I love how you described the patient process of unfolding the right life—instead of a top-down, highly architected plan for life that often falls apart when it meets reality. The same thing has happened for me in trying to find the friendships that are most activating and exciting, and the work that’s most fulfilling to me.
Generally speaking, being very attentive to the day-to-day and the tiny steps available in it (exploring one tiny new thing or experience, for example) has been much more useful for me. I’m learning a little bit about myself and the world, and I have the space to iterate. This insight you shared feels especially true: “The context is smarter than you. It holds more nuance and information than you can fit in your head. Collaborate with it.”
I'm happy to share (and so sorry for the delayed reply!)
I've slowly realized that I had 2 incorrect assumptions about how to make friends, and which friends to make. The first assumption is that my "type" of friend would have certain interests, preoccupations, personality traits, lifestyle. In my late teens/early 20s I had a relatively fixed idea of who I was (personality, interests, goals, &c) and made friends who seemed to match that. But many of my closest friends now are wildly, wildly different from that—and I've also changed so much over the last 5–10 years. I ultimately believe that friendships (and all relationships, really) are inherently transformative: they can introduce you to new dimensions of yourself, new ways of living, new things that you thought you wouldn't be into but end up being the center of your life. It's good to be flexible on who your friend "type" is, imo, and always see what's possible with each new acquaintanceship
The second assumption just came from wanting every new interesting stranger to immediately become a friend—and feeling disappointed when it didn't work out. I think it's helped so much to think of my social life as creating all these opportunities to meet people, but out of every 100 people I try to befriend (by chatting to at an event where I know no one, by getting coffee, &c), maybe only 20 people I'll meet again…and maybe only 5 become super close friends…these numbers are made-up, but the general idea is to not expect every possible friendship to actualize into a real, sustaining, intimate connection. Some people pass through your life very lightly and it's okay. It's helpful to meet a lot of people and see what's possible—each meeting is a low-probability chance of making a new friend, but the fewer friendships that result are easily worth all the effort
"friendships (and all relationships, really) are inherently transformative: they can introduce you to new dimensions of yourself, new ways of living, new things that you thought you wouldn't be into but end up being the center of your life" - so good!!!
So much food for thought here, and I especially resonated with the idea that defining a relationship while looking for one is starting on the wrong end. Part of the excitement is the authorship itself, of evolving the form to fit the context, which changes depending on how our needs and desires evolve. Unfolding big leaps, as you said, instead of sticking stubbornly to a template.
This resonates with a realization I had at some point in my life: I can’t trust what I “want”. Therefore, I can’t trust my “vision” of the life I “want.” I noticed that my wants and vision kept on changing as I changed, and, also, that often, getting what I want didn’t feel as satisfying and a fit as I thought it would be.
We think we want a certain life, but I don’t trust the want. Who wants that life anyways? My programming? My ego? My fears?
So, now, I trust what feels good. It takes noticing how I feel in certain situations, with certain people, doing certain things. And I follow that.
And, as you say, your life ends up looking different from what you thought you wanted. I now have a 9-5 and it’s actually a good fit with my life! I, who despised the 9-5! I now write online as my way to build a business, I who somehow thought my life wouldn’t be built around writing!
Your piece brought a process to what I have intuitively started doing. I am looking forward to using that to support what I started!
This is once again really really good, among your best pieces.
Jordan Peterson has made an observation, I think he has it from Jung, perhaps from the book Aion, but it is one of his best ideas, that the idea that is on top of the hierarchy, the skill to master the world itself and subdue chaos, is the metaskill, the eye and the word, the skill to see how the world around you truly moves, and to delve into the wisdom of others, your ancestors, your past and synthesize it with the demands of your present, or in your words: To find the key in the past, and adapt it so that it fits the context best.
This is basically a guide on how to attune yourself to the context, how to train your ear to hear it sing, how to dance with it.
And it made me finally understand that email you wrote me a while back, when I acquired about the context in Looking For Alice and contrasted it with Hurt People Hurt People.
I can't help feeling that mastering the world and subduing chaos doesn't feel very zennor very Jung? Working with flow feels more accurate and less aggressive/controlling.
