Knowledge + Experience = Wisdom

I want to let y'all know what is going on in my life.There will be a pause in my articles, podcast, and videos until at least August. For the next two weeks or so I will be delivering our boat from the BVI to the USA. Wait, WTaF?For those who don't know, my family has been planning to live on a boat since before the pandemic. We are finally to the point of making the shift. We are selling our home and getting rid of most of our stuff. We are buying a boat and will move a very small amount of our stuff onto the boat. We will be living on the boat in Chesapeake Bay, USA until December when we will head to the Bahamas. It reminds me of this George Carlin skit:Leaving the Rat RaceI've talked and written a lot about this shift, but mostly we want to try something new. We hope to shed some of the pressures of American Life and redefine our values. I'm terrified by all of it and think this is a great opportunity for growth. I also realize we may be in over our heads. But that's life, isn't it?We may come crying back with our tails between our legs. Who knows? We'll see. Good thing, bad thing, who knows. Reminds me of this Buddhist koan:Are These Bad Times or Good Times? The Story of the Zen FarmerWhen we stop trying to coerce life to go exactly the way we want, we naturally experience a greater sense of fluidity…mindfulness.comI look forward to sharing my experiences and discovering how this will change my writing, podcasting, and video. I'll be back as soon as I can.In the meantime, please enjoy some of my older content and let me know how it holds up!If you are enjoying this content, please tell your friends.

Have you ever sat down and thought about your values? Values are important, motivating, and provide guidance.I've done a lot of values work in therapy and find it challenging. I value many things, but prioritizing the top five to ten is difficult and dynamic.One thing I have learned during over a decade of values work is that many human values suck. I think a lot about universal or ‘optimum' valuesAre there ‘optimum' human values? For my purposes, optimum is an adjective meaning most favorable or desirable. The best. In biological systems, we can think of optimum in terms of homeostasis or balance. Please see here for more on that. An example of optimum is transportation. Can we identify an optimum mode of human transportation? Many suggest it is the bicycle: Science of Cycling: Human Power | Exploratorium© The bicycle is a tremendously efficient means of transportation. In fact cycling is more efficient than any other…annex.exploratorium.eduIn the case of transportation, we skipped past ‘optimum' in pursuit of ‘better'. Now we burn jet fuel to fly around the planet. This uses more fossil fuels and creates more problems associated with that industry. We also change our valuesChange is inevitable. Everything is impermanent and evolves. Sometimes, we change toward improvement. Sometimes our pursuit of ‘better' leads us astray. Words like improve, better, and success, are extremely subjective. Modernity induced a key shift away from optimum values and toward money, status, and power. Currently, artificial intelligence is exacerbating this transformation.With each technological advancement, we need to revisit our values. We are mistaken to believe that each step along the evolutionary ladder is an improvement. Rather, organisms experience increases in efficiency that facilitate new abilities. But these advancements are not always the optima.Consider, briefly, biological respiration. An amphibian requires minimal energetic investments to oxygenate cells across moist skin. Humans, on the other hand, must breathe. While humans can be more active and grow larger and more complex, are we ‘better'?So with evolution, knowing what is optimum is keyHumans evolved the ability to choose, which itself becomes a selection pressure. We can influence our evolution. If we want to remain extant we need to make better choices.Valuing money, status, and power leads to our demise. To enhance evolutionary fitness we must revisit our past. In our past, we may find more optimum values to guide our future.I will be assisting with delivering my future floating home for the next few weeks but will post when I can. Please check out my back catalog here and on The Neurodivergent Professor podcast and YouTube channel. If you are enjoying this content, please tell your friends.

You don't have to look far to find something to complain about. Climate changeInequalitySuicidal ideationMalnutritionLoneliness The world is full of problems.Now, I'm no doomer. My intent is not to illuminate human suffering. Rather, I accept the Buddhist notion that there will be suffering. My issue is all the EXTRA suffering. I can't shake the naive, hippie belief that solutions are within our reach. When it comes to the end of the world I'm an optimist.The question is, what can we do to reduce suffering?Isolation and ‘rugged individualism' are a big part of the problemI'm still wrapping my head around the concept of nonduality. I get that we are stardust. After all, I'm a huge fan of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. I believe the Big Bang is a good explanation of what probably happened to get us here. I understand ecological cycles and geologic time. We are all connected, but I have seen little evidence of these connections in human behavior during my lifetime. We exist in this world simultaneously as individuals and as obligate members of the human species. Many of us experience cognitive dissonance around being two places at once and I get that. This is a feature of reality we have to embrace. It's quite literally cosmic.We are going to have to hit ‘refresh' on our valuesHuman values have shifted from the group to the individual. This ‘we to me' transition aligns with modernity, the industrial revolution, financial systems, and religions. I continually ask, ‘What happened?', to speculate about this transformation but we will never know.The great value shift from kindness, connection, and cooperation toward money, status, and power has created most of our problems. The solution is a shift away from individualism and toward collectivism. The problem is, that individualism promotes short-term fitness. Humans are hedonistic and we love a good dopamine hit. Our values shifted to maximize this. Moving back toward collectivism ain't gonna be easy.How do we convince ourselves that the ‘success' of the human race over evolutionary time is more important than feeling high for a few seconds? To move forward we have to understand our pastWinners write history. The shift from collectivism to individualism is characterized by strong men defeating weak communities. This story gets recorded and repeated because the strong remain to tell it. Cherry picking at its' finest.Do we want the meaning of our existence to cater to a few men? Unfortunately, we continue to tell that story today. We value the strong. The competitive. The winners. We look down on the peaceful. The cooperative. The mutualisms.Humans are so much better than this. It's time to move past maximizing the ‘line of cocaine dopamine bumps' and understand the importance of delaying gratification. Our nervous systems evolved for more complex and intimate social interaction but we are headed the other way toward simpler and less interactive social behaviors. Rugged individualism is a great leap backward and spits in the face of our evolutionary prowess.Maybe we can stop treating life like a game of winners and losersWinning is not better than losing. They are the same when we experience the game as a community and not as individuals. We need to stop playing Monopoly with our DNA.Rather than socializing the gains and privatizing the losses, we can socialize gains by being a good steward of Earth and all its inhabitants. This is the pathway toward reduced suffering. We can change our values. There is still time.Frankly, I'm embarrassed for us if we continue to choose otherwise.If you are enjoying this content, please tell your friends.

Have you seen (or read) “2001: A Space Odyssey”?The story opens at the time of early humans. Folks are going about their business when a ginormous monolith appears. Everyone freaks out at first, but then some develop the ability to use bones as tools. At first, I didn't understand that the monolith represented punctuated equilibrium. This is a phrase used by evolutionary biologists to describe a quick shift in the fossil record representing a significant change. Compare this to gradualism, characterized by the slow accumulation of small changes. As an impatient person, I prefer punctuated equilibrium. Rather than waiting around and remaining comfortable, I've always been (generally) ok with quick changes toward a new condition. I don't mind changing jobs (I've one it 32 times in 39 years) or homes (ten houses in 17 years). Some things, of course, I want to remain consistent, but I don't fear change like a lot of people.I would go so far as to say I sometimes yearn for quick change, because most changes are painfully slow. And life is short.Mostly, though, changes happen slowly and punctuated equilibria are few and far between. The world is in dire need of change. Do we have the time to wait around for it to happen gradually? Can it happen gradually? This is the question that drives me, and this article.A built-in persistence mechanismNot changing is good for a system to persist. We have become experts in the bait-and-switch technique where we create fraudulent mechanisms for change that don't result in actual change but make us believe they do.How long do we throw good money after bad, making minute alterations to existing systems in hopes that something changes? How many rounds of negative feedback evidence do we need to acquire before we stop? Something like UBI, for example, could be a monolithic mechanism to change the global economy. But, The risks of Punctuated Equilibrium are highMention to any neoclassical economist that capitalism is broken and prepare yourself for a tongue-lashing. Tell any politician that the government needs an overhaul and you may have your citizenship revoked. Tell a high-school principal that students should be learning about meditation and, well, you get the point.People don't like change. Most of us fear the enemy we don't know much more than the one we do. This explains why we stay in bad relationships, cruddy jobs, and unsuitable cities. Change is scary. But as I have mentioned in many an article, change is the underlying machinery of life. It is our DNA. That we fear change is not an excuse to avoid it. Look, I get it, leaping into the unknown abyss is scary. But sometimes it is the only option. Gradualism is ineffective, especially during stressIf a lion were chasing you, would you run or take some time to think about which direction to run? If you had to think about it, you're dead.Sometimes gradual change takes too long. Though that sounds like something Yogi Berra might have said, it's true. Sometimes we need a change. Mostly this is because we tolerated non-change for too long.Gradualism is about not changing. Not changing is resistance. What we resist, persists. Instead of protecting ourselves, we are going against the basic principles of biology. The universe changes. We must change with it. If we want to change something, gradualism is not likely to work. Our problems require faster and more severe solutions. If we can't get comfortable with discomfort we will continue to gaslight ourselves into thinking things will be ok.If you are enjoying this content, please tell your friends.

The unexamined life is not worth living — SocratesIt seems natural, even innate, to want to make the most of one's life. To have a good life seems to require examination. Examining one's life, growing, and continuing to be aware is part of our purpose.The purpose of life has two branches. The first is the ecological purpose and the second is more metaphysical.The ecological purpose of life is to reproduce to alleviate mortality. In other words, because all life dies, life reproduces itself. In this way, collective life persists despite the individual being terminal.Evolution and natural selection, especially of the central nervous system, have facilitated communication, social interaction, and parental care. Humans still struggle with how to manage this complexity.What is less derived is our metaphysical or non-scientific understanding of being human or of making a good life. Sure, we figured out how to keep the water (fairly) clean, eat, and build shelter, but how do we deal with our free time? What do we do with all the gains from understanding our physical needs?Once our basic needs are met, what do we do? First, we evolve a complex neurology that facilitates taking in more information from our environment. To process all this new information we also evolve a central processing unit. Combined, we developed unprecedented ways to interact with our environment, each other, and ourselves. At the intersection of the metaphysical and physical elements of human purpose is socialization. Sophisticated communication and interactions led to cooperation, community, and enhanced parental care. Ultimately, love evolved to enhance our connections to each other and our ecosystem. Neural complexity also led to art, medicine, science, and other technological derivations. Along the way, of course, less desirable states or conditions arose including violence, competition, and selfishness. These elements, ideally, will be selected out of our population (see here for more).The future of humankind depends on these metaphysical elements. Prioritizing values like love, connection, and kindness over money, power, and status is critical to our healthy future.The privileged and fortunate among us are self-aware. Self-awareness facilitates an examined life. An examined life will grow toward an enhanced and necessary value system understood through our neural gifts.Self-awareness permits the unlearning process. Don Miguel Ruiz, of “The Four Agreements” fame, and other Toltecs refer to domestication as the mechanism for our initial learnings. As children, we learn to walk, talk, sit, and stay according to the rules of our families, villages, and cultures. Few of us even realize this has happened. None of us consented.Once aware our life examination begins, and the first step is to realize we don't know why we believe what we believe. We must audit our thoughts, ideas, and values to determine whether they belong to us. This is the first step.Self-awareness begets the undoing of domestication. Defining personal values and understanding one's ecological and metaphysical needs defines a life. The next step is realizing we are interconnected to balance our individuality with our community. Finally, we figure out how to nudge our fellow humans in a similar direction.Understanding and meeting our own needs helps us as much as each other. This is the pathway toward a good life. We make it by doing the work, being ourselves, and nurturing awareness. If you are enjoying this content, please tell your friends.

Do you suffer?Humans have problems. It's hard to deny. Despite many pleas for ‘looking on the bright side of life', we live in a world full of suffering. For whatever reason, I think about these problems, the causes, and potential solutions. While it is difficult to maintain a positive mental attitude and growth mindset, I strive for a balance. I consider how we might improve humanity while not getting bogged down in depression.I think existence consists of two main branches. These are the biological or physical, and the spiritual or metaphysical. You probably have different names for these things, but hopefully, you get what I'm saying. As an ecologist, I see the biological side being defined by growth, maturity, and reproduction. The biological purpose of life is to find group immortality, despite individual mortality. Species seek to persist. Life goes on. Biological organisms persist through time because DNA facilitates adjustments, acclimations, and adaptation. One purpose of life is to participate in the cosmic dance of natural selection, genetic expression of traits, and a changing universe. You might even say this is a universal biological value.This article, however, is about the metaphysical aspects of evolution. For more about the purpose of evolution and human life, see The Evolution Paradox and The Uniqueness Imperative. Humans also have metaphysical human needs. While we have a sound understanding of the biological and physical elements of life, there is less consensus about our spiritual or metaphysical purpose. If the biological purpose of life is to reproduce and persist, what is our metaphysical purpose? Why are we here?The ecological realm of existence is examined by science, but the less measurable elements are left to spiritual leaders, philosophers, and thinkers. How we define the purpose of life is highly varied.There are many schools of thought about our metaphysical purpose, but they all begin by understanding our non-biological needs and values. What ARE our needs and values? Are their universal values?Whereas the biological explanation of life is hedged somewhat in the realm of science, these metaphysical questions are more subjective. I suggest one way to approach this type of investigation is to ask which values are adaptive and which are maladaptive.What values might be maladaptive? As in, what are humans doing now that may be causing our extinction? What are we doing wrong? What do we currently believe in? And how's that working out?I suggest that our current human values are focused on money, status, and power. Focusing on these values may be helpful in the short term, but it is not adaptive in an evolutionary sense.Values like money, power, and status may be maladaptive. In other words, these could be among the problems that contribute to human suffering.What values might be adaptive?What other values might help us avoid extinction? This is the question that drives me to share my thoughts. What can we do to change direction? What are we doing wrong? These are questions for today's thinkers. The most important questions we can ask.What would life be like if we prioritized the values of kindness, cooperation, and love?If you are enjoying this content, please tell your friends.

