Parallel to this blog, my original drive was to show young people the possibility of a different kind of life quality than what is normally seen as being on offer. A life where your default experience is flow and deep aliveness. A life untouched by the assaults of one’s mind. A life connected to the greater reality.

The iteration was rather quick: I started and dropped writing 2 books and 2 ideas for a kind of wisdom school. It was all not “IT”. We don't need more education, preachiness - that is not how people imbibe information. We imbibe it through feeling engaged… mostly through entertainment.

After getting a glimpse of something real, one often rushes into sharing things. Little did I know that before I got to make my final creation, my “Self” had to be dismantled.

For a while, the universe has been feeding me information and hands on experience, with the exact goal unclear. Over the past 6 months the intensity and precision has increased exponentially. The pieces have come together now, the reconfiguration of “me” for the task seems to have reached a certain plateau. As the creation is ready to take on a life of its own, it will require full focus.

I don't know how long it will take me and it's too early to discuss any details. I do know I need to hunker down and let the process unfold. This means giving up all the non-core activities, including blogging, at least till I am done. I thank you for reading my ramblings so far.

What, in the end, can I say about parenting?

What impact can a parent really have, besides the obvious: being a decent human being, providing food, shelter and space for a bit of privacy? Besides those key parts, what is the one main overarching factor, when you look at the parents of completely successful people (not just financially free, but in terms of life satisfaction as well)? This is what I have found:

The parents of these people had their own life that they found highly interesting and engaging. There was not enough of “them” left to be obsessed and anxious by the role of the so heavily perceived responsibility of “parent”. They were living their interests, own pursuits and something that really fed their soul. From that position (of the parent being fully alive and engaged), when guidance is given, the child’s ears do perk up.

In the above case, the child can breathe and grow in the cocoon of the forces of nature/Tao (whose intelligence is vastly superior to ours), without having the baggage of emptiness, boredom, fears, expectations or dread of a parent’s (partly) unlived life.

However, outside of the house there is another big potential trip wire: Getting swayed by mainstream thinking and popular distractions. Being carried away by beliefs that one has not learned to question. This is where the astute parent can model the habit of what truly thinking for oneself is and how to question assumptions. Several articles in the index below touch upon this topic.

Besides healthy questioning of consensus thinking, it seems the best one can do is be an authentic caretaker and have other deep interests.

Children being inspired by your life is a bonus, it's not a requirement for them “making it”. The key part is that you are inspired by your own life.

But what if you don’t know what it is for you that brings this aliveness anymore?

What if you had the career highs, the wins, the parties, the travels, the philanthropy even… what if you have had all that and it stops being IT? What is the final, ever satisfying chase that puts an end to all chases?

For me, it was a thorough investigation into the nature of reality: what am I, what this life is, what are the laws that govern existence? Getting to the truth of all that, so there are no questions left, testing it and living it. This ends all chases. Then it doesn’t matter much what you do. The quality of life and the avenues that appear for any creative pursuit are of a different order all together.

The standard advice for this path isn’t that bad: Follow your natural curiosity, leave the secure path, take risks, question earnestly. If one does that with full buy in, the universe will eventually provide you with deeper, experiential explanation to the simplistic sounding truths. And the boon you ultimately wanted (but wasn’t able to articulate). I can say in the end, the payoff for the occasional discomfort and the time spent, is very much worth it.

Conclusion

There is no need to read parenting blogs, books and instructions if you have found what makes you permanently excited about being alive. There is no need to force the teenager to spend vasts amount of time doing something that he hasn’t examined the validity and use of. There is no need to stuff every free hour of their time with “productive” activities.

Model and authentically share how you live your best life whilst leaving them space to create their own. Love, have fun, explore, take chances, trust the universe, question popular beliefs and assumptions. Times are changing fast and all this “woo” stuff, mixed with some inquisitive common sense, is becoming more rewarded than it used to be.

At the bottom in resources is an index of themes/ articles that some have found useful.

Wishing you all a fantastic Christmas, happy holidays and a fruitful 2025.

With much gratitude,

Anna

P.S. All the paid subscribers had their paid subscriptions cancelled now and remain a free subscriber. Anyone on the free tier will get any future writing on other subjects/updates from me.

Some past Articles people found useful:

• High Agency Children. What does it mean to be a high agency? How does it arise and what destroys it?

• Immunization against low agency: Why does high agency seems elusive?

• Agency over own attention: Getting kids to value their attention as a core asset

• Learning to Love change

• Emotions and Self in an empowering context. The missing character in “Inside Out”

• Immunization against the adult-made virus of entry exam stress

• Understanding the value of agency and new opportunities in the changing education landscape. Kids proving how “School” was holding them back. A preview to the future of education?

• A paradigm in understanding of reality that can foster a connection to something beyond oneself, a sense of deep level okayishness. Modern minds arriving at “God”.

• Ability to think probabilistically + Parents who acknowledge that the times and payoffs of “what works” are changing fast. The risk of being real.

• Value of a shockproof bullshit detector.

• An ability to question one's own beliefs. The stuff fears are made off and What beliefs will your children inherit?

• A peak at a futureproof mindset that can take advantage of the Personal Agency Renaissance

• Awe for the intellectual

• Too Te Jim

• What Trading Taught me about Surrender, Spirituality and Reality

The movie “Inside Out” is a lighthearted, funny attempt to explain the interactions between emotions inside an adolescent mind and lived experience. 

The plot centers around Riley, a young girl who is uprooted from her Midwest life and moved to San Francisco. The main characters are her emotions - Joy, Fear, Anger, Disgust and Sadness, which in teenage years are joined by Anxiety, Fear, Envy, Embarrassment etc. The internal world and mind are depicted as a world of their own, with chambers like the “Subconscious” and “Long Term Memory”. The characters (emotions) can't stop being themselves and operate buttons in a kind of control station, basically pulling  the levers on what Riley is thinking, feeling and doing whilst she is dealing with the difficulty of adjusting to a new city and school.

Missing main Character

The following relates to people aged 14 and older. I think there is one main character missing in the whole picture. The real operator of the control station - The Observer. 

The Observer can never be swayed from his position of peace and fearlessness. He has the ultimate say over which Emotion or Thought gets the reign at any given time. One can meet this Observer/Awareness/Inner Wise Man.

How do you meet this Observer?  

If you sit quietly, perhaps close your eyes, and watch all your thoughts and feelings pass by without attaching to them or judging them… Who is it, that’s watching the thoughts? That’s him. You have just met The Observer. The closest to what can be described as “You”. His inner peace is never disturbed by any tribulations on the surface. He is not repressing anything, but can dissolve or inflate the importance and power of any of the minor characters like Joy, Fear, Anger, Sadness, Gratitude or any other. How? Through the method of pure focused, non-attached observation.

When the parent knows how this works, it’s not a bad idea to model to a teenager that you don’t have to be a slave to your thoughts and emotions. They are an incredibly useful tool and part of life, but they are definitely not in charge of You. 

Mind The Programming

Many trendy ideas about wellbeing and therapy will fixate on validating the importance of every feeling and thought that floats up. Multiple surveys, questions are trying to extract from a person how he feels. There is the implicit labeling of all emotions  as  “Mine”. Sometimes a school survey will asks:  “how often do you feel happy or sad?”, if one has anything more than a little bit of sadness that week, it makes one identify Me with “Sad” and “Depressed”  when in reality it is a mix of random temporary somatic blockages (that can be released) and/or beliefs not grounded in truth of what is.

We have created a popular societal narrative around “feeling your emotions”. This is pointing in the right direction, but misses the forest for the trees - it inadvertently  reinforces the difficulty of most of them. 

Just observing and fully accepting the anxiety, anger etc, without judgment, is actually helping you not to feel the sensation of so-called emotions and spinning them into worrisome thoughts, which in turn increase the emotions in a never ending loop. You get personal experience in observing the impermanence of them all, which gives confidence and ability to stop self reinforcing anxious loops. This Observer approach is completely different to denial and pushing emotions away.

Our mind has a way of often tricking us by mislabeling what is actually going on, not realizing how emotions and thoughts entangle, reinforce and feed on each other.

We feel a nasty knot in the midst of our stomach and have just been not noticed by a friend when passing by. Depending on the time of the week and events earlier, it can be interpreted anywhere from “tummy doesn't agree with food and I have not had enough rest” to “No one loves me and my anxiety about being a failure is justified and there is no way out”.

If you are constantly encouraged to feel your emotions, the mind interprets it as (i) take them all seriously and (ii) they are all mine, adding unnecessary weight. This doesn't mean that the feeling isn’t real, it means the story and interpretation that the mind attaches to it is wrong most of the time.

The relationship between emotion and action/consequence does not have to be as automatic as depicted in the movie. There can be a pause in between them, where the Observer can step in. Yes emotions happen. We welcome them all with equanimity, love and acceptance. But they don’t start running the show!

In resources there is a research-based, intro to basic mindfulness and an 1 hour, free mindfulness course for adults. It shows the process of mindful observation. If the parents really get it, they can model this to kids in their own natural way. Less drama at parent level => less drama at child level. The added bonus of raising the level and quality of awareness is that one also learns that happiness, equanimity and other good feelings do not depend on the external and can be self-generated at will (provided you are not in immediate physical pain and danger).

But what if you are angry about some real injustice (which you might do something about)? What if something  impacts you and you potentially need to act? Anger can indeed catalyze a valid response. This is also an instance where the gap between emotion and action becomes necessary. The Observer then has a moment to step in, evaluate the validity of reasons for the emotion of Anger and THEN consciously choose a reaction where perhaps Anger indeed plays a bigger role.

“Emotions can’t quit, genius!”

There is a line in the movie when one of the characters says this.

Yes, emotions can't “quit”. But you can lovingly demote or promote them! You can reduce their working hours and give some of them a long sabbatical, where they come back only once in many years, in an emergency situation.  

Oh, and by the way.. Your arsenal is not limited to the ones in the movie. Some of the other, more powerful characters at your service are Compassion, Excitement, Curiosity, Awe, Agape and Love.

You can be the master of your mind or let it become your master.

Nothing I or anyone says should hold as much value vs observing your own experience and what works.

Thank you for reading.

Anna

Useful resource:

An introduction to basic mindfulness (5 ways to know yourself) by Shinzen Young: https://www.shinzen.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/FiveWaystoKnowYourself_ver1.6.pdf or his Core 1.5 mindfulness course. Both are excellent . This is research-based, free, no dogma treasure. It breaks down the internal process of what is occurring in one's perception into parts, which opens up insight into impermanence and much more. One can easily learn to increase focus capacity, observe non-permanence, things arising and watching them dissolve.

Here the kids have a lot more to teach us than we can teach them.

When a child starts singing a weird tune and doing a weird dance - I join in.

If he wants to break a small rule somewhere - I let him.

If he gets carried away talking and cajoling the cat and invites me to join - I join in the humanizing of the cat.

I let myself be pushed in the pool and enjoy it.

It won’t always be ‘right’ and it won’t always look good, but it will be real, unscripted and hence closer to how nature intended it to be.

The child that sees his parents find their inner child is a child that will retain joy, playfulness and authenticity. That part of us that is unconsciously yearned for, that thing we are enamored with when we see it in others and wish it for ourselves. Most of the time we are too self conscious and conditioned to feel it and most have forgotten it exists.

Why do people voluntarily repress themselves and adopt crippling defense mechanisms as they grow up?

People take on a persona they feel will be more liked, socially accepted and/or proper. The more ‘propriety’ and ‘adherence to convention’  is prioritized in the household, the more the child will create the persona that is obsessed with confirming. This is what he will be doing when he is an adult. Primarily led by the fear of not being loved by others, unless he is wearing that mask. Not empowered to explore one's own true nature and be led by one’s natural curiosity. Always seeking permission.

“Yeah, but if I don't impress on them what to do and how to behave, they will turn out into delinquents that will put me to shame..”

If they are impeding on or bothering others - tell them it's inappropriate. But if the kid is loudly singing a weird tune on the street, whilst all the adults are walking quietly… it is really not the kids' problem. It is the adult’s perception (and perhaps embarrassment) that is the problem. The kid is being himself and enjoying life. 

Beyond don’t kill, steal, abuse, poop in public and obvious things like that - the more self expression is celebrated and not looked down upon, the better. Natural mechanisms of correction can come into play and the child can adjust without being ‘adjusted’.

What about the dreaded “Will you play with me now?”

Clearly we all get tired playing kids games and can't spend too much time doing it, but you can ask for better games. Don't want to play Twister? Propose Badminton or table tennis or Risk.  Explore stargazing or den building.

Don't want to watch stupid kids tv shows with them? Say what you are and what you are not interested in, watch Percy Jackson or things that can ignite both your curiosity. Plan an adventure together instead of watching adventures on tv. The child will benefit seeing you also have interests and curiosity.

”When would I have the time to get my interests and explore my curiosity?”
Tell the child you also need ‘play dates’ with adults and alone time - there is nothing wrong with letting them know you are a human with genuine needs. This is not about sacrifice and “catering to child” or always “trying to be their friend”.

It’s about getting to know what makes you feel alive, present and engaged. Which models to the child that being an adult doesn't have to be a dread.

All this makes the parents face tricky questions:

“If I actually do what I really want as opposed to what my social circle expects me to do, if I go off script- what is the worst that will happen?”

“What do I really enjoy?

“What feeling/understanding do I ultimately want that stops the endless chases and allows me to enjoy the present?”

“What is actually possible in terms of the quality of human day-to-day experience?”

Powerful, often scary stuff that people usually put aside till they have “More time” …. 

But here is a great passage on that subject which lines up with my own experience:

The intellectual man has a lot to learn from the  “naivety of youth”.

Thank you for reading.

I am delighted he had the experience of a minor “stressor” in his otherwise stress-free life. Adapting and thriving through change is like any other muscle: if there is no opportunity to overcome uncomfortable feelings early on, minor life changes can become a big drama later.

Most children don’t have the experience of immigration or serious adversity to train the shockproof muscle. The confidence of ‘I can overcome anything and flourish under any conditions’ is harder to acquire in the age of convenience and relative prosperity.

Leading up to our move there was occasional sulking and bouts of ‘why are you making me move’. A tight natural balance was calibrated in our response:

Validate the feelings, don’t validate the drama and internal story that aggravates the feeling. 

My husband was better at validating the feelings of sadness about the loss of friends and the known environment. But there is a healthy limit of how much attention is worth spending on validating the negative Story. Perhaps there is an option to choose another Story? And then perhaps this new Story shifts the experienced emotions and feelings?

