. And the person who pursues contributes to the other withdrawing. Each person is co-creating the other. That is the essence of the dance — especially in negative escalations.

I love the word "co-creating" and "dance" in this. Those words really connect with me. It's like M.C. Escher's hands that draws the hand that draws the hand that draws the hand...

I think what is so crucial about this way of communicating is that Esther does not just tackle her irrational wrath or his victim complex separately. We often think that "we need to work on ourselves" irrespective of what is going on in our environment -- as if we can extricate ourselves from the relationships that are tethered to us. But we don't realize that often, the other person or thing is directly tied to our response. It draws out our response. We are co-creating each other. It is crucial that we don't lose sight of this. Nora Bateson and Vanessa Andreotti gave a talk about this very way of thinking. Nora said this is her opponent -- the monster, the ghost, that we are tackling is "the ghost that doesn't feel the violence of the separations when they're made." Esther is a master at deeply understanding the relational, contextual aspect of her work. When we fail to bring this into our way of thinking, we obscure possibilities that we could have walked down.

Mcgilchrist, I. (2019). The Master and His Emissary : The Divided brain and The Making of the Western World. Yale University Press.

Machado, V. (2021). Hospicing Modernity: parting with harmful ways of living. North Atlantic Books.

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The post first goes into acknowledging that you are in a rut when you have symptoms like feeling a sense of meaninglessness, your daily life lacking a sense of fulfillment, you falling back into old bad habits, and you having no motivation to do anything. During this period, perhaps you're in your bed a lot, you can't get house chores done, and you’re not taking care of yourself -- all the while a part of you is begging you to get out of bed, reminding you incessantly that you have to do these tasks.

Fundamentally, I believe that one of the ways we get ourselves into this mess is we are no longer being spontaneous with our day-to-day lives and we are narrow-minded about what constitutes as a productive day. We want a certain rigid set of tasks to be completed. We want to complete our goal. We reduce what we are into something mechanical -- thinking that we are made to unload dishwashers, buy groceries at the supermarket, and go to work, never realizing that in doing so, these are the very things that get us stuck.

Then, because a part of you doesn't want to get those specific tasks done, it'll pitch a fit and you will further be burrowed in your bed scrolling on your phone. The antidote is to find a little self-compassion (which is mentioned in the article). In a podcast episode with Nora Bateson, Najia Shaukat Lupson describes getting her 5-year-old son, who is quite head-strong and opinionated, dressed for school in the morning. She asks her son to go put on his shoes and he promptly yells “NOOO!!!” They talk about how you handle this scenario is one of the most challenging yet insightful things that you can do as a parent. How you manage this kind of situation is at the crux of how you talk to yourself. Do you yell at the top of your lungs that they need to get their shoes put on or they’ll receive a spanking? Do you rationally go through why we need to put on shoes all the while ignoring their internal distress? Do you yourself take a deep breath and sit down with them, ask them what’s wrong all the while knowing that you’re late for school? A lot of the times I think about this scenario when I’m in a rut. Ironically, I hold on to my to-do list the most when I’m in a rut; it is incessantly going through my head. And these are the hardest moments to relinquish control over the rational side of myself because you know you are already “late” in getting the day started — just like when you’re running late in the morning and your child doesn’t want to put shoes on.

In Quit Like a Woman, Holly Whitaker describes being late to work after a night of drinking and her way of giving herself grace:

There was one morning that January I remember particularly well: I was on a business trip in Boston while still working for the health care start-up. I’d drunk the night before to the point of obliteration, or maybe just embarrassment, and woke up in my hotel room late for work. I was the boss and my staff was already at the office and I was tempted to scurry there as fast as possible, but skipping my morning ritual felt unthinkable — almost as unthinkable as skipping a drink. This was the moment the routine clicked — the moment I realized I could not face the world without doing a self-care ritual. I read my little book, wrote down my daily mantra, meditated, drank hot lemon water, and danced around my hotel room to Too Short blasting from my phone. By the time I made it to work, I found I could smile, and not the kind of smile that hides the pain of wanting to die, but the kind that is in and of itself a smile. (Whitaker, 2021)

By doing her rituals, she’s soothing herself just like you would soothe a child. She’s not berating, she’s not abrasive, and she’s certainly not upping the anxiety level. Instead, she’s taking her emotionally charged self seriously and genuinely listening to what she feels and what her body needs and fulfilling that part of herself. There might still be a part of her that looks at her mantras and her journal and her hot lemon water as stupid or a complete waste of time, but I think it’s important to shift into a different perspective in order to change — especially if you’ve already tried the military sargeant hat on and it’s never worked. To further shift perspectives, if you can manage it, take the day off from the incessant to-do list in your mind. Maybe find a little park, buy some watercolors and sit there and draw the scenery in front of you. Doesn't matter if it's good or bad. It's about the experience of being there with the wind and the birds and the grass. Or perhaps invite a friend to go see a play. Or maybe drop in on a yoga class. Do something that you've never done before to infuse your life with a sense of wonder and vitality. Perhaps you will learn more about yourself on your adventure. Perhaps you'll have a nice conversation with someone that will lift your mood. I believe we've lost all spontaneity in today's world. We don't do anything for the sake of doing it anymore; it's more about recording than the present moment, optimization over experience, and achieving some arbitrary goal.

