The Neurodivergent Professor

Does this bother you?

You interact with someone at their job, maybe getting a coffee or something. The server is rude, obnoxious, entitled, and unhelpful. Maybe they're even condescending toward you. You may or may not say anything, but, hey, you want your coffee. Maybe you think about it later, but at some point it occurs to you that they were not good at their job in that moment. Maybe it was an isolated event, maybe it was the norm.

But what gets me, and maybe you, too, is that they were THERE. Which means this WAS an isolated event or their supervisor didn't notice. In any event, and this is where my mind always goes, the fact that they were still working suggests that there was no ACCOUNTABILITY for their behavior.

Whenever I see someone acting like an asshole I think, "at some point someone was supposed to kick their ass and didn't'. In other words, people act the way they do because other people ALLOW them to, or ENABLE them.

So one thing accountability does is remove that enabling. It calls people out on their shit.

And that's the point I'm trying to make with Accountability this week. 

Again, from Mirriam-Webster: 

Accountability: an obligation or willingness to accept responsibility or to account for one's actions

So, yeah, the misbehaving barista? No one was holding them responsible for their actions. Neither you, their supervisor, their coworkers, other patrons, nor themselves.

And that just doesn't work. 

I'd argue that one of the main assumptions of any society is Accountability. 

Where there is no Accountability, there can be no rules. No norms. No laws. (See Episode 56: Domestication for more on these)

So there is no society with out Accountability, yet we are maybe not doing the best job practicing this obligation.

We are obligated to hold each other AND OURSELVES accountable for our actions - and probably our thoughts, ideas, and other things where they influence other people.

When did we forget this?

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Definition of authentic (Taken from Merriam-Webster)

1 a: worthy of acceptance or belief as conforming to or based on fact paints an authentic picture of our society

b: conforming to an original so as to reproduce essential features an authentic reproduction of a colonial farmhouse

c: made or done the same way as an original authentic Mexican fare

2: not false or imitation: REAL, ACTUALan authentic cockney accent

3: true to one's own personality, spirit, or character is sincere and authentic with no pretensions

4 aof a church mode : ranging upward from the keynote— compare PLAGAL sense 1

b of a cadence : progressing from the dominant chord to the tonic— compare PLAGAL sense 2

5 obsolete : AUTHORITATIVE

Geeze, that's thorough, eh? But let me summarize:

Factual

Same or similar

Real

True

Sincere (like a pumpkin patch)

So, yeah, something real, or representative of something real. But most interesting is that many of these depict a thing REPRESENTING another thing. And that RESEMBLANCE is either good (authentic, real, conforming, true) or not (not authentic, fake, different, false). And remember, a dictionary is book of what we THINK words mean, not what they necessarily mean. 

In the context of the Are vs Should Problem, authenticity is behaving in the world the way you feel/want/believe you behave in your head. 

On the surface, this may seem like it means you must live in your Are to be authentic. I don't believe this is true, however.

I think we all exhibit a certain amount of Shoulds throughout our lives, no matter how hard we try not to. We are going to slip. We are human. 

The goal is not to live 100% Are and 0% Should, it's to do the best you can. I don't see any other way around it. We always build in an error term. A human error term. Which provides a degree of . . . . missing the mark. Failing. Being Inauthentic. It's ok!

So there's two points in this Episode, really. One is that the Are is your Authentic Self, and we have been discussing authenticity for the past twenty or so episodes - to point out and use the common vernacular. And the second point is that we are not trying to be 100% perfect, or 100% anything. The utility of a concept like authenticity is as a target to aim for, not something to become.

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Remember that time when everything seemed perfectly clear? 

Yeah, me neither.

But once in awhile things DO seem clear. And it feels good. There's no doubt (Episode 28) and things just make sense. Though these moments are fleeting, I think we can learn to maximize the amount of clarity we see in our lives.

