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 Race

I’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 Farmer
When we stop trying to coerce life to go exactly the way we want, we naturally experience a greater sense of fluidity…mindfulness.com

I 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!

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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’ values

Are 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.edu

In 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 values

Change 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 key

Humans 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.

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You don’t have to look far to find something to complain about.

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.

Isolation and ‘rugged individualism’ are a big part of the problem

I’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 values

Human 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 past

Winners 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 losers

Winning 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.

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