We must expand what we think of as our lives. It hasn't always been this way -- striving to become something better at the cost of mental health and relationships. Everyone is holed up in their own houses, trying to experience life through screens. Think about how lives were lived throughout history. In the Renaissance, there was this explosion of art and science. Many prominent European cities were a major center of the arts, with Opera houses and orchestras. Society earnestly valued the arts, music, dance, fashion and architecture. These things were at life's core -- not brushed to the side as if we could do without them. And people came together in the form of balls and festivals to dance, socialize, and flirt on a monthly if not weekly basis. I'm no historian, by any means, so I'm not doing justice to how vibrant they lived. But by the elegant and beautiful paintings and the utterly creative scientific discoveries that have come out of this period, I can't help but wonder if they live better than us in this respect. I want to be careful because I'm not trying to romanticize. In fact, I know that some of the festivals that were born out of this period came after a bout of the plague, to celebrate their lives which they saw first-hand how tenuous and precious it can all be. Ultimately, expanding what is possible in your day-to-day life can lead to feeling alive again.

Whitaker, H. (2021). Quit like a woman : the radical choice to not drink in a culture obsessed with alcohol. The Dial Press.

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

His point in this parable is to bring to attention that often, the most common and important things are usually never discussed or never spoken at length about. I want to attempt to describe them, even though I know I will fail at this impossible endeavor. I want to apologize in advance if (and most likely, when) I get something wrong. This is mainly for me to understand how I got here today, where we came from, and where we can go in the future.

I am sitting at my computer scrolling through Reddit. I see a post about some injustice a corporation has done to the masses. The people in the comment section are understandably shocked and angry. What I have described is something so common -- sitting at a desk, scrolling through a website, and reading the comments -- I don't even need to say it out loud; it's trite, even. But let's take another look.

The Macbook I'm using was designed by Apple and manufactured through a complex global supply chain spanning 6 continents. It is powered by electricity that was once fossil fuels extracted from the ground and went through a pipeline most likely coming from OPEC. It seems like things got complicated real fast. One part of this lifestyle can be attributed to the Bretton-Woods financial system. Around the end of World War II, the Allied nations sent delegates to discuss how to rebuild the world financial system. A couple of ideas were tossed around but ultimately, (since the U.S. had a lot of influence at this time) it was decided that countries "should peg their currencies to the United States dollar, and that the dollar would remain pegged to gold at a fixed exchange rate, and redeemable for gold to foreign central banks" (Alden, 2023). This is key because it allows corporations to have a uniform currency throughout a complex supply chain, like manufacturing a Macbook for example. Doing business is faster and easier if everywhere you go, everyone is using your currency. The Bretton Woods system also kept the peace. Because the economic pie gets bigger every year for most participating countries, instead of squabbling about land or resources or money, countries are more inclined to work together to mutually assure success.

In addition, during the oil shortage of 1973, Nixon started discreet negotiations with Saudi Arabia leadership attempting to persuade them to sell oil only in U.S. dollars. This is also key to many processes that we take for granted today and that help us live in this particular way today.

The United States would buy a lot of oil from Saudi Arabia and sell a lot of military equipment and aid to them in return. The United States would, by extension, also use its unrivaled naval power to ensure that the Strait of Hormuz would remain open for global oil trade, since that is how the U.S. would get its oil as well. (Alden 130)

It is important to observe how crucial geopolitics has been to the U.S. Access to cheap oil has been paramount for the manufacturing of goods and services, which leads to consumer spending. Because consumer spending accounts for almost 70% of the U.S. GDP, you can bet that U.S. leadership has put a lot of effort in keeping this wheel turning (i.e. the rise of the Petrodollar, the war in Iraq, stamping out oil trading not using U.S. currency, etc.). I believe that anything that makes the U.S. population spend more, like advertisements, like social media, like keeping-up-with-the-Jones’s, the better it is for the stock market, for investors, for 401k's, for corporations, and for politicians. That's why Americans overspend, have credit card debt, and ultimately, seek a lot of these dopamine-inducing activities. That is why we feel like cogs in a machine -- that it is so hard to stay off social media, that it feels like we have no control over some parts of our lives. It's because there have been systems in place for decades, if not a century now, to optimize for consumption at the detriment of individuals', environmental, and species health. All of this is not right, but I no longer blame only myself for spending more time than I care to on the internet.

