Science - Revolutionizing human evolution

Is This a Testable Personal Growth Hypothesis?

Does science play a role in your life?

Do you value hard data and evidence? Do you think humans are good at proving things? Or maybe you defer to religion or culture to decide what is real?

I talk a lot about how science is over or undervalued. Some folks think science proves reality. Others think scientists are full of crap.

Regardless of how you feel about science, the scientific method is regarded as one of the best tools we have to help us answer questions. One of my favorite questions is,

“Is there a better way to live?”

This question is related to other questions like,

“Why are we here?” and,

“Why do humans suffer?”

I’m sure you have your own version of these questions, but few of us ever pursue this in a scientific way. This week’s podcast/video is my attempt at formalizing this metaphysical question in a physical way.

My work focuses on understanding how humans can suffer less.

Most of my interest lies somewhere in this personal and communal growth space, and much of my research falls outside the realm of hard science as we know it. But what if we took a more organized approach? What are we really trying to understand?

Briefly, science is a way to formalize how we ask questions and how we interpret the answers. We conduct experiments that convert the real world into numerical data, analyze the data using low-bias mathematical techniques, then convert the numerical results back into real-world terms. We ask a question, form a hypothesis, conduct experiments, and interpret results.

So, is there a better way to live?

Let’s convert that to a hypothesis:

Ha: If we nurture our individual and collective self-awareness, then this will trickle up to solve the world’s problems because self-awareness, or lack thereof, is the cause of human suffering.

Ho: If we nurture our individual and collective self-awareness, there will be no effect on human suffering because the two are unrelated.

Basically, do the ‘data’ we observe in the real world support or refute the idea that there might be a better way to live?

Of course, all science starts with a question that stems from our personal interest, solving a problem, or trying to understand something. For me, it is a key personal interest of mine to try and understand the human condition. It’s fun to poke around, think, read, and contemplate my naval, but it is mostly unofficial. This is just a fun way of formalizing, in scientific terms, what I am trying to do.

My work suggests that self-awareness as an upstream cause of human suffering.

Mostly, when we experience suffering we look nearby for causes and solutions. If we bleed we get a band-aid. But often the ultimate causes of our discomfort are farther away and more upstream.

If we are constantly getting cuts that require band-aids, maybe we should stop playing with knives, for example.

If we are constantly disillusioned with money, power, and status maybe we need to redefine our core values.

If we are always anxious in social situations, maybe we need to understand the trauma we experienced in childhood.

Personally, as I have pieced together my anxiety, I see that the causes are much more upstream than I ever imagined. Real solutions are often much farther away from the problem than we think. Scientific investigation is a tool designed to help clarify these relationships.

Moving forward, I can look for evidence that supports or refutes my hypothesis.

Eventually, I will have ‘enough’ evidence to either abandon the idea (fail to reject my null hypothesis) or continue to pursue this line of reasoning.

The beauty of science is not that it proves anything. Rather, science helps us understand our realities by guiding us toward more likely causes. These relationships, in turn, help us understand ourselves and each other.

The more we understand the links between self-awareness, attention, mindfulness, and connectedness the more likely we are to reduce personal and collective suffering.

Our ancestors paved the way for our amazing individual lives. The least we can do is make the most of it. Do wars, anxiety, and suicide sound like making the most of it to you?

There is a better way. Together, we are learning what it is.

Streaming podcast audio:

https://www.buzzsprout.com/530563/15032705

YouTube video:

https://youtu.be/-NSrHPYIVWY

For more about what science really is see here, and here, and here.

The Cumulative Stress Hypothesis

Are you aware of the stress in your life?

Can you FEEL it when stressors are building up and you think you may pop? Do you ever feel like you’re right on the verge of a meltdown?

I think most of us are familiar with these scenarios. We can only take so much stress.