I think that is his own spin on things, but I once found the book where he takes the best parts of his cosmology, the schizo stuff about marduk and horus and such from, and it was a Jungian work. I forgot by whom, and how it was called tho, and sadly he doesn't reference it directly.
This is my favorite essay of the ones you have written. Or perhaps it just hit me straight... it was particularly timely for me.
In working on a piece or two about analytic methodology (as a discipline) and methodologists in my own professional context... I can extract this from the working text that seemed to echo many of the things in your essay:
"a methodologist is someone who... operates with the base assumption that every problem has more than one solution. A good methodologist understands that while there probably isn’t a ‘correct’ answer, there likely is a ‘best’ answer. They also use a brief but structured process to explore multiple approaches before selecting one. This mindset shift is slight but crucial: searching for the best fit as opposed to the right answer."
Thank you so much for this. It's much much better to approach life with a grounded internal understanding, taking stock of what works (feels good) and what doesnt, along with the context of who you are and what your tendencies are. Then, from there you can build your life to accommodate those things.
As somebody who struggled a lot with disillusionment, this is something i've only just recently started to understand, and you helped me really crystalize what that looks like.
Michael Singer's life is an incredible example of this principle followed very diligently for fifty years. He ends up going from economics grad student to creating an Ashram in Florida to becoming the CEO of a multimillion dollar software company — his book "The Surrender Experiment" is bizarre, beautiful, fascinating. I have to say your post is more imminently practical though
I’ve been thinking about this essay a bunch, and this response is not to any one point in it, but rather to the way it has bounced around in my head.
Some months into my retirement (I was an exec in a cybersecurity training firm), I began to realize that I wanted to be more integrated with a group of people … but I certainly didn’t want to be part of a conventional company, with conventional meaning anything like my previous company, filled with a pressure to sell, to provide metrics to hungry investors, to supervise a bunch of employees, and sit in Zoom meetings. To all that, never again.
No, I wanted a different kind of context: I wanted to work with my hands, to make some kind of product, and I wanted it to be very close to my home, a small town in the Pacific Northwest (United States). So I just started looking for opportunities, for signs. One day, I saw a “help wanted” sign at the local bakery, and I signed on, first to help in pastry production (think thousands of croissants), but soon to be the “lead” in taking a van full of baked goods to a local farmer’s market.
This led to another opportunity: Andy, the lead baker, was friends with Keith, a fifth-generation farmer who had converted his family’s land out in the valley into an agri-tourism business. They have a massive u-pick blueberry farm in the summer and then a hugely popular “fall festival” that runs from mid-September through to November 1. Keith wanted to set up a small food service operation, selling donuts and fudge and lemonade and hot cider, but he needed someone to get it all set up, to hire kids to work there, and to supervise the operation. Well, I though, that sounded interesting.
It was, in truth, too much, but I loved their operation and will go back again this fall.
Slowly, by placing myself in position to find interesting, local, hands-on work, I’m getting integrated into my community in a different way. I’m not sure where this will lead, honestly, but I don’t need to define an end at this point. I’m just seeing where putting myself in this context will take me.
I love this! It reminds me of my favorite writer adrienne maree brown and her work on Emergent Strategy. She taught me the difference between making a plan to go from a known A to another known B in a known way, versus creating the space by doing what you can to allow for something unknown to emerge. One question I would love to read more about is the very concrete things you do or feel that help you navigate the difference between the two. Do you get signals from your body? Does 'forcing a vision' only feel bad or also good one way or another, and is that why it's so addictive sometimes? And more meta: what does a society look like that's allowed to unfold versus planned from a vision, and what does our current society look like more?
Interesting questions. I'll add it to my pile of things I meditate on when I work in the garden, and see if something insightful comes of it. First reaction is: unfolding feels like a spectrum between aliveness and confusion; visions feel like longing, a dream of safety, fear, desire, decision fatigue. I would say society at a macrolevel is unfolded, ie instutions etc, but I wonder if we couldn't create something more interesting if we enabled more unfolding on the individual level.
