Polymathic Being

Chit-Chat

Michael Woudenberg — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 08:01:43 GMT

Welcome to Polymathic Being, a place to explore counterintuitive insights across multiple domains. These essays explore common topics from different perspectives and disciplines to uncover unique insights and solutions.

Today’s topic works through a great deal of angst surrounding small talk that too many of us dismiss as shallow or irrelevant. However, the research tells a different story of how it unlocks our superpower of social learning and rewards us with feelings of belonging, involvement, and camaraderie.

You don’t have to be around the interwebs too long before you find a lament of ‘small talk.’ It’s often an edgy introduction to the humble brag that they want to dive deeply into topics that matter, with the implication that those who engage in small talk are somehow vapid, shallow, and wasting precious time. Here are two common takes:

And then this particularly cringe video on LinkedIn describing ADHD socialization thus: “What exhausts them is this: Pretending to be interested, forcing reactions, performing a personality, so they choose silence… because they value authenticity.”

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’ve had some pretty banal and incredibly boring experiences with small talk where it felt more like I was hearing about a four-year-old’s day than what I expected from a grown adult, but…

captures the angst really well: “Somehow we’ve absorbed the idea that connection counts only when it’s deep. Small talk became the junk food of social life: empty, fake, and a waste of time.”

So deeply have we internalized this that 22 different studies indicate we are talking less overall,1 and this isn’t resulting in deeper conversations or more positive outcomes. In fact, the more we close ourselves off to the social connections that surround us, the more we replace them with the artificial connections online where everything seems to bifurcate into Algowhoring, Fear Porn, and PSYOPs.

But the research indicates that the underlying impression is totally wrong:

People underestimate how enjoyable even “boring” conversations will be. Across multiple experiments, participants expected conversations about mundane topics to be less interesting and enjoyable than they actually were.2
Interactions with those you don’t know well, like acquaintances, classmates, and people we casually know, contribute measurably to well-being, and people reported greater happiness and belonging on days when they interacted with more weak ties than usual. 3
Even extremely brief interactions can improve mood and a sense of belonging. In a field experiment, coffee-shop customers who were simply instructed to smile, make eye contact, and briefly converse with their barista experienced more positive affect than customers who were instructed to complete the transaction as efficiently as possible. The former felt better and had a better experience.4
People consistently underestimate the benefits of talking to strangers and incorrectly predicted that interacting with a stranger would be worse than remaining alone, but experimentally assigned conversations produced more positive experiences than solitude. 5
We often underestimate how much we learn from talking to another person. We believe we’ll learn nothing, but are often surprised. This was my own experience on a plane recently, where both my seatmate and I were shocked at how much we learned in a relatively short time.6
Weak ties (The $5 term for these sorts of relationships) are disproportionately useful for exposing us to information outside our immediate social network because close relationships tend to occupy overlapping networks, while weaker ties more often bridge otherwise separated groups, allowing novel information and opportunities to move between them. This is a great method for breaking out of your echo chamber.7

Those findings weren’t a surprise to me because I learned long ago that humans aren’t that wise and our true superpower is actually social learning. As such, we should embrace calling ourselves Homo Socialis over Homo Sapiens, and much of that socialness starts with small talk.

Put in a more memorable way: Dogs sniff butts; humans small talk.

To be honest, I’d rather lean into the chit-chat over butt-sniffing myself. It’s also physiologically important because we have to give our bodies and brains a quick minute to adjust to another human, their styles, tones, culture, language, sex, religion, and dozens of other characteristics that help us suss out the proper profiles to start with and, without significant consequence of a social faux pas, tailor those profiles to match the actual person, learning to stereotype properly.

, a fellow I’ve known for almost 20 years, recently wrote on the power of small talk, where he shares the insight from Gillian Sandstrom, a professor at the University of Sussex who has a mnemonic for how to have good small talk she calls QUICK: Question, something In Common, and Kindness. It’s that simple: just start with a question, look for something in common, and lead with kindness.

Justin writes how he was doing this without the framework, and that’s honestly how I got to know him. We worked at the same company, but in different areas. We didn’t have a lot of time to just hang out, so often our conversations were just quick chit-chats that jumped topics somewhat randomly; however, over time, we built a friendship where we learned a lot about each other.

It's still something I love doing in general. Simple questions like, “What’s your favorite color?” seem capricious on the surface until you follow the conversation and see how much it puts someone at ease, opens new avenues, and builds rapport that you just don’t get elsewhere. Chit-chat also, quite literally, saved my life as I shared in The Enemy’s Gate Is Down about my time in the Army, deployed in Iraq:

Similarly, when I’d sit with police leadership and was offered a cigarette, I’d accept, sit back, and ask questions that had nothing to do with my mission. In this manner, I learned a lot about the Iraqis I relied on for my success.

It was those simple, ‘weak-tied’ relationships that connected us on a human level, and that connection allowed us to get intel on an IED that we were able to avoid. Chit-chat works, even with those who might be your enemies - Homo Socialis for the win!

Likewise, I like to start meetings, even with people I’ve worked with for a while, just talking about life. Just five minutes of caring about them, not the job, unlocks so much more value and goodwill for the deeper conversations later. A favorite question is “Tell me something about you I don’t know yet.” It’s never disappointing.

Small talk is powerful, and it’s also core to being human and a sign of social intelligence. I honestly don’t care to go any deeper until I can respect the whole person I’m engaged with. Simple chit-chat will tell me a great deal about your intellectual and emotional mettle. It shows your adaptability and quickness of thought. It lets me see if you can manage to hold onto a couple of threads of conversation at the same time. It gives me time to regulate my initial profiles of you and allows you to relax as well.

And the harder truth is this: Those who cannot pass through chit-chat also rarely have anything valuable to add in the deeper conversations. They’re so enamored with their own intellectual ego that they can’t appreciate the delicate dance and humor of the surface-level. Subsequently, they often carry that same rigidity and closed-mindedness into more complex topics as well, which never bodes well.

That’s because true intellectual curiosity requires broad relational curiosity. That relational curiosity leverages humanity’s superpower of social learning, which allows us to hack into the incredible corpus of human knowledge, insights, and creativity.

So, chit-chat. Approach the world with Insatiable Curiosity about everything. Have QUICK conversations where you ask fun questions to find something in common and be kind. Engage with that stranger on the bus. Share things about yourself. Unlock social learning and feel the rewards of belonging, involvement, and camaraderie. That’s about as authentic as you can get!

Even better, before you leave, tell me something about yourself that I don’t know yet.

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The Bunnies and the Bears

Michael Woudenberg — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 08:01:31 GMT

Today’s topic investigates two views of the world that exist across societies. It’s a simplified view with significant consequences for understanding different perspectives. It’s critical to personal relationships as well as how we can view larger social systems.

Years ago, I had a great mentor, let’s call him Craig, who was my company commander in Korea. We were out at a gunnery event shooting the Bradleys and, in a break in the training, he asked me about my girlfriend, now wife, as our relationship was getting serious entering late summer 2006. The resulting discussion wasn’t about how in love we were; it was about how frustrated we both were over a disagreement.

As a bit of backstory, we started dating after I commissioned in the Army and right before I entered Ranger School. From there, I went to Airborne School, and if you’ve read The Things You Do For Love, you’ll remember how I forged a doctor’s signature on my return-to-duty form so I could go on a cruise with her, my cousin, and his girlfriend (now wife). After that adventure, I went to Korea, where our relationship was limited to video and phone calls.

On the positive side, it forced us to learn how to communicate.

On the downside, it gave us many opportunities to step on each other’s toes.

I don’t even remember the topic of our disagreement, but it boiled down to her feeling uncomfortable with it and my being frustrated because I wanted to dig in and dissect it. Craig listened to my lament and said something along the lines of “There are bears and there are bunnies. No matter how well-intended the bears are and no matter how gently they play, the bunnies still think they’re going to die.”

I wasn’t trying to be malicious; I was well-intentioned and wanted to play with a complex idea. It’s likely a precursor to my love of Mixed Mental Arts, where we grapple with complex ideas in the octagon of life… However, when a bunny squares off against a bear, it really doesn’t matter how well-intentioned I was; the matchup seemed imbalanced.

Now, it’s funny because my wife is actually not a bunny. She’s just a smaller bear, and people she worked with as an engineer fully assumed she wore the pants in the family because she was a bear to their bunny. However, the analogy holds when considering different perspectives and different personalities at play in the world.

On the surface, this seems totally obvious. We have many names for this understanding, from emotional intelligence to Personality Proclivities to situational leadership. At work, we talk of bringing our whole selves to work, and in life, we appreciate not getting trampled.

At least, that’s how we tend to deal with the bears.

But how do we deal with the bunnies?

Bunnies, specifically the prolific European varieties, live underground during the day in large warrens of family groups. They emerge in the evenings and mornings, when the light makes it harder for predators to find them. Their eyes, on the sides of their heads, provide near 360-degree peripheral vision, and they’re built to jump and run.

That’s a real rabbit, and for our bunny analogy, that translates into Personality Proclivities that look more introverted, conscientious, very agreeable, and higher in neuroticism. The warren for these folks was family, church communities, social clubs, internet forums, and more.

Just to clarify, this isn’t a bad thing at all. The world needs bunnies to create balance. The challenge emerges, as we explored in Born or Trained, that current Western culture, and I’d argue culture through time, overtly values the bears, not the bunnies.

So who are the bears? Largely extroverted, also conscientious, but not anal retentive, willing to be disagreeable, naturally open, and very low neuroticism. They’re rumbling and rolling, and wrestling with ideas, and challenging the status quo.

As we looked at business leaders before, we value traits such as openness, structured conscientiousness, being able to get along without being a pushover, low anxiety and self-doubt, and being outgoing and engaging. Almost every leadership book and every celebration of leaders, both men and women, value the bears. What else is the phenomenon of the ‘boss bitch?’

Worse, we value the bears so much we view any difference between the bears and the bunnies as some form of systemic oppression or structural limitation, which, to be clear, are systems more often designed to control the bears and protect the bunnies. However, instead of appreciating the bunnies, and teaching the bunnies to appreciate and understand the bears, we’ve been spending decades destroying the systems and have focused on turning bunnies into bears.

A challenge emerges that, when bunnies try to be bears, they’re going against their natural inclinations no matter how much they’d like to be a bear and no matter how much society values bears. So, they play a different game to level the playing field.

For example, I know a person who is a pure bunny. She’s trying really, really hard to be present in the world, but she exudes nervous tension. Everything is a threat. Everything can be, must be, safer. In the face of an upper-middle-class life, living in an extremely low crime/risk area, with an advanced education, and a well-respected career, she’s still a bunny acting like she’s surrounded by predators.

And if the bears are playing, no matter how gently, you’ll hear about her worries, typically through a third party and never directly. This isn’t manipulative, covert narcissism that we explored, either. It’s just that the world, outside the warren, will never be as safe, and she’s a bunny.

This leads to a counterintuitive twist that the bunnies are an unappreciated threat to the bears. We have many systems in place to prevent the trampling of bunnies and, especially when they’re women, we have no shortage of other bears willing to white-knight. However, this is sometimes weaponized because rabbits, to quote Monty Python, can also be “ the most foul, cruel, and bad-tempered rodent you ever set eyes on." It’s bad when it’s intentional, but the real danger, to the bears, is when the bunny doesn’t even know what they’re doing, or why, or what that does to the bears.

The infamous Rabbit of Caerbannog

Now, think back to the COVID lockdowns six years ago and the number of people celebrating the ability to stay home, in their warrens, playing it safe, eagerly masking, and reacting to anyone who questioned the safety of the warren as a threat. The problem is that they undermined the bears, attacking anything that they viewed as a threat no matter how mundane.

Adding to this, I feel like over the past 20 years we have seen the revenge of the bunnies, as society has demanded they play while allowing them to rewrite the rules of play. The result is a massive mismatch: over-indexing on threats, underappreciating the violence needed to keep danger away, and pushing bunnies to be bears while dragging bears down to be bunnies. At the same time, as the spaces for bunnies are being abandoned, the space for bears is also shrinking.

So back to my wife and me: It’s pretty clear that I needed to adjust my tact and meet my wife where she was. She wasn’t even a bunny. She’s a bear, but I was a bigger bear, and I’ve spent years tempering and adjusting myself so I can integrate, lead, and love better. It’s easier because so much focus is placed on helping the bears and containing the bears when necessary.

But what do we do about the bunnies? Can bunnies learn to be bears?

I wish I had an easy answer for this question. The only place to start is by understanding the difference and appreciating it, actively looking for mismatched expectations, and then adapting.

Both the bunnies and the bears are essential to a healthy society, and when that’s not appreciated, the entire system is at risk of being ripped apart by the always-afraid bunnies and the ill-intentioned bears. The former attacks the systems that protect them, and the latter, unbound by those systems, roam freely.

It might be a simple analogy, but it helps articulate, without having to name distinct systems, what happens when we don’t understand the differences between perceptions, the systems that exist to manage them, and the consequences of ripping things down. Instead, we need to embrace the bears, protect the bunnies, and learn to value the diversity that these two perspectives provide to our societies.

Are you a bunny or a bear? Did you learn something about yourself and others based on that insight? Leave a comment and let us know!

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A related conversation about the implications of this was explored in Damn the Patriarchy, where we see how systems designed to restrain our negative inclinations get attacked when they’re not understood.

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How to be Right

Michael Woudenberg — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 08:01:37 GMT

Today’s topic explores an old axiom of mine and how that ties into the core philosophy of Polymathic Being. The goal is to improve our ways of thinking, open ourselves to new information, and to truly learn how to be right in our search for truth.

One of my core axioms is “Don’t be disprovable.”

The twist is that this doesn’t mean I have to be right.

There’s a nuance there because it typically leads me to being right more often than otherwise because, counterintuitively, I’m not worried about being wrong.

Okay, okay, that hurts my own brain. Let me break this down:

What not being disprovable means is that I’m the first person to critique my own ideas, and that pushes me to stress test my ideas before blithely accepting them as right. It also means I’ve learned how to decouple my identity from my ideas so that being wrong doesn’t challenge who I am, avoiding what calls “Identity Protective Systems which she described recently as:

“It’s when a belief becomes part of who you are, or part of the group you belong to. Your reasoning will shift from finding the truth to defending your belief. Instead of weighing the evidence, you’re guarding a piece of yourself.”

These identity-protective systems shield bad ideas from critique and fuel an insatiable drive to feed a rage-bait-driven algorithm regardless of the facts. As such, decoupling information from how I define my identity helps me navigate life more effectively.

Let’s use a quick example: Climate Change

It doesn’t take a lot of evaluation to see that climate change is much less about the actual science of the climate and much more about political and ideological identity and signaling.1 Key to note is the dearth of discussion about which conditions have represented the greatest planetary thriving in biodiversity throughout history. (fun fact: it’s higher temps and higher CO2)

And if that statement was triggering, that’s exactly what I’m talking about. A large part of that is that we only talk about avoiding change, and that change is assumed to be de facto bad mostly because humans have a natural inclination to avoid change.2

Well, I know we have this inclination, and so I’m curious about the biology, entomology, geology, and more about the topic. As I investigated, without fearing climate change, I observed that the planet has generally had greater and more prolific biodiversity under conditions that current climate alarmists claim are deadly. Note that I don’t claim to add a moral dimension of ‘could’ or ‘should,’ but I’m curious to understand ‘why.’ Why do warmer temps and greater CO2 lead to more biomass and biodiversity?3

This query uncovered that CO2 is a fertilizer. So much so that commercial greenhouses pump in tons of CO2 to help their plants grow faster with increased yield.4 In fact, 10% of the yield increase in staple crops like corn and wheat is due to increased CO2, and almost 70% of the planet's vegetated land surface experienced active greening.5 You may or may not know that this is because all plants, all of their mass, is built from CO2, extracted from the atmosphere by photosynthesis, with trace minerals and water coming from the soil. So, if increasing atmospheric CO2 increases plant biomass, then what is the consequence of reducing CO2?

Well, the last ice age showed a few indications when CO2 levels were so low that plants nearly suffocated,6 and as temps and CO2 increased, we’ve seen dramatic greening. This opens another thread on temperature: the climate is both emerging from an ice age and dynamic. The compounding causal chain of increased temperature is fundamentally so complicated that it’s only recently that computers have been powerful enough to compute a fraction of it. Most models lock all but a few variables, so their outputs look severe but rarely match reality.7

Now, this is where it gets interesting because the right answer isn’t confidence in an ideology, but insatiable curiosity to delve deeper and wider. These facts aren’t attempting to dismiss climate concern, deny climate change, or dissuade action, but to demand that we have the proper context, facts, data, and understanding. This ensures that our actions actually have the impact we want, rather than the common outcome of greenwashing, and addresses the challenges we face, where even recycling has a dirty secret because of feelings over facts.

This is why the polymathic mindset I embrace balances these three things:

Let me reiterate here that my goal isn’t to be “right”; it’s to not be disprovable because the deeper you get into the science of climate change, the more you realize two things: First, the science is certainly not settled and, second, our knowledge of the climate is still nascent, and we’re still applying simple analytic tools to a highly complex and adaptive system.

So, am I right? Well, in the world of science, it helps to remember British statistician George Box’s famous line:

“Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful.”

It’s a great reminder that no scientific model can capture the full truth of the real world. That doesn’t mean they aren’t useful, as a simple model can still help us solve problems, make good guesses, and understand how things work. However, we, too often, suffer the fallacy of composition when we assume what is true of a part must automatically be true of the whole, which is what’s happening in spades in the climate conversations, which are then weaponized by politics and moral language.

In the end, we’re all wrong.

If you’ve been reading Polymathic Being for a while, you’ll see we take this approach with almost every topic that we explore. From Feminism to the Patriarchy, from Polio to Skin Cancer, from Leadership to Innovation, and from Religion to Myths, the goal here isn’t to be right. It’s first and foremost an effort to prove ourselves wrong and, in doing so, avoid being disprovable.

Weaving in a final concept we’ve looked at before, being right isn’t just about learning something new but about a critical focus on unlearning what no longer works and relearning new positions. Let’s break this down and weave it together.

Learn - Driven by that insatiable curiosity, the goal is to constantly explore. As I coach others, I intentionally look across domains and disciplines to see what new information is out there and how others are approaching similar problems. I found out CO2 was a fertilizer from the Department of Agriculture, not the Environmental Protection Agency.
Unlearn - Undescored by humility, we have to recognize when old models are too wrong to keep using and remove them from the equation. This is something that Thomas Kuhn would describe as shifting your paradigm and forces you to analyze and, hopefully, decouple yourself from rote adherence to old systems. This also helps us critique moral statements from base facts. A critical conflation that permeates climate science is the unwillingness to unlearn.
- I need to caveat here that this isn’t throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Sometimes, it’s just clipping something you thought was important and seeing if anything even changes. So much of what we hold tightly doesn’t need to be.
Relearn - If you’ve already thought about how intentional reframing fits here, you’re right. Sometimes, it’s just rotating our perspective and recognizing that other views and interpretations exist. This is why Steelmanning is such a powerful critique because, instead of trying to prove someone else wrong, you try to make their argument better than they can. Similarly, you apply critique to your own arguments to challenge and keep yourself open to challenge.

With these two frameworks woven together, we’re now armed to reconsider almost anything. Back to climate change, this doesn’t mean we just switch from one extreme to another but actually consider avoiding the binary completely. For example, I like to play a thought game where I call myself a ‘climate change advocate,’ and I embrace both the increase in temperature and CO2.

What then?

Well, now you’ve unlocked a powerful tool that the Stoic philosopher Epictetus frequently used throughout The Discourses to challenge his students' assumptions and bring them back to the core dichotomy of control. But truly, what then?

What do increasing temps and CO2 do to our perceptions of geopolitics? Why do most debates end up talking economics, and not bioscience? On a dynamic planet, why is the debate over whether something should, or shouldn’t, change? Why did we pick the baselines we’re even arguing over? What if we did nothing?

What then?

When you apply curiosity, humility, and reframing with learning, unlearning, and relearning, you’ll be amazed at how interesting those questions really are. You also realize how many elements of the topic you hold dear that don’t need to be. Done well, you’ll also learn you don’t have to be “RIGHT!” When you get to that point, you’ll find yourself less disprovable, less wrong, and more open to new information.

That’s the best place to be and is certainly never wrong.

What’s fun is how this essay was pulled from my drafts after a random Tuesday tag in Substack Notes with a continuation poem. The goal was to take the last line and build a new stanza. The one tagged me to build from was: "Until the hour that my grip on life eases.” The first thing that popped into my brain was learning, and the poem flowed from there:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Until the hour that my grip on life eases

I will strive to learn—

To chisel ossified truths from my bones

And test them against a world still shifting,

To unlearn the walls I called foundations,

Then relearn how to stand among the rubble,

Keeping only what can still bear my weight

And letting wisdom grow from what I lose... and learn.

This is how to be right. Counterintuitively, it’s more about not being wrong while also challenging everything you think to be right. It’s insatiable curiosity, humility, and intentional reframing wrapped into the mantra of Learn, Unlearn, and Relearn.

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Rediscovering Awe

Michael Woudenberg — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 08:02:07 GMT

Today’s topic is a quick reminder to slow down and appreciate the complexity of the world around you. It’s a great antidote to misery and doesn’t require anything special. We’ll introduce a simple technique that can help you find awe in almost anything.

When was the last time you felt Awe? Like truly marveled at something that showed the beauty, complexity, and even rawness of life?

Too often, we pass right by millions of things that are awe-inspiring while tending to focus on the things that matter least. Like what a politician said thousands of miles away, or what a social media influencer thinks, thought, or did. Or worse, the invention of things to fear that have no bearing on reality, as Seneca the Younger said 2000 years ago:

“We suffer more in imagination than in reality.”

Thankfully, I’ve been introduced to a cohort of thinkers and writers here on Substack who leave me in awe. One of them, whom I mention often, is who recently wrote: “How to Find Awe In Everything.” I left a comment that I want to build on today:

I find that awe happens slowly, not quickly. I find myself appreciating the tiniest things when I slow down long enough to see them. I've never felt awe at a sprint.

What then?

How to Find Awe In Everything

4 months ago · 61 likes · 43 comments · Sam Alaimo

First, let’s touch back on the intro because it’s not even the speed at which we move that pushes us to overlook awesome things. Perversely, social media has taken to scorning awe as somehow infantile or, worse, ‘tone deaf’ to what they see as endemic suffering. Ironically, that behavior is the second of the 10 Commandments for Misery and I explored before:

2) Thou Shalt Scorn Awe
You must never experience awe on the road to misery. You get extra points for constantly denigrating the awe of someone else. The trick is to always be irreverent while demanding reverence for your own irreverence.

Obviously, the title contains the answer to how successful eschewing awe really is. It’s also just a miserable look, as evident in many people mocking Europeans who came over for the World Cup and were in awe at what we consider normal. Common things like gargantuan stadiums that hold tens of thousands of fans, massive freeways that transport millions, ridiculous gas stations like Buc-ee's, with over 100 gas pumps and a massive convenience store with one of the best brisket sandwiches around.