And by clarity I mean more the ABSENCE of stuff rather than the PRESENCE of something. Clarity, to me, is really just a lack of noice. A lack of disturbance. A lack of . . . . . conflict.

So, yeah, clarity is PEACE.

But it's also a feeling. An emotional state, if you will, where the calmness takes over and we are filled with confidence and knowing. And how do we know if we really know what we think we know? Clarity.

But in my life, and maybe in yours, and certainly in many peoples', there is a distinct LACK of clarity. In truth, life is more like a game of telephone where whatever messages we receive from the world are many times adulterated so what we hear is wrong. Even if the game is only played by two people 

I seriously wonder how any conversation between any two people ever results in both parties simultaneously being understood and understanding. It's amazing we can understand each other given our propensity to interpret each other, insert our subjective biases, to be poor communicators, to define words differently, and any other of a multitude of elements that complicate communication among humans.

But, generally, we can actually talk to each other. My use of the term CLARITY is simply to suggest that we could be much better at it.  And that's what I talk about in this video. 

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To some, this is a ridiculous question steeped in pointless naval gazing. To others, it's a comedic take on people who ask the 'big questions'. To others this is a reasonable assessment of what we want to understand. To me, it's all three at the same time. And maybe that's the point.

And like most rhetorical questions, I don't really want to KNOW if I really know what I think I know. Rather, I'm curious about how this questions makes one think a few steps ahead. It's not about what we know. It's about the idea that we think we know in the first place. Like, what makes us think we are so awesome that we can understand the very nature of a thing? What makes us think we are so special? Why are we the only living thing on the planet that can 'know'? Or is that even a logical thought in the first place?

So, yeah, wondering whether we can even really know things is interesting in and of itself. Perhaps even more interesting than the simple question of whether we are right or wrong. Because that's the nature of knowing, I think. Knowing implies we are correct. And like my buddy Paul Gadola says, we all think we are correct. So knowing is a bit biased to say the least. We ALL think we know. And we often disagree. And modernity has brought, if nothing else, an ever increasing number of potential explanations to things which means the options of knowing what is right are becoming more and more infinite. 

In other words, knowing, or being right, is increasingly more impossible. And, more importantly, does it even matter? If there are 'subjective truths' (which I believe are really subjective realities, and not truths at all) then REALLY what does it matter? Can't we all be right? Doesn't everyone get a trophy?

What follows, then, is my curiosity in the knowing itself. Not whether or not I know. And how did I arrive at that knowing? One of the major assumptions of the Are vs Should Problem is that much of what we think and believe was simply inherited, so why do we connect so much of our identity with this inherited 'knowledge'? 

Moreover, isn't it the capacity to think we know stuff far more interesting than actually knowing the stuff? Were the ancient Greeks correct to 'know thyself'? Isn't that the first step, anyway? How can we know ANYTHING without first understanding how we would even begin to know in the first place?

Here are two links to the Toltec and Taoist ideas of 'not doing' and 'non thinking':

https://toltecschool.com/toltec-indexes/index-page-1/not-doing

https://tao-in-you.com/what-does-non-doing-mean/

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I'm using the Forest for the Trees metaphor to suggest that humans have become exceptionally myopic. The only reason I know what myopic means is because after defending my Master's Thesis a professor proclaimed that I was very myopic - meaning I had a terribly narrow view of the question I had asked and answered. I thought I was being pretty broad and was a bit hurt by his statement, but I also understood his point. I could have taken a 'bigger picture' approach, but by the time I realized that I was too far along to expand my view.

Anyway, I realized recently that myopia was again affecting my life.

During the decade I spent in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy I didn't really change. And I knew I wasn't changing, but couldn't understand why. Sure, I learned a lot, but my problems stayed the same. At some point I realized that I understood what I was doing, and how to fix it, but only in an analytical way. My mind understood the logic, but my behaviors, attitudes, and habits weren't changing. 

I was still anxious although I understood how irrational many of my fears were.

