Month: November 2025

People at the earlier stages of development usually want things to stay the same. So they don’t want people to change, as change feels risky because it can shake the sense of who they are and where they belong.

People in the middle stages start to see new possibilities and often want to help others change and thrive too…but usually in the direction they think is best.

People at the latter stages stop trying to fix or convince others. They paradoxically just focus on growing and being real themselves, knowing that kind of honesty naturally encourages others to grow too.

“Knowing” this is easy. Embodying it is epically challenging.

To visualize this stepping out of one’s “self” to create a sense of psychological distancing, imagine you’re playing a MMORPG game like World of Warcraft as a “player character.”

Your “character” is who you believe you are, your identity / ego as a construct, because you’re so immersed within the game.

You as a “player” represent the boundless you, your soul.

So being able to step out of both your present “self” and future Self is like a liminal moment of being boundless and witnessing yourself outside of time and space. It’s a moment where you become aware that you are not a body with a soul but rather a soul with a body.

So this process is one in which you let go and follow the lead of your larger sense of Self trying to emerge from within the hidden depths and core of yourself.

My work seems to be about experiencing ontological dissonance within one’s life which arises from a collection of cognitive dissonance forming a door or portal that can allow one to teleport to a new sense of being.

This portal, however, seems both foreign and dangerous, yet alluring and mysterious at the same time.

The trick with it is to not close the portal prematurely, assuming we “know” what it is and means, but to continually hold space for it, so you can explore the emerging meaning of it daily, like an adventurer making forays and dispatches from a new world which embodies a newer, larger sense of Self.

I once told someone who was struggling through a growth moment, beating themselves up in the process, that there is more potentiality within them than they’re aware of and realize.

I indicated that when they feel compassionate and try to help someone else, think of themselves as that person and apply what they said to them to their very self.

This is not always easy to do though because 1) you need to be able to step outside of your current “self” and 2) perceive yourself as both your future Self helping your present “self” which 3) means being neither of them and both of them at the same time.

I just had a realization based upon what I’ve been seeing happening online on platforms like Substack.

The old “expert model” of social media was built on stability, where you mastered a topic, established credibility, and then broadcast your expertise outward. It assumed a relatively stable world where knowledge had lasting value.

Then came “learning in public” which was a response to accelerating change. The idea was that transparency and curiosity mattered more than authority. Yet even that model assumed a kind of linearity: you’re on a knowable path of learning something specific, and the social experience is about documenting that path as it unfolds.

But in today’s world, change is not just faster, it’s nonlinear and emergent. What we’re dealing with isn’t just learning new information but learning how to learn in the midst of instability. So the social experience that fits this era might not be “sharing expertise” or “sharing learning,” but something like “sharing emergence” which is about being in visible dialogue with uncertainty itself.

That would mean showing how sense-making and meaning-making happen before learning stabilizes, so when it’s still messy, ambiguous, even contradictory. It’s not about “Here’s what I know” or “Here’s what I’m learning,” but rather “Here’s what’s trying to form through me in real time, even though I don’t yet know what it means.”

That kind of presence fits a world where transformation, not transmission, is the real work.

And this type of presence is what I continually struggle to outwardly express as my mantra of “the adventure of your life,” even though it is a daily inner experience for me.

In closing, I just want to highlight one of the best examples I’ve seen so far that actually embodies this sharing of emergence. It feels a bit messy and chaotic, yet at the same time it’s real and authentic, as though the person is stumbling through a wilderness, trying to make sense of their inner terrain in the present moment.

Years of Destroying What Actually Works by Brad Did