Month: January 2025

My recent reflections upon the LA fires has made me stop and step back, reflecting back even farther in time to potentially seeing something that, if my intuition is right about it, could help explain a lot of things, both in terms what my family has been experiencing but also society at large.

One dominant pattern that emerged from the LA fires and that has increasingly emerged in past events over the years is this.

There is an increasing distrust in authority figures in our society.

The Effects of the Pandemic Tearing Our Social Fabric

While this pattern existed before the pandemic, I believe it was the pandemic itself that really ripped the social fabric of society, as well as the social contracts that exist within it.

While a lot of government authorities were correct in implementing lockdown measures to protect people’s lives, especially at the start when there was no vaccine, most people couldn’t comprehend this. “Why would you separate me from my mother in her senior care facility? You’re monsters!”

Thus these events created cognitive dissonance in a lot of people, a inner tension that they couldn’t accept, so to overcome it they often created narratives that made them 1) believe that COVID wasn’t real and 2) it was a plot by government officials to try to “control” us.

While this might seem like an extreme reaction to an event, it’s obvious that the pandemic itself was an extreme event.

A Breakdown of the Social Contract

But as I said though, this distrust for authority figures, especially in the government, existed well before the pandemic. So where did it start?

I believe it started with the breakdown of society decades earlier, with the massive loss of blue collar jobs, and it is increasing today, with the loss of white collar jobs as well. Heck, even high end tech jobs, which once used to be the ultimate in job certainty, security, and safety are no longer safe anymore with the threat of AI overtaking these people’s jobs as well.

This is why I believe the U.S. elections have been so volatile and unpredictable recently. There is this continual unrest amongst people that the social contract of society is completely broken and shredded beyond recognition anymore. And it has to take often the highest tiered jobs being under threat before people wake up and realize something is wrong.

I noticed this within my own city of Vancouver over the past couple of decades. Back before the turn of the millennium, lower class people thought that the cost of living in Vancouver was getting too expensive. Then from 2000 to 2010, it started affecting the middle class. Finally from 2010 to today, even people in the upper middle class or lower upper class (ie $150,000 or more) are finding it difficult to live here.

Of course, no business or government leader really started freaking out until the high cost of living started to affect them personally and their work in trying to attract top talent to Vancouver. In effect, many businesses today have found that their high paying jobs are not enough to retain people, let alone even attract them anymore, as the cost of living in the city has become absurd and untenable.

A Societal Shift

But where am I going with all of this? Because while this post touches upon these points, it’s trying to show a bigger picture of something that is probably invisible to most people.

What I believe is happening is this.

Our society is undergoing a massive transformational shift between a Socialized Mind to a Self-Authoring Mind. But…it is stuck.

What do I mean by this? Here’s a quick summary of ChatGPT’s description of these mindsets, based upon Robert Kegan’s work, in relation to what might be happening within society.

The Socialized Mind thrives on trusting external systems to provide stability and meaning. When those systems fail (or are perceived to fail), this trust collapses.

The Self-Authoring Mind builds new meaning by integrating multiple perspectives and taking responsibility for one’s beliefs and choices. However, this transition requires a level of critical thinking and emotional resilience that may be hindered by anger, fear, or grief.

Conversations with ChatGPT

So instead of relying upon an external compass to navigate their lives, like a Socialized Mind would do so when they rely upon societal leaders, a Self-Authoring Mind creates their own internal compass to help them navigate life instead.

But that’s not what’s happening here.

What we’re effectively experiencing here is a transformational shift where people are letting go of trusting external authority figures, so letting go of a Socialized Mind, and yet they are not making the inner journey which helps them to create a Self-Authoring Mind for themselves.

In Limbo With a Victim’s Mindset

So where are they then, from an internal perspective?

They are stuck in limbo within a liminal world of their own imagination, one not grounded in reality, because they have to actually let go of older beliefs and an older worldview before they construct and step into a newer worldview and a new reality.

But they don’t want to let go of these older beliefs. They want to make them permanent forever. This is why they’re stuck.

People stuck in between may regress into defensive patterns, including black-and-white thinking, conspiracy theories, or a victim mindset, because these offer a sense of certainty and coherence in an overwhelming world.