There is a potentiality for a positive concealed in every perceived negative. The human wiring just usually doesn't perceive it quickly (or in this lifetime). As someone who has learnt not to fight with life and arrived at the superiority of WHAT JUST IS (aka reality), any change, especially the one thrown at you from “greater forces”,  is to be perceived with open arms. I don’t preach this attitude, I live and embody it. My son even started playfully mocking me months before the move:  "Everything is better in Wimbledon, isn't it mummy?”

I don’t mind in the slightest being the clown if it’s grounded in the reality of how things work:

You know how they say “the pessimist and the optimist will both be right?” 

I think the best life comes if you can be neither - just be a lover of reality as it happens, without fighting it in your mind and overly attaching to outcomes. (There are people who significantly refine this level of perception for a reason, but they are rare).  Having said that.. if you are inclined to venture into future prediction, then you are better off having an optimistic tilt. It just means wearing another kind of glasses, through which you perceive the world and opportunity differently and hence act differently. 

One might say - why not have some wallowing in drama if that's what the person wants at this time? For me it’s no longer an authentic reaction to indulge the extent of the dramatization. I could degrade your abilities by playing along. I could pretend not to know how powerful you are to shift your own reality (with a shift of your perspective). But I am not interested in playing in this theater any more.

You can have as much drama as you want in life - if that is what you want. I am just questioning how you really want to feel and saying that it’s in your hands to shift. Events are opportunities to gain a deeper understanding of life, which, in turn,  makes excess drama obsolete. The sooner one sees it for what it is, the better life experience becomes. They don’t tell you this in schools. 

I told my son there is opportunity and benefit from any change on closer inspection, no matter how grim it seems. In this case there is nothing grim, but from his perspective losing his friends and known environment was a reasonably big change. 

He asked “ So how can there be a benefit from things like hay fever and breaking your leg?” Absolutely, I said, there can be benefits from that, if this occurs. You just need to be able to see possibilities wider than usual. For example, if you don’t suffer some inconveniences in childhood - how are you meant to learn resilience, tenacity and dealing with discomfort? Do you think every baby is born with these abilities? Some require more practice.

There is also a beautiful Chinese parable on the broken leg instance:

Farmer’s son was trying to break one of the horses and she threw him to the ground, breaking his leg. The neighbors cried, “Your son broke his leg, what terrible luck!” The farmer replied, “Maybe so, maybe not.”

A few weeks later, soldiers from the national army marched through town, recruiting all boys for the army. They did not take the farmer’s son, because he had a broken leg. The neighbors shouted, “Your boy is spared, what tremendous luck!” To which the farmer replied, “Maybe so, maybe not. We’ll see.”

What other options besides moving are there?

There are plenty of opportunities  for a child to grow their resilience and adaptability to change:

1. Independence + nature

Wild camping/hiking trips with overnight stays come to mind. Beautiful story in the Times of a mom who sent her son and 8 friends (13-14y) wild overnight camping without smartphones. Parent-free is the key there. Take away parental conditioning, fears and drama and watch the children bloom naturally. 

Walking to school by themselves or to the grocery store as early as possible is a good idea. I love this Hero’s Journey of an 11 year old into the grocery store from Letgrow organization. They have research and tips on child independence therapy (it’s sad this has to be prescribed now to some children’s parents as “therapy”).

2. Animal observation + conversation

Animals provide endless opportunities for showing as opposed to preaching. The parent can use them as a crutch to make observations:
“Does it look like this cat has any fear, uncertainty or doubt ever polluting his experience? Anything like that, beyond fulfilling his direct needs?”
“Look at this ever joyful dog, no matter where he is led - he is always up for anything”.

Our cats are the best zen teachers.
It is true, we need more discernment and have more agency than a cat and a dog. But that doesn’t mean they are not there to learn from are not a useful reminder. Reminder of what? The ideal of getting out of your own head. The being your natural self without masking joy/ without unnecessary projecting into past /future. The ideal of enjoying life without overthinking it for longer than necessary. Many philosophers spent a whole life struggling just to arrive to this conclusion :) Kids can learn that from observing animals.

3. Give the child permission to fail:

If you overly protect your children

They will fear failure

And avoid pain.

But failure and pain are twin teachers

Of important lessons.

Unless your children fully experience both

How will they know they have nothing to fear?

Your children do not learn from their successes.

They learn from their failures.

They must have complete permission to try and fail.

And discover they are still OK.

What has your child failed at recently?

How did they react?

How did that make them feel?

How can you each learn from this?

~ From The Parents Tao Te ching (W. Martin)

So.. is everything better in Wimbledon now we are here? Absolutely! The drama stopped on the day of the move and didn't reappear. Only joy. What becomes of the place all depends on the type of glasses you choose to wear. 

Useful resources:

• For 3-7 year olds: My son loved this great little book Tiger Tiger Is it true?  by Byron Katie that introduces  a way to question your thoughts and concerns in a fun way. It empowers a child to inquire about their own beliefs and choose the glasses that work.

• Great newsletter and resources for fostering independence and resilience:

  https://letgrow.org/

• For adults (that then seeps into children): Core 1.5 mindfulness course by Shinzen Young is excellent ( because you can’t pass anything on if you don’t live it yourself): This is research-based, free, no dogma treasure. It breaks down the internal process of what is occurring in one's perception to see how it’s all fleeting. One can easily learn to increase focus capacity, observe non-permanence, things arising and watch them dissolve. How is this related? Less dramatization with parent => less drama with the child. https://unifiedmindfulness.com/ (I am not affiliated)

• The Thinker and the Prover framework is for me the most interesting framework about the workings and delusions of the mind. Presented in 6 threads by Jim O’Shaugnessy, it is very much worth it. This can be discussed with older kids. When opportunity naturally presents itself, I will relate it to my son in a way that is approachable and possibly will write about it.

Through mindfulness practices, artistic self-expression, connection with nature, and by creating a space free of judgment and full of freedom and trust, The Epicenter liberates students and provides them with a unique experience of self-exploration and self-discovery.

For a year, I had been contemplating ways to encourage critical thinking, belief questioning, and unlocking human potential in young people. As Allison and I share similar views on childhood development and human potential, she came to support the idea I had for this work in the UK.

The two-day event was truly exciting. Participants left feeling confident, inspired, and full of ideas and agency.

What did we do? 

1. Value hierarchy exploration:

   We used a questionnaire designed to reveal each participant's unique combination of interests. Just as we have physical DNA, we possess a set of unique mental attributes. Finding this combination of interests, attractions, and qualities is not straightforward. Through 12 indirect questions, the teens discovered what their priorities were.. 

2. Exploration of Limitless Potential: We did a visualization / relaxation exercise based on an imaginative story of what it would be like to be Source and create from that place of fearlessness/limitlessness. What kind of fears and concerns would naturally drop if you knew you just couldn’t lose? After that the students had time to explore their creativity through free art making.

3. Belief questioning exercise:

Using a long roll of wallpaper, we first identified at the end of the roll the desired life outcomes the kids wanted to experience in the next 10 years (e.g., various types of freedoms, wisdom, making an impact, etc). 

Then, through the length of the roll, participants drew bubbles representing beliefs that might be holding them back from getting there, with bubble sizes indicating the mental space these concerns occupied. We spent over two hours questioning the validity and origins of these beliefs, and exploring how the teens would feel and act without them. After sufficiently challenging a belief, it was covered with a piece of junk food wrapper, symbolizing the distortion and pollution of the clear path to the life we want.

4.  Mask Decoration:

In this exercise, participants decorated masks to reflect who they become for other people. The outside represented one of the masks they wear for the world, while the inside depicted their true selves. This activity highlighted the difference between the personas we present and our authentic selves. The idea is that it’s ok - everyone puts on a mask sometimes, the problem is when we start thinking that the mask is who we actually are, as opposed to a costume we put on and off. Many of the masks revealed an inner world that was different from the one being projected. For example, one girl presents herself as very smart and study-obsessed to the outside world, whilst inside she yearned for time to herself, to create art, and to be in nature.

Reflections

This experience was illuminating on many levels. Before starting the workshop, I was curious to know if a) such workshops are needed in the UK and b) they can be impactful. Because the format was a bit different to what The Epicenter has been doing in the US, this pilot program was an experiment. After this weekend, it seems like yes, the workshops are needed, and this one was impactful.

Given the results and the positive feedback from the students, I am brainstorming how to create our own physical space for this important work. We’re also in conversation with The Epicenter about exploring online options. Though we recognize the invaluable impact of in-person work, there may be a meaningful contribution to be made through work online.

Cultivating skills did happen over time, but I never put any thought into how skills are honed or refined to top level. I was always a “Hacker”, as defined in the book Ordinary Mastery:

(Image from John Durrant’s substack Ordinary Mastery where he summarizes the book)

Only at the grand age of 40 did the pursuit of mastery come on my radar as something that could be relevant to me. I realised that just the act of doing a thing at a high level can be a form of joy in itself, without necessarily being driven by the result. I wonder what would happen if kids were exposed to this subject in their formative years.

Current society encourages us to focus on quick results and is submerged with distraction. It seems that the current culture is permeated with hackers and “dabblers”:

(Image from John Durrant’s substack Ordinary Mastery where he summarizes the book)

Nevertheless, when I have the inkling to whine about trash movies, trash institutions, trash fashion, ugly architecture and pollution, I remind myself that the world I perceive is connected to me at subatomic level, so if I am serious about the desire for a world with less trash and more quality, I better start cultivating mastery in myself. From the The Tao of Physics book:

“"The subatomic particles have no meaning as isolated entities but can be understood only as interconnections between the preparation of an experiment and the subsequent measurement. Quantum theory thus reveals a basic oneness of the universe. It shows that we cannot decompose the world into independently existing smallest units. As we penetrate into matter, nature does not show us any isolated 'basic building blocks,' but rather appears as a complicated web of relations between the various parts of the whole."

There is a great opportunity here for conversation. Whenever a teenager starts to complain about some aspect of the world, one can introduce the idea of Hackers and Dabblers as an explanation of why the results are as they are.

One can turn the lens on the teenager: “Are you going to be any different? The world is a reflection of its participants, so if you want a prettier, cleaner world with more beauty, wisdom and more intelligent processes - you can be the change you want to see by pursuing mastery in something you care about. This is how we get more quality and less trash.”

The ingredients that make mastery happen

To better illustrate this, I am going to quote some passages from a book that is a great reference on the subject - Mastery by Robert Greene. I think the following are formative elements:

1. Find your uniqueness

“This uniqueness is not something merely poetic or philosophical—it is a scientific fact that genetically, every one of us is unique; our exact genetic makeup has never happened before and will never be repeated. This uniqueness is revealed to us through the preferences we innately feel for particular activities or subjects of study. Such inclinations can be toward music or mathematics, certain sports or games, solving puzzle-like problems, tinkering and building, or playing with words. With those who stand out by their later mastery, they experience this inclination more deeply and clearly than others. They experience it as an inner calling. It tends to dominate their thoughts and dreams. They find their way, by accident or sheer effort, to a career path in which this inclination can flourish.”

The hints of that uniqueness are to be discovered in childhood, if one looks closely:

“These childhood attractions are hard to put into words and are more like sensations—that of deep wonder, sensual pleasure, power, and heightened awareness. The importance of recognizing these preverbal inclinations is that they are clear indications of an attraction that is not infected by the desires of other people. Masters and those who display a high level of creative energy are simply people who manage to retain a sizeable portion of their childhood spirit despite the pressures and demands of adulthood. ”

I track all the attractions and fascinations of the young child, in case he forgets. In case he is at risk defaulting to Conventional mind when he is 18, and needs a reminder of what made him feel alive:

“As the years pass, this intensity inevitably diminishes. We come to see the world through a screen of words and opinions; our prior experiences, layered over the present, colour what we see. We no longer look at things as they are, noticing their details, or wonder why they exist. Our minds gradually tighten up. We become defensive about the world we now take for granted, and we become upset if our beliefs or assumptions are attacked. We can call this way of thinking the Conventional Mind. Under pressure to make a living and conform to society, we force our minds into tighter and tighter grooves. We may seek to retain the spirit of childhood here and there, playing games or participating in forms of entertainment that release us from the Conventional Mind.

Masters not only retain the spirit of the Original Mind, but they add to it their years of apprenticeship and an ability to focus deeply on problems or ideas. This leads to high-level creativity. Although they have profound knowledge of a subject, their minds remain open to alternative ways of seeing and approaching problems. They are able to ask the kinds of simple questions that most people pass over, but they have the rigor and discipline to follow their investigations all the way to the end.

2. Find and pursue the thing you really care for

Mastery requires high energy and perseverance. This cannot be maintained in pursuits you don’t care enough for.

“Feeling motivated and energized, we can overcome almost anything. Feeling bored and restless, our minds shut off and we become increasingly passive.”

Sometimes it is not an object or an activity  but rather something in the world or culture that sparks a deep connection:

“When Thomas Edison saw his first demonstration of the electric arc light, he knew then and there that he had found the ultimate challenge and the perfect goal toward which to direct his creative energies. Figuring out how to make electric light not just a gimmick, but something that would eventually replace the gaslight, would require years of intense labour, but it would change the world like nothing else. It was the perfect riddle for him to solve. He had met his creative match. For the artist Rembrandt, it was not until he found particular subject matters that appealed to him—dramatic scenes from the Bible and elsewhere that conveyed the darker and more tragic aspects of life—that he rose to the occasion and invented a whole new way of painting and capturing light.”

If there is nothing you care deeply enough for: keep looking, dabbling if you wish, in a variety of things, make this search itself the thing you deeply care for. Just recognize the temporary purpose dabbling serves here.

3. Realise the potential value of mastery to you personally, how it connects you to the transcendent. 

One way is getting exposure to the inner lives of people who you admire, who pursued mastery. Reading about what kind of zest and absorption into flow is possible.

A benefit many (including you) can get from pursuit of mastery is the connection to the transcendent: intuitive, miracle like coincidences, serendipity, ideas and connections that seem to drop out of nowhere. The world becomes more enchanted and you feel more of a wizard:

“ As William James expressed it, the mind “transitions from one idea to another … the most unheard of combination of elements, the subtlest associations of analogy; in a word, we seem suddenly introduced into a seething cauldron of ideas, where everything is fizzling and bobbling about in a state of bewildering activity.” A kind of mental momentum is generated, in which the slightest chance occurrence will spark a fertile idea.” ~ Greene, Robert. Mastery (pp. 184-185).. 

When describing Goethe:

“His mastery was not over this subject or that one, but in the connections between them, based on decades of deep observation and thinking. Goethe epitomizes what was known in the Renaissance as the Ideal of the Universal Man—a person so steeped in all forms of knowledge that his mind grows closer to the reality of nature itself and sees secrets that are invisible to most people.” ~ Greene, Robert. Mastery (p. 309). 

