natural selection -

Learning About Where We Goofed Up

By kpluseiswise | April 11, 2024April 10, 2024 by kpluseiswise

What went right? Do you ever wonder how we got here? Do you ever think about what has changed over hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution? The past few decades have seen exponential growth in technology. Smartphones. Passenger trips to space. Electric vehicles. Lots of crazy new tech. In most of our lifetimes, technological advances have dominated the changes we experience. Science changed the world. Medical advances like germ theory and surgical techniques have…

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What Is the Matter?

By kpluseiswise | March 21, 2024March 19, 2024 by kpluseiswise

Ranking importance is critical to mental health What IS the matter? Matter is an interesting word. It’s a noun and a verb. The noun means something of substance and can be physical or metaphysical. The verb means for something to be important. There’s matter, and there is the matter. I like words like that, but the complication of communication and understanding. The idea of something mattering, as a verb, has been on my mind lately. The…

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Does Neurodivergence Empower Us to Resist Conformity?

By kpluseiswise | February 22, 2024February 20, 2024 by kpluseiswise

This week I’ll skip right to the punchline. The ability to see beyond the mainstream and to understand the continuum of whatever feature it is in the world is a special gift. This is enhanced awareness. I wonder if being neurodiverse or atypical or having a sensitive or different nervous system, sort of gives us this ability. In an evolutionary context, I can see how this ability would have been selected for. Hypervigilance enabled some of…

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Mindfulness Practice Is the Key to Human Success

By kpluseiswise | February 15, 2024February 6, 2024 by kpluseiswise

Are you familiar with Jon Kabat-Zinn? In short, he’s one of the people who has made meditation mainstream. While I generally don’t like words like ‘mainstream’ and ‘conformity’, anything that makes helpful tools more accessible to the masses is good in my book. Known as one of the creators of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), Kabat-Zinn has written a bunch of books and helped teach meditation to all sorts of regular people. This article is inspired…

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Neurodivergence Is an Awesome Gift of Evolutionary Brilliance

By kpluseiswise | February 1, 2024January 30, 2024 by kpluseiswise

Have you ever felt like you didn’t belong anywhere? Do you have a ‘sacred space’ where you do feel like you have membership? For many of us, we have our family. Whether or not we truly feel comfortable in that space, there is a membership based on genetics or time spent together. It is a difficult thing to simultaneously exist as separate and together. We are individuals. Our skin is a boundary separating us from…

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What This Neurodivergent Dude Gained From Therapy

By kpluseiswise | January 11, 2024January 10, 2024 by kpluseiswise

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…

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Autism is Fitness in Darwin’s Language

By kpluseiswise | December 21, 2023December 27, 2023 by kpluseiswise

Are you a religious person? An atheist? Agnostic? I consider myself to be agnostic. Mostly because I Don’t Know. If I had to choose any belief system to attach to, I would be a Darwinist. Natural Selection is the best explanation of the meaning of life I am aware of. When I think about ‘why we are here’, I can’t help but recognize how life persists through time and changes with each generation. In short, I…

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An Autism Self-Diagnosis May Be Helpful

By kpluseiswise | December 14, 2023December 20, 2023 by kpluseiswise

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…

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The Mind is a Splendid Thing

By kpluseiswise | November 23, 2023December 20, 2023 by kpluseiswise

Have you ever thought about how complex our brains are? Or about how little we seem to really know about the way we think? Like, how can we simultaneously love our family but also they annoy us to no end? I think this dissonance, this capacity to hold to two seemingly oppositional thoughts at the same time is just something we are able to do. What’s weird it that we try to not do this. When we have two…

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Doesn’t Life Want to Live?

By kpluseiswise | November 9, 2023December 20, 2023 by kpluseiswise

Do you ever think about what life was like for early humans once we had our basic needs met? You know, once we figured out how to procure victuals and maintain a shelter. What was life like? Experts including historians, anthropologists, and scientists seem to disagree. Some say we were ignorant savages (I’m looking at you, director of Pocahontas) whereas others claim we actually didn’t work that much but spent a lot of time playing. I…