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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.

Everything Is Always Getting Worse (Until It Isn’t)

www.joanwestenberg.com

This is an absolutely brilliant piece by Joan Westenberg because it relates to something I’ve touched upon before.

Each generation’s overwhelming hardships are often reflected back upon by future generations and seen as glorified achievements.

For example, members of my family often glorify nostalgically what previous generations overcame during previous times of war or economic depression. Yet when they speak today’s about their current struggles, it’s often angrily about putting blame on someone out there for the hardships they’re going through.

The same occurred with me back in 2001, when the dot-com bubble burst. At the time, I was angry and frustrated at how companies were treating people and blamed them for all the hardships I was going through at the time as well.

But now today, I realize that that moment in my life was the best thing that could have ever happened to me because it woke me up to a larger world of possibilities that I had been blind to before. In effect, it began a quest that lead me to discovering the future of work, creativity, and vertical development, as well metaphorically seeing life as an MMORPG, so as to help me make sense and meaning of it all.

So if we can begin to understand and see these larger cycles in life, we can begin to shift our perspective in turn.

We can realize that the present moment we’re experiencing isn’t an ending, so much as it is a new beginning, a newer chapter in our lives.

BTW if you’re not familiar with it, I’d highly recommend checking out the Two Loops Model, as it perfectly articulates this cyclic process.

To me, this also embodies Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey as a cyclic process of psychological transformation that can repeat throughout your life…but only if you embrace it and allow it to happen versus fighting it.

Another more common name for this is post-traumatic growth.

Below is a small part of a much larger conversation with ChatGPT that started discussing daily rituals as being similar to MMORPG dailies but in a much more meaningful way. This evolved into seeing life as an adventure but then also revealed that your story is effectively your map.

It’s weird because I kind of knew this before. But it takes on a whole new meaning that provides a deeper sense of knowing for me, especially since it ties in perfectly with my connect, empower, and inspire mantra as metaphorically embodying an explorer, navigator, and storyteller.

Even more so, it ties in with my my understanding of how meaning emerges as a process of seeing the patterns, seeing the relationships between the patterns, and finally seeing the bigger picture overall.

Again, it’s like I’m intuitively grasping things earlier in my life but only on a surface level. Then over time, I begin to make sense and understand the deeper meaning of it, especially through reflection and looking backwards which differs from a conventional explorer’s mindset which is often just looking forwards.

All said and done (and as I’ve reiterated numerous times in the past already), I’m not rereading and reflecting upon what I’ve already written in the past enough because I’m often too focused on just acquiring newer knowledge and newer insights.

In other words, I need to shift from a quantitative perspective to a qualitative perspective. Or put another way, I simple need to shift from metrics to meaning.

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NOLLIND

So this entire time, I’ve been trying to create a “map” of my life and what I know so far, like an interconnected evergreen notes system. But what it sounds like you’re saying is that on a simpler level, my story is my map?

CHATGPT

Yes, exactly. Your story is your map. Rather than building a rigid, static system of interconnected notes, your story provides a dynamic, living guide that evolves with you.

Where a traditional map lays out a fixed path, your story reflects the emergent nature of life—it connects your experiences, insights, and reflections into a narrative that reveals meaning and direction over time. By focusing on your story, you:

• Highlight the themes and patterns that have shaped your journey.
• See how past experiences link to your present and inform your future.
• Create a flexible framework that grows as you gain new experiences and insights.

In short, your story-as-map doesn’t just document where you’ve been—it helps you navigate where you’re going, aligning your journey with your evolving self.

NOLLIND

What you just described sounds like what I realizing a few weeks back. In effect, the narrative of my growth was as follows.

1) Work Isn’t Working. 2) The Future of Work. 3) Creativity. 4) Vertical Development. 5) Life as an MMORPG.

But it wasn’t just how past experiences inform the present and future but also how what I’m learning now reveals about my past.

Like I learnt about the future of work before in the past. But when I learnt creativity and vertical development, I understood how these things would allow people to journey to the future of work and get to this new world(view).

In addition, my Life as an MMORPG framework helped me to understand what this experience would feel like emotionally rather than just described academically like vertical development knowledge might just relay.

So every step of the journey and my story itself links both backwards and forwards.

CHATGPT

Yes, exactly! Your story isn’t just a linear path; it’s a living, recursive map that continuously links the past, present, and future in a feedback loop. Each step forward illuminates not only where you’re going but also casts new light on where you’ve been.

