human behavior

AMA with Jeffrey Ladish. Wednesday 2/4 at 2:00 PM CT

Executive director of Palisade Research; studying AI loss of control risks.

AMA with Rob Miles on AI Safety. Wednesday, 2/4 at 1:00pm CT

AISafety.info founder has spent years telling the world about risk posed by strong AI.

AMA with Ali Beiner. Wednesday 2/4 at 11:00 AM CT

Kainos host Alexander Beiner exploring cultural sensemaking around psychedelics, popular culture, philosophy, psychology, alternative economics, and spirituality.

Like is different than trust. I think Jordan said at an uptrust session that he misses the like button. I’m having the same feeling lately, there are posts I like that I wouldn’t necessarily say I trust. Or I want to give it some sort of that was cool but I don’t want that statement in my trust algorithm.

But maybe that’s all for the best? Surely some not-insignificant portion of my trust isn’t in my conscious awareness, maybe feeling a sense of yes to something is functionally the same as trust.

How to make skills of depth/presence/development legible to others? I've had this fantasy for the past year of creating a YT live stream show that features different teachers, facilitators, healers of different modalities and somehow make legible what they're doing to a larger audience.

Often, my experience is people enter the spiritual/healing/relational arts world from a really intellectual place and work down.

For example, 
- Read a book about the topic (NVC, IFS, meditation, etc)
- Practice it mainly from their head (sentence stems)
- Do a milllion reps and somewhere realize, this is also an embodied awareness practice
- Start getting into the weird woo territories of energy, spirits, intuition, etc

But to a beginner, there's a pre-/post- issue where you can't really tell the difference between a really deep facilitator and a really confident charlatan.

Furthermore, you aren't really that interested in the really deep people. A lot of my friends have been practicing for 15+ years and won't seem impressive on a podcast or a stage like the big head intellectuals and academia folk (Brene Brown, Lex Friedman, Huberman, etc) but they are geniuses in their own craft.

So, how to illustrate these skills that don't translate as well into written or spoken existing mediums?

hope that's legible what the q here even is

Shadows of personal growth culture: weaponized toolkits. I think everyone here has probably experienced weaponized NVC. What are some of the other things you see weaponized that annoy you?

eg:

• Weaponized Commitment to connection: there are bunch of versions of this: i can’t heal myself without you, my feelings are dependent on your reaction (classic codependency) you must stay in the connection and respond to my inquiry or else you’re not deep, spiritual, or committed enough, etc

• weaponized owning your experience

Of course most of the time if you simply use principles, steps, and tools for yourself only you dont run into these issues; but even then people are sneaky and manipulative (often without even realizing it themselves!)

Relatefulness vs Circling. I've been discovering distinctions and felt-senses of Relatefulness that seem to differ from how I know Circling. My short catch phrase is: "If meditation is the art of being, and Circling is the art of being-with, then Relatefulness is the art of being-human-with."

I like this, it's short and sweet. I can't tell what Relatefulness really is vs what I'm making it and, given that I'm a founding member, it doesn't matter. I'm gonna bully these points.

Jane Goodall is in more Flows than she is in Surrendered Leadership. Helping behavior, care, needs, art, and the building of infracstructure are welcomed in Relatefulness. One thing I notice about Circling, if person A offers person B something, person A is (at least culturally) more likely to ask, "What's underneath it for you?", as if they're asking, "What's this cocaine cut with?" It's rarely believed in Circling if the underneath isn't negative. If the offering Circler says, "Care", then most Circlers assume a spiritual bypass and probably imagine being less sexually attractive (sarcasm). In Relatefulness I'm creating that, Person A offers Person B something, Person B, taking notes from Hannah Taylor, feels whether accepting feels like comfort and then accepts or declines accordingly. 

In Relatefulness we let the responsibility for shadow-hunting be with the one offering. It's a huge leap to believe that accepting something is bad because the offer had some shadow somewhere inside of it. It's actually a ridiculous leap. It's stupid. The shadow could just as easily be ameliorated by seeing its energy flow generatively or made worse by non-rational repetitive rejection.