On the pleasure that comes with the pursuit:

“We are all in search of feeling more connected to reality—to other people, the times we live in, the natural world, our character, and our own uniqueness. Our culture increasingly tends to separate us from these realities in various ways. We indulge in drugs or alcohol, or engage in dangerous sports or risky behaviour, just to wake ourselves up from the sleep of our daily existence and feel a heightened sense of connection to reality. In the end, however, the most satisfying and powerful way to feel this connection is through creative activity. Engaged in the creative process we feel more alive than ever, because we are making something and not merely consuming. We are Masters of the small reality we create. In doing this work, we are in fact creating ourselves. Although it involves much pain, the pleasure that comes from the overall process of creativity is of an intensity that makes us want to repeat it. That is why creative people return again and again to such endeavours, despite all of the anxiety and doubt they stir up. It is nature’s way of rewarding us for the effort; if we had no such rewards, people would not engage in such activity, and mankind would suffer irreparably from this loss. This pleasure will be your reward as well, to whatever degree you pursue the process.” ~Greene, Robert. Master (pp. 204-205). 

A path of mastery is a road less travelled in a world of Dabblers and Hackers. One has to get comfortable with often walking alone:

“Most people don’t have the patience to absorb their minds in the fine points and minutiae that are intrinsically part of their work. They are in a hurry to create effects and make a splash; they think in large brush strokes. Their work inevitably reveals their lack of attention to detail—it doesn’t connect deeply with the public, and it feels flimsy. If it gets attention, the attention is momentary.” ~ Greene, Robert. Mastery (The Robert Greene Collection) (p. 293).

But stifling the natural creative force can become a source of misery:

“Understand: we all possess an inborn creative force that wants to become active. This is the gift of our Original Mind, which reveals such potential. The human mind is naturally creative, constantly looking to make associations and connections between things and ideas. It wants to explore, to discover new aspects of the world, and to invent. To express this creative force is our greatest desire, and the stifling of it the source of our misery. What kills the creative force is not age or a lack of talent, but our own spirit, our own attitude. We become too comfortable with the knowledge we have gained in our apprenticeships. We grow afraid of entertaining new ideas and the effort that this requires. To think more flexibly entails a risk—we could fail and be ridiculed. We prefer to live with familiar ideas and habits of thinking, but we pay a steep price for this: our minds go dead from the lack of challenge and novelty; we reach a limit in our field and lose control over our fate because we become replaceable.” ~ Greene, Robert. Mastery (The Robert Greene Collection) (p. 177). 

4. Dispel the myth and belief that “genius” cannot  apply to you

Friedrich Nietzsche expressed it well:

“Because we think well of ourselves, but nonetheless never suppose ourselves capable of producing a painting like one of Raphael’s or a dramatic scene like one of Shakespeare’s, we convince ourselves that the capacity to do so is quite extraordinarily marvellous, a wholly uncommon accident, or, if we are still religiously inclined, a mercy from on high.

Thus our vanity, our self-love, promotes the cult of the genius: for only if we think of him as being very remote from us, as a miraculum, does he not aggrieve us…

But aside from these suggestions of our vanity, the activity of the genius seems in no way fundamentally different from the activity of the inventor of machines, the scholar of astronomy or history, the master of tactics.

All these activities are explicable if one pictures to oneself people whose thinking is active in one direction, who employ everything as material, who always zealously observe their own inner life and that of others, who perceive everywhere models and incentives, who never tire of combining together the means available to them.

Genius too does nothing but learn first how to lay bricks then how to build, and continually seek for material and continually form itself around it. Every activity of man is amazingly complicated, not only that of the genius: but none is a ‘miracle.’”

A pitfall a young adult might encounter is the conspiracy against “showing off” excellence and mastery. There is an undercurrent where one might not want to appear too excellent as that would feel unfair to the others . Sticking out with your accomplishments becomes looked down upon.

The internet is filled with stories of people getting rich or famous quickly or with personal struggles, failures and drama. Where a person is excelling and achieving mastery, it just doesn’t go viral as much. When it does, it's seen as a one-off , viewed as a form of rare genius that is deemed inaccessible to mere mortals.

But the truth is that guy  just cared more about his activity more than we do. There is something else you care more about than the next person. And that is where the doors of mastery can be open for anyone.

“Don’t be the best in the world at what you do; be the only one in the world who does what you do.” ~ Jerry Garcia, The Grateful Dead

Now this, I think, would sound sexier and more relevant to a teen eager to differentiate himself, than the good old snooze: “You got to become good at X so you can get on the career ladder and secure your future.”

A little disclaimer

There are many ways to entice a child to explore mastery, but a little Taoist disclaimer is in order: Every subject discussed, for it to “arrive”, you cannot be too attached to it arriving. If you are going to go on about mastery as something that is a requirement to get ahead in life, if there is an unspoken whiff of it being linked to your approval… it will just cause unnecessary resistance. Everything I talk about with my son usually comes with something to the effect of  “Don’t have to believe or agree with me (or anyone for that matter). These are just my observations in the limited context of my experience. Look around as you go through life, see for yourself what works and explore if it's true.” He knows I don’t care what he does in life, I just have a mild preference that he feels truly alive living it.

P.S. Exploration of any deep subjects better flows during walks, trips, playing badminton or any other moving activity as opposed to “let’s sit down and talk”. Especially for active boys. 

Resources:

• Robert Greene’s book Mastery  is enticing and would be very interesting to read for anyone 15+.

• A good Substack on Mastery :

  Ordinary Mastery

  We can all embrace mastery in our pastimes, vocations and our ordinary lives. In this newsletter, I am exploring ideas, concepts, philosophies, and strategies for living life with an attitude of mastery.

  By John Durrant

The problem is not people being uneducated. The problem is that people are educated just enough to believe what they have been taught, and not educated enough to question anything from what they have been taught. - Richard Feynman

A comment on my previous article revealed a widely held belief that high agency is actually an elusive trait. Little Johnny is either born with it or not. Let’s explore where this common belief comes from and to what degree it is true..

I will assume that some traits are inherited and others arise or diminish by exposure to a certain environment. We can’t tell the proportions exactly as it is not fixed in stone. Even something like height, which is pretty clearly genetic, can be changed by the environment: if you deprive children of food, it will impact their height. 

I thus believe there are two key inputs that can be varied:

1. Environment. We become what we are mostly exposed to. 

2. The chosen objects of one’s attention & focus. 

You can be a child in an unhealthy situation, but if your will is strong enough, your attention and focus can be radically targeted at ‘being elsewhere’ whilst you increase your understanding to transcend the environment and get out. 

This is brilliantly pointed out in the book Troubled. The writer, Rob Henderson, spent his childhood moving from foster homes (and an addiction to marijuana aged 10), to a Phd in psychology from Cambridge and being a best selling author. 

His book stresses that he is not an exception but that personal agency matters. His is such a refreshing read, because we somehow believe it takes a rare, special, person to break out of his environmental conditioning and acquired belief structures. But how come this belief is so common?

The environment adolescents swim in

When they taught you in school about the achievements of the likes of Nikola Tesla, Albert Einstein or Galileo, did the teachers spend time discussing how much they had to go against convention? Was it emphasized how much resistance they got to achieve what they did? Or was it kind of rushed over and just the Galileo prosecution is discussed, perhaps because it was so long ago in the ‘dark ages’? 

If you take an average school or family, how many children do you think are exposed to adults who tell them it's ok to explore if rules and conventions should be questioned and broken? How many are told that their personal reality can be changed to an unrecognizable degree by … themselves? 

There are certainly awesome teachers out there fighting a tough battle in the system. But realistically, what do you think is the percentage of those comfortably stretching the kids’ horizons to an extent that is bigger than their own? How many teachers will be tempted to imprint their own beliefs and preferred agenda onto their pupils, as opposed to guiding them to start a personal exploration of where their natural curiosity leads them?

Psychologist Carl Rogers reviewing his experience as a teacher of teachers in the book “On Becoming a person”, concludes:

1. My experience has been that I cannot teach another person how to teach

2. It seems to me that anything that can be taught to another person is relatively inconsequential, and has little or no significance on behavior.

3. I realize increasingly that I am only interested in learnings which significantly influence behavior

4. I have come to feel that the only learning which significantly influences behavior is self-discovered, self appropriated learning . 

5. Such self-discovered learning, truth that has been personally appropriated and assimilated in experience, cannot be directly communicated to another.

6. As a consequence of the above, I realize that I have lost interest in being a teacher.

I concur that beyond basic skills like math and reading, all the learning that I think was useful in my life was self-directed and self appropriated (during and after school/university). Everything else went into one ear for the purpose of passing the exam and straight out the other ear after it. 

So what we have is a clash of two paradigms of what education should be about:

Paradigm 1. A world with little change, rules and knowledge are static and it is beyond the power of students to discover knowledge. “The goal is to get into the students head a series of assertions, definitions and names as quickly as possible.” as eloquently described in “Teaching as a Subversive Activity” by Postman & Weingartner. This book (from 1969!) describes the agency-curtailing paradigm prevailing in the majority of educational institutions. Not much has changed since then for the vast majority.

Paradigm 2. Change is constant and accelerating. Abilities that are required to deal with rate of change adequately can only be accessed when the individual has developed the ability to ask new questions and engage in meaning making. It is an inquiry focused method. The student feels free, safe and confident to develop and grow his inquiry and meaning making abilities in pursuit of what works and better explanations. The learning that works is self-discovered and self-appropriated. You will find this in Montessori like schools for the younger kids and for later ages in a few relatively new facilities where the teachers have transmuted into guides and facilitators. For now, a very small percentage of educational facilities functions like this.

I think because of the accelerated changes in our economy, paradigm 2 is starting to become more of a pressing necessity.

The things society needs and rewards have moved from assembly type and fact cramming professions towards less teachable qualities being in demand: curiosity, out-of-the-box and meta thinking, persistence and appreciation of mastery, creativity and originality, self directed focus and attention abilities. Everything in paradigm 1 is going to be covered by machines and pretty much already is.

The Learning Game by teacher Ana Lorena Fabrega is starting to champion a move to Paradigm 2. Ana provides ideas on how the education environment should be transformed and gives a good overview on how kids learn best.

The “environment” is of course not only school and parents - it is also the exposure to low quality opinions of others that are pumped into your attention span at every opportunity.

It is a parent’s job to model discernment and agency over one’s attention given the reality that we live in. I wrote about getting kids to value attention agency here.

So what is the best environment possible? What to aim for?

I asked myself the other day - what would be the characteristics of a world, where I can say the environment most kids grow up in has become good enough? 

The answer was a world where there is no demand for life/career/leadership coaches and psychologists from adults. (With exceptions for those who are exposed to significant traumatic events like serious abuse, disease, death, war). 

In a world I see as possible, healthy adults see these types of coaches as suboptimal to accessing their own inner resources leading to no demand. Adults are equipped to be their own “coach” in any personally specific mental matter. They have the agency to acquire whatever skills that suit their interests. They are not afraid to follow their unique, authentic path and don’t require hand holding to do so. The natural outcome of this would, I believe, would be more problems solved, a renaissance of quality in art and more interesting, delightful outcomes in all spheres. 

It’s not enough for a handful of progressive rich self-sufficient entrepreneur parents to instill a questioning, can- do attitude into their kids. An environment fostering high-agency should be a public good available to all kids. The way it’s going, the future of civilization could depend on it. From Lessons of History from Will & Ariel Durant who studied what makes us move forward or collapse:

“If we put the problem further back, and ask what determines whether a challenge will or will not be met, the answer depends upon the presences or absence or initiative and of creative individuals with clarity of mind and energy of will (which is almost a definition of genius), capable of effective responses to new situations (which is almost a definition of intelligence)”

Whilst others rightfully focus on saving the environment and scientific innovation, I think my evolving niche has something to do with removing the blocks to high-agency in the current environment.

For now, we are in a society where low to “normal” agency is normalized, so high-agency indeed seems an elusive quality. But the environment can be adjusted or… one can become immune to it.

Immunization

Let’s say the school and media environment that destroys agency is what it is. You really can’t change your child to a more alternative education option. What can be done then?

1.  Don't delegate all the kids' education to schools, as Ana Lorena argues here . You can offer a lot and have deep exploratory conversations with your child yourself. Making sure he/she has a rock solid crap detector, will allow them to traverse any environment with high agency intact. But what if you don’t feel like you have enough knowledge to do philosophical enquiry? Not to worry:

2. Get inspired. An interesting resource is this Youtube channel from the founder of the socratic experience school (I am not affiliated in any way). He basically has socratic conversations with his friend's daughter recorded from age 4 to 10. (There is enough material there to talk to kids even if they are older). You can see different subjects covered and how critical thinking develops through just asking the child questions and ‘loving the child's mind’. You can see many adults would struggle with articulating thoughts like the girl does at 8-10 years on subjects like; how do you know if something is true, what is knowledge, causation, mastery, map not being the territory and other useful topics. If a parent is struggling for inspiration on how and what to talk about, there is a lot there. 

There are also plenty of activities and ideas in my previous article on High Agency that can spark conversations.

3. Stop fixing all your kids' problems and give them the freedom to sort theirs

I was at a Jonathan Haidt event the other day. One teacher in the audience mentioned that since the early 2000s a shift happened in UK education, where striving for excellence was replaced by making sure everyone feels good. This impacted not only performance, but also lowered kids' wellbeing. (Another perfect example of ‘trying’ to smooth out any rough patches having the opposite effect). This same focus on preventing kids from feeling any adversity can be observed in the parenting trend of past 30+ years as described in Haidt’s book.

A common occurring concern amongst Gen-Z is that they feel their life is meaningless. Given the above, how many parents/teachers/ counselors  will now tell the teens that it is on them to start making their own meaning as opposed to inventing something just to make them feel better?   Or will they think it’s too harsh?

Who will tell the teens that if they feel lonely they have to take matters into their own hands? Yes - this involves risking rejection and ridicule. Maybe organize a group activity, a spontaneous dance party, park debate or something. No one might show up, but so what? Instead of adults attempting to sort their meaningful engagement or social life… maybe they should be given the freedom to suffer through trying it themselves? Without constant parental planning and oversight? Whatever perceived disadvantage the generation might have gotten due to unhealthy premature access to social media does not have to be a fixed diagnosis. Plenty of people have transmuted themselves out of far worse conundrums.

To wrap up..