From one perspective, I see why all of this is so important. Things must keep growing. If everyone's economic pie is not increasing, there will be conflicts as was the way throughout most of our history. Our retirement accounts (if you have one) are dependent on this exponential economy. But we cannot sit here and think that this is largely the perspective of what a human life is for nor should we think that this system makes sense. Because it doesn't. Nothing on this earth keeps growing forever -- which is what our financial system is built upon, growth at all costs. It reminds me of what Iain McGilchrist says about the left hemisphere:

[The left hemisphere allows us] to re-present the world in a form that is less truthful, but apparently clearer, and therefore cast in a form which is more useful for manipulation of the world and one another. This world is explicit, abstracted, compartmentalised, fragmented, static (though its 'bits' can be re-set in motion, like a machine), essentially lifeless. From this world we feel detached, but in relation to it we are powerful. (McGilchrist, 2019)

The left hemisphere's principal concern is utility. It is interested in what it has made, and in the world as a resource to be used. It is therefore natural that it has a particular affinity for words and concepts for tools, man-made things, mechanisms and whatever is not alive. (McGilchrist, 2019)

Our global financial system feels like this. It is as if our collective left hemisphere has made this global economic system to help us, to manipulate the world around us, and to optimize for utility. It feels like we have built this make-believe system which sort of represents the world; it's not the Truth but it gets us closer to it than not having it. It does a good job at getting everything partially right but where we get into trouble is when we start believing that the model is the world. Growing at all costs doesn't match up with reality and I would argue it is a pretty big caveat to remember. Daniel Schmachtenberger said it best: that we have an "exponential economy on a linear materials economy that is taking non-renewable resources and turning it into un-processable waste that can't degrade on human timescales".

Let's talk about the electricity that is powering that Macbook. Nate Hagan's video on his channel provides a new perspective of what it means for humans to have discovered fossil fuels, which are plankton and plant compounds that have been underground for millions of years. Suddenly, we had the capacity to do exponentially more. Hagans says "when combined with a machine, a gallon of gasoline could output the same work in a few minutes as a person laboring for an entire month". Now if that isn't magic, I don't know what is! Suddenly, new possibilities emerged in all sectors in our world, from the military to travel to domestic households to how we work. The result of this energy was equally as optimistic with high profits, high wages, and cheaper goods. But we all know from 5th grade science class that fossil fuels are non-renewable. It took millions of years to create and cannot be renewed on human timescales. Instead of treating it as a windfall of money, we've actually created this huge, extravagant, prodigal global economy on top of it, where we can no longer live without this energy. Not only that, energy is extremely tied to GDP and we need it to grow by about 3% every year.

You may be thinking that we are making progress with green energy but there are a whole host of issues to contend with, namely Jevon's paradox (efficiency improvements can sometimes lead to increased consumption rather than the intended conservation) and that renewable energy is not really renewable because the materials needed to make a solar panel still needs to be processed with fossil fuels as of 2025.

This predicament is nothing short of intriguing. That we have managed to sit our entire global economy on something so fragile. That we didn't realize how precious fossil fuels are. And that most importantly, it has disastrous effects on the environment over time. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been providing Assessment Reports commenting on the state of the climate since 1990. And each year, global temperatures have gone in the opposite direction of what we desired. The interesting thing is that many governments around the world set out to stop this and yet it can't be stopped. I believe that most people's ideal world doesn't involve animals going extinct or plastics proliferating our oceans. It reminds me of someone who is trying to eat clean but keeps going back for ice cream every night. It is a superorganism, as Hagans calls it, that has a mind of its own, like a runaway train. There are no solutions yet and this phenomenon runs deep, runs quite possibly to the core of who we are as humans at this period in time, I believe.

So back to the Reddit post and the unjust ways of the corporation. Injustices are all over Reddit. The people at the top all seem evil or at the very least out-of-touch. But I believe there are more factors at play here than the simple fact that politicians and businessmen are greedy. They may be that but there is also this concept called the multipolar trap where an individual of a certain industry, for example, will do a thing that will have negative consequences for everyone involved but the individual will gain an advantage. It will force everyone to also adopt that thing in order to keep up or else be outcompeted. But overall, it is a net negative for the entire population.

A concrete example might be facetuning, which is the process of editing your photos and videos using artificial intelligence to reshape and enhance your face and/or body for social media content. Once a few people do this and at first, gain an advantage and more views, then more and more people who seek to increase their following will make the decision to try it on their photos. Soon, everyone who wants more of a following or engagement will be forced to adopt facetuning. Not one person is actively imposing their will on others but it is in everybody's interest to facetune. In the end, no one is better off (one could argue they are worse off); it's just that now everyone has another step they have to do before posting a photo and on a more serious note, the general public could be more susceptible to body dysmorphia, eating disorders, etc. Or let's say with artificial intelligence, a CEO of a successful tech company is privately nervous about the rise of AI and doesn't want to explore into the space. Yet, he has a fiduciary responsibility to his shareholders and also if he doesn't jump on the bandwagon in a timely fashion, all of his competitors will and thus render his company obsolete. So even though he doesn't necessarily want to or he personally thinks it's risky, the decision is already made; he must dive into AI in order to survive in the industry. This is the multipolar trap.