Do you ever think about your comfort zone? I'm sure most people are at least aware of the concept.To me, our comfort zone is like an invisible egg that surrounds our physical body. Near the center, we are, well, comfortable. As we near the edges we become less comfortable. Our comfort zone is like a sixth sense. It is more a bodily feeling or awareness than an identifiable sensation. Approaching our comfort zone is unlike hearing, smelling, touching, tasting, or seeing.Why do we experience these comfort zone sensations?The purpose of our comfort zone is to alert us when our environment changes. Likely, there are several evolutionary adaptations for being aware of these changes. When our comfort zone is triggered, we become alerted. Sometimes the changes are mild, irritating, or uncomfortable. Other signals may protect us from real danger.Our mortality depends on a degree of comfort and a lack of danger. The fortunate and privileged among us spend more time in comfort, and less in danger. Our environmental, emotional, and physical needs are met and we have nothing to be concerned with. Our lives are not threatened and we are, well, comfortable. As situations change, our “spidey senses” begin to tingle. We may become aware that something has shifted, but we do not always know what the danger is. One of the key protections of our comfort zone is for us to avoid real danger. Some call this intuition, a sixth sense, or ‘spidey senses'. These are critical but not what I am writing about here. The function of our comfort zone I am writing about here is more ambiguous.Most often, our comfort zones act as a simple signal that we are encountering non-routine experiences. To know about our comfort zone we have to be self-aware.I know I sound like a broken record, but everything begins with self-awareness because without it we have no agency. Once we are self-aware, we can direct our attention with intent toward our comfort zone. In this way, we are paying attention. I believe that self-awareness is selected for in evolution and will talk about this in an upcoming episode. Once self-aware, we can learn to discriminate among the various signals provided by our comfort zone. These signals can be benign and boring, moderate, or warnings about danger. For growth, we are interested in moderate information. The goldiloxian feelings are not too intense nor too uninteresting. Signals from our comfort zones are growth opportunities. By paying attention to our sixth sense, we can identify our fears. With practice and courage, we can push beyond our comfort to better understand the source of these fears. The era of maximizing comfort is over. Human persistence (non-extinction) requires discomfort. Growth. Risk. Bravery.The industrial revolution and capitalism introduced an unprecedented degree of human comfort. While many of these comforts have been incredible, there are downsides. Privileged humans have become complacent, lulled to a waking sleep by immense comfort. In a world that constantly changes, however, complacency is maladaptive. To continue our evolutionary path our comfort zones need to be confronted. We need to get comfortable with discomfort again. To move forward we have to take a few steps back. It's time to trade in our privilege for the next frontier. Links:YouTube video: https://youtu.be/JvGkio3Zt8zRyan Holiday's “The Obstacle is the Way”If you are enjoying this content, please tell your friends.

Does science play a role in your life? Do you value hard data and evidence? Do you think humans are good at proving things? Or maybe you defer to religion or culture to decide what is real?I talk a lot about how science is over or undervalued. Some folks think science proves reality. Others think scientists are full of crap.Regardless of how you feel about science, the scientific method is regarded as one of the best tools we have to help us answer questions. One of my favorite questions is,“Is there a better way to live?”My work focuses on understanding how humans can suffer less. Most of my interest lies somewhere in this personal and communal growth space, and much of my research falls outside the realm of hard science as we know it. But what if we took a more organized approach? What are we really trying to understand?Briefly, science is a way to formalize how we ask questions and how we interpret the answers. We conduct experiments that convert the real world into numerical data, analyze the data using low-bias mathematical techniques, then convert the numerical results back into real-world terms. We ask a question, form a hypothesis, conduct experiments, and interpret results. So, is there a better way to live?Let's convert that to a hypothesis:Ha: If we nurture our individual and collective self-awareness, then this will trickle up to solve the world's problems because self-awareness, or lack thereof, is the cause of human suffering.Ho: If we nurture our individual and collective self-awareness, there will be no effect on human suffering because the two are unrelated.Basically, do the ‘data' we observe in the real world support or refute the idea that there might be a better way to live?My work suggests that self-awareness as an upstream cause of human suffering. Mostly, when we experience suffering we look nearby for causes and solutions. If we bleed we get a band-aid. But often the ultimate causes of our discomfort are farther away and more upstream.For example, if we are always anxious in social situations, maybe we need to understand the trauma we experienced in childhood.Personally, as I have pieced together my anxiety, I see that the causes are much more upstream than I ever imagined. Real solutions are often much farther away from the problem than we think. Scientific investigation is a tool designed to help clarify these relationships.Moving forward, I can look for evidence that supports or refutes my hypothesis. Eventually, I will have ‘enough' evidence to either abandon the idea (fail to reject my null hypothesis) or continue to pursue this line of reasoning.The beauty of science is not that it proves anything. Rather, science helps us understand our realities by guiding us toward more likely causes. These relationships, in turn, help us understand ourselves and each other. The more we understand the links between self-awareness, attention, mindfulness, and connectedness the more likely we are to reduce personal and collective suffering. Our ancestors paved the way for our amazing individual lives. The least we can do is make the most of it. Do wars, anxiety, and suicide sound like making the most of it to you? There is a better way. Together, we are learning what it is. For more about what science really is see here, and here, and here. If you are enjoying this content, please tell your friends.

Do other people ever make you angry?I'd be worried about you if you said no. Or assume you are the Dalai Lama. Many of us struggle to find connections to people we disagree with. Or people who act out, are annoying, or mean.I preach a lot about how we are all connected, and how we need to love one another and participate in our communities. But it is so very hard, sometimes, to love everyone or to want to connect.If you struggle with truly feeling connected to people, this article is for you.Have you ever considered reincarnation? I never used to think about it. I don't know why. It just wasn't a concept I considered. Recently, however, I had an epiphany. I struggle to tolerate people and am often annoyed by human behavior. While considering a particularly annoying person in a loud truck I thought about reincarnation.What if we were all at very different stages of some much longer lifespan? What if our Consciousness, Self, or Spirit gets multiple ‘laps', or chances to live a good life? What if reincarnation is a thing?This explanation made me feel much closer to my fellow humans — even the ones that annoy the crap out of me. Somehow, believing we are all at different stages — perhaps vastly disparate stages — made it easier for me to find tolerance for others. This sudden thought of having multiple lives led me where other ideas could not. If reincarnation is ‘real' I can understand how people can be so incredibly different. It explains a level of diversity that goes beyond a human lifetime. What if our Consciousness, Self, or Spirit lives longer than a human lifespan? What if we ‘come back' to Earth and continue to live somehow? What if part of life is about the growth we can accomplish over multiple lifespans?This idea shifts my focus from personal growth from a single life to a much longer period. Rather than spending thirty or forty years trying to be a ‘better person', ‘reaching enlightenment', or ‘growing up' what if we have hundreds or thousands of years to accomplish these goals?I know, I know. This is crazy talk. And maybe it is. But I can't deny how much this has opened me up.Considering that reincarnation is real made me more tolerant. When I consider that another person might only be on lap two or three it makes it easier for me to find compassion for their journey. At the same time, I do not consider myself ‘advanced' or ‘better' than them for potentially being on a higher lap. Rather, I see that I was them and they will be me. The idea that we all might be blessed with multiple lives fills me with joy.Reincarnation checks all the boxes.If you have seen my work you will know that I preach diversity in all things. Reincarnation extends our capacity for diversity by extending the growth period. I have spent almost fifteen years learning to live better and frustrated by the slow pace. Sometimes it feels like I haven't made much progress. But if we get more chances to grow I am somehow less frustrated. Similarly, the idea of reincarnation makes it easier for me to tolerate others' behavior. When I am frustrated by another person's behavior I can remember that I was once where they are. I am them and they are me. That we are on different levels of the same playing field connects us. Any idea that makes it easier to feel connected is ok in my book. If you are enjoying this content, please tell your friends.

Have you ever wondered how any two people can have a conversation and walk away feeling both like they were heard and believing they heard the other person?It blows my mind how limiting conversation can be. As magical as language is, it leaves so much room for error. Words mean different things to different people. We hear one thing when they mean another. Context matters. We have different life experiences. There are so many layers that make it easy to misunderstand.Language, like any technology, is wrought with at least as many restrictions as benefits. Yes, we can be more complex in our descriptions and needs. But that same level of complexity increases the potential for error!Being a good communicator is incredibly difficult. But it is also a luxury because it takes time, skill, and most of all, awareness. Self-awareness is a huge luxury. Not everyone can afford to pay attention. We are all at a different place evolutionarily and these different perspectives further complicate communication.Despite the incredible variation that occurs between any two communicators, I think all conversations can be described as having fairly discrete outcomes. Either two people (or more, this is a simplification) agree, or they disagree. We can behave as isolated individuals or as part of a connected partnership. When two people disagree, the results are therefore limited:Result 1) Person A gets their needs met, and Person B does not. The outcome is A, BResult 2) Person B gets their needs met, and Person A does not. The outcome is B, A. The same result reversedResult 3) Person B and Person A both compromise to reveal a third outcome of C, CHow many conversations have you been in that have the above result?The first two outcomes require concession by one party. This concession is often characterized as ‘giving in', ‘people pleasing', or having ‘weak boundaries'. Not advocating for your needs is considered unhealthy.Of course, the ‘winning' party in the first two scenarios is often described as being ‘assertive', ‘confident', or ‘narcissistic'. The most interesting outcome is the last one which represents a compromise or partnership. When both parties alter their needs to allow for the other we approach an equitable condition. This, I argue, is more evolutionarily ‘fit' in the long run.Compromise, of course, requires good communication. Which we suck at. The pathway to compromise and partnership — to truly realize that we are all connected — is the practice. The practice helps us take an observer's perspective, witness nonduality, and make peace with the dissonance.This is how we change the world.If you are enjoying this content, please tell your friends.

“The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.”― Charles BukowskiDo you ever think about this? Can you think of an example from your life?Sometimes, it seems we're surrounded by idiots. And they're loud.  We worship confidence, arrogance, and status. Why are we surprised when the greedy become gluttonous?Why do we not honor traits like kindness, empathy, and connection? A lot of this is fear. We worry about what might happen if we interrupt, disagree, or speak our minds. The system is oppressive The system requires non-leaders to be complicit, to elect these leaders, and to value the characteristics that make them so bad at leading. These power differential relationships are not only common, but they also dominate. In one way, we are simply playing our role in the governance systems of human society. From another viewpoint, if we do not reject the undeservedly arrogant, we are complicit in their remaining in power. The good news is, that these authoritarians have no power if we can stop enabling.Taking the bone away from the pit bullIt makes perfect sense that the oppressors are drunk with power. We expect our oppressors to oppress. This power is just too much. Like heroin or iPhones, it is impossible to resist once you've had a taste. Once a person who values power, status, and money gains access to these things, it becomes a runaway train. The first step is taking away their power. But how do we do that?What are the alternatives?Our current societies are governed by the wrong values. We admire those who seek and master power, status, and money.  It is time we choose a more cooperative and less competitive approach. There are too few winners under our current competition models. What is voting if not a competition? A solution I propose frequently is simply not to elect anyone who wants to be in government.  To change anything, we must first take the bone away from the pit bull. Power is addictive and no one who has it is going to give it up willingly. Unfortunately, the system makes it nearly impossible for us enablers to do anything about it because we have no power. It isn't easy to leave an abusive relationship. It's a trap.  But we must take the power away. Ending the enabling slays the dragon. Help ourselves, help each otherThe first step is for those of us more fortunate to help ourselves. I preach about a practice that facilitates healing and includes journaling, therapy, meditation, mindfulness, and healthy living. These journeys are unique to each of us and, in my opinion, our responsibility. The next step is for those more able to help those less able. Some of us suffer less from oppression. The global north, for example, has gained all the benefits of using fossil fuels. This leg up can be used to help leverage smaller countries to build the necessary infrastructure to be able to care about things like government. Those of us not in abusive relationships can connect with centers designed to help abused spouses leave unhealthy relationships. We can help adults learn to read.  We help ourselves, then we can help each other. This nurtures connectivity and cooperation. It forms the foundation of a bottom-up takeover and redistribution of power.In my perfect world, all voices will be heard with equanimity. The one-dimensional, self-serving, obnoxious voices will be ignored by most rather than supported. We can get there by cooperating.It's the hardest thing we do because it is overthrowing the system designed to keep us complicit. This ain't gonna be easy.If you are enjoying this content, please tell your friends.

What went right?Do you ever wonder how we got here? Do you ever think about what has changed over hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution?The past few decades have seen exponential growth in technology. Smartphones. Passenger trips to space. Electric vehicles. Lots of crazy new tech. In most of our lifetimes, technological advances have dominated the changes we experience.Science changed the world. Medical advances like germ theory and surgical techniques have arguably improved our lives. Fossil fuel use has underwritten most of our ‘advances' in making things easier to do. Imagine having to walk to the store to get groceries.What went wrong?Despite all of these increases in knowledge and efficiency, we are surrounded by problems associated with these advances. We are addicted to our smartphones. We drive too much. The speed with which we live our lives has become dangerously fast. We struggle with anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation. Wars are fought over the increasing limitations in the fossil fuels that provided all of these comforts.It's not nice to fool Mother NatureI can't help but think about the lack of systems thinking that got us here. Arguably, the ‘advanced thinking' that got us to the point where we have ‘godlike technology' has caused at least as many problems as it has solved. “The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.”― Edward O. WilsonOur creative abilities have outpaced our nature. We abandoned the understanding that all things are interconnected, depend on each other, and work together in a natural system. We thought we could out-do evolution.Natural selection winsDespite our ability to outpace selection, the natural world will select the traits that work. I can't see how arrogance and competition are going to ‘win' over empathy and cooperation. If we consult the natural world, we will see how this plays out.Yes, competition exists and even regulates some animals in some populations. Sure, being aggressive, mean, and arrogant has led to world domination by some cultures. Yes, if we allow and tolerate excessive inequality it will persist.But does that make it right? In a world that is intimately interconnected and interdependent, do we think that is going to work in the long run?The oversimplification of the world will be our demiseUntil we accept that Natural Law governs all things, including arrogant humans, our extinction will continue. I firmly believe Homo sapiens is being selected against. Our inability to consider the long-term consequences of our short-term gains, our insistence on ‘privatizing the gains and socializing the losses', and our valuation of competition over cooperation are driving nails in our collective coffin.I say this not as a doomer. I have faith that humans will, eventually, see the errors of our ways. I think I am a small part of a growing movement that is ‘coming to Jesus' about where we goofed up. I am confident we will get it right. I'm just getting impatient and it is hard to watch.More like this on Medium, and The Neurodivergent Professor podcast.If you are enjoying this content, please tell your friends.