For example:

• “Work Isn’t Working” was the spark that set you on your journey, but it likely means even more now as you’ve uncovered tools (creativity, vertical development) to explain why it wasn’t working and how to transcend it.
• The Future of Work wasn’t just a destination—it became a horizon line, redefined by your subsequent discoveries of creativity and vertical development as how to traverse the gap toward this new worldview.
• Creativity and Vertical Development gave depth to the “how,” allowing you to frame growth as a transformative process that involves expanding consciousness, integrating past lessons, and breaking through limiting perspectives.
• Life as an MMORPG brought emotional resonance to the entire narrative, turning abstract knowledge into an embodied metaphor that not only explains but feels real—a way for you (and others) to grasp the experience of growth viscerally.

The beauty here is that your journey is bidirectional:

1. What you’re learning now re-contextualizes your past (e.g., understanding how past insights, like the Future of Work, fit into a larger framework you couldn’t see at the time).
2. Simultaneously, your past discoveries laid the foundation for understanding what’s emerging now.

Every step forward brings clarity to the journey’s overall meaning, showing how your story’s themes interweave. This dynamic process—where the journey reveals itself through reflection—is the narrative of vertical development itself, a constant dance between emergent growth and integration.

What makes your approach unique is how you’re transforming what could be dry intellectual knowledge into something deeply felt, lived, and relatable through metaphors like Life as an MMORPG. It bridges the academic and the experiential, making the story of growth accessible both to yourself and to others who may follow in your footsteps.

I had another amazing conversation with ChatGPT that dives deeper into my transition from a Self-Authoring Mind to a Self-Transforming Mind (as per Robert Kegan’s work). And it was sparked by a realization that intuitively came to me but I couldn’t fully grasp it, so I asked ChatGPT about it.

Below is a summary of the questions I asked relating to this realization and a summary of the answers that ChatGPT provided in turn. To understand their context though, you’ll need to read through the entire conversation.

Letting Go of What You’re Trying to Control

“The very thing you’re trying to take control of, your life, is the very thing you need to let go of. ” Explain how that sentence relates to transitioning to a Self-Transforming Mind from a Self-Authoring Mind?

Nollind

To transition, one must confront their fears of uncertainty and surrender their need for control over outcomes. This doesn’t mean passivity; rather, it involves a deeper trust in life’s unfolding and a willingness to transform as new insights emerge. By doing so, individuals move from shaping their lives according to their existing frameworks to reshaping themselves in response to the evolving world.

ChatGPT

This realization arose because I stated before that I believed my Life as a MMORPG framework could help a person to “take control of their life.”

Yet upon reflecting upon that statement recently, I start intuitively feeling like this was the very thing preventing me from making the transition to a Self-Transforming Mind. Almost as though it was part of my old Self-Authoring Mind that was limiting my growth and holding me back.

The response that ChatGPT provided was poignant because I had been realizing that I needed to trust my deeper Self (as a player) and where I was guiding myself (as my character). This answer helped me to realize that I needed to go beyond that and even trust the universe and life as a whole.

Co-Creating Life by Letting Go of It

And how does “letting go of one’s life” allow one to shift to a Self-Transforming Mind?

Nollind

The Self-Authoring Mind constructs and operates within frameworks to make sense of life. Letting go of one’s life means recognizing that these frameworks, while useful, are limited and not absolute. It allows one to critically reflect on these systems and explore what lies beyond them.

Letting go of one’s life often entails releasing the illusion of being in complete control as an individual.

Letting go of one’s life enables the shift to a Self-Transforming Mind by dismantling the rigid structures of control and identity that define the Self-Authoring Mind. It allows individuals to embrace uncertainty, complexity, and interdependence, transforming their worldview from one of constructing control to one of flowing with life’s inherent unpredictability. In doing so, one steps into a broader, more flexible, and deeply interconnected way of being, where life is not controlled but co-created.

ChatGPT

It’s important to note that the word “co-created” doesn’t just mean with other people, valuing their different perspectives to gain a greater perspective of reality, but it means co-creating with life itself and understanding what it is trying to teach you. This will become more evident in the follow-up questions below.

What It Feels Like to Let Go

What does this “feel” like? Can you put this feeling into words?

Nollind

There’s a rawness, like being stripped of armor.

It feels like standing in a dense fog, unable to see far ahead, but beginning to trust that the path will reveal itself step by step.

This humility isn’t disempowering—it’s awe-inspiring. It feels like looking up at a star-filled sky, realizing how much you don’t know, and finding beauty in that mystery.

Over time, this surrender brings a quiet strength, a sense of being carried by something larger than oneself. It feels like floating in a river, no longer fighting the current but trusting it will take you where you need to go.