Given that the environment for the majority (and this includes private schools) is indeed agency - neutering, it is not surprising why the quality seems elusive. We become what we are mostly exposed to, combined with where our attention and focus lies. A parent that prioritizes kids agency, focus and independence of mind, will develop the necessary understanding needed to nurture and grow those qualities, against the odds of them being chipped away at by the environment.

Next time I will try to crack the subject of how kids start valuing mastery.

*** If you like reading my work press like so more people can see it on Substack ***

I will start with my attempt at a definition. When you are “high agency”, you know the  world is a malleable place, that reality is not ‘fixed’ and that you have the potential to create whatever you want. You can see and tap inner and outer resources to do so. It is being possibility-seeing and having a can-do spirit, without deferring to outside authority for approval.

People are born with agency and lose it as they progress through childhood. A healthy young child generally has no problems with frequently voicing his genuine desires and putting in motion the things that are needed to get them. As the kid hits early adolescence, he enters the world of rules, should’s, comparisons and fixed concepts. All of them reduce his confidence in his own will, in what he can achieve and the effectiveness of his actions.

So how does a person maintain and grow a mind of their own, not too polluted by conditioning of what already exists and what is deemed possible? What follows is an overview of what I have found to be meaningful ingredients:

1. Doing useful things. No demarcation of child games and adult activities.

When we asked my son what his most memorable holiday memory was (and he has been on many cool holidays), he recalled a basic thing we did in Cabo Verde,  when he was 6 - rubbish picking. 

We went off the official beach into the dunes, noticed trash, took trash bags and went though the sand dunes collecting trash. It was the most memorable thing for a 6 year old because it was high agency: He is doing something that has an impact, something unplanned, unstructured, outside the confines of school/home/official beach lounging and it is an activity that no one else is doing. A perfect combination. Now he has a rubbish picker tool he proudly carries to the park which he sometimes uses to fish things out of the lakes.

I love this awesome exploration of agency and taking children seriously by Simon Sarris. He rightly notices:

‘We seem to have a political (public) imagination so shallow that it cannot conceive of what to even do with children, especially smart children. We fail to properly respect them all the way through adolescence, so we have engineered them to be useless in the interim’

2. Interests are noticed and valorised

Every time Jeff Bezos had a new interest as a child, like mechanical engineering, his mother would change the decor of their home or add stuff in it to match his new interest. This valorised it, made it noticed and meaningful. She made the environment one with what he wanted to practice.

Now.. changing decor is overkill for a wuwei/no-excess-effort parent like me. Having said that, if the child here becomes interested in any subject, we will offer him deeper exposure to it, through books, tools, connections and experiences where possible. This is encouraging the feedback loop of “my curiosity and interests can drive more interesting things in my reality”.

Asking questions and asking him to teach us more about it, is an easy way to inject further enthusiasm and deeper curiosity. I am so excited that my kid is going to be smarter than me and already is in some ways. I let him know this.

3. Parents see the world as malleable

This is best modeled with the counterfactual: Imagine parents that believe things are fixed as they are, there are confines and unbreakable rules that one operates with. You look at job ads and apply for jobs that are available as opposed to reaching out to apprentice with someone you really want, even if he has no listing. You believe you wait till you are officially in adult territory (18+ ) before you can do meaningful work and contribution in society. You think life happens to you as opposed to you being a creator of those events. It is a belief tunnel where you are convinced about how things ARE, together with the absence of a culture of questioning and exploring truth. This models low agency for the child.

More on what it means to  “see the world as malleable” can be found in this great interview with Danielle Strachman at Rebel Educator. 

I also love this reminder on the risk of becoming a member of the herd from Jim O’Shaugnessy:

“Most societies, religions, philosophies, institutions and their hand-maidens in media, corporations, celebrities and other fellow travelers are there to tell you *what* and not *how* to think. If you let them, you surrender your agency and become a member of the herd. Resist it.”

Which brings me to the next part.

4. Taking risks is encouraged (and our obsession with Safety is re-examined)

Agency dies with Parental Overprotection and “Safetyism a theme explored by Jonathan Haidt in his books “The Coddling of The American Mind” and “The Anxious Generation”. Safetyism started exploding in the 90s and is an ideology that places self-perceived safety, especially the feeling of being protected from disagreeable events, ideas and information, above all other concerns. Rather than seeing safety as one concern among many, it becomes a sacred value. From the book “The Anxious Generation” :

“‘The ultimate antifragile system is the immune system, which requires early exposure to dirt, parasites, and bacteria in order to set itself up in childhood. Parents who try to raise their children in a bubble of perfect hygiene are harming their children by blocking the development of their antifragile immune systems. It’s the same dynamic for what has been called the psychological immune system—the ability of a child to handle, process, and get past frustrations, minor accidents, teasing, exclusion, perceived injustices, and normal conflicts without falling prey to hours or days of inner turmoil.”

The book provides plenty of research showing how kids need antiphobic risk-taking for healthy development:

“Sandseter and Kennair define risky play as “thrilling and exciting forms of play that involve a risk of physical injury.” Sandseter and Kennair analyzed the kinds of risks that children seek out when adults give them some freedom, and they found six: heights (such as climbing trees or playground structures), high speed (such as swinging, or going down fast slides), dangerous tools (such as hammers and drills), dangerous elements (such as experimenting with fire), rough-and-tumble play (such as wrestling), and disappearing (hiding, wandering away, potentially getting lost or separated). These are the major types of thrills that children need. They’ll get them for themselves unless adults stop them—which we did in the 1990s.”

When grandpa here offered to buy a workbench with professional drill and different drilling attachments for adults, for our 8 year old..  we say Yes!. Unsupervised drilling and sawing happens here. When I need something drilled in the house, like a hole in a plant pot - I call the 8 year old to do it.

Ways to give kids more independence, play, and responsibility can be found here: https://letgrow.org/ - a charity co-founded by the inspiring Lenore Skenazy, author of Free Range Kids.

What environment could you create so the child doesn't require your constant input?

5. Unconditional Love 

Agency dies when parents try to shape and push a child in a direction, when parents' love is conditional. The subtle aura of  “I reward you and am proud of you if you get this degree/grade/school admission/profession. If you make ME proud.” 

When the child knows that being loved is kind of conditional, through many subtle unspoken ways it manifests,  doing something authentic that involves risk of failure of any kind becomes less viable. The best way I have seen demonstrated the subtle language and display of conditional vs unconditional love is in this series of summary videos of Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg kindly shared by Dmitry Buterin, father of Ethereum’s Vitalik. Full workshop link is in resources. Dmitry says :

‘People overthink parenting. If you can give your kids unconditional love and not pass on too much of your own trauma, you are way ahead of the game. Trust the universe.’

So obvious and simple. But how much of it happens in practice? Especially that trusting the universe bit and not not passing on your own limitations. All this writing on agency is not rooted in the need for my son to become rich or famous. It is highly rooted in the value of him becoming authentically himself and exploring the richness of that experience. Whether it is living in the jungle amongst the monkeys or developing space exploration, my only concern is if he is getting a rich enough experience based on his own metrics.

6. Parents emotionally connected to the richness of life

If richness of expression of emotionality and authenticity is observed in their environment, the child is more likely to notice his desires and aspirations from early on. He can be transparent about them. If parents never display excitement or awe, it is harder for the child to know what one can reach for. I wrote about exploring awe for for the intellectual here.

Following your bliss and having fun being valorised at home is contagious. Work can be play, play can be work. 

7. Not knowing is seen as exciting as opposed to scary

Not passing an exam or not knowing the answer results in a reaction of “Oh, here is something else I can master!” and “Here is an opportunity for me to learn to do difficult things”  as opposed to ”‘I really suck, it's daunting and I failed”. 

A powerful insight from Nat Eliason in this article:

“The proof you can do hard things is one of the most powerful gifts you can give yourself” 

I also try to model to my son lack of certainty being great because it means a field of unfolding possibilities, as opposed the need to have certainty and all the answers.

8. Linking things the kid is learning to what is meaningful to him

I would personally steer away teaching philosophical ideas too abstracted away from the practical, after the basic skills are in. But we cannot avoid this happening in most schools. So if a teenager complains about meaningless work there, it is potentially a valid complaint. Learning should be linked to the things that the kid wants in life , for example options and possibilities to pursue his interests (“you need grounding in  basics like math and literacy to do cool things”). At some point the kid might be held back by traditional school because the world is changing and education is not able to catch up. The persons reasoning as to the alternative he wants to pursue should be heard.

This kind of sums up my exploration into the elements relevant for high agency in children. If you have any other ideas, drop them in the comments. The final thing I have the most confidence in (but nothing to back it up): 

Look at the child without preconceived notions of who he is and what he can be, like he is not your property , like you see him for the first time. When you look at the child occasionally, try to spot the Infinite Force and all of creation in their eyes.

Interesting resources on the subject:

• Interview with Danielle Strachman from 1517 fund ( “We back dropouts working on hard problems & sci-fi scientists at the earliest stages of their companies”)

• Simon Harris excellent article on why agency matters and the forces that threaten it in current times. “13-year-old Steve Jobs called Bill Hewlett and received a summer job at HP, which would be unsurprising in Carnegie’s time, was certainly surprising for 1968, and is obviously verboten today.”

The Map is Mostly Water

The Most Precious Resource is Agency

The world is a very malleable place. When I read biographies, early lives leap out the most. Leonardo da Vinci was a studio apprentice to Verrocchio at 14. Walt Disney took on a number of jobs, chiefly delivering papers, from 11 years old. Vladimir Nabokov published his first book (a collection of poems) at 16, while still in school. Andrew Carnegie…

Read more

5 years ago · 372 likes · 37 comments · Simon Sarris

• This nonviolent communication workshop is transformational in the sense of ironing out any remaining trace of parent neediness and expectation, so the child can naturally flourish under real unconditional love:

• On modeling the value of attention agency to kids https://www.wuweiparent.com/p/kids-attention-agency-and-the-us

• Agency for the immigrant is usually natural. There is a strong personal drive to get ahead away from poverty / limits etc. I was exploring here how this can be perhaps accessed for the non-immigrants. https://www.wuweiparent.com/p/land-of-the-free-level-2

• I wrote about the mindset of high agency that allows to take opportunity of the personal agency renaissance here https://www.wuweiparent.com/p/personal-agency-renaissance

• On  debunking fears based on one example of societal conditioning https://www.wuweiparent.com/p/the-stuff-fears-are-made-of

• https://letgrow.org/ has great ways to give kids more independence, play, and responsibility

All good, unless... you want to make a masterpiece, a cool innovation, build a real business or obtain an extraordinary skill. To achieve this, you need to spend a certain amount of time, mostly years, in the proverbial dungeon. A place where you are often on your own, where you haven’t produced or achieved yet. There is no acknowledgement of the work you put in, because there is no ‘result’ yet to acknowledge. A place where you sometimes might consider yourself ‘useless’.

What do I know? At 40 years old I have put myself in a complete beginners seat. Extracting an income from my small trading capital does not take that much time. Managing someone else’s large capital is just not something I could muster an appetite for. So here I am, writing a fiction novel for young adults and developing an innovative experience for teens in London. Both circling in on unlocking real agency.

The issue is that I am a trader, not a writer. My writing is frankly rubbish. My fiction writing is even worse. The time it will take for me to produce a worthwhile creation might be years. Besides having “My Big Why” and hints at “How”, there is close to nothing. I spend a not insignificant amount of time seemingly unproductively, reading, going down rabbit holes that interest me, whilst trading on the side. My “success” is highly uncertain. 

In the meantime, my contribution to society or being skilled at my craft is not there yet. And it is likely not going to be for some time or maybe even ever. For someone who is used to ‘winning’ and ‘performing’ I noticed a simmering undercurrent feeling of uselessness.

That feeling, if allowed to fester, impacts the effectiveness of the endeavor itself, besides the quality of life, which for the result-obsessed person is often secondary. But the self-doubt and self-flagellation is more costly than it seems.

One thing I learned on the trading floor is that permitting myself the luxury of wallowing in feelings of fear, limitations and need for anyone’s applause was expensive, monetarily and otherwise. The proverbial trading graveyard is littered with those who give up because it’s hard and scary. I can imagine the entrepreneur graveyard is not dissimilar. 

In the end, no one really cares whether you succeed or not. You are either going to do the thing and become your own cheerleader before you make it or you will get taken down by your fears and overthinking.

I can understand many young people could feel this way and worse, before they have the skills necessary and ability to do cool things. Especially in a world where you can see so many achievements of others immediately online. 

When I grew up, your circle of influence was limited to your university and school friends. You could not engage in endless comparison of the nuances of your situation vs others on reddit. “There are 10 people who quit college to build a start up of which 3 made it, 2 are broke and 5 are coping. Hmm, where would I fall?  The cope and failure described sure do sound unpleasant”. Or just the plain old “Why apply to this highly desired position when there are 500 applicants. Surely they can’t pick me with all my deficiencies, which I am so sure I have.”

Even when one’s odds are not bad, one can still fail just because we tend to over focus on the negative whilst downweighting the positive. Our brains are just wired that way. This is nicely presented in The Power of Bad: How the Negativity Effect Rules Us and How We Can Rule It . The authors argue that the negativity effect is so powerful in the brain, that it takes four positive experiences to counteract a single negative one, a concept they refer to as the "Rule of Four." While the negativity bias may have served an evolutionary purpose by helping our ancestors avoid danger, it is one of those hurdles we need to outgrow if we want to progress as a species.

The good news is that brains can be rewired if one sees the logic for doing so.

But how can someone with a logical, sane mind, master the logic to become one’s own cheerleader? 

The key is to get to the stage where you see the practical usefulness of rewiring. Then it’s practice makes perfect to get to that ideal middle ground with a slight tint towards healthy optimism.

But hang on a sec.. You might say: “Why wouldn't one entertain data points that he might not be good enough and how others are better and more successful at xyz ? That he just might not have what it takes to ‘make it’? Isn’t this .. realistic? Prudent risk management?”

First of all, because this is ineffective. Did Solzhenitsyn require the comfort and security that anyone would read his writing in the future, whilst sitting in the Gulag? No, there was no certainty of him ‘making it’. He didn’t engage in such concerns, he was too busy composing  "One Day in the life of Ivan Denisovich" in his head, for the lack of paper. Did Viktor Frankl have anyone tell him his life had meaning in the concentration camp? No, he had to come up with his own meaning, in a way that his intellectual brain would buy. And survive that way. His keen observation couldn’t help but notice that those who couldn’t master this - didn’t (survive).  

Given all the trials and tribulations of the people who created great art and innovations powering us now … what excuses can there be for those of us, for letting the mind worry about things we can’t control? Why not just do the work at hand?

The second reason why it isn’t necessarily ‘realistic’, is you are more likely wrong and your estimates are biased.