Boom. Suck it. (I don't know who I'm angry at....myself.)

Last night as I was leading lab it felt amazing. I was watching them float in and out of chit chat. The thing that wasn't in and out was everything they were talking about was meaningful. There wasn't anyone there, besides a voice in my mind, that was tracking whether they were using speech patterns of immediacy, "Being here now, I feel like my balls haven't descended." They were just talking. I did not police it because it felt so fucking good. We're monkeys and we feel good. What I did do was use immediacy leaning language and speak it between people. I let people see the effect and never brought up them following. If it's good and it works then they'll follow at their aligned speed.

I stayed in slight vigilance as the thing in my brain that polices immediacy, or is on the lookout from being policed, slowly calmed down. It was beautiful.

In short, Relatefulness is more about being monkeys than monks, healthy than right, in alignment than understood.

Pass the bananas!

Dating is over. 

discuss...

Our Experience of Gender is Caught in a Drama Triangle. My contribution to the #DeepTakes event is an experience I find really alienating and lonely on a personal level and I see it playing out culturally in a way that seems to impact everyone I know (and obviously huge swaths of people I don't).To express what I am seeing in this context I first have to explain a little bit about what I mean when I invoke the concept of a Drama Triangle.

The Drama Triangle is a social model of human interaction proposed by psychiatrist Stephen Karpman. It suggests that in circumstances where conflict arises and individuals are reactive to rather than present with that conflict there is a tendency to assign three roles: victim, hero, and villain.The victim role is characterized by fear and helplessness, the hero role is characterized by righteousness and some attempt to act as a saviour for the victim, and the villain role is characterized by blame (of self or others).

What is most important to me about this model is not how it points out that this dynamic often emerges in the context of conflict, but how it reveals that the dynamic is unconscious, volatile, and misleading. When the dynamic arises, it is typically through some invisible collusion that the roles are assigned and they remain implicit rather than being consciously claimed by the individuals involved. As a result of the unconscious nature of the dynamic, the roles are unstable - individuals often end up switching between these three roles as implicitly and unconsciously as the same roles initially emerged. Regardless of how the roles are assigned at any given moment, they obscure something true about each individual involved - victims are actually agentic and accountable for their own experiences, heroes are not moral authorities nor are they responsible for victims' experiences, and villains are not sole causes of the conflicts arising between them and their hero/victim counterparts.

I've explained this concept in the context of a conflict arising between individuals but, when it comes to gender, I am seeing the same dynamic play out in broader cultural conflicts between and within gendered groups. Probably the clearest example I can provide is how conflict between capital W-Women and capital M-Men has given rise to a drama triangle. For longer than I've been around there has been a broad, complex cultural claim that society is structured in such a way that Women are inherently victims and Men are inherently Villains. The specter of a Hero arises from this dynamic in many forms; activist groups are perhaps the clearest examples but it is also interesting to see how women/men may belong to the group role of victim/villain yet act in the role of the hero on an individual level if they can be seen as acting out any sort of protection, vengeance, etc. in reaction to to the Story of Women's Victimhood.

In my own experience relating to men, the cultural phenomenon of this Drama Triangle has been profoundly unhelpful! The dynamic sets a cultural precedent that looms over any conflict that arises between me and a man in my life - as tension emerges in our connection our difference in gender pulls this cultural lens into place such that there is a shared apprehension that I will be assigned the victim role and he will be assigned the villain role. What a mess! As if staying present with tension and orienting toward love and truth isn't enough of a task already! From here there are plenty of ways we squirm together - maybe we both preemptively try to promise we are not the victim/the villain, maybe I'll try to put him in the victim role or he'll try to put me in the villain role, maybe one of us will scramble to be the hero. All unconscious, unhelpful strategies to navigate an unconscious, unhelpful cultural script. I am getting a headache just writing about it.