Ok, I know, it sounds weird but hear me out. Humans are freaked out by death. I'm not saying I'm any different, just drawing attention to this in hopes of reducing our suffering. Today I'm wondering what life would be like if we could change our relationship with death.The Toltec civilization of Central America considered death an advisor like a friend who gives advice. In this way, Toltecs navigated their lives knowing they were temporary. It is a way to try and make the most of the time we have. Some modern cultures ask how you would live life differently if you knew you only had 6 months to live. I'm sure you've heard this approach at some point in your life. It's an interesting question.How would you live differently?My ecological background treats death as a normal part of life. Death is kind of the same as birth. It is a necessary occurrence for all living things. Things change through time, and part of that is death. Humans forget this. We don't talk about it. We pretend it isn't true. We try to use technology to make it false.Isn't that weird? At least in an ecological sense? What did our other animals do? What did our ancestors do? I love that question. I think as our minds and nervous systems became more sophisticated we developed a lot of emotions around death. Sadness. Grief. Regret. I think that our hardware evolved faster than our software. In other words, our awareness of our emotions lags behind our capacity to have them. Let's face it. Death is overwhelming.But can't we learn to incorporate death into our lives? Talk about it. Recognize it. Not overdramatize it so much. Can't we use death as a reminder to live our lives? If we can embrace our mortality, we may discover ways of dealing with our loved ones' deaths. Recognizing and talking about our mortality is a start. Ecology understands that all things are part of a larger system. Within this system, energy flows and nutrients cycle. Life and death are natural parts of that cycle. You can start at birth:birth->life->growth->reproduction->death->decomposition->nutrient recycling->repeatDeath is a part of a natural cycle. One we can't change. Isolation and alteration of any part of the system can upset everything. Modifying death can destroy the homeostasis within the biosphere. What would it be like with less fear and guilt and shame and drama? Would we be more connected and less separate? Can we take back all the energy we spend avoiding death and pretending it away? To do otherwise seems profane. I wish we talked more about death. I don't want to take away the grief and sadness. But maybe we could learn to reduce the guilt and regret. Maybe it would help to ask ourselves how we would live differently if we understood our time here is limited. The Neurodivergent Professor is a weekly podcast and video project that examines what is like to be different.If you are enjoying this content, please tell your friends.

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt meDo you remember this nursery rhyme? When I was younger, I believed it. I thought I would rather be yelled at than physically harmed. While I feel lucky to have received more verbal bullying than actual butt-kickings, I'm not so sure the damage was less harmful.As an adult, I realize words have real power and do a lot of harm on their own. Sometimes I wonder if words hurt worse than beatings. Certainly, words don't ‘never hurt me'. Sticks and stones may break our bones, but words can break everything else. Including our hearts.Words are hard, and communication is even harder. I often say it's remarkable any two people can have a conversation where each person simultaneously feels understood and that they truly understand the other person. Poor communication can be traumaticMy experience in therapy, particularly using the Internal Family Systems (IFS) model, taught me that I had unmet needs as a kid. For whatever reason, I needed more information than was made available. I quickly learned that the people in my life, including my parents and teachers, didn't want to communicate the way I needed to communicate.Differences in communication styles can lead to incomplete understanding. Again, it's a wonder we ever have an effective conversation given the communication challenges. We define words differently, we use slang terms, and there is often non-verbal communication occurring. Communication is more than just trading wordsIn addition to the obvious back-and-forth word exchange, other elements complication our conversations. Our posture, body language, and gestures can modify the words we use. How we talk can be just as important as what we say. Effective communication requires multiple levels of interpretation. How do we ever know if we get it right? Lack of effective communication can make us feel unsafeMy childhood trauma centers around not understanding what was going on or what was going to happen. I felt out of control in my home environment because I didn't comprehend the rules and norms. People didn't talk very much, and what they did say often disagreed with what they did. The lack of knowing and being out of control made me feel unsafe. This, of course, led me to need to understand even more but also to develop strategies to cope with the unsafe feelings.I learned, or created Parts in the IFS sense, to protect me from feeling unsafe. When I didn't have the information necessary, I made up stories. When the words didn't come, I posited explanations for other people's behavior that made sense in the context of what they were doing. I told myself comforting stories about my family, my school, and myself so I could get through the day. This ability helped me survive childhood but has been maladaptive in adulthood. I have spent most of the past decade trying to unlearn these techniques. It turns out, my stories were inaccurate (surprise). No one can read other people's minds. Relationship quality depends on effective communicationPeople who suffer from poor communication often make up stories to feel safe. Many of our maladaptive childhood schemas stem from this storytelling. If we are lucky, we realize this before it's too late. Like many of us, I am working hard as an adult to learn how to better communicate and make sure I get my needs met.If a conversation occurs in the woods, but neither party is listening, does anyone get their needs met?If you are enjoying this content, please tell your friends.

What IS the matter?Matter is an interesting word. It's a noun and a verb. The noun means something of substance and can be physical or metaphysical. The verb means for something to be important. There's matter, and there is the matter. I like words like that, but the complication of communication and understanding.The idea of something mattering, as a verb, has been on my mind lately. The last two episodes (here and here) have focused on the relationship between our experiences and our stress. What matters directly affects our bodies, our minds, and our well-being.Everything can't matterMany of us don't discriminate among the barrage of experiences we face. Our inability to rank things in our lives means that everything matters. If everything matters, we're exhausted. We can't pay attention to all the things.And why would we? So many things don't matter. So much of our lives are inconsequential. I would go so far as to say MOST of the things we worry about don't ever amount to anything. Awareness, inventory, and ranking are requiredThe first step is self-aware. Truly, I think this is the ultimate cause of human suffering. Lack of self-awareness leads us to two ways of being. Either we are completely unaware and hedonistic, or we are hyper-aware and overcome with worry. I talk a lot about self-awareness and I don't know how to create it where it doesn't exist. I do know that things like journaling, meditation, mindfulness, and healthy living help nurture a state of awareness. Once we are aware, we can inventory the things that we experience in our lives. We wake up. Have coffee. Maybe we give care to the family. Maybe we go to work. We drive a car. All of the things we do have the potential to matter — but not all of them!An inventory of our life things and experiences, the physical and metaphysical, facilitates ranking and prioritizing. This process is similar to and often benefits from following a personal values assessment. We identify what matters, and then rank these things are high or low. High-ranking values demand our attention and energy. The low-ranking stuff? Not so much. This immediately frees up a lot of worry, reduces stress, and helps us maximize the things that DO matter.Our minds dream up the storyNo one can tell you what matters. Though I do believe there are universal values that are critical to all forms of life, our inventories will differ. The important part — the part that matters — is the process of figuring this out for ourselves. It is dynamic and requires frequent reassessment.This process of continually identifying what matters is our dream of life. This is the story we tell ourselves and others. To some degree, we have control over this story and we get to choose whether it is a horror film or a fairy tale. Some things we cannot change and our privilege, or lack thereof, certainly comes into play. Can nature advise us?Can we let evolution provide a lens to consider what matters? In nature, the things that matter are selected for while the less important stuff tends to go away. Traits or conditions that benefit a species start showing up with greater frequency whereas less beneficial features might decrease. So, what matters to you? What matters to all of us?If you are enjoying this content, please tell your friends.

I couldn't care less about that.How many times have you said that?We use this phrase as a euphemism to mean we completely don't like, disagree with, or are opposed to whatever is being discussed. There are things in life we don't care about, and some things we care a lot about. We pay attention to and direct our energy toward the things we care about.  My argument here is caring about things is energetically expensive and we need to be careful.Caring requires attention.We use the phrase ‘pay attention' because our attention is limited. When things are bothersome or stressful, paying attention can be painful.Some things are important. Life or death. We need to care about eating, staying hydrated, and sleeping. Other things are not very important. We don't need to care about which celebrity won an academy award, who is sleeping together at work, or what other people think about us.Our bodies, however, don't know the difference. We experience stress based on how we pay attention to the things we care about. Knowing what is important matters.We need to ask ourselves whether or not things are important. If something isn't worth worrying about, we can give ourselves permission to not worry about it. Imagine a life where you knew what was important and only worried about those things. Imagine being bothered, worried, or stressed about fewer things. Who doesn't want that?A therapist once told me that my worrying about my familial reputation ‘wasn't mine'. What he meant was I had learned to spend my energy manipulating how my family viewed my behavior as a means of being loved. He was telling me that this was something I developed as a defense mechanism to feel safe. This wasn't mine because it was caused by other people's inability to love me the way I needed to be loved. It wasn't mine.Figuring out what's yours is up to you. But I guarantee you it will help reduce the things that you care about. Taking this inventory of your life can help you care less about things that don't matter. What would life be like if you couldn't care less about things?Our energy, as awareness and attention, are spent on a lot of dumb shit. We worry about what other people think. We worry about exercising enough. We worry about how we look. We worry about how much money we make. Most of these things are out of control. Our worrying about them is of no consequence. Well, the only consequence is causing stress to ourselves.What would life be like if we could reclaim this wasted energy? Imagine what we could do with ourselves if we spent less time caring about things we don't really need to care about?You can learn how to care less, but you need to practice.In my writing and podcasting I talk a lot about having a practice. A practice is a set of routines we do that have long-term effects on our awareness. My practice includes journalling, meditation, mindfulness, yoga, exercise, and eating an ok diet. Your practice may differ. My practice has taught me how to take an observer's perspecitve. As an unintended consequence of my practice, I have built-in the ability to pause. To take a deep breath. To see myself preparing to behave automatically. I can now choose how I react a lot of the time. It has been life changing.Other relevant Episodes:Trying to Change the Future Is Like Living in The MatrixThe Cumulative Stress HypothesisUnlearningIf you are enjoying this content, please tell your friends.

Are you aware of the stress in your life?  Can you FEEL it when stressors are building up and you think you may pop? Do you ever feel like you're right on the verge of a meltdown?I think most of us are familiar with these scenarios. We can only take so much stress.When I was an ecologist, I had a vision for my life's work. I planned on studying how aquatic ecosystems resist or integrate stressors before they break down. Some streams were beautiful. Full of a diversity of life, clean water, and complex habitat. Other systems were homogenous. Devoid of most life. Ugly and plain. The difference, I hypothesized, was stress. I wanted to test the hypothesis that ecosystems integrated stressors, meaning they didn't change, up to a point beyond which everything changed. In other words, a natural system would resist change until it experienced too much stress. After that point, or threshold, the ecosystem would change entirely and likely never return to the previous condition.I call this the Cumulate Stress Hypothesis and, though I retired from being an ecologist, I now apply the same model to human systems. Individuals and communities. The Cumulative Stress Hypothesis suggests that a human system, individual or collective, will resist a shift from homeostasis by integrating stress. However, beyond some threshold of accumulated stress drastic and irreversible changes to the system will occur that are deleterious. In a community, peace becomes war, cooperation becomes competition, and life becomes death.We all experience stress in various forms. To effectively integrate small stressors without inducing dramatic shifts to our livelihoods we need to be healthy. Essentially, being healthy is maintaining a state of minimal stress BELOW some threshold. Small stressors like job changes, mild sickness, or even moving to a new city don't cause much harm because our healthy state facilitates the absorption of these changes.The problems arise when a small stressor pushes us over the threshold. Many of us, and most communities, are operating just below the threshold. This is too close for comfort. When the accumulation of background stressors is very close to the threshold we run the risk of drastic change. The closer we get the more risky a blowup gets. I argue that the maintenance of individual and communal human health requires us to stay well below our Cumulative Stress Threshold. Doing so requires an effort or practice.For individuals, this is a combination of a healthy diet, exercise, mental health management including meditation and mindfulness, maintenance of relationships, and general awareness of all of these things.For communities, this means having some form of healthy government, affordable amenities, good infrastructure, and balanced economies.A healthy practice helps us minimize the accumulation of stress. In essence, this is how we maintain health, happiness, and contentment. It is also how we minimize suffering. I can imagine a world where many more humans can do this. Once we change ourselves, we can change our systems. Changing our systems is how we change the world.Other science episodes:FactsScience Is Not the TruthIf you are enjoying this content, please tell your friends.

Do ever joke that we're living in the Matrix? I often refer to the movie when talking about the problems of the world. Sometimes it does seem like we're living in a computer simulation. Or does it? Anyway, I was inspired to do this episode by the idea that the future might be predetermined. Or, more to the point, that we can do anything about the future. Many of us seem to think we can. A common psychological error many of us commit is future prediction. Mind reading, catastrophic thinking, and worst-case-scenario thinking are common versions of this fallacy. I learned that my anxiety was directly related to this erroneous belief. Check this out. I actually thought that my worrying could control the outcome of my future. Seriously. I believed that if I worried hard enough I could create a positive outcome down the road.Many of us do this and with good reason. We are protecting ourselves from future suffering by trying to understand the possible future scenarios. The worst-case-scenario thing comes up because we believe if we prepare ourselves for the worst we can handle anything. Our worry about the future is likely adaptive. It probably helped us evolve by being hyper-aware of the potential outcomes. We were likely able to avoid danger and learn from the past. No one is arguing that this is helpful. Except when we create problems now that induce more suffering than any future scenario could.And maybe it does, but the problem is we spend too much time worrying and being anxious. This is entirely human. It's something we do. It is automatic. It requires a lot of work to NOT do it.How do we beat our central nervous system?The first step is admitting you have a problem. To do this requires self-awareness. Even with self-awareness, the fear doesn't go away. So we need courage. Identifying and reconsidering our beliefs and values also helps. Often, it is easy to see the error of our ways. Sometimes, it isn't so simple. There are many techniques to help with this. The entire self-help industry exists in support of changing our behaviors and beliefs. The problem thus becomes knowing how to differentiate between the people who can actually help and the snake oil. Again, self-awareness is the first step. Often, getting help is the second.There has to be a better way. Acceptance. Letting go of the need for control. Making room for change. And the unknown. Therapy modalities that help identify and change old and limiting beliefs. Wu-Wei. Being ok with sitting with ourselves in quiet. This may be harder for neurodivergent people because our coping mechanisms are often stronger. The stakes are higher for people who are truly afraid of being abandoned or cast out of their family or community.  Remember, you can NOT predict the future. So why bother trying? More details in this episode.YouTube version: https://youtu.be/Zkx5CdHHeTchttps://chrisburcher.com/science-is-not-the-truth/https://chrisburcher.com/episode-4-quiet-vs-distraction/If you are enjoying this content, please tell your friends.