The probabilities are not set in stone. If you love the thing and something inside tells you it's a worthwhile pursuit, even if the likelihood of success is low TODAY, equating this to your final chances is a figment of imagination. Reality is a complex adaptive system and outcomes cannot be boxed in as easily as you think. Probabilities evolve. The path of probability can develop depending on your attitude, input, chance and a hundred other things. Thinking you are smart enough to know the probability in advance is actually giving your beliefs more credit than they warrant. 

If you are not sure why you really want the thing, by all means cut the endeavour, swallow the sunk cost and move on. Just don’t do it out of fear, need for certainty or need for cheerleaders, whilst sitting half way through climbing the proverbial Mt Everest. 

What gives me strength is I have unconsciously done this before... 

The seat of the clueless beginner.

Before applying to Lehman brothers summer trading internship at 21, I spent a year punting Eurostoxx futures with borrowed money at home, without job security, savings or anything like that. That has given me some good practice in losing. When I showed up on Lehman's Brothers trading floor I had nothing special going for me except a ‘childish’ belief that I was lucky for having survived to be there. My grades and uni were of worse caliber than pretty much everyone applying for analyst. I was not a math genius. But I was in the building, and that was a little win, and I cheerleaded myself for any little win that followed, whilst not beating myself down too much every time I messed up.

Getting the internship, getting the job, getting more responsibility, getting your own capital to trade, making the first million in trading profits etc - win win win. All noticed and embodied in me being a winner. Forgetting to blotter a trade for my boss, messing up interactions with colleagues, losses (that are part and parcel of trading but still hurt) and being told off for them - all tough stuff. But I didn’t pay them as much weight as I did to the wins, so they wouldn’t knock down my confidence.

Being my own cheerleader here wasn’t planned. It just happened that I found out much later in life that this is actually how staying power is created.

So why is it that we crave external validation to tell us that what we are doing is worthwhile? Why can’t our own desire to just live and be present not be enough?

A mother raising 3 kids is often unable to do anything else. No cheerleading for many years, if ever, for that endeavor. 

What about when you are older and need to learn the reason why it has value in itself to be able to just sit and appreciate the sunset, whilst producing nothing? Without anyone telling you that what you are doing is worthwhile? It is an intellectual journey just to realize why you having that experience with full attention has a lot of worthiness in itself.

These are the things we are pushed to investigate. And the answer, when found, is beautiful and penetrates the logical mind. But I digress… Back to the young and the restless.

What do I want to model for my son?

Not relying on external validation to give what he is doing meaning. This allows for a longer time horizon. Which is needed for mastery.

Being comfortable in the beginners seat, whilst doing something that very few will understand.

That this includes risk of failure, a highly uncertain pay off and no cheerleaders.

Realizing that needing them is just one of those weird conditionings we pick up in an always connected world.

Appreciating that when you have killed that need and are still doing the thing - you are likely onto something.

Then discarding any trace of the feeling of uselessness.

With full knowledge that this is a rational, productive act.

This article is not about these situations.

It is about the domain beyond what’s considered average results, such as having an exceptionally healthy state. Today I want to focus on one issue that is relevant to many people at certain points in their lives: recurring physical pain and how it can be created and influenced by the mind.

One testament to mind’s power in this domain is the book “Healing Back Pain - the Mind Connection” by Dr. Sarno, in which he describes his work and research into “Tension Myoneural Syndrome (TMS)”.

Dr. Sarno is a physician curing all kinds of serious back issues, including things like herniated discs, without physical treatment. His prescription is ‘mental’. Before you think this is some quackery, I suggest you read on.

So what is TMS? According to Dr. Sarno, one avenue for the body to create pain is anxiety and repressed emotions triggering muscle spasms and depriving body parts of oxygen. Pain is often a maneuver of the body to distract the person, so the unwanted emotions do not reach the conscious mind. The diversion makes the mind focus on the physical pain instead. Dr. Sarno says self- motivated and driven people are especially prone to TMS. 

“The pain of TMS (or the discomfort of a peptic ulcer, hernia, colitis, tension headache or terror of asthma attacks) is created in order to distract the attention of the sufferer from what is going on in the emotional sphere. Focus one’s attention on the body instead of the mind. It is a response to the need to keep those terrible, antisocial, unkind, childish, selfish feelings (the prisoners) from becoming conscious. It follows from this that far from being a physical disorder in the usual sense, TMS is really part of a psychological process”

Dr. Sarno gives patients the TMS diagnosis and a certain understanding of what is going on with them. If they accept the diagnosis and follow some basic instructions about interactions with their brain, the pain stops. This is different to the placebo effect, which (as he shows in his work) is usually temporary. 

His methods prescribe an education program as treatment which can be summarized as follows:

1. Accept TMS diagnosis after following his lectures on the mechanics of it (or read his books several times for impact)

2. Think psychological not physical when pain happens

3. Talk to your brain - tell it you are not going to put up with this state of affairs anymore

4. Resume physical activity

5. Discontinue All Physical Treatment

Most patients had a resolution of their problems 2-6 weeks after Dr. Sarno’s lectures. 

So how does this work?

When the person really grasps what's going on, the trick to distract the mind with pain no longer works. The game is up. Sometimes the pain then moves on to try the diversion of attention on another body part, but if the person is aware about multiple ways TMS can show up, eventually the trickster gives up. 

Dr Sarno says the thing required for health is not to change yourself completely, remove all stressors from your life and express any unresolved childhood trauma. That is all not necessary to cause the healing. What is required is the understanding of the effect that the mental has on the physical. In addition he spends some time showing how one cannot overemphasize the importance of conditioning in TMS and the real physical impact of horrid sounding diagnoses that people get.

“Often people are programmed to have pain because of the things they have heard or been told by their practitioner. “Never bend at the waist” means the onset of pain is a sure thing when they bend from then on”

“In the long run, fear and preoccupation with physical restrictions are more effective as a psychological defense than pain. A severe attack of pain may be over in a few days, but if the person is afraid to do things for fear of inducing another attack, then the preoccupation with the body is continuous and the defense is working all the time.” 

The book discusses at length the variety of conditions and examples beyond back that are caused by TMS and its relatives' , things like tissue disorders, bone spurs, ulcers, inflammation, arthritis and all kinds of chronic pain. Even emotions as a factor in cancer processes are discussed, however he does discuss the difficulty that doctors have bringing this up with most  patients.

Before one throws their hands up and calls me a heretic, I wonder how many physicians have a huge fan list of people whose lives were changed after no one could help them, a movie with Larry David and others praising his work ?  So if it’s that good, what are the reasons that his method is not practiced everywhere and you will not get his treatment at your average doc? 

It’s basically a collective issue with the reluctance to surrender our smarts. It would make the doctors dealing with only the physical obsolete. Their expertise and power would be rapidly diminished. 

On the patient side, many refuse to consider that their diagnosed, severe, physical pain has in fact a psychological cause. It is often the case that life needs to push one to the brink before one is willing to consider surrendering his smarts. In this case it is everything he thinks he knows about mind-pain relationship and “traditional” healthcare. 

For who is this very hard to do? People who consider themselves Intelligent and educated, that have achieved certain things in certain areas. I have been there, done that. For many it is offensive to even consider surrendering pretty standard beliefs like:

• Physical pain and its degree always have a physical cause

• The mind and emotions cannot change the degree of pain, create or treat a physical condition

• The whole healthcare industry cannot possibly be so off base, the wider implications are too big to comprehend

• I will wait and see till its mainstream before I will be seen associating myself with these weird ideas.

The thing is - these beliefs can be taken apart by acquainting yourself with plenty of research, for example here and here. But usually it’s only people who are desperate enough for a solution, those for whom the current state of health is really intolerable, who will consider anything.

So, was my back cured by Dr. Sarno’s method? 

There was no need for this. I read about him after my own back issues were healed through a much ‘weirder’ method, described below. However Dr Sarno’s insights and methods belong in any family’s library and are a great resource for us in the future.

So what cured my and my family's issues and body misalignement? There is this woman in London… Maria Beremovich used to be an obstetrician, but is currently offering a specific service in her practice - Spiritual Spine Realignment. You come in, get observed, get measured by a huge ruler in various parts of your body, showing the differences in dimension in various body parts. Pictures of your misalignment are taken.  You are also shown the difference in the length of your legs as you sit down and a marker is drawn on your feet to mark the ‘before’ state. Then, Maria ‘sends energy’ into your feet when you lie down, without touching you. It takes less than a minute. I feel a warm electric jolt. I get up and my body, shoulder and leg differences are realigned. I feel different and can see and feel a straighter back. I lie back down whilst she is doing more healing stuff above the body for an hour, clearing your “energetic” body. After that hour the body is physically transformed.  Those with strong issues feel an immediate physical difference.  This was 3 months ago and my back is still great. Bi-weekly osteopath has been fired. My husband, parents and friends went.  My mother had severe dislocation and issues after a car accident years ago, now she stopped limping and neck pain is gone. My dad is a scientist who was very skeptical, but is a convert as his severely crooked back is better after this. 

Is any energy worker going to be the real deal? No, just like most doctors or drugs are not going to make much of a difference for recurring issues, otherwise the issues wouldn't be so prevalent in the population. However, for my family, Maria has been nothing short of miraculous.

What does this have to do with parenting? 

Healthier parents are beneficial for the child - that one is kind of obvious. But there is something else.. Throughout history, 99% of widely held beliefs have eventually been proven wrong when viewed through a long enough time scale. If I am serious about exploring ‘cutting edge’ human flourishing, it is only natural for me to look outside prevailing scientific and social consensus. In future writing I will explore the degree of ‘mind priming’ that’s happening , how it impacts mental / physical wellbeing and potential in kids and teenagers. And what can be done to empower them.

Resources:

Dr Sarno book: Healing Back pain . The Mind Body connection.

Heart Math Institute has plenty of research on mind-body connection:

https://www.heartmath.org/research/research-library/

A collection of various studies by others confirming Dr. Sarno’s work : https://drbrosh.com/pain-treatment-with-tms/tension-myositis-syndrome-resources/

An interesting interview with Dr. Sheldrake on how the cult of scientism is blocking shift away from the no longer defendable materialist worldview and thereby scientific progress infiniteloopspodcast.com/204

I think “The Last Edge” will be Intellectuals using one’s intellect to arrive at the optimal next move in life and profession: Inviting this Force into the driving seat. Then Surrendering one’s Smarts to it.

Yeah, right! If that’s so optimal, why does this not happen more often now?

Firstly, few want to surrender their smarts. They achieved so much! Any kind of setback would be traditionally fixed with more hard work and hustle.  It takes a certain intelligence to consider another way. The kind you don’t get in school, but through experience, insistent search or a crisis. Instances where no psychologist or coach is able to outdepth your kind of challenges. Possibly, most university educated people didn't have enough such crises yet.

Another reason why Surrendering Your Smarts is unpopular is that severely religious people, often devoid of logic and direction, use God’s will to justify everything including cases of own obvious stupidity..  It all just doesn't vibe with someone who thinks their life is based on (perceived) solid scientific principles.

If someone is indoctrinated from childhood to aim for a stable career and a regular salary as step 1, all of the surrender talk just feels icky. Questions that come up are:  “How will I make money? How do I know that the Force is wiser than me and beneficial to me? Let’s wait for the news channels to confirm to me that the “Force” and the right method of interaction with it has been scientifically proven”.

All I can share is what I have come to know through own experience that matches those of certain others.

The process that kicked it off for me was being Insistent on the need to learn about the underlying patterns that drive everything, how it all matches up across domains, how the game of life is really structured. 

This was driven by two seemingly unrelated questions: 

1. How to master the mind in trading so performance never falters? ( after learning that there are a few people in the world who have uncommon mind mastery)  

2. Why do animals suffer disproportionately to humans? (a variant on the ever present questions of good and evil)

The answers I got gave me more than I was looking for. But my answers won't work for someone else: their need to know the above is not as strong. People got their own individual burning needs and questions. My suspicion is that given enough time, they all lead to a similar place.

In the process of getting to the truth and what works, one has to suspend what we were taught and immediate need to judge. Subtle anxities that mostly revolve around worries about ‘making it’, the need to be right, being important and admired - they all become less and less relevant. This is a side effect of deeper understanding of the nature of reality.

At some point one can end up at a logically sound decision to interact with the Force, asking it to guide you in a way it sees fit, without conditions. For example: “What am I uniquely suited to dedicate myself to that will give me inspiration and joy till the day I die?” Or: “What lack of understanding  is preventing me from achieving my goals in X endeavor?”

Paying attention to the responsive universe

After setting course and asking the thing you really need to ask, you start paying attention to what unfolds over the next months. You ignore  your nagging critical brain every time it starts coming up with anxiety and cute ways to avoid the real questions. Paying attention to your curiosity and your emotions when you encounter events/people/new information is key. They contain information as to what you need to be doing.

Tom Morgan from Sapient Capital did this great 20 min video deepdive  on the Mystery of Curiosity, how it’s basically your future self signaling to you where to go. He is a master in unpacking the idea of a responsive universe that is quite hard for people to buy in to, but I experience it to be true pretty much every day. I understand people who keep drumming on about it do it, because they can’t imagine how they lived without it.

The better your attention paying skills, surrender and trust - the easier the process. The less judgment, impatience - the better. If you can master sprinkling any minor sign, hint, synchronicity with gratitude and acknowledgement of the sign that is given - you get more of it. Regular journaling through this whole process helps because the mind is fickle and often will glance over outright miracles.

Will anyone care?

Who would be mad enough to take this seriously out of a conventional career in finance, law, academia, politics? Very few. What about when conventional careers don’t sit so cushy anymore? When the worry of losing income and one's performance niche becomes a reality? Many more will start exploring beyond and digging into things like quantum science to find a “rational” explanation for something that their conditioning has been taught to reject.

I have a suspicion that the push will be AGI in the next 5-10 years as highly intellectual people who think they ‘know’ are the hardest to grasp the power of surrender & the idea of a responsive universe.

Someone might only care only if this process has made me a hundred million or if I can be considered a “success”.

Look, I consider myself no better or worse than anyone, the only difference with most is that I am at peace with where I am and all the places I could be going.. Why? Because I have seen this stuff work. Reality is responsive to the things that go on in my mind, the emotions I allow to wallow in and the vibes I choose to emit. If something is not going smoothly for any meaningful time, it is because the mind is not sufficiently leashed and I allowed myself to get out of sync.

The breakthrough comes when you see through the falseness of commonly held beliefs like “that’s just life”,  “life has to be a struggle and contain problems”, “hard work and worry is part of being a responsible adult” etc.