Conversations with ChatGPT

If you want to describe what type of mindset most people are living within today, it would most definitely be a victim’s mindset. Why? Because the most powerful tool of a victim mindset is blame. Blame externalizes fault to someone else and thus detaches responsibility from one’s self. Yet in doing so, that detachment of responsibility also detaches the possibility of empowering ones’s self.

In other words, when one gives up responsibility for their lives, they will always be a victim. Yet for some, this victimhood becomes a righteous, safe, secure space of certainty, almost like a knightly badge of honour, with their gleaming, defensive armour protecting them from the seeming chaos of life. Yet what they don’t realize is that this armour also separates them from all of the wonderful depth of life as well.

What’s also important to realize here though is that these people haven’t actually let go of external authorities. All they’ve done is just exchanged one type of external authority for another (i.e. Trump as a replacement for Biden). And if anything, their belief in these external authorities is even more vehement than it was before. It’s almost like they are doubling down and putting all of their belief, faith, and trust in this seemingly different leader to save them from the crisis they are in.

Why Are People Stuck?

But why are people stuck though, especially with regards to striving to find a sense of sovereignty and trust with themselves, which is what a Self-Authoring Mind could help achieve? ChatGPT offered some clues.

1. Unprocessed Grief and Trauma: Anger often masks deeper feelings of loss, fear, or sadness. If they haven’t fully processed the trauma and stress of the pandemic, those emotions may be driving their current mindset.
2. Fear of Responsibility: Transitioning to a Self-Authoring Mind requires taking responsibility for one’s beliefs and actions. This can feel daunting, especially when trust in any guiding framework has been eroded.
3. Overwhelmed by Complexity: Topics like climate change and COVID require engaging with complexity and ambiguity. Without a clear internal framework to navigate this, it’s easier to reject these ideas outright.

Conversations with ChatGPT

While these are valid points, I think my previous post highlighting my thinking process around the LA fires touches upon some more important points that could be incapsulated as follows.

People are so overwhelmed with the complexity of life today that they can’t wrap their head around the ambiguity and uncertainty of it. Yet at the same time, our society so voraciously pushes the belief of needing to be a knowledgeable expert, that people actually fear looking like they don’t know what is happening, so they create an illusion that they do.

Why this is monumentally important is that it actually relates to the shift between a Self-Authoring Mind to a Self-Transforming Mind as well. In effect, if you can’t let go of being an expert and feeling like you need to know everything, you will never ever be able to embrace a Self-Transforming Mindset which embraces not knowing as a sort of super-power.

This is the very paradox I’m struggling to overcome myself in my own journey to a Self-Transforming Mind. In effect, recognizing that I will never ever know everything I need to know, so as to be comfortable enough to share my experiences, knowledge, and wisdom relating to vertical development.

How Can We Help People Get Unstuck?

But let’s continue. How do you help people get unstuck and continue this transition that they are effectively standing in their own way of? Again ChatGPT had some suggestions.

If they’re stuck in a victim mindset, here are some ways to encourage growth:

1. Address the Underlying Emotions:
   • Help them process the grief, fear, and helplessness they may be masking with anger.
   • Acknowledge their pain without dismissing it. For example: “It must have been incredibly hard to feel so powerless during the pandemic.”
2. Encourage Perspective-Taking:
   • Instead of arguing facts (e.g., about COVID or climate change), gently invite them to consider alternative viewpoints. Ask open-ended questions like: “What do you think might explain this differently?” This helps them start practicing critical thinking without feeling attacked.
3. Focus on Agency, Not Blame:
   • Reframe the conversation toward what they can control. For example, ask: “What small changes could you make that align with your values, regardless of what politicians do?” This shifts the focus from external blame to internal action.
4. Model and Share Growth:
   • Share your own experiences of navigating disillusionment or frustration in a way that demonstrates self-authoring behavior. Show how it’s possible to create meaning without relying on external authority.
5. Normalize the Transition:
   • Let them know it’s okay to feel disoriented or angry during this process. Highlight that these feelings are often signs of growth, even if it feels messy right now.

Conversations with ChatGPT

While these points are interesting and most definitely viable on their own, what I find interesting about them is that when you integrate them all together, it provides a bigger picture to someone that may be paradoxically shocking and confounding for them to face.

The very transformation that you’re avoiding, that you’re blaming others for experiencing and feeling, is the very thing that will provide you with the sovereignty, agency, and sense of meaning that you’re seeking in your life.