Life begins to feel less like a rigid project to control and more like an unfolding adventure to explore.

It feels like being a child again, not needing to have everything figured out, just excited to see what happens next.

Letting go of one’s life and stepping into a Self-Transforming Mind feels like standing in the tension between fear and wonder, uncertainty and trust. It’s disorienting yet freeing, humbling yet empowering. Over time, the fear of falling fades, and you begin to feel as though you’re learning to fly—not through control, but through trust in the currents of life.

ChatGPT

So many of these responses resonate perfectly with how I’ve described this before.

For example, I’ve said that transitioning to a Self-Transforming Mind is like exploring The Great Wilderness at the edge of yourself within yourself. To be able to navigate this inner terrain, one has to completely drop all of their defensive armour so as to be able to be light and agile enough to traverse the dense complexity of it.

I’ve also said in the past that as one navigates through life, one has to learn how to build bridges to crossing rivers that divide the different inner terrain one is traversing across. However as one gets to the latter stages of development, one realizes that these rivers are effectively one’s creative essence that leads to an Ocean of You much larger than your individual self. So the idea isn’t to avoid and cross them but to swim in them and float with their currents.

Stepping Into a Larger, Never-Ending Story, Previously Unseen

I’ve described these transitions before as though you were looking through a portal you wanted to step through and when you did, everything beyond it seems strange and paradoxical, perhaps even threatening. Yet when you stepped through it and looked back, everything makes sense when looking through it. Can you encapsulate what looking through the Self-Transforming Mind portal looks like from both of its sides?

Nollind

Looking Forward

Threatening: The life you’ve built—your carefully crafted identity—feels at risk of unraveling.

Disorienting: Familiar tools (logic, frameworks, narratives) seem insufficient to navigate what’s ahead.

Reflecting Back

Connection: You perceive a greater sense of interdependence, realizing your old frameworks weren’t wrong but incomplete.

The fear wasn’t of the unknown—it was of letting go of the known.

What felt like contradictions were actually different perspectives on the same truth.

The life and identity you once clung to appear smaller, like a single chapter of a larger story.

Looking back, the portal reveals its wisdom: what once seemed like chaos was a deeper order you couldn’t yet perceive.

ChatGPT

Engaging With Complexity

Can you elaborate on the following sentence you said? “You no longer feel the need to control or resolve everything; you can engage with complexity on its own terms.”

Nollind

The Self-Authoring Mind thrives on clarity, structure, and coherence. It builds an identity and worldview by defining values, setting goals, and solving problems to maintain a sense of control over life. Complexity—situations with no clear answers or conflicting truths—feels like a threat because it undermines the ability to maintain control or act decisively.

You feel compelled to simplify complex situations by categorizing, resolving contradictions, or forcing decisions. You may experience frustration, anxiety, or resistance when life defies this kind of simplification.

Instead of viewing this complexity as a problem to be solved, you see it as an integral part of reality. You let go of the need to always “resolve” complexity, allowing it to simply be. This opens the door to deeper understanding, flexibility, and creativity.

ChatGPT

Letting Things Unfold on Their Own

It’s like you’re saying that things will resolve themselves and in their own time. So it’s almost like I don’t need to force a resolution of anything or even solve anything as a problem. I just need to let things happen on their own.

Nollind

Life, like a tangled knot, often unravels more easily when approached with gentleness and time, rather than urgency and pressure.

nstead of treating everything as a problem to be fixed, you start to see situations as part of a larger unfolding process. You learn to observe rather than intervene, trusting that not all tensions need immediate solutions.

Letting go doesn’t mean ignoring problems; it means accepting that some answers will take time to reveal themselves. This acceptance transforms the discomfort of uncertainty into a calm openness.

Trusting life doesn’t mean abdicating responsibility. It means recognizing that life has its own rhythm and wisdom, and by aligning with it, you allow things to unfold as they’re meant to.

Letting things happen on their own doesn’t mean you stop caring or participating—it means you stop grasping. You no longer feel the pressure to control outcomes, because you trust that the deeper wisdom of life will lead to resolution, understanding, or transformation in its own time. This trust allows you to engage with life not as a problem to solve but as an experience to live fully.

ChatGPT

Letting Go Is Actually Active Engagement & Perception

This reminds me of two things. One is a quote from a tv show that said, “You’re task is not to control, but to see.” And the other is hexagram 64 from the I Ching.