I still believed I wasn't good enough despite understanding where those beliefs came from.

I was still angry about many things, though I knew that energy didn't solve any problems.

I understood why I was the way I was, but I'll be damned if I learned anything about changing.

Until I realized I was looking at the trees.

In my metaphor, and maybe in yours, my logical, analytical brain was a tree. And it's all I saw.

Recently, I came to understand I was not only a physical body and an analytical mind, but also an emotional and feeling body with equivalent mental and spiritual elements.

And my anxiety, depression, feeling not good enough, and angry parts were spread across all of these different trees - and together formed my forest.

In order to heal, I had to form a real forest, and not just a bunch of trees.

Paul Gadola calls this Integrity - and I needed some.

A stand of trees does not a forest make. They must integrate. Together. With all parts having meaning. And seeing and feeling each other.

In the context of the Are vs. Should Problem, the analytical mind and the physical body are where a lot of the Shoulds are aimed. The Shoulds bully us into forgetting about the Ares, which lie within our other parts. Our Ares are whole. We used to be whole. We are becoming quite splintered. Myopia is stealing our wholeness. 

But we can get it back. We can resist.

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I recorded this episode after replying to a YouTube comment about good and bad types of change (Episode 61: Change is Hard, but Resisting Change is Wrong). The commenter made a good point that sometimes we change in a bad direction instead of making a positive change.

I agreed but in doing so realized I had a bigger point buried under that. Perhaps another assumption I had failed to realize or express. Which is that I believe the Are motivation is essentially driving GOOD change, and that many SHOULD motivators drive a bad kind of change. But an even BIGGER point was buried even deeper about good vs. evil.

I believe that humans are essentially good. We start out good, and any evil we develop is learned through Should type processes. This might have to do with a book I just finished about whether or not humans are essentially good or evil called Humankind: A Hopeful History, by Rutger Bregman. Rutger argues that we are essentially good, and I'm on that side - at least for now.

So another assumption I have made, perhaps subconsciously, with respect to the Are vs Should Problem is that living from our Are is on the good side whereas living from the Should is leaning toward evil.

HOWEVER, the commenter ALSO made me realize that some shoulds are better than others. Sometimes we tell ourselves we Should eat better, be nicer, be more responsible, get a better job, or whatever. Sometimes these shoulds HELP us move forward. 

So I had to break this down a bit:

Ares are intrinsic motivations that come from within us and generally encourage us to be better and come from a good place.

Shoulds can be intrinsic, or appear to be, OR extrinsic.

Intrinsic shoulds are mostly Are, but have some external motivations sprinkled in. Kind of like when I internalized my dads job motivation by conceding that I should change my major so that I could get a job. I internalized an external should, made it my own, and was fooled into thinking it was an Are. And, arguably, it was as it did achieve the goal. Of course, in HINDSIGHT I choose to see that as an extrinsic should that became internalized.

So most Shoulds come from external sources and can be misleading, bad, and downright evil. Shoulds serve to destroy the Are, but the degree to which this is intentional can vary from close to none to entirely. 

So three basic choices: Are, Should, Internalized Should that is confusing.

While discussing the multiple types of Shoulds in this Episode, as you will see (or hear), I started formulating what I think will become the next phase of development in the Are vs Should Problem. I hit on the good vs evil elements already, but also posited whether or not we need to look OUTSIDE ourselves to better understand the Ares. I even suggest we learn to love people FAR outside our realm of attention. People that oppose our views or make us angry. I am wondering if we apply what we've discussed so far to people at opposite ends of the field if we might learn some new things. 

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Apparently I didn't say quite enough about change in last weeks' Episode 62: Change is Hard, but Resisting Change is WRONG! because when I say down to record this weeks' Episode I just kept talking about CHANGE.

Change. It's the one thing we can count on.

Since the Big Bang, the universe has been changing. Changing forms. Changing states. Changing composition.

All around us, change is driving the universe. The Earth. Our behavior. The seasons. . . . 