I believe this goes on in all sorts of different competitive industries. And I believe that injustices happen sometimes due to these multipolar traps. Sometimes, companies do not properly take the time to complete a comprehensive risk analysis on their new product because 1) it may take years and 2) they feel like they have to move fast -- faster than their competitors. It seems to lead to a lot of egregious mistakes that turned into big scandals for corporations and even worse conditions for the general public.

I know this has been all doom and gloom and the future seems hopeless. But it's important to name and describe our world and how we got here. It has been fascinating to learn about these subjects and I feel like I can relate to what is going out there internally within myself. The reverberations of this global order is strong and it sucks everyone in -- to buy more, for example, or to question whether you are pretty enough or to play the role of the CEO. We've got to remember what makes us human. We are not just computers that make game-theoretic decisions. An AI will never make any meaning out of dancing with a partner. An AI will never make any meaning out of feeling the ground beneath their feet or smelling the salt in the air at the beach or having any sort of embodied experience. The path forward doesn't involve the same headspace as before. It doesn't involve thoughts like:

• What is the next step forward?

• Why are we so stupid?

• How do we undo the last 70 years?

It involves more of these things:

• dancing

• music

• poetry

• spontaneity

• sacredness

• meditation

• art

• imagination

• intuition

I know these things above are not the answers you're looking for and perhaps you're abhorred by what you just read since they’re ooey-gooey and "dumb" and non-answers. But obviously, if someone has figured out climate change and multipolar traps, they probably wouldn't be writing about them in a blog. They'd be actually, you know, solving them in the real world. The most important thing about the list above is that they give us a new perspective; they shift our focus from a linear, logical way of thinking to something that is implicit, whole, and creative. That is what we need more of moving forward.

Alden, L. (2023). Broken Money. Timestamp Press.

Mcgilchrist, I. (2019). The Master and His Emissary : The Divided brain and The Making of the Western World. Yale University Press.

In the Master and His Emissary, there is this section that discusses paradoxes and opposites. Rightfully so, the two hemispheres of the brain can be seen as opposites in many ways. He says:

Heidegger was not alone in seeing that beauty lies in the coming to rest of opposites, that have been sharply distinguished, in the connectedness of a harmonious unity. The need for ultimate unification of division with union is an important principle in all areas of life; it reflects the need not just for two opposing principles, but for opposition ultimately to be harmonised. (McGilchrist, 2019)

With the advent of Romanticism, paradox became once more not a sign of error, but, as it had been seen by Western philosophers before Plato, and by all the major schools of thought in the East before and since, as a sign of the necessary limitation of our customary modes of language and thought, to be welcomed, rather than rejected, on the path towards truth. (McGilchrist, 2019)

Time and time again, I see this in Perel’s podcast episodes. In one episode, she is talking with a woman about grief. The woman had experienced the passing of her father and then, most surprisingly, the passing of her little sister by suicide. Near the end of the episode, Esther discusses commemorating her sister and how they can do it as a large family. The woman expresses that it’s awkward to bring her sister up during big functions. In her heart, she wants to bring her up more and wishes that her family would do the same. Esther replies:

There needs to be room for each person. Those who want to speak. Those who don’t. Those who want to cry. Those who don’t. Those who cry with others. Those who cry alone … Each one highlighting different ways to experience and express grief. The most common one is those who say let’s remember and those who say we don’t have to bring it up each time. Those who say let’s move on and those who say how can you. They seem to all cancel each other out when in fact, both of these exist inside each of us. But in a family, sometimes instead of holding them inside of us, holding the tension and the polarities, they get outsourced onto other people. So one brother becomes the one that says let’s only talk about the children – the little ones, the future. And the other one says but what about the past. But in fact, they absolutely need each other. They are part of the holistic experience: holding on, letting go, remembering, forgetting, the past, the future, her strength, her illness.

How poignant and perceptive of Perel to express it like this. It is so beautifully said and there is so much truth to all of this. I believe this is what McGilchrist means when he says that two opposites must ultimately be harmonized and welcomed in our lives. I think that we live in a time where black and white thinking not only dominate our society but we have a discomfort around holding two opposites in our minds for a long period of time. We often want to pick a side or analyze which one is right when really, they are both right, they are both needed, and it is the tension of the two that holds both.

I recently devoured a book called We Are the Luckiest by Laura McKowen, which is a memoir about her sobriety journey. I’m not sure what it is about sobriety stories that makes them so relatable to me. I’m not going through any sort of alcohol addiction but I feel a connection to these men and women. Their feelings about themselves before getting sober and the realizations after have a similar ring to what I went through with my own identity. There’s a part in her book when she realizes that something in her was changing. She understood more about her addiction and drinking but she also couldn’t stop drinking. My identity shifted in a similar way. In my bones, I knew that I can no longer keep up this facade of going to a white collar job everyday and striving to become some executive. I could no longer lie to myself about wanting that. But I was scared of what I would become if I didn’t have that to fall back on. Who would I be? How would I support myself? I had no idea what it looked like for me to pursue something different. Similarly and perhaps in a much more difficult way, McKowen had to shift her entire identity and find what that looks like for her during parties, birthdays, dates, and happy hours.