This week I'll skip right to the punchline. The ability to see beyond the mainstream and to understand the continuum of whatever feature it is in the world is a special gift. This is enhanced awareness. I wonder if being neurodiverse or atypical or having a sensitive or different nervous system, sort of gives us this ability. In an evolutionary context, I can see how this ability would have been selected for. Hypervigilance enabled some of us to ‘scout' out our environments and look for threats, which was protective of the village. I think neurodivergence is an artifact of that.In this way, we can look at neurodivergence, ASD, OCD, and other forms of neurodiversity as superpowers rather than disorders. There is a lot of chatter for and against this perspective, but I guess I'm more of an optimist.I have always been different. A non-conformist. Outside the mainstream. I think many neurodivergent people are similar. In an evolutionary sense, we need all of us to participate so we have as many options as possible to adapt.I have shared my thoughts about expressing our genotypes, flying our freak flags, and not trying to conform. Two episodes, The Uniqueness Imperative and The Evolution Paradox go into great detail about why it is our human responsibility to ‘be ourselves' rather than conform to the mainstream.Why are neurodivergent people outside the mainstream?It's complicated. But it's also just like anything else. Why do some people have blue eyes? Or blonde hair? Or olive skin? Why are some people more nurturing than others? How come my brother is better at math?Biology perpetuates diversity (see the linked episodes above). To try and force everyone into normalcy goes against that basic natural law. We must express our differences — in every way — to enhance human evolution. And even to prevent extinction.Unfortunately, things like music, books, and religion select for sameness, normalcy, and mainstream. The more mass appeal something has, the more people will buy it. At least that seems to be the logic. So we end up with an unnatural amount of similarity.In other words, unlike natural selection which chooses what is fit, unnatural or non-natural selection forces things to be more similar. Humans are the only species I know of that can do this. We are essentially going against nature.Nature wants diversity because it enhances evolutionary success. Humans seem to be undoing that system by reducing diversity in favor of conformity. The more similar we are, the lower the probability that we will be able to survive environmental change.Being ND isn't easy. But in the context of human evolution, we are important. There is nothing wrong with conformity. The problem is going against our nature. When we conform because we need to feel safe there is a problem. When we don't feel free to express our differences and ‘fly our freak flags' there is a problem. When a species loses its diversity there is a problem. So maybe this will help us understand that being different is a special gift. Maybe these words, and the growing support of other weirdos and freaks, will enable us to show the world who we are. Maybe one day we won't need to wear masks because our brothers and sisters welcome our quirks and appreciate the differences we bring to the world.Join me by sharing yourself with my writing, podcasting, and vlogging. You can find me on Medium, YouTube, your favorite podcast app, and my website.If you are enjoying this content, please tell your friends.

Are you familiar with Jon Kabat-Zinn? In short, he's one of the people who has made meditation mainstream. While I generally don't like words like ‘mainstream' and ‘conformity', anything that makes helpful tools more accessible to the masses is good in my book.Known as one of the creators of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), Kabat-Zinn has written a bunch of books and helped teach meditation to all sorts of regular people. This article is inspired by Kabat-Zinn's book, “Coming to Our Senses”.This talent of being able to teach complex and often polarizing subjects to ‘regular people' is the type of thing we need right now. This is one of the reasons I left academia. Scientists are really bad and explaining their findings to regular people. When I was a scientist and polled my colleagues, they nearly unanimously agreed that this type of dissemination — the sharing of complex knowledge with regular people — was NOT a scientist's job. I suppose journalists and writers are ‘supposed' to do these things?I tried to explain this in my fourth episode, “Quiet vs Distraction”. But this is an issue that continues to be central to my work. Anyway, Kabat-Zinns uses the term ‘mindfulness' to describe a meditation-like state we can maintain for most of our lives. More importantly, his writings and teachings help regular people learn how to do this.Mindfulness practice is about focusing our awareness to pay better attention to our individual and communal lives. Paying attention, I argue, is the key to human success — and the answer to all of our problems.I truly believe this. Until we figure out how to pay attention we are not going to progress as a species. I also believe that most, if not all, human problems are related to our lack of awareness.This includes collective problems like: Disease. War. Income inequality. Racism. Prejudice.As well as individual problems including:Anxiety. Suicide. Relationship issues. General dissatisfaction with life.In this episode, I argue that we cannot move forward as humans until we learn to be mindful. I think the solution to all human problems starts with self-awareness, moves on to awareness of our connectivity, and finally permits real progress. That's a massive oversimplification if ever there was one, but it also perfectly describes my work and where I am headed. Until we learn to care for ourselves, we cannot possibly hope to protect our planet.Until we can identify what we are feeling. . . what we value. . . what we truly need . . . we can't possibly solve problems of modernity.I think mindfulness is a way of reconnecting with ourselves and each other. The problem is one of marketing. How do we introduce mindfulness and ‘awareness management' to people across cultures without scaring people away? If you are picking up what I'm laying down please let me know. This community is growing and we need to know each other.You can follow my writing here on Medium or at www.chrisburcher.com. Subscribe and follow my podcast or YouTube channel if you prefer oral and written formats. If you are enjoying this content, please tell your friends.

Have you ever thought about your boundaries? Maybe a therapist told you your boundaries were weak. Or maybe you read something about relationships and how some people might not respect your boundaries. I learned early on that my boundaries are weak. I tend to pay attention to other people's needs more than my own. Some people in the world will take advantage of this. Many of us struggle to simultaneously love other people while protecting our own needs.As I learn about neurodiversity, I have been thinking a lot about how boundaries relate to masking. Masking describes how we alter our behavior to reduce conflict. Masking often requires us to soften our boundaries to appease other people. The problem is, when we loosen our boundaries we open ourselves to more suffering.Boundaries ensure that we know when we are approaching discomfort. They are warning systems that tell us we are wandering into situations where we have felt unsafe in the past. Sometimes it is important to push our boundaries for personal growth, but mostly they are important to maintain our mental and emotional balance.I, like many neurodivergent people, struggle with hypersensitivity. My awareness is super responsive to environmental stimuli, and I am often overloaded with information. In some ways, this is a superpower that protects us but in others, it is paralyzing. Too much information isn't always a good thing, and it is easy to become paralyzed and overwhelmed.Boundaries help hypersensitive people from becoming overwhelmed. It can reduce analysis paralysis and help maintain awareness of our needs. If we don't have awareness of boundaries, we can't possibly expect to process all the information coming in. Lack of boundaries is simply overwhelming.Boundaries allow us to discriminate among competing information and match up our needs with possibility. This is critical for interacting with other people, but also in understanding what is going on with us inside.A lack of boundary awareness almost ensures that our sensory systems will be hijacked rendering us nearly helpless in our environments. I honestly think this is the cause of MANY of our problems. You gotta stand for something or you'll fall for anything.Boundaries protect our needs but require awareness of them. The first step to identifying and forming healthy boundaries is awareness. Hell, what is awareness NOT the first step toward? Whether you need boundaries or not, awareness is the key to any type of personal growth. I think the most important point in all of this is that having poor boundaries can lead to a loss of awareness and self. Loss of, or lack of, self-awareness is a problem. Without self-awareness, we are victims of our reactions. As victims of our reactions, we become passive participants in our lives.But what do we do, Chris? What's the point of all this boundary and awareness mumbo-jumbo?Look I get it. We all want solutions. Unfortunately, the solution to these problems is the same as all problems. Or at least a core part of the solution to any problem. The shortest pathway to self-awareness is meditation and mindfulness.In this episode, many of my past episodes, and certainly in future episodes I campaign for mindfulness. If you like this kind of thing please let me know in whatever way suits your style. You can find me here on Medium, at www.chrisburcher.com, on most of the podcast platforms, and YouTube.If you are enjoying this content, please tell your friends.

Have you ever felt like you didn't belong anywhere? Do you have a ‘sacred space' where you do feel like you have membership?For many of us, we have our family. Whether or not we truly feel comfortable in that space, there is a membership based on genetics or time spent together.It is a difficult thing to simultaneously exist as separate and together. We are individuals. Our skin is a boundary separating us from each other.Yet we are also connected to each other in a very obligate way.Here I want to point out that neurodivergence provides an excellent model or example to understand this seeming dichotomy.One of my central tenets is that we are biological organisms defined by natural selection. Our genetic composition combines with interactions with our world and each other to help us change through time. We evolve. Our success through evolution, or our fitness, defines our value. We made it!However, layered on top of that fundamental scenario is the very human insistence on conformity and normalcy. In the face of continuous natural change we resist. I call this the Evolution Paradox.Similarly, our success along this evolutionary path is in expressing our diversity. Our uniqueness is ‘meant to be' and flying our freak flags is critical to this phenomenon. I call this the Uniqueness Imperative. Together, these ideas summarize my platform. That human problems arise from the dissonance between our nature and our arrogance. For some reason, we think we are better than evolution. We resist the very forces that create and perpetuate us. We don't want to change, yet change is the very foundation of our humanity.That neurodivergence — or any type of diversity — exists is brilliant. Diversity is the key to our success. In a universe that is always changing, multi-generational, mortal beings must change with it. Or go extinct.Pretending that neurodivergent people are somehow unimportant, ‘less-than', or have no value is insolent. For whatever reason, humans have shifted from recognizing and embracing diversity, to trying to minimize it at all costs.Just look around. Choose any conflict. Anxiety? A result of trying to be someone you are not. Fitting in is stressful.War? I want you to be like me. You aren't. Let's fight. Inequality? You are different from me. I must abolish you.It may be oversimplifying, but I believe most of our problems come down to the dissonance that arises from resisting our nature. Of trying to conform in a world that values non-conformity.And I get it. Conformity is protective. Showing others your ‘true self' is scary. Masking, or blending in to social groups, is self preservation. And we've done this for so long, maybe thousands of years, that we have forgotten how to be ourselves. To just be. The lack of safety and fear of being cast out of the village has led us to try and be alike. And this is damaging our fitness, in the Darwinian sense.I argue here, and throughout my writing and podcasting, that we have to stop this. Somehow we have to find the strength to be ourselves. And to embrace each other. And to be ourselves in a world that seems to want us to be each other.It's time to shift the power from being normal, average, or conforming to being authentic. The time for human arrogance is over. The stakes are too high. The persistence of our species is literally at risk. Diversity is the way. If you are enjoying this content, please tell your friends.

How do you feel about terms like people pleaser, codependent, inauthentic, or chameleon?We use these terms to describe when we are not ‘being ourselves' in the presence of other people.I think this probably has some evolutionary significance in ensuring we remain members of a group. We are being polite and trying not to hurt feelings or cause conflict. We want to be liked.The neurodivergent community uses terms like ‘masking' or ‘camouflaging' to describe this behavior. Autistic people mask to hide behaviors that may identify them as autistic. Similarly, allistic or neurotypical people mask when they try to avoid conflict or blend in. My experience with masking began in therapy where I was identified as codependent. According to psychoanalysis, I mask all the time so that people will like me and to avoid conflict. I was given tools to help change my mind and beliefs, but I couldn't let go of my desire to keep the peace.Later I would experience Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy where I learned I had ‘parts' who protected me. One, or more, of these parts were related to my need to avoid conflict and blend in. I learned at a young age that ‘being myself' often invited ridicule from my peers and made me feel unsafe. I learned to mask to feel safe in the world.Unfortunately, we humans tend to repeat what works and I became a master masker. I learned that my brain works like this. If I feel unsafe I will perform a behavior or role that worked in the past to make me feel safe. Reducing my personality, or masking, and blending in more with the person with whom I was interacting or was afraid, accomplished this need for safety. I think the IFS model makes a lot of sense and I have met many of the parts that help protect me. The problem is, that these masking behaviors also reduce our growth. Especially when we become adults and can protect ourselves in other ways or when the bullies of our youth are gone. It is easy to overdevelop masking tendencies. Like a muscle, the more we use them the stronger and more pervasive they become. The more we mask the less comfortable we are being ourselves. We start to become the masks we wear. Eventually, it is easy to lose track of who is you and who is a mask. I believe a lot of us suffer from this identity crisis. We forget who we are because we spend so much time being someone else. Where do we draw the line?Masking is protective, of that, there is no doubt. Personally masking probably saved me from getting beat up more than once. It also enabled me to learn critical life skills like public speaking, interviewing for jobs, and maintaining relationships.But somewhere along the line, I lost myself. I realized I had done so when therapists would ask me what I wanted or what I needed. I honestly didn't know. I didn't know what I wanted or needed because I didn't know who I was. As sad or weird as that may sound I think it is incredibly common. I think we learn to rely on our masks to get through our days. In doing so, we strengthen them and rely on them. It becomes subconscious. We are not aware of what we are doing. In the background of our lives, beneath the level of our awareness, our masks become stronger. As they do, our ‘selves' become weaker. We become more afraid of revealing who we are and more convinced that doing so would cause trouble. The key, then, is to moderate our use of masks. To do this we must first be aware that we are masking. I have learned to do this through a meditation practice. There are probably other ways, but I will focus future articles and episodes on how a practice is essential; especially for neurodivergent people.If you are enjoying this content, please tell your friends.

