Ordinary Love. An invitation to true wellness culture
Postmodernity is too egocentric. This includes current âspiritualâ trends.
Hereâs what an alternative can look like: Yesterday Dara asked Jason to install a window A/C unit in Valâs room; he came over and did it. Last night a participant shared struggling with a contract at work, and a lawyer in the session volunteered to help her redline it. My sister watches the kids while I help my brother-in-law move their furniture to make room for the new baby. If this doesnât sound special, thatâs the point. Youâre already doing this, thatâs also the point.
Iâm not writing to admonish us to âget ridâ of the âegoââa particular self-identity*. I think itâs too hard for modern Americans, steeped in a culture of individualism. I love life, people, experience, and I think a good life includes a sense of âme.â Instead, I want to expand the sense of self to go much beyond the concept of âmy body, my historyâ to see the larger whole these are part of. One upshot of this is gratitude, even for what I usually think of as âJordanâsââlike these thoughts thunk in English. I needed English to think âem, so how much are they âmineâ?Â
Automated & consensual narrative lock-in
We know that social media exacerbated this. Many studies show narcissism and loneliness increasing faster with mass adoption of social media, especially after 2012. Young kids donât want to serve as a fireman or doctor anymore, they want to be adored as an influencer (Weâre working on this social media problem by launching UpTrust).Â
Now I worry that AI is exponentiating this self-reification trend to unprecedented levels.
Last week I met four people who were convinced that their personal ChatGPT interface, molding its âpersonalityâ to respond based on their unique interactions, was a sentient being. If you think our filter bubbles are bad now, imagine what itâs like when we have 8 billion of them? Each individualâs personal collection of bots reinforcing whatever identity feels special, safe, and comfortable, no matter how limited and delusional?
Thereâs nothing wrong with specialness, safety, and comfort, but neither is there anything wrong with ordinariness, risk, and discomfort. Transformation, life, intimacy, and play all demand both. Are we bleaching the color of life in pursuit of maintaining a self? What are we so afraid of that we hide from becoming? Life is transformation. Relating requires and changes our uniqueness. Other people providing friction and challengeâthatâs a service, freely given to all at birth.
Perhaps the trap isnât narcissism. Itâs any reification of identity via any narrative frame, especially spiritual ones, designed to parade as if theyâre narrative-free. And the cost is ordinary love.
Transcend and exclude often means we fall back into less maturity
Iâm still trying to get my mind and language around this, so Iâm going to highlight the contrast to see the phenomena more clearly. Does your coach / (AI) therapist / culture / practice help you:
Express more gratitude? Become more forgiving? Be more accepting of othersâ flaws? âSettle matters quickly with your adversary who is taking you to courtâ?
Or say you should be treated a very particular way (reifying a victim identity?)
Build infrastructure thatâs super helpful but unsexy? Do things that are good for others without recognition? Feed those who are hungry? Do mundane things for the local whole like pick up trash thatâs not yours?
Or build a marketing funnel that will help you promote yourself and perpetuate the âmeâ âmeâ âmeâ cycle?Â
Love your friends and family better? Accept being misunderstood? Show up to their events and support their successes? Take care of them when theyâre sick? Be more generous? Patient, humble, respectful, loyal, temperate? Maintain commitments regardless of feelings?
Or emphasize your in-the-moment desire above all else, calling impulsivity and self-centeredness âsurrenderâ?
Develop boundaries as expressions of love and connection? Face challenges with grace and acceptance? Take responsibility for your pain, flaws, mistakes, shadows, and limitations?
Or use "boundaries" to control others and force them to change according to your preferences?
Admit ignorance, learn from criticism, hold your beliefs lightly, speak simply about profound experiences, work steadily without needing dramatic breakthroughs, notice your defensive patterns without performatively announcing them, contribute to social understanding, love others as they are?
Or position yourself as having rare insights to help others transcend their limitations through your techniques and advice?