But we drive by that every day and don’t even consider just how amazing it all is. It’s also worse than that because while we aren’t even awed by the awe-inspiring extremes of consumerism or nature, we’re overlooking so much below that which can still inspire awe. Thankfully, we can rediscover awe in some of the simplest things that surround us.

Rediscovering Awe

Start by slowing down.

Getting back to that comment, I find that awe happens slowly, not quickly. I find myself appreciating the tiniest things when I slow down long enough to see them. I’ve never felt awe at a sprint. This is important because the world is demanding our attention in a thousand different ways, and the best thing to do is just push them away and focus on something super simple, like this Gorilla, and his son intently watching a simple caterpillar.

I find that watching an anthill does the same for me. Find a quiet space with an anthill, and just stop and watch them. Consider their industriousness, relentless effort, and sophisticated command and control for the entire nest.

Same for flowers. Just deeply observing their colors, textures, and the way they move in the breeze, and the types of insects that come by.

Spider webs are similar. Even if they’re not active, just looking at how intricate the web is, how it moves, tracing the gossamer strands to see where they attach it and considering how they did that in a single night.

When you can find awe in the micro, then it also helps to find it in the macro. Not just in massive vistas or beautiful mountains, but in the complexity of humanity as we explored in The Awe of Sondering, where we learned a new word for many of us:

Sondering: The profound realization that every random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own, filled with their own stories, struggles, and history, even though they seem like background characters in your life.

Just stepping back and considering that the people you zip by each day have lives as complex as your own, and then considering what you’re dealing with, is a wonderful way to depressurize the anxiety that constantly threatens to overwhelm us. Even better, you realize that there’s almost nothing going on out there that matches what we’re told is happening online.

The same thing can happen when you do sit on the lakeshore, or the mountain, or deep in the woods, surrounded by a mass of other things that, as you start to zoom from the macro to the micro, and back, is frankly awe-inspiring.

It can happen within nature or deep in a city because there’s always something big or something small that you can focus on that helps you slow down and get out of your own brain, where it’s hard not to find awe.

Take a moment, go find something to focus on. Spend 10 minutes just considering the complexity of the micro and/or the magnitude of the macro.

Slow down, and let the world keep moving.

Let yourself be amazed at what you find, the tiniest details or massive majesty.

Intentionally find awe and feel what it does to your brain.

Now, see if you can find awe in almost anything.

So, what did you find? What did you find awe in? Leave a comment; I’d love to hear!

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Masking as Neurodivergent

Michael Woudenberg — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 08:01:50 GMT

Today’s topic attempts to unmask true anti-social behaviors from the protective cover of neurodivergence. We’ll explore the current state of the neurodivergent world, identify key patterns to pay attention to, and in doing so, I truly believe that once we pull off that mask, we can create healthy, inclusive cultures.

Intro

Human behaviors have broad diversity in cognitive, emotional, cultural, and social expression. There are, however, toxic behaviors; the shadow behaviors that manipulate, control, and exploit. When I started investigating neurodivergency, I was annoyed at how healthy behaviors were getting classified as divergent and personality profiles, which are useful for identifying the healthy diversity of neurotypicality, were being ignored, which allowed anti-social pathology to hide in plain sight.

As I explored, I found that we collapsed neurotypicality into a facsimile, some largely undefined ‘other’ which, apparently, controls and designs everything to exclude the neurodivergent. This allows the ‘divergent’ to be victims, set apart, and special, openly claiming status as gifted and exceptional while also, paradoxically, claiming disability.

This cocktail of victim + special is intoxicating and has exploded the diagnostic window of neurodivergence, where a majority of Gen Z claims neurodivergence as core to their identity. This is bad enough, but as I kept digging, I found something more sinister lurking beneath that I felt in my original post, and confirmed as I kept digging. There is clear manipulation within neurodiversity by classic Cluster B.

Yes, the *non-exhaustive list which goes on and on and on…

All these variables make this both difficult to critique without being accused of ‘punching down’ and impossible to pin a definition where quirky personality sits next to Down Syndrome, Stuttering, Giftedness, and Anxiety. It’s so broad as to include anyone and claims enough legit disabilities to create a minefield for analysis. So what we’re going to do is start picking it apart, starting with the pathology of Cluster B.

Cluster B

To better understand, in psychology, Cluster B is a category of personality disorders in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). It encompasses four distinct conditions regarding emotional regulation, impulse control, and maintaining stable relationships:

Antisocial: Disregarding laws, norms, and others’ rights.
Borderline: Intense instability in emotions and relationships.
Histrionic: Constant attention-seeking and excessive drama.
Narcissistic: Grandiosity and lack of empathy.

What makes Cluster B challenging to recognize is that it’s largely a feminine cluster, in contrast to the Dark Triad's (narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy) masculine tendencies. Add to this, Cluster B manifests as what can sound and look like caring, but it’s the feminine shadow, the devouring mother, and reveals itself as toxic empathy, which isn’t empathetic at all!

I don’t make this claim lightly, because as I dug deeper into understanding True Neurodivergence, I kept coming across social media and Substack accounts that were purportedly neurodivergent, but all started to sound the same. It was the victim + special cocktail where anything and everything that held these influencers back was blamed on the nefarious neurotypical.

Three accounts highlight this best:

writes about how everything that holds her back is the fault of everything else. Her recent article, Fragile Men and the Women Who Outlast Them, is a perfect example where, if you replace Neurodivergence with Cluster B, the reasons for her ‘harassment’ become clear.
is a case study on what can be best described as ‘intellectual masturbation,’ where any sense of agency or acceptance of challenge is pushed away for the easy button. No surprise that she claims a PhD in ‘Creativity’ and that comes through in her fantastical justifications. She’s also (self-described) ‘gifted,’ so that purportedly gives her unquestionable wisdom.
’s most popular articles all lament exclusion and, with no irony intended, include one on how toxic personalities target neurodivergents. I don’t place Eva in Cluster B yet, but she’s a great example of utility for Cluster B, which we’ll get into shortly.

I could add in the and and and and and and and and , ad infinitum1 because, as I explored that area, I kept coming across more and more accounts that all had something critical in common:

They are women.
Of higher socioeconomic status
Claiming disability as core to their identity
Displaying clear Cluster B behaviors in their writing and/or reactions.2

Now, I don’t want this to be viewed as an attack purely on women, but two things emerged: first, it was nearly exclusively women3 and, second, Cluster B manifests under the neurodivergent banner much more seamlessly than the masculine Dark Triad. Put another way, it’s much easier for the shadow feminine to hide there than for the shadow masculine, because it masks itself in caring, nurturing, and comforting. It’s the perfect recipe for toxic empathy and the devouring mother archetype, which creates the very exclusion the nuerodivergents fear.

Cluster B Exclusion

The challenge is that it actually weaponizes those with true disability. This is where I think Eva plays a role in that she may very well be autistic, but her language and her supporters push her away from agency and accountability and into victimization, which, in turn, helps hide the Cluster B manipulators. Eva is a useful lackey and perversely views her manipulators, selling her the cocktail of victim + special, as allies.

To add insult to injury, Cluster B designs intentional exclusion, fosters division, and stokes animosity while weaponizing the vulnerable who actually need help but convinces them it’s a superpower that no one should take away. So, those who are divergent are pushed further away, not by people like me who want to see Eva integrate and grow, but by those who relish the power the division provides while being able to excuse socially pathological behaviors.

The perverse result of the Cluster B infiltration is the exclusion of truly autistic and ADHD people who need the attention and resources to lead more productive lives. As more people try to gain influence, accommodation, and disability compensation, we see the explosion of pathologizing personality and the subsequent siphoning of funds and resources from those who need them the most, as describes:

Note here, they have to append “desperately” to help you understand that these are what we merely called “disabled” twenty years ago. Similar to how (note the modifier ‘profound’) writes about her autistic children who are lumped in with a social media influencer with a quirky personality.

It’s so bad, , writes about the gentrification of level 1 autism (formerly Asperger's), and recently described the exclusion thusly:

Redefining autism to exclude its negative symptom because they embarrass the least disabled autistic people is harming those of us who do not have the luxury of denial.

The resource drain is becoming more and more obvious as Karina, who works as a practicing therapist, has this to say about the situation:

also pulls no punches in “The Spectrum”: How Autism Was Hijacked By Narcissists, where she puts it plainly that neurodivergence now feeds those Cluster B behaviors where autism now,

“means you’re socially odd, intellectually superior, and emotionally detached in an edgy and endearing way. For many, especially mothers with narcissistic tendencies hungry for a narrative of exceptionalism, this offered a seductive reframing of their child’s misbehaviour and non-conformity as evidence of giftedness. She could thus become the one who gave birth to the quirky but special genius. She alone saw the hidden brilliance beneath the “weird” behaviour. She became the martyr and the insider to an elite subculture. It’s Munchausen by proxy, 2025 edition.

Likewise, a year ago, wrote Dark neurodivergence or Cluster B traits? where she delineates the ever-eroding line between disability and anti-social pathology and how the latter demands no fix for the former. This is why you now see people protesting the push to prevent or cure autism, because if we fixed the problem, we’d take away their social currency and mask.

Masking as Neurodivergent4

Here’s where it really gets truly messy because Cluster B traits can resemble autistic behavior at the surface,5 and the intelligent narcissist learns to mask. This is profoundly counterintuitive because nuerodivergents have been using the term “mask” to explain how they’re expected to fit into normal life, which, I have to point out, everyone does, and sociology calls it code-switching among other terms. However, in a true twist, Cluster B successfully uses neurodivergence as a mask to hide, or cloak6 their behavior where:

Emotional volatility may look like a meltdown
Criticism sensitivity, like rejection sensitivity
Unstable relationships, as social-communication difficulty
Entitlement like accommodation-seeking
Cruelty, like autistic bluntness
Identity instability like late “unmasking.” (You can tell a brilliant cover where they tell you what they’re ‘masking’ but make it sound like they’re masking for neurotypical while they’re actually masking Cluster B as something else)

The strongest warning sign is their selective incapacity, where the person invokes neurodivergence when challenged, yet demonstrates restraint, social awareness, and strategic presentation when reputation, authority, or personal advantage is at stake.

Which brings us back to , of recent fame for her 5,000-word AI-generated posts, published near daily, which end up being insightful in a perverse way. In her essay on being Targeted by Toxic Personalities, she nearly gets to the problem when she identifies that: “One in three autistic women has received at least one psychiatric misdiagnosis before an autism diagnosis, most commonly a personality disorder.”

The challenge here is that we’re finding it’s not a misdiagnosis at all! In fact, it lines up with my own analysis that 1:3 women claiming autism are using it as a mask for their personality disorder, and it isn’t autism at all! It wasn’t a misdiagnosis because personality disorders are typically much more strenuously diagnosed, with multiple observations, whereas I can go online, schedule a meeting, and walk away with an autism diagnosis in minutes.

This allows neurodivergence to be an unusually effective identity shield for people who display manipulative, narcissistic, borderline, histrionic, antisocial, and other abusive behavior. It’s brilliant at reframing misconduct as disability. It protects by accusing criticism of ableism. It deflects demands for accountability by claiming they’re a denial of accommodation.

It hides this exploitation as a misunderstanding, all while allowing access to disability and accommodation. Even worse, it feeds narcissism by claiming to be ‘gifted’ and ‘exceptional.’7 In her most amazingly close assessment of the situation, while I was drafting this essay, Eva actually wrote Why Neurodivergent People “Attract” Narcissists, which indicates that she perceives the same thing but hasn’t figured out that Cluster B are creating these problems and she’s their lackey. She worries that it paints the neurodivergent as defective, while I think most of us see how their innocent vulnerability provides a perfect mask for pathology.

That’s where we find (real name Sher) wearing this mask so well as she laments feeling excluded from everything. Unlike Eva, the Cluster B is much more obvious as she blames everyone else. The catch is, her behaviors are a poison that our long-evolved social systems were designed to exclude because they’re a pathology, not some cute cognitive quirk. noted that her rant reads as deeply aggrieved, entitled, and antisocial, while trying to say it’s a superpower being held back by the neurotypical. She’s right that it’s being held back; she’s wrong that it’s a superpower, at least in the protagonist sense.

Mike also astutely points out that most of these writers studiously police their comments, deleting anything they disagree with, ironically, excluding anything that diverges from their narrative. This is something even Eva did on a post about the problems with exclusion… Yes, the irony goes deep.

This reinforces the idea that the easiest discernment is in their response to accountability. A person acting in good faith can usually say, “This explains why it happened, but I recognize the harm and will work to prevent it.” Conversely, the mask produces a recurring cycle of harm, denial, justification, identity-based counterattack, victim reversal, ally recruitment, censoring, and blocking with no sustained, nor even attempted, behavioral change.

Unmasking Cluster B

I want to be clear that I’m not offering a diagnosis, but I’m seeing and naming patterns. This discernment allows me to accommodate legitimate disability, state my engagement boundaries explicitly, expect reciprocity and repair, and judge whether the diagnosis is being used to improve functioning or to create immunity from consequences. It helps me be maximally inclusive while protecting me from toxicity.

As far as a recommendation for you, dear reader, the easiest way to discern the difference is that neurodivergency produces lifelong, broadly consistent difficulties with social communication, sensory processing, rigidity, and repetitive patterns, whereas Cluster B behavior is more often organized around abandonment, validation, status, control, entitlement, or exploitation.

Once you see the behavior for what it is, it becomes much easier to distinguish it whether online or in person, and all you have to do is start watching for the pattern. This recommendation is for both neurotypical and truly neurodivergent people, as we aren’t as far apart as the Cluster B manipulators would have you believe. I truly believe that once we pull off that mask, we can create healthy, inclusive cultures.

I’d like to point out that many others are starting to see the same thing, including , who opened my eyes to Cluster B behavior through his personal stories about his mother growing up. He has this to add to the conversation:

So does :

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The Catastrophe of Smokey Bear

Michael Woudenberg — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 08:00:28 GMT

Today's topic ignites the conversation about human hubris and its ecological impact when we view ourselves as masters of nature, or set apart from the consequences. It looks at the recent focus on wildfires and how they’re largely of our own creation, though, not through the reasons that are often provided.

This summer, and most summers of the recent past, we are inundated with news of wildfires across Canada, California, and Europe. Last year started with the devastating wildfires in California and, for over two weeks, we watched the news as the entire town of Pacific Palisades burned to the ground. Everywhere we turn, it seems like the world is on fire.

The blame is often placed on climate change, but that’s only a minor part of the story. The main cause is actually the ecological disaster of Smokey Bear, the mascot for a well-intended prevention of human-caused wildfires, that rode on the back of suppression of ALL wildfires starting around 100 years ago.

Let’s start with a little context about fire first: It’s natural.

It’s so natural that everything on Earth has learned how to adapt to survive it. Even more so, fire is often an essential culling and reproduction method that keeps ecosystems healthy. For example, the Midwestern Jackpine requires fire in older forests to open the pine cones to allow new growth. When fires were suppressed, the stands of trees aged and choked out other species and ecosystems. Notably, the Kirtland Warbler was a bird on the verge of extinction until biologists recognized that it only nests in young-growth jackpine. Fire suppression was causing their extinction, and when prescribed burns were reintroduced, the population rebounded.

This is just one example of thousands, and so, for the sake of brevity, let’s look at what happens when we second-guess nature as we did following the Great Fire of 1910. This fire was undeniably catastrophic and shocked the world in its speed and devastation. It also led to the mass suppression of wildfires in the United States as the U.S. Forest Service shifted to a rigid policy of total fire suppression, aiming to extinguish every wildfire quickly and completely. This led to the 10 A.M. Policy in 1935, which mandated all fires to be suppressed by 10 a.m. the day after discovery.

The result was, counterintuitively, much worse fires. Extinguishing the fires early merely postponed the inevitable while allowing more fuel to accumulate. That’s because frequent low-intensity fires consumed grasses, fallen branches, and young trees, creating open forests in which larger, fire-adapted trees could survive.

Suppression overburdened the forests with unnaturally dense stands of trees connected by “ladder fuels” that can carry flames from the forest floor into the canopy. The resulting fires burn hotter, spread faster, and become far more difficult to control. Instead of fires that burned low and slow, the entire forest now burns.

A thousand years ago, especially in the US, those fires, even if catastrophic, had little human impact. However, dense housing developments nestled close to fuel-dense wildlands, and the resistance to allowing more suburban forests to burn and ‘scar’ the landscape views, created the perfect conflagration for an ecological disaster.

Simply put, what we are seeing is the result of fire suppression, which, even if climate change is putting a thumb on the scale, that scale is already overloaded with a hundred years of unnatural fuel that will burn, regardless.

Let’s focus on the Palisades Fire for a moment because the root causes of the ferocity and devastation were well known! In fact, Design For Disaster, a 1962 Documentary produced by the Los Angeles Fire Department, highlights how, long before we blamed everything on climate change, we understood the risks and yet spent the last 60 years doing nothing about it:

Central to this is the fundamental human foible of hubris. We just think we know more than we do; we tend to view ourselves as supernatural, and we tend to view completely natural things as problems to be contained. Put another way, instead of understanding nature, we pretend we are set apart and above that noise.

Three great examples start with what wrote in Culture of Failure, Geography of Reality, where he shares:

as you keep reading about Los Angeles being burned because of prolonged drought and a desperately dry landscape from climate change, notice what’s happening thirty miles to the south, as the beachfront City of Rancho Palos Verdes pumps up to a million gallons of groundwater a day into the ocean.

The second example is from Stan Luhr, a forensic building expert, who posted a great discussion on LinkedIn where he showed how the houses that burned down were designed in such a way that they are at high risk when you combine the high winds that are endemic to that area of California with fire, which is also a natural occurrence in that coastal desert.

High wind moves burning brands into attics.
Houses with vented (code required) attics burned down.
Houses with single pane windows burn down.
Houses with wood siding burn down.
The very few houses with no attic, no eaves, no gable vents and no combustible siding had the best chance for survival.

He goes on to say that, while water mains dried up due to the reservoir mismanagement, houses burned down with 50,000 gallons of water sitting in pools nearby. That’s the typical amount of water needed to fight a single-family home fire.

The third example is how Eucalyptus trees were planted en masse because they grow fast, they’re quite lovely, and they do well in the California coastal deserts which surround LA. Problem is, they are also nature's pyromaniacs with volatile oils that vaporize under heat and release flammable gases…

So, how many layers of hubris do we have?

Total fire suppression
Combined with restrictions to controlled burning due to concerns of CO2 emission and air quality
densely packed eucalyptus trees like gas-soaked rags
All wrapped into a coastal desert that gets less rain than the Sonoran Desert in Southern Arizona.
Add in the issue with the houses
Then water management
And this doesn’t even get into the problems with the fire response.

Oh, I need to add one more because in 2019, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) began to replace century-old wooden power line poles with steel, widen fire-access lanes, and clear surrounding brush. However, environmental advocates halted the work within days out of concern for the endangered Braunton's milkvetch plants. However, those plants all burned to a crisp in 2025…

So, what do we do with this information?

For every heart-rending picture of burnt wildlife is the underlying reality that Nature isn’t nice; things do die. Fire kills.

Yet it’s also perfectly natural, and it really helps to appreciate nature in all its destructive glory.

It also helps to contextualize that, while Smokey Bear was a well-intended activity, our perpetual human hubris has turned it into an ecological disaster worse than anything Nature would have thrown at us without our interventions.

Thankfully, since it’s almost totally human-caused, we can actually fix it, and this starts with disabusing our pretention that we can control nature or that we can stand outside of it without consequence. Once we do that, we can start to better understand our integration with Nature:

Better forest management through intentional burns
1. This has been starting, but with so much fuel accumulated, this is an incredibly difficult challenge without tremendous labor or the acceptance of more catastrophic fires.
Intelligent building codes:
1. Back to Stan from above, that great discussion on LinkedIn comes with a lot of good building ideas like installing pipes into pools that fire trucks can connect to, spraying fire retardant in attics, water sprinklers in eaves, and more.
Improved urban/wild integration:
1. Ensuring proper set aside for wild areas, and when combined with #1, the acceptance that fire scars are a healthy sign for regrowth.
2. Understanding the larger impact of housing in fire-prone regions.
3. Recognizing the multi-level role of water management and use
And there are even some fun ideas like the introduction of goat herds, on public and private lands, to help reduce foliage. A partnership where ranching can become integrated in urban areas, as Smithsonian Magazine discusses here.
Finally, just to foot-stomp this: Humans are natural, and we are hubristic. We really have to understand that we cannot control nature because, despite our best efforts, nature finds a way to humble us.

What I find, when I apply this to my own life, is more understanding of how I fit in the world, a greater sense of calm about catastrophe, a greater connection with nature, and more humility and appreciation for the world around me. Smokey Bear may have been an ecological disaster, but it provides an opportunity for us to understand who we are and how we fit into a more natural existence.

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The Noble Savage

Michael Woudenberg — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 08:00:55 GMT

Today’s topic explores the mythos of tribal cultures worldwide. When we dig just below the surface, we find the same humans, the same issues, and the same struggles, whether in the Amazon jungles, among American tribes, or in the cities of the world. We’ll also discover how to reconnect with the land to ensure thriving.

There’s an underlying assumption that emerges in conversations about indigenous peoples: that our historical and current tribal cultures are more in tune with nature than the rest of us. This is especially prevalent with what people love to call ‘first nations’ or what we’d call Native Americans here in the United States. However, it also includes Australian Aborigines, the African Bushmen, and uncontacted tribes around the world.

The image that’s created is the Noble Savage with better ways of knowing, connection with nature, a utopia of harmony, peace, and prosperity where the animals sing, nothing dies, and war is a distant thought, brought by invaders who despoil paradise.

Wait, that was Pocahontas…

This is important to extract because much of that angst is exacerbated by what I’ll call the Disneyfication of indigenous people and, in my generation, Pocahontas, specifically the song Colors of the Wind whose lyrics decry European colonization and exploitation of the Americas, is a perfect example.

It resonates because it has an element of truth in it. Graham Hancock writes about this in America Before: The Key to Earth’s Lost Civilization on the crazy layers of civilization that existed before colonization, and Jason Stannard wrote similarly in American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World. Simply put, the European conquest reset Native American civilization to the point that what most colonists experienced were the Mad Max apocalyptic survivors, not the nations from before.

However, it fails to fully land because the natives who lived here at the height of their civilizations weren’t any more in touch with nature or any more magnanimous than those who conquered them. This is something explores in great detail in Conquest Everywhere: The New World Was No Eden. In just one example, he shares how, when the Mayan written scripts were decoded, their culture, once thought to be peaceful, instead carved its true legacy in stone where:

chronology tables read like a ledger: Ah-Cacaw of Tikal captures Jaguar-Paw of Calakmul. Caracol conducts star-war action against Tikal.

More interesting is that the Aztecs, who followed the Mayans, were mercenary soldiers from the North American prairies who moved south. In a twist of fate, they were hired by warring Mayan tribes and, after decades of fighting on behalf of others, decided to just conquer them all and brutally subjugate them.