Trust me, I wish this dynamic only loomed over my connections with men in my life. On the contrary, the way this Drama Triangle twists up my relationships with other women may actually be even more damaging - it's a tough race to call. In my connections with women the cultural precedent of the Drama Triangle still creates a shared apprehension but in this context the apprehension is that we are both victims and that we agree that men are villainous. Now I could gesture at the various ways in which this has been awkward and disconnecting in my relationships with other women but frankly, there is one stand out context which I see as the likely root of my deep resentment motivating this deep take.

I have had difficult situations with bad outcomes (ranging from deep emotional wounds to physical/sexual assaults) arise in my connections with men in my life. From the very earliest of these challenging experiences, it has been very important to me to integrate these experiences in ways that protect and strengthen my capacity to have healthy, loving relationships with men. I faced profound difficulty finding women who were able to support me in integrating my experiences this way rather than imposing the Drama Triangle on my situation, villainizing the men involved, and seeking to either play out the Hero role by saving me or pressuring me to join them in the victim role as a fellow woman. I have severed friendships, fired therapists, and generally opted out of "women's spaces" to protect myself from this because to the extent that I have ever seen myself as the victim of difficult situations with men it has been intolerable! My experience of the victim role was catastrophic for my self esteem, ruinous for my romantic relationships, and completely spiritually backward. I really really hate it.

Obviously I can't say as much about how this dynamic impacts men's relationships with one another but I do see men face pressure from women to take on the hero role by confronting other men as villains in their community. I've also had multiple men open up to me about the way that they've internalized the cultural role of Men as Villains and alienated them from their own sexualities, ambitions, boundaries etc. through a narrative that they are inherently creepy, greedy, controlling, etc. Although I don't seem to attract men who respond by trying to claim the victim role for themselves in my personal life, I am certainly aware of the "Manosphere" where the subcultural norm is to invert the cultural script and see men as the victim of women who perpetuate the myth of their own victimhood as a power grab and manipulation at mens' expense.

Now more than ever before it seems especially clear that gender non-conforming individuals are also deeply impacted by the way the binary gendered experience is captured by the Drama Triangle. While this impact is complex and multi-faceted, I'll offer an over-simplification here which I see as gesturing to a very prominent thread of impact for these communities. Non-binary and Trans people often seem to me to be implicitly collapsed into the same group role as Women or Men so that the existing cultural script can fit them into the Drama Triangle without much modification.

My social circles and information channels tend toward treating gender non-conforming groups as analogous to Women and implicitly assumes that they too are inherently victims of Men and assenting to this categorization puts "Us" (whoever we may be) in the hero role. Given my own impact of internalizing the message that I am a victim of Men, I have a strong projection that gender nonconforming people are actually greatly disadvantaged by the imposition of this lens and in my own relationships with gender non-conforming people in my life, the apprehension that they are victims and I ought to be heroic about it makes me act kinda weird. I feel an inflated sense of responsibility for their feelings and end up walking on egg shells around them in a way that doesn't feel true to me at all. This is something I really wanna work on in these relationships but, just like in my relationships with men and women, I deeply resent the added weight of the Drama Triangle as it shows up for me here.

Similar to the Manosphere example, I don't have much first hand experience of the corresponding culture which collapses gender non-conforming people in with Men but it is on my radar that there are people who see Women as victims of Non-binary and Trans People. This dynamic tends to rigidly impose the existing gender binary against the autonomy of gender non-conforming people and conclude that AMAB gender non-conforming people are trying to cheat their way into Women's Sacred Victimhood and AAFB gender non-conforming people are abandoning their sisters to escape Women's Sacred Victimhood and that whole narrative is unspeakably yucky to me in so so many ways.

There exist at least a couple of "answers" to the Drama Triangle that offer possible healthy responses to this unhealthy dynamic. Choy's "Winner's Triangle" suggests softening the helplessness, righteousness, and blame of the victim, hero, and villain into vulnerability, care, and assertiveness, respectively. Emerald's "Empowerment Dynamic" suggests swapping the victim role for the creator, characterized by a reclaiming of personal power, swapping the hero for the coach, characterized by the facilitation of the creator's self-empowerment, and swapping the villain for the challenger, characterized by the capacity to call others to action.