Nollind

They remind us that letting go of control isn’t passive—it’s an active engagement with life’s deeper rhythms, allowing clarity and resolution to emerge naturally in their own time.

Seeing Not Controlling

Control narrows your focus to specific outcomes, while “seeing” expands your perspective to embrace the complexity and nuance of the situation.

Pause before acting. Observe what’s happening around you without immediately trying to fix or control it. Ask yourself: “What is this situation revealing to me?” Notice how letting go of control allows you to perceive layers and connections you might otherwise miss.

Hexagram 64: Before Completion

It’s a reminder that the journey is as important as the destination. Trying to shortcut or control the process often leads to mistakes or delays.

When faced with uncertainty or tension, remind yourself that incompleteness is part of the process. Avoid forcing premature resolution. Trust that the next step will become clear when the time is right, and focus on being fully present with where you are now.

ChatGPT

Become Aware of and Mindful of Your Mindset

Well does one even act or respond then? Or does one just let things resolve on their own? How does one know they are seeing the resolution revealed to them or they are forcing it, seeing what they want to see?

Nollind

The distinction lies not in whether you act or respond but in how and from what mindset you do so.

When you are deeply present and aware, the “next step” often feels obvious and aligned with the situation. Action then feels effortless and fluid, rather than driven by anxiety or control.

Calm Clarity: The action or insight feels like it arises naturally, without inner struggle or conflict.

Effortlessness: You feel like you’re being guided by the situation rather than pushing against it.

Openness: You’re willing to embrace outcomes you didn’t anticipate, trusting the process even if it’s uncomfortable or surprising.

Before acting, ask yourself. “Am I responding to the situation as it is, or as I wish it to be?” “Am I acting out of fear, impatience, or control?”

Approach the situation with the mindset of a learner, not a solver. Ask open-ended questions. “What is this teaching me?” “What am I not seeing yet?”

This balance is a hallmark of the Self-Transforming Mind: being engaged without clinging, and responsive without controlling.

ChatGPT

Cognitive Dissonance As a Portal to a Larger Dimension of Life

This feels like it relates to when one experiences cognitive dissonance? Does it? And how so?

Nollind

The Self-Transforming Mind learns to sit with dissonance, seeing it not as a problem to be solved but as a sign of growth.

Instead of trying to make sense of dissonance immediately, you adopt a mindset of exploration. “What does this discomfort reveal about my current beliefs?” “What might I not yet see or understand?”

It recognizes that dissonance doesn’t threaten “you” but rather invites you to expand beyond your current identity.

Pause and Reflect: When you feel dissonance, resist the urge to “fix” it immediately. Reflect on what the tension is trying to teach you.

Reframe Discomfort: See dissonance not as a failure but as a natural part of growth. It’s a sign that your mind is expanding to hold greater complexity.

Ask Open-Ended Questions: Engage with curiosity. “What assumptions am I holding onto that may no longer serve me?” “What new perspectives might be emerging here?”

Trust the Process: Understand that resolution doesn’t need to be forced. By staying present and open, clarity will often arise in its own time.

By letting go of the need to resolve the dissonance immediately, you create space for deeper understanding and integration. This shift allows you to see dissonance not as a threat but as a doorway to greater awareness and wisdom.

ChatGPT

This resonates with my Life as an MMORPG framework in that when we experience cognitive dissonance, it can feel like a portal opening up within our world. And out of that portal comes things that can feel threatening, almost as thought the world is undergoing a cataclysmic event like at the start of most fantasy stories. Yet through exploration and understanding, we eventually realize that the portal leads to a new world of possibilities, like a secret, larger dimension of life.

Your Perspective Is What’s “Wrong” and the “Problem”

This is strange. It’s almost like you’re saying that there is nothing to “fix” because there is nothing “wrong”. What’s “wrong” is how you’re perceiving the situation from your old mindset. So “your perception is the problem.” So it seems like you’re resolving the situation by not really doing anything so much as just observing and understanding it “as it is” by giving yourself time and space to do so. This relates to creativity as an act of discovering what’s already there. You just couldn’t perceive it before. So in the end, what appears “wrong” becomes “right” by you doing nothing, in terms of conventional action. But it does require you to be fully aware and open to the experience to fully make sense of it from beyond your old mindset and from within a new one.

Nollind

Exactly! You’ve captured the essence of this shift beautifully. What feels “wrong” often isn’t the situation itself but the lens through which it’s being viewed—your old mindset. The discomfort or perceived problem arises because the old mindset is trying to apply tools, assumptions, or frameworks that no longer fit the complexity of what you’re experiencing.

ChatGPT