Unfashionable Truths

Conquest Everywhere: The New World Was No Eden

Templo Mayor (reconstruction), Tenochtitlán, Wikimedia Commons…

3 months ago · 23 likes · 4 comments · Edward Campbell

The stories of mass killings, human sacrifice, and brutal enslavement aren’t hidden, but they also tend to be ignored as inconvenient. It was so bad that when the small contingent of Spanish arrived under Hernán Cortés and conquered Tenochtitlán, they were supported by large numbers of regional tribes, itching to unseat the Aztecs.

Similarly, to the north, the Comanche were some of the most prolific raiders and slavers in North America. In fact, they have more in common with the Vikings than many consider. Like the Vikings, their terror evoked legend and enemies, where the Texas Rangers had no shortage of Native American help, from tribes who were NOT Comanche, to eliminate the threat. Just like the Aztecs.

Another example, pre-dating Columbus, was the Mushkodain tribe from Michigan, also known as the Bone Indians. Their brutality and constant fighting culminated in the creation of the Council of Three Fires consisting of Odawa, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi tribes. The Council responded to the Mushkodain provocations with an intentional war of execution and extermination. Simply put, it was targeted genocide to purge a hyper-violent tribe from their midst. They systematically hunted the Mushkodains down the western coast of Michigan, annihilating men, women, and children, and forcing the few survivors to flee the region permanently, where they were absorbed by other tribes, often as slaves and ‘wives.’

This isn’t isolated, as recent studies in the Mesa Verde region of the Southwest United States show incredible violence, where 90% of human remains from around 1160AD contain trauma to the hands and heads, while other evidence suggests attacks on the pueblo towns in the region as the civilization collapsed. Archaeology continues to uncover long-term trends of persistent war, conquest, and extermination.

What’s really interesting is how this weaves together where the precursors of the Navajo and Apache moved down from Canada and took over the lands recently decimated in the Mesa Verde region. Those who remained hunter-gatherers became the Apache, while those who settled and absorbed the survivors of the Pueblo extermination became the Navajo. However, the Apache were regular raiders and pillagers of the Navajo, and they also raided the Zuni, Hopi, and Taos tribes in the region. The tribes changed, but fighting remained the status quo.

Back to the Comanche, they also weren’t natives to Texas, and, after an internal rift within the Shoshone nation, they pushed down from the north, attacking the Apache in the Great Plains over the course of many decades and pushing them into the mountainous southwest US, where we are most familiar with them. They conducted a war of colonization, pushing from their ‘mother’ tribe in the Wyoming region and capturing the occupied lands south of them, pushing out the ‘natives.’ To close the loop, remember, the Aztecs migrated from this same Texas region further south in their eventual conquest of ancestral Mesoamerica.

As another example of the brutal nature of the Native Americans is the Mandan of the northeast plains. wrote, in detail, about the Okipa, a grueling four-day Mandan initiation ritual that tested young men's endurance to prepare them as warriors. The extreme test started with a four-day fast without sleep, then suspension from the ceiling by wooden skewers pierced through their flesh, and voluntary finger amputation. It ends in a final race where those skewers are hooked to buffalo skulls and the boys are dragged until the skewers rip out, and they fall unconscious, ‘dying’ in practice, to prepare for the realities of war.

While it demonstrated the classic hero's journey and the rites necessary to enter manhood, it also captured the brutal reality of the perpetual war these tribes prepared for. In a perverse way, it was in tune with nature, but that nature is the brutal reality of harsh survival, not the Disneyfication of utopia.

The Okipa, where the initiates are dragged until the skewers pull out, and they’re rendered unconscious.

You don’t have to search deeply to find similar behavior among the Apache, Cheyanne, Cree, and other notable warrior tribes. When you read the history, you also find how many tribes allied with the colonists against their violent neighbors, as the Iroquois and Algonquin did with the French and English. This doesn’t exonerate the brutal nature of the Europeans but contextualizes that the Indigenous residents weren’t fundamentally different.

Even when it comes to spirituality, the indigenous Americans weren’t any more attuned to human needs and their connections to nature than other groups in Europe at the time. levies a similar complaint against the reaction to psychedelics, which ignores that the use likely carried over from the Middle East into Asia and the Americas, as studies in ergot, the mystery religions, and more continue to underlie our ancient history as we expanded outward from Africa. The shamans of the Americas were no more idyllic than the shamans of the Vikings. The truth is, as Andrew concludes, these practices “reflected the full spectrum of human motives, just as modern use does.”

And this really comes close to home when you observe the Indian Reservations across the US. With the exception of a few outliers, what you see aren’t societies living in tune with nature. More often than not, you’re seeing dilapidated housing, broken cars, and zero landscaping sandwiched between reservation casinos and non-reservation urban centers. One of the most jarring being the Salt River Reservation abutting bougie Scottsdale, Arizona. It’s the same land, similar opportunity, burgeoning tribal commerce, and a wasteland on the reservation where the natives survive; they don’t thrive either.

However, all this said, there is a strong case that, in modernity, the West has stepped away from the dirt, the trees, and the blood of its history, and that’s left a gaping hole in our psychology and physiology that causes us to yearn and imagine what life could be if we went native.

Artificial Separation

This separation is undeniable as we sequester ourselves in concrete jungles and subdivisions where everything, including the grass, is artificial. We drive in air-conditioned cars on paved roads and work in steel-and-glass buildings.

Our food is packaged in plastic, thousands of miles from where it grew, perfectly selected, not raw, not too ripe, and surely stuffed full of chemicals we don’t know how to pronounce that don’t exist in its natural state. Food genetically engineered either through selective breeding or laboratory alteration bears no resemblance to what existed just 100 years ago.

Our water pours from taps, perfectly filtered, treated, and clean. In fact, everything is too clean, too sanitized, too divorced from nature. We know this in our minds, and our bodies are also rebelling as our gut biomes are being thrown out of whack.

It’s so bad that our basic physiology is collapsing, where we breathe wrong, we walk wrong, and we even poop wrong because modern convenience separates us so dramatically from our bodies.

Our fabricated societies, crafted online and not in person, are lacking. Even our information is no longer personal, but pumped into our eyeballs through blue light screens, filtered by algorithms, inflamed by algowhores, fear-porn, and PSYOPs designed to trigger your primal brain but divorced from primal responses and tribal safety. We are over-connected and yet more isolated in artificiality. It’s a problem Chris Ryan explored in Civilized to Death.

We are divorced from nature, by and large, and we yearn to get back. Since we are, generally, Western in the United States, it’s easier to blame the origins of that on the East and the solutions on what we took over. It’s a classic game of assuming that Other = Different, and that Different must = Better.

The result is the Disneyfication of Native Americans and the subsequent denigration of everything else. We whitewash the history of the native americans with the colors of the wind, ignore that, not long ago, we were there too, and fail to understand that modernity isn’t something we can manage.

Taking Action

I hope this has added some perspective to the myth of the Noble Savage: that humans are humans are humans, and the solutions aren’t wrapped in some Disney Fairy Tale of natural kumbaya. Nature isn’t nice. Everything is trying to kill you. History is replete with travasty.

However, there are some pretty simple things you can do:

When was the last time you actually stepped barefoot on dirt?
When was the last time you grew food? (or even a houseplant?)
When was the last time you harvested it? Butchered an animal? Hunted or gathered food from the wild? Went fishing for goodness sake?

Because there is something sacred about all of that. It just involves putting down the screens, leaving the chaos of the cities, and touching grass! If you want to find people who are in touch with nature, go to a farm, a hunting lodge, a fishing camp, a backcountry hiking group, a birdwatching, butterfly, or nature photography group. Really, anyone out there who is engaged in real life.

There’s nothing mythological about Native Americans or any other tribal cultures around the world. Europeans were there, not that long ago, and the tribes here were not so noble. They represented the grand texture of human life, ingenuity, and, yes, brutality. However, that doesn’t mean that what we have today is necessarily better.

But it’s also not worse. We are safer, healthier, more peaceful, with more leisure time, more disposable income, and greater freedoms to travel, explore, and more. Put another way, there’s nothing stopping you from reconnecting with nature. You just have to be savage enough to say no and step away to regain that noble connection with the land to ensure thriving.

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Hack Your Brain! A dynamic exploration into Counterintelligence and Mixed Mental Arts

Michael Woudenberg — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 17:41:24 GMT

Available for iOS and Android

Damn the Patriarchy

Michael Woudenberg — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 08:01:20 GMT

Today’s topic investigates the nuance between the Patriarchy and the Matriarchy and how our common misunderstandings of what they really are deny us an understanding of what it truly means to be human. Let’s strip back the false binaries and fictions to find out how nature optimized us for both.

The term Patriarchy is almost exclusively used as a pejorative in the modern lexicon to capture everything wrong with humanity. Conversely, the term Matriarchy is used as a shortcut for victim or a juxtaposition against the patriarchy for everything that’s good and healthy in humanity. A recent LinkedIn post by highlights a quandary while proffering the following definitions:

“Patriarchy organizes society around: → Hierarchy — who is above, who is below → Control — who has it, who doesn't → Ownership — of land, of labor, of women, of children → Competition — for resources, status, dominance → Domination — the idea that power over others is the highest good

Matriarchy organizes society around: → Stewardship — care for what sustains us → Relationship — the web we live inside, not a ladder we climb → Cooperation — the understanding that survival is collective → Care — as a serious value, not a soft one → Continuity — the long view, not the quarterly report”1

At first blush, those definitions seem to fit, and for very obvious reasons. Given what we explored recently in The Two Rules of Life, evolutionary biology has optimized males and females differently:

The female is optimized for creating, growing, and raising new life.
The male is optimized for creating, growing, and providing resources and protecting the tribe.

Underlying that definition is an issue I need to address out of the gate, and that’s the perception that the patriarchy protects men while oppressing and abusing women. This is where it starts to get complicated because we have to face the shadow behaviors on all sides, tease apart the healthy vs. the unhealthy patriarchy, and strip down the structures to their fundamental elements to really understand them.

Yes, there are negative masculine behaviors, but it is my argument today that those are not a feature of the patriarchy, but rather why the patriarchy exists. Further, due to human nature, that negative shadow never goes away because those behaviors can be useful, and it’s a constant battle to keep it at bay (or turn it into a weapon against your enemies). Further yet, the matriarchy and the patriarchy have never existed in an either/or binary. It’s always been an AND function. This is something we explored in Chaos and Order, where the Yin and Yang are two halves, one of chaos and the other of order, one feminine and the other masculine, coming together to create an antifragile whole that restrains the shadow in themselves and in each other.

While the original definition in that post teased at the nuance of the answer, the conclusion, and further posts from Carolyn highlighted a simplified definition that seems to drive the major perceptions of patriarchy and matriarchy:

Patriarchy = everything wrong with everything in the world
Matriarchy = everything right with everything in the world

This isn’t hyperbolic on my side because she went on to post:

We did not invent patriarchy because it was the best system. We inherited it because it was the system that won wars, r.a.p.i.n.g. and destroying ancient Matriarchal societies. A society built for conquest will conquer societies built for living. That’s not a moral victory. That’s just how conquest works.

What Carolyn describes is the shadow behavior, and the shadow has a seductive attraction. (Don’t give in to the Dark Side!) She is right that we need to keep the shadow in check, but the shadow is not the patriarchy. Further, the statement positions the matriarchy and patriarchy as adversaries, which, as we just described in yin and yang, is wrong and shows her own adverse shadow. The shadow is why the patriarchy exists.

The Shadow

It helps to understand that both the masculine and the feminine have positive and negative manifestations. Again, back to Chaos and Order, these are represented as:

The Good Mother, Gaia, Mother Earth | The Devouring Mother
The Good King | The Absent or Tyrannical Father

What’s typically being described as “patriarchy” in this debate is narrowed to the negative manifestation of the masculine. A definitional error is that this masculine shadow is only compared to the positive manifestation of the feminine, the Tyrant vs. Gaia. But that’s not how it works, and that’s not how it is, and those negative behaviors aren’t the status quo. The shadow exists, absolutely, and the patriarchy and the matriarchy fight to keep the shadows in check. (Stay tuned for a forthcoming investigation into the feminine shadow)

The other catch with Carolyn’s original definition is that what she describes as the matriarchy is actually part of a healthy patriarchy. I wager she’s blinded by the adversarial relationship she’s created, but it’s pretty clear she’s abandoned the actual femininity of the matriarchy. As an improvement, I’d proffer that her original definition encompasses most of the patriarchy, while the matriarchy differs thusly:

Matriarchy organizes society around: → Nurture — dependency is protected and developed into competence → Enculturation — transmitting values, identity, behavior, and tradition → Socialization — teaching language, manners, values, identity, and the norms required to live with others → Integration — weaving individuals into families and communities through relationship, mediation, inclusion, and care.2

This distinction is important because feminism seems to ignore the uniqueness of the matriarchy and, like Carolyn, is fighting over who does the patriarchy better.3 It also misses that her prescriptions are the shadow feminine under the guise of care, and what we see is Toxic Empathy and a ‘Mother knows best” attitude. It’s very successful in painting the entire patriarchy with the shadow while absolving the matriarchy of any role, agency, or, heaven forbid, negative impact itself.

Yes, there’s a shadow. It exists on both sides and expresses itself slightly differently. However, the patriarchy isn’t defined only by its shadow, and claiming the positive patriarchy as part of the matriarchy actually exhibits the feminine shadow and doesn’t help us understand the patriarchy at all!

The Patriarchy in Context

Here’s the reality: The healthy sides of both the patriarchy and matriarchy constrain the negative inclinations of both men and women while directing their energies toward the two things that are optimized for.

Matriarchy = creating, growing, and raising new life.
Patriarchy = creating, growing, and providing resources and protection to the matriarchy.

To put this in context, the worst inclinations of men are terrible until you really need them. Sociopaths create chaos in society, but they’re useful as weapons of war to protect the very society they can’t quite fit into. This is why elite military units have an above-average number of sociopaths. Note, though, that it’s the patriarchy encapsulating these shadow behaviors and directing them toward something useful. Left alone, these behaviors would dominate; held in check, they eliminate threats.

To be balanced, each half has to encapsulate the light with the shadow.

The patriarchy is also a dragnet that doesn’t discriminate whether these negative behaviors come from men or women. When you hear complaints about ‘boss bitches’ being ‘held back’ by the patriarchy, just recognize that the patriarchy doesn’t appreciate that behavior from men or women. Too often, when women enter patriarchal systems, they emulate the shadow behaviors the patriarchy is designed to suppress. They feel the suppression without realizing that men, behaving the same way, do too.4

There’s another twist here in that both the patriarchy and matriarchy correct the excesses of the other. Carolyn demonstrates the valuable role the matriarchy can play in correcting the excess of the patriarchy, but the complication is that she’s railing against any attempt the patriarchy might make (this essay likely included) in correcting her own excess, manifesting the shadow of the feminine.

I’d also like to point out that her definition of patriarchy includes domination, which is wrong.5 A healthy patriarchal hierarchy shouldn’t be confused with unchecked rule by the strongest individual. Research on humans and chimpanzees shows that while alphas can gain influence through dominance, intimidation, and coercion, this influence is fragile because adversaries, working together, can bring the tyrant down. Domination is the shadow, and we can see its shade cast in many places because it can work, but only in the short term, and often provokes resistance over time.

Instead, the best leaders cultivate allies, care for potential supporters, mediate conflicts, and maintain coalitions. Simply put, domination doesn’t work because hierarchy depends on social intelligence, alliances, reciprocal support, and some degree of acceptance by the group. Put another way, it’s stewardship, relationship, cooperation, care, and continuity. This is what the healthy patriarchy and society writ large celebrate, nurture, and promote.6

That’s why humans have repeatedly developed what researchers call leveling mechanisms: criticism, ridicule, ostracism, sanctions, and coordinated resistance against individuals who try to convert rank into unrestricted personal power. This is why, as adeptly points out, you have chivalry because these are the mechanisms that create healthy, balanced men.

Similarly, this is also why the healthy patriarchy holds men accountable to the Hero’s Journey, where men have to literally die to their shadow to be reborn and add value to society. The matriarchy also values this sacrifice, as evidenced by its persistent use in books, plays, and movies throughout history. This is true patriarchy.

Burn it Down?

At this point, I hope you appreciate how the simplified definitions of the evil patriarchy and magnanimous matriarchy fall apart under simple scrutiny. The problem is we rarely allow the conversation to get into this gritty reality, and today, it feels like feminism is improperly comparing only the positive feminine with the negative masculine. But clearly, this is stupid.

But what happens when you damn the patriarchy and seek to burn it all down? This is a topic we poked at in Tradition, where the author Donald Kingsbury wrote:

“Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. Throw away the solution and you get the problem back.”

Simply put, when you work to destroy the system that holds back the worst inclinations of men, you aren’t freeing yourself from domination, as that’s a shadow behavior. What you’ve done is tear down the fence that keeps that behavior in check and let it roam unfettered.

I also don’t know any men who appreciate the masculine shadow. But, in attacking all things bad as patriarchy, we’ve thrown the baby out with the bathwater, and, as Chesterton’s Fence warns, when you remove a social structure, you unlock everything that it was designed to hold back. Let’s look at two examples that shatter the simplistic understanding of patriarchy that we’ve been analyzing.

The first is my Alma Mater, Michigan Technological University, an engineering school where there were three men to every one woman. To hear tell, that should have been the most dangerous place for women. In fact, it was the opposite. Michigan Tech is, and has been, one of the safest places for women at any University. All that raping, domination, and ownership of women? It was rare because the worst inclinations of men were checked by men.7

The statistics are damning because universities that have equal to or greater numbers of women actually have greater percentages of sexual assaults.8 The women are competing more, and the patriarchy is not as strong. These also tend to be more liberal universities, which makes the numbers more contradictory than we’d assume.

For the second example, let’s look at the collision of the shadows of both the patriarchy and the matriarchy happening right now in the United Kingdom regarding the Pakistani Rape Gangs. recently wrote Britain’s Rape Gangs and the Failure of Feminism, where she identifies: “One of the report’s most unsettling implications for feminists is that the loudest voices forcing this scandal into the open were not the major women’s organizations or state-backed feminist commissions but insurgent figures: male, and outside the consensus classes.”

What you’re seeing is the patriarchy trying to stand up against accusations of racism to protect the women of their culture against sexual threats.

Think on that one again: the loudest voices demanding accountability, even protesting this violence on women, are largely Men.

When you tear down the healthy patriarchy, you unleash the very things you want to avoid. This is exactly the situation that’s manifesting in universities and with the Pakinstani Rape gangs as the shadow ‘patriarchy’9 meets Western feminism, which has hobbled chivalry with accusations of racism via misapplied, toxic empathy.

Summary

To formulate a better definition, I propose that the Healthy Patriarchy = creating, growing, and providing resources and protection to the matriarchy through structures that constrain the shadow and direct the energies toward order, competence, hierarchy, and sacrifice.

Human civilization depends on two social orders, where the matriarchal order creates, nurtures, and integrates human life, while the patriarchal order organizes resources, protection, external cooperation, and long-term provision around that life. Each order channels characteristic human drives toward socially productive ends, and each restrains the ways those same drives can become destructive within its own order, while also correcting the excesses of the other.10

The counterintuitive insight is that the alternative to patriarchy is not matriarchy. Likewise, the alternative to male domination is not female domination. The right answer is a complementary system in which both the matriarchy and patriarchy constrain, correct, and strengthen one another while preventing the negative tendencies, the shadow behaviors that threaten stability.

Divided, masculine order becomes sterile, and feminine care becomes suffocating. Integrated, they produce a social order capable of protecting, generating, developing, and renewing human life; in short, an antifragile relationship. So, let’s damn this unhealthy understanding of the patriarchy and ensure we elevate the healthy version, allow it to restrain the shadow, and pair it with a healthy matriarchy that’s doing the same. Long live the Patriarchy!

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Earning Life

Michael Woudenberg — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 08:01:10 GMT

Today’s topic addresses a common misunderstanding that our survival in a hostile natural world has become systematized through complex transactional mediums which are misinterpreted as requiring humans to pay to live. We’ll step back from the moral language and dive into evolutionary biology to see the truth.

Every once in a while, I come across an opinion that’s so divorced from reality that I have to really stop and wonder how they got to this point. Recently, it was this gem, right here on Substack, suggesting that we are the only species on Earth that has to pay to live.

Superficially, it almost sounds legitimate; however, it quickly falls apart. Note the switch in language. The post starts with “Pay to live” and then transitions to “Earn the right.” It’s nuanced and sounds similar but hits you with two triggers, attempting the same task but missing what’s actually happening underneath. Let’s break this apart, starting with Paying and then analyzing Earning to better understand the problem.

Paying to Live

This is the hook. He’s not wrong. We have to pay for Land, Water, Shelter, and Food. No other creature on this earth has to pay anything…

Kind of… Notice where your brain went with “Pay.”

Payments are typically made with money, or at least, in our common vernacular, we immediately consider the exchange of currency for goods as payment. The reason is that humans are the only species that uses currency as a transaction medium.

Humans are also the only species that have developed broad-spectrum and highly specialized skills and services across all elements of Land development, Water acquisition, sanitation and delivery, complex Shelter engineering, building and maintenance, and the global farming, harvesting, processing, and distribution of Food. Put another way, humans are the only critters on planet earth for whom the vast majority of us put zero direct labor into developing our land, water, shelter, and food. We just consume what others produce.

And the consumption we have available is that of the ultra-rich just one hundred years ago. Given you’re reading this on Substack, you have access to the internet, a computing device, and the luxury of time. However, most of us have even more. Even the poor have conveniences that were unfathomable just centuries ago, which we, yes, have to pay for.

Likewise, others consume what we produce. I write here on Substack and have published two novels. They’re not necessary for survival, but they help us understand who we are as humans and how to survive better, hopefully even thrive! Which, by the way, if you appreciate these essays, you can help keep them open for everyone by becoming a paid subscriber!

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What we just showed is the exchange of currency for goods. Because 20% off, which makes it $24 a year, or $2 a month, or just 50¢ an essay, is a way to demonstrate value using a transaction medium. I’m not bartering for chickens, housecleaning, land, or freshwater because that just doesn’t make sense.

But… if I were your tribal shaman, sharing these counterintuitive insights, helping you understand human psychology and sociology, and even physical health, you would probably hook me up with Land, Water, Shelter, and Food. But these insights would have to be worth that compensation, or I’d have to go do the work myself. Simply put, I don’t have a right to your hard-earned money; I have to earn your support.

Earning the Right to Exist

Now, let’s get to the twist: the post began with payment for Land, Water, Shelter, and Food, then pivoted to earning the right to exist. The simplest read screams injustice when we think of the other creatures on the planet just existing.

But are they? Because if you think those other creatures aren’t working their assess off for those things, you don’t know nature. There is zero unconditional access, and nature is not nice. Every other species has to fight to get land, water, shelter, and food. Hell, most animals eat other animals to get that food.

Every living thing on this planet earns the right to exist on the planet that made us. That’s the fundamental cornerstone of evolutionary biology. Survival of the fittest. If you don’t earn that right, nature will eliminate you, and the fossil record is replete with billions of examples of animals that did not earn the right.

There is no natural right to existence. It is the core foundation of what we explored in the first of the two rules for life. Incidentally, that post reflects the necessity of the second rule of life because it’s cloaked in the moral language of could, should, and ought, and is missing what IS. We have the ability to survive; we don’t have the right.

