Ordinary Love. An invitation to true wellness culture
Postmodernity is too egocentric. This includes current “spiritual” trends.
Here’s what an alternative can look like: Yesterday Dara asked Jason to install a window A/C unit in Val’s 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 doesn’t sound special, that’s the point. You’re already doing this, that’s also the point.
I’m not writing to admonish us to “get rid” of the “ego”—a particular self-identity*. I think it’s 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 “me.” Instead, I want to expand the sense of self to go much beyond the concept of “my body, my history” to see the larger whole these are part of. One upshot of this is gratitude, even for what I usually think of as “Jordan’s”—like these thoughts thunk in English. I needed English to think ‘em, so how much are they ‘mine’?
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 don’t want to serve as a fireman or doctor anymore, they want to be adored as an influencer (We’re working on this social media problem by launching UpTrust).
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 “personality” to respond based on their unique interactions, was a sentient being. If you think our filter bubbles are bad now, imagine what it’s like when we have 8 billion of them? Each individual’s personal collection of bots reinforcing whatever identity feels special, safe, and comfortable, no matter how limited and delusional?
There’s 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 challenge—that’s a service, freely given to all at birth.
Perhaps the trap isn’t narcissism. It’s any reification of identity via any narrative frame, especially spiritual ones, designed to parade as if they’re narrative-free. And the cost is ordinary love.
Transcend and exclude often means we fall back into less maturity
I’m still trying to get my mind and language around this, so I’m 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 others’ flaws? “Settle matters quickly with your adversary who is taking you to court”?
Or say you should be treated a very particular way (reifying a victim identity?)
Build infrastructure that’s 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 that’s not yours?
Or build a marketing funnel that will help you promote yourself and perpetuate the ‘me’ ‘me’ ‘me’ cycle?
Love your friends and family better? Accept being misunderstood? Show up to their events and support their successes? Take care of them when they’re 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 ‘surrender’?
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 I’m stuck in my own bias.
I’m not saying it’s easy, we of course need guides, mentors, feedback–it’s so complicated! Nor am I saying its special—all of this has been said for thousands of years! I’m 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 ‘spiritual’ hotbeds like San Francisco, Boulder, Ubud, Amsterdam. Austin is somewhat counterbalanced by its Texas-ness—cowboy culture still emphasizes family, duty and sacrifice to a greater good beyond ‘you’. Plus our immigrants are a little more integrated.
What’s up with me?
Anyway, I ask myself: Why do I care?
Sure, practices purported to transcend ego instead teach self-absorption. But it’s in the name— "personal growth" and “self-help.” What’s got me?
Because I’m guilty of all of this.
Sometimes despite my best efforts, I’ve taught people to ignore their minds in order to stay with the sensations of their bodies (rather than integrating them); to ‘surrender’ to their feelings-in-the-moment and ignore larger consequences or agreements and the greater wholes that hold them. I’ve corrected a lot of these mistakes, made amends, even evolved the practice and training. Yet I still can’t quite escape the selfishness of ‘wellness’ culture. Prime example: a couple years ago we hosted a “Give Fest” 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 didn’t follow through on what we ‘won.’
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 gifting—and after your first year, it’s 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. It’s 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 fanatic—I went to Black Rock City in 2012 and 2014, and then didn’t go again.
Relatefulness
Relatefulness, especially in Level Up ⬆’s Leadership Program and the The Relateful Coaching Training, does not fall into these problem nearly as badly as almost every other community I’ve seen. We claim our directionality of truth + love. This means the personal can’t be number one—individual expression and growth is always in service of something greater. Of course we make mistakes. (For example, the Level Up structure highlighted individualism. We’ll be returning to a cohort-only model this Fall—more on that in a future email). But we’ve done a really good job focusing on being with what is, especially relationally and communally.
We don’t abandon compassion and honesty in service of making sure people feel seen, heard, cultivating a ‘safe space,’ 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 it’s 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 “yes” or “no” 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 experiences—spiritual or otherwise—often becomes a form of conceptual possession, serving self preservation rather than self-transformation.
Frozen
The Disney movie Frozen shows another fantastic example of a healthy alternative. (I just watched the Broadway version with my kids this weekend, so it's fresh on my mind).
In my view, the critical part of Elsa moving from “Conceal don’t reveal” to “Let it Go” is not about self-expression, it's about surrendering the need to control, particularly others’ reactions to her true nature. As a result she loves what she previously saw as her shame (her ice power), an identity transformation that eliminates the victim-perpetrator dynamic entirely and unlocks her ability to use her power for everyone’s benefit.
But of course the most incredible part is reframing the trope of “true love”—not just from romantic to familial love, but about the act of loving others. The secret that ‘healed’ Anna’s frozen heart wasn’t receiving ‘true love’ from someone else, but her performing a selfless act of true love herself. Even better, she truly loved the one who accidentally caused the curse in the first place, in a show of what I like to call “true forgiveness”—there was never any threat to love’s presence in the first place. So in some real sense, nothing to forgive. Family love, particularly love that endures despite harm, represents the ordinary, unglamorous love that doesn't depend on worthiness or reciprocity (romantic love ideally is the same, but often feels like something we need to earn or could lose).
Oh and there’s the wonderful Olaf, as a projection of the best of Anna and Elsa’s innocence in childhood. And I love that it’s not spiritual :)
True spirituality isn’t spiritual (and is definitely not about ‘me’)
As usual, I’m writing this for myself as much as anyone. Can I experience states of fundamental wellbeing, help others, and act with virtue and integrity without any internal or external narration / validation? Without needing it to be spiritual development? Who would be accumulating spiritual experiences or qualities anyway, and what would they be good for if not to benefit the whole of existence?
Can all of my mastery lead me to being completely ordinary? Not needing actions to be recognized as anything, even by myself, I respond to what's in front of me without overlaying (spiritual) significance.
And can I not do that for the sake of development either? If I notice that self-referential trap, may I love myself in it and move on with the normal good stuff of living. The self-referential loop is infinite if I engage it.
Instead, let me show up lovingly for the sake of itself, because that’s what love does.
—
*Although that is a path that can work for some people like Byron Katie or Eckhart Tolle, it’s a hard one to “do” because the will that acts needs to eventually be transcended. In both of their histories, their dissolution was more done to them.
(this will be sent out to my #TTT email in a couple of days, but UpTrust gets the early exclusive ;) )