I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees. I speak for the trees for the trees have no tongues. Dr. Seuss, The LoraxDo you have an opinion about climate change? How about abortion? Or universal basic income?We all have our concerns and our hills that we'll die on. This week I will use climate change as an example of a polarizing issue and make an argument about how neurodiversity may provide a model for solutions.Human beings argue about many polarizing issues, but we often agree about solutions. Most of the solutions involve top-down strategies like voting. We have to change the ‘machinery' at the top, regardless of the change we seek.  Want to make groceries more affordable? We have to change the major food companies. Want to reduce discrimination? Vote in better politicians. Want to ban sensitive books? Elect new state government officials.Voting, you will find, is a common solution to many human problems. How's that working out for you? Remember Ronald Reagan's ‘trickle-down economics'? Yeah, that didn't work.Even science has lost the ability to solve our problems. Truly, science has sort of joined the club in trying to regulate our beliefs in a top-down direction. We don't need to understand our problems any better. We need solutions.Top-down approaches don't work. I think it is time for a bottom-up approach.My work often suggests that we need new solutions to our problems. Currently, humans are plagued by intrinsic problems like anxiety, depression, and suicide. We also suffer from extrinsic problems like health care, equality, and racism. Most solutions follow a top-down approach where we believe in following the rules to change the system within the constraints provided. Increasingly we are losing faith in these systems and more people believe the systems were designed to keep us stuck.Education, government, and economics rely on students, citizens, and consumers who behave predictably. Predictability works best when people are similar. Thus, systems favor sameness and conformity as a means to an end. The argument I continue to make, however, is that this approach disagrees with the basis of biological life on Earth.The problem, then, stems from a dissonance between how we live our lives and the machinery that provides us with life.Briefly, our DNA has evolved to create diversity, yet we increasingly depend on conformity. Species persistence depends on expressing this DNA as diversity. Our problems stem from our refusal to do this. Rather than embrace diversity, we reject it. Why humans would ever design systems that blatantly disagree with basic biological principles is beyond me. Life is diverse. Diversity ensures persistence. End of story. I fundamentally believe that most, if not all, of our problems stem from this mismatch.Unfortunately, top-level systems like science, democracy, and capitalism are too difficult to change. Or, if we did implement changes, they would be too radical and uncomfortable and cause new, unforeseen problems. This is why we can't just stop using fossil fuels tomorrow and switch to electric vehicles.All solutions to human problems start with individuals. It's time to try a bottom-up approach. I think we are converging on this realization. To change the world we have to change ourselves. Many of us are doing this work now, and I believe my work contributes to this larger effort. NeIf you are enjoying this content, please tell your friends.

What is your experience with therapy? Have you tried it? Wanted to try it? Hesitant to try it? Overwhelmed? Did you have a bad experience? I have noticed some neurodivergent people have had negative experiences with therapy. Here I want to clarify my own story about how both therapy and neurodivergence are helping me heal and become the person I want to be.Briefly, I have been in therapy, counseling, or coaching (I use the general term therapy to describe all of these forms of help) for thirteen years. I began my healing journey after a divorce and retiring from my career to be a stay-at-home dad. I have seen over a dozen specialists over those years and continue to see a therapist today. Recently, my current therapist suggested I complete several autism and general neurodivergence self-assessments. I was surprised to discover I scored quite high as autistic. This began a new type of healing for me where I considered for the first time that, perhaps, there was nothing wrong with me that required fixing. But I also realized that my psychoanalytic journey is also extremely helpful. Just not in the way I thought it would be.Therapy helped me build a practiceMy practice grew out of therapy, although I didn't realize I was building it. Over the years, I tried all of the things that were supposed to help. Journalling, meditating, exercising, and a healthy diet were all components supposed to make me feel better. More generally and ambiguously, having a good mindset and being mindful were also supposed to help. I realize now that my problems stemmed from expecting immediate and specific results. Despite having convinced myself I was being patient, I wasn't. But I practiced enough of these techniques regularly enough (ish) that I started to see changes.I didn't associate changes in my moods and beliefs with anything I was practicing Getting out of my head and into my body changed everythingSomewhere along the line, I realized I understood everything intellectually but that I wasn't seeing any real change in myself. I eventually stopped trying to intellectualize the lessons and started experiencing them somatically and emotionally in my body. This is when things started to shift. When I started learning about neurodivergence things took off.Less intellectual, more somaticMy practice now consists of several elements. Here's a list of things I do daily-ish (I included links to older episodes on some topics):Meditation AwarenessMindfulnessExerciseMindful eatingJournalling.  I developed this habit before meditation and it is probably one of the most critical elements in understanding my emotions and values.These are things that work for me, and they can work for you, but you must develop your own, personal practice. A good therapist, counselor, or coach can introduce you to the tools and help you design a practice that works. I'm sure there are other ways, but these tools are readily available and have worked for lots of people. Therapy taught me how to build my practice to build a new life for myself. Therapy might be able to do the same for you. I'm sure there are other ways. I think the most important things I have learned are that:If you are enjoying this content, please tell your friends.

Do you love yourself?I know, it's an extremely personal question. When a counselor first asked me this question I was taken aback. It's offensive and puts one in a defensive position. And who likes feeling defensive?But therapy is about healing and I answered as best I could. Again, and again. I'm fairly certain every counselor, therapist, and coach I have worked with has asked me some form of this question.When my new therapist heard my answer to this question she heard something the others did not. When I described my inner and outer worlds and my troubles blending the two, she suggested I might explore some autism self-diagnostic quizzes. Long story short, I tested very likely to be autistic. So here we are.What fascinates me is what I have learned from the neurodiversity community in just a few months. Whereas therapy made me feel like something was wrong with me, neurodiversity suggests that there is not. Being different isn't wrong.In therapy, I was taught that many of my beliefs were incorrect and could be changed. The problem was me, the solution was easy, and it was simply a matter of me implementing the solution. Therapy suggests my feelings are irrational and that I need to change. Therapy made me feel broken and prescribed various quick fixes. Most of these solutions came in the form of simply changing the way I think — the way my brain works. However, after over a decade in various therapies with nearly a dozen different practitioners, I was unable.My beliefs . . . my brain . . . my neurology proved impossible to alter.My inability to fix myself led me down a shame spiral.I don't blame therapy or the therapists. I learned a lot intellectually. I came to understand the popular psychotherapeutic approaches and concepts. I also learned a lot about my childhood and my trauma. I did a lot of healing over the years. Yet, the same problems plagued me. When I considered that there was nothing wrong with me things started to loosen up. Therapy reinforced my feelings of being different but left me feeling wrong. Thinking I might be neurodivergent made me feel okay about being different. And this lines up with my understanding of evolution and ecology. Of course, we are different. That's the point.Being autistic suggests that these feelings are rational and there is no need to change. My shame is unfounded. There is nothing wrong with my brain. The solution is to recognize how and why the world seeks conformity and that this is irrational — not me. Autism is teaching me that I don't need to change myself, but that there are things I can do to help integrate my inner and outer worlds. Though prejudice and stigma try to hide neurodiversity in the shadows, it is time we figure out how to be present. Expressing our diversity is imperative to solve our problems. We are not all alike. Trying to alter this natural law is killing us. My writing, podcasts, and videos are a small part of making this change. Together we can find the courage to change the world.Help us stay connected by subscribing to my Medium page, podcast, YouTube channel, or webpage. I'm currently reading “The Healthy Deviant. A Rule-Breakers Guide to Being Healthy in an Unhealthy World” by Pilar Gerasimo. You can find her work and the book here.If you are enjoying this content, please tell your friends.

Have you ever felt like everyone understands the rules except for you? Me, too. And I've spent over a decade in therapy trying to figure it out.The main reason I sought help from therapists, counselors, and coaches is because I have always felt different. Like everyone else got the ‘Manual to Human Life' except for me. As a result, I have always felt like an outsider. I think feeling different also motivates rebellion. Growing up in the 80s, we called this non-conformity. If you're younger than me, this means your interests fall outside the ‘normal crowd'. As I discover more about my neurodivergence and Autism, I realize that neurodivergence is the antithesis of conformity. This fits well with the ideas I outline in my podcast episodes 99 and 100. In short, the world is supposed to be diverse. Make room for people different from you. Don't be an asshole. This episode and the future direction of my podcast (which I have rebranded from Knowledge + Experience = Wisdom to The Neurodivergent Professor) is to be the person I needed when I was 15. I'm here for 1 me and the other people who need to hear what I have to say. I'm thankful to discover where I fit.My mission is to be additive to the body of the work that helps normalize diversity. I think this is self-actualization, as described here. I'm old enough to have figured some stuff out (see all 157+ episodes of my podcast and Medium articles for more) and need to share it in case folks are looking for it — like I have been. My growth now depends on giving back. Growth perpetuates life but requires resources. All living things get a fair share of communal resources to grow, reproduce, and die. Other forms of growth that consume too many of the limited communal resources are bad. Bad growth is limitless; the only biological example I can think of is cancer. Limitless growth is also one of the central tenets of capitalism, which has never made sense to me. Limitless growth disagrees with Darwin as I discuss in episode 156. It isn't considered fitness in an evolutionary sense. I think part of our duty is to grow, to address our issues, so we can give more back. Commensurate with our privilege, or course. Of course, it's your right NOT to, but . . . . then you're an asshole.I want humans to FLOURISH, and to assist others in flourishing. I seek to make humans better as obnoxious as that sounds. Personal growth. Self-improvement. I believe in these things.Suffering exists and is going to exist. It is part of being human. But we can learn to minimize suffering and maximize flourishing. We can learn to thrive rather than merely survive. I want to honor our ancestors who got us here. Here is where we are. My ‘here' is giving back to the future for me. Suffer less. Flourish more. We all have different paths. Different traumas. But we all have trauma. Healing is part of flourishing. Not healing maximizes suffering. I think that the purpose of growth is to minimize suffering, maximize flourishing, and help everyone else do those things. HOW to do this effectively is the direction of my podcast and writing. Whether you identify as neurodivergent or not, please subscribe to The Neurodivergent Professor on YouTube, podcast, my website, or Medium.If you are enjoying this content, please tell your friends.

Are you a religious person? An atheist? Agnostic?I consider myself to be agnostic. Mostly because I Don't Know. If I had to choose any belief system to attach to, I would be a Darwinist. By this, I mean that I believe that Natural Selection is a meaningful explanation of life. When I think about ‘why we are here', I can't help but recognize how life persists through time.In short, I believe Darwin best explained what I think the purpose of life is. Life begets immortal individuals that can reproduce and perpetuate. Life dies, but life persists. The chief mechanisms in this dance are DNA, sexual reproduction, and Natural Selection. I capture this argument in episodes about Sexual Selection and Love, Let's Talk About Sex 1 and 2, the Uniqueness Imperative, and the Evolution Paradox. In short, the purpose of life is to perpetuate diversity to ensure we persist through environmental changes. The creation of diversity maximizes the probability for survival where ‘fitness' results when biological characteristics work out when things change.The purpose of this episode, and the future direction for my work, is how this applies to neurodiversity. Sexual reproduction creates new individuals that are different from their parents. These individuals express those differences during their lives. Individuals deemed ‘fit' for their environments will reproduce and continue the process.Of course, this applies to our nervous systems. I define neurodiversity as genotypic (in an individual's DNA) and phenotypic (the physical expression of DNA) variation. To me, the nervous system is the interacting parts that facilitate our sensory interpretation of the environment. When we talk about neurodivergence in the form of autism, ADHD, OCD, and many other conditions we are referring to the different ways our nervous systems work. Briefly, our brain, spinal cord, and other nervous cells and tissues coordinate with our sense organs to interpret our external environmentsIt should come as no surprise that a diversity of neurotypes is beneficial to survival. We're supposed to be different in every way. To represent a continuum — a spectrum, if you will. It is true for height as well as sight. Diversity is key to survival. Not for individuals, but for species.The bothersome thing is that as critical as diversity is, modern humans try very hard to be the same. Being forced into conformity is what's wrong, not neurodivergenceWhy would we all ‘work' the same way? We are unique individuals. We are products of sexual reproduction, which ensures that we are similar, yet differ, from our parents.We used to be cool with this variation. We understood the value of diversity. We might not have known why, but we supported instead of rejected our differences. At least I like to believe that to be true.The more we seek conformity, the more we notice neurodivergence. This matters. This needs to stop. My goal is to help change this BACK to how I think it used to be.Accept that different is good. Stop trying to reduce it.Neurotypes have different capacities for interacting with the world. Phenotypes. External stimuli are differentially intercepted and interpreted. Each one of us has a unique way of navigating the world. We can all benefit frIf you are enjoying this content, please tell your friends.