Try reading Deeper Mindfulness by Danny Penman, he talks about the 'feeling tone'. Practicing being more aware of how we feel about things allows access to our intuitive intelligence, which knows more about the context than we do.
Much of this is so directly consonant with the downstreams of meditation done right, what it looks like and yields in the end, that I'm very curious if you've done that or gone the other route, namely reading, dialoguing, introspecting in a skillful integration-differentiation loop towards a personal complexification that's landed you at the simplest understandings which render the deepest truths. Classic buddhist insights inhere all over this article, if you came to them by another means, bravo! That's nearly impossible
Completely unrelated to ^: this 8 min video of Jordan Hall explaining 3 separate notions we mean when using the word "truth" captures/articulates/is upstream of the essence of what you're getting at throughout. It's his 2nd notion, lived truth. Years ago this little video rewired my cognition and untangled much that had been endemically busted https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1SLQC7IoUg
I had a meditation period 6 years ago, so I have some superficial knowledge of that domain. But my feeling is that many of the ideas have seeped into philosophy etc over the last 150 years, so it is in the water if you go drinking in certain places.
Yes, your articles are usually long. This one is worth unpacking, if you have the interest in going further. Because so many I know are keen with design thinking and even teach it to the professionals coming up behind them, your article could contribute much to that continuous growth.
As a college student who has had so much existential and career anxiety about not knowing what I want to do or pursue, this was great non-ordinary advice that actually makes a lot of sense. it also reminds me of the lean startup model where instead of researching for long periods of time and then putting out a product, you constantly find opportunities to test your ideas on a smaller scale and iteratively pivot based on feedback.
I love how you described the patient process of unfolding the right life—instead of a top-down, highly architected plan for life that often falls apart when it meets reality. The same thing has happened for me in trying to find the friendships that are most activating and exciting, and the work that’s most fulfilling to me.
Generally speaking, being very attentive to the day-to-day and the tiny steps available in it (exploring one tiny new thing or experience, for example) has been much more useful for me. I’m learning a little bit about myself and the world, and I have the space to iterate. This insight you shared feels especially true: “The context is smarter than you. It holds more nuance and information than you can fit in your head. Collaborate with it.”
It takes trust. The steps look so small. You don't know where they go.
Hey Celine, I'm interested to hear more about how this played out in your life with respect to friendships if you're willing to share!
I'm happy to share (and so sorry for the delayed reply!)
I've slowly realized that I had 2 incorrect assumptions about how to make friends, and which friends to make. The first assumption is that my "type" of friend would have certain interests, preoccupations, personality traits, lifestyle. In my late teens/early 20s I had a relatively fixed idea of who I was (personality, interests, goals, &c) and made friends who seemed to match that. But many of my closest friends now are wildly, wildly different from that—and I've also changed so much over the last 5–10 years. I ultimately believe that friendships (and all relationships, really) are inherently transformative: they can introduce you to new dimensions of yourself, new ways of living, new things that you thought you wouldn't be into but end up being the center of your life. It's good to be flexible on who your friend "type" is, imo, and always see what's possible with each new acquaintanceship
The second assumption just came from wanting every new interesting stranger to immediately become a friend—and feeling disappointed when it didn't work out. I think it's helped so much to think of my social life as creating all these opportunities to meet people, but out of every 100 people I try to befriend (by chatting to at an event where I know no one, by getting coffee, &c), maybe only 20 people I'll meet again…and maybe only 5 become super close friends…these numbers are made-up, but the general idea is to not expect every possible friendship to actualize into a real, sustaining, intimate connection. Some people pass through your life very lightly and it's okay. It's helpful to meet a lot of people and see what's possible—each meeting is a low-probability chance of making a new friend, but the fewer friendships that result are easily worth all the effort
"friendships (and all relationships, really) are inherently transformative: they can introduce you to new dimensions of yourself, new ways of living, new things that you thought you wouldn't be into but end up being the center of your life" - so good!!!
Love it. Thanks for the thoughtful response Celine.
So much food for thought here, and I especially resonated with the idea that defining a relationship while looking for one is starting on the wrong end. Part of the excitement is the authorship itself, of evolving the form to fit the context, which changes depending on how our needs and desires evolve. Unfolding big leaps, as you said, instead of sticking stubbornly to a template.