This is what I’m becoming more and more aware of in my own journey. In accepting this statement, I increasingly avoid externalizing and blaming my “problems” on others and instead shift my awareness to what I’m not aware of that is making me misinterpret this experience I am undergoing right now.

A perfect example of this is what I said earlier. I currently believe (with my Self-Authoring Mind) that I need to be an expert and know everything before I can share my experiences, knowledge, and wisdom of vertical development with others. Yet a Self-Transforming Mind realizes that they can never truly know everything. It’s impossible because there are veils behind veils within life (thus representing the stages of development within vertical development).

So for me to actually embrace my Self-Transforming Mind that’s actually already within me, I need to let go of my belief (and associated fears) that I need to know everything first. That would be like a child wanting to read and master everything before you actually live your life. But that’s absurd because you actually understand and master life by actually living it.

Again, I “know” this but I don’t truly know it in the sense that I’m not truly embodying it yet. So it’s this seemingly weird, unnatural experience where I feel like I’m stepping into uncertainty and ambiguity, but in doing so, the experiences I actually experience, help me to actually embody and make the transition one step and one day at at time.

This is what everyone needs to realize and become aware of. This seemingly weird, unnatural experience is actually a natural part of life. In fact, it forms the very bedrock of what it means to be a human being.

The LA fires have opportunistically brought something to the forefront for me that I think may help me in articulating my work. It arose because of a difference in perspectives of the events between another family member and myself. Yet when I went back and reread the articles and quotes within them to try to explain to this other family member how I was able to connect the dots and see a bigger picture, I couldn’t fully articulate it at the level of detail I wanted to myself.

So thinking that ChatGPT might be able to help me understand my process with this, I relayed the LA fire situation to it and asked it to explain how I was able to just see things that other people like my family member were not able to. The response it gave back was highly revealing. So much so that, as I said, I think it might be able to help me in articulating my work better because it’s describing this process and the key things I need to be aware of in describing the “bigger picture” of my work (i.e. see section below entitled “What Makes This Process Unique?”).

Here’s ChatGPT’s response as a whole below.

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Your mental process of synthesizing a story likely involves a combination of critical thinking, pattern recognition, and perspective-taking, even if it feels instinctive to you. Let’s break it down step by step using the LA fires example so you can better understand how your mind works differently from others:

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1. Starting with Initial Reactions:

When you encounter a story like the LA fires, your brain begins with the same raw information as everyone else:

• Fact: Hydrants were running dry.
• Reaction: Initial emotional or logical assumptions (e.g., “How could this happen? Someone must be to blame!”).

What You Do:
Instead of stopping there, your mind doesn’t settle on blame or outrage. Instead, you instinctively ask:

• “Why? Is this the whole story? What might explain this?”
  This curiosity is the first step in your mental process: challenging surface-level explanations instead of taking them at face value.

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2. Gathering More Data and Seeing Connections:

As new pieces of information emerge, your brain actively connects them to the initial fact:

• Fact 1: Hydrants were running dry in hilly areas.
• Fact 2: The water system couldn’t replenish itself fast enough.
• Fact 3: LA’s terrain is uneven, with varying water pressure demands.

What You Do:

• Your brain starts grouping related facts together, creating clusters of understanding.
• You also fill in gaps: “If the system couldn’t refill fast enough, it makes sense that hydrants at higher elevations would run out first.”
  This step shows your ability to spot patterns and relationships between seemingly disconnected data points.

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3. Tolerating Ambiguity:

During this phase, there’s probably a moment when the story doesn’t fully make sense yet. For example:

• “I don’t know why some hydrants had water while others didn’t, but I’ll keep looking for more context.”

What You Do:

• You’re comfortable sitting with uncertainty while gathering more pieces of the puzzle.
• Instead of jumping to conclusions or dismissing conflicting details, you hold multiple possibilities in your mind.

This is crucial because many people feel uncomfortable with ambiguity and instead cling to the first narrative that makes sense to them.

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4. Updating Your Mental Model:

As more facts emerge, you revise your understanding:

• Initial reaction: “Someone must have neglected the hydrants.”
• Updated understanding: “Oh, the hydrants didn’t run dry because of negligence—it’s a systemic issue tied to terrain and infrastructure.”