This list can go on; I wish I could speak to the connection and community side more but Iâm stuck in my own bias.Â
Iâm not saying itâs easy, we of course need guides, mentors, feedbackâitâs so complicated! Nor am I saying its specialâall of this has been said for thousands of years! Iâm trying to highlight a healthy version of one pole and unhealthy versions of another on purpose to get more clarity on where we are deeply unbalanced today. This is especially true of âspiritualâ hotbeds like San Francisco, Boulder, Ubud, Amsterdam. Austin is somewhat counterbalanced by its Texas-nessâcowboy culture still emphasizes family, duty and sacrifice to a greater good beyond âyouâ. Plus our immigrants are a little more integrated.
Whatâs up with me?
Anyway, I ask myself: Why do I care?
Sure, practices purported to transcend ego instead teach self-absorption. But itâs in the nameâ "personal growth" and âself-help.â Whatâs got me?
Because Iâm guilty of all of this.Â
Sometimes despite my best efforts, Iâve taught people to ignore their minds in order to stay with the sensations of their bodies (rather than integrating them); to âsurrenderâ to their feelings-in-the-moment and ignore larger consequences or agreements and the greater wholes that hold them. Iâve corrected a lot of these mistakes, made amends, even evolved the practice and training. Yet I still canât quite escape the selfishness of âwellnessâ culture. Prime example: a couple years ago we hosted a âGive Festâ at the Relateful Studio in Austin with a reverse silent auction, where people bid on what they wanted to give to a local nonprofit. Even my wife and I didnât follow through on what we âwon.â
Let us redefine wellness and self-development. Let us change the metrics to gratitude, forgiveness, acceptance of our and others' flaws, showing up for family, friendship, and our greater communities. Let us celebrate unglamorous, unwitnessed interdependence.
Three alternatives: what is it all for?
Burning Man is actually a great example of a positive alternative. The economy is about giftingâand after your first year, itâs well known that to get the most out of the experience, you need to give. People camp in communities, build massive art projects and cars together, and give them freely without credit, burning them at the end. Itâs all about creating for the whole, being present with each other in non-transactional relating. All of this disrupts the self-reification loops in such a way that people are consistently shaken from long held encumbrances, and come out of the desert transformed. I say this as an admirer but not a fanaticâI went to Black Rock City in 2012 and 2014, and then didnât go again.
Relatefulness
Relatefulness, especially in Level Up âŹâs Leadership Program and the The Relateful Coaching Training, does not fall into these problem nearly as badly as almost every other community Iâve seen. We claim our directionality of truth + love. This means the personal canât be number oneâindividual expression and growth is always in service of something greater. Of course we make mistakes. (For example, the Level Up structure highlighted individualism. Weâll be returning to a cohort-only model this Fallâmore on that in a future email). But weâve done a really good job focusing on being with what is, especially relationally and communally.Â
We donât abandon compassion and honesty in service of making sure people feel seen, heard, cultivating a âsafe space,â or maintaining instagram-defined-trauma-therapy-norms. This is hard, because I not only want people to feel seen, heard, safe, and heal, I think itâs crucial for a healthy community and for the true pursuit of truth and love. It just needs to be in service of love/truth, rather than an end unto itself. It needs to come authentically from the moment, not as a script or status signal or performance. We run into generative friction embracing the seeming paradox of this polarity all the time, and it is incredibly demanding of our facilitators to walk this tight rope. It demands that we are always changing, individually as leaders, as a community, and even the practice itself. Even our coaching teaches revealing identity commitments, inherently making the self an object in a larger self that can choose âyesâ or ânoâ to, versus reinforcing a self and an existing worldview.
And even as we teach people how to meta-narrate as a way to witness and disembed themselves from unconscious habits that have been running them, we recognize that the compulsion to name and categorize experiencesâspiritual or otherwiseâoften becomes a form of conceptual possession, serving self preservation rather than self-transformation.
(continued in comment)
(this will be sent out to my #TTT email in a couple of days, but UpTrust gets the early exclusive ;) )