When I was an ecologist, I had a vision for my life’s work. I planned on studying how aquatic ecosystems resist or integrate stressors before they break down. Some streams were beautiful. Full of a diversity of life, clean water, and complex habitat. Other systems were homogenous. Devoid of most life. Ugly and plain.

The difference, I hypothesized, was stress.

I wanted to test the hypothesis that ecosystems integrated stressors, meaning they didn’t change, up to a point beyond which everything changed. In other words, a natural system would resist change until it experienced too much stress. After that point, or threshold, the ecosystem would change entirely and likely never return to the previous condition.

I call this the Cumulate Stress Hypothesis and, though I retired from being an ecologist, I now apply the same model to human systems. Individuals and communities.

So what is the Cumulative Stress Hypothesis?

First, I’ll define the individual terms:

Cumulative — something that accumulates, builds, increases, or becomes larger.

Stress — an undesired condition that can cause harm or interrupt equilibrium or homeostasis.

Hypothesis — a testable question you either support or fail to support

The Cumulative Stress Hypothesis suggests that a human system, individual or collective, will resist a shift from homeostasis by integrating stress. However, beyond some threshold of accumulated stress drastic and irreversible changes to the system will occur that are deleterious.

In an aquatic ecosystem, when human activity in a watershed becomes too intense, the streams draining that watershed will shift in characteristics from pristine, diverse, and heterogeneous to damaged, plain, and homogenous.

In an individual human system, our health will shift from good to bad, well to sick, or healthy to unhealthy when a threshold of stress is passed.

In a community, peace becomes war, cooperation becomes competition, and life becomes death.

We all experience stress in various forms.

These can be work deadlines, familial responsibilities, paying bills, or coming down with COVID. Communities experience stress, too, when jobs become scarce, rent gets too high, or crime gets out of control.

Fortunately, human systems, communities, and ecosystems can resist or absorb stress. Small and regular stressors can be successfully integrated into a system without causing any change or harm.

Everyone gets now and then. We deal with the runny nose, watery eyes, and drowsiness but go on with our regular lives. We all experience hardships and losses. Sometimes we lose our jobs and have to scramble to make ends meet. The lucky ones recover from these discomforts and not much changes. We don’t have to move, sell our houses, leave our families, or remarry.

To effectively integrate small stressors without inducing dramatic shifts to our livelihoods we need to be healthy. Essentially, being healthy is maintaining a state of minimal stress BELOW some threshold. Small stressors like job changes, mild sickness, or even moving to a new city don’t cause much harm because our healthy state facilitates the absorption of these changes.

The problems arise when a small stressor pushes us over the threshold.

Many of us, and most communities, are operating just below the threshold. This is too close for comfort. When the accumulation of background stressors is very close to the threshold we run the risk of drastic change. The closer we get the more risky a blowup gets.

Blowups or shifts beyond the thresholds for individuals include health changes like cancer, failed relationships, lost jobs, and the general inability to manage our day-to-day lives: suicidal ideation, hopelessness, and even death.

When human community thresholds are passed we see things like inequality, social injustice, resource scarcity, and war. In short, I think many individuals and most communities are experiencing too much stress.

I argue that the maintenance of individual and communal human health requires us to stay well below our Cumulative Stress Threshold.

Doing so requires an effort or practice.

For individuals, this is a combination of a healthy diet, exercise, mental health management including meditation and mindfulness, maintenance of relationships, and general awareness of all of these things.

For communities, this means having some form of healthy government, affordable amenities, good infrastructure, and balanced economies.

Maintenance of sub-threshold homeostasis requires a few elements. We must be aware of our stressors, how they affect us, and how close to our threshold we might be. To do this, we need to pay attention to what is happening and how it affects us. The same goes for communities. To manage our human systems below the threshold requires effort.

A healthy practice helps us minimize the accumulation of stress.

Being healthy means being able to process, integrate, and move beyond the daily stressors that occur. It can even help us reduce the effects of major stressors. But our practice also requires monitoring.