But it is so not about hard work for the sake of toil..  When I see people running around developing AI-driven future job and earnings anxiety, I smile and see how all the drama from the increase of complexity is actually designed to push the gradual raising of people’s level of consiousness.

So what is The Last Edge that AI can’t replace?

“Letting it show you” your optimal path and the things that are blocking you through Surrendering your Smarts.

Trusting that “It” is infinitely smarter than your mind.

Asking clear questions through a journal or other means.

Attention and noticing of the subtle signs and nudges. 

Endless ever present Gratitude…

Thank you for reading.

Anna

Some rabbit holes for the curious:

Interview with Dr Rupert Sheldake biologist who developed the hypothesis of morphic resonance. An ‘apostate of scientism’ talking about its origin and damage.

The Mystery of Curiosity - 20 min video on the mystery of curiosity summarising 10 years of wisdom from Tom Morgan

“Science Ideated - The fall of matter and the contours of the next mainstream scientific worldview” by Bernardo Kastrup. ‘Leading-edge empirical observations are increasingly difficult to reconcile with 'scientific' materialism.’

The Cosmic Game: Explorations of the Frontiers of Human Consciousness by Dr Stan Grof

Thankfully, after my husband and I emailed our views on this, the school took note and said that Youtube from now on will only be allowed for research. The teacher said they just didn’t think of it in the first year of use and that our arguments made sense. It’s likely similar across other schools. We just don’t think to value our free attention and hence kids are not taught to exercise agency over it. As a society we often signal to kids that having free unstructured time is best spent with the algo stealing our attention agency. 

When we originally spoke about it, my son told me the school had reassured the kids that they won't be able to access any ‘bad stuff’ on youtube, which is a questionable assumption to say the least. He also told me he chose not to watch ‘stupid trampoline videos on youtube’ like some of his peers, but chose to do Lego and sketching instead. I chose to believe him. He has been made aware of the initiatives driving the attention economy, so he knows what’s at stake. 

What is actually at stake and how does he know? 

I was reading a book one day, Adam approached and told me “I am bored. What do I do now?” 

Me: ‘Wanna know what I am reading now? A book that talks about the US slot machine industry and how it manages to expand its profits using the stuff they learn about human nature and psychology. How it’s possible to get people to a point where some of them choose to always wear black whilst playing the slot machines. They do it so it’s not visible when they urinate themselves. This is because they cannot detach from the machines to go to the toilet.’’ He is naturally interested in how that's possible.

I discuss some passages from the deeply disturbing book by Natasha Dow Schüll ‘Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas’.

She claims that you cannot understand addiction without understanding that it's not about the money, it is instead about reproducing a reliable response and ‘merging with the machine’. You hit the button and you get the sound beep. The player enters a state of absorption where his actions disconnect him from the real world and the sense of difference between him and the machine is obliterated.

Schüll quotes one of her gambler informants saying, “I feel connected to the machine when I play, like it’s an extension of me, as if physically you couldn’t separate me from the machine.”

The industry provides a service to the gambler - the glorious feeling of having certainty in a world of uncertainty and change. From the book:

“I don’t care if it takes coins, or pays coins: the contract is that when I put a new coin in, get five new cards, and press those buttons, I am allowed to continue. So it isn’t really a gamble at all—in fact, it’s one of the few places I’m certain about anything … If you can’t rely on the machine, then you might as well be in the human world where you have no predictability either.”

The refined arts of attention design can be ramped up to a pretty high level:

“It is not uncommon for heavy users to stand at a machine for eight or even twelve hours at a stretch, developing blood clots and other medical conditions. Paramedics in Las Vegas dread getting calls from casinos, which usually turn out to be heart attacks. The problem is that when someone collapses, the other gamblers won’t get out of the way to let the paramedics do their job; they won’t leave their machines. Deafening fire alarms are similarly ignored; there have been incidents where rising floodwaters didn’t dislodge them.” This is being in the “zone”.

I will get to what all this has to do with ‘being bored’.

Game designers target “full immersion” through careful interface and surrounding design, ensuring that the player “plays to extinction”. This includes giving the player the illusion that he is gaining mastery and having favorite machines call the regular players by the name through the hallway. Player extinction also mates up with the Freudian idea of the death instict - a slower form of suicide - relief frustration and pain through compulsion to repeat something that overrides pleasure.

My son wonders why the government allows this. I say the government can’t be relied on to protect people from all pitfalls and industries and I tell him that the government happens to profit from the taxes of the gambling industry. General potential good intentions of the government can’t be relied upon to be enough for effective policy. Relying on the government to prevent you from being addicted to anything is a bad bet.

Your Attention is a prized commodity

I tell my son that the same research on human psychology and attention is used by the much bigger and more ‘accepted’ industry. An industry less obvious, but still has horrid long term effects we are now starting to get the stats from. 

It is the not-much-frowned-upon “attention industry” and the dark arts of “attention design”. The way this industry makes money is through harvesting as much of your attention and free time as possible. It actively uses most people’s inability to consciously direct it. They use the same research on impulses to escape and get in the zone as the gamblers in Vegas, to prevent you directing your attention somewhere else.

If you cannot figure out what to do with your bored time yourself, there are a whole lot of companies who will offer you an addictive, seemingly easy solution and make money out of you being hooked to it. 

Western economies are moving from goods to delivering services, many of which are experiences. This relies on techniques for attracting and holding attention. However, one shouldn’t assume the individual cost of this is going to be taken into account at design stage of the product. Before AI ramped everything up a notch, here are just some similarities with the slot machine industry:

1. Variable reward schedules: You never know when you'll get a "win" (a jackpot or a fun new post/notification), which leads to addictive checking behavior.

2. Feedback loops: The sights, sounds, and haptics of slot wins are designed to be pleasurable feedback cues reinforcing play. Similarly, likes, comments, red notification badges give our brains little hits of dopamine, conditioning us to keep using apps.

3. Frustration design: Casinos place ATMs conveniently to ease poker losing streak frustrations. Likewise Twitter/FB auto-refill your feed if you reach the end to eliminate "dead ends."

4. Big data & personalization: Just as player loyalty cards let casinos analyze to optimize gambling spend, so too do tech platforms leverage mass data surveillance to tune interfaces to maximize engagement based on personal profiles.

I learned a lot from the fascinating book “The World Beyond Your Head'' by Matthew Crawford. Whilst I don’t agree with everything there, the book is packed with gems like:

“ Silence is now offered as a luxury good. In the business-class lounge at Charles de Gaulle airport, what you hear is the occasional tinkling of a spoon against china. There are no advertisements on the walls, and no TVs. This silence, more than any other feature of the space, is what makes it feel genuinely luxurious. When you step inside and the automatic airtight doors whoosh shut behind you, the difference is nearly tactile, like slipping out of haircloth into satin.

The much-discussed decline of the middle class in recent decades, and the ever greater concentration of wealth in a shrinking elite, may have something to do with the ever more aggressive appropriations of the attentional commons that we have allowed to take place.”

And :

“While animals certainly have memory and the ability to learn, human beings are thought to be the only creatures who can deliberately recall something not cued by the environment. But we do this only in those stretches of time when the environment is not making urgent claims on our attention.

It is at these times that we try to find (or impose) coherence on our experience, retroactively. If we are currently facing a culturally and technologically induced trauma to our ability to suppress environmental input, that raises a big question: Is this distinctly human activity of coherence-finding at risk?”

My main takeaways from Crawford’s  book are:

• Without the ability to direct our attention where we choose, we become more receptive to those who would direct our attention where they will

• Distractibility is the new obesity

• To attend to anything in a sustained way requires actively excluding all the other things that grab at our attention.

• “Our changing technological environment generates a need for ever more stimulation. The content of the stimulation almost becomes irrelevant. Our distractibility seems to indicate that we are agnostic on the question of what is worth paying attention to—that is, what to value.” - Doesn’t this sound familiar to the Las Vegas gamblers?

• Crawford thinks we need to sharpen the conceptually murky right to privacy by supplementing it with a right not to be addressed. “This would apply not, of course, to those who address me face-to-face as individuals, but to those who never show their face, and treat my mind as a resource to be harvested by mechanized means.”

More relevant for child rearing and education from Crawford:

“It would seem this activity of narrative self-articulation gets under way, developmentally, with the capacity to ignore things. Further, because this self-articulation is something we are never finished with, an ability to ignore things would seem to remain important to the lifelong task of carving out and maintaining a space for rational agency for oneself, against the flux of environmental stimuli.”

So what can be done at the family level?

Of course I can’t count on anything changing in the near future in education, government or corporate spheres. 

What I can count on is only what comes naturally for me. 

To preserve my child’s autonomy of mind. 

To give him a shockproof bullshit detector and critical thinking ability. 

My kid plays Minecraft and will, later on, of course use youtube, when it's purposeful and consciously chosen for his chosen needs, which can be play. Not to fill his lack of instruction time. Not to be the first go-to thing when he has a moment of boredom.

My controversial opinion here: I think children don't need Tik Tok or Instagram. Like till 15 or maybe never. When was the last time a friend of yours said “I’ve been off instagram for a week and I feel worse for it”?

Yes we can agree with close friends' parents and exchange research about how it shouldn’t be allowed. Then you don’t have to deal with weird problems like 10 year old girls raiding the family budget for anti-aging creams. These are artificially created problems. For anyone still on the fence about feasibility of this, I strongly suggest reading the recent research from university of Chicago presenting data on how Instagram and TikTok are a collective trap. It shows most use it out of fear of FOMO rather than interest and are worse off than if the platforms didn't exist. Social media is not a normal consumer product. 

'Why can't I have TikTok dad?’ 

“Here is the reality son: TikTok is a virus app for people who don’t value their brain cells, their health, attention and focus. You think you are worried about AI doing all human work? Wait till you see what your value is if you can't read long form and your brain is hooked on short form TikTok like content. Your ability to create anything that society values is likely to approach 0.”

How about smartphones? Can someone tell me why they need one till 15+ ? Why not have a burner phone with maps till sufficient impulse control is attained and their own attention is highly valued as an asset? 

The smartphone is excellently tuned to meet your unexamined needs flawlessly and instantly. Every time you want an escape from engaging in thought, reality or real relaxation - just scroll. 

Scrolling in your free time without a self chosen purpose is just like pressing the button at the Vegas slot machine. 

Consciously choosing what to attend to is a skill. Adults should better model it’s value.

Let me know what you think in the comments.

~ Anna

Links to explore:

After Babel

What We Learned in 2023 About Gen Z’s Mental Health Crisis

We launched the After Babel Substack eleven months ago, on Feb 1, 2023. We’ll have a post next February reflecting on our first year and looking ahead to our second. In this post, we highlight a few of our 31 posts that readers seemed to enjoy most, and that we believe are the most essential readings for those following this Substack…

Read more

2 years ago · 282 likes · 55 comments · Jon Haidt and Zach Rausch

When Product Markets Become Collective Traps: The Case of Social Media - University of Chicago . Results imply the existence of a “social media trap” for a large share of consumers, whose utility from the platforms is negative but would have been even more negative if they didn’t use social media. Users would need to be paid $59 to deactivate TikTok and $47 to deactivate Instagram if others in their network were to continue using their accounts. Users would be willing to pay $28 and $10 to have others, including themselves, deactivate TikTok and Instagram, respectively.

Stoic: Change belief

Epicurean: Shift Attention

Taoism / Wu-Wei: No prescription. Excess trying or contrived effort is not as effective and often counterproductive. Discovery of true nature of self and the truth about the situation, creates natural right action. Through developing of own understanding of how things really work and don’t work at the meta level, you arrive at perfect unforced action given circumstances. Then stuff just flows.

Sounds complicated, right?

You can’t quickly describe what that last thing actually means in practice. But it’s damn useful. Hence I am giving it a shot through various subjects of parent and child co-development.

The Stoic/Epicurean solutions have their place, are highly valid skills and sound easier than they are in practice. Having said that, my experience is that Wu-Wei is the ultimate way at the meta level. When grasped, you can really see the excess force and chase ruining things that could be beautiful across many domains.

The thing is, people are hungry for quick solutions, a how-to list. But if you present them with 5 step plans and dumb it down, you get nonsense concepts and easily sold ideas like ‘Gentle Parenting’. The result of excess trying to be ‘gentle’ and following ‘rules’ is a mess: stressed parents and overly sensitive children in a near perpetual state of tantrum.

Wu-Wei doesn’t mean non-action. When something is clearly wrong - the natural thing is to take action to stop it, even if it’s hard. As psychologist Jonathan Haidt correctly noted - we have overprotected kids in real life, and are under protecting them online. I don’t see why anyone below 15 should be given TikTok, Instagram or a smartphone. Computer access at home and at school is sufficient.

In an article I have almost finished, I will compare the business tactics of these non-standard consumer products to those of the slot machine industry in Las Vegas. It is unbelievable how we normalised giving tools of mass addiction (for adults!) to kids. Kids who have not learned yet to really value their agency and attention, who are too young to be rooted in who they are.

This year, I covered some things that aid natural child development into flourishing adults. The stuff that becomes increasingly important in the age of ever increasing complexity:

• A connection to something beyond themselves, a sense of deep level okayishness. If the parent has it, it’s enough and it will vaccinate against many anxieties.

• Space, time and a habit of experiencing awe and wonder . This will allow them to develop and follow their curiosity.

• A shockproof bullshit detector and vaccination against unexamined societal fears.

• Much more agency in their education , given that most institutions are way behind

• Ability to think probabilistically. Parents who acknowledge that the child is not there to live the parents lives, but to live his own.

• An ability to question own beliefs

• A futureproof mindset that can take advantage of the personal agency renaissance.

Next year I will touch upon introspection/personal space, tech/social media, valueing agency and attention, the trouble inside the intricate dance between males and females and much more.

End of year review

Everyone loves doing these nowadays. I am asking myself the following, which grew out of the themes that interest me:

• What strong beliefs have I suspended this year?

• Where was I directing my attention unconsciously and hence have allowed it to be stolen? Where and how did I waste this precious resource?

• Where was I exercising unnatural force (out of fear, greed, impatience or other ineffectiveness)? What is the missing understanding that caused the chase?

• Which activities and decisions felt fully aligned with my specific flow and with what I am meant to be doing? Which were not?

• Where was I not present and grateful enough? Where did I rush past the miracles?

  
  

  Thank you for reading. Wishing everyone a Merry Christmas and a Joyful, Healthy, Harmonius 2024!
  
  Anna

My son also will likely be doing this exam in 3 years, however I don’t expect any meaningful stress about it, and he is not any kind of genius. What I am doing today is premeditation:

"What is at rest is easy to hold.