This resonates with a realization I had at some point in my life: I can’t trust what I “want”. Therefore, I can’t trust my “vision” of the life I “want.” I noticed that my wants and vision kept on changing as I changed, and, also, that often, getting what I want didn’t feel as satisfying and a fit as I thought it would be.
We think we want a certain life, but I don’t trust the want. Who wants that life anyways? My programming? My ego? My fears?
So, now, I trust what feels good. It takes noticing how I feel in certain situations, with certain people, doing certain things. And I follow that.
And, as you say, your life ends up looking different from what you thought you wanted. I now have a 9-5 and it’s actually a good fit with my life! I, who despised the 9-5! I now write online as my way to build a business, I who somehow thought my life wouldn’t be built around writing!
Your piece brought a process to what I have intuitively started doing. I am looking forward to using that to support what I started!
Thank you, Henrik!
This is once again really really good, among your best pieces.
Jordan Peterson has made an observation, I think he has it from Jung, perhaps from the book Aion, but it is one of his best ideas, that the idea that is on top of the hierarchy, the skill to master the world itself and subdue chaos, is the metaskill, the eye and the word, the skill to see how the world around you truly moves, and to delve into the wisdom of others, your ancestors, your past and synthesize it with the demands of your present, or in your words: To find the key in the past, and adapt it so that it fits the context best.
This is basically a guide on how to attune yourself to the context, how to train your ear to hear it sing, how to dance with it.
And it made me finally understand that email you wrote me a while back, when I acquired about the context in Looking For Alice and contrasted it with Hurt People Hurt People.
Late is better than never I suppose...
I can't help feeling that mastering the world and subduing chaos doesn't feel very zennor very Jung? Working with flow feels more accurate and less aggressive/controlling.
Never mind, found it!
Jordan Peterson has the idea from: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origins_and_History_of_Consciousness, which is a Jungian work, but not by Jung directly.
Most of his good stuff comes from here.
I think that is his own spin on things, but I once found the book where he takes the best parts of his cosmology, the schizo stuff about marduk and horus and such from, and it was a Jungian work. I forgot by whom, and how it was called tho, and sadly he doesn't reference it directly.
This is my favorite essay of the ones you have written. Or perhaps it just hit me straight... it was particularly timely for me.
In working on a piece or two about analytic methodology (as a discipline) and methodologists in my own professional context... I can extract this from the working text that seemed to echo many of the things in your essay:
"a methodologist is someone who... operates with the base assumption that every problem has more than one solution. A good methodologist understands that while there probably isn’t a ‘correct’ answer, there likely is a ‘best’ answer. They also use a brief but structured process to explore multiple approaches before selecting one. This mindset shift is slight but crucial: searching for the best fit as opposed to the right answer."
I like that description! (and thank you - that means a lot coming from you)
Thank you so much for this. It's much much better to approach life with a grounded internal understanding, taking stock of what works (feels good) and what doesnt, along with the context of who you are and what your tendencies are. Then, from there you can build your life to accommodate those things.
As somebody who struggled a lot with disillusionment, this is something i've only just recently started to understand, and you helped me really crystalize what that looks like.
Great article
I love the way this post is written, how it's gentle but free of self-doubt at the same time.
Fantastic dissection of a complex subject: thank you!
I love this, you articulated something I felt so deeply yet couldn't articulate myself
Michael Singer's life is an incredible example of this principle followed very diligently for fifty years. He ends up going from economics grad student to creating an Ashram in Florida to becoming the CEO of a multimillion dollar software company — his book "The Surrender Experiment" is bizarre, beautiful, fascinating. I have to say your post is more imminently practical though
So much good stuff in here about designing a life and on making choices. I'll be reading it a few times!
I’ve been thinking about this essay a bunch, and this response is not to any one point in it, but rather to the way it has bounced around in my head.
Some months into my retirement (I was an exec in a cybersecurity training firm), I began to realize that I wanted to be more integrated with a group of people … but I certainly didn’t want to be part of a conventional company, with conventional meaning anything like my previous company, filled with a pressure to sell, to provide metrics to hungry investors, to supervise a bunch of employees, and sit in Zoom meetings. To all that, never again.