Monitoring stress in our lives requires awareness and attention. We need to constantly inventory the stress coming in and our proximity to the threshold. In essence, we need a stress budget. Knowing how stressed we are and what new stressors threaten our health is critical.

Fortunately, having a practice allows us to maintain the required awareness. In my experience, maintaining our physical, emotional, and mental health goes a long way to nurturing the awareness necessary to budget our stress and maintain it below the critical threshold.

In essence, this is how we maintain health, happiness, and contentment. It is also how we minimize suffering. I can imagine a world where many more humans can do this. Once we change ourselves, we can change our systems. Changing our systems is how we change the world.

This article is based on an episode from The Neurodivergent Professor podcast.

Audio stream:

https://www.buzzsprout.com/530563/14631766

YouTube video:

https://youtu.be/O4DT8FfKvb4

Other science episodes:

Facts

Science Is Not the Truth

I May Be Wrong, and That’s OK!

Have you ever felt like scientists were assholes? Or at least super arrogant?

I often hear scientists sound this way. And when I was in academia it seemed they surrounded me. Being an academic seemed synonymous with being so arrogant that you turned people off.

I think many of us have experienced this and it does academia and science a disservice.

It’s like a medical doctor with no bedside manner. If you can’t communicate with ‘normal people’, whatever level of intelligence or value you offer society can be ineffective.

In other words, if you can’t talk to people in a way that doesn’t turn them off they won’t hear what you have to say.

Think about that.

If we can’t communicate well we run the risk of losing our meaning. Our value to society can be severely diminished.

That’s why I have podcasted here and here and even here about the importance of being human — being NON-SCIENTIFIC. Being humble.

When I say Science is Not the Truth, I mean it. When you hear scientists claiming they (and usually only they) know the truth or have some special access to reality, you should believe them less.

When I say “I Don’t Know” are the most powerful words in the English language, I mean that, too. If you hear someone sound so confident that they stop questioning their brilliance, you should believe them much less. If at all.

I talk about the truth and facts and science and arrogance a lot. Hell, my very first Episode was about this.

I talk about this so much because it matters. It is important for us to act as informed consumers. Of goods and services but also of information. It is up to us as a society to reach a consensus via a science-informed discourse.

Unfortunately, what happens nowadays is that we treat scientists as either Gods or pariahs. Neither moniker is fair or accurate. This is a dangerous practice.

It’s obvious to me that not everything can be effectively studied using science. Science requires measurements and numbers.

At the most basic level, all science does is convert reality to numbers and then use math to answer questions.

If you accept that explanation (and I get it if you don’t, because, well, this article and every link in it) then you can entertain the idea that the ‘goodness’ of science is dependent on the ability of the measures to be measured effectively and accurately.

In other words, for things that can’t be effectively measured AND replicated (i.e., measured many times or have many different units to measure) then science just won’t work.

And I am VERY guilty of this because as a scientist I studied streams. Each stream is unique. Every part of every stream is unique. As Hericlitus is supposed to have said,

No man ever steps into the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he is not the same man

His lack of gender appreciation notwithstanding, this is essentially accurate.

Despite my inability to replicate streams I still used math to assess my data. In reality, this makes my science weak, at best.

Psychological science suffers from a similar shortcoming. It’s hard to measure human intelligence, the brain, or our emotions. But we use scientific methods anyway.

There are many who would thus consider ecology and psychology to be ‘soft’ sciences or pseudoscience. And I don’t really care what we call it. To me, the conclusions from studies like mine and others are still valuable.

Are they the refutable truth?

Absolutely not. But neither is anything else, either.

I’m not here to tell you what the alternative is or to profess that I have some alternative method of understanding reality. All I am saying is that there are MANY ways to understand reality. Every single one of these is going to be wrong.

All models are wrong, but some are useful.

The real issue here, if I may be so bold, is fear.

We are so afraid of not knowing things that we would rather believe in a false God than no God at all. The solution, then, is to address this fear.