Yet, many of us resist change. We don't like it. It messes up our scheduling. We OBSESS about predicting the future. The popularity of the Weather Channel is a great example. We believe we can predict the future and CONTROL change. Or even omit it altogether from reality.

Seriously, sometimes I wonder if that's the state of nature we are shooting for. To have every day be as predictable as the last. The literal Groundhog Day of life. And on the one hand, it's easy to see how comforting that predictability would be, but also how COMPLETELY BORING life would become.

And I get it. We resist change because it ISN'T predictable. And that makes us feel unsafe. And feeling unsafe is scary and sad. So we are afraid. So we want the fear to go away. So we attempt to CONTROL, and remove change from the world.

But that is literally insane. It is as asinine as removing oxygen from the atmosphere. Not only is it impossible, it would kill us. And I'm afraid the path toward minimal change will similarly cause our demise.

In fact, I believe our resistance to change is somehow related to (or the cause of!) many of our human problems. 

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In the next few videos I focus on CHANGE. I have covered changing old beliefs, changing the way you think, changing your habits. But it wasn't until Episode 47: Changing Behavior Changes Beliefs that I actually started to realize how critical CHANGE is. 

Change is the key. The main element. The obvious, yet hidden mechanism of life.

One of my chief assumptions is that we we are vehicles for, or at least highly influenced by, our DNA. 

And change is what our DNA was designed to do. 

In Episode 55: The Bully and your DNA Part 2, I go in to detail about how and why I think DNA is so important, but I'll reiterate here.

The Universe is constantly changing. It's been well established by multiple branches of science. I'm going to assume most of us accept that tenet. I will further argue that the fact that things will change is one of the few things we can predict about the future. And we can look to the past and see things were different before. So we know that wherever we are today is likely to change. How it will change is hard to say, but we spend a lot of time trying to figure that out.

An unpredictable future is more dangerous than one that is known. Yet we WANT to know what's coming up so that we can prepare. Will it rain today? Do I need a jacket? Will the weather be good while we're at the beach? Will my retirement accounts be worth anything when I need them?

So, in essence, the world/universe/environment in which we live is going to change through time. Ok. Got it. So, in order to live in this world/universe/environment we probably need a mechanism to deal with change.

A crystal ball might seem like the most useful tool, but if you think about it, that only helps the individual. Sure, if we could predict how much Bitcoin would be worth next week we could make a lot of money. Or if we could know how many avalanches would occur in a certain area we would know where NOT to build a ski resort. Those things are helpful, but they only really increase the fitness of single individuals. And in the long run, biology is more interested in the whole than the parts. Because we are all connected, after all.

But I've talked a lot about that in other Episodes.

The conundrum I talk about in Episode 61 and 62 is how humans seem to resist change. In the past 200 years or so, it seems that human evolution has entered a period of minimal change. We have established cultural norms and rules that select for 'sameness' and predictability in individual behavior. In some ways this makes sense for behavior management as the Earth gets more crowded, but I worry about superficial and short-term changes trickling up to affect our general opinion about change.

Because change isn't going away. We can never control it all. Control is an illusion, anyway, and we will never control the weather or the economy. We can depart Earth to inhabit Mars, but we will eventually have the same problems we have here.

I am concerned that our resistance to change in our daily lives is going to reduce our ability to evolve and persist as a species in the long term. In the short term, we will lose creativity and diversity of ideas and intellect, which will in turn stifle our ability to navigate the future. In the face of change we need creativity and diversity, not sameness and conformity.

I hope you enjoy this miniseries about change. More next week.

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When I was a teenager I realized I would be working for the rest of my life. This hit me like a ton of bricks. This realization LITERALLY left me feeling like I had fallen out of a tree and couldn't catch my breath. Though I'd experienced physical pain by this point in my life, fully coming to understand that I was going to have to spend a significant part of my life doing things I didn't want to do was disturbing.