No, I wanted a different kind of context: I wanted to work with my hands, to make some kind of product, and I wanted it to be very close to my home, a small town in the Pacific Northwest (United States). So I just started looking for opportunities, for signs. One day, I saw a “help wanted” sign at the local bakery, and I signed on, first to help in pastry production (think thousands of croissants), but soon to be the “lead” in taking a van full of baked goods to a local farmer’s market.
This led to another opportunity: Andy, the lead baker, was friends with Keith, a fifth-generation farmer who had converted his family’s land out in the valley into an agri-tourism business. They have a massive u-pick blueberry farm in the summer and then a hugely popular “fall festival” that runs from mid-September through to November 1. Keith wanted to set up a small food service operation, selling donuts and fudge and lemonade and hot cider, but he needed someone to get it all set up, to hire kids to work there, and to supervise the operation. Well, I though, that sounded interesting.
It was, in truth, too much, but I loved their operation and will go back again this fall.
Slowly, by placing myself in position to find interesting, local, hands-on work, I’m getting integrated into my community in a different way. I’m not sure where this will lead, honestly, but I don’t need to define an end at this point. I’m just seeing where putting myself in this context will take me.
I love this! It reminds me of my favorite writer adrienne maree brown and her work on Emergent Strategy. She taught me the difference between making a plan to go from a known A to another known B in a known way, versus creating the space by doing what you can to allow for something unknown to emerge. One question I would love to read more about is the very concrete things you do or feel that help you navigate the difference between the two. Do you get signals from your body? Does 'forcing a vision' only feel bad or also good one way or another, and is that why it's so addictive sometimes? And more meta: what does a society look like that's allowed to unfold versus planned from a vision, and what does our current society look like more?
Interesting questions. I'll add it to my pile of things I meditate on when I work in the garden, and see if something insightful comes of it. First reaction is: unfolding feels like a spectrum between aliveness and confusion; visions feel like longing, a dream of safety, fear, desire, decision fatigue. I would say society at a macrolevel is unfolded, ie instutions etc, but I wonder if we couldn't create something more interesting if we enabled more unfolding on the individual level.
Try reading Deeper Mindfulness by Danny Penman, he talks about the 'feeling tone'. Practicing being more aware of how we feel about things allows access to our intuitive intelligence, which knows more about the context than we do.
Hi Lena, I enjoyed reading your comment and would also love for the author of this post to write more to the meta question you posed.
Also, a friend of mine introduced me to adrienne maree brown's book "Holding Change." Have you had the chance to read it?
Yes I also loved Holding Change! Also excited for her new book ‘Loving Corrections’
Much of this is so directly consonant with the downstreams of meditation done right, what it looks like and yields in the end, that I'm very curious if you've done that or gone the other route, namely reading, dialoguing, introspecting in a skillful integration-differentiation loop towards a personal complexification that's landed you at the simplest understandings which render the deepest truths. Classic buddhist insights inhere all over this article, if you came to them by another means, bravo! That's nearly impossible
Completely unrelated to ^: this 8 min video of Jordan Hall explaining 3 separate notions we mean when using the word "truth" captures/articulates/is upstream of the essence of what you're getting at throughout. It's his 2nd notion, lived truth. Years ago this little video rewired my cognition and untangled much that had been endemically busted https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1SLQC7IoUg
I had a meditation period 6 years ago, so I have some superficial knowledge of that domain. But my feeling is that many of the ideas have seeped into philosophy etc over the last 150 years, so it is in the water if you go drinking in certain places.
Yes, your articles are usually long. This one is worth unpacking, if you have the interest in going further. Because so many I know are keen with design thinking and even teach it to the professionals coming up behind them, your article could contribute much to that continuous growth.
As a college student who has had so much existential and career anxiety about not knowing what I want to do or pursue, this was great non-ordinary advice that actually makes a lot of sense. it also reminds me of the lean startup model where instead of researching for long periods of time and then putting out a product, you constantly find opportunities to test your ideas on a smaller scale and iteratively pivot based on feedback.