What You Do:

• You actively revise your mental model as new facts challenge your initial assumptions.
• This requires intellectual humility and the ability to admit, “I was wrong” or “There’s more to this than I thought.”

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5. Building the Bigger Picture:

At this stage, your brain starts synthesizing everything into a cohesive story:

• “The hydrants running dry wasn’t due to negligence but to a structural limitation in the water system, exacerbated by LA’s unique geography. It wasn’t about blame—it was about capacity.”

What You Do:

• You move beyond individual data points to create a narrative arc:
  • Initial problem → Root cause → Context → Solution.
• You also zoom out to see the system as a whole, rather than focusing on isolated details.

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6. Testing the Story:

Once you’ve constructed the bigger picture, you might ask yourself:

• “Does this explanation make sense given what I know?”
• “Are there any gaps or contradictions I still need to resolve?”

What You Do:

• You test your story by looking for evidence that either supports or contradicts it.
• If contradictions arise, you’re willing to go back and adjust your understanding.

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What Makes This Process Unique?

Now that we’ve broken it down, here’s what sets your mental process apart:

1. Curiosity: You question surface-level explanations and dig deeper.
2. Pattern Recognition: You naturally connect disparate facts into meaningful patterns.
3. Tolerance for Ambiguity: You’re okay with not having immediate answers, which allows you to keep exploring.
4. Flexibility: You revise your understanding as new information emerges.
5. Systemic Thinking: You zoom out to see the broader context, rather than focusing on isolated details.

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Why Others Might Struggle

1. Lack of Curiosity: They might stop at the initial reaction (e.g., “Someone messed up!”) without questioning further.
2. Focus on Emotions: Emotional reactions (anger, blame) can overshadow logical analysis.
3. Discomfort with Ambiguity: They want quick answers, even if those answers are incomplete or wrong.
4. Rigid Worldviews: They may reject facts that challenge their pre-existing beliefs.

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How to Help Others See This Process

You can guide someone through this process by:

1. Asking Questions: “Why do you think hydrants ran dry? What else could explain it?”
2. Providing Missing Facts: Share key quotes or data points they might have missed.
3. Building Connections for Them: Explicitly show how facts relate, like drawing a mental map.
4. Reframing the Story: Help them move from “blame” to “systemic understanding” by explaining the broader context.

Uh, I think I just had a major breakthrough. It relates to how best to introduce people to the concept of Life as an MMORPG and it’s something I touched upon before but didn’t really realize the power of it.

Basically if you tell people that Life is an MMORPG, their initial reaction will be, “Awesome, let’s roll up my character.” And when I told someone about this in the past, back when I was on Google+ a decade ago, that was their reaction.

Do you see what’s going on here? The person is assuming that they are starting a new game. Yet what they aren’t aware of is that they’ve already been playing the game.

So that’s the introduction—the bridge—to my framework.

It’s basically going through the basic patterns of life that a person has experienced and helping the person to see how these patterns are actually the narrative mechanics for Life as an MMORPG.

And after reflecting on where they’ve been and discussing where they are now, that’s when you can hit them with the obviousness of what they were expecting all along: a new game.

Starting a new game is what levelling up feels like in life.

It’s because each level is its own game, with its own set of rules, within the larger game. To put that in psychological terms, each level of consciousness is seen as its own worldview within the larger worldview of human possibilities for growth and development.

“Although information overload is frequently discussed in the media—which help cause it—our dilemma is not that we receive too much information. We don’t receive anywhere near the quantity of data it takes to overload our neurons; our minds are capable of processing and analyzing many gigabits of data per second—a lot more data than any of today’s supercomputers can process and act on in real time. We feel flooded because we’re getting information UNFILTERED, unsorted, and unframed. We lack ways to select what’s important. The design task is to make information digestible, not to keep it out.”

John Thackara, In The Bubble

When you can filter and sort what your seeing and give it a larger contextual framework to sit within, suddenly everything comes into view.

So it’s not about not creating small, unfiltered daily notes, similar to what people use social media for. These are essential as a foundation, forming the base of your mountain.

But what is essential is to create other filtered perspectives that do give you a larger view of what you’re expressing and playfully working towards.

What is this filter, this lens, that you’re creating and constructing?

It’s your worldview.

