Naming the Real

Immaturity is marked by either-or, all-or-nothing, zero sum thinking…and our culture it steeped in it, especially in the form of false binaries. In this episode, we explore how false binaries help keep our culture stuck in polarization and anxiety and how, through recognizing them, we can transcend them. We can live in the maturity of both-and thinking, which leads to humility, empathy, and wisdom...

In our over-stimulated world, experiencing anxiety in the form of racing thoughts and a spun-out mind is a pervasive reality. We humans already have a negativity bias: as the metaphor goes, our brains are like Velcro for negative thoughts and Teflon for positive thoughts. But we can transcend our fixation on negativity. In this episode, we explore how to counter the anxiety of our culture (and our...

Since the 1970s, America's sense of community, measured in "social capital," has steadily declined, resulting in what sociologists sometimes call "the atomized self." We are more disconnected from one other now than we were in the past, which directly impacts how we go about getting our need for recognition and dignity met. And with two very different understandings of what dignity is (recognition...

Defining happiness—let alone what leads to it—is difficult, and yet the quest for happiness is at the heart of our modern cultural ethos. In this episode, we explore Abraham Maslow's "hierarchy of needs" and how the notion of "self-actualization" reigns in our culture, when "transcendence" is what really makes us happy. And we explore the difficulties in pursuing transcendence in a culture in whic...

Regret is looking back and wishing something had been different—a different choice made or a different path taken. And it is often linked to shame. In this episode we explore how to navigate regret in a way that ends strengthens us rather than burying us. And we explore principles and practices we can engage to deal not just with regret but pain in all of its manifestations. This, too, is part of...

In this episode, we explore how notions of personal freedom have changed over the last 400 years, post-Enlightenment, creating a new notion of the self and a rampant individualism across Western culture. This concept is key to understanding our cultural crisis of anxiety and polarization because our new notion of freedom and our new individualism fuels much of our contemporary anxiety and undermin...

Progressives and conservatives mis-understand each other's morality, that much is clear. But what exactly do they misunderstand? In this episode, we explore Jonathan Haidt and Craig Joseph's research into the 5 universal moral foundations (harm/care, fairness/reciprocity, authority/respect, in-group loyalty, and purity/sanctity) and the differences between the moral frameworks of progressives and...

How do we understand the rise in anxiety, polarization, and division in the US? More to the point, how do we name it so that we can transcend it and live free of its dominance? In this episode, which launches a new series, I explore two of the dominant archetypal impulses in human nature: conservatism (the desire to keep the good that is) and progressivism (the desire to pursue the great that coul...

There's an ancient paradigm for how we build our character: our desire for change can be funneled into practices . Practices, consistently engaged, become our habits , our instinctual, reflexive ways of behaving in the world. Our habits, quite simply, become our character , who we become, for ourselves and for others. It sounds simple, but it takes real work. Sometimes people get so caught up in "...

Every issue we face in life is, to some degree, a factor of how we think. Even how we frame issues, whether we see it as a problem or an opportunity, for example, is a function of how we think. Sometimes our problems really exist solely-or at least, primarily-in our own minds. We our are own jailers, and...we can be our own liberators. Bottom line, if you change the way you think, you can change y...