Why Is Vertical Development so Important in Our World Today?

I’ve been researching vertical development for over a decade now. And as I begin to understand it at a deeper and deeper level, I realize how so much of it underpins life as a whole. So much so now, that I pretty much see how it relates to everything, especially issues arising within our world today.

The girl on the news who said she was doing everything society said she should do but nothing seemed to be working for her. More than anything, she felt like she was drowning and could barely get ahead.

The guy who committed suicide after he lost his job that he had most of his life.

The other guy who lost his lifelong job as well and ended up killing some of the people within the company in retaliation.

Leaders in companies who believe they’re the epitome of success, yet they’re often completely detached from the needs and values of their employees and customers.

Politicians who often say they will solve all of the problems their opponents created, yet they often end up creating more problems than solving them themselves when they get elected.

Citizens who feel like politicians and governments aren’t helping to solve the serious problems in their lives. Yet most of these wicked problems in the world today are systemic, societal issues that no single politician or political party can possibly solve on their own because these problems are so huge and complex in nature that they require a collective societal effort not seen since the previous world wars.

It Teaches Us About Our Perceptions & Beliefs

Most of these issues arise because of the way we perceive ourselves, our identity, and the world around us. They arise because we believe something and we make that belief into a reality, even though it may not actually be.

What vertical development helps a person to understand is that what they perceive and believe to be true, may not actually be true, primarily because we’re not seeing reality directly, so much as we’re seeing an internal GPS-like map of it that we believe to be true. And as the saying goes, “the map is not the territory.”

So when you lose your job and you feel like your life is literally over. It isn’t. It feels that way obviously, with a painful intensity that you can barely contain. But it’s not real in the sense that you’re not literally dying, even though it feels like you really are. This more than anything is what vertical development can help you to understand.

It helps you to realize that when you’re challenged by life on a monumental scale and your way of navigating the world no longer seems to be working for you, your life isn’t ending so much as it is creatively beginning in a whole new way. But in a way you just can’t fully understand and make sense of yet, until you take that first step of the journey into the unknown and begin mapping it out yourself.

It Teaches Us That Change Is Constant & Complex

For a lot of people, this is something that they aren’t going to be able to comprehend. For example, most people might say, “Life never seemed this complex before, why now?”

That’s because our world is constantly changing, yet many of us often aren’t aware of it in our busy daily lives, so we don’t really realize it. Instead we often look at the world today and think the world always worked this way. But it didn’t.

Everything that’s a part of your everyday life was conceived of as an idea by someone and made into a reality. The institutions that form the foundations of our society once didn’t exist but were created. Even the concept of a “job” is a fairly new invention for humanity.

It Teaches Us How Every Generation Has Their Own Challenges That We Later Glorify

People from history realize this because they themselves went through monumental times of change that we today often can’t fully comprehend, even though we often glorify those times. For example, World War I and World War II brought massive changes to the world and society, with women taking a huge step forward in terms of their rights because they were needed so much by society on the homefront, while men were fighting away on the war fronts.

Today, massive changes are rippling across our world and the pandemic was a perfect example of this. Most companies never considered allowing employees to work from home before, as they believed it would be an impossibility. But as the reality of the situation unfolded, it made it a necessity for it to be a possibility, regardless of how painful the process seemed for some, if not all of us.

Again this is what people who glorify the past often forget. They often wish they could have been alive during those times and been a part of those changes and gallant social efforts to overcome them. Well they can’t. But they can be part of the changes today, helping to gallantly overcome them. They just need to realize though that these challenges, as well as the methods to overcome them, will often be dramatically and painfully different than those of the past.

So think about that for a second. The very thing you may be pushing against today, because you believe it’s an impossibility due to your beliefs, may actually be the very thing that future generations may look back on and glorify as a possibility that was created to overcome the challenges of the times. “Women working in men’s jobs? Outrageous!”

It Teaches Us That Change & Growth Are Often Painful But Meaningful Experiences

This is something that most people have a hard time understanding about challenges. When we are dealing with them, we often perceive them as negative and threatening to our way of life. Yet after facing them and overcoming them, our lives can often be dramatically and meaningfullychanged for the better.

So yes, getting laid off at work can be a traumatic experience. But it can open our eyes to newer possibilities that previously we may have thought were impossible before within our safe, stable lives. This is more commonly known as post-traumatic growth.

The key thing to realize here is that life isn’t throwing challenges at you to make your life a miserable hell (even though it may seem that way at the time.) Life is presenting challenges as lessons to you to help you grow. And as always, growth is often a painful process. But with that growth comes a greater understanding of ourselves, the world around us, and what it means to be a human being in a much deeper and broader way. Something that hopefully brings us closer together collectively, rather than pushes us farther apart.