What has not yet occurred is easy to plan for.

What is fragile is easily shattered.

What is small is easily scattered.

Tackle things before they appear.

Cultivate peace and order before confusion and disorder have set in."[1]

The starting point is a happy, anxiety-free child who is not born with exam stress. When they are 8, like my son, they are still walking around singing random invented songs, blissfully unaware about the worry storm that’s going to be unleashed on them soon, by adults.

Parents and teachers might drop comments about how getting into X school is the only way to get to the best universities and jobs. They could imply in the tone of their voice, that you could do worse than your peers, that you are competing against them for a scarce resource.

Some parents might not have faith in the kid to have the discipline to persevere with the exam prep without any scare tactics. There is a lack of trust in the child and own parental fear and worry starts setting in. The result is that the child naturally starts thinking the exam is a very big deal and stressing about its ‘failure’.

Those who think not passing the entrance exam to a hot school is a big deal, infect the child with their fear-based programming, unless… the parent immunizes the child.

If we don't want our child to worry and think it's a big deal, my husband and I must make sure we don't think it's a big deal. Additionally, if he asks, we must relay to the child why others who think it's a big deal are wrong. As above, so below.

Here’s a possible future conversation:

Should the exam be done? There is no harm in doing it, it could be a fun way to test how well you know the things they are asking you.

Is this exam going to play a role in whether you are going to have a great life and profession? No.

Is being in a brand name school going to make or break your career and life quality?Absolutely not. It would be folly to think this piece of paper should give you peace of mind about becoming a ‘success’ in life.

He might ask, then: Why are all the kids and parents so fussed about it?

Not everything that they are fussed about is right. Why don’t you accumulate your own understanding, before you elevate in importance that of others to a level where it gives you stress? If you think it's useful to copy the crowd in their worries - do it. But question it first. Don’t drop the ability to ask ‘Why’. You were always such a professional in this area (even though it got annoying sometimes.. :)

If he tells me he is still stressed about the 11+ exam, for example:

‘What if I will not make it to top school and my other friends might. And that worries me.’

Why? Will they stop being your friends because of that?

‘Probably.’

In that case, they were probably not much use as friends anyway, if that's the reason they stop being your friends. Isn’t that, right?

The child might persevere with worries inherited from his conditioned surroundings:

‘But mommy, how will I get a job later if I don’t go to a top school?

You will go to an average school and become an autodidact.

‘Become what?’

Someone who doesn't depend on school to teach him things he wants to learn. Someone who doesn't depend on excess pushing by others to become the person he wants to become. There are benefits to everything, especially ‘failure’. But failure can’t be aimed for. If you get cute and aim for failure, it will have 0 benefit. The exam is part of the school process you are in, like the general classes and exams, but it is not a big deal.

Some parents might say - but what about learning to work hard? Isn’t that an important part of getting ready for adulthood? Isn’t that what exams are for - to prove to your employer you can work hard?

First, working hard happens naturally when a person is really interested in getting somewhere or practicing a craft. The better question is not how to learn to work hard, but how to know what will make you want to work hard. And even then, it will look like very hard work to others, because they don't share your passions, but for you it will be something you are just very keen on doing, akin to playing.

Secondly, why would you want to work for an employer who sees merit primarily in someone who has been working hard to show he can work hard through passing exams? Which is a completely different attribute to what actually is needed if you want to hire a problem solving, internally driven individual?

I genuinely do not care if my son passes the 11+ or not. This naturally will reduce any worry and fear of failure that could arise in him. This attitude is likely to lead him to do it and actually passing, for the fun of it.

You can’t fake it. You get to this understanding by questioning deep seated beliefs. I started to observe how life works and how it doesn't work. Newton's third law of motion states that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Leaning too much to one side causes a counter force. You see this truth replicated in many areas. As in physics, so in life.

You can be in the world but not of it. I nod at a lot of self-generated fears and nonsense I see created in society, I feel compassion for people being swayed by it, but I do not participate. Everyday life feels lighter and lighter.

I was wondering if there is a book that exemplifies what I have come to embody from Tao Te Ching, but with regards to parenting? A book I can endlessly quote from to show what I am talking about? It turns out there is!  It is The Parents Tao Te Ching by William Martin:

If you want your children to be generous,

You must allow them to be selfish

If you want them to be disciplined,

You must first allow them to be spontaneous.

If you want them to be hard-working,

You must first allow them to be lazy.

This is a subtle distinction,

And hard to explain to those who criticize you.

A quality cannot be learned without first understanding its opposite.

In the 11+ exam case: if you want the kid to do well in life or pass exams stress free - you have to figure out how ‘succeeding’ actually happens in life, so you are not muddied by the fear-based waters that the majority of our society is used to swimming in. It’s about not trying to get to the school the crowd fears not getting into. If you want really good stress-free results, it’s about seriously considering why not getting into that school might actually be a good thing :)

_______________________________________________________________

This article is going to be part of a series of articles Tao Parenting in Practice.
_________________________________________________________________

^[1] Tao Te Ching verse 64

What has his life’s work and content done for me?

A convincing approving nudge to really keep thinking outside of the box. A regular push to level up my game and not succumb to mediocrity. His guests are a reminder that you don’t need to be ‘rich’ to live a life you really love. I feel that's missing a lot, especially in finance/corporate land. You rarely encounter someone who knows they have ‘enough’ and act like it.

After years of following Jim, my general worldview has flipped from leaning towards “Black Mirror” outcomes to a healthy enthusiasm about the direction and future of humanity. Great book recommendations and people he interviews have helped with this. It is akin to a regular infusion of curiosity across various domains.

I think I have figured out Jim’s secret sauce.

He has deciphered the core principle, the meta-truth, behind most of our world's problems (and solutions):

Reality is created first in the minds of people and then it manifests as the world we experience. Everything else is a derivative flowing from this. Of course, nothing gets done unless you take action, but the absolute first thing is the ability to See, Imagine and Think differently. 

However, our way of perceiving and believing, our ‘Human OS’ as Jim calls it, is full of bugs.

Despite selling his Asset Management firm for billions and never having to work again, he is tirelessly making sure that our Human OS and opportunities are up to speed with The great reshuffle2 - a period of exponential change where all old traditional models are collapsing and our Human OS is being pushed to update.

As the Medici did during the Renaissance, Jim does through O'Shaughnessy Ventures. He is the financier and patron of many creatives, start-ups and tinkerers in various non-zero sum fields. The fund focuses on 4 specific areas: Infinite Adventures, Infinite Films, Infinite Media, and the  O'Shaughnessy Fellowships program.

OSV Ventures  invests and influences businesses building the future. Examples are Stability AI and Synthesis School, where my 8 year old son enjoys exploring lessons with his AI tutor.

Infinite Films is creating White Mirror scenarios so we stop worrying about everything going to hell. OSV also started a book publishing company. To paraphrase Jim: ‘Talent and genius are equally distributed. Old gate keepers have a habit of blocking access. We can identify them and we can fund them.’

In his podcast and newsletter, Jim champions books and writers that have the potential to free a person from stale ideas and various unexamined anxieties. The quality content delves into consciousness, biases, science, AI, futurism, art, science, finance and education. 

Jim on Human OS

Nostalgia is basically bullshit. We hallucinate a lot of our past. Because humans have a strong need for illusion of control, minds overwrite and update our memories to make it consistent with what we think now. I found his thinker and prover parable especially interesting when considering deeply held beliefs.

 ‘Desire for certainty is a big bug in human OS. Premature certainty is a massive mistake. You are almost always wrong initially. Only the madman is certain.’

Jim says everyone wants progress but no one wants to change, but we need to be aware that progress always comes with problems but they become better problems. If you can't evolve yourself, the change that's happening in society still can't be stopped. Hence his obsession (and mine) with Human OS - the underlying driver of everything impacting the world.

“The only certainty is movement and change. Stasis is death.” - Jim is often seen quoting from Tao Te Ching3

Cognitive biases are similar to a cognitive mirage - you don’t stop seeing it. You don't stop walking towards it. Learn to write things down on paper for clarity of thoughts. Jim has 40+ years of journals which he will convert to machine readable format.

“We need the discipline of Sparta around our Athenian delusions....develop a process you don't emotionally overwrite.4”

He learned the usefulness of Pre-meditation from his grandfather: You write down by hand - I want X, all the ways your life might change if you get X, but then you state the negatives of getting X. Do the same for the option where you don’t get X. You write the positives and negatives to tame any excess bias.

“You have to be Lao Tsu AND Confucius, always walking on a razor edge. All emotion or all reason is suboptimal.  If you over optimize to either side it's not great.”

The edge he continuously uses in investing is the fact that Human nature doesn’t change. Here is a thread on how to arbitrage it in investing. Jim also published several great books for investors that are worth exploring.

 ‘It seems that the one thing that doesn't change is people's reaction to short-term conditions and their axiomatic ability to perpetuate them far into the future.’  

Jim on parenting:

“We want to raise great adults, which precludes a lot of traps young parents fall into, for example saying ‘Because I am the parent and you are the child’ or ‘My house my rules’, nothing that would make them believe you are right and they are wrong.' If a child has compelling arguments, take them seriously. Make them understand they have agency. We encourage them to question and challenge us. I do not live vicariously through my children. Don't get your children to be mini versions of you.”

Key inspiration for me:

The idea that doing what makes you jump out of bed in the morning is important and can be combined with managing money. The endless give, even after you have made it financially, is a place where there is no space for mid life crisis, depression, loneliness or other plagues.

I have found in my own life the principles and wisdom of Tao Te Ching as generally true and helpful with the ultimate optimal way of being, living and yes, parenting. Hence the name of the blog - Wu Wei, the principle of effortless action, the ultimate mastery of ‘flow’.  Jim confirmed that I am not alone and crazy in this area.

How to access

The Podcast Infinite Loops has proven to be valuable for developing an ever more nuanced mindset. Featuring a variety of guests, themes, and disciplines, it spans from heavy hitters like Cliff Asness to “ordinary” people who are doing something extraordinary.

OSV Ventures Newsletter is excellent. 

Jim’s twitter 
________________________________________________________________________
When Write of Passage's last assignment required a curation piece on an online persona worth knowing, I cringed. As a trader, I am allergic to displays of excess praise - I know how easy it is to tip the emotional balance out of equanimity. Nevertheless, it is great to venture out of the comfort zone sometimes. As the course is coming to an end, I am super grateful for the conversations with and feedback from , , ,, , ,, , .

__________________________________________________________________________

4

Some of the quotes are from this great interview:

Liberty’s Highlights

Jim O'Shaughnessy: Origin Story, Career in Finance, Groundbreaking Books, and Future with OSV 👶 🕵️‍♂️ 🏦 ✍️📚 🚀

Listen now

3 years ago · 13 likes · 8 comments · Liberty

What do I mean by the Agency Renaissance? An explosion of permutations and possibilities to enjoy living and earning on your own terms.

The 15-17th century Renaissance was the transition period from the Middle Ages to Modernity, filled with change in fields like art, science, architecture, politics. For someone to take part in that Renaissance, as a minimum, you would have to know how to read and write. Additional qualities like math and interdisciplinary knowledge were a plus and allowed a person to take full advantage.

Today, there are also qualities that let you take part in the current Renaissance of personal opportunity. The problem is that many people cannot see it or overcome the increase of complexity they feel. The growing divide between the beliefs and content consumption of these two groups is growing and the differentiating traits are worth a look…

Relative Utopia for those who can see

Just the sheer number of options to construct life how one wishes is huge compared to any time in history. Whether you want a life  in the cocoon of a beautifully decorated home van traversing nature with minimal tech like this couple, or you want to create breakthroughs like this 14-year-old America’s Top Young Scientist, inventing a 50 ct bar of soap that treats skin cancer - the spectrum of possibilities is boundless for those willing to engage their imagination. Yet…

The personal agency utopia demands a unique skill: the art of focusing inward, where the definition of success is not plucked from the external, but forged within the crucible of one's own aspirations.

There are many forces at play that prevent someone from going after their dream life.

As the tide of Personal Agency Renaissance swells, there is a counter current dragging some people into a personal dystopia—an abyss of ineffective beliefs and activity. Here is how I see the futureproof Agency qualities compared to the qualities dragging someone down into a Personal Dystopia:

Personal Dystopia 

Imagine being in the 15th century: Some are getting pumped up to create and live the Renaissance. At the same time, you have a device in your pocket with a bunch of voices telling you: “No need to focus on getting literate, that is for those who are richer and have more opportunity than you. You are a victim and you are owed by “Them”. They created a system that is evil and unfair. Come and identify with us and let's spend our lives trashing the system together”. 

Think of the millions of young people finding “community” in multiple identity groups like “Sigma”,”Incels”, “tradwives” and what not. 

Think those protesting something like climate change, without a well-thought out clear realistic ask vs solution architects. 

Think healthy young people who allow themselves the luxury to bemoan the lack of opportunity and fairness (in the most prosperous and opportunity rich time in history) vs those who are powered by their limitations, take chances and create their own opportunities. (Many immigrants like me, from actual non-functioning countries, find this phenomen incredulous in the West.)

You might say - it was always like that. Yet, the differences are growing and the divide is more noticeable. Technology changed engagement with news and each other, whilst giving us wider access to innovation and opportunities. There is valuable information amongst the heaps of garbage. But, let’s not forget: If you are worried about your abilities to attract a mate or “make it” - the algo will amplify the things you click on. This is a new way to get stuck in a bubble of ineffective beliefs.

Kids are not born with an innate curating mechanism (yet). 

It is up to the parents to guide them towards development of a shockproof bullshit detector. It is highly unlikely they will get one at school. That is where the ‘annoying’ question-asking is nipped in the bud after a certain age. Schools, which have to optimize for grades and exam passing, have no time for frivolities like development of real independent thought.

In the meantime, the world keeps adding hurdles for one to develop it…

Today, You can get addicted to watching how other people live, what 10-step plans to success they follow (which will not work for you anyway). You can indeed have AI manipulate your desires and attention, if you are not sure what you actually want in life. Then there is the constant allure of passionate protests for causes you have zero actual impact on. One can succumb to peacocking in endless virtue signaling contests.

Alternatively, you can live wherever you want, invent your own job aligned with your values, get paid doing what you love in a multitude of ways and freely access knowledge and wisdom that was once a privilege reserved only for the affluent. You can create innovation that the world needs and get funded regardless of your social status, if your idea is good. You can easily meet people from all over the world, who share your niche interests.

Depending on which way you are leaning, you have more opportunity to get entrenched in your warrior-victim bubbles, or have more tools to build freedom, create and live a myriad permutations of one’s choosing. 