Any living thing on this planet has to fight, strive, and yes, earn the ‘right’ to be here because not doing so leads to entropy, which ends in decay and death. What makes that meme intoxicating is that entropy is easy, and you see the shift of blame from personal laziness toward the implication that the system is somehow costly and denying the right to existence.

If you take that system away, the effort, counterintuitively, increases. As many of you have observed in survivor-type TV shows like Alone, Outlast, Survivorman, 7 vs. Wild, and the eponymous and long-running Survivor series, the challenges and effort involved in mere existence, unprotected by that system, are epic, and failure is constant. That’s because the right to exist requires fighting to earn it, and the systems that we created help us maintain that right and to allow thriving in a hostile world.

From Surviving to Thriving

The systems humans created foster hyper-specialization, allowing masses of people to put in fractional effort across millions of systems to produce the things we use. A simple example of the depth of economics is the classic story of the pencil, where systems of systems of systems and global supply chains work together to produce a ‘simple’ pencil.

This system, in turn, pays us for our labor, and that payment is in a currency that serves as a medium of exchange, which we use to obtain those things. The whole system created a life of luxury, separated from nature and, ironically, allows people like Frank Bard to post that meme and angrily type away on high-tech keyboards, connected to billions of humans around the world, while enjoying air conditioning and plentiful and safe food and water.

Thriving in this environment means understanding where we actually sit in the natural schema and finding better ways to connect because the root feeling here isn’t wrong. We do feel out of touch with nature as we live in concrete jungles surrounded by artificial… everything. We also have a moral language that’s often divorced from fundamental reality.

For the latter, I recommend you Go Touch Grass. Get out there into nature, get away from the chaos and hustle and bustle.

For the former, for the moral language, once you’re out in nature, I challenge you to watch an ant-hill for more than five minutes. Or a bee’s nest. Or watch the birds. Observe the rabbits constantly looking for threats. What you don’t see there is leisure time; you don’t see rights; you just see them earning their existence day after day after day. You don’t see the moral language in their existence. You see survival.

When you step back to your current situation, with proper grounding in what IS, you can then consider ways to make it better. The catch is to always align your moral language to reality. This balances the first rule of evolutionary biology against the second rule of soul maturation and is the key to thriving.

We do have to earn our right to exist, and we, as humans, have mastered it to the point where we are really thriving in almost every conceivable dimension. Ignoring that risks entropy, whereas appreciating that reality allows us to continue the trend.

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Laugh at Yourself

Michael Woudenberg — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 08:02:18 GMT

Today’s topic adds to our toolkit of Mixed Mental Arts and provides another way to embrace humility, which we first explored in Embracing our White Belts. This powerful art can be applied to politics, our life circumstances, and to our own behaviors to uncover the absurd things we do, and then laugh them away.

Let’s be honest, we take ourselves too seriously. Just look at any social media platform, and 90% of it is the projection of the most inane banalities as the most important thing in the world. When questioned, we often double down and affix to tenacious identities, and when pushed, we catastrophize our circumstances as worse than they’ve ever been.

Simply put, we don’t laugh at ourselves enough. There’s no room for the ironic chuckle when you realize you’ve created a logical contradiction. There’s only anger when it’s pointed out. Instead of seeing the absurdity in how the seriousness is feeding the problem, the reaction is to accuse the person laughing of irresponsibility.

But this isn’t easy. It requires introspection, and it requires constant effort. There is no ‘one-stop’ win for laughing at yourself. Once you pull the self-righteous stick out of your ass, it might start with a frustrated yet rueful grunt, but over time, the more we learn to laugh at our own absurdities, the more we can find the amazing things that surround us, boosting mood, perspective, and positivity.

To get started, let’s break this down into three layers and explore how to laugh at politics, circumstances, and ourselves, both our behavior and our ego.

Laugh at Politics

The politics challenge came to a head recently with a fellow who was clogging my feed with post after post about the horrors of American politics. This is bad enough, but even crazier because he’s Australian and, when questioned, he viewed me as the irresponsible one for not caring as much as he does and his actions as his duty…

However, I honestly think it’s hilarious. Sure, Trump is an anathema to how I would like to see the President of the United States conduct business. I wouldn’t want to work for him, that’s for sure. But what I find more absurd than Trump is the response. I still chuckle when I think of how many news cycles were spent on “Covfefe.”

Yes, he says absurd things. No, you don’t have to repost every absurd thing he says. Humorously, he’s called an egomaniac, yet those same folks fail to understand that every over-inflated panic-attack post they feverishly type feeds his ego. It’s the opposite reaction to what I recommend in Heaven is High, and the Emperor is Far Away, and we’ve collapsed heaven into a hellscape of social media while inviting the emperor to live rent-free in our brains.

And yes, I laugh. I laugh a lot because it’s so absurd, and yet people take it so seriously that it becomes more absurd. It’s something recently wrote in Never Trust the Unironic, where he dives into the idea that, if you can’t laugh at yourself or your life or your beliefs, you’re never going to be able to do much in this world but experience misery. He asks:

Can dyed-in-the-wool Republicans and Democrats laugh at their presidents’ follies? Do communists, libertarians, and socialists smirk at their ideologies’ absurdities? Why do the devout never seem to chuckle at the inanities sprinkled amid their admirable beliefs?

So, yes, laugh at politics, laugh at how seriously they’re taking themselves, and laugh at how seriously you take them. When you can step back and just chuckle, you’ll feel the shackles in your brain unlock, and you’ll be able to step away more and more and focus on laughing at your circumstances.

Laugh at your Circumstances

Coupled with our sense of identity with politics is also how seriously we take our circumstances. As we explored in How to Be Miserable, much of our misery is self-inflicted because we take ourselves, our goals, our perceptions, and, especially, our grievances way too seriously. That’s why the 10 commandments of misery are bracketed as.

1) Thou Shalt Label Thyself and Chafe at Labels
10) Thou Shalt Wallow in Apocalypse

The first is that we take the labels so seriously that we can’t see them for their facile absurdity, and the tenth is that we catastrophize everything under the idea that NOTHING HAS BEEN WORSE! which is absurd, and I laugh about all the time when I consider just how damn good we have it right now.

One of the tricks I’ve learned to help provide perspective, especially when I’m tempted to take my circumstances too seriously, is to Stare Into Evil and really consider how bad things could get and have gotten in the past. It’s shockingly therapeutic to consider the depth of darkness, and then, when you pull back out and consider your current minor inconvenience, done right, you can’t help but chuckle.

Even better, you’ll start to realize just how much cool stuff is happening as recently wrote in World Cup Fans Discover Ordinary America; Maybe We Should Too. Imagine awe in ‘ordinary’ America. Awe in things we take for granted that cause thousands of others to stop and marvel while we drive by, rage-posting the latest banal political outrage on social media. When you do that, you’ll start laughing at your own behavior.

Laugh at Your Behavior

Lastly, and wrapping it all together, is to laugh at yourself; your own behaviors at the intimately personal level. This is important because it’s about introspection, not projection. It’s fundamentally related to the crucial social tool of teasing. Now, this might seem counterintuitive, but teasing is incredibly important to gently guide behavior in larger social settings.

Being able to laugh at yourself and roll with the teasing allows informal feedback, long before it needs to escalate. Those who can’t handle teasing risk something even worse, as people tend to avoid overt confrontation and will just slowly push the person out of their lives. The overserious person typically finds themselves both miserable and alone as they eschew the ability to laugh at themselves.

Worse, they miss the critical opportunity to improve at what they do. This leans into another of Andrew’s essays, How To Be Great, According To Xenophon, where he shares a quote from Seneca:

“No one prompts laughter if he has already gotten a laugh at his own expense. Tradition relates how Vatinius, a man born for both laughter and hatred, was a charming and witty joker. He said a great many things at the expense of his own feet and his scarred neck. This is how he avoided being made fun of by his enemies, who were as numerous as his deformities…”
— Seneca, On the Constancy of the Wise Person, 17.2

This is a tactic I used to great success growing up, when I was truly bullied by a small group of people. I was tall, gangly, and, yes, nerdy. I was a perfect magnet and got the nickname “Gump” from the blockbuster movie of my childhood. Instead of hiding from it, I leaned in. I laughed at myself, and that forced a situation where anyone else was laughing with me, not at me.

Sure, I was gumpy; I grew six inches in a year, my brain had no idea where my body ended! I could have taken offense, but I stopped taking it seriously and laughed. However, because I was laughing at myself and I saw the need for improvement, I doubled down and worked my ass off to improve my coordination. I’m also focused on helping my own percosiouly tall children do the same (My 13-year-old daughter will likely break 6 feet in height this year.)

Being able to laugh at my behavior has been one of the most important tools for professional development I’ve ever used. It breaks down the defenses and keeps me humble as I consider the absurdities of my own reactions and the size of my ego.

Laugh at Your Ego

The final element is to just laugh at your ego and all the things you clutch to yourself as identities, values, and all the other banalities you’ve conflated to be of utmost importance. Once you’ve stripped off the first three layers, you’ll find your ego at the core, and with the practice you’ve acquired, you’ll find, as Epictetus said: "He who laughs at himself never runs out of things to laugh at."

Because truly, the person who needs to laugh first is yourself, and once you do that, you’ll find how many things you’ve allowed others to control or manipulate and, giving perspective, just how absurd that really is. Laughing at your ego is hard, but incredibly rewarding.

Tying it Together

Being able to laugh at politics, your circumstances, and yourself provides four different layers of existence that demand reconsideration. It’s what and I wrote about in The Power of Inversion, where, when we find ourselves hyper-focused on something, desperately trying to hold on, it helps to invert and really consider if we’re being logical or absurd.

Most of the time, our ego blinds us to absurdity, and one way to really highlight this is the art of Mastering Irreverence. This is a powerful mental tool for looking at the things we take most seriously, and it intentionally applies irreverence, breaking the ‘sacred’ into gritty reality. Coupled with that sense of humor, I’ve found myself laughing at just how crazy and silly it really looks.

I’ve done this personally, professionally, and politically. It’s been refreshing to just laugh because it frees me from the bonds that others demand I conform to, while helping reframe and redirect my attention to what really matters. I laugh, step away from my computer, and realize there’s actually more in life that's awesome than the absurd banality of what I thought was serious.

It’s a critical Mixed Mental Art that helps us embrace the polymathic mindset of Insatiable Curiosity, the Humility to accept I don’t have all the answers, and Intentional Reframing to see if I understand the situation. Laughter helps soften the impact of each of these as they challenge who we are, how we view ourselves, and how we position ourselves in the world.

Laughter is also one of the best therapies, and this powerful art can be applied to politics, our life circumstances, and our own behaviors to uncover the absurd things we do and then laugh them away.

What have you discovered that now makes you laugh? What beliefs, cares, identities, or politics were held dear, but now you just chuckle?

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A Defense of Populism

Michael Woudenberg — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 08:01:58 GMT

Today’s topic strives to untangle and understand what is actually meant when we use populism as a pejorative. As with much of politics, we find that its use reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of a critically important concept, and that the solution is far easier to achieve individually than we’re told. It’s a perfect topic as we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence here in the United States.

It doesn’t take long on social media or even just watching the news to hear the word “populism” thrown out as a pejorative specifically toward the right wing of political America. “Right-wing populism” is lumped in with Fascists and Nazis as some deep, menacing force that threatens our country.

But what is populism?

noun

a political approach that strives to appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups.

Huh… Doesn’t that make almost any Democrat a populist under a Republican regime and vice versa? Oh, and do you know what else is profoundly populist? Communism and Socialism. In fact, their entire foundation requires populism, and it doesn’t take a hard look at the revolutions over the past 100 years to see that, whether right-wing or left-wing, they’re populist.

But also, wasn’t that the entire reason for the American Revolution? I mean, if you’ve read the Declaration of Independence, you saw the unmistakable flavor of unadulterated populism constantly pushing back on government excess and disdain of the elites. That’s what we celebrate every 4th of July for the past 250 years.

In fact, our entire Constitution is based on empowering populist agency, with power in the federal government restrained and governance structures pushed down to the states and the people. Even more fundamentally, democracy itself is populism, in which the masses get to vote for their preferred candidates.

This is what I’ll call healthy populism, which recognizes that institutions are failing to represent ordinary people, that elites have become insulated, and that power needs to be made accountable again.

There’s an interesting flipside to democracy, though, which Alexis de Tocqueville coined: the "tyranny of the majority" in his seminal 1835 work, Democracy in America. What he describes is the potential for democratic majorities to impose their will, suppressing the rights and voices of minority groups or individuals.

What this is really describing is a form of populism which suggests that “We alone are the real people. Our enemies are illegitimate. Institutions that block us are corrupt. Losing only proves the system was rigged.”

This is unhealthy populism that tilts toward factional authoritarianism. It’s also apolitical, as you can see with how fast communism turned from anti-elite to the elite communist party as the ‘real people,’ and anyone who disagreed was considered illegitimate. I merely have to point out that the Gulags existed to put proof to point.

Balance

The thing to recognize is that few of our political systems would exist without populism. This is the nature that describes as both anti-elite and revolutionary. Which makes sense because your elites are my tyrants and vice versa, and the only way to fix that is revolution. What he adds, though, is key, and that’s polarization. As he describes:

Affective polarization refers to the belief that the “other side” is not merely wrong, but illegitimate, dangerous, or evil.
While populism describes a theory of politics, affective polarization occurs when that theory of politics becomes manifest.

Polarization is the natural manifestation of any political ideology, and populism is how you motivate polarization in order to make a change. Put another way, no revolution, including the one that founded the United States, could happen without populism and polarization.

I’d also suggest that polarization isn’t bad either, as we need to challenge the status quo to grow, or at least avoid being stagnant. For example, a perfectly conservative nation will die for lack of growth, and a perfectly progressive nation will die from a lack of controlled identity. So you need a functioning polarization to keep the two balanced, which is driven by their own populisms.

This is why the Founders didn’t create a democracy; they created a Constitutional Republic with multiple checks and balances. Did you know that the Senate was originally designed to temper the populist House of Representatives? Representatives are elected by the people for two-year stints and reflect the will of the people. Conversely, Senators were originally representatives of the States, and voted for six-year terms to temper the passions of the populace with the pragmatism of the States. On top of this they added the Executive Branch and the Judiciary, providing three legs of government with their checks and balances (read empowered yet managed polarization and populism), all further constrained by the Bill of Rights.

This allows true populism to happen down deeper at the state and local levels. Even the original intent of the States were to be areas where people could experiment with what worked well based on their desires. This allows California to manage differently than Texas and the people can vote with their ballots and their feet as they’re currently doing. The system has constrained populism overall, with fractional polarization, keeping the voice of the people clear, ensuring the elites weren’t tyrannical.

The Fear

So what’s the fear of modern populism? Fundamentally, because power has slowly concentrated higher and higher, and polarization has also concentrated into two major parties, which weaponize populism, stoke polarization, and tilt toward factional authoritarianism and the ‘otherization’ of their opponents. The irony of accusations of right-wing populism is that it’s a mirror back. The right wing are the ‘others’ against whom? The left wing’s noble population and glorious leaders?

This is a topic we explored in Looking Into a Mirror, where you realize the ones levying the insults and accusations are reacting to what they see in themselves. They’re reacting to what they’d do in your situation, not what you’re doing. And that should be patently obvious as well. (We can invert this, but the main accusations of populism come from the Left, so I’m holding the mirror up that way first)

Simply put, they’re expecting from the other side what they expect from themselves. And since many of our elite universities, elite companies, elite governments, and elite social circles have tilted towards the Left, they naturally see the anti-elite and revolutionary elements of populism as an existential threat. Thankfully, there is still a chance at balance.

Synthesis

To balance populism, there should be tension, and I think we need to return to MORE populism, not less. This is where I found what wrote in the recent essay, These Two Books Contain the Sum of All Human Knowledge, so insightful. The First book is The Revolt of the Elites, which posulates that the elites have locked themselves away from reality and disconnected themselves from society, where the author, Lasch, recommends:

Return to a more populist, community-oriented form of democracy, where power is decentralized, and citizens are actively engaged in public life, restoring trust in institutions and bridging the gap between the elites and the masses.

The second book is Revolt of the Public, which suggests that the public’s access to social media and the ability for almost anyone to garner an audience regardless of who they are undermines the legitimate authority necessary to function as a country, and the author, Gurri, recommends:

We need new models of governance—more responsive and adaptable to the demands of the digital age, to maintain the visibility the public demands of its elites.

I agree with Adam that we see both manifesting today, and that’s what I’d suggest is inflaming polarization, which is fueling the elites on both sides who want nothing more than to weaponize populism. However, it’s not like a cabal of Crystaliens or Lizard People,1 it’s something much simpler. It’s the abdication of our healthy populism, and that populism relies on one thing, and only one thing: Agency!

Healthy populism requires each of us to recognize that we own ourselves, that we are responsible for ourselves, and that we can elect people who we also hold accountable. What we see on both sides is the abdication of agency. MAGA isn’t about individual accountability but siccing the attack dog of Trump and Company© on the Elites™ on the other side.

Which, I actually support because those elites had become so entrentched and ossified that a counter dark populism bubbled up with Trump Derangement Syndrome® where you’ve seen a political party go from viewing open borders as a Republican Conspiracy as Bernie Sanders accused in 2015 to the full embrace of open borders and claims that anything less is pure racism that the left flipped to in 2021, largely in opposition to Trump’s Build the Wall campaign.

Other notable flips include the general leftist distrust of big-pharma and the medical-industrial complex as recently as 2015, to their incredible inversion and full-throated defense of the COVID vaccine in 2021 (but not when the vaccine was Trump’s idea). Ironically, this created an inversion collision between both sides with “My Body My Choice” where Republicans used bodily autonomy arguments against vaccine mandates while supporting abortion restrictions, and Democrats used bodily autonomy arguments for abortion rights while supporting vaccine mandates.

On the right, it’s just as bad as they pivoted from fiscal responsibility under Obama to Trump-era debt expansion and from free trade to tariff nationalism. They “back the blue” but complain about the weaponization of the FBI. They decry the over-reach and militarization of the police while supporting paramilitary ICE raids.

What you see in each of these is a complete abdication of Agency in support of demagogues and elite elements. You also don’t see the demand for accountability, of actual agency from others (unless it’s the opposing side). The abdication is complete, and politics is driven by Narcisssists and NPCs where freedom dies in the middle.

The key thing to remember, though, is that changing this starts with you! You have to break the shackles, free your mind, think for yourself, and step beyond the slogans. Populism isn’t the problem. Our lack of Agency is.

That’s not to say that we’re all free to live to our own desires. The structure of the Republic was designed to balance populism against the ambitions both of the few and of the many. This requires that agency, and its subsequent liberty, cannot be separated from civic duty; otherwise, it turns into private indulgence, turning back into the negative populism that is being corrupted and weaponized.

And that’s what is most likely to upset the balance of populism and create polarization, because there’s no shortage of people looking to gain power, and there’s no shortage of people with half-baked opinions that will say anything to gain clicks and engagement. The only way to balance it is with our agency connected to civic duty.

So, let’s get back to populism. Let’s wrangle with what Lasch and Gurri are warring with in those two books regarding our elites and ourselves. Let’s embrace our agency and recognize that the institutions are failing to represent ordinary people, and that elites have become insulated, and that power needs to be made accountable again. Let’s defend populism and also temper it by recognizing that healthy populism requires individual agency. Let’s keep this great experiment going long into the future.

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The Original Porn

Michael Woudenberg — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 12:02:45 GMT

Today’s topic wrangles with a contradiction between male and female consumption of erotic content. Men tend to prefer visual, and women tend to prefer verbal. This, in itself, isn’t the contradiction; that occurs when we have such different perspectives on the acceptability of those media as well as the twists and turns of female sexuality we aren’t supposed to discuss in polite company. Let’s go deeper!

I’ve been wrestling with a contradiction for a while: the number of women gorging on dark romance and also pearl-clutching about #MeToo. Fifty Shades of Grey, a smut book about a rich and powerful man taking sexual advantage of a young woman, was a blockbuster book and movie, gushed about in thousands of book clubs by women. At the same time, women, often those very readers, were accusing rich and powerful men of taking sexual advantage of women.

What’s even crazier is the number of women who have rape fantasies and use that imagery to orgasm during sex. Yeah, when I heard that I had to uncover the data but I hesitated to just plunge in before handling the nuanced prep work.

According to one study, 62% of women admitted to fantasizing about being forced to have sex.1 Other surveys find that about four in ten women admit to having rape fantasies with a median frequency of about once a month.2 This includes during actual intercourse, where one study noted that many married women used those fantasies to help attain orgasm,3 with a related summary reporting that 48% had fantasies of being “overpowered or forced to surrender” at least some of the time during intercourse.4

These studies are so shocking to our modern yet surprisingly puritanical perspectives that many of us just ‘glitch’ and flip the script. I can hear the justification bubbling up already, but let’s stare at what rises up a little bit first because were not done yet! We’re barely past the foreplay of the argument.

Because I’m going to explain why, when I started looking, I found that I wasn’t as surprised as I thought I’d be. Let me take you on a segue…

When I was a kid, my church held a summer garage sale where people would bring items to sell, with the proceeds benefiting the church. I remember perusing the tables and looking at piles of Louis L’Amour, Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and other books. But those piles were dwarfed by those the ladies brought in.

Stacks of erotica; Bodice Rippers, the covers adorned with the shirtless Fabio embracing a darling damsel. The church ladies had brought the hardcovers, the softcovers, and apparently every style in between. As a young man, the covers sent a little jolt of excitement because they were naughty. However, I remember not wanting to get scolded by the church ladies for enjoying the women on the covers. I thought the covers were scandalous, not realizing the real thrust of the matter was inside.

Which really cracks me up now, because those ladies were reading those books by the dozens, trading them with other women, and sharing what they liked most about them. These books, which immerse them in a sexual state where the descriptions never lack, and the man always satisfies everything, often, were openly sold at church.

This wasn’t too shocking as, back then, you’d see these books arrayed at the grocery store checkouts. It was just something that was ‘normal.’ It wasn’t until much later that I ever considered how pornographic they really were!

Pornography

Origin: mid 19th century: from Greek pornographos ‘writing about prostitutes’, from pornē ‘prostitute’ + graphein ‘write’.

The original pornography wasn’t pictures or video; it was written erotica. Now, the astute reader will point out that this term was coined by researchers and observers in the 1840s to describe and categorize “licentious” art and literature, and was later expanded to include imagery as we know it.

And this is key because erotic literature has existed for at least four thousand years, with the Babylonian and Sumerian erotic poetry circa 1800–2100 BCE. These were intimate, often explicit love songs celebrating physical desire and sexual passion. As with modern erotica, they were frequently written from a female perspective and centered on the goddess Inana and her lover Dumuzi. The texts used intense, metaphorical language about the body, with many poems likely performed during sacred marriage rituals.

Fun fact: many modern scholars, literary critics, and theologians consider the Bible’s Song of Solomon, or Song of Songs, to be one of the finest examples of erotic poetry in the ancient world. It has everything: intense sensual imagery, breathless longing, intimate dialogue, lush metaphors, and enough “your body is a garden” energy to make a modern romance novelist reach for a fan. So how did it get in there?