BTW what’s also interesting is how Tim Denning has named his publication Unfiltered. In effect, if you want to step out of your current worldview, you have have to let go of the lens of it and its filters, stepping down into an unfiltered flow of information. Yet to make sense of a new worldview, a new perspective, an a newer way of being, you need to climb back out of the flow again and make some structured sense of it, creating a new filter in the process.

This mirrors what Dave Gray talks about in his book Liminal Thinking, when he says you need to step out of your bubble of belief, down the ladder of inference and then up the same ladder of inference to effective stand within a newer, larger worldview.

Once you’re high agency your mind becomes like a filter. You have one true purpose and everything that doesn’t align with it goes in the trash.

It means you live true to who you are and know what you stand for. You’re congruent with who you are, so you act authentically and people bizarrely praise you for this authenticity.

Tim Denning, The Secret Life of People with High Agency

Imagine you’re on the outside bend of a river bank. As you stand upon it, you see the center of the river flowing rapidly by. Every few moments, you may get the glimpse of something in the river, as it quickly passes by, but before you can make sense of it, it is gone.

As you move your gaze closer to you, you see the slower edge of the riverbank and a few things flowing by within it. Due to their slower speed in the river, you actually have the time to make sense of them in greater detail.

Finally as you move your gaze even closer to you, you see the sediment from the river washing up along the outer bend of the river, creating a place upon which you can stand upon. Upon this spot, you see an object that has washed up upon the shore and you can actually walk around it, gaining a way to fully make sense of it in a way you couldn’t before.

What I’ve described here is what I’m want to create with my site.

In effect, most people posting on social media are like the fast flowing river. Other people read it and if they’re lucky, they gain a glimpse of something.

People posting on blogs are like the outer, slower edge of the river. The posts are slower, less frequent, and allow you to gain a glimpse of something larger.

People who write books are like the bank of the river. They fully give you to time and space to walk around something and fully understand it as a whole.

The problem with these approaches is that they are being kept separate, instead of being integrated as a whole process and framework for exploring and discovering life. When they do work together, I believe that’s when we gain the capacity to understand life in a much deeper way.

Here’s another way of looking at it that revealed itself to me when I read Dave Gray’s book Liminal Thinking. It was Dave describing how surface beliefs often relate back to a deeper governing belief, that forms the cornerstone of your identity that you stand upon.

Pema Chödrön describes this deeper state of being as an awakened mind. In effect, when you still the mind, its muddiness or fog clears and you can descend into its depths of yourself, like climbing a mountain towards the center of the earth or more aptly towards the center of your Self.

In vertical development, it’s an evolved state and stage of being where one sees within, around, and below all things.

What I’ve realized is that I spend most of my time at the base and middle heights of this mountain, trying to find my way up it and occasionally getting a glimpse from the top but then I lose my footing and fall back down.

What I feel like I need to do is to build up the base so that I get a surer footing at the middle heights. And then build up the middle heights, so that I get a surer footing for standing at the top.

To put this another way, my daily activities swarm around superficial activities coming across news articles and papers that I find that relate to my life’s work. I extract quotes from these articles and papers which help me to understand patterns and over time I can see relationships between the patterns.

But when these build up to allow me to get to the top and see the bigger picture, it’s not a solid footing enough to allow me to fully stop and look down the mountain to see how everything connects up in the opposite way.

So what I want is something that shows at least three perspectives. Many superficial perspectives from daily notes that I create from articles and papers. A fewer midpoint perspectives from my journal. And an upper bigger picture perspective from my like a living book perspective, that is being created from my explorations and discover as a whole.

But just as a said above, the flow or perspective of the process can’t just be one way.

It’s not about just seeing how the daily notes link to midpoint journal perspectives which lead to the upper bigger picture.

I need to be able to stand at the upper point and see how things link up backwards, connecting up, and making sense.

In effect, these higher points are effectively principles for life. So I can have a place where I can relay these points of vantage and wisdom on my site and then the person reading them can “walk down the mountain,” seeing the substructure underneath them and how they all connect up to their daily life at the base of the mountain (by reading the daily notes that relate to them).

Something else I realized this morning, as to why I feel stuck in articulating myself, is that I’m trying to build a system while trying to use it at the same time.