Have you ever felt like the only person who didn't receive a ‘How to Live Life' handbook? Did you think everyone else understood what was going on except you? I've felt like that my whole life. And it isn't that I don't like myself. I love myself. Everything breaks down when I move from my ‘inner world' to the ‘outer world'. I struggle to understand human interactions. I always feel like I'm different.And don't get me wrong, I'm not looking to be ‘happy', whatever that means. I'm just trying to reduce my suffering. I believe in human flourishing and I'm trying to learn how to address the aspects of my life that reduce that. And to help others learn how to do it, too.My first foray into healing was seeking the help of counselors, therapists, and coaches. Near uniformly, they told me that everyone feels different. I internalized that to mean, if everyone feels different then we are all the same. More importantly, we are all wrong. I am wrong. But I already knew I was wrong. Feeling wrong or different was the whole point of me seeking therapy. Being told that I was wrong for feeling different not only didn't help, it made me feel ashamed. A lot of therapy was like the shift from guilt (something is wrong and I can change it) to shame (something is wrong because I am wrong).Does that make sense?I was a weird kid. An odd teenager. And an awkward adult.The first time I vomited I thought I was dying and I developed emetophobia — the fear of vomiting. It has been crippling.I had a lot of weird friends growing up. This made me feel superior until I realized that parents lumped weird kids with other weird kids, so what did this say about me?The first time a girl expressed interest in me I built up a wall so tall no physical interaction could ever happen. Despite my curiosity, I was just too overwhelmed to do anything about it.My interest in breakdancing and skateboarding got me beat up. My weird clothes induced ridicule.Eventually, I learned how to mask or act like I knew what I was doing. I had various degrees of success holding jobs, passing tests, driving a car, and even making physical contact with the opposite sex. I also learned that smoking weed helped. But there was a lot of collateral damage there. Eventually, I discovered alcohol and had similarly polarized results.Now, more sober and with highly developed coping mechanisms or masks (see Episode 148), no one would ever suspect I was autistic.And maybe I'm not. Except in the neurodivergent community, I have found clarity. The shift from therapy (there's something wrong with you, and you need to fix it) to autism (you're just different, and that's ok) has been overwhelmingly relieving. A few months ago, I allowed the idea that I might be autistic — or neurodivergent to some degree — to penetrate my psyche. After taking tons of online tests and always scoring in the ‘likely autistic' category, I accepted that this might be an explanation for things I had learned about in therapy. What a difference perspective can make.To me, autism posits a theory that suggests humans may be neurologically variable. I don't really care for the DSM definitions, this one makes sense to me. Sure, I may lack psychological training but I have a curious mind and a shit ton of degrees. It makes sense to me that, like most anything related to biology, our ‘neurology' will vary around a mean to some degree.What I have learned about biological organisms is that we receive information through our nervous systems. This includes nerve cells, brains, spinal cords, and all the connections within this system. Humans have five subsystems that allow us to receive information from our environments. These include the senses of sighIf you are enjoying this content, please tell your friends.

If you are in therapy or considering psychoanalysis this episode is for you. This episode is also for you if you have been wondering about neurodivergence, autism, or ADHD. This is the beginning of what I think will be a long quest and potentially a new direction for this podcast and blog.In this episode, I lay out my experience with psychoanalysis and my recent foray into learning about ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) and neurodivergence. Several episodes will follow with increasing levels of detail and both specificity about me and generality that may apply more broadly.There is a companion blog post linked here that inspired this episode and is worth reading if you're into this sort of thing.I don't know why humans ponder our existence. I don't know what motivates one person to pursue personal growth and another to dismiss it entirely. My work is directed at those of us who want to live a ‘fulfilled life', who are ‘pursuing happiness', ‘seek healing', or want to flourish. We want to live our best lives while here on Earth.This is not to say any of us are miserable. Some of us are, of course. Sometimes growth is motivated by severe trauma. Others are simply curious. I think curiosity is very human and is enough of an excuse to gaze at our navel should we choose to do so.For me, my pursuit of these things came about because I have always felt DIFFERENT. I didn't have a better word to describe this feeling, and I'm not sure there is a better word. I have just always felt a little awkward, or atypical, or unusual. I never really felt like I ‘fit in'. If you have read this far, I'm sure you can relate.This feeling led me to several experiences with counseling, therapy, and coaching in my youth, teenage years, and adulthood. After I had kids, and again after my divorce, I sort of ratcheted down on trying to understand myself and to heal. I have lots of experience with therapies of all types. And I can't say that any of it healed me. Certainly, much of it was HEALING, but I never felt a Eureka or ‘a-ha' moment that made me feel better.Mostly, therapy made me feel like something was wrong with me that I could learn to ‘fix'. But I never felt ‘fixed'. Not feeling ‘fixed' made me feel even worse. I felt shame at not being good enough to heal. I went into therapy feeling ‘not good enough' because I was different, and implementing the therapy training led me to feel even more ‘not good enough' because I couldn't make the techniques work. It wasn't until recently, when a therapist suggested I do some neurodivergence tests, that I was able to open up to Autism. Nearly all of the tests suggest that I have a high propensity for being Autistic. While I didn't score ‘off the charts' in the ‘super obvious' range, I was way above neurotypical or allistic (non-ASD). What surprised me about ASD is how well it seemed to explain the entirety of my experience. I found videos, podcasts, and interviews of people saying the same things I had said all my life. Things like:I always felt differentI feel like other people had a handbook of life that I didn't getThe world doesn't make senseI love myself, but I fall apart when I interact with the rest of the worldI have mysophonia, or sensitivity to some soundsI am an empathic, introverted, highly sensitive, INFJThat last one pretty much screams Autistic as far as I am concerned.I have also found a lot of support within the neurodivergent community. My few posts and episodes about self-diagnosing have been well-received and supported. I find myself identifying strongly with other neurodivergents.More than anything, if ASD does accurately describe me — and I If you are enjoying this content, please tell your friends.

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Have you ever thought about how complex our brains are? Or about how little we seem to really know about the way we think?Like, how can we simultaneously love our family but also they annoy us to no end? I think this dissonance, this capacity to hold to two seemingly oppositional thoughts at the same time is just something we are able to do. What's weird it that we try to not do this. When we have two opposing thoughts we say we're ‘confused', or ‘demented', or ‘senile'. We have all sorts of negative terminology to describe what I think is a perfectly normal condition.I think this all stems from our sadistic love of conformity. If you've seen any of my work you know I'm not a fan of conformity. Rather, I believe in diversity and variation. Maybe it's my background in Evolutionary Biology. Maybe it's that I've always felt different, maybe it just makes sense. I present both The Evolution Paradox and The Uniqueness Imperative to explain how our genetic makeup, via Natural Selection, creates diversity. Change is the way of the world, not conformity. By definition, conformity goes against the very literal basis of our being.For more background, I discuss in ‘Let's Talk About Sex Part 1' why sexual reproduction is so important and how this facilitates diversity. Our biological nature creates diversity and has led to our splendid minds. But what is a mind, exactly? A mind comes from our neurology and our brain but is something different. You can't measure a mind. It us ‘us', our individual Self, our Soul. It makes each one of us unique.And this is where it gets tricky.Inasmuch as we are a unique member of Homo sapiens, we are also a PART of the collective human race. We are one with the Earth. There is not actual, individual Self. And there is.This is another thing humans aren't very good at: holding two seemingly opposing ideas simultaneously. But not only is that possible, it is just a feature of life.The difference, nay, the problem in all this is that has led us, humans, to feel separate, and to promote conformity while shunning diversity.Think about it. That's what we do. And it's wrong.This episode is chock full of other ditties about evolution, conformity, and neurodivergence. I am on a new path and much of the meat of future discussions are introduced and rehashed here. Please feel free to drop ideas, thoughts, comments, and corrections.Your mind is a splendid thing. I hope you use it to promote the very diversity that makes you unique.If you are enjoying this content, please tell your friends.

Have you ever felt like scientists were assholes? Or at least super arrogant? I often hear scientists sound this way. And when I was in academia it seemed they surrounded me. Being an academic seemed synonymous with being so arrogant that you turned people off.I think many of us have experienced this and it does academia and science a disservice.It's like a medical doctor with no bedside manner. If you can't communicate with ‘normal people', whatever level of intelligence or value you offer society can be ineffective.In other words, if you can't talk to people in a way that doesn't turn them off they won't hear what you have to say.Think about that.If we can't communicate well we run the risk of losing our meaning. Our value to society can be severely diminished.That's why I have podcasted here and here and even here about the importance of being human — being NON-SCIENTIFIC. Being humble. When I say Science is Not the Truth, I mean it. When you hear scientists claiming they (and usually only they) know the truth or have some special access to reality, you should believe them less.When I say “I Don't Know” are the most powerful words in the English language, I mean that, too. If you hear someone sound so confident that they stop questioning their brilliance, you should believe them much less. If at all. I talk about the truth and facts and science and arrogance a lot. Hell, my very first Episode was about this. I talk about this so much because it matters. It is important for us to act as informed consumers. Of goods and services but also of information. It is up to us as a society to reach a consensus via a science-informed discourse. Unfortunately, what happens nowadays is that we treat scientists as either Gods or pariahs. Neither moniker is fair or accurate. This is a dangerous practice. It's obvious to me that not everything can be effectively studied using science. Science requires measurements and numbers. At the most basic level, all science does is convert reality to numbers and then use math to answer questions.If you accept that explanation (and I get it if you don't, because, well, this article and every link in it) then you can entertain the idea that the ‘goodness' of science is dependent on the ability of the measures to be measured effectively and accurately.In other words, for things that can't be effectively measured AND replicated (i.e., measured many times or have many different units to measure) then science just won't work.And I am VERY guilty of this because as a scientist I studied streams. Each stream is unique. Every part of every stream is unique. As Hericlitus is supposed to have said, No man ever steps into the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he is not the same manHis lack of gender appreciation notwithstanding, this is essentially accurate.Despite my inability to replicate streams I still used math to assess my data. In reality, this makes my science weak, at best. Psychological science suffers from a similar shortcoming. It's hard to measure human intelligence, the brain, or our emotions. But we use scientific methods anyway.There are many who would thus consider ecology and psychology to be ‘soft' sciences oIf you are enjoying this content, please tell your friends.

Do you ever think about what life was like for early humans once we had our basic needs met? You know, once we figured out how to procure victuals and maintain a shelter. What was life like? Experts including historians, anthropologists, and scientists seem to disagree. Some say we were ignorant savages (I'm looking at you, director of Pocahontas) whereas others claim we actually didn't work that much but spent a lot of time playing. I like to think we were pretty smart. I think we fairly quickly met our basic needs and spent a lot of time enjoying ourselves. Painting caves. Making babies (though we may not have known that's what we were doing). Learning to communicate, tell stories, and document history.It's certainly fun to think about. And I can't help but think what I wrote in the title above:Life wants to live. Doesn't it?And, evolutionarily, wouldn't natural selection sort it out this way? As in, individuals who had a proclivity or interest in life — living life — would be more likely to procreate and perpetuate their genes into the future. I'm making a few assumptions here. Mostly that Nature Knows Best and that the Meaning of Life is to express our individual genome. In essence, to live out our nature. Refer to those episodes for more details.I think we humans are at a point in our evolution where we are sorting out the recent past. The past 5,000 years or so of recorded history are all we know about ourselves, and that is a tiny fraction of the time we have existed. Our ancestors have been around maybe 200–300,000 years. What was going on before, say, Egypt?Many think our ‘highly evolved brains' make us ‘better' than our ancestors. Certainly our non-human ancestors. Modern times have been dominated by decisions and choices that utilize our ‘advanced brains'. This is unique.During most of our history natural selection was mostly external. As our brains became more complex (and more complicated) humans started to impose selection pressures on ourselves. That's where things get interesting.As I mark 150 episodes and over three years of this podcast, I am being pulled in this direction. Along with many other thinkers and creators, I feel a collective emergence of questions. Many people are questioning our human decisions. We are wondering about the direction of evolution. We might be creating more problems than we are doing good. Our capacity to override Nature might be taking us away from where we need to be.We are in an age where we, and our technology, can act as new selection pressures and literally alter the course of evolution.Is this good? I argue it is not. This episode introduces many ideas that I will explore in the next arc of Knowledge + Experience = Wisdom. I hope you enjoy the summary and will stick around for the future. If you are enjoying this content, please tell your friends.

Do you ever feel like what you want to do goes against what society ‘wants' you to do? Like, maybe you want to be a painter, but your parents and your school tell you that you'll never make any money.Maybe you want to take a gap year after high school but your parents fear you'll never go to college and, thus, never ‘amount to anything'. Maybe you are attracted to people of your same sex but your religion tells you that's wrong.I think you get what I'm saying. It's kind of like my ‘Are vs Should Problem' and the many episodes I dedicated to figuring out who you ARE and who it is you feel like society, your parents, and your religion tell you you SHOULD BE.So this episode is about that, but it's also about a more general, yet pervasive, set of ‘rules'. For me, this started very young, maybe six years old. I realized that, in order to live my life, I was going to have to spend that life working. I was surrounded by people who didn't seem to like their jobs, so I also learned that working pretty much sucked.Even at this early age, I realized life was about things I didn't want to do. I also realized that ‘society', whatever that was, regulated the things I could and could not do. It was as if I had to get permission to be myself. Surely, many people can relate to this feeling.The most basic form of permission is working to earn money to pay for your life. How awful is that?I'm not sure what initiated this feeling that I needed permission, but it is a fairly pervasive element in this life we live. If we are privileged enough to have a choice. But we don't need permission to live. The fact that we are lucky enough to be born is all the evidence we really need. I talk about this in Episode 99: The Uniqueness Imperative. But we miss that. Society, religion, family, work, and culture beg to differ. They want us to EARN our way, and I just can't get behind that.We don't need permission to live.If only it were that simple. I can tell you all day long that you don't need permission to follow your dreams, date who you want, or wear whatever clothes you want — as long as you obey the Golden Rule and harm no one in the process. But it won't do any good. The brainwashing, the INDOCTRINATION that you experienced is just too strong.We really need to get away from the idea that earning money permits us to fulfill ourselves. We deserve to get our needs met, as long as doing so doesn't harm others. Though we don't all have equal access to pursuing our dreams and needs, those of us that do owe it to everyone to try.We owe it to our ancestors who suffered for our success. Whose traits were selected for and persist in us. Expressing these traits is the highest of achievements. Yet, that's not how we measure achievement. We measure ‘success' in the form of money. How effed up is that?Money is just something we made up. Your DNA is what makes you you and links you to everyone else.But you don't have to play this game. You can do what you want. You can follow your own path. Listen to the beat of your own drummer. Listen to your heart. Whatever it means to you to be yourself. The person you ARE.You have my permission. Not that you needed it. www.chrisburcher.comIf you are enjoying this content, please tell your friends.

you remember the term ‘coping mechanisms'? We used to hear this phrase often, usually when people were referring to our bad habits. Like, smoking is a coping mechanism for stress. Avoiding conflict is a coping mechanism for people who don't want to get involved. Denial is a popular coping mechanism for avoiding hurtful truths.Though the term ‘coping mechanism' has sort of gone out of style, we still talk about the same phenomenon. We talk about people wearing masks and changing our personalities depending on who we talk to.We talk about limiting beliefs affecting how we navigate our lives.All of these terms describe how we can respond to life in ways that aren't necessarily how we would choose to act. It's like our reaction to things depends on the situation. In different situations, we employ different reactions or strategies.This is most obvious to me when I take psychological tests or quizzes. I had to do this recently with my therapist. I found myself thinking ‘it depends' in answering many of the questions.For example, a classic Meyers-Briggs personality question is about introversion vs. extroversion. A question might be something like,Do you enjoy being in a crowd of people?Well, yes and no. It depends! Or sometimes we think, “I don't know”.Another example is related to autism. Do you find it difficult to make eye contact with others?Again, it depends!In this case, I do find it difficult BUT I have learned to make an effort to have eye contact because I understand it improves communication.So, which is it? This got me thinking about coping mechanisms, limiting beliefs, masks, and how we alter our behavior in different situations.Most importantly, it made me wonder who I am and where is my Self.In Internal Family Systems Therapy, Richard Schwartz describes how personality is comprised of multiple parts. These parts perfectly address these coping mechanisms.Dr. Schwartz describes how trauma, or uncomfortable situations, can lead us to create masks or sub-Selves that help us navigate our lives. We learn to alter our behavior to protect ourselves.Thus, there are many attempts to understand how and why we wear masks in our lives to cope with stress.In the end, I think it comes down to this:If we aren't getting our needs met, we implement strategies we learned as children Many of these strategies no longer work for us as adultsIf we can figure out how to meet the unmet needs we no longer need the maskLife, then, becomes about finding our Self and discarding the masks we wear.I hope this episode will help you on your journey of self discovery.Please subscribe to my podcast, YouTube channel, and/or this blog for updates and notifications.If you are enjoying this content, please tell your friends.