I like to imagine some poor scribe, late at night, candle burning low, copying sacred texts like a good and faithful servant. Then, because he’s human, he sneaks a quick read from his favorite little scroll of spicy poetry. Right then, the chief rabbi walks in.

The scribe does what every guilty man does when caught with forbidden material: he shoves it into the nearest pile of respectable documents and tries to look scholarly. Flustered, he forgets where he stashed it, years pass, and another scribe comes along and finds a stack of holy writings and, tucked between law, wisdom, and prophecy, this suspiciously passionate little poem where everyone is admiring each other’s bodies with the subtlety of a vampire duke in a dark romance. But, instead of saying, “Wait, why is there a bridal boudoir scene in the sacred archive?” he shrugs and incorporates it. Apparently, the line between sacred poetry and smut is mostly binding, age, and how confidently someone says “allegory.”

The fun part is how Christians have been wrestling with this for a very long time. Historians, meanwhile, look at the whole situation and basically see a copy of Playboy slipped into a catechism, preserved by accident, sanctified by tradition, and then defended for centuries by people insisting, “No, no, you don’t understand. The breasts are a metaphor.” Which is probably the oldest recorded case of someone being caught between the covers and insisting it was research.

And this is where we hit an interesting catch. We have a major difference of perspective in how we view men’s sexual consumption versus women's. Let’s go back to that church yard sale. As a man, I’d be chastised for fantasizing about the girls on the cover while these women were finding out how many holes that man could fill between the covers. Just imagine the uproar if those ladies’ husbands brought their Playboy or Hustler magazines to sell and trade! There would have been a whole church intervention and full-throated condemnation while the original porno-graphy weighed down two entire tables.

One was visual, the other was written. And part of that is because men and women are wired differently for sex. Men are much more focused on the visual, and women are much more focused on the whole context, the story, the coffee done right in the morning, the subterfuge, and nuance, and… Same appetite, different entry point.

Simplified, guys like to see naked bodies; women like to read all the intimate details. I’ve also heard that men love with their eyes and women love with their ears.5

And we view the former as worse than the latter. This is why I appreciated what recently wrote about how Erotic literature is worse than visual porn, where he poignantly observes:

And what are books, exactly? At base, books use text to provide you with a controlled hallucination produced by your own mind, and if you’re reading a particularly good book series, the effects of this hallucination can stay with you for weeks, months, years, or perhaps even a lifetime.

Brackish Waters, Barren Soil

Erotic literature is worse than porn

A little while ago I wrote a couple of posts…

4 months ago · 88 likes · Rohan Ghostwind

He goes on to point out that while the average porn video session lasts about five to ten minutes, a romance novel lasts for hours to days. Is it addictive? Yes! It targets the exact same dopamine, oxytocin, and endorphines providing pleasure, bonding, and natural pain relief. Porno-graphy addiction, among women, is common. The only real difference is that men get pixels, women get prose.

That’s kind of crazy when you think about it! What’s even crazier is that there’s also no shortage of genres for women to select from:

General Erotic Romance is your Hallmark Films edition with more sex. It can happen across any time in history or even the future. It’s attractive adults, jobs that somehow allow endless time for sexual tension, and a plot powered by misunderstandings that could be solved by one honest conversation. Expect coworkers, neighbors, friends-to-lovers, enemies-to-lovers, fake dating, second chances, and emotionally repressed people discovering that communication is hot when paired with abs. Every plot needs conflict, tension, climax, and release. Sometimes several.
Power-position erotica is the fantasy genre for readers who looked at normal dating and thought, “Fine, but what if he owned the company, ruled the castle, controlled the wolf pack, or had been brooding shirtless since the Crusades?” Sometimes he’s a billionaire CEO with control issues or a vampire with cheekbones, trauma, and boundary problems, or a werewolf alpha who can smell desire but still can’t communicate like an adult. It doesn’t matter. The formula is overwhelming power, dangerous attraction, possessive obsession, and a heroine taking it all in, narratively speaking, of course. It actually fuses the desire for resources we explored in Two Rules for Life with the seduction of power and influence that can represent reproductive success.
Dark Romance throws restraint away, and people love it. It plunges into morally gray or outright villainous love interests, coercive situations, captivity, revenge, obsession, stalking, crime, trauma, and non-consent or dubious-consent fantasies. It’s closer to BDSM / Kink Erotica than not, so if you like being spanked or having a train ridden on you,6 this one might be spicy enough, and oh, is it popular!

Now, mix those with any of these other flavors, and you get the picture: Paranormal Romance / Supernatural Erotica, Monster Romance (Orcs, minotaurs, krakens, aliens, gargoyles, dragons, mothmen, and… more) Historical Erotica, Reverse Harem, Taboo / Forbidden Erotica, Religious / Spiritual Transgression Erotica, and… If it can go inside her, it will. If it’s not physically possible, don’t worry, it’s fiction, and it’ll just raw-dog biology and end up being the most fulfilling fit ever.

How fulfilling? Well, erotica sells over 50 million units a year in the United States, with dark romance accounting for about 25% of that. A 2026 report indicates 62% of women surveyed are interested in "spicy" or romantic books for fun. We aren’t talking small numbers here, and that 62% also lines up well with our rape fantasy statistics from earlier, and research indicates that those romance novels fuel those fantasies.

The weird thing is that all this is OK in the general consciousness. Until you actually turn one of them into a pornographic video. (apparently Fifty Shades of Grey doesn’t count as it was only rated R, not X) When it becomes a true video porn, it suddenly crosses into a taboo that we need to hide and legislate and people write long, moralizing articles mocking men’s taboo tastes.7

Biology

Well, the fun thing about this whole conversation is that it’s actually not too far from evolutionary biology either. We explored this earlier in Sex, Poop, and Rock ‘n Roll, but it bears repeating here. Did you know that the human penis is unlike any other primate in both shape, size, and persistence? The head, specifically, is uniquely shaped in a manner that can expunge ‘competitor’ semen… and it only gets weirder.

Human women not only have persistent mammary glands signaling sexual capability,8 but also a hidden ovulation, so that even they aren’t typically aware of their full cycle. Add in that this cycle is monthly versus the more typical seasonality, and you have a sexual capacity and drive that is vastly greater than that of other animals.

This culminates in a situation that many want to absolutely ignore about our animal evolution: A woman is biologically wired to act more like a cat in heat9than a monogamous maiden, and men who proposition and compete have a higher chance of reproductive success over the white knight.10 So, it really does make sense that Fifty Shades of Grey was a bestseller. It’s a billionaire unlocking something deep in our primal brains that tantalizes. Porno-graphy is keyed to something deep in a woman’s reproductive desires, and it’s not so surprising that it’s so popular.

What still needs to be teased apart is how we have a prudish response to male sexuality, i.e., the visual and carnal sex in porn, while ignoring that complicated side of female sexuality, including the shockingly rape adjacent material in porno-graphy.

The Implications

Now that we’ve named erotica for what it is: Pornography, and we understand some of the biology and psychology behind it, we can begin having a more nuanced discussion. Like whether pornstars are empowered or exploited, whether the reduced friction of porn drives poor behavior in men when it comes to pleasing their women, whether the egregiously inflated and unrealistic storytelling in erotica is causing women to make sex more complicated than it needs to be, and more. But I hope, more than anything, we can realize that women binging errotica for hours at a time, over the course of weeks, months, and years, is having an impact on real life.

In fact, in therapy, visual porn has a huge clinical vocabulary around it: porn conflict, porn concealment, porn addiction, compulsive sexual behavior, betrayal trauma, sexual dissatisfaction, escalation, shame, and partner comparison. All of which revolve around the rejection of visual porn as acceptable and the pushing of the material into the realm of taboo and shame, which also increases its addictiveness.

It appears the clinical world has probed every angle of male porn use while barely slipping a finger between the pages of women’s written porn. Annecdotally, I reached out to two therapists I know who both said written porn has similar addiction, dysfunction, and relationship impact. However, what I was able to find in the literature tiptoes around the topic,11 but leans towards the angle that erotica is often used in therapy to improve a woman’s libido, and that’s viewed as a good thing. In fact, feminists celebrate this. Ironically, visual porn does the same for a guy as well, hence that laundry list of terms, but that’s not viewed as a good thing nor celebrated.

And again, this makes sense because women generally have a lower libido, and men aren’t complaining when they find their partner all aroused and randy after a few hours of hallucinating over the bestseller, Morning Glory Milking Farm (Book 1 of 5). However, when men increase their libido, at odds with their partner, many of those negative connotations manifest. One way I’ve heard this described is that women use porno-graphy to get in the mood, whereas men use pornography to finish, which is part of the challenge, but we’re still talking about the same thing, aren’t we?

Frankly, I’m not sure what to do with all of this. It’s a weird cultural glitch when we can have Fifty Shades of Grey and #MeToo at the same time. Where we can have more than 50% of women fantasizing about forced sex, while an awkward pickup line can ruin a man’s career. Where a relationship can be violated by video porn, as the argument escalates in front of a bookshelf full of erotic porno-graphy.

It really is a great example of the Angel and the Animal that Ernest Becker writes about in The Denial of Death. I think it’s a conversation that needs to be open and analyzed so we can better understand who we are. It’s certainly something we need to reconcile on why it’s denigrated for men and ignored or even celebrated with women. That’s the fun adventure of learning what it means to be human!

So, what do you think? Why do we have such a double standard? Why is written porn viewed as innocent, whereas video porn returns such condemnation?

Are they fundamentally different, and I missed something obvious?

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Don't Lose Your Voice

Michael Woudenberg — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 11:02:49 GMT

Today’s topic addresses the challenges of an uncritical use of AI in writing. On the one hand, AI represents a transformative tool that can help unlock creativity, improve research, sharpen arguments, and challenge bias. On the other hand, it can lull the author into a sense of agreement, feeding their ego, and drowning their voice in the banality of the average. Let’s dig into the consequences and the solution.

Intro

I feel like I’m losing my mind. Over the last few years, I have kept coming across more and more articles that are all starting to sound the same. The same cadence, tempo, style, flow. More and more often, I get about 25% into an essay, and I see a convergence, it’s almost a resonance in my brain, a high-pitched whine where my eyes start to glaze as the markers of AI begin popping out of the text.1 As I scroll, the essay just keeps going without a clear focus, peppered with complex words that add nothing to the context. At that point, I close it down and move on.

My intuition tells me it’s all AI because I use AI for many things. One of my new favorite things is using Gemini on Android Auto to ask questions about history, geology, small town economics, random facts, and more on family road trips. It’s super insightful, like a personal tour guide, but after a while, you notice the pattern. If not managed, it just blathers on, reuses the same ‘dress-up’ words, and constantly telling me how my questions and its answers are amazing, unique, fascinating…

I know what generic AI sounds like because I train my AI to avoid it. And, to be clear, the issue isn’t with the use of AI, as I really enjoy using it as a valuable tool, and it can provide a Brain Boost if used properly. But those essays I’m reading? I’m not reading anything unique, which is fine for historical facts about Cloudcroft, New Mexico, and a basic overview of different bike computers, but not for true insights.

Because what’s really valuable is what you add to the writing. What’s your voice? Do you sound like you write? Are there fingerprints and personality that make it unique? Is there some quirk or counter-intuitive insight that you’ve discovered and want to share? I can confidently say that if there was, the uncritical use of AI buried it under the banal voice of an LLM. Worse, when it’s no longer your voice, it’s really no longer your ideas. You’re just agreeing with the output.

Losing Your Voice

A great example of this is when, in a recent article on Neurodivergency, responded to an accusation of it being purely AI-generated with:

“AI is part of my writing process the same way dictation, spellcheck, or text-to-speech are part of someone else’s. I’m autistic, and the cognitive load involved in translating complex thought into linear written language is very real. Tools that reduce that load are accessibility tools, not shortcuts. The ideas, framework, structure, and lived experience in this essay are mine.”2

Which is fair and a point I made in the past about Artists vs. AI, where I shared how AI can help unlock creativity:

Two examples from writing are an author I know whose husband has a fantastically creative mind but crippling dyslexia. He can’t write and struggles to work with writers to capture his ideas. Enter ChatGPT which has inordinate patience and can take the ideas and bring them to life so he can edit. The second example is an author I met who has a progressive neurological disorder threatening her ability to write. She uses AI to help capture her ideas while her body fails. It’s her imagination and creativity expressed through technology before it’s too late.

It’s not the accessibility that’s the problem. Those two examples are people who used tools to capture their ideas. They had conversations with the AI, they used voice-to-text, and had the AI pull threads together. They added their voice, and they worked with human editors to polish it up. What they didn’t do was rely on it completely.

This is a nuance that Eve Fairbanks nails in a recent Atlantic article titled The Biggest Tell That Something Was Written by AI:

“Now some authors tell me they’ve embraced AI as a “writing tool,” no different from spell-check or a laptop. The phrase is protean and euphemistic, covering everything from using ChatGPT to find a quote to having it compose a long essay based on a two-sentence prompt.”

The tell, she says, is when you “Look closely and you’ll see that every part of the text is not quite right.”

My visceral reaction described earlier, that high-pitched whine in my brain, is that every part of the text reads nearly perfectly, but is not quite right. There’s perfect punctuation, a lot of big words, but nothing there. That’s the common mode of an LLM and the way it formulates a general prompt. I have many hundreds of hours fighting with LLMs to eliminate this bias, and so I’m sensitive to it.

That’s what triggered my internal AI detector with Eva’s essay in question and many others including ’s essay here, and who attempted to rebut3 my post on True Neurodivergence with her’s titled When Someone Renames Your Experience For You 4 all of whom admitted using AI to write them. What you’ll see is that there’s content, but it just doesn’t feel authentic. They’re all 5,000 words, blathering on and on, claiming to present a new view while offering generic blurbs of nothing but a marginal average.5

Part of what bugs me is how often the uncritical use of AI comes from the neurodivergent sphere. I’m harder on them because they claim to offer a different perspective, unlike the Algowhores or PSYOPs we’ve looked at before, where we aren’t told to expect more. They talk about their ‘lived experiences,’ or ‘gestalt language processing,’6 yet all start sounding convergent and typical. Worse, it’s not actually their lived experience; It’s an inanimate AI describing something for them, which was averaged from everyone else, and they thought it was close enough.

This happens because AI is incredibly synchophantic and actively strokes your biases like Wormtongue, replacing you with itself if you aren’t careful. AI also doesn’t Default to Truth; it will tell you things that you want to be true. Lastly, AI is trained on enough victim narratives to make it sound compelling to the ‘author’ and to their readers. The outcome is that all three of those ladies I mentioned proclaim a neurodivergent perspective, all claiming to be gifted or exceptional,7 (Chris claims twice-exceptional), while they all sound like the same AI.

What’s even more fascinating is that Eva turned around, just days after my critique, and wrote: “How AI Systems Exclude Neurodivergent People by Design.” Which is suberbly ironic because that’s the argument I’m making against her use of AI. There’s no need for me to rebut those examples more from that perspective, so let’s look, instead, at the other consequence of losing your voice.

To truly understand her contradictions, consider that both essays are clearly AI-generated.8 She took the easy path, tossed in a couple of prompts, and pasted the result. She didn’t struggle to form, unform, and reform the logic underpinning Critical Thinking, and she ended up in logical contortions while also missing the valuable insights sitting in plain sight.

You may recognize that Eva gets close to understanding that AI is merely mathematical bias, on top of data bias, on top of organizational bias, but just misses that unique insight. The irony of her angst was already covered here, in Eliminating Bias in AI/ML, where, simply put, you cannot eliminate bias; you can merely bias the bias. Moreover, she misses that when you pathologize healthy personality, you tend to be excluded from normal engagement, which is another of her frustrations.

All of this occurred because, when you lose your voice to AI, you also risk ceding your thinking.9 Eva not only ended up with the banal average in her claimed experiences, but was also unaware that she was uncritically creating cognitive distortions. She’s pasting AI content instead of learning about the nuances that drive the challenges she seeks to rectify. She lost her voice, ceded her thinking, and lost the ability to find solutions.

AI is also very slippery. As Bates recently describes in a recent essay, it’s not that AI is useless, but, to quote him, “No, the infuriating part is that it is useful enough to keep using.” This is the slippery slope with AI, especially when you aren’t looking at it with critical thinking. With its syncophancy, sophistication, and semi-accurate output, it can lull you into complacency and tempt you with the ‘easy button.’

The perverse outcome is articulated well by who captured the risk in “We Know You’re Using AI,” where he shares:

“You burn bridges, in fact, when you indulge in not thinking. If you commit to this strategy, you’ll end up frenetically chasing your own tail, trying to spike your slowly declining popularity with people who, by definition, go away as they pay more attention to you.”

I’ll be blunt: when you lose your voice, you lose your thinking, and you lose the very thing you want people to follow you for: your humanity.

Finding Your Voice

That said, AI is a great augmentation tool, and even using it to compose a long essay isn’t necessarily bad. hits the target with his struggle of balancing the tool with authenticity in the note embedded above. The tough reality is that there’s no right answer except for that struggle. The struggle is authentic.

Similarly, shared the note below showing that AI is the safe route, it’s not going to challenge what the guardrails deem politically correct, and it tilts toward justifying your inability to act instead of motivating agency to act. Both of these are anathema to creative writing or uncovering counterintuitive insights. Your voice should add something new to the conversation, not just mimic others.

For myself, I used AI to help me get past the blank page and start writing the first chapter of The Singularity Chronicles. The AI produced rubbish writing, but it got me writing and creating. As I went back to edit, I realized, about halfway through the book, I’d found my own voice, a cadence, a style. I then went back and re-edited the rest to pull that unique voice through. In the end, what the AI produced was completely eliminated by 120K words of my own, authentic voice. AI just provided the original grit to motivate the struggle that helped me find my voice.10

I’ve also found my own voice here on Substack. My AI-augmented spellcheck doesn’t like my style very much and recommends lots of edits. (but for some reason never flags that I can’t spell nuerodivergent) I ignore most of them, and what you read here is largely how I talk, and you are, quite literally, reading my brain flow… Even better, you’re seeing me wrangle to form, unform, and reform my thoughts. This last part is important because that’s not something AI does and, in my experience, can’t do. AI’s output is deceptively perfect but not quite right. My output is gritty and uncovers counterintuitive insights.

It’s also made me appreciate human writing more. Recently, I got a blurb from another author for a collaborative essay and loved it, but when they submitted a more polished version as we edited, it felt flat. They admitted using AI to touch it up, and I asked to keep the original because, even imperfect, I felt it had their voice, and I valued that more than perfection.

I’ve also reached out to fellow Substackers when I feel that what they published sounded like AI. If that was intentional, then OK, but it sounds like it. If it wasn’t AI… it still sounded like it.11 Some don’t care, and eventually I find myself tiring of their writing and falling away as James warned earlier. The others typically improve their writing as they find their voice and strive to highlight their unique contributions.

An added challenge, as , who wrote The Pitch-Perfect Author: Voice Mastery for Writers, notes is that what used to be considered straightforward formal business writing style12 is now what AI emulates by default. That’s part of the attraction we discussed earlier, but when content creators pollute the commons with AI content, the resulting enshitification also drowns out professional writers who are writing to a formerly established standard, which forces us to find a new voice.

However, this is where the most counterintuitive insight emerges because you can use AI in a way few do: It can actually help find your voice, highlight your biases, and challenge you to think differently. For example, I use AI against my own writing to:

Produce a counterargument
Steelman another’s argument to make sure I’m understanding
Have AI challenge my biases or identify biases in my writing
Critique my voice, my tone, and my style
Highlight gaps in my logic

Simply put, you can use AI as your toughest critic and best coach at the same time. The key is that you have to critique the output and force yourself to introspect when it feels like something you want to hear because it loves stroking your ego and bias.

Other tips are, as J. Daniel Sawyer recommends: “First thing to do is to listen to how you speak and write already: read your writing out loud, record yourself speaking extemporaneously, record and listen back to your stories or essays. You develop an ear for what “sounds like you.” You learn your own verbal/writing ticks, your sense of idiom and turn of phrase, etc.”

This is what I do with these essays, and each one has a recorded voice-over read by myself to ensure just this. I’ve found my voice. I think it’s important that others find their own, and balancing between the extremes of pro or anti-AI13 is key to that.

Summary

So, I feel like I’m standing between two worlds. I embrace AI as a tool, and it has dramatically improved many things in my own writing, and yet, the more AI becomes ubiquitous, the more I use AI, the more value I’m seeing in the raw, but human writing that remains. What I’m avoiding is slop, whether human or AI-generated.14 What I’m trying to produce are human insights into who we are.

So, for those authors I mentioned and everyone else reading, the key is to embrace the struggle of writing. You have to accept the grit of imperfection; you have to find the line between Augmenting your Intelligence with AI and replacing your voice and thoughts with AI. I want to hear your voice. This is how we maintain our humanity in an AI-saturated world.

If you see someone who you think needs this message, please share this article. The more people we reach, the more we can rebalance our humanity. At a minimum please hit the ❤️ button above or below. This will help more people discover Substacks like this one where we explore what it means to be human.

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Unsettling Science

Michael Woudenberg — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 08:01:09 GMT

Today’s Topic is Part 11 in our Keys to Innovation series and tackles the idea of “Settled Science,” showing just how myopic and resistant to new information that idea really is. Worse, it lacks creativity and locks out innovation when consensus can no longer be challenged, preventing us from learning, unlearning, and relearning.

Intro

If you’ve been around the internet or watched the news for more than five minutes, you’ve heard the term “Settled Science.” It’s held up as a conversation ender, not an opener. No need to go further, no need to ask questions. Just accept and move on. Doing otherwise turns you into a ‘denier’ who can be dismissed with prejudice.

However, the utterance of “settled science” is also a key tell that the person fundamentally doesn’t understand how science works because it’s never been settled, and I hope it never settles as we continue to expand our understanding.

“All models are wrong, but some are useful.”

That said, science can be useful and applicable even if it’s not perfect. To quote George Box: "All models are wrong, but some are useful.” This is true because science can merely model the world, and models, by definition, are a reduced facsimile of reality. That doesn’t mean the model isn’t useful, but the model is also never perfect and, I’d wager, never can be. At its best, the settled science is what works for what we need, and science rests on a lot of proven work, even if it's incomplete.

Physics is a great example of how four different models operate like Russian nesting dolls, where each works on its own scale but fails when applied to a more complex one. For example:

Euclidean Physics operates at the everyday scale and governs our perception of flat, three-dimensional space by providing static rules for how shapes interact. Your house is fundamentally built with these principles, and this was sufficient for most of our history, and it’s settled science that was challenged.
Newtonian Physics takes over with motion and structural loads of more complex buildings. This level of understanding becomes crucial to aerospace. It governs a more complex level and is also settled science that was challenged.
Einsteinian physics governs the universe, in which mass warps spacetime, affecting time and gravity at high speeds or on massive scales. Until recently, it had zero bearing on our lives, and upended the scientific world that only knew Newtonian physics, but this, too, was challenged.
Quantum physics addresses the unpredictable world of atoms and electrons, where particles behave as waves and probabilities that none of the other three layers are considering. It’s still challenging our understanding of reality and, as yet, is not a settled science.