Towards the end of her book, she writes about this poem called “The Holy Longing” by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe:

And so long as you haven’t experience
This: to die and so to grow,
You are only a troubled guest
On the dark earth.

She explains that before getting sober, her mentality was that she tried to be good and then hated herself when she was bad. She was only a troubled guest on this earth. She couldn’t see another way to be. But after her journey with addiction, she writes:

So much of what I’d perceived to be courageous or successful or important or interesting had been such a joke up until then. I hadn’t known anything about life at all: what it meant to meet your limitations or the depths of your capacity for pain, or how hard it was to actually change. …
But those early [AA] meetings, and the daily struggle of that first year or so, stripped away most of my illusions. It was like being introduced to an underworld, a much deeper layer of the human experience, and it didn’t take me long to see that it was the place I’d always been chasing. It just looked a hell of a lot different than I’d thought it would, and the price I had to pay to get there was far more than I expected.
In this world, my mistakes are as sacred as my triumphs. In this world, the ugly and the dazzling are the same. In this world, there is room for both joy and terror, pleasure and pain. In this world, nothing is too shameful to speak of. Nothing counts you out.

The bad becomes the good because through the bad, she was able to accept so much of herself instead of kicking it away. Through the unification of both the good and the bad and understanding both sides, she was able to transcend the black and white thinking of “I was irresponsible when I drank so I’m bad” or “I didn’t drink tonight so I’m good”. It not about that.

This dichotomy of the opposites that McGilchrist talks about lives in so many stories that I’ve read. It seems as if it’s through this tension of opposites that something entirely new is born. It is sacred and lovely and beautiful.

Mcgilchrist, I. (2019). The Master and His Emissary : The Divided brain and The Making of the Western World. Yale University Press.

Mckowen, L. (2022). WE ARE THE LUCKIEST : the surprising magic of a sober life. New World Library.

West Coast Swing is near and dear to my heart because it was one of the first things that I took up after reading The Master and His Emissary. I decided that it was imperative that I do something that was an experience. Something implicit, something belonging to the present moment. I wanted to put more “right hemisphere” into my life — to see what that feels like and where it could take me. I’m so glad I did because it has become one of the most fun, stimulating, and exciting parts of my life. You know, sometimes when you decide to do something and it doesn’t take much to get it started? And it seems like the universe has your back logistically? The place where I go starts the social dancing around 8:30 at night which is exactly when I have the time to do something. It’s also not too far, inexpensive, and has plenty of parking most of the time. It just really worked out — as if I didn’t have to do much. Whereas other things I’ve tried to start sometimes felt like I was working uphill. Sometimes, classes would cost a ton of money or I can’t find the right equipment in my city, or the timing is off. It seemed to me the universe helped me out a little.

McGilchrist writes:

Despite the fact that there is no culture anywhere in the world that does not have music, and in which people do not join together to sing or dance, we have relegated music to the sidelines of life. We might think of music as an individualistic, even solitary experience, but that is rare in the history of the world. In more traditionally structured societies, performance of music plays both an integral, and an integrative, role not only in celebration, religious festivals, and other rituals, but also in daily work and recreation; and it is above all a shared performance, not just something we listen to passively. It has a vital way of binding people together. In our world, competion and specialisation have made music something compartmentalised, somewhere away from life’s core. (McGilchrist, 2019)

Dancing and music has made me realize how crucial it is to practice this kind of present moment feeling. West Coast Swing is a dance that is improv’ed on the spot — as in it’s not a performance or a routine that is practiced over and over and then performed on stage. It is a partner dance where you don’t know what song you will be dancing to next and you also don’t know what patterns you will be doing. Of course, you learn some highly recommended basic patterns along the way. I feel like the dance is so special because of these characteristics. Because during the dance, it calls for your whole attention and puts you squarely in the present moment. You can’t think of anything else because you have to listen to the music, listen to your lead/follow, and listen to your body.

One of the unique aspects of this type of experience is that while you are on the floor, it is very hard for the left hemisphere to intercept. More often than not, you are tugged back to the present moment. For example, when you are attempting to work on some kind of skill like your anchor step, you can only work on it for so long before your lead tugs you back to the present moment. He/She seems to say, “Hey, focus on us, we are here together, are you listening?” While it is totally fine to work on your steps and movement, the tug back into the present moment hints at where it is most important to be during the dance.

The very first thing you learn when you take a West Coast Swing class is connection with your partner. And even when you go up the ranks, teachers still talk about connection, connection, connection. We all start out by holding both of our partner’s hands, swaying back and forth, and seeing if our partner follows our movement. Gradually, we close our eyes and see if we can sense our partner’s location (left, right, up, down, etc.) with just their hands in ours (without them moving their hands much). At the start, I was skeptical of being able to guess correctly without sight. But as I did this exercise over and over, it was a success most of the time! You do get the sense of where your partner is right from holding onto their hands.

