Author: Kate

The Rewards of the Anti-Hustle

One of my practices over the past year has been to slow down and become less visible and less available.

I have made two specific changes. After training myself to feed the algorithms, I have stopped writing for social media except when I have something I want to say in a specific environment. I have also drastically reduced my availability on and decreased ease of access to my public calendar.

My reasoning was two-fold.

1. Having a public calendar accessible without friction increases the percentage of people who book time and never make any further contact. This has been true for my whole coaching career. It’s a cost of doing business. One way I reduce no-shows is asking potential new clients to invest a little more effort into getting my support.
2. Writing for social media shapes what I write. It places everything I write in the context of hustle culture and selling myself. It subtly influences the topics I will address and the language I use. I wanted to disrupt myself and speak more courageously about questions and less confidently about answers. I wanted to use language poetically and metaphorically, even jargon and technical terms. And I wanted to stretch myself into writing more soulfully and with more willingness to engage with writers and thinkers who discuss human truths in explicitly spiritual and theological terms.

I have noticed several things that have occurred during this time in terms of the clients I attract and the work I write.

Good things. Things I had previously been trying hard to make happen in other ways that emerged simultaneously with this shift but that I cannot clearly attribute directly to the changes.

But, most of my work is like that.

Ripples of spaciousness, consciousness, effort, and intention that pass through me into parts of the cosmic, human and more than human, interdependent system that I am part of. And then, later and in surprising ways, ripples that emerge from the mystery, showing signs of my actions as part of their source material.

There’s a sneaky deep way my work impacts the world. And a mysterious way that my conscious mind is as likely to block the effectiveness of that work as it is to enable it unless I let go of my desire to “make an impact” and simple notice that I am having impact.

Noticing that I am having impact seems to shift the impact I have. It increases accountability and responsibility for my action. But, and this is huge, letting go of the responsibility to make a specific impact result allows me to co-create impact with the whole universe in a dance of interchange with the seen and the unseen.

By trying less hard to make connection and shifting my focus to recognizing the connections that already exist, I have become more connected, more seen, and more positively impactful.

This is deeply weird to my conscious ego and deeply soothing to my soul.

Becoming less performative has helped people see me.

I want to start by saying that gender dysphoria is a mental health concern and any discussion of causation such as I am about to embark on must not be used to in any way reduce efforts to eliminate or mitigate the suffering of individuals. Gender dysphoria is culturally created and experienced in individual bodies. Repairing the damage done by the culture is a collective responsibility.

Sex and Gender

Two interconnected but conceptually different concepts that are frequently conflated.

Sex

Sex refers to biology. In humans, we are incompletely sexually dimorphic as a species.

The vast majority of humans develop functional reproductive systems that either carry eggs until they are expelled through rejection for nonviability or birth or provide extra genetic material needed by eggs carried in other bodies to create a viable human baby. We call the first female and the second male.

Due to the genetic complexity of human beings and the biological mechanisms of generating biodiversity within the human species, there are always a substantial number of human beings of all ages that for one reason or another are biologically unable to participate in the co-creation of a baby and a smaller but still substantial number of human beings who are not easily categorized as male or female. The first group we call infertile and the second group we call intersex. There is also always a substantial number of human beings that are biologically capable of reproduction and not cognitively, emotionally, or romantically attracted to the act of sexual reproduction.

Gender

Gender is a social construct that maps cultural expectations onto markers of sex, usually onto visible secondary sexual characteristics (breasts, Adam’s apples, facial hair).

Gender norms are cultural and fluid. As society changes, gender norms change.

In addition, gender norms are frequently defined in ways that also reinforce class status and social power. Gender norms as expressed by powerful people frequently also include elements that require leisure time and money to acquire.

Every culture has different gender norms that are specific to that time and place. And society’s in transition in other ways often reflect that transition in changing gender norms.

Through out history, different cultures have had different gender norms associated with the reality of the reproductive realities of human beings.

Some cultures have norms that explicitly treat fertile women of child-bearing age differently from other women, recognizing that child-bearing is done through the bodies of individual women and provides the next generation for the whole society. Others treat mothers differently, but not women of child-bearing age without children. Some cultures try to pretend that the bearers of children and raisers of children aren’t really part of society at all.