Each one builds on the previous and, at a certain point, for mere mortals, it’s irrelevant to daily survival. Eclucidian and Newtonian physics are all we really need to understand, but they are still incomplete, and new theories continue to emerge.

However, the layers do matter, and one fun example of an intersection is your cellphone’s GPS. To pinpoint your location on a map, the system relies on a Euclidean grid of coordinates. It needs Newtonian orbits to track the satellite positions, but that’s not all, because the satellites are moving fast (Special Relativity) and sit high above Earth’s heavy gravitational pull (General Relativity), their onboard atomic clocks tick slightly faster than clocks on the ground. Engineers use Einstein’s equations to subtract 38 microseconds every day from the satellite clocks because, if they didn’t, your GPS location would drift by about 6 miles daily.

Settled Science

Now, as far as ‘settled’ goes, each layer is built on the ‘settled’ science of the previous layer, but it also required challenging the previous layer, even though it worked, to find out where it failed, and expand the realm of understanding. Its usefulness and general acceptance provided a springboard for the next idea.

But if you think each layer of experts just went along with that challenge and progressed, they didn’t. We’ve had gatekeepers for millennia who have regularly weaponized “Settled Science” to shut down critique and curiosity. It’s so prevalent that Thomas Kuhn wrote The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, noting that science is not a smooth curve of growth, as people tend to believe. Instead, it’s revolution, discovery, ossification, and then revolution, where paradigms shift dramatically.

That’s because those models aren’t wrong per se, they’re just incomplete. The problem also isn’t that they’re incomplete; it’s that when people believed the science was settled, they lost their curiosity and became more inclined to defend their position rather than challenge what they think they know. Max Planck describes it as:

"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."

This is known as the Planck Principle, often summarized as “Science progresses one funeral at a time,” because they viewed science as settled and stopped exploring. captured this recently with the best two lines I’ve read on the topic:

Science isn’t a cathedral for you to defend. It’s a frontier for angry, curious, difficult people to attack. The moment you declare it settled, you don’t become wise. You become dead weight.

Frankly, there’s a lot of dead weight out there. It’s incurious, dogmatic, often ideologically driven, and is certainly not what we think of when it comes to scientific progress. We’ve run into these folks a lot over the years, and here’re a few of the topics we’ve poked at which have garnered that defensive response:

How The Climate is Changing, but CO2 is an arbitrary baseline and is actually a fertilizer, not a pollutant. Moreover, as the models have improved over time, the position keeps shifting, but the narrative remains apocalyptic. (I just wish the climate alarmists understood the psychology of their behavior)
Or the follow-up regarding the Rates of Climate Change and how increasingly more sophisticated measurements show a historical pattern that contextualizes what we measure today, as not as extreme as we are told.
One of my favorites is on Polio and how the hyper reductive method of identifying a virus caused us to redefine what polio was, reclassify an entire family of symptoms as something else, and actually didn’t cure the full suite of symptoms because it also has a connection to Pesticides (Fun fact, Polio, the family of symptoms, still exists, they just call it something else)
And in a related investigation, we found that Masks Do Work, however, not the way we think, and that actually led to increased COVID infection rates through risk compensation.

Each of these has a common thread: detractors constantly used “Settled Science” to shut down curious exploration. However, as we found in each topic, there’s still more to explore!

For the climate, we need to learn to adapt to a dynamic planet to survive. There’s no magic “Stop” button that lets us prevent change. Similarly, if polio symptoms still exist, and it’s not virally induced, we have millions of humans we can help by reopening the investigation. Likewise, with masks and virology, instead of sticking susceptible people together and saying masks work while the infection rips through, had we remained curious and open, had we not shut down the conversation as “settled,” millions more would have survived.

To me, ‘settled science’ is what particulates out of the creative formula and sticks like gooey residue clogging up the system. That so many people fall into this logical fallacy is unsettling, but that’s not quite what I mean here. Every once in a while, we need to stir things up, flush the system, eliminate the dead waste, and let the creative process continue. Unsettling science is revolutionary.

Unsettling Science

Clearly, the consequences of settling science are profound and regressive. That’s why I’m advocating the unsettling of science. We need to keep shaking it up. We need to keep challenging. To quote Eric again, here’s how we can do that:

Read the old masters. Ask rude questions. Hunt for the places where the priesthood gets angry and evasive. Teach your kids that doubt and wonder are not sins, but despair damn sure is.

Despair is a good way to look at it. When the science is settled, the potential solutions become limited, and the only option is despair because we’ve eliminated the opportunities for innovation. Flip that idea back around on our examples:

It’s climate alarmism that’s despairing, not inventing. Even when they do think they’re innovating, there’s a lot of greenwashing to make it appear better.
It’s viral terror, wearing a mask in panic and despair that no one else is, vs. understanding the nuanced protocols that can actually help.
It’s vaccine certainty, despairing when people raise questions, instead of recognizing that vaccine theory has merit, but the application does have legitimate concerns. (Did you know that vaccine manufacturers have been absolved of liability since 1980 because the financial risk was too high?)

That despair is the opposite of innovation, which is why unsettling science is our next Key to Innovation. Unsettling rigid structures also allows greater freedom of maneuver and a greater ability to form, unform, and reform ideas because they’re no longer locked in place dogmatically.

We can apply this concept elsewhere, too, because settling and becoming ossified happen in our personal lives, too. In our ongoing discussion over personalities, pathologies, neurodivergency, and more, Kit Perez recently wrote about how The Cost of Identity-Protective Systems destroys the dynamic adaptability that life demands. “Settled Science” is another perfect example of an identity-protective system and clearly shows the consequences in our daily lives.

Conclusion

The next time you hear the words “Settled Science,” just know that you’re hearing the defensive gasps of unscientific people, violating the core principles of the scientific method rooted in Popper’s Principle, which postulates that for any theory to be considered scientifically valid, it must be inherently testable and capable of being proven wrong.

That principle is powerful for both how we view the scientific world and how we view our own lives and beliefs. Just imagine how much we could unlock, personally and professionally, if we remained curious, testable, and open to challenge. Think about how antifragile that approach is when we invite that debate. Imagine the innovation that can be unlocked when the drive is to find something better by challenging the way things are done today! Unsettling Science is one of the fastest ways to do that and forces us to Learn, Unlearn, and Relearn and remain curious.

“True Innovation comes from those willing to break the rules”
- Anthony Pompliano

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The Two Rules of Life

Michael Woudenberg — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 08:01:00 GMT

Today’s topic forces us to face two rules that govern our lives. The first is evolutionary biology, and the second is soul maturation. We’ll see how ignoring these two rules creates chaos in society and how understanding, appreciating, and embracing them creates fulfillment.

A quick caveat before we get going: This topic is going to make many people uncomfortable, and my intent isn’t to offend. I’m trying, without moral claims, to understand how the world works and what that means for us humans. If you feel triggered, that’s a good thing, and you should lean in on that to better understand yourself. Don’t forget to check the footnotes for references and other observations.

This investigation started with a simple question:

Why are so many women offended when it’s suggested that bearing and raising children is not only fulfilling but fundamentally core to her existence?

Already, I can hear the rustles as some women grab their Handmaid Tales 1 protest dresses and men lean forward, ready to white knight. But let’s look at the first of two rules that govern our existence: evolutionary biology.

Evolutionary Biology

We are hairless monkeys, a prey animal that evolved into an apex predator, only fully extant in our current biological form for a mere 200,000 years, and coming into a semblance of history about 12,000 years ago. Even if you stretch back further, as some of the recent evidence is suggesting, you still only get civilization for 20,-25,000 years. A rounding error on the long path of evolution. For context, if all of Earth's time were the length of a football field, human existence is the final blade of grass.

For those of you with a religious foundation, we have to iron something out first: Evolutionary biology is a fact, regardless of our theological bent. Even young-earth creation follows this fundamental rule today because it’s how nature operates. The fantastic book The Science of God explores how both evolutionary biology and Biblical creation aren’t at odds.2 To summarize, due to time dilation, it can be both 7 days of creation AND 14 billion years, which is a fascinating study on its own. Another way to think about this is that God created this existence with evolutionary biology as the foundation on which to mature the soul. (more on that later)

I say this because Evolutionary Biology has a core principle that helps us understand who we are: Survival of the Fittest / Natural Selection.3 This principle boils down to the simple fact that, to continue the species, it must successfully reproduce. To continue your lineage and ensure your genes are the fittest and survive, you must reproduce and successfully raise your children so they can reproduce.4

This isn’t trivial. This is one of the most challenging tasks in nature, with hundreds of techniques that work to varying degrees, and the fossil record shows that 99.9% of all life forms that existed didn’t survive the process. We are here because our long line survived.5 Across all animal species, survival of the fittest requires two things:

Creating new life
Creating resources to support #1.

Due to this, we see a physical and psychological/behavioral bifurcation between males and females across most species.6 Only females can build the offspring. In internally gestating animals, the male supplies his genetics, and the female grows that into a baby. It’s no exaggeration to say that the survival of our species rests in the woman’s hips. If she doesn’t bear offspring, we fail the rule of evolutionary biology.7

To emphasize how non-trivial this is, childbirth is incredibly vulnerable and resource-intensive. Nature has bestowed humans with a great big brain and a prefrontal cortex that can reason, giving us a moral layer that might be rebelling at this conversation so far. This great big brain causes two things to happen: first, the mother’s hips have to widen significantly more than those of other primates, and second, the baby has to be born incredibly premature compared to other animals.

The implications for females are important as their bodies are designed in a perfect balance of birthing a baby and being able to run away from a tiger… barely, while burdening them with raising children who aren’t independent until puberty. This vulnerability results in extensive psychological coding. Quite literally, she bears all of the risk of reproduction and childbirth, which, until recently, was the largest cause of premature female death.8

This is why, if the male wants to ensure his genes pass into the future, he has to assist the female in her success. Since he cannot create the child, the only thing he can do is provide resources and protection. (which includes white knighting) This is why humans are a body dimorphic species. Women are smaller in stature with their muscle distribution centered on their hips, while men are larger in stature with denser bones and muscles, centered on their chests. We even know the generally preferred ratios and have named them the Venus and Adonis Indexes.

Psychology is also impacted, where women, on the Big 5 Personality Test, have generally higher anxiety, while men do not. This helps the women sense and avoid danger and keep their children alive, why allowing men to walk into danger in order to gain resources. Women are also more agreeable, which helps them get along with other women when they’re communally tending to the demands of babies, while men will disagree, challenge, and demand more resources. These are all evolutionary adaptations that maximize survival. Simplified:

The female is optimized for creating life.
The male is optimized for creating resources.

To pin this one down, it’s important to note that nearly all markers of beauty reflect those two. What we call beautiful 9 are core indicators of reproductive health and resource production health. Women’s ‘Rule of Sixes’ (Six Foot, Six Pack, Six Figures) is founded on evolutionary biology as they all indicate their potential for resource creation and protection as they consider him as a mate. Likewise, men’s Triple-F rule (Fit, Feminine, and Friendly) all tap into the physiology and psychology we just discussed.

All of this is logical because reproduction, especially in humans, takes a lot of resources. That’s why men play such a large role there. They’re the ones exploring new lands, digging into the ground for gold, hunting large game that can feed the tribe (and can also kill you), putting in 80 hours a week to grow a business, and constantly pushing, angling, and advocating for more resources.10

When we think of a workaholic, it's normally a father, and it’s interesting to note that married men drive the majority of the perceived pay gap, where single men earn roughly equal pay to women, while married men earn far more. I don’t think it’s a stretch to suggest that the demand for resources to produce those offspring is a driver of that gap.11

This is where we hit the crux of the situation, where both the male’s resource creation and the female’s reproduction require one thing: Sacrifice.

A woman sacrifices her body in the creation of a new life. Without adequate resources and nutrition, she will literally harvest the necessary components from her own body, which is why bone density, teeth, and hair loss are so common during pregnancy.12 She also sacrifices her youth. Reproduction isn’t kind to the female form, and, based on how much money is spent these days trying to retain/reclaim that form, it’s a sacrifice women fully recognize, even if they’d like to avoid it.

However, a man also sacrifices his body in the creation of resources and protection. Let’s go with the starkest example: War. To protect their society/tribe/family, men, often men who have not yet reproduced, will sacrifice their lives. To put this in context, our DNA represents the genes of 80% of the women across time, but only 40% of the men. Put another way, for every two women who successfully mothered children, only one man was a successful father. Men are expendable and have been used that way to create and protect resources, and that led to different gene expressions, such as teamwork. Men also sacrifice in thousands of ways that are less catastrophic. There’s a reason why women, who survive childbirth, outlive men.

This dual sacrifice has driven thousands of psychological and social structures that emerge from the foundational rules of reproduction and resource creation. Traditions, religions, governments, moralities,13 and more exist to manage it.14 Much of what we rail against, in this resource-rich time, are the structures put in place when things were harder.15

This becomes especially evident when our men aren’t as visibly sacrificing, with some going so far as to suggest being born a man is akin to winning the lottery, or that the structures for men are better, which is a fundamental misunderstanding of both men and women.16 The irony is that it’s been the women who have had the true value and power in evolutionary biology all along, but we ignore that.

So, let’s swing back to the original question: Why are so many women offended when it’s suggested that bearing and raising children is not only amazing as a parent but fundamentally core to her existence?

It boils down to the fact that we think resource creation is more desirable, and this makes sense to a degree. Resources are a sign of status because they are an indication of your probability of successfully reproducing and giving your progeny an advantage in life.

We value resources because they make life easier, and an easier life means more success in raising children. This angst also seems more recent as the means of resource creation became easier with fewer physical demands. Today, women aren’t clambering to work on oil rigs, as plumbers, carpenters, or other dangerous jobs with high injury and mortality rates. The resource creation jobs they desire are ones, like Engineering, which occur in climate-controlled offices where physical strength is not a discriminator.

Even then, women in professional careers still aggregate around care, education, human resources, social services, administrative coordination, and other people-oriented roles, while men are disproportionately represented in engineering, construction, extraction, maintenance, production, transportation, and other things-oriented or physical-systems roles. Even, and especially in the most egalitarian societies, women are biased toward professional roles focused on nurturing and resource management,17 while men are biased toward resource creation.18

These are the foundational facts, predicated on evolutionary biology with no intent to impart a moral lens. These things just… ‘are’ and male and female biology and psychology are deeply coded around that reality. This is the rule of evolutionary biology. This is what ‘is.’ Females uniquely evolved for successful reproduction, and males uniquely evolved for resource creation.19 You can see this same pattern repeated all over the natural world. That’s evolutionary biology, not patriarchy.

The problem is that our society is imbalanced in valuing only resource creation. As I stated in Rediscovering the Goddess, we believe that “to be a successful woman you must be indistinguishable from a successful man.” But this ignores that our legacy is our progeny. It doesn’t matter how many hours you worked, how many patents you have, how much money you made, or how many books you wrote. If your genetic line terminates with you, that fails the first rule.20 Today, it feels like both men and women have forgotten that a resource only exists to improve the probability of reproduction. It’s a secondary role, not the primary success of evolutionary biology.

If we stop fighting against nature and appreciate the unique roles we have, we can recalibrate our value propositions, support women in their superpowers, and properly align men to create resources. Both require sacrifices that help the species progress, and both provide natural fulfillment.

The inevitable protests of these facts typically contain the language of ‘could,’ ‘should,’ and ‘ought,’ but this is moral language, not biological. It demonstrates our drive to improve the world around us, something that other animals don’t do. Fun fact: humans are the only species that intentionally conserves its environment. It’s enough of a difference from the natural that it appears nearly supernatural. This is where the second rule comes in regarding spiritual soul maturation.

Soul Maturation

Now that we’ve got a solid foundation in evolutionary biology and how that rule governs our corporal existence, let’s pivot to something more spiritual, because we do have this big brain with a hypersensitive moral compass. That morality manifests itself as a religious psychology. We all have it, even the most ardent atheist, and it emotes religious behaviors.

My belief is that there is more to life than the mere corporal evolutionary biology we just explored. It’s a topic I wrote about in Reincarnation Sounds Awesome, where the idea of a soul journey was introduced. To summarize, we are here, in a corporal existence, to mature our souls. We are not born inherently good, with clear morals. We may have moral language, but that doesn’t mean we have mature souls. This soul maturation provides meaning and aspiration beyond mere reproductive success.

Before the pitchforks of heretic hunters emerge, let’s consider two things.

Nothing in any religious text contradicts this. Even the Christian Bible talks about dying, rebirth, an old and new kingdom, of Sheol and the resurrection of the dead, of cycles of life, and the word Torah is rooted in improving ourselves.
Nothing in evolutionary biology can deny this. In fact, our inclination to religious psychology has formed structures for reproduction and resource creation that have exploded our population, social systems, and societies from hunter-gatherers to today. Our great ape cousins, without this moral layer, have not done so.

Key to the journey is that there are different soul maturation levels. As I wrote previously, “I’m going to wager it follows the Pareto Principle, where you have 80% who are in the ‘younger’ bucket, 19% in the ‘mid-aged’ bucket, and 1% who are old souls.” This means that we have a lot of young souls sitting on an evolutionary biological foundation, and are having difficulty resolving the two. The ‘could,’ ‘should,’ and ‘ought’ are running straight into the first rule that ‘is.’

But our soul maturation requires synthesizing the two. We both have to successfully achieve the rule of evolutionary biology AND the rule of soul maturation. The journey of souls notes that this isn’t a single chance on this mortal coil, but continued growth over lives. The core principle here is that the “I” ego has to mature into the “Us” ego.

A successful man must mature by dying to himself, embracing the sacrifice, and working in union with his wife to create resources, build systems that protect, and mature the next generations. He must die to himself to be reborn for that sacrifice.

A successful woman must mature by sacrificing herself, creating life itself, nurturing, growing, and managing resources that mature the next generation.

Together, this is the Yin and the Yang of balance. It’s not about dominance or subjugation. It’s not about better or worse. It’s about two halves, biologically coded for complementing survival, coming together into a whole.21 It’s about the “I” growing toward the “Us,” and when we recognize that, our souls can mature.

Conversely, consider that much of the angst about this conversation is largely from what I might call less mature souls.22 Their energy isn’t as focused, their experience is less refined, and they are struggling with the “I” ego that both nature and the soul journey demand must be sacrificed. The result is men chasing women, feeding their base desires, never striving for something else, and avoiding growth. Similarly, we have women chasing resource creation, fighting their nurturing inclinations, and living in angst. Both are failing at soul maturation and are stuck in the “I” ego.23

The Synthesis

On the one hand, we have the rule of evolutionary biology, which codes a world that is bound by physics and demands reproduction and resource creation to overcome entropy and evolve. On the other hand, we have a moral and spiritual consciousness that differentiates us from that first rule, but does not separate us from it. Each incarnation into this world provides an opportunity for us to mature our souls.

If we fail to recognize the first rule, we’ll live in a world of make-believe where reality (biology) keeps happening, and our refusal to embrace that leads to a life of frustration, worry, and disappointment. Nature will always violate ‘could,’ ‘should,’ and ‘ought.’ Nature isn’t nice, and humans, regardless of our prefrontal cortex, aren’t as far separated from our lizard brain and ape cousins as we’d like to think.

If we fail to recognize the second rule, we’ll live life with nihilism and meaninglessness. We won’t recognize that the struggle is the point and that resiliency requires stress. Our religious psychology will jump from one ‘religion’ to another, desperately hoping to be right, without realizing this hope is wrong because it’s about growth, not correctness.

Currently, it feels like we are at a time when we are ignoring both! The world is more atheistic than ever, and at the same time, our modern cultures are ignoring biological reality more. The result is profound with significant declines in sex, marriage, and family formation starting with Millennials and accelerating with Gen Z.24

We have more sexual, relational, employment, and cultural freedoms than ever before, yet teens report less sexual intercourse, more young adults report no recent sex, fewer young people expect marriage and children, birth rates are falling fastest among younger women, and young adults report elevated depression, anxiety, loneliness, financial dependence, and delayed independent living, among other poor mental-health indicators.25

We are failing at both soul maturity and evolutionary biology.26

However, I think the adage, “hard times make strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times,” rings true.27 This isn’t the first time we’ve had this cycle; though, I think this is the first time we’ve had it so broadly across the world. The consequence I’d like to avoid is a pendulum swing to another extreme as the United Kingdom is risking with immigrants from rigid ideologies, not assimilating to Western values, but forcing Western values to assimilate to them. I don’t want to live under tyrannical systems.

This is why balancing the two rules is so critically important. Yes, we are hairless monkeys with a lizard brain, physical dimorphism, crazy sexual selection patterns, and biology that optimizes between reproduction and resource creation. Yes, we have a consciousness that houses a soul that all religious traditions focus on maturing.

Balancing also matures us from the “I” to the “Us,” where cooperation replaces competition, societies flourish, relationships grow, and life evolves. We are natural, and we are supernatural. Finding that balance is the key to a fulfilling life.

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Functional Fittness

Michael Woudenberg — Sun, 31 May 2026 08:02:22 GMT

Today’s topic introduces two amazing writers on Substack who are helping improve the health and resilience of… anyone. The focus is on Functional Fitness, which simply means being able to do what you want, when you want, without significant limitations, no matter your age, condition, or experience. You’ll discover that, when you embrace the challenge, how much potential you’ve left on the table.

It’s time to shift gears from leadership and psychology and get back to the practical applications of fitness. We’ve covered a few threads here before that you might want to look back on as foundation elements, like how we Breathe Wrong, Walk Wrong, and even Poop Wrong. These aren’t necessary to move forward, but they do provide great insights into how common biomechanics of modern life are out of whack.

This is why I wanted to introduce you to , who does great monthly fitness challenges that have kicked my butt. He writes , and you may also be familiar with some of his other writing I reference on mental resiliency. The other half of his equation is physical resiliency, which is driven by functional fitness.

Functional fitness is physically training in order to build, maintain, and enhance function in domains of interest across the lifespan. The body is always capable of adapting to demands imposed on it. Functional fitness aims to establish a baseline and improve all possible adaptations.

One’s why will greatly influence how they approach their what. When your why for training is function, your approach will aim to progressively improve performance in life rather than a particular concern in health, appearance, or biometrics.

There is not a profession or lifestyle that wouldn’t benefit from physical training to improve function. Train for function and expand your capacity to live your life to its fullest.

His top recommendations for you to read are focusing on Intentional Stress, Efficient Training for Maximal Results, and a podcast on Strength and Health with .

I’d also like to introduce you to who writes both Walking Point and Ruck The F* Up (RTFU). I asked him to provide an intro to functional fitness and what that means in his view:

The goal of functional fitness is right there in the name. Are you fit enough to function at the things life might require? When I was on active duty that meant one thing. When I retired from the Marines and started running ultras, it meant something else. As a human you should want to know that you will always be able to do what is needed and have something in reserve.
As we get older, we need to reevaluate what ‘function’ means. At 56, I’ve realized that I need to focus on what function will mean when I am 99. If I want to lift my carry-on into the overhead bin at 99, I’d better be able to overhead press at least 135 now.
I want to be able to go out in the woods with a ruck on my own. I want to travel and carry my own weight. I want to lift my grandkids if I ever have any. Or, if I realize that I never will have grandkids I may resort to kidnapping one. That will require strength, stamina, and speed.
We start losing around 3% of our muscle mass and 1% of our bone density per year after 50 if we aren’t working to keep it. The earlier you start lifting and the harder you keep at it, the better off you will be.
I like to believe that you don’t get weak because you get old, but you get old because you are weak.