Why are we afraid of the unknown? Why do we try so hard to find ‘proof’? Why do we want to reach some point where there is nothing else to know?

I moved a little closer to this question this week. I will continue to explore our relationship to the unknown and try to figure out why we would rather lie to ourselves than be uncomfortable about things we don’t (and can’t) know.

Please subscribe, like, or tell a friend about Knowledge + Experience = Wisdom

Streaming audio:

https://www.buzzsprout.com/530563/13961083

YouTube:

https://youtu.be/OlMsfL_opQA

100% Asshole Free

If you’re familiar with me or craft beer (or maybe both?) you may be familiar with the phrase, “The brewing industry is 99% asshole free”. This quote became famous when Sam Calagione, founder of Dogfish Head Craft Brewery published his book “Brewing Up a Business”. This book was an inspiration to my brewery and a big part of the craft beer explosion.

The quote suggests that the beer business is more cooperative than competitive. It turns out this is not true. Like any business, breweries compete with each other. And as the number of breweries increased, so did the number of assholes. In the end, Sam’s quote is not true, and there are as many assholes in the craft brewing business as there are anywhere.

Surely you have assholes in your life. Maybe a boss or coworker. Maybe a family member. Maybe your president. What’s crazy is that these jerks seemed to be more loved than hated a lot of times. How did they get to be the boss in the first place?

In fact, in our white patriarchal plutocratic world being an asshole seems like a requirement. Many people in power are admired for their assholery.

This makes me wonder how much we are all complicit in these assholes’ success because we enable it.

Now, I get it. Many people are not in the position to refuse an asshole. When they are in positions of power over us, there is little we can do that doesn’t harm ourselves. We lose jobs, relationships, and money if we rebel against their poor behavior.

But enablers and complicit behavior don’t help drive assholes extinct.

Have you ever thought about a time when there were no assholes? I often think (perhaps naively) that we didn’t have a lot of assholes until we had social hierarchies. Depending on when that began (and we’ll never know), there may have been a time when social groups had mechanisms to PREVENT assholes from gaining power rather than ENABLING them.

In fact, I will suggest here that shame was one of these mechanisms. Shame is a terrible thing, and I have shared about this here and here. But shame evolved for some reason. I think groups of humans, and maybe other primates, used shame to call out and DISABLE poor behavior. So when our ancestors acted like assholes, they got kicked out of the tribe. The asshole genes were selected against, in an evolutionary sense.

As our societies modernized and became more numerous the asshole reduction behaviors have been forgotten. Most assholes needed to get punched in the mouth or otherwise publicly shamed but were not. I think some elements of modernity, including social hierarchies, power, land ownership, and money, created artificial evolutionary selection pressures FOR assholery.

In this episode I talk more about why it is critical we reverse this trend and rid ourselves of the assholes in our lives.

Please tell your friends about Knowledge + Experience = Wisdom, my blog, podcast, or videos. It’s not easy to find this kind of content. We appreciate it.

Podcast audio stream:

https://www.buzzsprout.com/530563/13789818

YouTube video:

https://youtu.be/HzTMxb1tzyg

Science is Not the Truth

I’ll just come out and say it.

I’m sick of academic arrogance. Academic. Scientific. Intelligence mafia.

I don’t know why authority seems to be the foodstuffs of ego. But it sure seems like it is.

I am so tired of being talked down to — as a society member — by those who are supposedly smarter than me.

And it isn’t just the false dualism of ‘I’m smart and you’re not’. Or even that other people might know more about things than I do.

I TOTALLY GET THAT.

No, it’s an attitude. A TONE, if you will. A tone of voice.

And I certainly could be reading into this. I’ll admit this could be, at least in part, about my personal past trauma. I used to be an academic, after all.

I quit being a ‘practicing scientist’ for a lot of reasons. Not the least of which is that I don’t want to be around arrogant people. And I do believe the scientific community selects for arrogance.