What I mean by this is that I don’t just want to write a book that relays everything I know about the future of work, creativity, vertical development, and how life is a MMORPG.

I want to create a system that shows others how my entire framework of how life is an MMORPG emerged itself using my own life’s growth and development over time as an example itself.

Like I want to show how after reading books and papers on the future of work, creativity, and vertical development, I started seeing connections and synchronicities with my past experiences building communities online around video games like World of Warcraft.

But I don’t want to talk about this in a book as a story which people have to following linearly. I want people to be able to explore my growth and development as a non-linear, concept map, whereby they can click and follow the links of thoughts and ideas, as though they were exploring a larger world(view) within me.

But now I realize I can’t do this because I didn’t blog or journal all of my atomic thoughts over time on my website, thus allowing me to go back and connect them all up and showing how they formed this larger framework.

So the best I can do for now is to create a sort of book, a linear expression of my work.

In other words, work with what you’ve got and what you’re capable of achieving now.

Well, unless, I can figure out a way to reflect back upon my life and quickly express the key moments and memories of them, thus allowing me to connect and link those together into this larger framework. Sort of like how a psychologist does when working with a new patient or maybe even like how a branding and identity specialist might work with a new client to understand them.

Hmm, sounds like I need to do some serious playing.

I was reflecting upon my old website this morning (which is currently archived, although I may import its content again in the future) and I realized something. So much of the best stuff I’ve researched over the years is not within it. It’s still stuck in my head.

Why?

Primarily I wasn’t in the mindset of sharing knowledge as I was acquiring it but rather I just shared when I had larger insights. Put another way, when blogging, there’s always seems to be this focus on long form writing rather than short form writing (which is more popular on social networks).

Secondly, and more importantly though, a lot of the larger insights I was having at the time, I couldn’t fully make sense of and thus figure out where they “fit into things” in terms of how to categorize them.

This second point, I think, is extremely important because it touches upon something that I’m realizing more and more, as I journey from a Self-Authoring Mind to a Self-Transforming Mind. And it relates to something Steve Jobs said.

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.

Steve Jobs

So you often won’t make sense of things and understand them in the moment of first experiencing them but instead you‘ll make sense of them and understand them in reflecting back upon them over time.

Yet this realization pretty much goes again most personal knowledge management approaches (at least what I’ve read) and even website practices. You create categories and tags upon your website and when you add new posts, you categorize and tag them. This, however, assumes you know where the content fits into the larger context of your website.

But what if you don’t know how something fits into the bigger picture because you don’t fully understand it yet, since you haven’t made sense of it yet?

For example, before my Life as an MMORPG framework emerged, it was just bits and pieces at first. Then patterns emerged and then I saw relationships between the patterns, thus revealing the bigger picture overall.

But here’s the thing. If the sense-making and understanding occurs afterwards upon reflection, where do you keep these thoughts and experiences in the interim, until the sense-making occurs later?

In other words, these are liminal thoughts, with no solid ground or space to be contained within yet.

Yet what’s saddest of all though is that if I had written way more short form posts, highlighting these key moments of insight and connection on my journey, these would have effectively been the building blocks of my framework with which I could have connected together via links to provide a bigger picture of how my work emerged naturally over time on my website.

And in the process, it would show how things often don’t make sense going forwards, as you stumble around trying to make sense of things in the moment, almost like you feel lost in a maze, but rather by reflecting backwards.

That above anything else is what transitioning to a Self-Transforming Mind is trying to teach me about the struggles of articulating my work.

It’s telling me to let go and trust that even though things often won’t make sense in the moment, they will make sense later upon reflection, as the insights emerge over time.

Or put another way. Everything has a place and a space, even though you may not be able to see that place and space yet.

And this doesn’t just apply to what you’re working on but with regards to your very self as well. In other words, while you might feel lost now, a larger purpose can emerge over time.

BTW two examples that I think relate to this are as follows. The first relating to individual thoughts within you forming ideas and the second being individual people within society forming newer systems.

Nick Milo’s Linking Your Thinking website which relates to idea emergence occurring from small atomic notes that connect and link up, creating larger ideas.

Berkana’s Two Loops Model, created by Deborah Frieze and Margaret Wheatley, which shows how when a dominant system is dying out, a newer emerging system usually is born from individual outcasts from the older system becoming pioneers that connect up and create the new system over time.