Imagine me shouting to the sky and shaking my fists when I write how strongly I would prefer a cultural norm that experimented with these approaches (or invented new ones) in context where conflict arises and gendered experiences are implicated. I've been taking my own baby steps in my relationships with men, women, and gender non-conforming folks, but I come to you all hoping for help to foster awareness and openness to new norms in our community. I deeply believe if we could make our great escape from the Drama Triangle and reclaim our experience of life in a world with genders it would be miraculously transformative for our relationships with ourselves, our intimate partners, our friends and family, and the world at large. 

Quick take. Whether you are familiar or not with Freud's concept of "the narcissism of small differences", it's affecting the way you relate to people and ideas 

What’s up with the massive rise in popularity of cold plunge and sauna? #quicktakes 

We need to stop shaming small dicks. OK this was meant to be anonymous cos I don't want to be slut shamed ... 

But I can't create a second anon account right now, looks like that anon account is just going to the wait list. And I care about this topic and I like what I have to say about it so I'm going to go ahead and share even though I risk attracting condemnation (that relates to a whole other hot take that I'll set aside for now).

So here's my #deeptake on the hot take that we should stop shaming small dicks:

Am I the only one who winces with a vicarious ouch every time a woman casually insists that a big penis belongs on her list of essential criteria for a good man - like in this great example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjqvY7Gdp1A)

That’s how I was going to begin this piece. Then I looked in the mirror and admitted that it would be more accurate (and more honest) to start with: I know I’m not the only one who feels this way.

I know this because of the talking-to a friend gave me a few years ago when I conspiratorially spilled on a perfect new love interest whose only flaw was that his dick was on the smallish side.

When she started to object, I pleaded for understanding. I can’t help my tastes and preferences! This was just how I was born! I’d had enough experience to know what I needed!

I am ashamed to admit that I went so far as to suggest that if we progressed in our relationship, I could at some point maybe ask him to wear a strap-on. I think that was the point at which my friend-worthiness was forever punctured in my her eyes. She was legitimately horrified, and confronted me with the possibility that it might just be me who was anatomically challenged!

And she was right - I was the one with the problem. I’m still smarting as I write this - not from my own body shame, but from reliving the moment where I had to face my callous and miscalibrated treatment of my would-be lover and of men collectively.

One of the things that hurts most is how I ignored the uneasy stab in my heart every time I indulged in this offhand mass-bullying. I always knew, in a palpable way, this was wrong. Every time I singled out penis size when celebrating one of my sexual adventures. Every time I laughed sympathetically when a friend proclaimed a preference for bigger penises or dismissed a smaller one. My inner voice always whispered to me - how do you think men feel about this? What’s it like to have your worthiness as a partner be diminished to a feature you are powerless to change? What’s it like to be the butt of an enduring in-joke, to risk silent ridicule every time you want to share the joy of sex with someone?

Even with my difficulty handling some bigger penises. Even experiencing the deep bliss of my encounters with average-sized penises. Even receiving the liberating possibilities that opened up with smaller penises. None of these facts penetrated my collusion with what now seems like an obvious and incredibly harmful mass psychosis.

HOW is this still normal?! The closest I have come to understanding the roots of my own behaviour is that I was under-developed, not confident and embodied enough yet in my own sexuality to really claim the truth of my own experience.

What’s true for me, actually, is that every penis I’ve been honoured to meet feels like a blessing.

As I have matured and found the capacity to recognise and cherish this, some of my most extraordinary and ecstatically transformative sexual experiences have in fact involved a pretty small penis! I think penis size was actually an irrelevant albeit happily coincidental feature in this case - a feature which finally crumbled any residue of the myth that small dicks are bad and bigger is better.