To get kicked off with John’s suggestions, I highly recommend his essay Building a Base and We Must Undergo A Hard Winter Training.

As you can see, John’s response is right in line with what Kyle described, and I’m not surprised. To underline just how serious John’s statement about age really is, take a look at these MRI images of leg muscles of a 40-year-old and a 74-year-old triathlete compared to the center image of a 74-year-old sedentary person. The triathletes both look similar and healthy. That 74-year-old isn’t… old. The sedentary 74-year-old is also clearly not able to do much with those muscles.

Instead of optimizing for any fitness, that sedentary person optimized for ‘comfort’ at the cost of that comfort. I can only imagine how well they can get around. I’ve lived in Florida and Arizona, and there’s an adage: “Arizona is where you go to retire; Florida is where you go to die.” What I saw between the two was stark. Here in Arizona, people are out and about, doing outdoor things year-round, and are more functionally fit. In Florida, that didn’t happen as much, and the results are pretty stark from both a quality and quantity of life; they were comfortably sedentary and miserable.

Here’s a good test for you to try right now: Squat down to your heels and back up. If you can’t make it before you need support, that’s a problem. You’re demonstrating the fact that the elderly don’t ‘fall’, they collapse, which Peter Attia shares on a Joe Rogan Podcast, is the highest cause of accidental death of the elderly. Peter goes on to share that eccentric strength, or strength while lowering, is a core feature of true functional fitness and critical to maintain as we age.

For example, stepping down from a 16-inch block and taking more than three seconds to lower under control is a great way to start building that strength. I use a 24-inch box as well as working in deep, body-weight squats. Additional exercises, like Farmer’s Carry, which is just walking with weights in your hands, can help prevent collapses and improve balance and flexibility. You can’t get more functional than this!

Let me bring this back to bear on myself on why functional fitness is so important over specialized fitness. I currently have degenerating discs in my lumbar from my time in the Army, and so, functional fitness, the core elements, are crucially important for me to remain active, healthy, and enjoying life. While I’ve embodied the mental and psychological benefits Kyle and John talk about, my biggest need is ensuring I can continue doing this long into the future.

Recently, I started mountain biking more as my daughters have been racing here in Arizona in both Fall and Spring leagues. I was getting fitter and faster on my bike, but my general back pain turned acute and began to affect my mood, behaviors, and my family’s life. It turns out that mountain biking with my kids is great, but it meant I was optimizing for that and not focused on balancing my glutes equally.

That imbalance was creating torsion in my lower back and exacerbating my degenerating discs. The pain was excruciating, and the Veterans Administration Hospital wanted to increase my dose of painkillers, give me trigger point injections, and advise me that I may need surgery. I demanded physical therapy instead.

As we’ve gone through the basics of glute engagement, my low back pain is going away. The key here is that, even with my background in functional fitness, there’s still more I need to learn. To help bring that point home, my cousin is a Physical Therapist working in Home Health, caring for elderly patients recovering from surgery. Here’s what he wants you to know about functional fitness today, which can help you avoid seeing him in the future:

I’m a physical therapist, and I see patients in their homes and get to observe them interacting within the environments they live in. The main issue I find when it comes to treating injuries, or the issues that lead to surgery, is that they are often caused by an imbalance or overuse of a particular structure.
For instance, a lifelong receptionist only answered phones by pinning the phone to her ear with her right shoulder. Over time, her cervical muscles tightened on one side, and nerves became pinched, and hands went numb. Either the imbalance is dealt with and lifestyle changes are made to bring structures back into alignment, or the issue is ignored and tolerated until surgical intervention is needed to relieve the impinged nerves.
Another example is a middle-aged man never getting his weight under control and carrying an extra 50-pound belly that extended past his toes. This imbalance caused decades of strain on the low back, compressing his discs, leading to sciatica pain. His front side abdominals were stretched and weak, while his back muscles were extremely tight and rigid.
Pain is the signal that something is out of balance or alignment, but too often we attempt to mask the pain, ignore it, or treat it just long enough until it pops up again like a game of Whack-a-Mole. Towards the end of life, within the geriatric population, I see significant tightness within the myofascial connective tissue layer that surrounds the entire body‘s musculature.
This tightness can lead to a significant loss in mobility, and when inflamed, can cause burning and aching in all areas of the body. Most of these symptoms and injuries could have been avoided with a disciplined functional fitness routine that maintains the 4 foundational areas of fitness: Balance, strength, flexibility, and endurance. With these four, a body can remain resilient, capable, and injury-free. But for those who don’t, it gives me great job security.

This highlights the point of functional fitness: It’s a combination of intentional stress, balanced activities, and whole body focus. The result is the ability to do things, most things, without much worry while also being able to manage injury and pain better.

For example, the other weekend, even while dealing with my back issue, I shouldered a 50-pound backpack and hiked 13 miles round-trip up a mountain to camp out with friends. Because I had my glutes under control, my back didn’t hurt, and, although I was a smidge sore for a couple of days, it didn’t require weeks of training preparation.

Likewise, I can go paddleboarding, rock climbing, snowboarding, mountain biking, and more without worry, even as my body ages and injuries flare up. That ability easily puts me in the top 5% of my age group, but that doesn’t mean it’s out of reach for you. It just means you have the opportunity to join the adventure.

Taking Action

The point of functional fitness is to define your goals, balance your needs, and get yourself moving in that direction. Write out your goals, go to Google, or even better, an AI like ChatGPT, and have a conversation. Ask it to provide references and resources and begin taking action.

You don’t need an expensive gym membership or complicated home gym equipment. You can do almost everything you need with a plyo box and a kettlebell, but you can also just do body weight exercises, as I used to put together for my physical training group in the past, which you can see HERE.1 The key isn’t sophisticated, equipment-intensive training, but functional movement. emphasizes this in 4 Muscles to Train for Maximum Anti-Aging Effect and recommends focusing on quads, glutes, core, and grip, offering great intros to simple exercises

I also recommend asking for physical therapy or hiring a personal trainer, as treatment from your doctors is typically muscle relaxers, pain killers, and anti-inflammatories. It’s easy to pop pills. The harder answer is learning how the body functions so that you don’t need them. When I go to physical therapy, I learn the core fundamentals of functional fitness and where I still have gaps. I take every opportunity I can, just to have them check out and correct my form and provide insights for where I’m neglecting functional fitness.

The fastest way to fail is to think you can or should do it yourself.

It’s also important to remember that the fastest way to fail is to think you can or should do it yourself. This is why I suggest surrounding yourself with others who are doing the same thing. A key to my success was building a routine with friends, family, and neighbors, who joined our garage workouts. We’ve had a constant flow working through our weekly exercises and, when others show up, I have no excuse not to work out. These days, we’re focused on just the family, and when my kids turn 10, the workouts become mandatory. The result is an established routine where they push me as often as I push them.

So, take that step, get moving, understand who you are and what you want, and remember: “A healthy body is HARD to sustain; it takes a lot of Discipline. An unhealthy body is HARD to maintain; it takes a lot of Medicine. Choose your HARD.” Let’s take advantage of your potential and take the first steps so that you can do what you want, when you want, without significant limitations, no matter your age, condition, or experience.

“It does not matter how slowly you go so long as you do not stop.” - Confucius

Now, for the best part, if you want to listen to John and Kyle together, talking about functional fitness, check out this podcast:

For another outstanding essay on the dangers of sugar, please check out Sweet Death:

Remember, you don’t need fancy equipment, even landscaping rocks, in the backyard of a VRBO, the day before a wedding, with the groom, makes for a great way to keep yourself balanced.

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Embracing PolyPaths

Michael Woudenberg — Sun, 24 May 2026 08:02:06 GMT

Today’s topic builds on a new concept that resonated with me: the idea of a PolyPath as opposed to a Polymath. It’s the same thing from a different framing that I’ll exemplify as we explore the multiple paths my career has taken. It’s been both an asset and a liability, but understanding what it means can also help take the fear away from others who would like to try something new.

This one is extra special as it’s my 200th essay since I started nearly four years ago! As always, I strive to keep these essays open to everyone, so please help by becoming a paid subscriber for just $24 a year. That’s just $2 a month and makes a big difference. Right now, we have 1.5% helping out. Can we get that to 3%?

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The other day, I came across on Substack Notes, and she introduced me to a new view on our Polymathic Apsirations. She calls it Polypaths, and in, Yes, you can really be a master of many trades! she breaks down three types:

Meta Masters have one underground source — call it a philosophy, a way of seeing, a foundational obsession — and it erupts across domains the way a single spring feeds multiple rivers. Science and art, to them, are not two things. It’s different manifestations of the same spark.
Multi Masters hold genuinely separate excellences that run in parallel, distinct as two rivers that never merge but share the same mountain. Football and mathematics. Chemistry and symphonies. No explicit connection. But one person, containing all of it.
Merge Masters do something rarer still: they take two domains and deliberately collide them, producing something neither could generate alone. The merger is the method.

Naturally, I resonate with this framing as it lines up with my own experience. I’m nowhere near where I’d imagined I’d be right now at any point in my career. Currently, I’m the Chief Engineer for Space Force programs within my business unit and an Adjunct Professor teaching in a Master’s of Engineering Management program at the University of Arkansas. Neither of which I could have predicted five years ago.

So, how did I end up here? Let’s just say looking back is interesting…

Three years ago, I was on a sabbatical (fancy word for unemployed but busy) and was trying to kick off my strategic advising with Polymathic Disciplines and preparing to publish my first novel, Paradox. Which, by the way, is a great read about AI and what it means to be human, and the novelization of the concepts we explore here in Mixed Mental Arts. This was when I found the power of embracing multiple paths.

But four years ago, I was a Software Engineering Senior Manager at a Blockchain startup doing advanced analytics on cryptocurrency. It ended up being a company that didn’t want to grow up, and my efforts to mature products, processes, and people went nowhere. I saw the writing on the wall and took a sizeable early severance.

And just five years ago, I was a recently published author of a peer-reviewed paper on Systems Engineering of Autonomy while working across Lockheed Martin’s corporate technology portfolio. I was also cranking out new Trust Frameworks for Autonomous Systems and AI. The new leadership kept asking a fish (me) to climb a tree, and I struggled to understand the way I processed work compared to them.

And six years ago, I was doing analysis with Westinghouse on their small modular reactor while helping finish a manned-unmanned teaming project for Lockheed. It was here I learned the valuable lessons of how to Acknowledge and Ignore while avoiding the siren call of Confidently Answering the Wrong Questions. I was doing well, worked across multiple domains and disciplines, and loved what I did.

None of that was planned. When I joined Lockheed, I couldn’t spell AI and was expecting to help them with offensive and defensive cyber technologies.

Because at the end of 2018, I finished a fantastic year as a Systems Engineering Manager at Raytheon with a second hat as a Cyber Technologies Program Manager. I was at the top of my game before their merger with United Technologies, which collapsed my entire portfolio and, in mid-2019, redirected my career to Lockheed as Raytheon went through a painful transition.

But I’d been able to finish my Master's in Systems Engineering at Johns Hopkins, a dream I never had because I didn’t imagine anyone with an undergrad in Business could even apply. I was the only one without an engineering degree, yet I graduated with Honors. It was right about here that I read “The Polymath” by , and learned what I aspired to be.

And that grad school opportunity happened because a fantastic manager, , a man who knew how to Provide Top Cover, saved me from a horrible boss and showed that my background in Six Sigma was actually very similar to Operations Research, which I now claim as one of my main professional disciplines alongside Program Management and Organizational Optimization. (Fun fact, they’re all the same core) That systems engineering position, plus a good interview and some powerful letters of recommendation, got me into Ratheon’s Johns Hopkins cohort.

I got noticed by that manager because I was really good at Lean Six Sigma at Raytheon, where I was sent to optimize every nook and cranny across the business, from Engineering to Finance, to Supply Chain, to Business Development, and beyond. I worked with very senior leaders (who would write those letters of recommendation) and was able to cultivate multiple mentorships where I learned a ton about business strategy and customer focus.

I got that job at Raytheon because I learned the ropes at Honeywell Aerospace, where I was an Engineering Program Manager helping transition new technologies into production. That’s because Honeywell hired me after I left active duty to help run a production floor, trained me in Lean Six Sigma, and the Engineering Department saw that skill set, my success, plus my leadership, and brought me upstairs. (From 2011 to 2019, I was job-coded as an engineer before I had my engineering degree)

That leadership foundation matured because, before Honeywell, I was an Army Field Artillery Officer focused on Fire Support activities, yet deployed to run a Police Transition Team in Iraq with the 3d Armored Cavalry Regiment, where I started to really learn counterintuitive insights. Sure, I was Airborne and Ranger qualified with a background in the heavy mechanized 2nd Infantry Division, which meant I was a light fighter in a heavy role, but… (cue the first major professional skills alignment discrepancy) I adapted, I rolled with the different paths, and always found myself somewhere better than I expected, though nowhere near where I expected.

How many paths is that so far? Because if we go further back, the pattern continues. I’ve waited tables, mowed lawns, worked at a lumber yard, as a handyman, cleaned hotel rooms, done photojournalism, washed dishes, worked at two ski hills, done lawn care, and at this point, I’m starting to lose track.

Grooming Mont Ripley in Houghton, Michigan, where I went to Michigan Tech

My career has been a catastrophe if I were to measure against the common advice of ‘find your niche and master it.’ Yet, because it’s been a catastrophe of that advice, it’s opened up opportunities and insights that few can even fathom. It took me a while to understand that it was those polypaths that make polymaths.

This isn’t to brag. I wouldn’t wish the chaos on many people! It’s also as much of a liability as it is an asset. I’ve been in dozens of interviews where I can watch their faces and see that they wanted a monopathic individual. Worse, they couldn’t even see how the polypath could help the very problems they’re hoping the new hire would solve because they can’t Embrace the Divergents. They ended up hiring monopaths who changed nothing.

The challenge is very real. On my sabbatical, I applied to 984 jobs. I had over 100 interviews, was ghosted by 75, declined by 24, and got two jobs: one teaching, and one in Space Force Engineering, a domain I had almost no experience in. Clearly, the polypath, while I can see the value, isn’t aligned well with corporate America. But those two jobs I did get are the two most rewarding of my career. Looking again at what Apoorvaa suggests, “That’s not a problem to fix. That’s a life worth living.”

However, for me, the misalignments, forced adaptability, and my own personal agility to transition allowed me to slip into adjacent spaces, find fusions and confluences, and quickly gain traction and make improvements while mastering what many would consider a totally separate domain or discipline.

The hardest part about this is that it’s really hard to advise others on how this happens or if it would even work for them. I certainly can’t recommend how to pass a classic interview with these polypaths, let alone get past the recruiters. (Well, I can, but it requires artful resume management and playing the game)

However, unlike my background, most people are stuck on one path and wouldn’t mind trying something new, so the best two things I can recommend are: First, be willing to Jump Into the Unknown, and, second, understand that PolyPaths don’t have to be quite as chaotic as my own to add value. Apoorva’s description of Multi, Meta, and Merge Masters helps structure a target set to work toward. Sometimes, it’s just as simple as understanding how your Art influences STEM or how the 7 Liberal Arts are the foundation for everything. The point is to start fusing across those domains and disciplines and see where it takes you.

I do still cringe when I think of how I’d respond to that classic interview question: “Where do you see yourself in three to five years?”

Hell if I know. But I’m sure it’ll be somewhere awesome.

Welcome to the life of a PolyPath! What’s your story?

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Which Polypath do you think I am? Meta Master, Multi Master, or Merge Master? I’d love to know how you see my fusion of domains and disciplines.

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"I Am"

Michael Woudenberg — Sun, 17 May 2026 08:01:38 GMT

Today’s topic is another collaboration with my cousin and co-conspirator . It explores the idea of embodying Christian ideals and the challenge to be Christ-like. We also explore how this same pattern exists across multiple religions and philosophies, and how it is the most rewarding place to be.

If you’ve followed along here for a while, you’ll recognize what I describe as my Theological Adventure, where we’ve explored topics like Religion as a Psychology, Exegesis and the Bible, how many Biblical Laws we follow, Antifragility and the Bible, how Reincarnation Sounds Awesome, The Truth of Myths, and Religion as Psychotherapy.

The best part of this adventure is that Jared was really the instigator in many ways. Don’t let his mild demeanor and southern manners fool you; he’s always been one step ahead of me, and today I’m proud to work with him on one more step by exploring how to be the embodiment of Christ. To be “I Am.” Far from being heretical, what we are exploring today is perfectly Biblical and, even better, one of the most empowering concepts of agency for our corporal and spiritual lives.

A Note on Culture and Language

Something we have to face out of the gate is that much of the language will sound odd to the heavy Western tradition many of you readers inhabit. We’ll be using the Bible as the core because that’s what we are familiar with. However, the Bible also highlights the challenge with language.

For example, Jesus spoke in Aramaic, not Greek or Latin. Very likely, so did all of his disciples,1 and this is crucially important because the Aramaic culture, and the Hebrew that preceded it, was much more mystical than the structured and processed Greek foundations of Western Philosophy.

Take, for instance, Matthew's use of a Hebrew technique called Midrash, which fills in interpretive gaps, often through analogy. So when Matthew uses examples from the Torah and Prophets to defend the story of Christ, we interpret it as literal, whereas his audience never would have. As a Rabbi told me on my adventure, “You keep trying to make everything literal when we Jews don’t even take it literally.”

With that in mind, you’re going to have to step away from the common, systematized view of the Bible and reorient into the more mystical underpinnings of the ancient Hebrew and later Aramaic cultures. Let’s hand this over to Jared and dive in.

The Name of God

Humanity has always tried to name the unnamable. We attach designations to the horizon so we can point toward it, describe it, and define its direction. There is comfort in containment. We love to box things up, add labels, and place the contents on shelves in their proper places. But how does a person respond when the uncontainable encounters them?

The spiritual journey, in all of its expressions across cultures and centuries, begins with a question of identity. “Who am I, truly?” What is the nature of the self beneath the surface roles and the personal history? Beneath the beliefs handed to us by family, culture, and religion? To explore the roots of this question, we must return to one of the most enigmatic and transformative statements in sacred literature: “I AM.”

The first appearance of this divine declaration emerges in the Hebrew scriptures, when Moses encounters the burning bush in the wilderness. As the story tells it, Moses is asked to return to Egypt to liberate the Israelites from bondage. Unsure, he asks for the name of the One who sends him as a defining anchor that he can offer to his people as proof of divine authority. The response he receives is not a title, not a mythology, not a personality or description, but an expression of Being itself:

“Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh”.

The Name is often rendered as “I Am That I Am,” or more accurately, “I Will Be What I Will Be.” In this profound reply, God refuses the limitation of definition. Rather than being named as an object or entity, God reveals a state: pure, unconditioned existence. The divine is presented not as something other or separate, but as the very foundation of Being, the awareness in which all things arise.

In this original context, the divine is not a distant, anthropomorphic ruler with human attributes; it is Being itself. It is the silent presence beneath all forms, the living essence that simply is. It is fluid, dynamic, unfolding. “I Am” is a state of existence that cannot be confined by words. Moses’s encounter2 suggests that the sacred is not found by naming God, but by awakening to the divine that is.

Jesus and the embodied “I Am.”

Centuries later, this thread resurfaces in the teachings of Jesus, particularly in the Gospel of John, where he echoes the same divine identity with statements like:

“I am the way, the truth, and the life.”
“I am the light of the world.”
“Before Abraham was, I Am.”

These are typically interpreted through our literal lens as claims of exclusive divinity and, as such, read like blasphemy if we utter them. However, I’ve come to realize they read like clarity if we hear them as the same divinity speaking through a life. Jesus’s message is not worship of a distant exception but awakening to a nearness: “the kingdom of God is within you.”

This is where it becomes crucial to apply the tool of Exegesis and read from the text in context within the Aramaic worldview Jesus taught; these statements are not declarations of his ego or claims of divinity. They are expressions of the same eternal essence Moses encountered. Jesus is not pointing to a personal identity separate from humanity. He is speaking from the unconditioned awareness within all beings. He demonstrates what it looks like when the “I Am” becomes one’s lived identity rather than merely believing a theological concept.

In the Aramaic tradition, his message was patently clear. It was never “worship me,” but “follow me,” a correction he made continuously while explaining that it meant embodying what he embodied; realizing what he realized. Through this lens, Jesus is not an exception to humanity, but an example of it. (John 10:34, 2 Peter 1:4, Hebrews 2:10–11, John 4:21–23 Almost all of John 14, Matthew 16:24, etc.)

As an aside, it’s helpful to understand that Christ is not Jesus’ last name, but a state of consciousness. The word comes from the Greek Christos, meaning “the anointed one.” Its Hebrew/Aramaic root is Mashiach / M’shicha (מְשִׁיחָא), also meaning anointed. But a better understanding of anointing does not refer to oil poured on a king’s head, which was the literal manifestation. Rather, it symbolizes the inner consecration of awareness, or the awakening of one’s divine nature, not unlike the communion bread and wine that Christians are directed to consume. No one confuses the literal with the metaphorical of that sacrament.

Therefore, to be “as Christ,” as Christians3 are called to be, is to embody the universal pattern of spiritual evolution. Simply put, the Bible describes Christ as the blueprint of our higher self, as our true nature before conditioning, ego, and separation distort it. This archetype can represent the fully awakened human, one who realizes union with the Divine, the bridge between the finite and the infinite, and love embodied in form. Jesus “The Christ” becomes the example, not the exception.

In this view, Jesus of Nazareth was one who fully embodied the Christ principle and lived from that state. This includes fearless compassion, radical forgiveness, ego transcendence, non-duality, and service guided by love. His life serves as a model of the human journey toward the divine, which early Christians called theosis: becoming divine by participation. Thus, Jesus is the window through which the “I Am” was revealed. Spiritual development can be understood as a movement from belief to direct knowing to lived embodiment, and that starts with seeking.

Seeker

The seeker senses that something is missing and begins searching through religion, spiritual experience, teachers, symbols, or practices. This is a sacred beginning, but it can become a loop when the person keeps collecting beliefs, highs, or experiences without allowing them to reshape how they live. In this stage, identity can get tied to being right, belonging to the right group, or chasing the next revelation.

Their identity becomes anchored in belief. Belief IN Jesus, belief IN the Bible, belief IN salvation, as well as belonging to a group that validates those beliefs. It is here that many unintentionally miss the essence of Jesus’s message. Rather than guiding people to awaken the “I Am” within themselves, Christianity as a religion often teaches people to worship the “I Am” in Jesus only.

Jesus becomes a figure to believe in, rather than an example to realize. This preserves the separation between the individual and the divine. The person remains the Seeker, while Jesus remains the unreachable exception. Worse, they become confident IN their belief and stop seeking altogether.