Gender markers become more prominent in cultures that are uncomfortable with public acknowledgement of the messy realities of human sex and sexuality, cover secondary sex characteristics, and have markedly different subcultures for men and women. In these cultures, performative gender that reveals sexual role without the need for verbal interpersonal interaction is necessary for mating rituals.

“Appropriate packaging” so people know what to expect in bed allows people to avoid talking about taboo topics (sex) and to avoid trying to communicate in the foreign language of another subculture (men or women).

Gender Norms Oversimplify Human Reality Intentionally

From a biological perspective, gender norms facilitate the matching of individuals who can successfully produce offspring together. A simple system for matching viable egg and womb holders with viable sperm producers increases the viability of the species.

From a sociological perspective, social norms that may or may not be matched to gender norms facilitate the matching of partners with the resources to raise successful children. Success, like gender, is a fluctuating construct.

In cultures where children are expected to be raised by pairs who are their biological parents, gender norms tend to include displays of fertility, genetic inheritance, and social success (or potential for social success). In cultures that raise children more communally, gender norms can be separated from markers of success in arenas other than fertility.

What About Gender Roles?

Gender dysphoria is caused by a mismatch between the gender norms of a culture and the subjective experience of an individual.

Gender Marks Categories

Every culture runs the risk of excluding people as a result of gender norms. This is an inevitable result of the messiness of human biodiversity.

There are different ways cultures can handle the messiness. I will use the analogy of kitchen drawers to explain.

Knives and Forks

All kitchen implements can be treated as knives or forks. Knives go in one drawer and forks in another. Anything that doesn’t fit doesn’t have a place in the kitchen. Sorry spoons, that means you are out unless you convince the chef you are a weird knife or a bad fork.

Knives, Forks, and Spoons

Same deal. Three categories. No room for sporks, but spatulas could try to claim knife-ness or spoon-ness.

Add a Special Tools or Junk Drawer

This one is interesting. Make an “other” category and then decide whether other is positive or negative.

Everything Gets It’s Own Place

No categories. No clumping. No batch processing. Each utensil gets its own special location. No touching. No overlapping.

Exclusion Exists in Most Systems

The only system that doesn’t result in excluding anyone is the system in which everyone gets their own label and no attempt is made to simplify the complexity. This requires a lot of time having intimate, personal conversations as each potential mating pair must explicitly share details about themselves with the other. And in many cultures, such explicit conversations are taboo.

Even the Knife, Fork, everything else system excludes. The “other” category seems to fix the exclusion problem, but it is an illusion. The existence of an other category solidifies the distinction between those who can be categorized and those who cannot be categorized. The attempt to categorize makes the category marker important.

It is very difficult for human beings to separate categories without a status component. Oxytocin flows in our bodies and create the embodied experience that everyone who is part of “my” group is someone I will protect and everyone who is not part of that group is a potential enemy. My people get valued more than others.

Gender Roles Are a Partial Solution

In a culture that respects the dignity of all people, roles that are necessary but not sufficient alone for the survival of the community are divided along category lines to create a larger community that transcends and includes the gendered categories. The recognition of each role as necessary creates a bigger container to which everyone belongs.

To include everyone within the whole community, the other category must be seen as necessary for the survival of the community.

Gender Roles are Only a Partial Solution

No matter what categories are created and however respected the roles assigned to all the categories, there will be individuals who do bot fit comfortably into their assigned social role.

Human beings are too complex for any functional system to not have edge cases.

Whatever the social construct of gender norms and roles, every society will have gender non-conforming individuals. The more rigidly the constructs are policed, the more harmful experiencing oneself as not being comfortably included in that construct will be.

Gender dysphoria is going to be with us as a species forever. We get to choose whether we are culturally compassionate in response or not, but we cannot eradicate it.

What Does All This Have to Do With Gender Dysphoria and Multi-Culturalism?

Multicultural communities probably differ in gender categories and roles just as they differ in other aspects of culture.

This is destabilizing for everyone.

As soon an any individual leaves their subculture, they must wrestle with the differences between the norms of their family and the norms they find in other groups.

People who experience gender dysphoria in their culture of origin may find other subcultures that offer them a set of norms that feel more comfortable. This sets them up for conflict with their family. Do I disrespect my mother’s teacher about what it means to be a good man or woman? Or my father’s?