Your hands are the connection points through which you feel your partner. It is in that space where your hands meet, that’s where the dance is created, that’s where two people come together as one. McGilchrist writes in The Master and His Emissary (bear with me here, I promise there’s a point):

Our attention is responsive to the world. There are certain modes of attention which are naturally called forth by certain kinds of object. We pay a different sort of attention to a dying man from the sort of attention we’d pay to a sun, or a carburettor. However, the process is reciprocal. It is not just that what we find determines the nature of the attention we accord to it, but that the attention we pay to anything also determines what it is we find. (McGilchrist, 2019)

One way of putting this is to say that we neither discover an objective reality nor invent a subjective reality, but that there is a process of responsive evocation, the world ‘calling forth’ something in me that in turn ‘calls forth’ something in the world… as music arises from neither the piano nor the pianist’s hands, the sculpture neither from hand nor stone, but from their coming together. (McGilchrist, 2019)

I believe this is exactly what happens when two people are dancing West Coast Swing. Instead of the world ‘calling forth’, it is my partner who calls forth a certain movement; it evokes something in me to move in a certain way and then my response evokes something in my partner. It is beautiful. In talented dancers, they slow down and listen to what their partner is saying. The lead steps 1, 2 and he waits. The follow responds with 3 and 4 and that evokes something within the lead to do something with what he is given. The dance is always in flux, always moving, always changing. Rarely do we think like this in real life. We don’t believe that we are co-creators with the universe. We are consumers, yes. We are passive, yes. We are goal-oriented, yes. Co-creators?! No way. We either feel like we have no control or we bulldoze our way through to get to our goal. Lately, I’ve been trying to take a few steps in the direction that I want to go and then try to listen to what the universe is saying. Then I respond, go a few steps, then listen again. It has been incredibly freeing.

Finally, I want to talk about the process of learning this dance or any artistic endeavor for that matter. A question that came up time and time again for me was how does practicing the skills of this dance connect with the intuitive aspects of movement. I think the below passage really answers it:

What is offered by the right hemisphere is offered back again and taken up into a synthesis involving both hemispheres. This must be true of the processes of creativity, of the understanding of works of art, of the development of the religious sense. In each there is a progress from an intuitive apprehension of whatever it may be, via a more formal process of enrichment through conscious, detailed analytic understanding, to a new, enhanced intuitive understanding of this whole, now transformed by the process that it has undergone. (McGilchrist, 2019)

I think this perfectly captures how you get better at dancing! It starts with your own personal intuitive way of moving through music. Then you sharpen your movements. You tighten up your turns so they are not so wobbly. You drill and practice your basic patterns — which becomes the left hemisphere’s part. When you are practicing, the patterns are static, dead, and detached from music. Then this gets ‘lifted up’ and used in the right hemisphere. When you go dancing again, your intuitive movements are now bolstered by the left hemisphere training and enriched by your practice.

Some people get stuck, however.

This idea, though difficult, is critically important, because … there has been a tendency for the left hemisphere to see the workings of the right hemisphere as purely incompatible, antagonistic, as a threat to its dominion — the emissary perceiving the Master to be a tyrant. This is an inevitable consequence of the fact that the left hemisphere can support only a mechanistic view of the world, according to which it would certainly be true that the unifying tendency of the right hemisphere would reverse its achievements in delineating individual entities. (McGilchrist, 2019)

People get stuck practicing or learning different patterns that they forget that there was a point to the left hemisphere’s drills and practices. The things created by the left hemisphere is a means to an end. And that end is always to merge with the right hemisphere for the greater purpose of goodness, truth, and beauty. It is not practice for practice sake. It is not “I want to learn a new pattern just to learn a new pattern”. The key idea is that these things that you drill help your intuition for the dance. It is in the implicit that you will find how to elevate your dance. You will never find it by learning another pattern.

Mcgilchrist, I. (2019). The Master and His Emissary : The Divided brain and The Making of the Western World. Yale University Press.‌

I thought that was it! I thought I finally found my path because Nate Hagens’ work felt so honest, good, and true. And it is! I came upon Daniel Schmachtenberger’s work through Hagens’ podcast next. I feel like Schmachtenberger is a big picture thinker of today’s global problems. Mainly, he works to frame and describe the metacrisis, which is a phenomenon where because our technology is so advanced it has the ability to significantly negatively change our planet like never before and that there are multiple sectors where this could happen (e.g. nuclear weapons, AI, biophysical weapons, etc.). More bad news.

I wanted more of Schmachtenberger’s content and found the Rebel Wisdom podcast and through that, I finally came upon Dr. Iain McGilchrist’s episodes and his work, mainly his book The Master and His Emissary. I think anyone who has read his books will say that his work has changed their lives. And I am no different. It felt as if McGilchrist’s works is the overarching concept of what Hagens and Schmachtenberger are getting at. This feeling that we are stuck, that there is no easy way out of the global predicaments that we have gotten ourselves into, McGilchrist’s work perfectly explains why. And it has everything to do with the way we are as humans.