However, there are those who stay in a perpetual loop of seeking. They jump from one belief to another, one church to another, chasing the echoes. We call this type “Bliss Bunnies,” always looking for the thrill without the challenge of the uncomfortable truths. This behavior is not constrained to religion either! As has written about, the deep longing for the “I Am” self-actualization makes our religious drives more of a psychology than a theology, where some of the most religious people chasing bliss are atheists. This was what my wife experienced in a Costa Rican ayahuasca retreat where she met people on their 19th meeting with Mother Aya, yet their lives are still a wreck, and nothing has been resolved. They were hooked on the euphoria of revelatory downloads, yet failing to embody those same lessons, and remained seekers, never transitioning to knowers.

Knower

Eventually, for those willing to continue, a shift occurs, and one enters the stage of the Knower. In this stage, belief evolves into direct experience. God is no longer a concept, but an inner reality. The person no longer prays to a distant deity but becomes aware of the presence of the divine within. Prayer itself turns from recitation into relationship, and from distance into intimacy. The Knowers begin to understand the patterns and teachings of Jesus, the Buddha, Kuan Yin, and the other wisdom traditions from the inside.

The “Kingdom of God is within you” stops sounding poetic and becomes an experienced truth. There is no need for argument, and no conflict as to who is right, because the ego is no longer attached to any religious doctrine. The search turns inward, and the soul recognizes, sometimes with awe, sometimes with simplicity: “I Am.”

I, too, was caught up in the highs of psilocybin revelation, where I was having phenomenal encounters and learning so much about reality, myself, and my purpose during those high-dose “hero journeys.” That is, until I encountered a hard lesson when a hero’s journey turned dark, scary, and like a whirlpool, I was being sucked down a spinning vortex.

The same inaudible voice deep inside my heart and mind said it was time for me to live my life and embody the lessons learned. Psychedelics can be powerful tools for recalibration. But I had gotten to a place where I was using it as a cheat code, and I needed to transition to the next level and embody the knowledge.

Embodied

In the Bible, Jesus calmly walked on water and commanded the storms, a metaphor for mastering the chaos of the unconscious, fear, and unstable forces that disrupt human life. This can be seen as a fully aligned consciousness that is unthreatened by chaos. Peter shows what happens when a human being entrusts themselves to the same consciousness Jesus models. Jesus tells Peter, “Come, " inviting him to the same state of being, and at first, Peter shares in the “miracle” not because of a superpower, but due to a shift in perception and alignment.

But Peter begins to sink. He “saw the wind”, meaning he became absorbed in the threatening conditions rather than the relational connection that had momentarily lifted him above them. He shifts focus from presence to his circumstances. He moves from inner alignment to external threat assessment. And he returns to the egoic survival mind, which sees chaos as more “real” than the call of Christ. When the mind re-identifies with fear, the soul sinks beneath the waves of its own projections.

There is nothing to fear in stepping beyond belief into embodiment. The God you have loved from afar becomes the Presence you awaken to within. You do not lose Jesus by moving deeper. You discover him more intimately than ever, not as an external savior but as the template of your own divine potential, which in turn “saves” you as perception shifts. Nothing but distance is taken away.

The reward of continuing this journey is profound: the ability to witness your life from a place of clarity instead of fear, to detach from trauma without suppressing it, to live with a sense of inner freedom, to meet reality with strength rather than defense, and to anchor your life in the unshakable knowing of who you truly are.

“I Am” becomes the key to separating identity from experience. Take trauma, for example: Instead of unconsciously declaring “I am broken,” I learn to say, “I have experienced pain, but I am not the wound. I am the awareness that holds the experience.” This shift is not denying that the experience happened, but rather liberating the person from its grip and returning agency. It empowers the individual to process life not from the fractured self, but from the wholeness that existed before and beyond it.

Belief is the seed. Direct knowing is the blooming. Embodiment is the fruit. And the divine “I Am” that once spoke from the burning bush now waits patiently within your own heart, ready to be remembered, lived, and expressed through you.

Back to Michael with a few more thoughts on the impact across culture and steps we can take ourselves.

I Am Across Cultures

The power of embodying “I Am” is one of the most important things we’ve unlocked on this adventure. Instead of looking at Jesus as the literal Son of God, literally God according to the doctrine of the Trinity, I now see the ability to be Christ-Like. “I Am” is not a claim of divinity but the realization of living in alignment with the potential of being created in God’s image, as Genesis 1:26 establishes.

This realization is not new. We haven’t ‘unlocked’ ‘secret’ wisdom. It’s been right in front of our noses the entire time (Deuteronomy 30:11-14), and what Jesus was trying to get his disciples to understand, with what I can only imagine were a lot of face-palms as he explained one analogy after another while countering constant misinterpretations.

This idea is also not unique to Christianity. Across the mystical traditions of the world, we find parallel expressions of the same truth. For the sake of brevity, here’s a short summary:

In Advaita Vedanta, the realization “Aham Brahmasmi”, I am Brahman, captures the understanding that the Self is one with the Absolute.
In Sufism, the mystic Al-Hallaj’s declaration “Ana al-Haqq” (“I am the Truth”) cost him his life, yet it reflected the dissolution of ego into the Infinite.
Kabbalah speaks of the indwelling spark of the Divine, the Neshamah, as the emanation of the Infinite (Ein Sof) within the human soul.
Taoism points to the nameless Tao that can only be lived but never defined.
Buddhism, though framed through the language of no-self, directs the seeker toward recognition of an unbounded awareness beyond the illusions of identity. Buddhism peels away the layers of “I am this” and “I am that” until only the awareness of “I Am” remains.
Even the Norse traditions understand this mode of being, where Odin shows that you can understand reality completely, act nobly within it, and still remain unable to save or transcend it, but you have fully embodied it.

Though the languages and metaphors differ, the mystics of every tradition converge. The deepest truth of the human being is not the personal ego, but the universal, divine awareness that simply says, “I Am.”

Synthesis

As Jared and I wrangled with this topic, I struggled with the sense of heresy instilled in me. Who was I to dare suggest that “I Am” like I were God?

On the other hand, that’s exactly what the Bible tells us to do, and the idea that I can is, frankly, empowering and humbling. "Take up your cross and follow me"4 has nothing to do with ego and everything to do with dying to that ego to be reborn and embodied in a new way of thinking and acting. Which is exactly what Jesus talks about in John 3.

Am I there yet? I Am… not. But that’s because Seeking, Knowing, and Embodying is a cyclical, not linear transition. Just like Polymathic Being advises to Learn, Unlearn, and Relearn, each stage of our lives continues to evolve and process these lessons. I’ve embodied some ideas, I know others, and I’m still seeking an infinite number more.

That’s where I can’t shake just how much agency it demands. “I Am” shatters the shackles of disassociation. What I mean here is that, in common Christianity, too often we are taught to take a passive approach. All have fallen short of the glory of God. We can’t do anything but rely on salvation. In the extreme, it’s only about grace, and no action we take is sufficient. This view denies our agency and absolutely blocks people from maturing while also keeping us from the promised fulfillment.5

Simply put, it runs counter to Jesus’s call to action, and what Jared and I have found by responding to that call is transcendent, ego-destroying, and fulfilling. We are no longer chasing those highs because we realize that the goal isn’t an external salvation but an internal embodiment of “I Am,” and that is salvation from this world.

“I think, therefore I am.” - René Descartes

There are many written attempts to capture this change in perception; to realize the spiritual understanding of one’s true essence, and to answer the call to awakening. From Seeker, to Knower, to Embodiment of the I AM. Below are verses taken from the Christian Bible to illustrate this deeper meaning. They are some of the clearest biblical passages that describe spiritual awakening, inner transformation, and the realization of divine union; the “Christ within” experience.

John 10:30

“I and the Father are one.” (of the same essence)

John 14:20

“On that day (awakening) you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. (We all share the same essence)

John 17:21–23

“That they may all be one; just as You, Father, are in me, and I am in You, may they also be in Us… I in them and You in me, that they may become perfectly one.” (We share the same divinity)

Colossians 1:27

“Christ in you, the hope of glory.”

Galatians 2:20

“It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me.” (Ego replaced by I AM/True Self)

1 John 2:27

“The anointing you received from Him abides in you… it teaches you about all things.” (We are all set apart when our perception shifts to our true identity)

2 Corinthians 5:17

“If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!” (To be “in Christ” is to share in the awakened perception that our inheritance has always been I AM. Our old identity has been crucified, and the new realization of the I AM has risen)

Romans 12:2

“Be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”

Ephesians 4:22–24

“Put off your old self… be renewed in the spirit of your mind… put on the new self, created after the likeness of God.” (This may be the clearest message illustrating these points)

John 3:3

“No one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again… born of Spirit.”

Psalm 82:6

“I said, ‘You are gods; you are all sons of the Most High.’” (Our birthright; our true essence is shared divinity)

Genesis 1:26–27

“God created mankind in His image and likeness.”

2 Peter 1:4

“…you may become partakers of the divine nature.”

Luke 17:21

“The kingdom of God is within you.”

1 Corinthians 3:16

“Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?”

1 Corinthians 6:19

“Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you.”

1 John 4:16

“God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in them.”

John 15:4–5

“Abide in me, and I in you… apart from me you can do nothing.”

1 Corinthians 2:16

“We have the mind of Christ.”

Philippians 2:5

“Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus.”

See past the illusion of ego, awaken to the perception that we are children of the Divine made in its image and share in that birthright, embody the I AM, and become co-creators in relationship so that we may live out our purpose.

Their primary language would be Aramaic, though they may have spoken Greek as apostles, like Paul, who was a Pharisee and more educated.

It should be added that the ‘Burning Bush’ is also read as a euphemism for psychedelics, similar to ‘smoking a blunt as the Acacia bush in that region has one of the highest levels of natural DMT of any plant. To those who have studied psychedelics, the entire encounter is incredibly similar to how people describe a Hero’s Journey

Not to distract from the main thrust, but the word Christian literally means ‘Little Christ’ and in a proverbial sense "all that is noble, and good, and Christ-like” (History of the Christian Church, Volume I: Apostolic Christianity. A.D. 1-100 by Philip Schaff:

Matthew 16:24, Mark 8:34, Luke 9:23

One of the most horrifying descriptions I’ve heard for the reason for our human existence is to “Glorify God.” I don’t know what sort of ego-infused idea this is, but if your God created everything merely to direct that energy into a synchophantic glorification… I want nothing to do with it. However, this reflects something deeper in that mindset, in that it’s what they would do if they were God. This mindset is that of a seeker at best and will likely have the most visceral reaction to the idea of “I Am” embodiment because to deny God that ego and identity means their identity and belief IN that God is challenged.

Maiden, Mother, and Crone

Michael Woudenberg — Sun, 10 May 2026 08:01:58 GMT

Today’s topic looks at the importance of the unique phases of human femininity that differentiate us from much of the natural world. We’ll explore the power behind each of the three phases as well as the shadow archetypes that emerge when we don’t properly mature through those phases. At the end, you’ll get a preview of my third novel, Rebirth, where these ideas are fused together.

Throughout history, there have been three major phases of the feminine, typically rendered as the Maiden, Mother, and Crone. At the simplest distillation, the Maiden begins with puberty and ends with motherhood. The Mother, obviously, picks up there and ends with menopause, and the Crone finishes the cycle as neither of the first two, but something added to both.

What’s interesting to note is that, amongst mammals, especially primates, humans are quite unique in having menopause and in the long lives women live beyond their reproductive years. In nature, when females stop producing, it’s typically the end of their lives. This extension of life created a unique evolutionary adaptation that makes each phase unique and important.

Each phase also comes with both positive and negative archetypes. This is critically important to understand in the light of modern feminism because there’s a natural maturation that we tend to ignore, which conflates all of the feminine as inherently good while desperately overlooking the negative manifestations. Let’s dive into each one a little deeper.

Maiden

The positive Maiden emulates autonomy, curiosity, creativity, courage, and the willingness to step beyond inherited limits. She’s the explorer, innovator, and truth-teller who refuses to be trapped by old roles. She brings freshness, experimentation, aspiration, and the conviction that a woman’s life is larger than what convention prescribed. She’s the independent thinker, head held high, keeping both the men and the other women on their toes in the best possible ways.

She’s fiercely feminine and comfortable in who she is while also not compromising to be something she’s not. She sees the natural maturation into Mother as a goal, not a burden. I’ll note here that the Mother doesn’t require babies, and babies do not make the Maiden into a mother. The Maiden explores the feminine, while the Mother is the embodiment of the core feminine.

This last part is important as the Maiden’s shadow is the “boss bitch” or influencer version of feminism, built on optics instead of depth. She’s liable to sell her sex on the one hand while also trying to pretend her sex doesn’t exist on the other. The shadow is hyper-individualistic, consumerized empowerment, with endless reinvention, and often refusing to mature beyond rebellion.

Yet, as she refuses to mature into the Mother and pushes that social responsibility down the road, she continues fighting old constraints, but is trapped in performative independence. We can see this manifest in the social justice warrior willing to burn down the old structures instead of appreciating that, as Donald Kingsbury wrote, “Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. Throw away the solution, and you get the problem back.”

There’s another layer here where many of our Maidens are on hormonal birth control, which tricks their bodies into thinking they’re pregnant. This means they’re suffering the vulnerability of the Mother without having had the maturation of the Maiden.

This compounds the problem that there are a lot of moms out there who are still Maidens. In part, that’s because feminism hasn’t recognized that the Maiden is a phase providing a natural and valuable tension that needs to settle as she matures into her role as Mother. In part, that’s because we have gotten rid of so much of the value of Mother that the systems that support her are gone, and women aren’t challenged to mature into the Mother.

Mother

As we move forward, we need to recognize that the core function of the Mother goes hand in hand with her own physiological evolution. It’s not overexaggerating to say that the Mother is the evolutionary apex of the woman from a natural selection perspective. Our entire species relies exclusively on the ability to support, protect, and care for the Mother while she bears and raises our children.

For example, to birth a human baby’s extraordinarily large head, a mother’s hips are just wide enough to birth and just narrow enough to still run away… barely. Babies are also born much more prematurely than other mammals, and so both of these together mean that she and her child are incredibly vulnerable during and after birth. This is compounded by the fact that human children are reliant on their mothers significantly longer, both through nursing and care, than other animals.

This time of life is also the height of the monthly menstrual cycle, which flows through patterns of estrogen, progesterone, and oxytocin. This cycle is essential for fertility, bonding, emotional attunement, and caregiving, which drive healthy Mother archetypes. However, this cycle is also chaotic, and doesn’t fit within modern structures that want to ignore or break that cycle, starting with the Maiden before her.

However, with a well-supporting system, the positive Mother expresses protection, generativity, stewardship, community building, and a desire to create conditions in which others can flourish. At her best, she not only nurtures but adds formative structure to the community.

Because she is the most vulnerable, the Mother’s survival depends on building families, institutions, movements, classrooms, neighborhoods, and cultures that support her children. She’s responsible, manages chaos, mentors, preserves what is worth saving, and works to improve others' lives. The positive Mother is the strongest person in the room because she can bear burdens without losing sight of the human beings involved.

The Mother is both at her greatest strength in the feminine and the most susceptible to the worst of the shadow, which manifests as safetyism, moral policing, helicopter activism, and the “Karen” or “woke scold” enforcing control under the guise of care. That’s because, when the Mother’s desire for protection outweighs all else, she resorts to gatekeeping ideological purity or bureaucratic management using regulation for justice and turning nurturing energy into smothering authority.

This gatekeeping also shows up in resource protection. It’s only been in the last 100 years that we’ve had a surplus of resources in the West, and even less time across the world. Add to that intrasexual competition, status hoarding, and the perpetual fear of replacement by the Maiden, and the Mother often weaponizes typical matriarchal structures of soft power to protect what she has, even if it holds others back.

What’s interesting to note is that as we delay the transition to Motherhood by pushing marriage and childbearing ten years later in life, we end up with a lot of vulnerable mothers who are also going through perimenopause, where those hormones, especially estrogen, start to fluctuate unpredictably and exacerbate the negative archetypes. Simply put, she has no more room for error, and the shadow is more compelling.1

This is where it becomes hard to face the main implication that the Mother, while the creator of life, is also the most chaotic and, without structure, becomes incredibly fragile. If this isn’t understood, the Mother cannot mature into the value of the Crone.

Crone

As described earlier, the Crone is unique in nature as she’s unburdened from reproduction, unlike the Maiden and Mother. She is post-menopause, where estrogen and progesterone drop to more stable levels, and the influence of androgens increases, resulting in greater emotional steadiness. This helps her create clearer boundaries, reduces the need for external validation, and fosters a more direct, discerning mindset. The Crone’s body goes from a more chaotic, hormonally reinforced mode of connection and creation to a calmer form of clarity and integration.

This maturation allows the Crone to stabilize the overall feminine with memory, discernment, pattern-recognition, depth, and wisdom gained from her life’s experience. The healthy Crone can contextualize social change, temper youthful excess, name uncomfortable truths, and mentor the younger generations without needing to dominate them. She has a freedom that no longer needs approval because she’s not fighting for intrasexual competition like the Maiden or resources for her babies like the Mother.

Or, at least that’s what should happen. If this maturation doesn’t happen, or the negative archetypes have predominated through the first two cycles, she becomes a hardened veteran, cynical, combative, and unable to let go of past battles. Worse, she desperately competes with the Maiden and Mother while fighting against the gravity of age. This is the aging activist who sees progress as betrayal and cannot perceive how far society has moved, while, at the same time, demanding that younger women struggle as she did. (or perceives she did)

Where the positive Crone guides, balances, and supports, the shadow Crone clings to grievance and turns wisdom into bitterness and vigilance into perpetual war. The negative Crone also weaponizes the zealotry of the immature Maiden and the fears of the vulnerable Mother in ways that exacerbate chaos, a topic we explored in Toxic Empathy.

Synthesis

Threading these three layers together highlights just how much the impact of the Mother has across the board. This makes complete sense from our biological evolution. What’s fascinating is that, unlike other species, we have two unique bookends of the Maiden and the Crone.

Think about that. Almost every other primate has no Maiden that challenges, strives, and competes, forcing both the patriarchy to do better while keeping the matriarchy from becoming ossified. Likewise, nature rarely has a Crone who balances the equation with temperance and support.

That is, only if we actually understand and embrace the layers properly. However, in our current zeitgeist, I fear we’ve thrown out that understanding and stagnated the natural maturation. Without the balance, the shadow archetypes emerge, and we see that in much of modern feminism, which, at its worst, has lost the value proposition of the feminine, an irony of ironies given its goals.

In part, we got so fixated on the negatives of masculinity that it’s become a knee-jerk reaction that assumes everything about the feminine is positive while also collapsing the distinct phases of the feminine into one chaotic mess. If the current mental health crisis, male loneliness epidemic, declining birthrates, and general absence from sex are any example, it’s not helpful for anyone.

But what did we expect when we’ve unbalanced the equation so badly? We’ve smothered the independence of the Maiden with birth control that her body interprets as pregnancy. We’ve convinced the Mother that she has to hold a career and let someone else raise her children, and we’ve abandoned the Crone in chasing eternal youth. Underpinning this is a general devaluation of the feminine and the embrace of the patriarchal value propositions, and the beauty and value of the matriarchy are lost.

So, how do we get it back? Is it a vestige of a bygone era and should be phased out? Has something better replaced it, or have we lost something important? I’d love to hear your thoughts and ideas.

Leave a comment

In the meantime, check out an excerpt from my forthcoming third novel in The Singularity Chronicles titled Rebirth. It follows the humans after the reset of Paradox as they work to sort through the aftermath and set the foundations for a healthy humanity:

Listen to this YouTube music while you read!

daDum daDumDum daDumDum daDum daDumDum daDumDum.2 The circular room pulsed with the rhythmic throb as if it were the heart of Mother Earth herself. At the center, sunlight poured through a hole in the ceiling, illuminating a statue of Gaia composed of three naked women standing on an equilateral triangle.

More voices added to the song: young, powerful - rich, mature – frail, thin, all wound in the same eerie chorus. It was a visceral celebration, not keening or wailing. It was invigorating as Miriella focused on the statue.

The Maiden, standing tall, facing the entrance. Her long hair flowed behind her, arms crossed over her firm belly, gently framing firm breasts with a look of fiery defiance carved into her eyes. Confidence and adventure oozed from her stone pores, tempered by the gentle curves of her body. She was no warrior, but she was fierce.

The Mother stood on the right side of the triangle, cradling a toddler in her arms while it nursed on her fuller breast. Her belly was gently swollen with a new baby, scored by stretch marks, and padded with a soft layer of fat. Her eyes glowed as they adored the baby, while shadows hung under her eyes and creases worried her forehead. Here were the tempered expressions of love, care, fear, and frustration. She was no longer fierce in the same way, but she was beautiful in new ways.

The Crone leaned on a cane on the final side of the triangle. Gravity waged war as everything sagged; her shoulders, her skin, even her knobbed knees no longer stood tall and straight. Yet there was a poise that belied the wrinkles and folds, a steel that held her up that neither the Maidin nor Mother possessed. You could see it in her eyes: a keen, piercing look that judged your soul wrapped in the care and warmth of the Mother.

Miriella stepped forward to stand in front of the Maiden. It pulled at her. She knew that expression. Without intending, she mirrored the Maiden’s pose. To her left, Mobedessa Anuradha stepped in front of the Crone. She wasn’t as old as the woman in the stone, but she had the same eyes.

Graceful movement shifted Miriella’s attention to the right, where another woman glided in front of the Mother. Reinabanu Valerahim wore shimmering silver robes that accented the silver highlights in her hair. She took a deep breath and looked into the Mother’s eyes. Miriella matched her breath and focused on the Maiden.

daDum daDumDum daDumDum daDum daDumDum daDumDum

The singers shifted their tone slightly. Their voices mixed while undulating tone and tenor as the volume and tempo increased. The humming underscoring their song deepened in juxtaposition.

As she stared at the Maiden, Miriella began to see new emotions flickering across the statue’s face.

Worry… Uncertainty? Vulnerability—

Were they carved like that, or was she projecting on the Maiden? The harder she looked, the more certain she became that the initial fiery defiance and confidence were only on the surface, and the more she focused, the more she saw a tapestry of emotions.

Even the Maiden’s posture, so brash and sexual minutes ago, now hinted at more. Her posture was tall, but her shoulders were subtly forward, guarded, not brashly confident. One foot pointed forward toward the exit while the other betrayed her subconscious by pointing slightly away toward a tunnel leading deeper into the Temple. Even her head tilted nearly imperceptibly toward the foot as if questioning, while her lips held a half smile, warm but guarded.

Miriella marveled at the subtlety and nuance. The Maiden didn’t stand tall because she had no worry, uncertainty, or vulnerability; she stood tall in spite of it. Yet it was all still there, shading the confidence and adding depth to her character.

Her eyes darted to Mobedessa Anuradha and then to Reinabanu Valerahim, who were both watching her warmly. They turned to each other and nodded. “She is ready,” Anuradha stated. The two older women turned and walked toward the point where the triangle's peak pointed, motioning for Miriella to follow.

daDum daDumDum daDumDum daDum daDUM DUM DUM—

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