Others may find that their family has norms where they fit comfortably that are not recognized in other subcultures they must navigate (school or work environments, for example). Once again, these people find themselves forced to choose or code switch.

Some will self-sabotage to fit into the roles offered in their childhood environments and bring trauma around gender roles to their adulthood. Others will experience traumatic injury adapting to the wider culture. Having adapted, people will frequently force others to adapt in order to avoid seeing alternatives that would have fit them better that were not available to them.

And what if my mother and father are trying to raise me differently than they were raised? Am I not allowed to model myself on my own parents? How am I supposed to figure out whether I am becoming a good adult?

These experiences can each create gender dysphoria when internalized.

In a multicultural environment, acting from the norms you hold unconsciously results in frequent misunderstandings and conflict. The process of peacefully resolving conflict around gender norms requires everyone to question their own sense of identity and their relationship to the wider culture.

Navigating cross-cultural expectations requires people to recognize that the categories are at some level arbitrary and at some level a useful proxy that help navigate the important social behaviours related to mating. And this creates existential angst.

Doubling down on one’s commitment to the gender norms that one is comfortable with or fighting for a new, more flexible or inclusive, set of norms avoids the paradox.

Gender confusion grows in places where cultures with different gender norms and roles intersect.

Creativity isn’t about generating something from nothing.

Creativity is the emergence of a third thing through the relationship between two things.

The more dissimilar the source material, the more “creative” or “novel” the result is likely to be. Also, the less likely it is to be coherent.

Coherence is aesthetically satisfying.

Mathematicians talk about beautiful results.

Most creativity that happens through people doesn’t get recognized because it is happening simultaneously in so many minds.

Have you ever had the experience of having an aha moment, thinking it was totally novel, and then realizing people all around you were having the same realization?

Have you ever written a draft of a blog post, then read someone else’s blog post on the same thing and decided not to publish because it wasn’t novel anymore?

The ones I find fascinating are the times someone picks up an idea early and what seemed out there and wild when they started writing a book lands at exactly the right moment culturally when it is published five years later.

Humans anthropomorphize and ascribe agency and intent. We compare what we cannot understand to what we already think we understand. We concretize abstractions and take metaphors literally. It’s how we make sense of the world and predict the impact of our behaviour.

Language, memory, animals, society, money, weather, literature, art. Everything is filtered through comparison to the our subjective experience of being in the world, part conscious, part unconscious, part driven by choice, part constrained by circumstances.

When we perceive new sense impressions, the nervous system reacts to those impressions and combines them with the remnants of past impressions that have found physical form in our bodies, creating new physicality.

In flow, that new physicality creates ripple effects that result in behaviour.

The behaviour will emerge in forms that have been grown in our bodies through the development of inherited patternings or trained into our bodies through lived experience.

I have deep training in writing, moderate training in performance and experience creation, low training in technical development, and no training in playing the oboe, so I am far more likely to act through writing than through software development, and I’m never going to spontaneously express myself through an oboe concerto.

Craftsmanship enables the coherent outflow of information.

But information must flow.

Everything that exists is in constant interaction with its environment, responding, adapting, absorbing, being absorbed, separating, and exchanging.

Creativity is an inherent property of existence.

Conscious information flow between individuals is a challenge because it requires intermediation through human bodies. Willful information flow requires craftsmanship.

In Feeling and Form, philosopher Susanne K. Langer distinguished between good art, bad art, and propaganda.

Propaganda is selfish creativity: pulling together ideas and the knowledge of what will influence other people and create circumstances that generate the response you want in other people. Propoganda is a direct attempt to shape the behaviour of others. Propoganda can involve good art or bad art. It is an application of art.

Art, on the other hand, doesn’t have an agenda beyond the attempt to create mutual understanding. Mutual understanding can only be created by creating a mediating something that creates an experience in the audience that mirrors the experience of the creator. It is a translation of the experience of the creator into the patterning of the observer.

Good art, according to Langer does this successfully. Bad art or poor art attempts to make this translation and fails.

This distinction between good art and poor art is interesting to me because it raises the question of how consciousness and creativity and willfulness play together.

Information is always flowing. Even when we consciously try to block it, the blockage merely redirects the flow. What is created when information meets a blockage is new information.

As agents in the world, bringing wilfulness to our action, we need craftsmanship to have impact.

As participants in the world around us, we are faced with a lot of poor art, unskillful communication from others.