My prayer is that more and more of us are liberated from this myth. I’m pretty sure we don’t need it to fuel this kind of creative brilliance (which I opened with, but here it is again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjqvY7Gdp1A). And we’ll probably all have way more extraordinary and ecstatically transformative sex without it. That’s what I really want.

Our Experience of Gender is Caught in a Drama Triangle. My contribution to the #DeepTakes event is an experience I find really alienating and lonely on a personal level and I see it playing out culturally in a way that seems to impact everyone I know (and obviously huge swaths of people I don't).To express what I am seeing in this context I first have to explain a little bit about what I mean when I invoke the concept of a Drama Triangle.

The Drama Triangle is a social model of human interaction proposed by psychiatrist Stephen Karpman. It suggests that in circumstances where conflict arises and individuals are reactive to rather than present with that conflict there is a tendency to assign three roles: victim, hero, and villain.The victim role is characterized by fear and helplessness, the hero role is characterized by righteousness and some attempt to act as a saviour for the victim, and the villain role is characterized by blame (of self or others).

What is most important to me about this model is not how it points out that this dynamic often emerges in the context of conflict, but how it reveals that the dynamic is unconscious, volatile, and misleading. When the dynamic arises, it is typically through some invisible collusion that the roles are assigned and they remain implicit rather than being consciously claimed by the individuals involved. As a result of the unconscious nature of the dynamic, the roles are unstable - individuals often end up switching between these three roles as implicitly and unconsciously as the same roles initially emerged. Regardless of how the roles are assigned at any given moment, they obscure something true about each individual involved - victims are actually agentic and accountable for their own experiences, heroes are not moral authorities nor are they responsible for victims' experiences, and villains are not sole causes of the conflicts arising between them and their hero/victim counterparts.

I've explained this concept in the context of a conflict arising between individuals but, when it comes to gender, I am seeing the same dynamic play out in broader cultural conflicts between and within gendered groups. Probably the clearest example I can provide is how conflict between capital W-Women and capital M-Men has given rise to a drama triangle. For longer than I've been around there has been a broad, complex cultural claim that society is structured in such a way that Women are inherently victims and Men are inherently Villains. The specter of a Hero arises from this dynamic in many forms; activist groups are perhaps the clearest examples but it is also interesting to see how women/men may belong to the group role of victim/villain yet act in the role of the hero on an individual level if they can be seen as acting out any sort of protection, vengeance, etc. in reaction to to the Story of Women's Victimhood.

In my own experience relating to men, the cultural phenomenon of this Drama Triangle has been profoundly unhelpful! The dynamic sets a cultural precedent that looms over any conflict that arises between me and a man in my life - as tension emerges in our connection our difference in gender pulls this cultural lens into place such that there is a shared apprehension that I will be assigned the victim role and he will be assigned the villain role. What a mess! As if staying present with tension and orienting toward love and truth isn't enough of a task already! From here there are plenty of ways we squirm together - maybe we both preemptively try to promise we are not the victim/the villain, maybe I'll try to put him in the victim role or he'll try to put me in the villain role, maybe one of us will scramble to be the hero. All unconscious, unhelpful strategies to navigate an unconscious, unhelpful cultural script. I am getting a headache just writing about it.

Trust me, I wish this dynamic only loomed over my connections with men in my life. On the contrary, the way this Drama Triangle twists up my relationships with other women may actually be even more damaging - it's a tough race to call. In my connections with women the cultural precedent of the Drama Triangle still creates a shared apprehension but in this context the apprehension is that we are both victims and that we agree that men are villainous. Now I could gesture at the various ways in which this has been awkward and disconnecting in my relationships with other women but frankly, there is one stand out context which I see as the likely root of my deep resentment motivating this deep take.