There are two perspectives that we see the world through, one view from the left hemisphere of our brains and the other from the right. He says:

I believe the essential difference between the right hemisphere and the left is that the right hemisphere pays attention to the Other, what it is that exists apart from ourselves, with which it sees itself in profound relation. It is deeply attracted to, and given life by, the relationship, the betweenness, that exists with this Other. By contrast, the left hemisphere pays attention to the virtual world that it has created, which is self-consistent, but self-contained, ultimately disconnected from the Other, making it powerful, but ultimately only able to operate on, and to know, itself. (McGilchrist, 2019)

I believe a lot of our problems stem from the fact that we think our left hemisphere technologies will be the savior to our predicaments when really it digs a deeper hole. AI, for example. How many articles have you read that talks about how promising this new technology will be? How many corporations are racing to gain first mover advantage to this technology? Another one is the loneliness epidemic in part caused by the invention of the smartphone and social media apps. How easy is it to get on social media instead of real face-to-face time with friends who will nurture your soul in the long run. We overdo it with our technologies and more importantly, our left hemisphere.

McGilchrist’s description of the right hemisphere has the solution to our problems. The right hemisphere is concerned with the relationship — the connectedness — to the Other or to the Sacred. It seeks out unity and knows that there is more to the Whole than just the sum of its parts. There is far more to be said about this topic which can be found in McGilchrist’s books. This way of thinking really touched me and rang true in me. It gave language to something that I felt like I knew all along. Not only that, but McGilchrist emphasizes that the way we “attend” to the world makes us see it in a certain way. This is important because if we keep seeing the world through our left hemisphere, then everything is separate parts, disconnected, a resource to be used. If only we just shift our focus to view it through our right hemispheres, what a world we could make. I believe even just reading McGilchrist’s descriptions of the right and left hemispheres would do wonders to how people live their lives. The fact that we don’t know our right hemispheres at all juxtaposed with the fact that we’ve had substantial left hemesphere training all through school and work creates the mindsets (and problems) that we have today.

Mcgilchrist, I. (2019). The Master and His Emissary : The Divided brain and The Making of the Western World. Yale University Press.

I feel compelled to share a little bit about myself before immediately jumping into abstract ideas. I have been wanting to start something like a blog or a podcast for the longest time and have wasted a bunch of time mulling over about it. (This is probably common, I know.) Something about linking words together and creating a succinct, readable, and refreshing idea really halts the process like no other! Plus the fact that I majored in math in college gives a part of me ammo to be like “You were never a good writer!” and “You dealt more with numbers than with words. You’re not going to be a compelling writer!”.

But alas, I cannot deny myself from putting my shitty ideas out into the ether any longer! They are coming out whether I want them to or not!

To begin, I come from a Chinese immigrant household. We lived in a suburb probably like any other WASP place in the United States circa 2007. There was a Kroger, a Walmart, a McDonald’s, a Chick-fil-A, and a Costco all on the same street. That street would eventually turn into a small road which was where I grew up, in a cookie cutter, Pulte, 3-bed, 3-bath little house in the middle of nowhere. Okay, too much detail. You’re like “Whoa! When she said ‘she’s going to share a little bit about herself’, she really meant SHE WAS GONNA SHARE TOO MUCH…”

In this kind of environment with an immigrant family, perhaps you can already imagine the landscape. Success in academics was paramount. There was so much pressure to achieve and do things for that college transcript that it became unclear why I was doing it and it became confusing to try to figure out who I was. Things like playing tennis, volunteering for nonprofits, and playing violin were all a means to an end. They were so entwined with my identity that I couldn’t even answer the simple question of do I like them or not. It wasn’t even a question that I thought about because the fear of quitting and not having anything to write on that transcript put me right back in my place.

I have heard numerous stories of my parents’ journey to get here. They are shaped by their remarkable experiences and I’m certain their relationship with risk is one that makes them gravitate towards security in the United States and so, that equates to a high-paying job for their child as well. Their goal in this country is survival and they unknowingly raised their child in a similar underlying tone. The child grows up not in an politically unstable country and doesn’t only have 3 dollars to their name. They grow up in suburbia — trying to navigate looking different than everyone else and Homecoming. But I still felt like “succeeding” was life or death. I felt like I couldn’t rest until I obtained my goal. I respect and admire my parents’ tenacity and their struggle but the same logic and values may not work for their children’s life, which looks vastly different from theirs. I think if this type of survivalist thinking was tempered with some emotional resilience, some present moment play, and some understanding of what it means to be human, I think I would have been in a much better place going into my 20’s.

Let me be the first one to say, I am privileged to have been born in this country and my parents have met my physical needs above and beyond anything they could have ever imagined. The opportunities and ways to succeed are boundless here. But I just want to share my experience and provide nuance to living in this period as a 2nd generation immigrant.