It’s kind of how politics seems to select for assholes.

Surgery seems to select for Gods.

All that to say, I don’t like arrogant bullies who are so attached to their own beliefs that they place themselves higher than others and close their minds to alternatives.

And I say that knowing full well I may be doing that exact thing right now. I sincerely hope I am not.

This is critical because arrogance can bully people into believing. And that ain’t how science is supposed to work.

Science is not the truth. Science generates evidence.

Evidence creates belief.

Beliefs change.

Truth, like God, is absolute.

Absolutes are outside human understanding.

Truth, proof, God, perfection . . . . why bother with such things?

I believe we cannot know them, yet we believe we can. Why not admit we cannot? Why accept that we are limited?

We can get close! Our estimates and models can be very useful in understanding how things work.

But we must — with as much universality as possible — leave the door open for new knowledge. For change.

Because that is the only thing we can really know that approaches the truth.

Things change.

All that and more in this episode. Podcast and video formats below:

https://www.buzzsprout.com/530563/13572992

https://youtu.be/3D6hyDMNBDc

A Comprehensive Approach to Understanding Our Biosphere

Would our ancestors be proud of us?

When I think of the problems humans face today: suffering, anxiety, inequality, social justice issues, war, pollution . . . I try to put things in an evolutionary context.

On the one hand, we have come so far. We have created many wonderful ‘science’, ‘technology’, and ‘engineering’ elements that benefit individuals and society. Clean water. Sanitation. Medicine.

On the other hand, it hasn’t all been rainbows and unicorns. We can’t seem to shake our violent and gluttonous nature. We kill each other and other organisms. We soil the water that gives us life.

Individuals will fall along some continuum from ‘all humans suck and we should just die’ to ‘we are so amazing because we can hoard billions of dollars’. Most of us are in the Gaussian middle.

Many of us can agree that there is some bad shit going on that we could change. More would probably agree that our ancestors would NOT be proud of how we treat our home. Probably because we romanticize how much more humans might have been connected to nature in previous generations.

Technophiles and scientists would argue against this view that humans are more cooperative and argue that competition is more our nature.

I find it hard to not see the problems we have created (pollution, climate change, war, famine, inequality, depression) as not being — at least in part — caused by our incessant need for growth. More money. More power. More tech.

I started my brief professional career by asking big questions. I studied how atoms travel around the entire earth in biogeochemical cycles. I asked broad-scale questions that required a LOT of data. Mostly because so many variables are interacting at these scales. As opposed to bench-top laboratory science where researchers can control for most variables and isolate one or two.

Ecology is an extremely broad-scale and multivariate science. So much so that traditional scientific methods, designed for the bench top, are often criticized for being inappropriate and inefficient. In short, the more variables you add, the more wrong you can be.

The problem is, that the world is exceptionally multivariate. The interconnected nature of, well, everything means we have to consider as many variables as possible to truly understand things.

Because of my ecological training, I used to think I was a big-picture person. Since I have freed myself from calling myself a scientist (by retiring), I realize how wrong I have been.

Yes, ecology and some other hard sciences are extremely ‘big picture’ and are considered the most complex of any discipline. But we are still far from holistic.

I realize now that to truly understand these broad scale issues of human importance we have to think even BIGGER.

The episode is a beginning. This is the start of broadening Ecology to include elements of psychology, anthropology, philosophy, and sociology to forge a more complete picture of interactions. These interactions are critical to understanding the problems plaguing humanity today.

We CANNOT move forward until we broaden our scope. Work together. Cooperate.

And before we can do that, we have to work on ourselves.