Can we enhance creativity, learning, adaptation of a social system by striving for mutual understanding, learning to look beyond the craftsmanship with curiosity about the inciting experience?

Do we want to? We are the embodiment of information flow. Creative output is the result of being changed by input.

Even if all we consciously do is pass information through us, we are holding that information in our bodies as it passes through.

This then is our nature as human beings, embodied vehicles of information flowing through us. Inherently creative, whether we engage with that information flow consciously or not.

Every interaction between things, whether it is at sub-atomic, human, or cosmic scale, creates something else. Patterns of such creativity repeated in similar circumstances aren’t “novel” so it is easy to miss how generative they are. That’s how the zeitgeist flows, through a critical mass of simultaneous parallel creations.

Always evolving. Never beginning.

Damned if you do. Damned if you don’t

Every action has consequences, mostly unpredictable.

When people do the same thing over and over again, the perceptual filters of our nervous systems take in less data. This is because the perceptual filters of our nervous system respond to change.

We respond to edges and movement and change.

Have you ever looked at a rapidly moving stream or waterfall for a long time then moved your glance to the shore and seen the shore appear to shimmer and move?

Our perceptual system adjusts to the motion of the water so it becomes the static background from which change will be detected. When we look at the land, our system takes time to adjust. While it is adjusting, our brain shows us the movement filter against which the land is still.

Some forms of depression appear to respond well to any change of activity. Creating change creates aliveness.

Many people who grew up in chaotic households create chaos in order to feel comfortable. Their nervous system has attuned to the chaos and it feels like home.

Boredom is painful (and extra painful for many people with ADHD) and bodies respond to boredom with the same level of crisis response as to a cut.

Not changing feels dead.

Change, on the other hand, feels exciting or dangerous. Neurophysiologically, the difference between exciting and dangerous is the presence of cortisol. Psychologically, the difference is in whether the change is perceived as moving towards something pleasant or away from something unpleasant. Moving in love and attraction or in fear and avoidance.

The more intense the emotional reaction, the more adrenaline will be generated to fuel the movement. The more adrenaline, the more the resulting action is a repeat of what has been practiced, trained or conditioned beforehand. Too much adrenaline makes the body move faster than consciousness can interrupt.

When my daughter was a competitive athlete, we described this phenomenon saying, “Under pressure, teams devolve to their level of training.”

The most dangerous games were the ones where a technically weaker team had stronger competitive drive than a technically stronger team. The technically weaker team would play faster than they could control and would injury themselves or their teammates through that combination of adrenaline and lack of precision.

Fear tends to drive actions that optimize the local environment for individual comfort. Love tends to drive actions that optimize the wider environment for collective comfort. Selfish vs prosocial actions.

The drawback of selfish action is that it creates enemies. Not just because other people don’t like being left out of the optimization process. But because the process of focusing on protection reduces our body’s assessment of who is “one of us” enough to be part of the optimization process devolves to the level of our training. Who have we been trained to see as family?

The drawback of loving action is that we can overextend ourselves, sacrifice ourselves for the collective. What have we been trained to sacrifice ourselves for?

Oxytocin, the us/them hormone is interesting. Many of us have been trained to sacrifice ourselves for our family. In which case, when acting unconsciously, our default actions under pressure are to sacrifice for family and be willing to sacrifice others for our family.

When we are moving slowly enough to make conscious choices, we ask questions about costs and benefits of action? When we are moving slowly enough to make conscious choices, we ask which actions we might take are in alignment with our values.

When we act consciously, we become responsible for our actions and their results in a personally tender way.

When we act unconsciously, it is much easier to deny that we should be held responsible. Our ego tells us because it wasn’t intentional, it wasn’t really us, so we shouldn’t be held responsible.

The challenge, of course, is that although none of us choose all of our training, all of us choose some of our training.

It used to be that calling something an accident, apologizing, and cleaning up the mess you made was promulgated as a cultural norm in areas I lived.

Accidents happen.

To err is human. (Is this where the fantasy of AI running everything comes from: a desire to escape from responsibility for one’s actions and shame?)

We are not in control. Certainly not in conscious control. Our bodies move faster than our thoughts. Our bodies have been entrained into a culture we didn’t choose.

We will eventually die.

To live is to be vulnerable.

To feel alive is to live in conscious relationship to that vulnerability.