What is your experience with therapy? Have you tried it? Wanted to try it? Hesitant to try it? Overwhelmed? Did you have a bad experience? Recently I have noticed some neurodivergent people have had negative experiences with therapy. Here I want to clarify my own story about how both therapy and neurodivergence are helping me heal and become the person I want to be. Briefly, I have been in therapy, counseling, or coaching (I use…
Have you ever felt like the only person who didn’t receive a ‘How to Live Life’ handbook? Did you think everyone else understood what was going on except you? I’ve felt like that my whole life. And it isn’t that I don’t like myself. I love myself. Everything breaks down when I move from my ‘inner world’ to the ‘outer world’. I struggle to understand human interactions. I always feel like I’m different. And don’t…
Do you ever feel like what you want to do goes against what society ‘wants’ you to do? Like, maybe you want to be a painter, but your parents and your school tell you that you’ll never make any money. Maybe you want to take a gap year after high school but your parents fear you’ll never go to college and, thus, never ‘amount to anything’. Maybe you are attracted to people of your same…
Knowledge + Experience = Wisdom 138 One of the most influential papers from my former career described the ‘River Continuum Concept’. Though quite basic, this paper revolutionized how we thought about streams and rivers. Specifically how freshwater systems changed from their springs where they began to the oceans into which they drained. This paper introduced me to systems thinking and changed how I think about the world and nearly everything in it. Generally, systems are comprised…
This is really the third in a series about the evolutionary significance of sex. I recorded this Episode first, then forgot about it and recorded the previous two episodes (117 and 118). Funny that this was all on my mind to the point where I forgot talking about it. But that’s how important this is. I can’t stress it enough and so give it three Episodes. The evolution of sexual selection as the way to…
What’s the point? Of any of it? For me, it is the unrest that comes from acknowledging what is wrong in the world. Poverty. War. Violent crime. Social justice issues. Inequality. Racism. Choose your weapon. It isn’t hard to see problems in the world. My point is not to point them out, but to try and posit solutions. Or pathways to solutions. Because I’m sick and tired of armchair, short-term, quick-fix ‘solutions’ sold by various…
I really dislike Competition. And it is a touchy subject. In an article I published on Medium, I received several hateful comments defending the importance of competition in business and sports. In KEW Episode 95 I discuss Rugged Individualism vs. Unified Connection to make the point that competition focuses on isolation rather than community. I talk about this topic a lot. And it is important for me to revisit this in the spirit of the…
It’s a good question. Why? Maybe we should always be asking why. When we don’t know why we’re doing something, what’s the point? Whether it’s for money. Or for power. Or to get something. Or maybe it’s a more altruistic reason. The ‘why’ we do things is critical and isn’t it crazy to think we might not know it? It seems to me the tools we have traditionally used to answer these questions, like Religion,…
Who Am I? Why Are We Here? What is My Purpose? Are We Living ‘Right’? Questions like this – the ‘big questions’ have been around since antiquity. It’s fun to think about when our brains reached a point in evolution where we started having luxury time. Because it’s a luxury to think. To ask these kinds of questions means we’ve already met our basic needs. At some point, we could sit down and take a…
The KEW Acid Tests ask how Nature can inform the big questions humans ask. “Why are we here?”, “Who am I?”, and “What is our purpose” have puzzled humans for years – perhaps millennia. In the past 4,000 years or so, we have employed philosophy, religion, and science as mechanisms to ask and answer these big questions. While we certainly have learned a lot, the questions are too big to have definitive answers. I don’t…