I have had difficult situations with bad outcomes (ranging from deep emotional wounds to physical/sexual assaults) arise in my connections with men in my life. From the very earliest of these challenging experiences, it has been very important to me to integrate these experiences in ways that protect and strengthen my capacity to have healthy, loving relationships with men. I faced profound difficulty finding women who were able to support me in integrating my experiences this way rather than imposing the Drama Triangle on my situation, villainizing the men involved, and seeking to either play out the Hero role by saving me or pressuring me to join them in the victim role as a fellow woman. I have severed friendships, fired therapists, and generally opted out of "women's spaces" to protect myself from this because to the extent that I have ever seen myself as the victim of difficult situations with men it has been intolerable! My experience of the victim role was catastrophic for my self esteem, ruinous for my romantic relationships, and completely spiritually backward. I really really hate it.

Obviously I can't say as much about how this dynamic impacts men's relationships with one another but I do see men face pressure from women to take on the hero role by confronting other men as villains in their community. I've also had multiple men open up to me about the way that they've internalized the cultural role of Men as Villains and alienated them from their own sexualities, ambitions, boundaries etc. through a narrative that they are inherently creepy, greedy, controlling, etc. Although I don't seem to attract men who respond by trying to claim the victim role for themselves in my personal life, I am certainly aware of the "Manosphere" where the subcultural norm is to invert the cultural script and see men as the victim of women who perpetuate the myth of their own victimhood as a power grab and manipulation at mens' expense.

Now more than ever before it seems especially clear that gender non-conforming individuals are also deeply impacted by the way the binary gendered experience is captured by the Drama Triangle. While this impact is complex and multi-faceted, I'll offer an over-simplification here which I see as gesturing to a very prominent thread of impact for these communities. Non-binary and Trans people often seem to me to be implicitly collapsed into the same group role as Women or Men so that the existing cultural script can fit them into the Drama Triangle without much modification.

My social circles and information channels tend toward treating gender non-conforming groups as analogous to Women and implicitly assumes that they too are inherently victims of Men and assenting to this categorization puts "Us" (whoever we may be) in the hero role. Given my own impact of internalizing the message that I am a victim of Men, I have a strong projection that gender nonconforming people are actually greatly disadvantaged by the imposition of this lens and in my own relationships with gender non-conforming people in my life, the apprehension that they are victims and I ought to be heroic about it makes me act kinda weird. I feel an inflated sense of responsibility for their feelings and end up walking on egg shells around them in a way that doesn't feel true to me at all. This is something I really wanna work on in these relationships but, just like in my relationships with men and women, I deeply resent the added weight of the Drama Triangle as it shows up for me here.

Similar to the Manosphere example, I don't have much first hand experience of the corresponding culture which collapses gender non-conforming people in with Men but it is on my radar that there are people who see Women as victims of Non-binary and Trans People. This dynamic tends to rigidly impose the existing gender binary against the autonomy of gender non-conforming people and conclude that AMAB gender non-conforming people are trying to cheat their way into Women's Sacred Victimhood and AAFB gender non-conforming people are abandoning their sisters to escape Women's Sacred Victimhood and that whole narrative is unspeakably yucky to me in so so many ways.

There exist at least a couple of "answers" to the Drama Triangle that offer possible healthy responses to this unhealthy dynamic. Choy's "Winner's Triangle" suggests softening the helplessness, righteousness, and blame of the victim, hero, and villain into vulnerability, care, and assertiveness, respectively. Emerald's "Empowerment Dynamic" suggests swapping the victim role for the creator, characterized by a reclaiming of personal power, swapping the hero for the coach, characterized by the facilitation of the creator's self-empowerment, and swapping the villain for the challenger, characterized by the capacity to call others to action.

Imagine me shouting to the sky and shaking my fists when I write how strongly I would prefer a cultural norm that experimented with these approaches (or invented new ones) in context where conflict arises and gendered experiences are implicated. I've been taking my own baby steps in my relationships with men, women, and gender non-conforming folks, but I come to you all hoping for help to foster awareness and openness to new norms in our community. I deeply believe if we could make our great escape from the Drama Triangle and reclaim our experience of life in a world with genders it would be miraculously transformative for our relationships with ourselves, our intimate partners, our friends and family, and the world at large. 