To navigate this labyrinth, one has to drop the addiction to external validations, the siren call of futile endeavors, and the paralysis induced by societal programming. You have to know what you don’t want, if you are not sure yet about what you do want. It is a delicate ballet where autonomy of mind has to be fiercely guarded against the deluge of information and opinions. Regular time alone journaling, questioning my beliefs and actions, zooming in on how they serve me, has worked for me. This was a good nudge to keep at it from writer Jed Mc Kenna:

“You just have to keep at it, keep going, constantly reminding yourself of what you’re doing and why, because as soon as you stop you start to sink again and the next thing you know you’ll be sitting in a nursing home thinking back to that long ago night when some crackpot stood in front of the dancing flames and shooting sparks and told you not to let it slip away, but you did, and now it’s too late.”

Below are some of the articles I wrote that can guide a young person towards embracing the Personal Agency Renaissance as opposed to joining the self-identified ‘incels’:

Next level of Freedom - On the joys and use of adversity and what a shockproof bullshit detector gives you

Kids proving how school was holding them back  - About kids who are breaking out of traditional education, spend ⅓ of usual time on academics, actually graduate with better results, whilst having spent the freed-up time creating profitable businesses and real life experience.

Science agreed with some of Religion. Kids wellbeing can profit - The sign to the door out of the meaning crisis

Awe for the Intellectual - Engaging the right brain hemisphere and experiencing awe 

What Beliefs will your children inherit? - Talking about the downside of unquestioned beliefs about group belonging and entitlement.

The Stuff Fears are made of - A live look at debunking fears and beliefs through the use of self-inquiry.

This article is a continuation of my last post where I broached the subject of undissected beliefs that power emotions.

What follows is a part of my recent chat with Tessa, a young woman coming out of college who I have known for many years. Tessa said she is scared to apply for an ambitious position she wants, because she deems it to be above her perceived level of skill. 

I asked her: What’s the worst thing that will happen if you apply to this company? The absolute worst, most disastrous outcome?

She said it would be that her fears would be confirmed.

I asked: “Fears of what?”

Tessa: “That I am not ready, I am not suitable, that they don't want to hire me.”

In the physical world nothing would break. What is actually going on is her being scared of how she will make herself feel by thinking certain thoughts and believing certain conclusions.

I asked Tessa if she would be able to observe her stream of thoughts for half a day and jot down briefly most of the thoughts that arise. She said she would.

The purpose was to show her that the entity that would be observing her thoughts cannot be the same entity as her thoughts, otherwise logically there couldn't be 2 entities, one of which is observing the other. If you are watching a movie and get emotionally involved with the wellbeing of the character, it still does not make you the character.

One of the entities is you and the other one is not you.  You are the thing that observes.

Tessa: “I never thought of it this way. I realize this is true, and if this was about someone else I would have said 'Don't be stupid, it's all nonsense fears', but when it's about me… I have no idea why I have this porridge in my head.”

Who forces us to believe the porridge in our head?

What if we actively looked for more evidence before we believed the things that arise as ‘our’ thoughts?

Back to Tessa’s original statement on her fears: “I am not ready, I am not suitable,  they don't want to hire me.”

One could dissect that into several separate beliefs:

Not being hired is a bad thing. If they don’t hire me, it can only mean that I am not suitable or ready. Me trying to apply and being rejected is a bad thing. Them not hiring me is 100% due to me and my qualities. Enough assumptions to build the Great Wall of China between her and reality!

What can be done then if one is really eager to get somewhere?

After identifying the plethora of beliefs one happens to carry, you tackle them one at a time. On paper. Out of the head. The person could ask things like:

How has this belief worked for me so far? What did it give me? Who would I be without that belief? 

Then you actively try to find reasons why that belief might not be true. Debunk your own bullshit. Logically, without wishful thinking, reduce the probability you placed on certain outcomes by seeing the possibility of other, more helpful outcomes.

If, after examination, you have no logical reason left to believe the thoughts powering your fears, then you are left with one thing only:  Feel the fear and do it anyway.

Some might want to know what happened to Tessa. She said she would iron out her beliefs. Then she came back and said she now actually wants to do something even scarier: start her own business. The thing is.. what Tessa does is not really relevant for anyone else looking to progress in their own lives. We all need to look inside ourselves for answers more often.

The most productive way I found is to have your beliefs loosely held. This is encompassed nicely in this quote by writer Robert Anton Wilson:

The process starts with introspection, identifying and detangling each belief on paper. Testing their actual validity.

The main ingredient of success in this process? The strength of the desire to progress out of the predicament one is stuck in. This desire is rarely present. I will explore why in future writing.

~ Anna

Any comments, questions and anything you would like me to expand on, please do mention it below, I do love to hear from you.

“You are depriving him. Look at all the other bilingual families speaking with their children in their mother tongue. ” 

With that in mind, why don’t I make the effort?

Because I will not burden him with any emotional attachment to a nation that refuses to grow up and learn repeated lessons from history. 

My view is that it’s better not to pass on any strong feelings of affiliation with any identity group, unless it is vital for his survival and well-being.

You can be in the group, but not of it, so when the group goes stupid, you are not blind to it or too slow to react.

They say ‘Actions have consequences - choose wisely’. But what are our actions based on? They are based on Feelings that grow out of the substrate called Beliefs. This is the stuffy dark basement that few want to venture into: the questioning of one's own beliefs. The problem is: when beliefs remain unquestioned and unacknowledged, they can have serious real life consequences and cloud critical thinking…

The cost of attachment to an identity based group

WSJ Journalist Evan Gershkovich was born in New Jersey to Russian immigrants. He had a typical American childhood and could have had a great life. Today Evan is in Russian prison on fake charges facing 20 years. He is another lucrative “hostage” for Putin.

The interest of a young man in his rich heritage pulled him into Russia to work for the New York Times in 2018. A warm fuzzy feeling of belonging came over him in Moscow. I can see exactly how it happened,  his love affair with Russia is not uncommon. The conversations are more open and frank than in the West, if you speak the language, the parties are more real, the homey feeling of the Russian banya and dacha gatherings, the soulful songs that suck you in - all these things that could be enjoyed as cultural artifacts and left behind, unless… There is a part of you that believes this group of  people and their aura is who you belong with.

Evan wasn’t a Putin supporter but wasn’t vocal about it, he wanted to help the ordinary Russians by documenting their reality. He did it carefully. But his sense of belonging clouded his decision-making capability. When it was clearly time to leave, he missed the signs and was still there a year after the war started. The naivete that comes with growing up in the West, that if you just bring goodness and truth , you are unlikely to encounter evil, just does not work in certain places. 

The counterbalance to all the above “attractors” in Russia is an underlying cultural and moral rot. It was taking over the majority of the population. Some never got rid of it from the Communist indoctrination days. This was visible on many levels if one would look. Just one example: during the 2014 Crimea occupation there was genuine happiness, joy and a sense of entitlement to that land, also amongst the educated. Now the price of lack of critical thinking and respect for basic human rights is starting to be paid for. Which brings me to an unspoken belief that creeps in on all of us:

Entitlement and it’s various forms

When you live in a democracy with functioning laws, without corruption, excess violence, and stray dog packs, the relative utopia lasting for decades starts feeling like something you are entitled to. It lulls you in the expectation that it will always be like that. You forget the sacrifices it took to get here, and you become blind to the efforts that might be necessary to maintain the order that everyone is used to. The guard goes down and disappointment is big when something shatters the illusion of stability and control.

Passing on feelings of any kind of entitlement to kids, even in a disguised form, has a negative impact on their ability to make sound decisions in the future. This doesn’t seem like an odd statement. However, it does make many people defensive and uncomfortable.

A father who feels cheated by an employer and carries a grudge feels entitled to have been treated differently. A mother who is resentful about her ex-husband, feeling entitled to a lifelong commitment and can’t hide her feelings of resentment from the kids. A family that feels cheated out of property or land and passes on the anger at the dinner table quietly hoping that maybe the kids will get retribution… How many people do you think have a radically honest examination about their hidden biases, allegiances, and attachments? How could all of this impact the future wellbeing and present life of their kids?

Only a very emotionally mature parent really wants nothing from the kid besides them to be happy. All kinds of neediness and expectations are often disguised. How much do we really love our kids unconditionally and how much do we love them if their ideas support our ideologies?

There is no absolute final truth anyone can hold claim to. But not all ideas and cultures are evolutionary and morally equal, just like not all beliefs we pass on to children are equally sound.

“The best argument against moral equivalency is that denying that one culture is better than another entails denying that the future state of one's own culture can be better than the present. It denies the possibility of progress, is hostile to it” – Physicist David Deutsch.

Group allegiance and participation works better if it is based on merit and/or the presence of a clear common goal. It doesn’t work well when it is primarily identity and emotion based.

Want to avoid groupthink and the trap of entitlement? Ideas to ponder:

• Are most of the people in my group interested in the truth and solutions or are they just interested in chit chat and noise?  Or is it the pity, righteousness and camaraderie they get in suffering?

• How have the policies / beliefs / ideas of my group been working for the group so far? How effective have they been over the years? 

• How much bias could I have inherited from them?

• How is what I want to be real impacting my perception of what reality actually is?

• Where and to what do I and my group feel entitled?

If one Really Wants to progress, given the constraints and reality of one's situation - the path is always there. Blame, victimhood, feeling sorry for oneself and feeling entitled to anything - all take you off this path. For individuals or nations, it’s the same…

I was 28, trading in the bank in 2011. I bet that Greece and other South European governments would default. The consensus was that it would never happen. I was convinced it would. Despite the incredulity that surrounded me and tricky market whiplashes, I stuck with it. Greece defaulted. The crowd was wrong. I had my big win. I felt invincible. Like I could fly close to the sun and my wings wouldn't melt.

Eventually the bank became too constraining for someone who “knows it all” and I went out trading on my own. People often ask me how I do it - No colleagues, no boss, no institutional backing, or salary.

The truth is that after about 3 years of messing about, I came face to face with the depths of my stubbornness, insincerity, overconfidence, and unseriousness to such a degree that I had a serious conversation with “the Force”. It went something like this:

Me: This is freaking hard, I keep making money and giving it back and some, on a repeating loop.

The Force: No one cares. What do you really want? What are you chasing?

Me: I want to make high returns on my capital every year. If someone gives me capital on my terms – fine, but I don’t want to go and beg for it.

The Force: How do I know if you are serious? How bad do you want it?

Me: I am going to persevere without having a Plan B no matter what you throw at me!

The resolve was this:

No matter what happens, I will keep going. If I blow it, I blow it. If I have to be content with a meagre monthly income for the rest of my life, so be it. Ex-colleagues or whoever might think I am a loser, to hell with my image as well.

Easier life, easier jobs: there are plenty of those. They don’t interest me because I am not interested in being a quitter just because this is hard. I resolved not to quit until I master consistently high performance.

It would disappoint me if I started entertaining Plan B’s out of a position of weakness. If I ever do something else, it will be out of a position of strength. It would suck to depend on others to ‘pay’ me + I hate marketing myself. The level of freedom I felt is unparalleled despite the difficulties, hence I persevered.

The Force submitted when the seriousness of resolve hit this fever pitch (as seen in hindsight).

Turns out I have learned more about trading and managing risk at home than I did in the bank: at home the stakes are more significant. When stakes are high you can’t settle in an intellectual cesspool of nice theories for long - you have to get to the point of what works in practice for you.

Over time the mistakes reduced, the activity became less forced, I enjoyed good years and the freedom to do what I want from a position of strength. Much more interesting are the parallels with real life outside of trading I picked up on the way.

The ability to fully submit to the will of something bigger than you, something that you can’t control, is a process. It is easier said than done, but it is the only way if one wants to get somewhere real. 

In trading, that something is the market as the culmination of millions of participants and factors. 

In life in general it is Reality. In Taoism, it’s called the Tao – the enigmatic process that drives everything. In certain science circles it would be known as a morphic self-organizing field with the organizing activity being probabilistic. A summary of my understanding of “it” is outlined in the 6 points in this article I wrote. Here, I will be calling it The Force.

The moment you start pushing your excess desires upon The Force through clinging, demanding, hoping, fearing… the moment you think you are a bit smart or indulge in some overconfidence, you will be smacked down. If you indulge in feeling sorry for yourself or despair or overthinking - it will cost you as well.

My experience has led me to become keen on going with the flow of The Force as opposed to against it at multiple levels in life outside of markets.

What I have learned:

The optimal way to be, is to start loving what IS without hoping or attaching to the outcome.

Before you can LOVE what IS unconditionally, you need to be able to SEE what IS, without tainting reality with what you wish it to be.

To SEE what IS, you need to WANT TO SEE true reality badly, meaning UNDERSTANDING the superiority of what really IS to anything else.

That last one is the tricky part for most as people think they are “smart”, they think that they know and control more than they do in reality. 

To logically understand the superiority of what IS beyond mere theoretical buy-in, you end up digging in things like the nature of reality and consciousness, complexity science, non- linear dynamics, and ancient wisdom. Then you put the pieces together from different disciplines and realize and FEEL how little you actually know and control. You can have fights with reality in your head as much as you want, but it’s pointless unless you can actually go and do something about it. Basically, the quicker you can let go of your anger / disappointment / resentment/ fear the quicker you are realigned with the flow. 

When the Illusion of Control is fully dropped (this takes some time) and the submission to the Force is complete, only then are you given access to “Jedi powers” – the things that make high level performance effortless, the state of flow and “being in the zone” which is often mentioned by top performing athletes.

If there is need for comfort, fear or greed or your actions are not aligned with your core values - it transmutes into excess energy. The result being that the thing that you chase eludes you. Excess force, according to laws of physics, creates counterforce, which has a limiting effect by default.  One doesn’t have to believe in things like a unifying energy field to be able to observe this effect in own life: 

When you are staring at the phone too eager for someone to call - they will never call. 

When your child hears desperation and excess emotion in your voice when you try too hard to make him do something… he shuts down or rebels more. 

When a girl is naturally easy going and not too eager – the man chases her, when she is overly clingy… you know what happens. 

“The Force” hands out Jedi Powers in small batches based on the level of your sincerity, self-honesty, and ability to debunk your own beliefs. Progress is always possible , but only for those who value it more than their convictions.

Over time, as this process unfolds and all your beliefs become ‘loosely held’, you realize you can actually be engaged in a co-creative partnership with The Force that drives reality. Then, a whole new level of fun begins…

I am inspired to unpack this subject on a practical level in parenting and life in general through creative writing and other means. Perhaps it will make the ride into increased complexity a bit more comfortable for some.

If you liked this, please Like and Share on Substack so others can find the blog easier. Thanks!