If you're familiar with me or craft beer (or maybe both?) you may be familiar with the phrase, “The brewing industry is 99% asshole free”. This quote became famous when Sam Calagione, founder of Dogfish Head Craft Brewery published his book “Brewing Up a Business”. This book was an inspiration to my brewery and a big part of the craft beer explosion.The quote suggests that the beer business is more cooperative than competitive. It turns out this is not true. Like any business, breweries compete with each other. And as the number of breweries increased, so did the number of assholes. In the end, Sam's quote is not true, and there are as many assholes in the craft brewing business as there are anywhere.Surely you have assholes in your life. Maybe a boss or coworker. Maybe a family member. Maybe your president. What's crazy is that these jerks seemed to be more loved than hated a lot of times. How did they get to be the boss in the first place?In fact, in our white patriarchal plutocratic world being an asshole seems like a requirement. Many people in power are admired for their assholery. This makes me wonder how much we are all complicit in these assholes' success because we enable it.Now, I get it. Many people are not in the position to refuse an asshole. When they are in positions of power over us, there is little we can do that doesn't harm ourselves. We lose jobs, relationships, and money if we rebel against their poor behavior.But enablers and complicit behavior don't help drive assholes extinct. Have you ever thought about a time when there were no assholes? I often think (perhaps naively) that we didn't have a lot of assholes until we had social hierarchies. Depending on when that began (and we'll never know), there may have been a time when social groups had mechanisms to PREVENT assholes from gaining power rather than ENABLING them. In fact, I will suggest here that shame was one of these mechanisms. Shame is a terrible thing, and I have shared about this here and here. But shame evolved for some reason. I think groups of humans, and maybe other primates, used shame to call out and DISABLE poor behavior. So when our ancestors acted like assholes, they got kicked out of the tribe. The asshole genes were selected against, in an evolutionary sense.As our societies modernized and became more numerous the asshole reduction behaviors have been forgotten. Most assholes needed to get punched in the mouth or otherwise publicly shamed but were not. I think some elements of modernity, including social hierarchies, power, land ownership, and money, created artificial evolutionary selection pressures FOR assholery.In this episode I talk more about why it is critical we reverse this trend and rid ourselves of the assholes in our lives.Please tell your friends about Knowledge + Experience = Wisdom, my blog, podcast, or videos. It's not easy to find this kind of content. We appreciate it.If you are enjoying this content, please tell your friends.

What matters to you? What is important? What do you value (Episode 46 Values)? We say things matter to us when we put energy into developing, protecting, and thinking about them.Our families matter. Our relationships matter.Things that matter have meaning to us. What is meaningful to me might not be meaningful to you.But as I have said before, I think there are some things that have universal meaning. They matter to us all.Life. Peace. Calm. Justice. Love. Integrity.Many would argue these things matter.But how about power, wealth, or truth? Do these things matter?Probably there are some fairly universal things or concepts that matter to us all. Whether we realize this, of course, is open to debate.What really matters, then, depends on awareness. About trying. About making an effort to do the things I talk about in other Episodes like 136 Human Values are Common Sense, 133 What Freedom Means to Me, and 123 Nature Knows Best, 121 Awareness. Cultivation and Growth, 82 What Do You Need?. We have to care about ourselves and each other. I also think that defining what matters can be incredibly helpful to us as individuals and to our society. I may even argue that it is essential to define what matters if only to reduce the things we spend time worrying about.For those of us who are anxious, letting go of things that DON'T matter, or that matter less, can be freeing. We could all benefit from a personal inventory to help eliminate things we worry about but that probably don't matter.Many of us probably waste time on things that don't matter. Many of us also probably never thought about it.I invite you to take an inventory (Episode 51 Personal Inventory) of your life and ask yourself, 'Does this matter?'If it doesn't, let it go. If it does, hold it close and protect it.If you like what you're reading, hearing, or seeing please tell your friends. If you are enjoying this content, please tell your friends.

You're probably not old enough to remember, but a commercial in the 70s reminds me of this episode. In the commercial, a woman who represented Earth informed the viewer, "'It's not nice to fool Mother Nature."https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDkiq5jD5HcI don't know if this ad made an impression on me, but my adult self agrees with it.I don't think we consult Mother Nature often enough. It might be my Evolutionary Ecology background showing, but I tend to think of things in terms of evolutionary history. In many ways, I use Nature as a reference in most of my life.I have done several episodes honoring the beauty of evolution.Episode 44, 'Unnatural Selection' suggests that humans have altered the typical course of evolution using things like technology and machines.https://chrisburcher.com/2021/03/26/kew-episode-44-unnatural-selection/In my 100th episode, 'The Evolution Paradox' I discuss how strange it seems that humans resist change despite being entirely driven by adaptation to a changing environment. Quite literally, the only thing we can depend on is that things change.https://chrisburcher.com/2022/06/03/life-is-supposed-to-change-its-up-to-you-kew-episode-100-the-evolution-paradox/Truly, most of my thinking assumes that the evolutionary model and history tells us a lot about success.Fitness, according to Darwin, is essentially biological success. The things that persist on Earth are 'fit' for the environment. Fitness is good. Extinction is bad. Here I am going a step further to suggest that we treat Mother Nature as our ally. Our therapist. Our counselor. Why would we not consult this wisdom when making decisions about our future?This consultation is toward what I am calling 'Natural Law', though this term has been used before and isn't quite suitable here.I'm simply suggesting that we look to history to think about the future. Kind of like how meteorology and predicting weather is more 'hindcasting', or looking to the past, than it is 'forecasting'. Instead, humans often assume we know better than Mother Nature because we are so evolved and intelligent. We create technology that helps our bodies live longer while our minds rot. We burn fossil fuels that help us fly around the planet while we destroy the systems the planet relies on for life. We're good, but we're not that smart. This sort of unnatural selection is dangerously arrogant and, arguably, is leading to our demise. The most obvious example of this erroneous and arrogant thinking is Capitalism, and I discuss this in detail in Episode 37, 'The Currency of Life'. https://chrisburcher.com/2021/01/08/kew-episode-37-currency-of-life/Humans think we can do better than Mother Nature. And maybe we can, but we certainly shouldn't implement these strategies without consulting her first. Our ancestors knew this. We just forgot.If you are enjoying this content, please tell your friends.

Are humans inherently evil? There's a popular hypothesis that says we are. It's a great excuse for bad behavior. But believing we can't help ourselves has never set well with me. Kind of like when some guys use ‘millions of years of evolution' as an excuse to not be monogamous.My hypothesis is that humans aren't inherently evil, and I'm going to tell you why.In Rutger Bregman's ‘Humankind: A Hopeful History', he makes a convincing case for why he doesn't think humans are evil. He cites another book, William Golding's ‘The Lord of the Flies” as a popular example arguing against his thesis. He explains that “Lord” is a popular book based on no evidence. In fact, Bregman further describes, the only evidence we know of refutes the premise that humans would behave like they did in Golding's story.I think being evil and doing evil are different things. Kind of like how shame is about being bad and guilt is about doingbad. I don't think people are inherently evil. I believe we are born good. And always have been.Before I share my thoughts on why I think people are not inherently evil, please allow me to share a story.My brother is a bicycle rider. He has been my whole life. Sometimes he has to share the road with cars. Thirty years ago he told me he was literally run off the road by an intolerant (evil?) driver. For years I used this story as an example to illustrate that things were getting better. I thought those days were behind us.Just a few days ago my bro shared more recent anecdotes about having a dirty diaper and a bottle of human urine dumped on him by drivers while riding his bike. WTF is wrong with people?Were these people evil, or were they just doing bad things?I refuse to believe people are evil because I don't think natural selection would have favored it. I think the social nature of homo sapiens depends on lots of positive interactions. I think ‘good' is considered evolutionarily fit, and thus selected for whereas evil is not. So, why, then do people do bad things?I believe people do bad things because of trauma. Acting out distracts people from their pain and provides an escape. A hit of dopamine or oxytocin to cover up their wounds. Probably because other people did bad things to them. Other people who had their own trauma. Who also were not evil.These people, traumatized people, don't need our hate. They need our love. https://www.buzzsprout.com/530563/12353141In order to send love to and empathize with people who do bad things, we have to do our own work. This begins with us, as individuals. Next, we can learn to extend love outward toward people in need. We can demonstrate tolerance and empathy.Self-awareness is contagious, but it is a luxury. Those of us who have it need to share it. This is the beginning of how we get to where we need to go.If you are enjoying this content, please tell your friends.

Lately, I've been wondering about capitalism and competition. As I have mentioned in other episodes (links below), competition only occurs when resources are limited. Also, capitalism requires competition to protect consumers from monopolies. While I argue in older episodes that this protective feature often doesn't work, the fact remains that capitalism requires competition.That competition is a requirement of capitalism is critical BECAUSE competition only occurs when resources are limited. When there are plenty of resources, there is no reason to compete. Evolution works the same way. Organisms will opt to avoid competition at all costs, at least at the species level, and will only compete if there are no other options. In fact, speciation results from niche diversification associated with this avoidance.In other words, when two species share a similar niche and require similar resources, they will not compete until those resources are limited (i.e., not enough to meet the demands of both species). When resources become limited, the species will look for other resources. As a result, their niches will change and one or two new species can form. This is how evolution works. It is natural law.When thinking about natural law and capitalism, then, I can't help but wonder why humans would design such a system. Why would capitalism require resources to be limited? Or, asked a different way, what is the result of this requirement if, perhaps, it was not understood a priori? It's more probably an oversight than an evil plan.When resources are required to remain limited, inequality happens. There will be haves and have-nots. I wonder if this is what led to things like the caste system, kings and paupers, masters and slaves, and the rulers and peasants. These systems are common to nearly all, if not all, modern human societies.In this episode, I ponder what would happen if we altered capitalism to be more egalitarian. This is the beginning of a developing idea so please forgive the incompleteness of my ramblings. Links to older episodes about similar issues:KEW Episode 39: The Growth Fallacy - Knowledge + Experience = WisdomWith respect to economics, people often say that you have to grow to stay in business. I heard this a lot when I tried…chrisburcher.comKEW Episode 44: Unnatural Selection - Knowledge + Experience = WisdomI am currently working on a larger project that will connect my background in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology with…chrisburcher.com"Rugged Individualism or Unified Connection?" KEW Episode 95: Cooperation vs Competition …Do you enjoy friendly competition? Many of us do. Some say it brings out the best in us. Some thrive in an environment…chrisburcher.comEpisodes 117–119 are all about why sexual selection evolved to replace asexual selection (cell division) and can be found on this page of my website. Nature Knows Best (Episode 123) - Knowledge + Experience = WisdomFor the past twenty-some Episodes, I have been trying to figure out how to formulate my current question of interest…chrisburcher.comIf you are enjoying this content, please tell your friends.

I'll just come out and say it.I'm sick of academic arrogance. Academic. Scientific. Intelligence mafia. I don't know why authority seems to be the foodstuffs of ego. But it sure seems like it is.I am so tired of being talked down to — as a society member — by those who are supposedly smarter than me.And it isn't just the false dualism of ‘I'm smart and you're not'. Or even that other people might know more about things than I do. I TOTALLY GET THAT.No, it's an attitude. A TONE, if you will. A tone of voice. And I certainly could be reading into this. I'll admit this could be, at least in part, about my personal past trauma. I used to be an academic, after all.I quit being a ‘practicing scientist' for a lot of reasons. Not the least of which is that I don't want to be around arrogant people. And I do believe the scientific community selects for arrogance. It's kind of how politics seems to select for assholes.Surgery seems to select for Gods.All that to say, I don't like arrogant bullies who are so attached to their own beliefs that they place themselves higher than others and close their minds to alternatives.And I say that knowing full well I may be doing that exact thing right now. I sincerely hope I am not.This is critical because arrogance can bully people into believing. And that ain't how science is supposed to work.Science is not the truth. Science generates evidence.Evidence creates belief.Beliefs change.Truth, like God, is absolute. Absolutes are outside human understanding. Truth, proof, God, perfection . . . . why bother with such things?I believe we cannot know them, yet we believe we can. Why not admit we cannot? Why accept that we are limited?We can get close! Our estimates and models can be very useful in understanding how things work.But we must — with as much universality as possible — leave the door open for new knowledge. For change.Because that is the only thing we can really know that approaches the truth.Things change.All that and more in this episode. Podcast and video formats below:If you are enjoying this content, please tell your friends.