We don't always have to feel connected with ourselves first to connect with others. Sometimes, I find myself in connecting with the other. Waiting to feel a certain way to join others, like waiting to lose weight to start going to dances; or waiting to feel confident to make that call we dread; or waiting for "signs" to talk with your partner and tell them you've thinking about separating (you thinking about it IS the sign to have the talk). I've seen in others` eyes the love that I have not had for myself in certain moments...the acceptance, the compassion, the understanding I can't sometimes reach on my own. What's stopping you, sometimes, to be felt and seen as you are?#DeepTakes

Musings: The World Is Overstilumated. I'm reflecting on my experience this summer spending 3 days in the dark. I was in Tangier, Morocco, in an apartment, and I had those garage door window shutters that would keep the entire apartment completely pitch black even in the middle of the day. I chose to spend 3 days in the darkness. Mostly sitting on the couch staring into darkness.

I wasn't aware of this experience having much impact until I started having phone calls with people from the darkness. I could hear everything in the silence. Beyond someone's voice, I could hear the Soul speaking. I'm pretty convinced we can communicate in Silence, and I love words.

I've been wondering about how overstimulated the world is. In this moment I'm watching the woman across the table from me scroll through her phone, going from Instagram to Spotify to texting to checking out concert tickets this weekend. Starting sentences and starting new ones mid sentence. I'm in love with how incongruent and disoriented we can appear as humans.

I wonder what it would be like for the world to take a day off from stimulus: food, cell phone, entertainment devices, etc. What if we had a collective pause? Sunlight, water, fresh air. Our collective nervous system could use a Parasympathetic Pause. I like this as an Emerging Probability and Planetary Potential. Feels like part of the emerging meta-model and protocol for The Wellbeing of Humanity.

Musings: The World Is Overstilumated. I'm reflecting on my experience this summer spending 3 days in the dark. I was in Tangier, Morocco, in an apartment, and I had those garage door window shutters that would keep the entire apartment completely pitch black even in the middle of the day. I chose to spend 3 days in the darkness. Mostly sitting on the couch staring into darkness.

I wasn't aware of this experience having much impact until I started having phone calls with people from the darkness. I could hear everything in the silence. Beyond someone's voice, I could hear the Soul speaking. I'm pretty convinced we can communicate in Silence, and I love words.

I've been wondering about how overstimulated the world is. In this moment I'm watching the woman across the table from me scroll through her phone, going from Instagram to Spotify to texting to checking out concert tickets this weekend. Starting sentences and starting new ones mid sentence. I'm in love with how incongruent and disoriented we can appear as humans.

I wonder what it would be like for the world to take a day off from stimulus: food, cell phone, entertainment devices, etc. What if we had a collective pause? Sunlight, water, fresh air. Our collective nervous system could use a Parasympathetic Pause. I like this as an Emerging Probability and Planetary Potential. Feels like part of the emerging meta-model and protocol for The Wellbeing of Humanity.

When it comes "the global warming debate," there are often third ways that are ignored. Often the framing is global warming and climate deniers or something like that.

but it seems like there are obviously multiple perspectives here, and these two black and white boxes keep us from really seeing potential solutions.

Bjorn Lomborg for example believes in man-made climate change, but also doesn’t like the alarmism. Although he cherry picks data like he accuses others of, he also I think rightfully points out lots of flaws in the arguments that help us identify solutions. Much of the hurricane damage increase over time is because we’re building bigger and more expensive houses in hurricane alleys; for this problem, we can stop building there; everybody stopping flying altogether until 2100 delays increases the increase by a few weeks, so stopping flying isn’t the solution. Often the solutions are smaller, more local, less sexy: want less polar bears to die? Increase regulation on poaching. (Polar bear populations are up over the past decade because of this, apparently). I would love to identify and popularize these solutions, so they are spoken in the same breath as global warming rather than it being all gloom and doom and end of the world.

There are real tricky questions about what we’re trying to preserve and for whom, as well. If all we care about are humans and climate migration, then building infrastructure in places like Haiti and even evolving to coal power would be more helpful.