I am building a path to demonstrate HOW to learn to communicate with each other to solve the biggest problems. I introduce five parts to this process:

Measures of individual and group human fitness that will be or are being selected for evolutionarily
Personal inventory of values, ethics, morals, feelings, and needs. This is practice, includes things like meditation, exercise, healthy eating, and self-awareness
Social structure including government, societies, and civilization
Resource allocation and equitability
Adaptive management and dynamic assessment

In future episodes I will develop these and describe steps toward solutions.

https://www.buzzsprout.com/530563/13532835

https://youtu.be/dJ2gYTtGJw8

Growing Smaller is a Worthy Goal Part 2

Here is Part 1 of this two-part series. In it, I focus mostly on the Growth part of the equation

In Part 2, I want to focus on the Smaller portion.

As I said, I used to be an entrepreneur. In my small town, I struggled to generate enough traffic to amount to any significant income. Believing I couldn’t manipulate revenue, I instead focused very carefully on the expense side of the balance sheet.

Later I would see the Netflix shows by the ‘Minimalists’ who described using things and loving people. They were effectively doing the same thing: putting energy into regulating the ‘expenses’, whether actual dollars or energy.

In this Episode, I summarize many of the different expenses we have. I talk about how easy it is to reduce a lot of these. I think many of us suffer from the whole, ‘well, I work hard so I DESERVE this’ kind of thing. According to this excuse, we make ourselves believe that spending more money is going to make us happier.

I know of very few people that illustrate this relationship. Mostly, everyone I KNOW is at least a little less happy than they think they could be.

I believe there is some magic income required to create the luxury of this line of thinking. If you can’t make ends meet, you aren’t going to have the energy to ponder where you might be able to budget more effectively. Many have said this income, for a small family living in the USA, is around $75k annually. It’s probably somewhere between $50k and $100k for most people.

However, there may be a lot of assumptions in this estimate that aren’t true. How would you ever know until you do your personal budget and take a good long look at your needs vs. wants?

Most of us just assume if we have something, we need it. I don’t think this is true nearly as often as we think.

I call this the personal inventory. It is CRITICAL, if we want to live better, to inventory EVERYTHING in our life — at least everything you spend money on in the case of growing smaller. And I’ll bet you $100 you can cut some spending. Probably a lot more than you think.

And for those living below the $50k threshold, I have a lot of ideas. I’m working on it.

https://www.buzzsprout.com/530563/13238068

https://youtu.be/EFIn0Qdw7pY

What Freedom Means to Me

The fourth of July makes me ashamed.

I’m ashamed of myself because I can’t seem to match the patriotism that surrounds me. In the USA, people get almost spiritual about their fireworks, hot dogs, and freedom worship. Behind all of this, for me, is a whole lot of weirdness.

The whole Independence thing is fine. We fled a plutocratic government to have the ‘freedom’ to worship any god we wanted only to find ourselves in a similarly autocratic system with exceptionally narrow-minded tolerance of ‘others’. What the actual f%^k is up with that?

I’m also ashamed of my country. How can we celebrate such a thing? Beyond the obvious hypocrisy, of course, is the genocide. How are Americans always so blind to the cost of things? Coupled together I end up feeling a whole lotta cognitive dissonance around July 4.

One of these things is not like the other.

Outsider.

Stranger in a strange land.

It’s a common theme I’m sure you can relate to in some way. Maybe not about the fourth, but there must be some situation in your life where you just don’t get what’s going on with everyone else.

For me, that is surrounding the concept of freedom. How can everyone else get this so wrong? (from my perspective)

To me, freedom is the capacity to choose our reaction to any situation we encounter. In a Buddhist, Taoist, or Viktor Frankl kind of way. To be able to understand that I am not a victim of my situation. To have the peace of mind to pause when we encounter an uncomfortable situation. And to remember that this, too, shall pass. And that we cannot control our environment or what happens to us, but we can control our reaction to it.

How can freedom be anything else?

Much more in this Episode:

https://www.buzzsprout.com/530563/13201252

https://youtu.be/Nayw6g7A74E

Our Feelings Drive Interactions with Each Other

If I’ve said it once by now, I’ve said it a thousand times:

It blows my mind that any two people can have a conversation and walk away feeling understood AND having understood the other person with any degree of accuracy.