And it wasn't so much that I had to WORK. I didn't mind working. I had my first job at 13 and was gainfully employed when I had this epiphany about work. It was more that a big chunk of MY TIME was spoken for. 

I felt like I was seeing my future, and part of it was already planned out. It wasn't so much about the WORK thing, it was the CHOICE thing. My future was, at least in part, not my CHOICE. And I don't know why this created so much dissonance. But this was a true blindside. I didn't see it coming. I felt like I lost my whimsy.

And so that is, in huge part, what led me to explore the Are vs. Should Problem. Why do we struggle between the person we ARE and the person we feel like we SHOULD BE? A big part of this SHOULD is related to having to work and to have a career. A huge part of our youth is being on a path that gets us to that point successfully and to a greater extent than our parents or grandparents. From early on we are chugging along a course related to some place we will be in the future that will steal our time.

And the best we can hope for is to love the career so we are not wasting our time. To sort of 'double up' and get paid AND find pleasure in our job. 

Well, how many of us got there? How many of us arrived at the place where we can't BELIEVE we're getting paid to do what we love? How many of us LOVED spending all that time studying, and interviewing, and kissing up, and missing out. . . . How fun was that?

Sure, some people do find a path they enjoy and a career that fulfills them. But most of us don't. And this investigation intends to figure out why it happened and how we can change it. 

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Depending on how you define 'uncomfortable', 100-200 million people worldwide can't meet their basic needs. Folks are born into societies and cultures where they are doomed to fail. Millions of people on this planet will live their entire lives worried about dying, finding food, or having a safe place to sleep. These are enormously huge problems that I truly don't understand. Nor do I understand how complicated the solutions are.

But I do believe one thing: if we wanted to solve these problems, we could. We could at least make them better. And I truly believe that the solutions begin within each one of us. 

To solve these problems we need to fix ourselves first. We each need to put on the proverbial oxygen mask so that we can take care of ourselves so that we can take care of each other. And right now there's a lot missing from that equation. 

• First, many of us don't care about ourselves. Some of us are so sad, stressed, malnourished, hungry, or whatever to take the luxury time necessary to change our beliefs, habits, and behaviors. And I'm not judging, that's understandable. 
• Second, many of us who DO have the luxury of pondering our existence just don't think it's important to do so. Many of us are too wrapped up in our jobs, iPhones, addictions, or whatever. 
• And last, most of us wouldn't know what to do if we DID figure out how to change ourselves because the rest of the world is out there running on autopilot. Once we figure things out, we need to share it with our community - and many of those communities just don't exist any more.

What I'm trying to say is that I truly believe the Are vs Should Problem is the CAUSE OF and SOLUTION TO, all of our problems. That might be a stretch but let's just go with the idea that this concept might help us solve some of our problems. 

See, I think if we can figure out how to reduce our time spend doing things we feel like we SHOULD be doing then we would have more time to ponder who we really ARE. And if I think we can make that shift in how we spend our time, we will find out that we actually crave connections to our brothers and sisters. I think we actually are inspired to do good. I think we do actually want to share resources instead of horde them. I think we do actually want to take care of our planet. I think we do want to spend our lives finding solutions to issues like world hunger instead of becoming investment bankers and stockpiling financial wealth. 

But I'm a naive naval gazer. Or I used to be. And now I want to be again.

I want all those things to be true so I'm believing all those things to be true. 

And if you follow the assumptions I've made thus far:

DNA is the precursor to human magic and MUST be fully expressed.

Expressing our individual uniqueness is our human purpose.

Reducing the things we feel like we SHOULD do frees up time and space for us to do the last thing.

By becoming the people we are destined to be we will realize, as a species, the way things used to be.

Peace and happiness result from more ARE and less SHOULD.

The CHALLENGES we face as humans can be solved.

Then maybe you're interested in learning more? That's what I'm here for.

Please take the time and let me know how you feel. 

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