This type of thinking, where everything becomes a goal and needs to be achieved, leads to burnout fast. Which is what I learned after getting my first white-collar corporate job and quitting it 3 years later. I came upon Anne Helen Peterson’s book called Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation. This book painted a backdrop of how I grew up. It explained:

Millennials became the first generation to fully conceptualize themselves as walking college resumes. With assistance from our parents, society, and educators, we came to understand ourselves, consciously or not, as “human capital”: subjects to be optimized for better performance in the economy.

That pressure to achieve wouldn’t have existed without the notion that college, no matter the cost, would provide a path to middle-class prosperity and stability. But as millions of overeducated, underemployed, and student-debt-laden millennials will tell you, just because everyone around you believes in the gospel doesn’t mean it’s necessarily true.

College didn’t alleviate the economic anxiety of our parents. It didn’t even guarantee our position in the middle class, or, in many cases, actually prepare us for the job market. But the preparation for college taught us a valuable, lingering lesson: how to orient our entire lives around the idea that hard work brings success and fulfillment, no matter how many times we’re confronted with proof to the contrary.

and:

[Millennials] spent a ton of time with adults, and learned the external markings of performing adulthood, but lack the independence and strong sense of self that accompanies a less surveilled and protected childhood.

These passages hit home for me. They give language and nuance to what I was already feeling for a long time, that this push for success and performance in our children sometimes ironically leads to what parents fear — burnout and failure.

Holly Whitaker in her book, Quit Like a Woman, also writes about similar feelings of disillusionment and fatigue:

The more I worked and excelled, the more I hated what I did, how it consumed me, and how it never ended. I didn’t know how to turn off or how to be less than perfect or how to not want to be better than every single person I worked with. I felt as if I had stepped onto a hamster wheel directly out of school, a life with a never-ending to-do list, credit card debt that followed me from college and somehow outpaced my raises, an inability to feel like anything was ever enough. I started out not being able to keep up with what I was supposed to be, and that feeling never really went away, no matter how great my title sounded or how much money I made. (Whitaker, 2021)

I relate so much to this picture that Whitaker paints. Although some of the details are different, it is the same feeling that is felt.

The point is, I built the life they told me I should build (they being, in the words of bell hooks, the “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy,” which I didn’t have words for at the time, so let’s just say every piece of media and advertising I’d consumed since I’d grown ears and eyes), and all I could do was plot to escape that life.

It never occurred to me that I could just stop, that I could step off the hamster wheel, that I could walk away at any time, that I could stop running so furiously and desperately toward a future I prayed would save me. What occurred to me was that I was unlike normal people, those people who seemed to be able to do what I couldn’t, which was not make messes of everything they touched. …

And: It wasn’t as if I wasn’t trying to make it, or be healthier, or live like everyone else seemed to be living. I’d been doing yoga for a decade. I ate kale before kale was Kale. I’d done the Master Cleanse and all the other cleanses. … I had it in my mind that if I just ate cleaner, worked out more, drank less, smoked less, lost more weight, made more money, saved more money, stopped spilling my bed wine on those monogrammed sheets — if I could just get more discipline or be more perfect — then it would all work out. (Whitaker, 2021)

My first thought is a question. Is this cliché? Does everyone go through some sort of similar process in figuring themselves out? I’m not sure but I’ve certainly felt everything described in the above passage: the confusion of doing everything to get to a well paying job but it was the last thing you wanted, the realization that if you were to step off the hamster wheel, what else could you do?, the fatigue of trying everything under the sun to “fix” you. It hadn’t occurred to me until much later that the “hustle” and the “fixing” were just the opposite sides of the same coin, even when the things under the “fixing” seemed like “good” things to do. That’s why the “good” things you do under the same mindset will lead to even more heartache.

The harder I tried to be more perfect — the more cleanses, the more books I bought, and budgets I made, the more things I bought to cover up and paint over the mess that was my life — the harder it became to keep it together. The attempts to fix me only added more chaos, the chaos added more pain, and so I added more wine. And pot. And cigarettes. And food. And clothes. I was a monster who couldn’t stop consuming things I thought would make me the human I was supposed to be. (Whitaker, 2021)

After having many conflicting thoughts in my head about what my career path was going to be, I felt like enough was enough. I have tried again and again to be in this box of educated college student and then white-collar employee and it’s just not working for me. Not only for me, but also for the coworkers around me. I realized that someone who was really succeeding in the environment that I was in wouldn’t be dragging their feet on projects and would be curious to learn about new branches of the company. Those are the markers of someone who deserved to be there and who would ultimately thrive in the role. Me, I was not that at all.

I decided that there must be a different way of thinking about my predicament and a different way of living. I needed to figure out what that was. And thus begins this blog………………………………………

Whitaker, H. (2021). Quit like a woman : the radical choice to not drink in a culture obsessed with alcohol. The Dial Press.