In other words, our communication sucks.

We often hear something other than the other person’s intent.

And how often have you had a conversation and then have to have the same one AGAIN because the person thought you meant something else?

And, if you think about it, given the complexity of communication beyond simple language, why SHOULD we understand each other?

Hell, most of the time we don’t even understand OURSELVES, much less be able to explain it to someone else.

Communication is hard.

And my therapist recently introduced me to a psychologist named Marshall Rosenberg and his ‘nonviolent communication’. In this video, I introduce his way of talking to each other which makes so much sense.

SO MUCH SENSE. In fact, I kind of feel like I have fallen all the way back to square one in my personal growth. It turns out I really don’t even understand my own feelings.

Nonviolent communication consists of 4 basic parts:

— Observing instead of evaluating. What is going on?

— Identifying the emotion we are feeling.

— Identifying the basic need underneath that feeling that isn’t being met.

— Making a request of the other person.

This simple process is so far from easy. It’s a lot of work. Just getting past the first two steps is nearly impossible.

Listen to this episode, check out Dr. Rosenberg’s YouTube videos and/or books, and see how much you don’t know about yourself.

I am amazed at how much I don’t know. But excited to learn!!

https://www.buzzsprout.com/530563/13082787

https://youtu.be/vBPxAmSvyNo

Radical Acceptance Can Help You Progress Through Life

Knowing yourself is an important part of being a complete human. Maybe this is just my opinion based on my own values, but it seems to be a theme. Throughout history there have been thinkers proclaiming the importance of knowing oneself.

To justify this conclusion we can look at the opposite side of the coin.

What is NOT knowing yourself like?

To me, not knowing yourself leads to lots of misbehaviors. Breaking societal norms (which arguable can be a good thing), committing crimes and not obeying laws, or just being an asshole. I think of ‘bad’ human behaviors as being associated with people to are clueless. Who lack self-awareness. Who don’t know themselves.

Because why would anyone do the wrong thing if they know they are doing the wrong thing? Out of desperation, probably. I understand that a starving person would steal bread. I don’t get why someone would commit hate crimes against outgroups. I assume that is, at least in part, a result of being clueless.

Anyway, this Episode is about knowing yourself. And I think to know ourselves we have to examine our choices. Especially the choices we didn’t know we were making.

As kids, we learned a lot of stuff. How to use a toilet. How to walk and talk. Hopefully, to be kind to people. This type of cultural conditioning and learning is important to a ‘good’ society.

We also learned about religion, history, and politics.

These subconscious and non-consensual teachings can become part of us. And I think it is a critical part of being human to become aware of what we chose and what we did not choose.

For example, some people believe in a Christian God who says being homosexual is wrong and punishable by being sent to hell. I wonder how many of these folks have ever really explored that belief. Taken it apart and thought about where it came from and what it actually means. I think much of this was non-consensual.

And so it’s important to take a personal inventory of what and why you believe what you do. This is a critical first step toward deconstructing and knowing yourself.

So Radical Acceptance is an interesting topic that follows from deciding to know yourself. Once you decide who you are and what you believe, you need to accept it. Of course, you are a dynamic individual who will change and grow, but you can monitor these changes and modify if necessary.

Accepting yourself AS YOU ARE, after you inventory and re-decide your beliefs, is one of the keys to personal growth.

Once you question your beliefs you create dissonance. Between the person you ARE and the person you WERE (or felt you ‘should be’). Because these disagreements can be polarizing and confusing, you must ACCEPT and KNOW yourself so you can remember the difference.

Old beliefs are so strong they will pull at you and try to convince you to come back. This ain’t easy.

Radical acceptance helps you remember yourself. And love who you are.

Remember you are ok.

https://www.buzzsprout.com/530563/13040225

https://youtu.be/WCjc2QKv19o