Would our ancestors be proud of us?When I think of the problems humans face today: suffering, anxiety, inequality, social justice issues, war, pollution . . . I try to put things in an evolutionary context. On the one hand, we have come so far. We have created many wonderful ‘science', ‘technology', and ‘engineering' elements that benefit individuals and society. Clean water. Sanitation. Medicine. On the other hand, it hasn't all been rainbows and unicorns. We can't seem to shake our violent and gluttonous nature. We kill each other and other organisms. We soil the water that gives us life. Individuals will fall along some continuum from ‘all humans suck and we should just die' to ‘we are so amazing because we can hoard billions of dollars'. Most of us are in the Gaussian middle.Many of us can agree that there is some bad shit going on that we could change. More would probably agree that our ancestors would NOT be proud of how we treat our home. Technophiles and scientists would argue against this view that humans are more cooperative and argue that competition is more our nature. I find it hard to not see the problems we have created (pollution, climate change, war, famine, inequality, depression) as not being — at least in part — caused by our incessant need for growth. More money. More power. More tech.I started my brief professional career by asking big questions. I studied how atoms travel around the entire earth in biogeochemical cycles. I asked broad-scale questions that required a LOT of data. Mostly because so many variables are interacting at these scales. As opposed to bench-top laboratory science where researchers can control for most variables and isolate one or two. Ecology is an extremely broad-scale and multivariate science. So much so that traditional scientific methods, designed for the bench top, are often criticized for being inappropriate and inefficient. In short, the more variables you add, the more wrong you can be.The problem is, that the world is exceptionally multivariate. The interconnected nature of, well, everything means we have to consider as many variables as possible to truly understand things.Because of my ecological training, I used to think I was a big-picture person. Since I have freed myself from calling myself a scientist (by retiring), I realize how wrong I have been.Yes, ecology and some other hard sciences are extremely ‘big picture' and are considered the most complex of any discipline. But we are still far from holistic.I realize now that to truly understand these broad scale issues of human importance we have to think even BIGGER.The episode is a beginning. This is the start of broadening Ecology to include elements of psychology, anthropology, philosophy, and sociology to forge a more complete picture of interactions. These interactions are critical to understanding the problems plaguing humanity today.We CANNOT move forward until we broaden our scope. Work together. Cooperate. And before we can do that, we have to work on ourselves.I am building a path to demonstrate HOW to learn to communicate with each other to solve the biggest problems. I introduce five parts to this process:Measures of individual and group human fitness that will be or are being selected for evolutionarilyPersonal inventory of values, ethics, morals, feelings, and needs. This is practice, includes things like meditation, exercise, healthy eating, and self-awarenessSocial structure including government, societies, and civilizationResource allocation and equitabilityAdaptive management and dynamic assessmentIn future episodes I will develop these and describe steps toward solutions.If you are enjoying this content, please tell your friends.

Much of our lives seem haphazard and disorganized. Sometimes doing our best simply means being able to get out of bed and go through the motions. As we gain awareness we learn how to better navigate life's obstacles. We learn to see the obstacles as the way. It is possible - I am living proof.As my journey - specifically the work I am doing here on my podcast - evolves I go back and forth between thinking I have no idea what's going on and an integrated theme.Does that sound familiar? Sometimes everything makes sense. Most of the time it doesn't. But I live for that sense of flow. This episode is a few steps toward integrating the first 139 episodes of KEW. And nearly 15 years of reading, listening, thinking, and learning. I used to say the big questions I was pursuing were things like 'Why am I here?', 'Who am I?', and 'What is the purpose of life?' But lately, I think the real questions are more like 'How are we doing?', 'What is good and what is bad?', 'Is there a better way for humans to live?'.My reason for pursuing these things is twofold. I want to live a 'better life' (whatever that means) and I want humans to 'better evolve'. I don't think anyone will disagree with me that humans are plagued with problems. Sure, we learned how to make water safe to drink, reduce infant mortality, live longer and healthier lives, and move food around the planet. But what have we lost? I look around and see problems. Problems that plague us as individuals like anxiety, depression, and suicide. And problems that plague our societies like war, hunger, income inequality, and racism. These indicators of human well-being suggest that we could do better.And that's what I'm looking for. What is it that we could do better? What things should we stop doing? What are the relationships between the things we do, have, and want and how we experience life?In this episode, I outline the basic components of healthy living as individuals and as groups. I firmly believe that we have to figure our own shit out fairly well before we can have the conversations that will change the world. Using personal growth as a model I think we can apply the same tools that heal us as individuals to groups. Families, communities, societies, and civilizations can grow as individuals grow. We don't need to reinvent the wheel.More soon.If you are enjoying this content, please tell your friends.

We can't live without water. It comprises most of our bodies and planet. Water does so many cool things. Water is pretty weird.Even though particle physics tells us we are mostly space, we seem to be mostly water. We can't live very long without it and it surrounds us and all we do.We live on a planet that has tons of water. Literally. As ice, and liquid water, and water vapor.Water travels around our planet in predictive ways we call the hydrologic cycle. Water creates currents because it holds heat differently than other compounds.Water has chemistry unlike any other molecules. Water is weird. And critical. Vital. To life.To understand our planet we must understand water. Why it's weird and what that strangeness means for all life. If you listen to this episode it will refresh your memory about why water is so cool and explan why I'm bothering to share this information. It will help you understand climate change and our connection to the Earth and each other.If you are enjoying this content, please tell your friends.

One of the most influential papers from my former career described the ‘River Continuum Concept'. Though quite basic, this paper revolutionized how we thought about streams and rivers. Specifically how freshwater systems changed from their springs where they began to the oceans into which they drained.This paper introduced me to systems thinking and changed how I think about the world and nearly everything in it. Generally, systems are comprised of individual elements and the interactions among the elements. The shift for me and many others is to expand the focus from myopic consideration of single parts to the interactions of all the parts critical to the item(s) of interest.This shift in thinking depends on our understanding of scope.Often we use the word scale or perspective when we really mean scope. Scope refers to the grain size of our focus (e.g., a salamander, a pixel, or a race car) and the extent of the area around that grain (e.g., a stream, a monitor, and a race track). For every item we are interested,there is a relevant and appropriate environment or system (extent) to consider. Thus we define not just the target of interest but the relevant system and parts we must also consider to truly understand anything about our target.Continuing the stream system analogy, we can consider many systems fairly linear in complexity. Truly, many systems are likely to be more three-dimensional and diffuse, but those are more difficult to study. The stream metaphor is a good intermediate step between target-based, grain-focused thinking and truly expansive and complex systems.Typically, when we focus on a problem or target of interest, we think about only the immediate context. When faced with an unproductive employee, for example, a manager might refer to the employee handbook, monitor performance metrics, or even adjust the location of the employee's office in order to adjust or improve performance. Using the stream metaphor, these solutions would all be located in the same area of the stream very ‘nearby' the employee's location. These solutions might have short-term effects but will not truly change things in the long run. This is because the causes are proximal and not ultimate. Yes, relocating an employee away from other staff who might converse too much may have a short-term effect on productivity. But if the true cause of the employee's poor performance is outside the workplace then the true cause is not removed. Using the stream metaphor, I learned that it is critical to move upstream if the target of interest is in order to consider higher-order influences and causes of distress or change. Each section of a stream from the headwaters to the mouth has differing characteristics. But the general rule of thumb is that only upstream areas influence downstream because of flow. Stream flow occurs in the downstream direction thus we must look upstream or laterally for influential causes of in-stream phenomena. I don't want to give away the whole story. Please listen to the podcast and/or watch the videos below for the full story. And please check out the other 150+ episodes of Knowledge + Experience = Wisdom. www.chrisburcher.comIf you are enjoying this content, please tell your friends.

Do you ever think about your comfort zone?You know, the thing that keeps you doing the same things over and over. And helps you stay calm, minimize anxiety, and do the things you need to do. I think of the comfort zone as being like a cocoon that surrounds our bodies. When we get into situations where we are uncomfortable, scared, or unfamiliar we start to experience negative emotions. Sometimes we're afraid. Other times we get angry. We experience shifts in our baseline emotional state. Rather than focusing on the discomfort that comes when we push up against our comfort zones, I see these states as opportunities. If we can be courageous and push passed these discomforts we can experience growth.The opposite is also true. If we continuously retreat from discomfort and interpret it only as danger, we miss out on opportunities for growth. While this kind of living can promote safety, it also promotes uniformity. If an unexamined life is not worth living, we should probably be looking at discomfort as an opportunity instead of a warning. In this episode, I argue that being uncomfortable promotes personal growth and that we can learn to welcome discomfort as a guide.I hope you'll check out this episode, and search the other 150+ episodes on the Knowledge + Experience = Wisdom podcast or YouTube channel. www.chrisburcher.comIf you are enjoying this content, please tell your friends.

Do you remember common sense? That people just kinda know stuff. What's right and what's wrong.Do you remember Common Sense? The document by Thomas Paine that was a precursor to the Bill of Rights and the Constitution? The first thing is something we think everybody we agree with has, and everybody we disagree with doesn't have.The second thing basically said government is a necessary evil.This episode is about the first thing, and inspired by an exchange I had with a much younger person at the Tractor Supply.We were talking about how common property is often left in disarray or even damaged. I made a comment about trying to leave common property the way I found it so that the next person found it the same way I did. The kid replied that it was just common sense to do so. Common Sense.Common. Meaning both frequent and public. Sense. To perceive through the human body and mind.This all makes me wonder where such a thing exists at all. Or whether it exists everywhere.Perceptions of reality that everyone shares.Certainly such a thing exists. It's just that we've lost it. We all sense things. But our nervous systems are very different. We each put our unique ‘spin' on our observations and call them truth.Isn't this what's happening in politics? Isn't this how we got to where we are.What happened to the common part. Why don't we share things anymore?Shouldn't we be trying to rediscover the common sense. The universal values. The shared part of the world.If you are enjoying this content, please tell your friends.

There was a time when my relationship with my father was pretty good. But during my teenage years I pretty much avoided him. During that period he gave me a lot of advice I didn't want nor listen to. One of the things he told me was that I needed to ‘Walk the Talk'.The essence of this advice is that we need to live a life of integrity. After living half my life on this planet I see the wisdom in his words. Humans truly need to align their values with their actions. This alignment, or integrity, leads toward the good things in life and away from the bad. I get it now.But as a teenager this advice just made me angry. Who wants to worry about the agreement between what we do and what we say, or believe in? Seems like a waste of time, right? But NOT making an effort to live in integrity, where your values match your actions is a huge disagreement. And disagreements can lead to conflict. This can easily become a sense of cognitive dissonance.In music, dissonance is when something doesn't feel right. Notes and tones of music occur that cause aural and even bodily discomfort. We don't like it. It is harmful.Sometimes dissonance works and is useful, but the execution requires mastery. I find this to be similar in life.Making the music of our lives sound and feel ‘right' requires awareness, attention, and observation. It takes work.Walking is work. It requires effort to move in a direction we want to move in.Talking is also work, because it requires a knowing. There is no more humbling nor important task than to identify and understand one's motivations, beliefs, and values. This is your talk.The rest is simply filtering your actions through these lenses.This is your walk.Alignment of the two is integrity.If you are enjoying this content, please tell your friends.

Here is Part 1 of this two-part series. In it, I focus mostly on the Growth part of the equationIn Part 2, I want to focus on the Smaller portion.As I said, I used to be an entrepreneur. In my small town, I struggled to generate enough traffic to amount to any significant income. Believing I couldn't manipulate revenue, I instead focused very carefully on the expense side of the balance sheet. Later I would see the Netflix shows by the ‘Minimalists' who described using things and loving people. They were effectively doing the same thing: putting energy into regulating the ‘expenses', whether actual dollars or energy.In this Episode, I summarize many of the different expenses we have. I talk about how easy it is to reduce a lot of these. I think many of us suffer from the whole, ‘well, I work hard so I DESERVE this' kind of thing. According to this excuse, we make ourselves believe that spending more money is going to make us happier.I know of very few people that illustrate this relationship. Mostly, everyone I KNOW is at least a little less happy than they think they could be. I believe there is some magic income required to create the luxury of this line of thinking. If you can't make ends meet, you aren't going to have the energy to ponder where you might be able to budget more effectively. Many have said this income, for a small family living in the USA, is around $75k annually. It's probably somewhere between $50k and $100k for most people.However, there may be a lot of assumptions in this estimate that aren't true. How would you ever know until you do your personal budget and take a good long look at your needs vs. wants?Most of us just assume if we have something, we need it. I don't think this is true nearly as often as we think.I call this the personal inventory. It is CRITICAL, if we want to live better, to inventory EVERYTHING in our life — at least everything you spend money on in the case of growing smaller. And I'll bet you $100 you can cut some spending. Probably a lot more than you think.And for those living below the $50k threshold, I have a lot of ideas. I'm working on it.

The fourth of July makes me ashamed.I'm ashamed of myself because I can't seem to match the patriotism that surrounds me. In the USA, people get almost spiritual about their fireworks, hot dogs, and freedom worship. Behind all of this, for me, is a whole lot of weirdness.The whole Independence thing is fine. We fled a plutocratic government to have the ‘freedom' to worship any god we wanted only to find ourselves in a similarly autocratic system with exceptionally narrow-minded tolerance of ‘others'. What the actual f%^k is up with that?I'm also ashamed of my country. How can we celebrate such a thing? Beyond the obvious hypocrisy, of course, is the genocide. How are Americans always so blind to the cost of things? Coupled together I end up feeling a whole lotta cognitive dissonance around July 4.One of these things is not like the other.Outsider.Stranger in a strange land.It's a common theme I'm sure you can relate to in some way. Maybe not about the fourth, but there must be some situation in your life where you just don't get what's going on with everyone else.For me, that is surrounding the concept of freedom. How can everyone else get this so wrong? (from my perspective)To me, freedom is the capacity to choose our reaction to any situation we encounter. In a Buddhist, Taoist, or Viktor Frankl kind of way. To be able to understand that I am not a victim of my situation. To have the peace of mind to pause when we encounter an uncomfortable situation. And to remember that this, too, shall pass. And that we cannot control our environment or what happens to us, but we can control our reaction to it.How can freedom be anything else?